Seeing as my topic purged and all, I felt I should document this somewhere rather than keeping all three of my fans hanging. And, you know, so that I can laugh at this in a few years time when I only actually like one of my current top five anymore. I don't think there has been a single year this decade that I heard my favourite album from the year during that calendar year. Well, except maybe 2008, but that was such a musical write-off that it barely even counts.

If anyone wants links to / write-ups for any of this stuff, I'll happily oblige. And it'd be awesome to see everyone else's lists posted on here too!

Anyway:

Top 25 Albums of 2009

1. Maudlin of the Well - Part the Second
2. Rome - Flowers from Exile
3. Shpongle - Ineffable Mysteries from Shpongleland
4. Converge - Axe To Fall
5. The Antlers - Hospice
6. Levon Helm - Electric Dirt
7. Sunn O))) - Monoliths & Dimensions
8. The Ruins of Beverast - Foulest Semen of a Sheltered Elite
9. Raekwon - Only Built 4 Cuban Linx...Pt. II
10. Natural Snow Buildings - Shadow Kingdom
11. Mos Def - The Ecstatic
12. Amesoeurs - Amesoeurs
13. Cunninlynguists - Strange Journey Volumes 1 & 2
14. Animal Collective - Merriweather Post Pavilion
15. Clipse - 'Til The Casket Drops
16. P.O.S. - Never Better
17. Lady Gaga - The Fame Monster
18. Mastodon - Crack the Skye
19. Wu-Tang Clan - Chamber Music
20. Drudkh - Microcosmos
21. Bohren & der Club of Gore - Mitleid Lady (EP)
22. Burial & Four Tet - Moth/Wolf Cub
23. The Necks - Silverwater
24. Cobalt - Gin
25. Crippled Black Phoenix - The Resurrectionists

Top 25 Songs of 2009

1. Converge - Cruel Bloom
2. P.O.S. - Let it Rattle
3. Mos Def - Life in Marvelous Times
4. Drudkh - Ars Poetica
5. The Antlers - Kettering
6. Clipse - Freedom
7. Converge - Dark Horse
8. Shpongle - Invisible Man in a Fluorescent Suit
9. Maudlin of the Well - Laboratories of the Invisible World (Rollerskating the Cosmic Palmistric Postborder)
10. Animal Collective - Brothersport
11. Grizzly Bear - Two Weeks
12. Rome - To Die Among Strangers
13. Sunn O))) - Alice
14. Rome - We Who Fell in Love with the Sea
15. Bohren & der Club of Gore - Mitleid Lady
16. Raekwon, Cormega & Sean Price (Wu-Tang Clan) - Radiant Jewels
17. Sole & the Skyrider Band - Black
18. Levon Helm - When I Go Away
19. Jay Electronica - Exhibit C
20. Joss Stone (feat. Nas) - Governmentalist
21. Lady Gaga - Alejandro
22. Why? - Eskimo Snow
23. Big Boi (feat. Gucci Mane) - Shine Blockas
24. Animal Collective - Bluish
25. Patrick Wolf - Thickets

It seems I work through a year's releases significantly less rampantly than some of my colleagues here - while icon could probably make a top twenty already I'm taking it easy.

Still though, initial impressions and rankings for a few choice albums:

Dessa - A Badly Broken Code
Dixon's Girl: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0eQL3BrRqM8

Can't quite boast the same highs as her debut False Hopes EP, but this is still a thoroughly excellent slice of hip-hop melancholia. There's something about this woman's voice and lyricism that just melt me - I can't think of a single female rapper quite as comfortable showing her tender side in her songs, and it's precisely that which makes her stand out. She focuses more consistently on the topic of failed relationships than on her EP; and while no one in hip-hop has covered that area as well as she does here, it still comes across as slightly contrived at times. It's also probably telling that the very best songs here (Children's Work, Dixon's Girl) are largely the ones which deviate from that lyrical formula. But after listening to A Badly Broken Code I don't want to marry Dessa any less than I did before it, so I guess that's mission accomplished on her part. She definitely has the potential to make an album better than this in the future, but for now I'm very happy with this one, thank you very much. 8.6/10

Eluvium - Similes
Leaves Eclipse the Light: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VpVzxGtyN6c

Matthew Cooper is a guy I'm glad the music industry has around. The best description of his music I've ever heard was "baby's first ambient," a quote which I've shamelessly stolen from a Copia review, but I don't see why that needs to be a disparaging comment. Sure, parts of Talk Amongst the Trees aside, he's never put out anything especially captivating or truly worth canonizing. But every single one of his albums have been cleverly put together, easy to listen to, and more importantly good. And despite what the internet might be telling you, Similes doesn't change that. Cooper's voice might not be the greatest, but it fits with his sound pretty seemlessly, and he has a pretty damn good ear for vocal melodies. I won't be praising this as anything mindblowing, but not everything needs to be. Similes is a consistently enjoyable and very pleasant album, and as far as reading music goes it's hard to do much better. 7.2/10

Jaga Jazzist - One-Armed Bandit
Bananfleur Overalt: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h3kOVxteDAQ

Hell yeah, this is the album I've always wanted Jaga Jazzist to make. All of their releases before now have appealed to me on some level, but this takes all of their electronic, post-rock, modern classical and jazz influences and tosses them into a big fusion melting pot. It's barely possible to describe the sound of the thing as it's just so diverse, but it comes out sounded roughly akin to Zappa's more jazzy material filtered through the music scene of the last decade. The nine-minute centrepiece Toccata is arguably the most impressive thing here, with its Steve Reich percussion and booming brass, but the whole album barely puts a foot wrong anywhere - of the record's eight songs, only Prognissekongen and Music! Dance! Drama! fall beneath utter excellence. I wouldn't necessarily go as far as to say that this is their best album, but it's certainly their most impressive, and more importantly it's definitely the one which appeals to me most. Anyone with an interest in jazz, fusion or progressive rock owes it to themself to check this out. 8.1/10

I'll do the other four albums I've heard so far later on, perhaps tomorrow.

A fortnight without a single post? I guess we were all just Shpongled.

The Necks - Chemist
Genre: Avant-Garde Jazz
Release Year: 2006

A note first: for all the Necks will be described as "avant-garde jazz" pretty much everywhere they're mentioned, it's a misleading label if I've ever seen one. When jazz is described as experimental or, lord forbid, "free," it conjures images of the likes of Ornette Coleman and Peter Brotzmann's noise-fests. Not that either weren't wonderful musicians, but it's fair to say that the likes of them being the reference points for an entire description of music is gonna be pretty offputting to the majority of curious music listeners.

For what the Necks do is basically bring the fundamental tenets of minimalism to the traditional jazz trio base. Their albums almost exclusively consist of one slowly shifting, utterly entrancing hour-long opus, and since they started adding studio wizardry and overdubs to their box of tricks around a decade ago they've been one of the most utterly unclassifiable bands around. They've skirted with Arvo Part-esque ambience on Aether, krautrock on the pulsating Hanging Gardens, and on 2003's Drive-By they created one of the most menacing, futuristic yet ultimately accessible takes on jazz I've ever heard. And amazingly, despite their blatantly unorthodox nature, The Necks are a pretty damn accessible band. Unlike avant-garde jazz's standard bearers, they're not difficult to listen to at all; in fact, the difficult part is not getting utterly swept away by the subtle shifts in tone and timbre throughout. If genres were truly literal descriptions of music's effect on the listener, The Necks would be the best trance band ever formed.

Which brings us to Chemist, I guess. Their latest studio album (before the release of Silverwater this month, anyway) probably isn't their best, and the fact it has three twenty-minute pieces rather than one does slightly hamper its potential (Fatal and Abillera could both be stretched to an hour with ease) but it is still remarkably good and probably the best way for all of you people to start loving these guys as much as I do. Which, I have no problem in admitting, is the entire point of writing all this.

The three tracks that make up Chemist pretty much cover The Necks' sound as well as three tracks ever could. The straight out the box, almost dirty 5/4 groove of Fatal makes it the most immediate piece they've ever done, Buoyant is spooky, electronic and minimal and Abillera almost sounds like The Necks playing at shoegaze - it marks the first time they've ever used a guitar in their 20+ year career, and using it to write what basically sounds like a twenty-minute jazzy M83 song wasn't a bad move whatsoever.

So, uh, yeah. The Necks are almost certainly the best band you don't listen to. Change that ASAP (make it Skepticism or Ulver or something instead!)

Download link (~220 kbps VBR)

Blog two, comin' with that ol' E-brew
Giggs-tical puttin' niggaz back in I.C.U.

Matt Elliott - The Mess We Made
Genres: Singer-Songwriter, Electronic
Release Year: 2003

Seeing as this is the exact type of thing that the likes of tranny and Seg in particular would likely eat up, it wouldn't especially surprise me if I'm reporting on old news with this one, but The Mess We Made is one of most awesome, moody albums I've heard in ages. Landing sonically somewhere between Boards of Canada, UNKLE and Low, with an dreary atmosphere best compared to Radiohead's Amnesiac, it's about as unclassifiable as it is effective. RYM has it tagged as Electronic, Slowcore, Singer-Songwriter, Post Rock and Folk, which just about sums up its uniqueness, I reckon.

The Mess We Made's eight tracks all tend to smudge together in a haze of unease, but the nine-minute centrepiece Cotard's Syndrome stands out simply because it takes the prize as the dreariest of all, and the brilliantly put together Spanish guitar-influenced closer Forty Days is also worthy of note and acclaim. Only The Sinking Ship Song really stands out at all for negative reasons - and even only then because as awesome as authentic accordion-laced sea shanties are, they're a little out of place on a record as ambiguous and grey as this one.

But if I know you guys at all, you love ambiguity and greyness, right?

Download Link (192 Kbps)

Link mercilessly stolen from http://aroomtobreathin.blogspot.com - check it out, or something.

Giggs is in the house; represent, represent, 'sent
A Tribe Called Quest; represent, repre-

Oh right, this is a serious blog and so forth. My bad.

The Ruins of Beverast - Foulest Semen of a Sheltered Elite
Genre: (Avant-Garde) Black Metal
Release Year: 2009

One thing I have been enjoying the absolute shit out of recently, to make this post vaguely topical, is the new The Ruins of Beverast album. Rain Upon the Impure is probably my pick for best black metal album of the decade, and despite thinking it was a jumbled incoherent mess upon first listen, I'm beginning to think his new one, Foulest Semen of a Sheltered Elite, is almost as good.

As it's ridiculous name may imply, though, it's most certainly not for the musically faint of heart. 80 minutes of oppressive black metal interspersed with harsh death-doom sections, beautiful Gregorian chant-esque vocals and obscene amounts of feedback await. I'd say "enjoy" but it hardly seems appropriate.

Download Link (320Kbps)