Pitchfork's Top 50 Albums of 2009

With their constantly evolving sonic identity, in-your-face vocal mannerisms, and open-ended ideas about what their music might "mean," Animal Collective seem designed to inspire obsessive fans and vociferous detractors in equal measure. Merriweather Post Pavilion, their latest full-length, has been anticipated to an almost ridiculous degree, with blogs and message boards lighting up with each scrap of new information or word of a possible leak. No one who's been looking forward to it should be disappointed. Everything that's defined the band to this point-- all those strands winding through their hugely diverse catalog-- is refined and amplified here.

I've heard Dave Longstreth cursed at length, and I've heard him compared to some of the lesser deities. In the Dirty Projectors frontman we have a fellow who fancies himself not so much a songwriter as a modern composer, a Yale comp-school dropout with one of indie rock's most divisive voices. Early DPs records carry with them ambitions so grandiose it's no wonder they range from wildly inventive to practically unlistenable-- occasionally in the span of the same song.

The xx are four 20-year-olds from South London who make predominantly slow, furtive pop music, mostly about sex. They are also one of the stranger recipients of UK hype in recent memory. They have no calling-card song; members of the Pitchfork staff have ID'd no fewer than four songs ("Basic Space", "Crystalised", "Islands", "Infinity") as "the one." They are not fashion plates, nor likely to be. Their list of influences is potent but imperfect: Young Marble Giants (too shaggy and he avy-lidded); Japan (too robust and theatric); Glass Candy (too quick and glammy). Without one gimmick song they'll never be able to reproduce, without an alternate agenda, without a set-in-stone hip influence, the xx start to sound like a real actual band, even if, after dozens of listens, it's nearly incomprehensible to think that a group so fresh-faced produced xx. 

Yes, it exists, and yes, it's as good as fans have been hoping for. We'll get more in depth on that shortly, but with the two most important questions surrounding this album finally answered after four years of anticipation, that leaves a third one: why a sequel? The easy conclusion is that Raekwon needed a benchmark-- that he couldn't just put together any slapdash collection of skits and weedcarrier features and b-grade beats, then slap the words Cuban Linx on the cover. So while some people might read this album's title as a gimmicky ho ok to lure in bring-NYC-back nostalgists, it actually acts more as a reassuring seal of quality from an MC who some people think lost his way the moment he released Immobilarity without a single RZA beat.

Veckatimest ain't perfect; lord knows it tries. More than most any album in recent memory not named Chinese Democracy (please keep reading), it is compositionally and sonically airtight, every moment sounding tweaked, labored over. Perfection-- and the pursuit thereof-- has its price, and in less able hands (with all love to Axl), this obsessive attention to craft and execution could lead to something dull. What's perhaps the most remarkable thing about the truly remarkable Veckatimest, however, is how very exciting much of it is; no small feat for a painstaking chamber-pop record that never once veers above the middle tempo.

Natasha Khan likes pretty things: fur, gold, melody, the moon, feathers, things that sparkle, chords that resolve. Since she began recording and performing as Bat For Lashes a few years back, the Brighton native has loosely assembled those things around her person like so many thrift store trinkets. Were it not for "What's a Girl to Do?", the lone song from her otherwise-too-precious 2006 debut to suggest that she might have the chilly songwriting charisma to match her outward appearance, it could have been easy to write Khan off as nothing more than an over-reaching asthete.

That the Knife's 2006 breakthrough Silent Shout didn't set the dominoes on a series of similarly grotesque and unnatural sounding imitators is less an indictment on its impact than a comment on its inimitability. The current apex of ten years' collaboration between siblings Karin Dreijer Andersson and Olof Dreijer, it's one of a handful of albums from the past decade that one might argue sounded like nothing before it. In the three years since, the Dreijers have treaded lightly, touring and remixing in carefully managed bursts before quietly receding back into silence altogether.

Girls frontman Christopher Owens grew up in the Children of God cult. His older brother died as a baby because the cult didn't believe in medical attention. His dad left. He and his mother lived around the world, and the cult sometimes forced his mother to prostitute herself. As a teenager, Owens fled and lived as a Texas gutter-punk for a while. Then a local millionaire took Owens under his wing, and Owens moved to San Francisco. There, he and Chet "JR" White formed Girls, and recorded Album, their debut album, under the influence of just about every kind of pill they could find.

Like any noise group, Fuck Buttons rely on a certain amount of vulgarity and aggression. While they've always possessed a knack for melody that has, for their genre, provided their music with an accessible edge, listeners unaccustomed to blood-curdling screams and metal-scraping drones have had their work cut out for them when searching for the more delicate moments that helped make last year's Street Horrrsing such a stunning listen.

The cover of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs' debut LP, 2003's Fever to Tell, set an early-decade benchmark for sheer ugliness, a deliberately heinous splatter of webbed blood, stabbed snakes, and flaming heads. The music was also confrontational, with lead singer Karen O following in the footsteps of countless riot grrls and righteous rock queens in crafting a persona of raw defiance and sexual menace.

Annie Clark, the musician otherwise known as St. Vincent, projects an aura of eerie perfection-- beautiful, poised, good-humored, and well-adjusted to a degree uncommon for rock performers, let alone ordinary people. She's clearly not oblivious to her disarming qualities. On the covers of both her albums, her wide eyes and porcelain features give her the a ppearance of a cartoon princess come to life, and in the songs contained therein, she sings with the measured, patient tones of a benevolent, maternal authority figure. The thing that separates Clark from any number of earth mother Lilith Fair types, however, is her eagerness to subvert that effect. Her album covers may showcase her pretty face, but her blank expression and the tight framing leave the images feeling uncomfortably ambiguous. Her voice and arrangements are often mellow and soothing, but those sounds mainly serve as context as she exposes undercurrents of anxiety and discomfort hidden just beneath a gorgeous façade.

Disliking teen-pop gets you cast as some sort of rockist Luddite these days, but beyond the fact that most of it doesn't sound like stuff I'd have wanted to hear as a high schooler, it doesn't feel like music for teens either. (Hell, it's more tween-pop than teen-pop anyway.) But what about the kind of stuff that, say, the "1979" video lionized-- breaking into your folks' liquor cabinet, obliterating the speed limit despite just getting your learner's permit, leaving your hometown for the first time and discovering how small it feels. What about jamming out with your best bud and deciding to call it a band?

The cover of The Crying Light, the third album by Antony and the Johnsons, is strikingly similar to that of its predecessor, 2005's highly-lauded I Am a Bird Now. The latter presented a stark black-and-white shot of transvestite performer Candy Darling lying on her hospital deathbed; this time, we get an even starker image of Japanese Butoh dancer Kazuo Ohno, a hero of bandleader Antony Hegarty since he first spotted her on a poster while studying in France as a teenager. As Ohno leans back, wrinkled and seemingly near death himself, the flower in his hair sits in the same position as the bright blooms that hover above Darling.

As we've gotten to know Bradford Cox over the last couple of years through shows, interviews, and blog posts, one of the Deerhunter frontman's most appealing qualities is his deep and nuanced appreciation of the music of others. Some musicians listen to records to see how they work, check out the competition, or trawl for ideas; by all available evidence, Cox feels records, deeply. If he was born without musical gifts and couldn't sing or play an instrument, one can imagine him working at a record store, amassing an enviable collection while driving people on a message board crazy with the suren ess of his detailed opinions. Whatever you think of his exploits as an indie rock media figure, Cox's music fandom is easy to identify with and also offers a portal into his own work.

Like plenty of other bands in the internet era, the Pains of Being Pure at Heart seem poised to attract an audience that will far outstrip that of their easily identifiable precedents-- in their case, groups like Rocketship or Shop Assi stants, each obscure these days even by Approved Indie Influence standards. A few other twee/noise-pop revivalists arguably pulled off that same trick last year, but Pains of Being Pure at Heart are likely to appeal to listeners beyond online name-droppers and Brooklyn scenesters.

Real Estate were born in the depths of one New Jersey summer. Frontman Martin Courtney had just returned home to his native Ridgewood from college in Washington State, a few fresh songs in his pockets. He'd been playing music with bassist Alex Bleeker and guitarist Matthew Mondanile since high school in various forms, even covering Weezer and the Strokes records from tip to tail. But during the summer of 2008, Real Estate didn't get nostalgic for just their specific suburban nights, crushes, or favorite bands as teens-- they fashioned a tin can-and-string to memories more universal. Their self-titled debut LP is a collection of those first underwater pop songs and onward, 7" cuts and mpfrees that have been backstroking their way across the Web and into lo-fi nerdpiles. Over the past year, many of these songs have soundtracked a time when it feels like every kid in or just out of college seems to be handcrafting/clamoring for music that shuttles us back to a time before career choices, adult responsibility, and this recession. 

Neko Case is a force of nature. Her voice can knock you over-- it's one of the strongest in any genre. She has immense control and surprising physical and stylistic range, able to jump from cowgirl honkytonk to pop muse to Americana banshee with ease and grace. However, on her fifth studio album, Middle Cyclone, she literally becomes a force of nature: Case sings opener "This Tornado Loves You" from the point of view of an actual tornado, tearing up trailer parks and cutting a 65-mile swath in search for its beloved: "I carved your name across three counties," she sings defiantly as the guitars whip around her and the snare patters frantically, suggesting destruction can be a demonstration of love. Later she's a cyclone, an elephant, a killer whale, a dove, a magpie, and possibly a mollusk. "I'm an animal," she sings on "I'm an Animal". "You're an animal, too.

No one ever wants to admit that summer's totally over, but it's even tougher this year considering how fun it all was-- seems like every other day, an evocatively named band would come about and contribute to this glo-fi/dreambeat/chillwave thing that was perfect for those unbearably humid August nights rife with possibility, imagining an alternate universe where the narcotic of choice in danceclubs were Galaxie 500 and Saint Etienne records.

"I used to be darker/ Then I got lighter/ Then I got dark again." With these three simple lines from "Jim Cain", the opening track of his lovelorn new album, the always-succinct Bill Callahan sums up his tempestuous musical trajectory. For those of you keeping score at home, "darker" seems to refer to most of his output as Smog, when his songwriting often succumbed to the weary dread his dead-planet of a voice e xudes like gravity. The lightening occurred over the course of A River Ain't Too Much to Love, his final record as Smog, and Woke on a Whaleheart, his first post-Smog effort. On these records, romantic gratitude gradually replaced romantic pessimism. Bill Callahan was happy; at peace. But it wasn't to last. The slumbering beast of love, "the lion walking down city streets," awoke, and it was pissed. He got dark again. 

For Emma, Forever Ago-- Bon Iver's 2007 debut LP-- was nearly eclipsed by its own (endlessly repeated) mythology. Famously: Singer and songwriter Justin Vernon curled up in a "remote northern Wisconsin cabin" for three epic, torturous months of post-heartbreak introspection/catharsis, writing the songs which would ultimately comprise his first solo album. For Emma was self-released by Vernon before being picked up Jagjaguwar and afforded a proper launch; grateful listeners swooned and shivered, circling the record like kids around a bonfire. For Emma became synonymous with dark winter ennui: the musical translation of earth's cruelest season.

Listen to it now and you might beg to differ, but history's current take on The Understanding (Röyksopp's 2005 answer to their relentlessly smiley faced debut) seems to be that it was a misstep. Despite a lead single ("Only This Moment") that foresaw trance's miniature mainstream resurgence and memorable contributions from Karin Driejer (whose "What Else Is There" ranks among Röyksopp's finest songs) and Chelonis R. Jones (whose syncopated "49 Percent" helped eke the Norwegian duo into more credible techno territory), this darker, more textured follow-up stalled at the gate. In retrospect, it was probably done under by both expectation and competition: Not only did The Understanding fail to deliver anything as relentlessly chirpy as early single "Eple" or as friendly and as instantaneous as the Geico Caveman-endorsed "Remind Me", but it was also up against increasingly significant competition from the emergent Scandinavian electro-pop scene.

While it may seem as if there's not a new release without a hyphenated genre to give it birth, Bear in Heaven's second LP feels fresh simply because it resists easy categorization or comparison. This isn't to say it's sonically groundbreaking, though-- fitting for an album whose title references the four main navigational directions, Beast Rest Forth Mouth is as familiar-feeling as it is difficult to pinpoint. Mostly made up of textural, spacious three- to four-minute pop anthems with towering choruses, BRFM is a welcome reminder that an album doesn't have to be bombastic to feel huge and important. Take out the earbuds and let it fill a space: This is music that's bigger than your iPod-- music you'll want to feel all around you.

Blue Record, the second LP from Savannah, Ga., hero-metal quartet Baroness, feels like it spins for either 30 or 90 minutes, but never the 44 minutes the tracklist advertises. Full of stops and starts, dynamic swells and swan dives, razor-sharp guitar leads, and dense full-band bludgeons, these 12 tracks swell with parts and counterparts, condensing epics into tightly arranged, executed, and edited two-minute stretches. Within most any given track, Barone ss twist between feelings of triumph and trouble, elation and depletion, playing all with unequal parts grace and grit. When those extremes and the sonic care that goes into creating them win over, the Blue Record feels like a marathon where everyone wins. That description, however, runs the risk of making Baroness' triumphant follow-up to 2007's Red Album seem like a laborious listen. It's not: Via expert pacing and meticulous sequencing, those peaks and valleys arise precisely where they should, creating an experience that feels more like a sunny ride in a sports car than anything resembling hard work.

Plenty of bands want to take you higher and even more are looking to get you down, but it's increasingly rare to find a record that sounds good with a AAA guidebook and a few hours to get to god knows where, as long as it's somewhere else. Despite the unabated use of adjectives like "sprawl ing" or "sweeping" or "epic," the indie road trip album has become something of a lost art, with bands mostly forgoing dense, pent-up instrumentation that slowly unfurls and releases-- you know, that lonesome crowded sound. You could blame it on so many bands being from autophobic NYC, or that the Pacific Northwest gods of indie are still going too strong to already be a primary influence, but neither would explain New York's Cymbals Eat Guitars' Why There Are Mountains. While there's plenty of geographical signifiers on their debut, it's almost topographic in its approach, without hooks and choruses so much as map-like layouts of mountains and sloping valleys.

When you talk about lo-fi more or less inspired by folk, the best stuff always carries with it a sense of discovery. Cheap and tinny acoustic music should feel like something you stumbled upon, like maybe you dug it out of an old drawer or rescued it from the freebee bin in the thrift store. And then the force of the music should sparkle through the gr it and hiss and distortion and make you think you understand something about the person making it. It's a romantic notion, one not necessarily based in reality. But the best music in this vein manages to convey a sense of intimacy, as if it's a one-to-one conversation between the artist and the listener. 

Midway through 2007, someone asked me the usual question-- the one about which records I'd want to take with me to a desert island. The first answer that sprang to mind seemed somehow perverse: Dan Deacon's Spiderman of the Rings? I certainly didn't think this was one of the best, most profound, or most life-sustaining records I'd ever heard, and it wasn't as if I had some great personal attachment to it; I'd only first heard the thing that spring. But it seemed like a lifetime on a desert island would get awfully lonely, and there was something about the album that seemed like a solution to that problem. All the happy massed shouting on a song like "Wham City"! There's plenty of music in the world that conjures up the feeling of crowds, but so much of it feels mob-like and jack-booted, or else it's just hero-worship of whoever's posing on the stage in front. Here, on Spiderman, was at least one song where the crowd felt joyous and inviting, like people celebrating the fact of sharing something. Which seemed about as essential, desert-island-wise, as a good sharp knife.