Rather than pick and choose between different albums, I’m focusing on artists here.  Sigur Ros released a lot of music in the past decade, and it’s all (or nearly all) worthy, so I just lump it all together here in the #2 spot.  The same goes for Basinski, The Caretaker, Boards of Canada, and so on.  Mind you, I don’t add everything by these artists–only the cream of their crop (so to speak).   My attitude is: why focus on one work when so many great artists created multiple works of incredibly high quality?

As a result, I think you’ll find that the top albums list comes out to about 29 individual works (and more, if you count The Caretaker’s work individually).  That doesn’t include the multiple-CD releases here like The River and Kesto.  What does this mean?  Despite the near-death of the music industry, there’s still a hell of a lot of great music out there.

1. William Basinski’s The Disintegration Loops I-IV and The River
2. Sigur Rós’s Agaetis Byrjun, ( ), Takk…, and Hvarf – Heim
3. Joanna Newsom’s Ys
4. Tod Dockstander’s Aerial #1, #2, and #3
5. The Caretaker: The Complete Digital Collection
6. Boards of Canada’s Geogaddi and The Campfire Headphase
7. Tim Hecker’s Radio Amor, Harmony in Ultraviolet, and An Imaginary Country
8. Pan Sonic’s Aaltopiiri and Kesto
9. The White Stripes’s De Stijl, White Blood Cells, Elephant, and Get Behind Me Satan
10. Radiohead’s Kid A, Amnesiac, Hail to the Thief, and In Rainbows

Honorable Mentions (in alphabetical order)

• The Advisory Circle’s Other Channels
• Amiina’s Kurr
• Antony & The Johnsons’ I Am a Bird Now and The Crying Light
• Gevorg Dabaghyan’s Miniatures: Masterworks for Armenian Duduk
• Fennesz’s Endless Summer, Venice, and Black Sea
• Flying Lotus’s Los Angeles
• Hildur Guðnadóttir’s Without Sinking
• Jacob Kirkegaard’s 4 Rooms, Eldfjall, and Labyrinthitis
• Kode9 & The Spaceape’s Memories of the Future
• Leyland Kirby’s Sadly, The Future Is No Longer What It Was
• Nick Cave & The Bad Seed’s Abattoir Blues/The Lyre of Orpheus
• Random Inc.’s Jerusalem: Tales Outside the Framework of Orthodoxy
• Rechenzentrum’s Director’s Cut and Silence
• Stars of the Lid’s The Tired Sounds of Stars of the Lid and And Their Refinement of the Decline
• The Silk Road: A Musical Caravan
• Tom Waits’s Alice, Blood Money, and Real Gone

I don’t review albums professionally any more, so my list is limited by what I’ve bought and what I’ve heard.  If I missed anything, it probably means I haven’t heard it (or didn’t listen to it very carefully).  In the end, though, “Best” lists are not the end of discussions; they are the beginning.  So enjoy–and add your thoughts at the end.

1. Leyland Kirby, Sadly, The Future Is No Longer What It Was
2. Hildur Guðnadóttir, Without Sinking
3. Antony & The Johnsons, The Crying Light
4. Tim Hecker, An Imaginary Country
5. Broadcast and the Focus Group Investigate Witch Cults of the Radio Age
6. Roj, The Transactional Dharma of Roj
7. J.G. Thirlwell, The Music of J.G. Thirlwell, Vol. 1 (Original Soundtrack to The Venture Bros.)
8. Jónsi & Alex, Riceboy Sleeps
9. V/A, 5: Five Years of Hyperdub
10. Patton Oswalt, My Weakness is Strong

Special Bonus: Top 5 Songs of 2009

1. Lily Allen, “The Fear”
2. Antony & The Johnsons, “The Crying Light”
3. Hildur Guðnadóttir, “Erupting Light”
4. P!nk, “Funhouse”
5. The Swell Season, “Low Rising”

1. Max for Live
2. Theodore Levin, Where Rivers and Mountains Sing: Sound, Music, and Nomadism in Tuva and Beyond
3. Leyland Kirby, Sadly, the Future is No Longer What it Was
4. Venture Brothers
5. The Mighty Boosh
6. Huun Huur Tu
7. Dropbox
8. Dudeism.com
9. Kraftwerk, The Catalogue
10. Engrade

Bottom 3

1. Opponents of health care reform
2. Sarah Palin
3. UCLA basketball (wow, pretty sad, guys)

In my review of Jonsi & Alex’s Riceboy Sleeps project, I note:

This is definitely not Post Rock or whatever Sigur Ros’s music is called.  It’s far closer to the experimental work of someone like William Basinski or Jim Haynes (whose work Sever touches on similar decaying themes) or Peter Wright or The Caretaker or any one of a number of musicians experimenting with rendering into musical form the very real concepts of death and decay.  Riceboy Sleeps is prettier than those works, but it’s also not as complete a work of art as something as monumental as The Disintegration Loops.  Then again, Jonsi & Alex are rock musicians first, experimental artists second; by contrast, someone like The Caretaker has spent a decade imagining and perfecting his own world of memory and decay. [emphasis mine]

By comparing Jonsi & Alex to The Caretaker (among others), I wanted to draw a distinction between two different types of experimental artists.  Jonsi & Alex (and Sigur Ros) create music that is unusual and even a bit weird–but still popular in the sense that it is created with an audience (and with pleasure) in mind.  Riceboy Sleeps, although more experimental and difficult than Takk…, still falls into this “palatable” terrain.  By contrast, The Caretaker’s work (especially the later stuff like Theoretically Pure Anterograde Amnesia) doesn’t bother with popular conventions at all.  There are no clear melodies, no discernible beats, no direct hooks to engage the listener.  It’s a journey of mammoth proportions, requiring hours of listening to pick through the intricate layers of meaning in each fragment of sound.  It’s a wonderful, emotionally drenching journey, but listeners are expected to find the trail for themselves.

All of this is to say that the first work under The Caretaker’s own name (more or less) is everything a Caretaker fan would expect–but also a significant enough of a departure to warrant the new moniker.  It’s long (almost four hours, spread over three CDs and twenty tracks), it’s intense, it’s maddening, and it’s exhausting.  It challenges listeners from the first moment and never lets up, never gives in to any semblance of conformity or audience expectation.  In short, it’s fantastic.

But it’s also surprisingly sparse.  The use of sampled or retouched material is absent here.  In its place is Kirby’s own piano work, which is twisted and mutated in ways similar to the ways old 78s were twisted and mutated on The Haunted Ballroom.  In the Caretaker work, there was always the hint of a ghost drifting through the soundscape (much like the ghosts that inhabit the hotel in The Shining, Kirby’s inspiration for The Caretaker).  The voices of long-dead singers warbled and floated through static and distortion.  It was, in many ways, the musical equivalent of a seance.  While the approach is similar here (music processed and treated to render it more opaque), the ghosts are gone.  There are no vocals or orchestra–just a lone piano accompanied by occasional synthesizer tones and stray, warbling distortion.

For this reason, it’s far sadder, far more melancholy than earlier works by this artist.  I figured this out after the first or second listen.  However, for the life of me, the more I listened to the work, the less I understood WHY this was a sadder, more melancholy album than the Caretaker stuff.  I actually listened to this work non-stop (or thereabouts) for over a week, trying to place this music, trying to wrap my head and ears around it.  However, it wasn’t until I read a review in the November 2009 of The Wire (by Joseph Stannard) that I finally understood why this work was so unique:

Whereas his work as The Caretaker acknowledges the possibility of magic–the source material deriving from songs which view love as capable of transcending even death–this new music confronts the listener with a sadness that cannot be escaped by earthly or supernatural means.  With its stately piano, ice-sheet synth and billowing clouds of all-enveloping Noise, History* offers nothing less than a complete immersion in grief, stubbornly denying the listener the comfort of catharsis.  Beautiful, but not for the light-hearted.

Whereas The Caretaker’s work hinted at ghosts, at the possibility of connecting with a “beyond,” Leyland Kirby’s work focuses on the absence of such ghosts, the absence of any meaningful link to another world or another realm.  At least, that’s what I think he’s saying here.  And he’s right.  There’s a distinct lack of comfort in this work, and while I wouldn’t exactly characterize the music as an “immersion in grief,” I would say that the music seems to exist in a world that is quite different from our own, a world that is uniquely alien to our everyday experience.

Or, to put it another way, if the “haunted ballroom” scene in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining was the inspiration for The Caretaker, then I wouldn’t be surprised if the shots of the vast living ocean in Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris was the inspiration for Sadly…  Like that ocean, this music seems to be both alive and beyond our understanding.  Like the ocean, the music here connects with its audience in ways that raise more questions than it answers.  There’s also a musical link between the works; there’s a hint of Edward Artemiev’s electronic score floating through many of the pieces in Sadly, filling in the otherworldly soundscape the way the ocean fills the minds and hearts of the characters in Tarkovsky’s epic.

In the end, though, this is a very personal album that, no doubt, elicits very personal, subjective responses from its listeners.  For me, this is a monumental work, the finest music to come out this year.  I don’t know what you will hear, so I encourage you to find out for yourself.  There are samples available at Kirby’s website, History Always Favours the Winners, where there are also links for places to buy the album.

* The Wire apparently reviewed the album under the title Kirby uses for his website.  Perhaps the work was renamed between the writing of the review and the CD release in October 2009.  Who knows and who cares?  It’s the same work either way.

Top 10

1. Candy
2. Angels (yeah they lost, but a great run, guys)
3. Leyland Kirby’s Sadly, the Future is No Longer What it Was
4. The Swell Season’s Strict Joy
5. Google Wave
6. British Library’s Archival Sound Recordings
7. Kraftwerk’s boxed set
8. Dudeism
9. Skee-Ball for the iPhone
10. 5: Five Years of Hyperdub

Bottom 3

1. Lady Gaga
2. UCLA football (holy crap, guys)
3. Republicans (wait until next month and the bottom 3 of the decade)

When The Commitments came out in 1991, I was a 23 year old English grad student obsessed with both James Joyce and soul music (especially Otis Redding and Bobby “Blue” Bland), so you know that Alan Parker’s film (based on Roddy Doyle’s wonderful novel) would be a big hit for me.  I saw it twice in the theater, I believe, and each time I had to pinch myself.  How did they know?  I asked myself.  How did they manage to create a movie just for me?

The thing that struck me at the time about the film (I’m talking the film’s narrative now) was the fact that, at the end, all the characters seemed successful (singing in bands, having girlfriends, so on) except for the two guys who started the band in the first place–the guitarist and bassist.  In the final montage, we see them singing for loose change on the streets of Dublin (they call those guys “buskers” in Ireland).  No fair, I thought then and now.  Those guys deserved better than that.

Well, turns out the happy ending would come for at least one of those two buskers, played by real-life musician Glen Hansard.  He had already started his own band, The Frames, at that point, and after the film that band went on to dominate Irish music for over a decade.  They had some popularity in Europe and America, but it wasn’t until 2007’s film Once that Glen Hansard became known to a truly wide audience when his little film won him an Oscar for Best Song.  He and his co-star in the film, Marketa Irglova, developed the songs for Once (which was directed by former Frames bassist John Carney) and began touring as a duo, calling their collaboration The Swell Season.

I should say, first off, that I absolutely loved Once.  Yes, it’s Irish, so that’s no surprise.  In fact, I’m probably more interested in Ireland now than I was back in the early 1990s when I only had a vague understanding of Joyce and why I liked Joyce.  Now that I have a strong grasp of Joyce and the larger picture of Irish literature and history, and now that I have actually visited Ireland on several occasions and seen Dublin for myself, I can say that my enthusiasm for the country is richer than it ever was back in 1991.  Seeing Glen Hansard walking along O’Connell Street just brings back a ton of wonderful memories.  On top of all that, however, I thought the film was an enormous artistic success, as it’s one of the few musicals to actually take the music part seriously enough to dispense with the stupid dancing and simply show the role that music plays in the lives of musicians who would rather perform for each other than talk.  It’s a film about the development of a close, musical friendship, with the focus on the creative process first and foremost. It’s a great film.  I’ve seen it a dozen times, and I never get tired of it.  It doesn’t help that the music in the film is phenomenal.

Well, a lot of other people liked Once, too, and a lot of people bought the soundtrack and became interested in the duo, especially after it was revealed that they were romantically linked.  So the follow-up was bound to be a big deal, and it certainly is.  It’s called Strict Joy, and it comes in a regular version (just the one disk) or a deluxe edition (with the album, a companion concert CD, and a live concert DVD).  I’ve been listening to the album and concert CDs for the past few days, and I have to say…I like the new album, but I really love the concert CD, and its worth getting the deluxe version just to get that CD.

I always felt The Frames had their moments (“Revelate,” “Lay Me Down,” to name a few), but their albums as a whole seemed weighed down with too many mediocre songs.  The Once soundtrack contained mostly wonderful material, but even that work had its clunkers, too.  I’d say Strict Joy is similar.  There are some incredibly strong songs, such as the opener “Low Rising” (in which Hansard channels his inner Van Morrison better than Van Morrison himself), “In These Arms,” and Irglova’s standout track “I Have Loved You Wrong,” among others.  And while there are no real clunkers here, there are also a number of songs that really don’t grab me for one reason or another.  So I like it, but I’m not overwhelmed by the experience of listening to the music.

But the concert CD is an entirely different story.  True, a lot of the songs in the concert are from Once, along with some standout Frames songs like “Lay Me Down” and “Fitzcarraldo,” so the material itself stands on its own.  But the content here, I think, is less important than the presentation.  Glen Hansard is an incredible singer, and I think this comes through live in a way that really can’t be captured in a studio.  There’s a dynamism, a force, behind his voice when he’s in front of an audience that transforms decent songs like “Say It To Me Know” into epics.  He sings like the world is on fire and only his voice can put out the blaze–it’s a fierce, strong, barely-in-control megaphone that only works when it’s a bit out of tune.  That sort of chaos just doesn’t fit on a conventional studio take, where the tunes are modified and the cracks and grit of a real voice is limited and compressed to better fit to a perfectly-designed score.  And the audience knows it, too; listen to the roar of love that bursts out when the crowd cheers after the opening number; that’s an audience that understands exactly what it has heard.

But his singing voice is only part of it. Hansard is also a storyteller, like a lot of musicians.  And like a lot of musicians, he is very comfortable telling little stories before the songs.  Some of the stories are funny (like the one about the kid buying the grave for his girlfriend), and some are truly bizarre (about the “ghostbuster” couple who talk to the souls of 500-year-old children), but the stories all lead to a brief explanation of what each song is about emotionally and the messages that he, as the songwriter, sought to convey when composing it.  That’s different.  Musicians are generally fearful of prose; they want their music to speak for itself.  They’ll tell a story about the song’s origin, but they won’t usually follow it up by stating “this song means x” because that declarative statement limits the power of the song.

Rather than cheapening the songs (by telling us how to listen to them), however, Hansard provides an emotional framework that helps direct our understanding of the songs.  Think of Sister Wendy describing a painting at the Louvre; we can see the painting without her, but she draws attention to details we might overlook, allowing us to seen and appreciate the work in a whole new light.  Hansard does the same thing; we can enjoy his songs without the introductions, but those introductions draw our ears and our minds to ideas and to emotions that make the experience of listening to these songs that much more meaningful.

Here’s an example.  Before the song “That Low,” he tells a funny story about his last visit to Milwaukee (where the concert took place) and then says,

This song is about an idea that you’re in a rut, maybe in a relationship, and you’ve got each other but it’s not great.  The song is about the idea that this one person has to go and walk a new road, and this song was written from the perspective of the person who realizes that they’re about to be left.  It’s for a good reason.  It’s like a double-edged sword.  It ups the ante for you and makes you go, “Okay, what am I doing?”  So this is about the whole idea that a rising tide lifts all boats, and if somebody has to go walk their way then it kind of forces you to think about yourself.  The whole idea of this song is “thread the light, walk the light, speak the light, seek the light, crave the light, brave the light.” The whole idea is “be in the light” because if you’re in the dark, then it’s no use to you.

Songs, like poems, often need a frame of reference before they can be fully understood.  Before I heard his introduction, I thought “This Low” was a sad song about a couple breaking up.  Of course, I didn’t really pay too much attention to the song when I first heard it on The Swell Season’s debut (which came out before Once).  Once I heard Hansard’s introduction to this song, however, I was forced to consider the “light” part and what it meant in the context of the breakup, and I realized that, yes, it’s a sad song about a breakup, but it’s more than that.  The idea he’s conveying here (which is conveyed musically better than it is conveyed lyrically) is the sudden realization that a part of a person’s life has just ended but that this is as much a moment of possibility as it is a moment of despair.  That is, she’s gone, which means that what happens next has yet to be written.  The “shine a light” part is the speaker’s mind opening up to explore the possibilities that have suddenly emerged (rather than retreating into the darkness of despair and sadness).  It’s a beautiful song and a beautiful idea, and Hasnard’s introduction allowed me to better understand and appreciate it.

He does something similar to this with many of the songs, but he’s not alone.  Irglova also introduces several songs, providing her own take on those she has penned.  Sorry I haven’t mentioned her much here, but her role in this group is definitely a secondary one to Hansard; she performs a few songs here, and she shines whenever she sings, but he seems to be the focus of the group, and he’s the one directing things and arranging things and singing most things.  But when she shines, she shines brightly–and in a similar way to Hansard.  Her voice warbles and hems around just like his.  It’s not a powerful voice, but it’s an equally passionate one.  Heck, there’s enough grain in those two voices to fill several beaches.

In all, Strict Joy is good, but the concert CD is a wonderful document of the true power of this musical duo.  So if you’re going to get this, get the deluxe edition.

Update (10/2): The CD version of the deluxe edition doesn’t contain the entire concert, so if you want to hear all the cool stories and stuff from that concert, buy the deluxe edition on iTunes.

Top 10

1. Angels playoff dreams
2. The Guild
3. New Venture Bros episodes
4. Flying Lotus
5. The Complete Stories of J.G. Ballard
6. Rewatching The Wire (the best thing created this decade)
7. Dr. Strangeloop, Are We Lost Mammals of an Approaching Transcendental Epoch?
8. John Scalzi, Old Man’s War
9. Longplayer Live
10. Solace of the Defeated

Bottom 3

1. Politico.com for using the phrase “ideas piece”
2. Extract (Sorry, Mike, but it sucked)
3. Portsmouth FC

Sub-Bottom 1 (even worse than the Bottom 3 above)

1. Anyone who thinks National Socialism has ANYTHING to do with Socialism.  These people are stupid and dangerous and should be called out as such.

LongPlayer Live from Documentally on Vimeo.

The best single of 2009 is Lily Allen’s “The Fear,” hands down.  She manages to combine the post 9/11 paranoia of the last decade, consumerism, trash culture, our obsession with fame and wealth.  It’s all summed up in the unbelievably line, “I don’t know what’s right and what’s real any more / and I don’t know how I’m meant to feel any more.”  This says more about the post 9/11 world’s total confusion and identity crisis than everything U2 and Bruce Springsteen produced in the last 10 years.

Amazing song, and the only thing that was worth hearing this year on VH1.