Given how the music geeks have apparently taken over music writing, and how there’s more music being cranked out than ever before, why is it that even the most cursory of trawls through a random selection of music sites’ year-end lists feel like it’s the same list of albums, only with the order changed? 

Music geeks used to be more exploratory, adventurous, bullish, individual, obscurantist, anti-trendy, and genre-hopping - and you can depend on them to throw light on stuff you might have possibly missed. These days, you get the sense of some file-sharing hivemind. Given how oblivious I can get to the permutations of the zeitgeist, and how skittish and restless and impervious to the strictures of genre my listening habits tend to be, my own list is only half as guilty, and hopefully throws light on stuff for anybody similarly and frustratingly asking if there weren’t any good records last year apart from Veckatimest.

For the record, I liked the new Grizzly Bear a lot - I liked the new Animal Collective, too, but haven’t come back to it in months, although I was thoroughly unmoved by the new Flaming Lips. But I lacked the room to put any of them in along with Letting Up Despite Great Faults, the Drums, Girls, Lee Fields and the Expressions, and Wye Oak. And there’s an unforgivable vacuum of domestic product - that one’s utterly my fault. I was distracted, I apologize and I will remedy at once. Meantime, my 12 favorite records of 2009,  meaning the noises I spent the most time with  last year, which is not to say they’re the 12 best records of 2009, except of course for the fact that they are. In ascending order:

12. One Cello x 16: Natoma - Zoe Keating



But for the odd Philip Glass record, classical has always eluded me, but really, bored the shit out of me is more like it. Passive and bland, detached old fart crap. But, pitched between eerie and pretty, ex of Rasputina Zoe’s avant cello is ambient as an organism. Born-again classical fan may be too much to ask of me, but I gleefully await her next album.

Choice Cuts:
Fern
Sun Will Set
Frozen Angels

11. Dark Days/Light Years - Super Furry Animals



Recombinant psychedelic album dipped in a candy of many yummy flavors - blue-eyed soul, beach pop, funk lite - testifying to the vitamin recharge of taking band sabbaticals and side projects. You wouldn’t have thought the Furries needed it, but good for us, they did.

Choice Cuts:
Crazy Naked Girls
The Very Best of Neil Diamond
Helium Hearts

10. The Life of the World to Come - Mountain Goats



In which John Darnelle makes explicit the way scripture has been a tonic to his troubles, going so far as naming every one of his poignant, and often lovely, song miniatures after a Bible verse, like some code you crack to deepen the harrow.

Choice Cuts:
Genesis 3:23
Matthew 25:21
Romans 10:9

Hopped-up 80s dance-pop revivalism, suitably frantic and, at turns, cleverer and catchier. It’s also cheesier and sloppier, but somehow more ebullient for it.

Choice Cuts:
Johanna
Having My Baby
Sweet Sixteen

How about that title, eh? That, and the first track is in reverse. But no one’s hanging a prog-rock tag around the neck of Mew for being predisposed to bombast, but for a fervid adventurism that, when it gets a little too aloof, is often punctured by their gift for hooks.

Choice Cuts:
New Terrain
Introducing Palace Players
Vaccine

7. Sainthood - Tegan and Sara



Sonically, a lost Cyndi Lauper album of Prince love songs with all the punky-perky poppy oomph that implies. Emotionally, too.

Choice Cuts:
Hell
The Cure
Sentimental Tune

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