My 13 Favorite Albums of 2009 13-6

Well, here we are in 2010, the year we make contact. For those of you who don’t know, a new federal law went into effect at midnight on New Year’s Day: if you hear any of your fellow citizens call this year “oh-ten”, it is legal to punch them in the face exactly one time.

Having safely seen 2009 out the door, I think it’s time to start talking shit about it. Everyone loves a list, especially one that doesn’t include Animal Collective or Phoenix, so I compiled a list of my 13 favorite albums of 2009. I don’t know if they’re the best albums of the year or not and I don’t care. They’re the ones I like the best and, honestly, I think that’s all anyone can say. Also, my list contains 14 albums (well, technically, 13 albums and an EP) because there was a tie. Anyway, feast yer eyes on this here list (helpfully rendered in a distinctly non-slide-show format):

13. Lord Cut-Glass, Lord Cut-Glass. I’ll just assume everyone knows that Lord Cut-Glass is really former Delgado Alun Woodward. And I know that my review of this record spent a good deal of time bitching about how the Delgados ought to just reunite, come to the U.S. and play shows in the courtyard of my apartment complex. But the fact remains that Lord Cut-Glass is a really beautiful record; Woodward lilts over plucked acoustic guitars and low brass, quietly issuing some of the best melodies of his career. Highlights include “Picasso,” “Even Jesus Couldn’t Love You,” “Holy Fuck,” “A Pulse” and “Big Time Teddy.”

12. Mike Doughty, Sad Man Happy Man. Last year, Doughty put out an album called Golden Delicious that I liked well enough at first. And then it kinda grew off of me with a stunning quickness. Just wasn’t feeling it, I guess. However, because I love Mike Doughty, I’m always willing to listen to his stuff. This year, he put out the superb Sad Man Happy Man, which I nabbed from Amazon’s digital store for five freaking bucks (gargle my balls, I-Tunes). SMHM is driven by Doughty’s chunky guitar strumming and absurd humor, and it’s my favorite album of his since Skittish (which has to be one of the most underrated albums I’ve ever heard). It opens with one of its best moments, “Nectarine (Part Two)” and also includes the coolest prayer ever (“Lord Lord Help Me Just to Rock Rock On”) and “Year of the Dog,” which might be Doughty’s best tune since “Sweet Lord in Heaven.”

11. Yeah Yeah Yeahs, It’s Blitz. 2009 was a great year for some of my favorite female vocalists, not least of whom is Karen O. of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. Not only did I get to delight in an affordable deluxe edition of It’s Blitz! (Amazon’s mp3 store has not yet let me down in the cheap goodies department), but I got to see the Yeah Yeah Yeahs play a kickass set at Coachella (one of the best sets I saw at that festival). The album is filled with awesome turbo-pop (starting with a pair of aces in “Zero” and “Heads Will Roll”) and a few pretty ballads (“Hysteric” splits the difference between the two types of song and is, in two words, fucking awesome). It’s Blitz! firmly established the Yeah Yeah Yeahs as one of the best bands in America and their live shows will back that claim up for the doubters.

10. Brother Ali, Us. I could make a joke about how Brother Ali is the king of white rap (ha ha, because he’s an albino, ha ha), but, taking Us as exhibit A for the prosecution, it’s more accurate to place Ali near the top of the hip-hop heap, regardless of skin pigment. Jay-Z has never, in my estimation, done anything to rival  “Tightrope” or “The Travelers.” To my knowledge, he’s never even tried. With Us, Ali threw down a gauntlet of new rules for the hip-hop community, chief among them: no skits and fewer songs about how badass you are (Us has ‘em, but they’re matched pound for pound by songs of real substance and at least one tune wherein Ali shows gratitude for his good fortune, saying, “I’m the luckiest sonofabitch that ever lived”). Us is a truly refreshing album, and it stays fresh with every listen.

9. Camera Obscura, My Maudlin Career. Speaking of refreshing, Camera Obscura released one hell of an orchestral pop album last year. My Maudlin Career, despite its potentially emo-sounding name, starts and ends with a bang (“French Navy” and “Honey in the Sun”, respectively) – in between, Tracyanne Campbell drops lines like “when you’re lucid, you’re the sweetest thing” and “drinking has never been the same again”, the latter from the stellar, mournful ballad “Other Towns and Cities”. My Maudlin Career is so good that I think almost anyone who likes music will like it. But some people who like music like Wavves, so I could be wrong.

8. The Minus 5, Killingsworth. Killingsworth is the album that elevated Scott McCaughey from Person of Interest to Folk Hero in my estimation. It’s basically a dark country rock album, but it’s so fully realized and wittily rendered (“your wedding day was so well-planned/ like a German occupation”) that it cannot be denied. Backed by an excellent chorus of women, McCaughey sings of lurking barristers, broken love, and crowded urban apartment life (“Big Beat Up Moon”) with a drunken weariness that is deeply appealing to young curmudgeons like myself. He also takes the time to satirize fundamentalist Christianity on “I Would Rather Sacrifice You”, a song that never fails to but a big smile on my face.

7. The Future of the Left, Travels with Myself and Another. I have said many times that, all appearances to the contrary, I like more music than I dislike. A small subsection of music that I like is nasty, noisy stuff that almost no one else I know likes. Titus Andronicus comes to mind here, as does the Future of the Left, whose Travels with Myself and Another beat its way into my skull and won my heart last year with its pounding drums and Andy Falkous’s snarling vocals. Subjects range from girls who get off on hitting people (“Chin Music” will only be appropriate at a very small number of weddings:  “I only hit him ’cause he made me crazy/ I only hit him ’cause he made me mad/ she only hit him ’cause it gets her wet/ yeah, she’s one of a kind/ she’s got chin music”) to the practical concerns of Satanism (“You Need Satan More than He Needs You”). Travels with Myself and Another pretty much kicks ass, though it’s not for the faint of heart or the humorless.

6. Andrew Bird, Noble Beast. I guess #7 and #6 on my list are a study in contrast. Andrew Bird’s Noble Beast is an understated, mellow, and completely lovely work – his finest to date, if I may be so bold. It blends Bird’s myriad musical talents (no one on earth – no one – can whistle like this motherfucker) into quirky pop (“Fitz and the Dizzyspells”), old school folk (“Effigy,” which is nothing short of stunning), and whatever you’d classify “Not a Robot, But a Ghost” as. Some of the songs have unique movements, but they never seem to wander, even on the seven minute “Souverian.” Bird is a musician’s musician, a guy you can study as well as enjoy, and Noble Beast is the textbook for aspiring musical ninjas.

I know. It’s taken me four days into the new year to even start counting down my favorite albums of the old year and now I’m doing it in two parts. Pitchfork took a week to do their list and they still fucked it up, so maybe it’s better that I’m taking my time. I, for one, wholeheartedly endorse every choice I’ve made so far. Tune in tomorrow or Wednesday for albums 5 through 1, which are bound to include demure rodents, plenty of references to whiskey, a rant about shitty record labels, the best pop album of the year, the word vagina, and plenty of weather.

Let’s Talk About Us

Sometimes, I review an album just to take the piss out of it – like Chris Cornell’s Scream or like I intend to do with the forthcoming Creed reunion record. It’s fun and easy and allows me to vent a lot of frustration in a short amount of time (usually while drinking quality brews). A friend recently asked me why I don’t do similar take-downs of, say, 50 Cent albums. I pointed out to him that I usually play the fish-in-a-barrel game with rock albums because a lot of people seem to understand that there is a wide variety of rock music (I’m including indie here as well because, generally, “indie” just means “rock music that the radio is too dumb to play” – and it doesn’t always even mean that) that is good and that I’m just poking fun at its most egregious offenders. I don’t do that with hip-hop artists because I’ve met too many people who immediately dismiss that genre as completely worthless, full of misogyny and violence. So when it comes to hip-hop, I like to focus my energy on showing people the really awesome performers who are out there waiting to blow your mind.

So let’s talk about Brother Ali, shall we? Based on his voice, some have compared him to Pharaohe Monch. I can kinda see the comparison, in that both artists are aggressively awesome, but I think Ali sounds more like Lyrics Born back when he was still doing rap (New Rule for Hip-Hop: if you’re an awesome MC, that doesn’t mean you’re going to make a good soul/pop record), if he sounds like anyone. The more I listen to Us, his recent masterpiece, the more I hear Brother Ali’s distinctive voice and the happier I am about it.

For those of you who value such ephemeral concepts as “cred,” Us starts with a sermon by a true hip-hop luminary: Public Enemy’s Chuck D. Of course, Chuck D’s endorsement is meaningless if Brother Ali doesn’t earn it, but he does so almost immediately, launching into “The Preacher,” with relish, working the beat like I imagine Muhammad Ali worked a punching bag back in the day (you thought I was going to make a Parkinson’s Disease joke there, didn’t you? I’m not quite that tasteless, although I did just remind myself to listen to the new Shaky Hands album).

Part of the reason mainstream hip-hop blows is that there is a long list of sins that rappers commit. One of the biggest is piling song after song about how awesome they are on their albums. We get it – you have healthy self-esteem. Shut the fuck up. (DOOM, formerly known as MF Doom, is one of the very few rappers who self-deprecates as much as he self-aggrandizes. Also, he did song about how Batman and Robin are gay which gives him a free pass on a lot of stuff.) Now Us does have songs about how awesome Brother Ali is but it also has songs about how grateful he is to have the life he has (“Fresh Air”), a song that calls out society for hating on homosexuals (Brother Ali gets it. Fucking Iowa gets it. Why doesn’t California get it?), a song about slavery (“The Travelers”), and songs about how he was hated on by white kids for being an albino (as such, I’d like to point out, Brother Ali is a pretty awesome “post-racial” rapper. He’s so good at it that the press used to think he was black. I’m not gonna rip on ‘em for it, though, because I thought he was the first time I heard him too. Take that, assumptions!). Ali is, in fact, brimming with a positivity and gratitude that a lot of rappers like. Rather than pulling a Kanye and saying God chose him to be the voice of his generation, Brother Ali is working ass off and being happy about where it gets him. Kinda reminds me of some certain other Minnesota musicians I can think of right now (*cough* Hold Steady *cough*)…

In fact, I’m just gonna spend a paragraph here handing some props to Minnesota. They have the best radio station on earth, America’s best freshman senator, they’re the birth place of Mystery Science Theater 3000, and they’ve given us the Hold Steady, Atmosphere, Brother Ali, Bob Dylan and Prince. So thank you, Minnesota. Now can you get rid of that crazy bitch Michele Bachmann?

Rap, historically, is a political beast (I know you wouldn’t know it from listening to 50 Cent or Eminem, but it’s true. It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back, perhaps the best hip-hop album ever recorded, is largely not about how great money and bitches are) and Brother Ali’s stuff addresses the political through the prism of the personal, spinning tales of deep human complexity while not letting the listener (or himself, for that matter) off the hook fortheir part in a bloody history. In very few lines of “Tight Rope,” he, among many topics, manages a substantive discussion of homosexual equality in just one verse ( featuring the couplet “there ain’t no flame that can blaze enough/ to trump being hated for the way you love”) in a way that has a lot less to do with the left/right stuff of American politics than it does with simple empathy. Ali’s gift is his ability to identify with the people in his songs (some of whom are probably people who listen to his albums and come to his shows) and the best tracks on Us are the ones that tackle the thorniest subject matter.

Given that subject matter, you might get the idea that Us is a total downer, but it’s not. It’s actually exceedingly uplifting, which you can credit both to Ali’s unsurpassed delivery and Ant’s (you might know him as the other half of Atmosphere) stellar production. At 16 tracks, Us avoids being unwieldy and ends up feeling like a party album for people who are more likely to discuss*, rather than run from, the world’s problems while they’re throwing back drinks and hanging out.

* A discussion is this thing rational people can have where they may politely disagree about things but are interested in hearing and respecting the other person’s viewpoint. Scientists think the discussion will actually become extinct sometime near primary season in 2012.