5,997 things yvynyl likes Explore more popular stuff on Tumblr →

Top 50 Albums of 2009 (40-31)

31. Pomegranates /// Everybody, Come Outside!

Singular yet unassuming, Everybody, Come Outside! is in danger of being heard by far too few people, though its boy-girl bounce and rib-tickling jangle feel like elements that indie kids of all stripes can agree upon. (Listen to track “This Land Used To Be My Land, But Now I Hate This Land” above.)

32. Pictureplane /// Dark Rift

It’s a safe bet that no one else was mangling and distorting samples like this—and even if they were, there’s no way it could’ve resulted in a post-rave, strobe-lit dance album half this horny and dehydrated.

33. The Sight Below /// Murmur EP

An ambient auteur enamored with Pygmalion-era Slowdive adds flickers of muscle and friction to his minimal palette and gets a divine remix treatment from Eluvium.

34. The Antlers /// Hospice

Originally an elegy for bandleader Peter Silberman’s “planned disappearance,” Hospice is no less harrowing as a mega-narrative about losing a loved one to cancer.  Having learned a thing or two from the quiet/LOUD/quiet school of millenial post-rockers, The Antlers outfit mental extremes with aural ones and never lose an ounce of their elusive beauty in the process.

35. Antony & The Johnsons /// The Crying Light

I swear you could kill the delicate quiver of his voice by listening too hard—ideally you’d be sprawled in an East Village apartment in 1976 after shooting up, with the lacelike arabesques of this lone cello or that flute drifting in and out of earshot.

36. Girls /// Girls

Sweaty and a complete mess and decidedly not for widespread consumption, but infectiously indifferent to the difficulties of appropriating shaggy surf or prescription-drugged drone or any lo-fi trick that’s been done to death already.

37. Moderat /// Moderat

The alliance of Modeskeletor and Apparat finally bears fruit in the form of some well-sequenced misty moody whirring Berlin house glitch adjective overload clusterfuck dub doozies.

38. Health /// Get Color

Health made us wait for the grower we knew they had in them: harsh industrial noise and esoteric amp effects used to raise snake-charmed threads of flame from what was once merely scorched earth and a libidinous metallic throb.

39. Jay Reatard /// Watch Me Fall

Walk into this maw of serrated teeth and just try to resist the blood-soaked frenzy of Kiwi-indebted virtuoso punk thereby unleashed.

40. Bat For Lashes /// Two Suns

All Kate Bush aside, this was a striking bid to extract emotional earnestness from the cold core of outside-the-consensus pop that could just as easily have been a hollow pose.  Lucky us.