2009 in Music: Jon’s List

Top 25 songs of the year

1. Private, “My Secret Lover (Diplo Mix)”
2. Phoenix, “Lisztomania”
3. Passion Pit, “Sleepyhead (Wallpaper Mix)”
4. Das Racist, “Combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bell (Wallpaper Remix)”
5. St. Vincent, “Actor Out of Work”
6. Dirty Projectors, “Stillness is the Move”
7. The Very Best, “Ntende Uli”
8. Sleigh Bells, “A/B Machines”
9. Neon Indian, “Should Have Taken Acid With You”
10. YACHT – “I’m in Love With a Ripper”
11. Joy Oribson, “Hyph Mngo”
12. Phoenix, “1901”
13. Basement Jaxx, “Raindrops”
14. Royksopp f/ Fever Ray, “This Must Be It”
15. Carl Sagan f/ Stephen Hawking, “A Glorious Dawn”
16. The Field, “Leave It”
17. Gold Panda, “Quitter’s Ragga”
18. Kid Cudi – “Made Her Say”
19. Charlotte Gainsbourg and Beck, “IRM”
20. Major Lazer, “Hold the Line”
21. Four Tet, “Love Cry”
22. Animal Collective, “Daily Routine (Phaseone Mix)”
23. Volcano Choir, “Island, IS”
24. Vitalic, “Your Disco Song”
25. Fuck Buttons, “Surf Solar”

Top 10 albums of the year

1. Phoenix – Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix
2. The Very Best – Warm Heart of Africa
3. Fever Ray – Fever Ray
4. Omar Souleyman - Highway to Hassake: Folk and Pop Sounds of Syria
5. Fuck Buttons - Tarot Sport
6. Taken By Trees - East of Eden
7. Neon Indian - Physic Chasms
8. Lily Allen – It’s Not Me, It’s You
9. RJD2 - The Tin Foil Hat EP
10. Dan Deacon - Bromst

Thoughts, endnotes, and a bunch more after the jump.

Ongoing Debates

Peter Bjorn and John’s breakthrough album Writer’s Block was pure Nordic ear candy. The follow-up, Living Thing, ditched the whistling and handclaps for a percussion kit made of pots, pans and rusted drums, distorted keyboards and a lead single with more than two dozen uses of the word ‘fuck.’  I would be sold on this if the melodies were there, but with the exception of “Lay It Down” and “It Don’t Move Me,” large portions of the record blend together into one long dirge.

Memory Tapes received quite a bit of buzz for their album, stray b-sides and a 22 minute ambient project that trickled out over the year. I dug the woozy keyboards on a remix or two, but as a project these guys struck me as a hollow imitation of M83. On that note, the Maps album was pretty mediocre.

Yeasayer decided the way forward from the stoner rock + Williamsburg hipster rock of their debut was acid. “Ambling Alp” is a mess – 30 minutes of noodling reduced to a disjointed four minute song. Perhaps the album will be better (or at least as good as the art direction).

Ethnomusicology

Nearly half the music I listened to this year wasn’t eligible for the list because it came from crate digging. I used my limited vacation time to maximum effect and visited five countries around Latin America – Mexico, Colombia, Ecuador, Guatemala and Honduras. Each place I brought my iPod and keen ear for the music blasting from mercados. My best find was a data CD full of Colombian cumbias purchased on a bus en route to a mountain wool market. No artist names, unfortunately, but there’s a great energy that flows through these 100 tracks.

I heard plenty of griping about Shakiria’s “She Wolf/Loba” in the latter half of the year, that the première Colombian artiste abandoned her roots to ape American slut-hop. But “She Wolf” wasn’t a big hit here, and doesn’t seem particularly obsessed with our country’s current rockist-or-Autotune trends. It’s every bit as idiosyncratic as her other hits, and all the better for it.

Tamizdat, the album we released this year, paid tribute to Bulgarian choral music. The best single disc anthology I could find was Le Mystère des Voix Bulgares, a recording of the national company released on a French record label. I also sifted through a Torrent of Bulgarian folk music. My favorites include Voileta Tomovska’s “Oj Devojce, Devojce” and Susana Spasovska’s “Zdravo Zivo Domakini.”

Elsewhere, I devoured music from places I could not visit this year. After I heard her music in an echo-y Red Hook art gallery, I treasured a hissy version of Cuban bolero singer La Lupe’s greatest hits. A better version showed up in my Christmas stocking.

I’m slowly making my way through the Sublime Frequencies’ back catalog.  Two releases that stood out were Choubi Choubi! – a collection of Iraqi pop from between the two invasions that proves that Mesopotamians are the original gangsters – and Thai Pop Spectacular 1960s-1980s, a collection of bizarre songs that takes jazz, funk and girl group pop and throws it into an organ-dominated soufflé.

I also discovered the incredible psychedelic jam “Ince Ince Bir Kar Yagar” by Selda, a political track produced in the early 1970s. The singer recently came out of retirement – check out the pictures of a homely middle-aged housewife rocking out to the still-subversive music of her youth.

Endnotes

1. Private – “My Secret Lover (Diplo Mix)”

The original song is mediocre; an undistinguished attempt by a trio of Norwegians to recreate Madonna’s Like A Virgin. Diplo throws the track in the blender, taking six or seven pieces and rearranging them in a banger that should be played at the moment when a gathering becomes a party.

3 + 4. Passion Pit, “Sleepyhead (Wallpaper Mix)” / Das Racist, “Combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bell (Wallpaper Remix)”

Wallpaper released an album this year – an O.K. slice of Autotuned hipster R&B called Doodoo Face. Whatever. All of his remixes this year, including a mash up of Jay-Z’s “99 Problems” and “D.O.A.” isolated the best elements of the source material and amplified them. More than one person told me they didn’t get Passion Pit. I played them this remix.
9. Carl Sagan f/ Stephen Hawking, “A Glorious Dawn”

The first song to make the list that began as a YouTube video. This eventually “crossed over” and was released on Ryan Adam’s vanity label.

23. Volcano Choir, “Island, IS”

“Island” means Iceland in Icelandic. So are we talking about an island or the country of Iceland? Perhaps both?
1.  Phoenix, Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix

I could have put every single song on this album on the best tracks list. At one point I thought about having just “Fences” sit there, then “1901″ crept in. Phoenix have yet to release a bad record, but this is their first great one.

6. Taken By Trees, East of Eden

I would love the budget to record with a full band in Pakistan. Taken by Trees doesn’t waste the opportunity. Rather than pasting the Pakistani musicians onto existing tracks, she weaves native instruments and singers through each composition, to a place where electronic, Western and Pakistani instruments all fit. The big surprise of this record was how much it sounded like The Studio’s Yearbook 1 transported around the world, with the sense of adventure intact.

9. RJD2, The Tin Foil Hat EP

Thirty minutes of funk pulled from the vaults. Miles away from the material leaked from the upcoming The Colossus.

Disappointments of the Year

Rihanna got together with several of the UK’s best dubstep producers, the guy who made “Umbrella” and Justin Timberlake, and only came up with a wan ballad punctuated by gunshots.

The Twilight Saga: New Moon Soundtrack featured a number of great bands – St. Vincent, Lykki Li, Grizzy Bear, Bon Iver – at their most boring. Thom Yorke fared best, but Radiohead oscillated from gems such as “Feeling Pulled Apart By Horses” (started with the band, finished as a solo piece) to tedious retreads like “Henry Patch: In Memory Of” and “These Are My Twisted Words.” Please release an album.

Simian Mobile Disco apparently hasn’t heard a post-breakthrough record from an electronic music act in the past 15 years, because they make the same freshman mistake on their sophomore album: too many guest stars. The first Simian album had a couple of guests, but the gang kept to people who actually fit their aesthetic. The band admitted they shipped the tracks out to 50 of their closest musical friends and took what came back. It’s apparent.

Things aren’t looking so great for next year as Massive Attack released a just O.K. EP in advance of their seven-years-in-the-making record that comes out in February. “Paradise Circus” – released last week – is a total snoozer. Perhaps Burial can save it with his rumored remix album.

Particularly Terrible Pop Songs (in no real order)
* Flo Rida “Right Round”
* Foo Fighters, “Wheels”
* Anything Glee
* Weezer, “”(If You’re Wondering If I Want You To) I Want You To”

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Tags: best of 2009, music