A Penny in the Well: Best Music of 2009

I used to be as into music as I was into movies. In college, I would make a weekly visit to Tower Records to check out the new releases. I subscribed to CMJ (formerly College Music Journal) to keep up on all the latest up and coming bands. If anyone at school needed to know anything about music, I was the one they came to.

Then, two years before our marriage, my then fiancé bought me a brand new to the market DVD player. Suddenly all the money I spent on music was diverted to movies. That is not blame I’m placing. I love my wife dearly for thrusting me into the DVD market at its birth, among other things.

While I attempted to get back into the music scene for the next eleven years, I could never seem to gain the same foothold I once had. I could never find the really new stuff. The stuff that was up and coming before it up and came. I couldn’t even seem to get the same grasp on long standing acts. I didn’t feel informed enough to swing for the fences in the way I once had. All my purchases seemed safe, and so my music collecting never got off the ground again.

That was until last year when a fairly impromptu visit to Chicago allowed a couple of good friends to prepare a new music introduction experience for me that created the spark I’d been looking for in my music obsession. Suddenly, I was back in the game. Part of that game is creating a list of favorite albums, songs, and music sources discovered throughout the year.

I had quite an overwhelming year catching up on the music scene, as well as figuring out how to stay, if not ahead of it, at least along stride with it. This being the first best of list I’ve ever produced for music, I may seem like I’m flailing at the wind with some of my choices, but these were the albums that left the most indelible impressions on me over the greatest year in music I’ve experienced in quite some time.

30 Favorite Albums

1. Omar Rodriguez Lopez – Solar Gambling buy

2. Stardeath and White Dwarfs – The Birth buy

3. Anneke Van Giersbergen & Danny Cavanagh – In Parallel

4. Giant Squid – The Ichthyologist buy

5. Count Raven – Mammons War buy

6. The Devil’s Blood – The Time of No Time Evermore buy

7. Lou Barlow – Goodnight Unknown buy

8. Black Joe Lewis & the Honeybears – Tell ‘Em What Your Name Is! buy

9. The Swell Season – Strict Joy buy

10. Der Blaue Reiter – Nuclear Sun buy

11. The Black Crowes – Before the Frost/Until the Freeze buy

12. The Dead Weather – Horehound buy

13. Heartless Bastards – The Mountain buy

14. Russian Circles – Geneva buy

15. Eagle Twin – The Unkindness of Crows buy

16. The XX – XX buy

17. P.O.S. – Never Better buy

18. Crippled Black Phoenix – Night Raider/The Resurrectionists buy

19. The Lonely Island – Incredibad buy

20. Horns of Anguish – Barriers buy

21. Dinosaur Jr. – Farm buy

22. Maserati – Passages buy

23. Pelican – What We All Come To Need buy

24. Behold! The Monolith – Behold! The Monolith LP buy

25. Black Math Horseman – ‘Wyllt’ buy

26. Bibio – Ambivalence Avenue buy

27. The Black Heart Procession – Six buy

28. The Leisure Society – The Sleeper buy

29. The Flaming Lips – Embryonic buy

30. DeWolff – Strange Fruits and Undiscovered Plants

Favorite Individual Tracks (in track order of “Words Unspoken: Best of ’09” mix)

Crippled Black Phoenix “Rise Up and Fight”
Mastodon “Crack the Skye”
The Swell Season “Low Rising”
BlackKoldMadina “Trouble the Water”
Crocodiles “I Wanna Kill”
XX “Night Time”
The Leisure Society “Save It For Someone Who Cares”
Foo Fighters “Word Forward”
Black Joe Lewis & The Honeybears “Get Yo S**t”
The Lonely Island “Boombox”
Behold! The Monolith “Battle for Balls Deep”
P.O.S. “Out of Category”
Pearl Jam “The Fixer”
Maserati “No More Sages”
Have a Nice Life “Trespassers W”
The Black Crowes “Greenhorn”
Steve Martin “Words Unspoken”

Download them here.

10 Reissues/Box Sets/Compilations