10. ST. VINCENT - ActorAfter a so-so album debut a couple of years ago and the timid performance we witnessed as an opening act in 2007, this fine effort came out of the blue. Annie Clark a/k/a St. Vincent finds her voice on Actor, adapting a number of personalities in a varied collection of songs. And don't let the sweet voice fool you.
KEY TRACK: "Actor Out Of Work"
BONUS: "Oh Sister" (cover of Dylan song with Andrew Bird, Providence. RI, October 2009)
9. DAVE RAWLINGS MACHINE - A Friend of A FriendFURTHER READING: Alec Wilkinson's excellent New Yorker profile of Welch and Rawlings from 2004.
8. NEKO CASE - Middle Cyclone
FURTHER READING: February 2009 profile of Neko Case from The New York Times Magazine.
7. BOB DYLAN - Together Through Life
In which the Patron Saint of TNOP interprets Chess Records blues with a Tex-Mex undertone. And it works, continuing the Bard's late-career renaissance. [Side note to long time fans: it's like Desire, except David Hidalgo's accordion replaces Scarlet Rivera's fiddle.]
6. DAN AUERBACH - Keep It Hid
First solo effort from The Black Keys' front man allows him to flesh out his sound. The record gets stronger with each listen, and shows that Auerbach is now a major player on the music scene. He's in a prolific stage, as evidenced by the BlakRoc project and the expected new Keys' release in 2010.
5. THE DECEMBERISTS - The Hazards of Love
America's least-likely rock stars continue their musical ascendancy, using little known folk tales as their narrative compass. We admit it took us a little longer to warm up to this effort than previous favorites like The Crane Wife and Picaresque, but this "Folk Opera" treats the listener to bombastic shapeshifters, ghostly kids and a psychotic queen. Too adventuresome? Pretentious prog rock gone bad? Some thought so. But head man Colin Meloy clearly believes in the album concept, and dares to push back at the iPod singles mentality. And it doesn't hurt that he sure knows how to pen a melody.
FURTHER LISTENING: David Dye of The World Cafe interviews Colin Meloy.
4. U2 - No Line On The Horizon
After two albums of straight ahead rock cementing the familiar "U2 sound," the Dublin lads decide to step out of the box again. The result is their best studio record since Achtung Baby. Their massive stadium tour will continue into 2010, a sign of how much they believe in the new work.
3. WILCO - Wilco (The Album)
The top American band hits a solid groove from beginning to end in this self-titled (kind of) CD. Major fans of Wilco's experimental, atmospheric side will be disappointed to an extent, but the album brims with confidence from a line up of musicians who clearly listen to and love all shades of rock and roll - and learn from it.
KEY TRACK: "You Never Know"
KEY TRACK #2: "You And I" (with Leslie Feist on Late Night With David Letterman, July 2009)
KEY TRACK #3: "Wilco (The Song)" (The Colbert Report, October 2008)
FURTHER READING: Time talks to Jeff Tweedy about the album, the passing of Jay Bennett and a fellow Chicagoan.
2. PHOENIX - Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix
Regular readers of TNOP know that we are suckers for the unadulterated joys of pop. After three promising tries, France's Phoenix stormed the U.S. shores this year with its sunny, percussion driven sound. We dare you not to like it.
KEY TRACK: "Lisztomania"
PERFORMANCE: "1901," "Lisztomania/One Time Too Many" and "Long Distance Call" (from La Blogotheque Take Away Show, December 2009)
FURTHER READING: "Phoenix Remains A Band Apart" from September 2009 issue of The Fader.
1. GRIZZLY BEAR - Veckatimest
The Beach Boys-like harmony and hollow bodied guitar sound - with production finished, appropriately enough, in a New York church - made this record by the Brooklyn quartet Grizzly Bear TNOP's most played record in the car and on the stereo and iPod during 2009. Although its production is sparse and tones often hushed, there is an unique and youthful exuberance about this work. It is a record that will be played for many years to come.
KEY TRACK: "Two Weeks"
KEY TRACK #2: "All We Ask" (Blue Ribbon Vision @ Pabst Theater, Milwaukee, WI, June 2009)KEY TRACK #3: "While You Wait For The Others" (KCRW's Morning Becomes Eclectic, February 2008)
INTERVIEW AND PERFORMANCE: Chicago Public Radio's Sound Opinions, November 2009.
1. Oh My God, Charlie Darwin The Low Anthem 
2. Noble Beast, Andrew Bird. I am a little surprised to see Noble Beast come in at #2--even though this is my list! When Noble Beast came out earlier this year, on first listen I found it less original than Bird's previous CD Armchair Apocrypha, which I loved and which was a surprise critical and commercial hit. Based on Armchair's success, Bird moved from the small club where I first saw him perform in Madison (and where, he joked?, someone stole his equipment) to playing this fall in the same IM Pei designed hall that the Madison Symphony and the Madison Opera use. And his shows now sell out. Often months in advance. Part of that is the joy of seeing him perform. Until I saw him the first time, whistling, singing, playing his violin and guitar all on a single song and controlling the samples he makes on the spot with pedals he works with his stocking feet, I just couldn't really appreciate what it was he was doing. And if you see him perform more than once, you will realize that each time he plays a piece it is different. If you are a hardcore Bird fan, you buy the Inklings EPs he sells at his concerts with variations of his compositions. And compositions is the right word. For Bird the voice (including the whistling) is an instrument on an equal plane with the violin and the guitar and he is his own quartet. The violin, especially, is essential to his compositions, not just instrumentation that is brought in to make this or that record sound richer or more sophisticated. If you have read my Baker's Dozen of Best Concerts of 2009, you'll know i love seeing Bird live. But it was Noble Beast as a record that had to grow on me. And it did.
3. Life of the World to Come, Mountain Goats. Okay, continuing with the surprised to see a CD so high on the list theme. I am still not sure this is a truly great Mountain Goats CD. It is not Tallahassee. But it is a pretty damn good CD and a good Mountain Goats CD is worth a lot of hours of listening. For those of you who don't know it, The Mountain Goats is/are John Darnielle (the one guy as plural band meme). And starting with his early lo-fi recordings (and I mean lo-fi, as in singing into a boombox and selling the result as cassette tapes) he has written an opus of songs that merit one of the most Phd worthy Wikipedia pages of any band (with a separate page for discography). He writes about the Alpha Couple, a not quite? autobiographical pair always on the verge of divorce or death from their various addictions. He writes straight out autobiographical songs like the ones on Tallahassee about growing up with an abusive step father. He writes songs that are flat out sci fi (see the entry below for the EP Moon Colony Blood Bath). He writes like an adult in a new century who is not at all sure where this world is headed, in the most cosmic sense. On the Life of the World to Come all the songs have bible verses as titles--but don't let that put you off. This is not Christian rock. Many of the songs feature speakers who are less than holy in any conventional sense. In Psalms 40:2, the speaker desecrates a church then checks into a Red Roof Inn where "we slept like infants in the burning fuselage of my days." This CD continues the exploration of desperate seekers in what might or might not be the end times that Darnielle sung about last year on the his great EP Satanic Messiah where the theme was the third world forgotten rising up against their rulers. But on Life there are also heartbreaking, more personal songs as well, with a quiet voice singing of the soul's deepest realizations and regrets, as in Genesis 3:23 where the speaker breaks into a cabin singing "I used to live here. I used to live here. I used to live here." If you are a lyrics person (hello poets!) you have to spend some time with the Mountain Goats.
4. Secret, Profane & Sugarcane, Elvis Costello. I like Elvis Costello (aka Declan Patrick MacManus). From early--My Aim is True is a really a classic--to late. I agreed with a lot of critics that last year's Momofuku was a match for that early work. But I am not an exhaustive fan. Lots of records in Costello's 32 year career that have never graced my turntable/cd player/ipod. So I read the reviews of this record--which tended to frown on it as Costello wandering off the ranch after Momofuku's return to rock n' roll. And let it pass me by. Then I ended up having to drive a rental car without any tunes on me from Albany, New York into the Berkshires and back. I stopped at a Target and gazing at the sad, half empty display that is music brick and mortar retailing these days of the download, I spotted only two CDs I could imagine owning that I didn't have yet. Secret, Profane & Sugarcane and The Monsters of Folk. I snapped up Monsters (which I had been eagerly awaiting) and got the other just for rotations sake. And you know what? In every way, Secret, Profane & Sugarcane is the better record. Monsters struck me as four guys taking turns singing songs that sounded like the songs on their own albums, not a breakthrough for anyone, not a group in any real sense of the word. But Costello's voice on Secret is different. He has turned into a first class interpreter of the ballad. Two of the songs on the album were originally writen by Costello for Johnny Cash, but Costello also includes some songs he wrote for an unfinished commission for the Royal Danish Opera about the life of Hans Christian Anderson and his relation to the famous singer Jenny Lind. And these-"She Handed Me A Mirror," "How Deep Was the Red," and especially the amazing "Red Cotton" which imagines P.T. Barnum reading from an Abolitionist pamphlet are some of the most striking on the album. And with T-Bone Burnett producing him, the striped down acoustic folk/country/bluegrass backing makes this album feel like some wonderfully odd bit of Americana that was lost and is now found.
5. Dragonslayer, Sunset Rubdown. Okay, I do like a (odd) distinctive voice (see Crying Light, Antony and the Johnsons below). I am really love Spencer Krug's (the lead singer/central intelligence of Sunset Rubdown). I like it when he sings for his main band, Wolf Parade and I like it even more in the more complicated, slightly more ornate songs he does as part of his "side project" SUnset Rubdown. I say side project because lately there has been more Sunset Rubdown work out than Wolf Parade (and did I mention his other bands Frog Eyes and Swan Lake and Moonface?). A busy--and luckily for us, talented guy. Krug manages to work emotion into every move of his singing, though his is in no way a conventianally good voice. And he writes songs for Sunset Rubdown that are eccentric and filled with surreal images and mythological characters. Sunset Rubdown songs are long, and full of time shifts with equal nods to English folk music and rock opera. In some ways, Krug shares some of Colin Meloy's interests (that are so apparent--and sometimes mocked--in this year's The Hazards of Love) but he addresses them with the manic energy of a jester not the calm of an Elizabethan bard. Listen to a track like "Up On Your Leopard, Upon the End of Your Feral Days" (clocking in at a relatively short 4:47) and you get it all. And you also catch what I love besides Krug's voice. This music makes you want to dance around waving ribbons over your head--maybe pausing once in a while to viciously knee someone who is standing in your way.
6, Actor, St. Vincent. St. Vincent is Annie Clark (the too rare woman as band meme). It is Clark's gorgeous flexible voice on all the tracks, but she also writes the rhythmically complicated music and the novelist lyrics as well--so she is no mere beautiful lead singer. If I have any excuse for not listing Neko Case here, it is that I prefer the flexible voice of Annie Clark to the more conventionally powerful one of Case. But I could have listed both--I know. So time for true confession, I have some deep preference for men's voices that as a feminist makes me hang head in shame, but not change my ways. One Woman! on a list of 13 Albums, my inner feminist says. But what can I say? I am putting myself into therapy about it. At any rate, in her songs, Clark addresses the condition of woman in the here and now. She is drawn, in particular, to the plight of restless women trying to break out of their conventional or unconventional lives into some new and better space, but their desperation is restrained by a sense of realism and/or self-doubt, and the music often muted. To me that only makes them all the more effecting. And, not matter the lyrics, the songs on this album are just flat out lovely to listen to.
7. Elvis Perkins in Dearland, Elvis Perkins in Dearland. Elvis Perkins is the son of actor Anthony Perkins and the great-grandson of the fashion designer Elsa Schiaparelli. His father died of AIDS in 1992. His mother, Berry Berenson was on one of the American Airlines Flights that hit the Twin Towers and Perkins sings about this in his first album Ash Wednesday, which has a couple of really wonderful songs for the ages on it--"While You Were Sleeping" and "All Night Without Love." When I first listened to Elvis Perkins in Dearland, his new album with the band he has gathered around him, I wasn't sure I liked it. But I changed my mind, helped by seeing him live in a great performance that made My Baker's Dozen of Great Concerts 2009 list. Is there a theme running here? I often change my mind about an album after repeated listening, sometimes aided by seeing the performer live. The songs on Dearland are less lyrics focused, by they are joyous. The drumming is especially infectious. Listening to Ash Wednesday then this CD, it seems Perkins has gone through the valley of death and, in the tradition of the New Orleans jazz funeral, is ready to cut the body loose and dance in celebrate of life.
9. Veckatimist, Grizzly Bear. Grizzly Bear is a singular animal that is a plural band, ie not one guy but four, Ed Droste (vocals, guitar, keyboards), Daniel Rossen (vocals, guitar, keyboards), Chris Taylor (bass, backing vocals, various instruments, producer) and Christopher Bear (drums, backing vocals)-- though it started as a just a name for Ed Droste's musical projects. It is Droste's voice (more falsetto) that is the signature sound of the band. Veckatimist is Grizzly Bear's third CD and when it was released early in the year the critical consensus was that it was a high point for the band, and maybe for Western civilization. But Veckatimist is another CD, like Merriweather Post Pavilion that started out high my list when it was released and then slipped. I still find it beautifuland lush. But is it deep? I am not sure, lyrically, but musically it is. It pushes indy rock/folk/psychedelic dare I say pop? to the breaking point of layered perfection. But it is not predictable, at least not unless you have been listening to nothing but Grizzly Bear. It wanders and loops and just when you wonder where it is going, it snaps back with the lovely collective chorus of voices that is Grizzly Bear's greatest strength. So it stays on the list. I am still listening to it.
10 Hungry Bird, Clem Snide. Clem Snide is Eef Barzelay. That statement will either make perfect sense to your or strike you as a joke, with two of the most absurd names you have heard lately side by side. Clem Snide is apparently character in several novels by William S. Burroughs, including Naked Lunch--but here it is the name of one of those bands that is really one man--a common place these days--plus whoever he wants to have in to help on a particular project. Barzelay's also records under his own name now, including last year's Lose Big, and if you like one of his incarnations, you will like the other. I am not sure I notice much difference. But that is okay with me. I am a fan of Barzelay's. I like his odd distinctive voice. And I really like his lyrics, which are often persona poems in disguise. Clem Snide is labled alt/country but I don't find much country about Hungry Bird--the instrumentation often strikes me as having a touch of jazz--unless it is the dusty, down and out nature of many of the characters Barzelay writes and sings about.
12. The Crying Light, Antony & The Johnsons. There are not enough baritones, there may be a day fast approaching when there are too many people singing falsetto. Maybe not this year, since I love The Low Anthem's Miller and as a Wisconsin girl have to give a Justin Vernon aka Bon Iver permission to sing in any register he chooses, but Antony Hegarty is in a falsetto class of his own, proudly so. I love his voice. But then I love opera too, which is not the world of realism and the natural voice. My daughter Magdalena, who is 18, could not bear to hear even on song from this album while riding with me in the car. But when I listen to songs like the soaring "Her Eyes Are Underneath the Ground" I feel it pull on my heart like the full moon on the ocean. And I am likely, when alone in the car, to cry a tide of tears. I listened to this CD a good bit after losing a dear friends earlier this year, and that probably explains some of my reaction. But I liked Antony's earlier three albums and think his cut, Knockin On Heaven's Door, was one of the strongest on the Dylan bio pic I'M Not There soundtrack. Give him a listen. It won't take long. You will either like him, or, like Magda quickly switch to someone else.
13. The Hazards of Love, The Decemberists. Okay, they were off the list, on the list. I have what I will confess is a Colin Meloy weakness (and yes I have noticed he sings with an Irish accent when he was born in Montana). I saw The Hazards of Love performed live twice. It was kick ass great musical theater. So I am listing Hazards as a cast album. And there are some great stand alone songs on it. Give The Rake's Song a listen. A really catchy tune about a man murdering his own children--that is up there with anything in Sweeney Todd. And in musical theater it is a thin line between the dramatic and the melodramatic. And, remember, I am also the one who likes opera? Who cares if a plot makes sense as long as there is a great love scene, a good villain, and a good death scene. The Hazards has all that and then some. But if you are new to The Decemberists, you might want to start with The Crane Wife.
1. Dark Was the Night, Various Artists. Hands down. A really great collection and it benefits AIDS research and treatment. My favorite tracks include Andrew Bird's cover of great Handsome Family song "The Giant of Illinois", the Feist and Ben Gibbard "Train Song" and "Hey, Snow White" by The New Pornographers.
1. Score! 20 Years of Merge Records, Various Artists. Favorites "Sleep All Night" with both St. Vincent and The National, "Santa Maria" by Bill Callahan, and "My Drug Life" by the Mountain Goats.
3, To Willie, Phosphorescent. Phosphorescent is Matthew Houck (another one man band) and I love his work. But this CD of Willie Nelson covers took me by surprise--in a good way. I like Houck's vulnerable take on Willie's classics. My favorite track is "Too Sick to Pray". And if it sends you back to find the Willie Nelson originals that is a good thing; no one sings ahead of/behind the beat as effortlessly as Willie Nelson does. He is jazz disguised as country.
1. Joe Pug, In the Meantime EP. A new artist whose first CD is due out in February. He has been touring nonstop, opening for just about everybody. If you get a chance to hear him--go. He has a good session at Daytrotter (www.daytrotter.com) if you want to check him out. He has a great way with a lyric. Listen to "Hymm #101" at Daytrotter or the instant folk classic "A Thousand Men" on the EP.
2. Moon Colony Bloodbath, John Vanderslice and The Mountain Goats and Black Pear Tree, Kaki King and The Mountain Goats. John Darnielle loves to tour with other people and each tour brings an EP. I love John Vanderslice, His CD Romanian Names almost made the Baker's Dozen. And I would have dearly loved to see their American Primitive Tour last spring. But in the meantime, this sci fi based EP is a trip, in every sense of the word. It is about the workers at an organ harvesting plant on the moon. I think. And the title track on the Kaki King/Goats CD, "Black Pear Tree" is sad and true and simple and still stunning. A perfect example, musically and lyrically, of less is more.
3. Fall Be Kind, Animal Collective. Just got it--and I am listening to it over and over. So here is my chance to show the Collective some love.
