Popcraft

Remember 2009? Well get ready, because you’re about to. The long goodbye to a regular-sized year ends with this short list. Here are my top 15 albums of 2009:

Honorable-ish mentions here and here.

15) Peter Bjorn and John – Living Thing
14) Asobi Seksu – Hush
13) I Was a King – I Was a King
12) The Pains of Being Pure at Heart – The Pains of Being Pure at Heart
11) Felix – You Are the One I Pick
10) La Roux – La Roux
09) Passion Pit – Manners
08) Dirty Projectors – Bitte Orca
07) Annie – Don’t Stop
06) Japandroids – Post-Nothing

5) The xx – xx
The xx were The band to talk about in 2009, if you liked to talk about everything in music that does not actually matter. There is something about sleepy looking early 20’s art school students with hip, easy-to-connect musical influences that just drive bloggers crazy, and next thing you know you have to decide if the girl singer reminds you of Margo Timmins or not and what you think will happen now that the band is falling apart and who they remind you of besides Young Marble Giants and Chris Issak. Who cares? Me, I guess, because I have talked about all of these things, and even cared about my answers. But that’s stupid.

For real: I have seen it as a talking point, multiple times!, that “everyone” has a different favorite song on xx. It is insane to me that anyone finds this interesting at all. I can’t think of a single album where everyone is expected to agree on one song as the “best,” much less an album where it is impressive that people like different songs over others.

So why do The xx make everyone act like idiots? Because they’re really cool. That may not sound very convincing, so let me explain: The xx are practically a walking field recording of cool detachment in the urban wild. They’ve instantly perfected a minimal pop sound that’s postured and deliberate, but smart and almost completely effortless. It’d be aggravatingly hip, except it’s so accessible and enjoyable from the outset that, just for a little bit, it makes you feel like you’re part of the club, a little cooler. Until you start acting like an impressed critic because people like different songs than you.

(The best song, though, is Basic Space)

4) Grizzly Bear – Veckatimest
At one point, right after I realized how much I liked The Beach Boys, I decided I liked “precise” music. I don’t think I knew exactly what I meant by that, but it sounded specific and correct in a way that made me feel proud that my taste had “developed.” I think I was trying to say that I liked tight harmonies and clean production and nothing else, which was true at the time, because that is what happens for a little while when you fall in love with Pet Sounds.

But my definition of “precise” was all messed up. I thought it meant I was seeking the most sweetly crafted music, void of imperfections, which meant I listened to a lot of boring Beach Boys knockoffs. I had a hard time with any sort of fuzz, distortion or dissonance getting between me and my chords. I just wanted something that sounded warm and smooth. I wanted to pick music like little flowers and then smell the flowers and cast them toward the sun and then lie down in the petals. I was awful.

Veckatimest is named after Veckatimest Island, a very small, uninhabited island off the coast of Massachusetts, where the flowers remain mostly undisturbed by overbearing nineteen year olds like my precision-loving younger self. “Massachusetts” sort of takes away from the romanticism, but Grizzly Bear aren’t worried about being romantic. They’re more concerned with being precise. The mistake I originally made in identifying “precise” music was that I was looking for something finely polished, sharpened. I didn’t understand that something truly meticulous starts at its construction, like growth occurring in nature. Veckatimest is lush and thorny in a way that I might not have fully appreciated at the time. It sounds like it had been playing for a hundred years before I had stumbled upon it, and is still blooming. I guess I am still a dweeb for flowery music after all.

3) The Flaming Lips – Embryonic
The Flaming Lips entered the decade coming off of the brilliant The Soft Bulletin, and from there they kept pumping more color and drug-induced funny faces into their music until they became a sort of sad cartoon band. They weren’t making bad music, but they started to sound tired and forced. I went from loving the rush of songs like “Fight Test” to wondering if Wayne Coyne ever gets too hot in that animal costume when he’s rolling around in confetti.

Embryonic is no less animated or richly colored than The Lips’ previous few albums, but it’s a whole new palette. Our cartoon heroes have traveled from a candy palace to a terrifying witche castle, and the resulting music is sort of (very) unnerving. This album is actually physically taxing to listen to. Once, while high, I said The Soft Bulletin is like “jamming pop rocks into your eyes, and then your eyes become your ears.” I don’t know if I would ever want to listen to Embryonic on drugs. It’s like setting a reel of Hanna Barbara cartoons on fire, and then that fire becomes your brain.

2) Girls – Album
It’s like Elvis Costello in board shorts! It’s like Jesus and Mary Chain open a hot dog cart! It’s like I’ve never walked on anything besides warm sand in my entire life!

Girls recall sickeningly perfect days of youth that couldn’t possibly have existed in my life, even if I wanted them to. To listen to Album is to remember hanging out with your beautiful, photogenic friends on the beach every day, surfing until you want to go get fucked up and and lay down in your friend’s basement, feeling heartache so heavy you can’t possibly believe it’s just a fleeting part of being a teenager. Growing up in a polite Midwestern suburb, I never had a single day like this. So why do I feel like Girls are directly connected to all the best parts of life before legal drinking age?

When I shared the music video, I said that the song “Hellhole Ratrace” “makes me want to hug every friend I’ve ever gotten drunk and told a secret to,” and I’m pretty satisfied with that.

Okay, time to make way for #1:

PHOENIX
Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix
The difficult thing about the previous decade was that no one really knew how to classify anything. In the struggle to leave a mark against their predecessors, musicians started to blend genres in ways that were fresh and interesting, but tiresome to describe. Suddenly we had to start wondering what terms like “freak folk” and “math rock” meant, and that got frustrating for some people. You couldn’t tell somebody about a band you liked without needing to associate them with three other bands, The Beach Boys and a dead 80’s genre. The worst thing that could happen to pop music was happening; it was beginning to seem inaccessible to people who just wanted to listen to good songs and didn’t want to bother with terminology and history.

Meanwhile, Phoenix spent the decade mastering the art of the single. Every album came with the promise of more catchy, Summer-defining pop songs and a focused direction for the band’s next sound. With this in mind, it shouldn’t be too surprising that Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix is a polished juggernaut of hooks that sounded as good on car commercials as it did on mixtapes for your girlfriend.

It’s not that Phoenix are less concerned with the past than their peers; I’m sure the primary influences at work on Wolfgang Amadeus Phoneix are clearly visible to those who want to trace them. What makes it so great is that there’s simply no need to do that. The album sounds like the product of a decade, a composite sketch of every pop song we’ve loved over the past ten years shaded so smoothly that you’re doing it a disservice to break it down into parts. Phoenix have managed to create fresh, truly pure pop music at a time when genre purity is usually reserved for novelty and nostalgia.