Best of the '00's

As Brad has stated below, its the time of the year when everyone who's got any form of opinion lists off their "Best Of The Best". I am one of those people. BTW, as a disclaimer, this is all a matter of my opinion BUT dispite my range being quite limited, all the following "Stuff" is well worth the time to watch/read/listen to.

Novels:
Runners up, Novel of the Decade:
Harry Potter Series, By J.K Rowling
The Da Vinci Code, By Dan Brown
Thud!, By Terry Pratchett

Novel of the Decade:
Angles and Demons, By Dan Brown


Television:
Runners up, TV Series of the Decade, Drama:
The Sopranos
ER
Spooks

TV Series of the Decade, Drama:
Lost


Runners up, TV Series of the Decade, Comedy:
Scrubs
No Heroics
Flight Of The Conchords

TV Series of the Decade, Comedy:
The Mighty Boosh


Runner up, Best Animated Series Of the Decade:
The Grim Adventures of Billy and Mandy
South Park
Harvey Birdman

Best Animated Series Of the Decade:
The Simpsons


Film:
Runner up, Best Movie of the Decade:
The Lord Of The Rings
Gran Torino
Casino Royal

Best Movie of the Decade:
Donnie Darko


Music:
Runner Up, Best Artist of the Decade:
Brand New
Foo Fighters
Coldplay

Best Artist of the Decade:
Muse


Runner up, Best Song of the Decade:
At The Bottom - Brand New
Farewell To The Fairground - White Lies
Nothing Ever Happens - Deerhunter

Best Song of the Decade:
Stockholm Syndrome - Muse


Runner up, Best Album of the Decade:
Origin Of Symmetry - Muse
Sawdust - The Killers
X & Y - Coldplay

Best Album of the Decade:
The Devil And God Are Raging Inside Me - Brand New

Best Albums of '09

Hello imaginary readers! Well, it's that time of year again when everyone starts making lists of the best and worst of everything that happened this year. And one of the most popular of these lists seems to be the Albums list. Insanely popular, and largely the cause of many forum and chatroom debates and mudslinging, listing the best albums from a single year is a hard job. You have to take into account personal bias, lasting power, audience reception, recalling every good and enjoyable album, and being wary to include an acceptable variety of genres.
This year marks a special occasion, as we have an abundance of 'Best of the '00s' Music lists as well. Creating a definitive list of either this years or this decades albums by myself seems redundant and time consuming, and the end result would be a hodge-splodge of my favourite albums and missing many decent albums (as well as rap and R&B, two genres, try as might, I cannot get into) that I've heard are great, but are currently still in my extremely large 'too check out' list. So I've devised a more practical and impersonal approach: I'm simply going to observe a varying range of 'Best-Of' lists and, using a very inaccurate polling system, present the 'consensus' of best albums.
So today is my 'Best of '09' list, restricted to a puny 15, but I'll tack on some sort of 'Honourable Mention' type-thing within the next couple of days.
So, without further ado, here are the best albums of two-thousand-and-nine.

15. The Pains of Being Pure at Heart - s/t

TPOBPAH are an easy enough band to like - their trademarked brand of warm, fuzzy twee pop sounds like the sort of thing you'd hear on a vinyl pulled from the excessively large and obscure pile of some music elitist, yet ring home like all of the best pop tunes. But there's something about this noise-pop album's sound that makes it even more enjoyable than that. This group is every bit as innocent and pure as their name suggests.

14. The Antlers - Hospice

Definitely the best album lyrically I have heard this year (if dark, depressing songs about cancer and death, and the guilt associated with being unable to cure an incurable disease is your thing), The Antlers match these lyrics with the appropriate package of ambience, white-noise and gut-wrenching vocal delivery, that you can't help but find yourself feeling the pain of the protagonist.

13. Neko Case - Middle Cyclone

"...Case sings about amorous storm fronts, menacing red tides, truly killer whales, alarming magpies, and other fauna that manifest particular conditions of the human soul. She's singing about common alt- and mainstream country themes-- broken hearts, wandering spirits, chilling loneliness, the nature of nature-- but no one bends traditional Americana sounds to fit her eccentricities so perfectly, getting at these issues through tangential songwriting and force-of-nature vocals." - Pitchfork (And no, this list is not just lifted from here.)

12. St. Vincent - Actor

On her second album, Annie Clark offers up an album that is as quirky and inventive as it is (somewhat) secretly dark and disconcerting. With a very apropos album cover that sums up it well: Colourful and upbeat at a glance, but there is something disconcerting lying there, that is as deceptive as it is obvious.

11. Raekwon - Only Built 4 Cuban Linx II

My token rap album, but that's not to say that it is not incredible. Paste reckons, "Simply put, it's a classic, and one of the best albums to come out of the New York rap scene in the last decade." You'll have to take their word for it.

10. Fuck Buttons - Tarot Sport

This duo from Bristol sure know how to make waves, whether they be sound waves, or all talk that these guys produce. They tamed down on this release, but that is not an insult, nor implies that this album is not heavy, and it is what helped to make it feel so epic. It has the brooding and leviathan movements of any great post-rock band, but, despite the band's claims, it is wholly danceable. The perfect amalgamation of post-rock and house one might say.

9. Yeah Yeah Yeahs - It's Blitz!

"[It] didn’t seem likely [for the YYYs] to release an album like It’s Blitz, which brings new-wave bounce and disco flourishes to the band’s forbidding signature sound. It’s a welcome set of dance-floor dread, and it points the way toward even more unpredictable possibilities" - A.V Club

8. Girls - Album

With a backstory as sad as it is impressive, it's hard not too feel overwhelmed by singer Christopher Owen's presence. His warbling delivery of "I'm just crazy... I'm fucked in the head" in album opener Lust For Life reveal the honesty and self-awareness he possesses. He just wants a chance. But it's the chances he takes that makes this album so enjoyable. Instead of pumping out song after song of the same formula, he dabbles in several genres, be it surf-rock or shoegazing, and pulls it off while keeping out front his honest and wry lyrics. He's not willing to hind behind lo-fidelity of fuzzy production, he's here, he's singing, and you listen.

7. Phoenix - Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix

"Phoenix first brought all its components together properly on 2006’s It’s Never Been Like That, serving up 10 compositionally similar but collectively daring pop-art constructions. Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix lowers the accessibility threshold for the band’s music considerably, offering 10 easy-to-like tracks that keep the rhythms brisk and the melodies catchy, with such casual confidence that they sound like they’ve been part of our shared musical heritage for decades." - A.V. Club

6. Fever Ray - Fever Ray

Featuring half of legendary Swedish house duo, The Knife, Fever Ray is the antithesis to the year's obsession with Auto-Tune - she uses software to destroy her vocals. She deepens them, and turns them wispy, airy, and brooding. It works impeccably well with the deep, bass-laden electronics, and together form a place dark and disturbingly beautiful, licked with black and childhood imagery. It seems only appropriate that I'm listening to this album as I write a 'Best Of' list.

5. The Flaming Lips - Embyonic

""Experiments" are great, but they matter most when their results can be put into practice. In retrospect, a lot of the Flaming Lips' quarter-century of intermittently inspired fucking around seems like preparatory work for this assured, forceful, savagely dark album, and for the way their cracked sense of humor glows through its darkness. This is a double album because it's heavy, an hour and a quarter of superabundance whose omnipresent digital distortion gives it heft like a jagged slab of lead, a mammoth pile of mammoth songs that offer more than it's possible to take in on a dozen listens because they're written around their sound design." - Pitchfork. Very high on my 'must-check-out list'.

4. Grizzly Bear - Veckatimist

Looking back, love it or loathe it, Grizzly Bear's Veckatimist sounds very much 2000's; it captures the warm, folksy indie sound that has transformed into such an omnipotent presence everywhere except 'mainstream', corporate radio. In a year trademarked by lo-fi, 'shitgazing' and noise, Grizzly Bear can come as a breath of fresh air, sounding familiar, "pretty" and simple.

3. Bat For Lashes - Two Suns

"Much of [this] record's seductive allure is owed to Khan's gift for melody and evocative atmosphere, but ultimately the most compelling element is her voice, which is as technically stunning as it is expressive. Her passionate performances keep the songs from descending too far into misery, and place the emphasis on the beautiful romance in the music rather than all the melancholy and tragedy" – Pitchfork

2. Dirty Projectors - Bitte Orca

Art-pop is a tricky genre. Too little, and it sounds contrived and forced, too much and it comes off as esoteric and pretentious. But, I dunno, as divisive as this record is, it's fucking good. This is most likely my favourite release this year, and, I assume, countless others. Bitte Orca moves through nine relentlessly eclectic tracks so effortlessly, it either leaves you lost-for-words or completely bemused. I'd be kidding myself if I didn't say that this album is a bit pretentious; it asks for a lot of open-mindedness (so much so that I've Italicized three words so far), and you may still end up hating it. But whether or not you end up loving it, you've got to admit, this album certainly got your attention, didn't it?

1. Animal Collective - Merriweather Post Pavilion
Gosh, who didn't this one coming, huh? No, it takes a special sort of album to be presciently labelled as the 'Best Album of the Year' only two weeks in. Talked at length for the entire year, this is one hell of an album. Lush layering of a seemingly endless supply sounds, this album finds the rare and happy middle ground between experimentation and pop sensibilities, maintaining enough obscurity to regain 'hipster' cred, whilst being accessible enough to earn Animal Collective a scourge of new fans who arrived late (like me). Really, what is there left to be said about this album?

Animal Collective - Fall Be Kind

Despite being released in January, Animal Collective's Merriweather Post Pavillion is still being talked about, and will easily top almost every single one of the upcoming "Best of '09" lists tentatively due out next month. And for good reason. MPP defied expectations, and simultaneously defined and expanded the sound of a band that appears to wear the metaphorical crown of Indie.
So to follow up such a masterpiece with a five song EP where the first track transforms into a full-on Hobbit dance-fest? Madness? Ingeniousness? In Animal Collective's case, I'm going to have to go with both. This is a band who tries out every idea the conceive without ever looking back. And time and time again these ideas that sound so failure prone on paper just seem to work. Can you imagine a band deciding to suddenly switch a song that has been swirling away in its psychedelic tapestry and spaced out vocals to an upbeat, PanFlute jig? No, neither can I.
This first track 'Graze', despite shocking at first, turns into such a wonderfully bizarre yet uplifting track and is an unexpected EP highlight. But it pales in comparison to the second track, 'What Would I Want? Sky.' Beginning with that trademark Collective washed-out sound of electronic scrapings and rolling looped vocals chanting 'Believe", then transforms into the warmest and most likable song of the album, and is one of my favourite Animal Collective tracks.
The rest of the five tracks don't quite match this peak but that is not to say they are terrible. 'Bleed' feels more foggy and intermission-like than a song, while 'On A Highway' is a slowed down lamentation on touring. The closer 'I Think I Can' is a long one (just over seven minutes) and it brings back the bouncing warmness of the second track, to its success.
Being the second outstanding release this year by the band, we have evidently found them at a creative and artistic peak, and us hardcore and casual Animal Collective fans alike are more than happy to enjoy the view and snapshots taken with them.

4.1/5

Standouts: Graze, What Would I Want? Sky, I Think I Can

Pulse - Pink Floyd

Thought I should update this brick of a Blog

Want a really good live album to blast through those tiny speakers on your wall? Try Pink Floyd's Pulse.

Its just really good. Taken from a series of concerts post Walters fallout, it features Guy Pratt on the bass, but he sort of lacks. Huge highlight is the encore of Comfortably Numb, features an EPIC 4 min solo which just blows your mind away. Its worth buying the album or DVD, yes it was released as a DVD, solely for the last twenty minutes of it.

An easy Four stars for the album, 5 for the DVD

Highlights: High Hopes, Keep Talking, Wish You Were Here, Comfortably Numb