So here we are. Today kicks off my look back at the music of 2009 featuring a countdown of my Top 10 Albums of the year which will span a few days and then be capped off by my annual Mixtape. This will be the first year I do the countdown on the blog so I’ve mixed things up a little bit, but it’s still pretty much the same thing I’ve always done. Over on the right you can see the schedule for the next few days as it relates to my Albums of 2009 postings. You’ll notice that this year, I am starting off with #11-#25 before heading into my top 10 countdown. Now, I always do a top 25, but usually I just post a link to my Amazon.com list after I’ve completed my top 10 countdown. I’ve never really thought enough of my complete top 25 to go into too much detail, but this year I had as much trouble figuring out my top 25 than I usually do with my top 10. That is clearly due to the amount of albums I got this year as compared with year’s past, but also can be attributed to the amount of very solid releases that I didn’t want to omit here on the blog. As you can see, today is when I offer a little introduction and also provide a list of all the albums I got in 2009. So…
As a whole, I thought 2009 was a very solid year. It maybe wasn’t as spectacular as I had hoped, but it was certainly better than 2008. Trying to summarize the year by coming up with a common theme between all the music released is an absurd task because there are so many different kinds of releases from so many genres. I guess if there’s something that sticks out to me, it’s the continuing infiltration of indie rock into the mainstream. I think 2009 has to be considered a landmark year for that movement, if you want to call it that. More and more indie songs are showing up in commercials, television promos, or just the general mainstream media. You had bands like Phoenix, Fleet Foxes, and TV on the Radio performing on SNL, not to mention all the late night talk shows that featured acts like Andrew Bird, Animal Collective, St Vincent, White Rabbits, Antony and the Johnsons, Dinosaur Jr, and Grizzly Bear just to name a few. Heck, Grizzly Bear’s album debuted at #8 on the Billboard charts! Accessibility was a major theme to many of the successful albums of ’09, so it’s probably no coincidence that we see those bands being accepted more in a mainstream fashion like they were in 2009. As the countdown goes on, you will see some of these themes come to light as well as the major impact the Brooklyn music scene had on the year in music. Like it or not, it was a banner year for the hipsters.
This year, I got a total of 94 albums, 86 of which are eligible to be included in my list. As usual, only full-length studio albums released in 2009 that I own are eligible. That means EPs, compilations/soundtracks, live albums, or b-side/rarities type releases can not be considered for the purposes of my list. Of course, there are a good bit of albums I never got around to getting, so I will most likely have a post-2009 album post like I did last year. For the complete list of all albums I got this year in order of their release date, you can click here or “Continue Reading” link below and the list will show after the jump. Tomorrow, I will start things off by unveiling my Honorable and Dis-Honorable mentions.
AC Newman – Get Guilty
Andrew Bird – Noble Beast
Animal Collective – Merriweather Post Pavillion
Antony and the Johnsons – The Crying Light
Bon Iver – Blood Bank (EP)*
J. Tillman – Vacilando Territory Blues
Cymbals Eat Guitars – Why There Are Mountains
Loney Dear – Dear John
Ben Kweller – Changing Horses
The Pains of Being Pure at Heart – The Pains of Being Pure at Heart
The Appleseed Cast – Sagarmatha
Beirut – March of the Zapotec & Realpeople: Holland (EP)*
Various – Dark Was the Night*
M. Ward – Hold Time
Sin Fang Bous – Clangour
Gentleman Reg – Jet Black
Here We Go Magic – Here We Go Magic
Laura Gibson – Beasts of Seasons
The Antlers – Hospice
Neko Case – Middle Cyclone
Elvis Perkins in Dearland – Elvis Perkins in Dearland
Handsome Furs – Face Control
The Love Language – The Love Language
Other Lives – Other Lives
The Decemberists – Hazards of Love
Harlem Shakes – Technicolor Health
Swan Lake – Enemy Mine
Great Lake Swimmers – Lost Channels
Maria Taylor – LadyLuck
Dananananaykroyd – Hey Everyone
The Thermals – Now We Can See
Metric – Fantasies
Suckers – Suckers (EP)*
Camera Obscura – My Maudlin Career
Woods – Songs of Shame
Akron/Family – Set ‘Em Wild, Set ‘Em Free
St. Vincent – Actor
Conor Oberst and the Mystic Valley Band – Outer South
Jeremy Enigk – OK Bear
White Rabbits – It’s Frightening
Au Revoir Simone – Still Night, Still Light
Iron & Wine – Around the Well*
Passion Pit – Manners
Grizzly Bear – Veckatimest
Phoenix – Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix
The Rural Alberta Advantage – Hometowns
Fanfarlo – Reservoir
Dirty Projectors – Bitte Orca
Japandroids – Post-Nothing
The Low Anthem – Oh My God, Charlie Darwin
Dinosaur Jr – Farm
Foreign Born – Person to Person
God Help the Girl – God Help the Girl
The Phenomenal Handclap Band – The Phenomenal Handclap Band
Sunset Rubdown – Dragonslayer
Bowerbirds – Upper Air
Wilco – Wilco (The Album)
Cass McCombs – Catacombs
We Were Promised Jetpacks – These Four Walls
Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros – Up From Below
The Most Serene Republic – …And the Ever Expanding Universe
Mount Eerie – Wind’s Poem
Fiery Furnaces – I’m Going Away
The Dodos – Time to Die
Lightning Dust – Infinite Light
Throw Me the Statue – Creaturesque
The xx- xx
Choir of Young Believers – This is for the White in Your Eyes
Arctic Monkeys – Humbug
fun. – Aim and Ignite
Mew – No More Stories…
David Bazan – Curse Your Branches
Wild Beasts – Two Dancers
Muse – Resistance
Washed Out – Life of Leisure (EP)*
The Big Pink – A Brief History of Love
Girls – Album
Islands – Vapours
Monsters of Folk – Monsters of Folk
The Pains of Being Pure at Heart – Higher Than The Stars (EP)*
The Twilight Sad – Forget the Night Ahead
Volcano Choir – Unmap
The Avett Brothers – I and Love and You
Yo La Tengo – Popular Songs
Built to Spill – There Is No Enemy
Califone – All My Friends Are Funeral Singers
The Mountain Goats – The Life of the World to Come
The Raveonettes – In and Out of Control
Thao with The Get Down Stay Down – Know Better Learn Faster
Do Make Say Think – Other Truths
Miles Benjamin Anthony Robinson – Summer of Fear
The Swell Season – Strict Joy
Real Estate – Real Estate
Animal Collective – Fall Be Kind (EP)*
*Not eligible
A Round of Sound 
[…] “It Gets Your Body Movin’”) are songs off of EPs, and thus came from albums not eligible to be in my rankings. Most of these songs have been featured somewhere on this blog in the past, or in the top albums […]