This Winki's Top 10 Best Albums Of 2009

This may sound intriguing. I’m talking about these numbered/ordered lists. But in the end, normal lists that contain nothing but items without priorities lack the excitement. Among the 10 albums below, there might only be a slight difference in appreciation from us. Some items are genuinely inevitable masterpieces and some are not, but they have one thing in common: they’re all our favorite albums of 2009.

10. Fever Ray – Fever Ray

Karin Dreijer Andersson’s solo debut could easily be as groovy as her main band The Knife. Though she went off the beaten path by keeping the surreal nightly forest-roaming elements of Knife’s 2006’s Silent Shout and interpreted the dancing elements to bone shivers. Her witchcraft voice and her voracious appetite in keeping us calm but waiting for a ghost strike heralds a pretty dark and lonely night out in the woods. And I’m not sure the ground on which I’m stumbling is on the same planet that I used to inhabit. [Read More]

09. Telekinesis! – Telekinesis!

Telekinesis! is an indie-rock bedroom project by a burgeoning songwriter called Michael Benjamin Lerner and produced by Death Cab For Cutie’s Chris Walla. It does not climb up any high summits and there are no dazzling innovations or conspicuous mixing techniques. Though, it’s a collection of 11 satisfying songs with pop cologne and simple but well-written songwritings. Due to Lerner’s serene style of singing and their appreciable simplicity, most tracks click somewhere peaceful in my mind, so you’re not in too much trouble loving them. [Read More]

08. La Roux – La Roux

A promising blossoming English electropop act with Elly Jackson as the outer shell, the presentation layer and a teen-romance singing beauty, and having Ben Langmaid as the burning core, a chiptune machine and a composer very well aware of the synthpop ups and downs, La Roux, now that we reach the last ticks of the new millennium’s first decade, knows exactly what a modern age teenager likes to depict in his/her mind or how he/she imagines soon-forgotten passions and immature relationships.

07. Franz Ferdinand – Tonight

Our very own Glasgow dance-punk figure returned this year with their 3rd LP not intending to make us think about which incident triggered WWI and they more or less got rid of some loud distortions they used to have. As the album title explains, Tonight is Franz Ferdinand’s dance incarnation. This is where Alex Kapranos and friends get help from Mike Fraser to mix a back-to-back collection of joyous and lively FF songs to cover up your party night. And they pretty much did it the best way they could, because the album has lingered in my car stereos for various occasions. [Read More]

06. The Horrors – Primary Colours

If you couldn’t get enough of the harmful but appealing violence in the music of bands such as Suicide, Jesus and the Mary Chain, Joy Division and The Sex Pistols, then you definitely have an insatiable yearning to hear The Horrors. They had once threatened us of their emerge in their indie-shoegaze debut that was 2007’s Strange House, but they strike us again in 2009 with Primary Colours to inject that David Lynchy unease harshly in our veins. [Read Review]

05. The Love Language - The Love Language

Yet another alluring lo-fi DIY work in our list, this time by Stu McLamb. The Love Language’s eponymous debut is the sum of all his feelings for his ex-girlfriends. But this sole statement is the most depreciative thing we can say about it. There are classic movies hidden inside, there’s a plethora of love-ridden anthems that are performed as loud and amplifying as they can get. Stu McLamb’s approach to The Love Language’s warmth and blatant beauty is not spontaneous. He could make this all happen in a more pop and less noisy way. But he refused to become a headliner and shrieked out by media and coined his own small originality and that’s why these 9 gorgeous anecdotes of romance have not yet escaped my mind. [Read More]

04. The Antlers – Hospice

Hospice is a rare concept masterpiece you don’t pass by every year necessarily. And there are prerequisites to the intensely picturesque lo-fi vibrations you hear on the album. The man behind all these is Peter Silberman who locked himself up in his apartment for a year not to lose his focus. And somewhere along the way he was gifted with such a meticulous way to write about the story of a gravely ill beautiful girl spending her last hours in a gloomy hospital. Hospice is an amalgam of handcrafted well-done noise, lo-fi and alternative folk with a huge trend towards acoustic guitars. Low-budget but overwhelming by design, perhaps it might not be a good idea to listen to single tracks or choose one song as your favorite for Hospice sounds like one long epic song severed into pieces with similar moods but different addressings. [Read More]

03. Animal Collective – Merriweather Post Pavilion

Each decade encounters a handful of albums that neither musically nor instrumentally reflect their own zeitgeist. They simply play beyond what we may anticipate and therefore, we need time to grasp the meanings and concepts behind them. Bowie’s Low and Radiohead’s Kid A were two of them and of course you can name many others. 2009 per se, saw two other items added to this list. Animal Collective’s Merriweather Post Pavilion is the first and the other one is our #2 in this very list! Merriweather is relatively Animal Collective’s quasi-pop album; the one in which Panda Bear and Avey Tare do not complicate you lyrically. In fact Merriweather refuses to be a philosophy journal and discusses youth crushes, family problems, daily routines and girls on the surface, though the layered neo-psychedelica and those infinite Beach-Boys-infected freak-folk loops makes the album a kaleidoscope of music as people will define in 30 years! [Read More]

02. The Flaming Lips – Embryonic

As mentioned above, you have to be and stay patient with Embroynic. For the record, The Flaming Lips, unlike their previous seven years, are not here to entertain you anymore. There are no Yoshimi-style electropop and there are no epic sounds like “Waiting For the Superman”. Wayne Coyne does not even bother himself singing on key or clean and he occasionally coughs, too! Allegedly he’s not a singer here, he prefers to be an instrument. The cruel guitar lines and spattering melodies sprayed across this rather long 18-track album succeed at suffocating your lungs and blocking your visions as if you’re inside an embryo and your universe is just as big as that and there’s nothing you can do about it. Listen more! Play it while you’re sleeping! Let the Lips distract you the way they want and may solve the riddle at last. [Read More]

01. St. Vincent – Actor

Annie Clark had her own marital complications on her 2007’s debut full-length Marry Me but now she’s somehow survived that hurricane. This time, playing her role as a schizophrenic housewife on this valiant pop record, Clark paints a troublesome life infused with worries, pessimistic thoughts and sinister decisions. She’s not at ease, she turns her own fantasies into nightmares and she’s in love with an unknown actor. So far, it sounds like an unfinished and raw script to a film. But what Clark does is mesmerizing: she has apparently converted all these black and white feelings into sounds! Next thing you know, Actor is only classified under the genre of pop while it steps wildly outside that scope. There are nauseating noise explosions just when your brain declares your current-playing song as a warm jazzy tune. Just look at her dull but hypnotized gesture on the cover and keep your distance. She needs your help! But she also takes custody of our #1 favorite album of the year. All her haunts are still haunting her! Can you help her get through this?

Also Read:
TW's Top 10 Best Albums of 2008