Best of 09
Here it is. More than a day late, less than a dollar short: the Foreign Embassy’s Best of 2009. My favorite songs of the year. The stuff that kept me warm during a long, hard winter, and the stuff that kept me cool during a somewhat more bearable summer. There’s a wide range here: artists that made their debut in 2009, and artists that have been kicking around since long before that.
An example of the latter: Dinosaur Jr., those 80’s alt-rock stalwarts, who just happened to have released one of their greatest albums, Farm, in 2009, 25 years after their debut. They’ve got two tracks on here, and if I wanted to fill more than two CDs with this mix, there’d be more. Farm is a fantastic album, one any current band would be proud of, and the fact that it came from the guys your big brother might have been listening to when you were in the seventh grade just makes it that much more of an achievement.
Another example: Built to Spill. As I wistfully recall it, BtS popped my indie music cherry, behind a great record store on East 6th Street in New York City, down an alley from McSorley’s, whose name I can sadly no longer remember. The year was 1999, and the album was Keep It Like a Secret, which I’d read about in the truly awesome music mag The Big Takeover (http://www.bigtakeover.com/), also purchased at said establishment.
[At this point, I should clarify: Built to Spill may have indoctrinated me into the love-that-dare-not-speak-its-name of loud, clangy indie rock, but I’d gone to at least second base before that. If not third. That dusky suitor went by the name of CMJ, which I’d started buying in college when it came in the size of a comic book and a comic book, in my financially starved eyes, was considered a major investment. CMJ (I believe it stood, and still stands, for College Music Journal), taught me there was life beyond Dave Matthews and the Cure, and for that, I will be ever grateful. But they didn’t introduce me to BtS, unless it was in some kind of subliminal fashion that I no longer remember.]
But I digress. Built to Spill has also been around for fucking ages in indie terms, and also released a great album (There Is No Enemy) this year, and is also on this mix twice, for the same reason as Dinosaur Jr.: I simply couldn’t decide which was the better song.
[If you care—and I have to assume you don’t—”Aisle 13” wins by a nose, simply because it has the lyric
Everyday something strange
I can’t explain, happens to me
Often I am called by name
To clean up aisle 13
which does exactly what an indie rock lyric is supposed to do, in which it presents to you an unusual, slightly weird scenario described by an odd and presumably unreliable narrator, who may be on all sorts of drugs while he toils away at his dead-end day job. Which is what an indie rock lyric is supposed to do because it will resonate perfectly to the people who listen to indie rock. Because, you know, that’s them. ]
Okay, let’s get to the rest of the mix.
“Home,” by Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeroes, may be my favorite single track of the year, at very least simply because it takes a breath halfway through so the male vocal can regale the female vocal (and the audience) with the story of how he fell in love with her when she fell out of his window and broke her ass. It’s that kind of song. I’ve heard Arcade Fire comparisons, to which I have to say: the Arcade Fire, while they make great music, come off as a bunch of prissy ponces. Ed and the MZs come off as the kind of guys who will ask to sleep on the floor of your living room on their way to Phoenix and end up drinking all your beer, repaint your kitchen so it looks like the interior of the Furthur bus, and leave you with vague memories of a night filled with debauchery and knee-slapping good tunes.
“Cone of Light,” by the Almighty Defenders. A rocking and rollickingly good tune. The kind that you might hear leaking through the doors of a nameless bar in Kansas City. You pause. Think, Wow, that sounds pretty good. You start to leave, because you’re meeting a buddy for dinner. But you can’t draw yourself away. Two minutes later, you’re crouched by the bathrooms with your cell phone to your ear telling your buddy he has to meet you at this nameless bar as soon as humanly possible, with this tune playing deafeningly in the background.
“Easy,” by Deer Tick, is another rocking and rollickingly good tune. Starting to notice a pattern here? Deer Tick is from Providence, Rhode Island, but they sound like they clawed their way out of a bottle of Kentucky bourbon. I mean that in the best possible way.
Personal confession time: I’ve got a major thing accents. In women, the killer accent is Australian, or even better, New Zealand. [I’m still at least one-third in love with the girl who lived in the house next to mine during my time in Sydney, Paula Wap, simply because she sang “Suicide is Painless” to me while walking through through the Royal Botanic Gardens after I took her to BRAVEHEART on a date.] In indie rock bands, it’s Scottish. Some might call We Were Promised Jetpacks the poor man’s Frightened Rabbit. I call those people fucking idiots.
I’m hugely excited for Surfer Blood’s upcoming debut album, due solely to the greatness of “Swim.” I’ve a profound weakness for hooky surfer guitar rock backed by echoey vocals. This one pushes my buttons.
2009 was the year the Silversun Pickups made it to your radio and were nominated for a Grammy, after being on my Best Of mixes since 2005 (I gave the nod to “Kissing Families” after hearing these guys when the played a weeklong residency at Spaceland, a couple blocks from my house in L.A.). 2009 was also the year I shouted, “ABOUT FUCKING TIME!” to no one in particular.
Deerhunter’s been fawned over to death, but amazingly enough, it’s justified. “Famous Last Words” is them trying to be My Bloody Valentine or something like that. Somehow, they pull it off. It’s almost frustrating how good they are.
“The Mountain,” by the Heartless Bastards. A garage rock band from Cincinnati, Ohio, which makes them yet another whiskey-infused Southernish alt-rock band from nowhere near the actual American South. It doesn’t matter. This band soars.
Do you like horror movies? Particularly, horror movies that kinda seem like the sort of movie you might have watched during a sleepover in fourth grade that scared the piss out of you and made you call home so your mom could pick you up? Would you like once again to have that feeling you had while you were watching the movie, with your borrowed bedsheet pulled tight to your chest or over your eyes, in the moments before you realized your were scared shitless and needed to call your mom? Drive around somewhere dark late at night listening to Dead Man’s Bones.
I know absolutely nothing about Elvis Perkins in Dearland. I don’t need to. “Shampoo” makes me want to invent them, a story about a guy making his way down a road towards an infinite horizon with his guitar on his back and his thumb outstretched. I don’t need to know the truth. The music is the truth.
Grizzly Bear, like Deerhunter, has been rightfully adored to death. They were on David Letterman, for Christ’s sake. DAVID LETTERMAN. And they played “Two Weeks,” and they fucking NAILED it. But “While You Wait for the Others” is better.
Sam Brisbee is on this mix three times. Each time, he sounds different. Each time, he sounds great. I never heard of this guy until this year. I’ll be hearing a lot more.
As I recall, I ordered The Mantles’ debut album unheard, on legendary NYC record store Other Music’s recommendation. Except I got it on vinyl by mistake. I don’t have a record player. The album sat on my office book shelf, unopened, while I tried to figure out what the hell to do with it. Sometimes I would stare at it and wonder what it might sound like. One night, I opened it up and found a slip of paper inside offering the album for free download to people who bought the record. And I discovered that it sounded even better than I’d imagined.
Yeah, Pearl Jam’s on here. Yeah, Pearl Jam hasn’t really been considered “indie” or “alternative” or “cool” since high school. “The Fixer” still rocks. SUCK IT, INDIE SNOB.
In retrospect, I have to say I probably like the tune “Ticket Taker” off The Low Anthem’s excellent Oh My God, Charlie Darwin just slighty better than “To Ohio.” Which doesn’t make “To Ohio” any less great of a song. By the way, I’m from Ohio. SUCK IT.
In one of my favorite movies of this past year (or the year before, or the year before that), THE HURT LOCKER, the lead has a box full of “stuff that almost killed me.” That led me to buy the domain name killedbyfilm.com in the hopes of someday creating a website discussing movies that I truly love, movies that changed my life, that permanently altered my view, kicked me in the guts, tore me apart, left me for dead. The Antlers’ “Kettering,” a quiet, atmospheric, unbearably sad lament that builds to a painful and inevitable crescendo, almost killed me. There’s no higher praise.
Hey look, it’s The xx (make sure it’s lowercase!) with their album xx (remember, LOWERCASE!) They’re English! They’re indie! They’re impossibly cool! They wear all black and pout like Robert Smith after some asshole stole his pony! Pitchfork named them the third best album of 2009! Oh, wait, they’re actually really good! FUCK!
Oh, look, it’s Sam Bisbee again.
Comet Gain is a cheat. Comet Gain is a British rock band that’s been around since 1992 and hasn’t released a proper album since 2005. I heard “Look At You Now (You’re Crying)” on Broken Record Prayers, a compilation album that was technically released in 2008 (though it didn’t get here until 2009). Listen to the song, and you’ll realize why NONE OF THAT FUCKING MATTERS.
I need to stop cursing.
Here’s some Phoenix. Unfortunately, at this point, you’ve probably heard Phoenix on everything from that stupid medical soap opera with the guy from the original CAN’T BUY ME LOVE to tampon commercials. Sometimes, the good sell out. Deal with it..
I think I first heard K’naan’s “Waving Flag” in the trailer for THE HANGOVER. But that might have been T.I. It’s still a good song. If you watch World Cup soccer, prepare to have this song drilled into your brain until you bleed from your eyeballs.
The Pains of Being Pure At Heart are one of those bands that could go wrong in so many ways. They’re so damn close to being too…TOO. Too cute. Too young. Too indie. Too earnest. But all they end up being is too good. Somewhere in a Midwestern basement, there’s a sixteen year old kid who just saw the love of his life kissing the quarterback behind the bleachers that afternoon and is trying to kill the pain by blasting TPoBPAH while he does shots of Creme de Menthe and won’t even feel it when the soul of the dear departed John Hughes enters his body and compels him to take up the mantle of writing movies that really speak to the young and in love instead of just trying to rip off SUPERBAD. And I, for one, can’t WAIT for those movies.
And now we enter the atmospheric section. Signal Hill is very Explosions in the Sky, which certainly isn’t a bad thing. Goes well with sunsets and crane shots of Texas high school football fields. Also goes well with a long drive, a sit on a back porch with a beer and a good friend, and numerous other soul-healing pastimes.
Jonathan Kane goes well with midnight drives through the Everglades to dump the body of the guy you just accidentally killed behind the Piggly Wiggly after he tried to beat your best friend to death for hitting on his girlfriend Jolene at the gas pumps.
Telefon Tel Aviv was an electronica duo out of Chicago, half of which died of an overdose in January of 2009 two days after the release of the album that contains “You Are the Worst Thing in the World.” Sad.
Okay, you know the rest. I could have cut some of the repeat artists and maybe shortened this mix to one disc, but really, what’s the point? It’s all good. At least, I think it’s good. Hopefully, you do too.
Anyway.
If you’ve read this far, and even if you haven’t, I hope you all have a good year, one filled with fun, friends, life, drama, uncertainty, excitement, a dash of remorse, a call to the wild, a hat thrown to the wind, and, last but certainly not least, music.
I’ll certainly try to do the same.
