1. MSTRKRFT: Fist Of God (Dim Mak/Downtown)
So you may ask what's this dated piece of non-sinusoidal crap doing here? Well, after all the years of indie and alternative musicians flirting with the avant-garde with no plausible outcomes since the No Wave heydays of Sonic Youth; after all the recent hype about shitgaze and beardo rock and a dozen of other new genres emerging only to show that the guys behind the big talk are nothing but pussies afraid of amplifiers; after years of nurturing my senses with the likes of Merzbow, Masonna, power electronics, whatever... Fist of God is the first album in ages, that when played through only a moderate PA-set, was actually able to hurt my ears. The pain becomes unbearable at about 7:10 minutes when Victor Santiago Jr. cries out his unintelligible "GetBoogalooGetBoogaloo!" howl, somewhere from the depths of the Hadal zone. Toss that phrase to an anthropologist and it will be like giving a sheet of bubble wrap to an infant - pure joy. Fist of God is one berserk of a tongue-in-cheek craphouse classic.
2. ANIMAL COLLECTIVE: Merriweather Post Pavillion (Domino)
I don't like Animal Collective. They are not my cup of mushroom tea. They are not my piece of space cake. The Animal Collective is not going to get a piece of my ass. Their only release I've found intriguing was Animal Crackbox which I was unable to purchase because of the limited pressings of 2000 copies or so. Fuckwits. Who needs them?
Well, the music press does. The press who deliberately adopted the band as their sweetheart ages ago. Propably because someone was a friend of someone of someone who used to bang someone at P4K. I've never heard a single bad word about Animal Collective and the same goes for Merriweather Post Pavilion. How the hell are you supposed to review an album that stands outside all critique, chosen to be the torchbearer of 2009 already in January by fixed fight throwing media mobsters? And then again; the album is actually brilliant. That is when you are fucking high on drugs I suppose. If you're not, it's just as shitty as their earlier works. Be warned.
3. THE PAINS OF BEING PURE AT HEART: s/t (Slumberland)
Anyone who names his band The Pains of Being Pure at Heart is propably a rapist. Who knows, maybe the whole group is some kind of a cult of diabolic sexual devourings and ruthless gangbangs? The point is that it's just too easy to have biased attitudes towards them.
This article has multiple issues; People will find you an asshole with no second thought if you name that way (1) your orchestra (2, I bet my head they call themselves an orchestra, not a band, disgusting pricks don't you think) that play retroish(3) twee(that is 4, for some) pop with DIY-aesthetics(5) and mock-Glaswegian art school(6)tradition mannerisms somewhere far leeward from the footprints of Charles Rennie Macintosh(7), sporting cutesy(8) looks on their DIY(9) barf-bag of a record sleeve that make you want to smash their cutesy rapist faces with a brick to raise back some of your indie cred after someone tricked you to check out their album(10). Since none of this really matters, I guess they've made a heck of a record.
4. GIRLS: The Album (True Panther)
Christopher Owens made the most uncomfortable happy-go-lucky record of the year and will propably die of an overdose within the next one. It's called showbisnes and it's what keeps California blooming twelve months a year.
5. THESE ARE POWERS: All Aboard Future (Dead Oceans)
Yuck. Another shitty tittle for a band again. Makes you expect another deal of cute wide-eyed indie pop. No. Most of All Aboard Future actually sounds like a set of broken in-bay-automatics in a conveyor car wash. So, your tiny hobo mind really thought it would be a good idea to sleep the night at the Exxon tunnel wash?
6. THE XX: s/t (Young Turks)
The xx are the mean rivalry band of The Pains of Being Pure at Heart. They are more suspicious, more sinister, and they always have dirty tricks up their sleeve. They are always the last two groups to duel at the battle of the bands in a local soda-pop joint. the xx play foul and smoke long cigarettes, when The Pains smoke no cigarettes at all. Luckily the latter always win, since they have the deus-ex-machina Fonzie type of saving character on their side, who is also the little brother of Vince Taylor. But that's a whole different story.
7. THE HORRORS: Primary Colours (XL)
Maybe because The Horrors are late-comers into the NYC'ish post-punk revival sound, they've been able to filter out the most obvious cliches of the style and emphasize the more sustainable elements in genre. I wasn't the only one to be surprised to hear that while drifting somewhere in the same shallow waters as Joy Division, Echo and the Bunnymen, Cure and Depeche Mode, they've avoided half-hearted imitation and the use of cheapest gimmicks in the production; Although years late of their time, the Horrors have made the record that The Rapture, Brakes, Editors, White Lies, Interpol and other clone bands strived to create. Sure they throw in some Jesus & Mary Chain mannerisms and trademark monotony of Ian Curtis and the likes of, but also venture as far as the Satanic Majestie's era Stones (Three Decades) or play with the misé en scenes of less-accessible postpunks like Public Image Limited (New Ice Age). Not to forget the overall krautrock influences dominating many of the songs. Maybe it's that motorik-beat indeed that creates the true nocturnal pulse, the feeling of time and space that their contemporaries lacked. It's the atmosphere along multi-lane highways. Music to drive all night by.
8. MAJOR LAZER: Guns Don't Kill People, Lazers Do (Downtown)
Nothing but a typical and healthy defensive statement; the wish to bury this album six feet under alongside with MSTKRFT, every goddamn Crookers remix and a couple of other naughties fad-raisers. Maybe they could seal the Major Lazer album in a 2009 themed time capsule? When opened a couple of hundred years in the future it destroys the human civilization, who, after nuclear disarming are practically unknown to weapons of massdestruction, and having melted their guns into plows - are unable to fight back. Worst one-liner of the year? "Vibrate like a Nokia."
9. GRIZZLY BEAR: Veckatimest (Warp)
Best engineered indie record of the year. Where disfiguration and strict modernisms are the keywords in production these days, Grizzly Bear paints with thin delicate layers of sounds slowly melting into one another. Very old fashioned I must say. At first I thought it was a Moody Blues or Colosseum record, or... something. In any case it struck me dumb. Yes, I was punched with the retro mallet. It felt quite nice anyhow.
10. THE FLAMING LIPS: Embryonic (Warner Bros.)
Like its name suggests, Embryonic is rather sketchy. But that doesn't make it any less exciting. One can only imagine what the final delivery will be like; the ending scene of 2001, maybe? A rock opera about those slugs in a can that survived the Spaceship Columbia explosion? Embryonic may not be classic but it certainly thrills you, and sets up some great and bizarre expectations... The Lips have made their most angular and ambitious record in years and for a band with a life span of two decades that is a long time.
11. YEAH YEAH YEAHS: It's Blitz!
The Yeah Yeah Yeah are all the rage. Like the Flaming Lips mentioned above, one might have thought their evolution to come to a halt. Instead they've renewed themselves with a sharp cutting, dance floor corroding near-masterpiece. At times It's Blitz! is so easy-accessible that you almost feel bad about it, but then again the upbeat gems like Zero and Heads Will Roll make sure you hit replay again and again.
12. WAVVES: s/t (Fat Possum)
Some of you propably know the classic Letterman clip with the drug frenzied(?) Crispin Glover raving onstage with his platform shoes; "You ever seen a guy drowning?" Letterman keeps asking seemingly disturbed. It was a ghastly, uncanny expression from the "I've seen it all" -man, totally surprised by Glover's fucked up performance, yet a perfect depictation of the moment. The man was drowning on stage. Exactly the kind of moment that one was able to witness at that faithfull night of May in Barcelona half-a-year ago, When Nathan Williams flushed his promising career down the drain in about 20 minutes. After the incident the blue eyes of indierock suddenly became the frontline asshole in media (well, some of us expected him to be a douche right from the start, call it precognition) and now he is practically suppressed dead and forgotten. I even have a hard time realizing that the record came out in 2009. Maybe a future cult-album?
13. COLD CAVE: Love Comes Close (Heartworm)
Might it be coincidence that the most chilling of coldwave albums released this year has a typography identical with that of Nick Cave's first solo album? These guys make the likes of Wilson from Limey, Mark Lewis of Peeping Tom and other antiheroes of murkiest cesspool drama seem like nice chaps. Nick Cave himself is starting to seem like a reliable babysitter for your newborn, and Mark Almond would be turning in his grave, if he had one.
14. BLACK MOTH SUPER RAINBOW: Eating Us (Graveface)
One would expect to run into Black Moth Super Rainbow while glancing through a record collection heavily relying on 90's retro-lounge-psychpop. Oh, crammed somewhere between Saint Etienne, Stereolab, Super Furry Animals and Kula Shaker LPs. It's all very corny... and charming at the same time. So hard to resist grooving along with this.
15. PHOENIX: Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix (Glassnote/Loyauté)
The power pop poster boys of Phoenix represent just about everything that makes you hate the French. Easygoing, sharp-dressed and balancing somewhere between artistic credibility and arrogant flamboyance in their superficial, yet so perfect tunes. They are less pittoresque than Air and not as tough or street smart as Daft Punk, which means they are more middle of the road than most of the bands on the list. But no matter how radio friendly, one must appreciate the architecture of their songs. I bet they get all the chicks too. They're French.
16. SLEEPY SUN: Embrace (ATP)
San Franciscan hippies. Ungroomed, wear no shirts, prefer jam sessions instead of throwing a gig. You get the point. The songs are not so much retro rock, than a series of bad trip flashbacks. Imagine this playing from an 8-track cartridge of a worn out '61 Impala convertible, parked in some deserted godforsaken Big Sur of a beach. You just drove 20 miles forth and back only to find that Owsley wasn't home and his wife hit you with a broom and now you are stoned to death with crappy liquor in your veins and you feel like dying and you stare at the night sky and listen to the slow quiet whimperings of waves to the waterfront and you feel that the whole world is dying with you.
17. ATLAS SOUND: Logos (Kranky)
After prominently showing up on various listings and leastwise positively toned ratings (not only because of his vast output of releases as Deerhunter/Atlas Sound) for about three years now, one might say that Bradford Cox is an indie superstar in the true meaning of the word. He has achieved what most left fielders are striving for in vain; establishing himself. It's a shame that his songwriting, although always fascinating, is still too bantering and lukewarm to produce true classics. Cryptograms was great and Microcastle was not bad, but they share the same shortcomings that Logos is suffering from. The songs seem half-built, bearing a kind of ghost momentum. For a while you see it and then it's gone and you can't be sure if it ever was there at all. Like a well done magic trick.
So maybe he is a some sort of trickster spirit. But after a while all this makes you feel that Cox maybe isn't that comfortable with his cult icon status - or that he finds it trivial. This is the reason why he seems like one of the most admirable musicians today.
18. MOS DEF: The Ecstatic (Downtown)
The overall paranoia of The Ecstatic is intense. An intense feel of being somewhere else. Misplaced and drifting. The atmosphere is anything but American, it's very European, drawing his inspiration somewhere from a combination of Antonioni, Rimbaud and Burroughs in Beat Hotel era Paris, you can almost imagine Mos Def building up this epic trip during an opium binge at the depths of some den in a Jewish ghetto or a riad in Tangiers.
19. DINOSAUR JR: Farm (Jagjaguwar) / SONIC YOUTH: The Eternal (Matador)
20. LA ROUX: s/t (Polygram)
How very easy to smirk at La Roux indeed, but the fact is that when totally forgotten a couple of years in the future, it will take a couple more and those old record-thriftshop-wandering gurus of disposable dance music, who cannot live without their daily doses of Oakey & Moroder will find this worth 180 grams of gold.
21. TELEPATHE: Dance Mother (V2)
Mark my words; electroclash rehabilitation will occur in two-to-three years. Telepathe are so out of style, that they almost sound like forerunners. I was forced to choose between Tegan and Sara and these girls for my list - it was a quick choice.
22. THE ANTENNAS: Feeling Feline Tonight (Novoton)
As the anxious melodrama of The Collector kickstarts Feeling Feline Tonight, one is able to find himself somewhere between the dark shadows and the contrasted back lights. There is a sense of adventure and a feeling of nostalgia and bitterness going on every moment. Although drapered in ultra cool vintage synth textures, the overall tone is associated with the unreal, the fantasy, the history and the dream. Antennas at their best are as campy as Roxy Music. But as the Roxy approach was strictly sentient postmodernism, the Antennas are retro-postmodernists with an admirable counterfeit of the overtly sentimental cinematic sound of past decades.
23. BEAR IN HEAVEN: Wholehearted (Hometapes)
Oh my, another bear/fox/wolf/fucking-eelworm-band expanding the fauna of Brooklyn. Thoreauesque longing, bucolic post-rock melodies and organic chord developments seem to be the new black in local hipster circles - in fact it's just about as cool as hoarding footstamps. I guess all this is passable in a city infested with rodents, cockroaches and Puerto Ricans. How about some realistic band names for a change? The Rats? How randy would that be?
24. BLACK LIPS: 200 Million Thousand (Vice)
The new Black Lips album sounds good as usual. This time they are maybe even a wee bit more sinister, smudgier & murkier. You know, the kind of mean ass music that Jack The Ripper likes to hear before going out to paint the town red. Lock up your daughters.
25. NASA: Spirit of Apollo (Anti)
This "record" is a lot of fun... for about five minutes. Then one starts to realize the epic measure of NASA sucking dick. Well, wait for 20 years and Spirit of Apollo will be notorious. In sucking dick.
