The Wake

10 Albums that I loved:

Agoraphobic Nosebleed – Agorapocalypse

Who would’ve thought ANb would put out an album with an average song length of over two minutes? The world’s fastest grind band slows down a little, with mindblowing results. Absolutely fucking insane thrash trades off with insanely heavy riffs, with the best drum programming in human history. This record has the perfect grindcore mood: pissed off and wild and gross, offensive just for the sake of it, and ultimately lighthearted, playful, and carefree. But what matters most is that this band has finally become more about the music than the spectacle, though they’re still further over the top than just about anybody else.

If you had to decide whether or not this is an album you are interested in based on only one track:
“Question of Integrity”

Andrew Bird – Noble Beast

The most peaceful and pastoral record from the Bird, and also his best-produced. Every track is a lush and constantly-shifting mix of layered instrumentation; each verse and chorus of each song is tracked differently, and though the initial draw of the album is the vocal hooks, it is this diversity of instrumentation that draws you back again and again. An intelligent and skillful album—a treat for longtime Bird fans and first-time listeners alike.

IYHTDWONTIAAYAIIBOOOT:
“Tenuousness”

Animal Collective – Merriweather Post Pavilion

The first AC record to be even in the same ballpark of good as their fans think it is, though it’s not the best album of the decade, or even of the year. The Collective have pulled off a complicated balancing act, creating an album accessible enough to find a wide audience while staying bizarre and complex enough to satisfy their extant fanbase. The album combines organic psychedaelia with partystopping electronics, peppered with field recordings and deep, writhing sounds. This music is thick, wet, and full of life.

IYHTDWONTIAAYAIIBOOOT:
“In the Flowers”

Black Moth Super Rainbow – Eating Us

The feel-good album of forever, a huge and bright and primary-colored sound that overwhelms whatever you’re feeling: sublimity by force. The album is sticky and sweet, weapons-grade happiness. Way better than a SAD lamp.

IYHTDWONTIAAYAIIBOOOT:
“Born on a Day the Sun Didn’t Rise”

Dälek – Gutter Tactics

Standing on the blacksand beach that is a rap record: beats pound in the ocean like waves beneath which lies a churning underbelly of anxious sound, undulating and nebulous. You can see dimly through the water the shapes of words shimmering like fish. The wave of static breaks, the sky whitewashed with noise.

IYHTDWONTIAAYAIIBOOOT:
“Gutter Tactics”

Krallice – Dimensional Bleedthrough

No other black metal album is so virtuosic, so guitar-oriented, so consistent. Possessed of both clarity and rawness. Mick Barr’s guitar melodies are catchy without being like anybody else’s. Absolutely mesmerizing, so constant in its energy and speed that it becomes meditative. The record is balls-out no-punches-pulled epic, eschewing the usual gloom and overwrought melancholy of the genre to provide an hour and a quarter of downright ecstatic music, an entire album of huge closing tracks.

IYHTDWONTIAAYAIIBOOOT:
the last two minutes of “The Mountain”

The Mountain Goats – The Life of the World to Come

This record is the first unqualified success of TMG’s hi-fi sound, their first studio-recorded album that is completely unembarrassing in instrumentation and orchestration; the production of this album is spacious and engaging, with huge drums, warm electronics, reverberating piano and subtle violin textures. But as always with this band, the reason to care is the writing. As we’ve come to expect, each song on this record displays beautiful language and emotional subtlety and depth. The record is also a rarity in TMG’s extensive catalog: a well-crafted and coherent unit from the prolific but inconsistent John Darnielle, known for making good songs but not good albums.

IYHTDWONTIAAYAIIBOOOT:
“Matthew 25:21”

The Paper Chase – Someday This Could All Be Yours, Vol. 1: The Calamities

A deceptive album: totally catchy but genuinely threatening; this is pop music pumped full of infection and disease, accessible hooks with bitterly misanthropic lyrics. Every instrument a little damaged, a little bent. Small touches of violence and discordance throughout every song, a complex patchwork of organic and digital sound. A fluidly-connected collection of sternly epic death marches and barely-controlled cathartics, each one seeping into the next. Producer/frontman John Congleton has come up with brand-new guitar noises, wild and screaming tones twisted out of recognizable shape. This band has a perfect sound, a gold standard for production junkies.

IYHTDWONTIAAYAIIBOOOT:
“what should we do with your body (the lightning)”

Ulcerate – Everything is Fire

Witness the percolation of a new style; if this is death metal then all death prior can be considered proto-. This album is beyond new: it is an album from the future. An alien thing come to our planet fully-formed; a melodic system from some other world. Spider-riffs weave webs around each other creating incomprehensible and amorphous rhythms. Many of the record’s best moments are bleak landscapes, but even at its most aggressive the riffing is abstract.

IYHTDWONTIAAYAIIBOOOT:
“Drown Within”

Zu – Carboniferous

Heavy bass, wild barry sax, pumping electronics and frenetic drumming centered around complex snare rolls. The saxophone used alternatingly for melody, for bassline, for percussion and for insane textures. A unique sound: heavy, intensely polyrhythmic, violent and celebratory, indebted to things like Lightning Bolt and John Zorn without sounding like anything but itself. This is bizarre, surprising, confrontational and meticulously constructed music; an impeccable album for a special breed of listener: those in it for the sound and the rhythm, not for a tune to hum.

IYHTDWONTIAAYAIIBOOOT:
“Chthonian”

15 Albums that I liked a lot:

Afgrund – Vid Helvetets Grindar
Riff-heavy grindcore from Scandinavia.
Anni Rossi – Rockwell
Newsom-y chirping and viola.
Antigama – Warning
Avant-grind. Interesting drumkit.
Augury – Fragmentary Evidence
Prog/tech/death.
Behemoth – Evangelion
The best Nile album of 2009, by just a smidgen.
Bergraven – Till Makabert Väsen
Weird, abstract, quiet black metal.
John Zorn – Alhambra Love Songs
Continuing Zorn’s listenable streak.
Khanate – Clean Hands Go Foul
Their most subtle, least cheesy; very menacing.
Mochipet – Master P on Atari
Dance music that is also listenable.
Ocean Chief – Den Förste
Best traditional doom since pre-hiatus YOB.
S.K.E.T. – Depleted Uranium Weapons
Excellent powernoise, punishing but danceable.
Shining – VI/Klagopsalmer
A real rocker from the suicidal Swedes.
St. Vincent – Actor
Catchy enough for you, bizarre enough for me.
Sunn O))) – Monoliths & Dimensions
Without a doubt the best ever Sunn O))) record.
Why? – Eskimo Snow
The (more) bizarre, poppy(er) flip-side to Alopecia.

5 Albums that other people liked:

Roy Montgomery & Grouper – Split
by Eric Brew

I admit my love for Grouper makes the mention of this album borderline self-serving. I could go either way with the 18-minute track by Roy Montgomery on the split, but Liz Harris’ tracks (playing as Grouper) always captivate me—usually late at night, when I’m on the edge of drowsiness with a small degree of disgust from the day still in my gut. The tracks are (as is most of Harris’ music) brooding, crackling and deep. Her voice, though often indecipherable, is like a drug that, once swallowed, catches onto some part near the inside of your left lung and never leaves—a sort of damage you accept and forever carry.

Akron/Family – Set ‘Em Wild, Set ‘Em Free
by Pete Noteboom

This album will make you feel like you’re giving birth to magical multi-colored eggs filled with hope, truth, miracles, and everlasting friendship. Akron/Family sounds like a couple indie kids took mushrooms and wandered off into the woods to roast some marshmallows and talk about how seriously intense it is to grow up. On the band’s epic quest to Set ‘Em Wild, Set ‘Em Free, they wander through the land of dancetastic party plucking and have a gander at the American dream while their collective brain swells with appreciation of The Beauty Inherent In All Things in a breathtaking cacophony of electric light.

The Flaming Lips – Embryonic
by Kevin Tully

It’s hard to believe that the same guys whose last album featured a song called “The Yeah Yeah Yeah Song” and whose stage show is filled with giant balloons and confetti cannons recorded Embryonic. My first impression of the album was that it sounded like if robots with fuzzy guitars soundtracked a James Bond movie. Then I decided that it sounded more like if robots with fuzzy guitars and an evil wizard soundtracked a James Bond movie where the entire thing was just James Bond panicking for no reason. Then I remembered that it was, in fact, The Flaming Lips.

Nomo – Invisible Cities
by Zach McCormick

Those floating, ethereal, percussive tones that drift mystically throughout Nomo’s music are the product of an amplified Kalimba, an African thumb piano. The Ann Arbor, MI band runs such simple instruments through a slew of effects pedals to craft everything from dulcet marimba chords to searing, distorted guitar lines. Calling Nomo an Afro-Funk group seems a woefully inadequate way to describe the band’s incredibly diverse range of influences: thick, complex horn arrangements recall 70’s funk, while reverb-drenched fuzz guitar gives the album a psychedelic edge. Truly one of the most unique and compelling records of 2009.

Ke$ha – Animal
by Sam Johnston

When Ke$ha was done puking in Paris Hilton’s closet, she turned around and puked into my heart, and I’m not sure if I should thank her or not.