Mixes By Year: 2009 Most Recommended Albums

2009- a year that’s tough to comment on being that it’s only now 2011. I posted my top 50 albums about a year ago and my top 20 are unchanged except for swapping Wild Beasts with Mos Def. Though the below twenty albums are not ranked 1-20 I can tell you that my top ten may now slightly differ with The xx and Neon Indian rising into the top ten and Raekwon & Mastodon falling just out of the top ten. The Pains of Being Pure At Heart and Dinosaur Jr. would also likely fall a few notches in the top 20 and Neko Case and Bat For Lashes rising a bit. Animal Collective/Girls/Dirty Projectors are still heads and tails above all else for me. I was worried that I overrated Passion Pit a bit but they sound just as great a year later to me. I’m somehow still not sick of the two ubiquitous Phoenix hits “Lisztomania” and “1901” which are so good that even excessive airplay can’t kill their charm.

When the music history books are rewritten years from now ’09 may stick out for its weirdness. I don’t think I’ve ever had an odder, or more inaccessible 1-3 albums in any year. As great as the three albums are I recognize they aren’t for everybody- I can’t see any of them garnering much future airplay like Phoenix has or like Passion Pit and the Yeah Yeah Yeah’s great “It’s Blitz” should. ’09 was not a big rap year but albums like Drake’s EP and Freddie Gibbs mixtapes and Mos Def’ return to form set the stage for a rap comeback in 2010. U.K. dubstep also became a dominant underground sound, which came to my attention with the release of the 5 Years of Hyperdub double album. Time will tell if dubstep will gain in popularity or if it will go the way of grime and be banished to relative obscurity. Whether or not the genre grows the sound has certainly been a big influence in the broader worlds of hip hop & r&b, house & techno. The same can be said for blog house and chillwave- they haven’t taken over the charts but there influence is everywhere. Will be interesting so see what happens next. With all of the re-workings of early synth-pop and soft-rock will the next movement be a return to heavy rock?

THE XX- THE XX