If I’ve had a more personally eventful year than 2009, I don’t know when it would’ve been. I started the year unemployed in Toronto. As I write this I’ve just gotten back from a weekend in Copenhagen to my apartment in The Hague, Netherlands, where I’m living for another few months working for a prominent international organization. I’m also spending the Holidays in Amsterdam, Paris, and Rome. So that’s been a bit of a change.

At the start of 2009 I also had all of four articles under my belt at this esteemed website. After press passes to the Toronto Jazz Festival, the Hillside Music Festival and Summerworks, plus a number of movies, concerts, and album reviews, I’m somewhere around ten times that now, despite only writing one post since mid-August. Sorry about that.

I also replaced my old Creative Zen player after it went through the washing machine in the pocket of my shorts with a pair of Etymotic ER-6i plugs, which are just terrific, and a Cowon D2, which is said to have some of the highest sound quality of any portable media player out there. So virtually everything sounds better to me this year than last. This may be worth keeping in mind, as I wax poetic about how amazing a year in music 2009 was…

Anyway, Wade will tell you that I spent most of the PM podcasts I was on this year talking about the Sunparlour Players, so let’s start there. My favourite live band for the last year and a half put out their second album, Wave North, in 2009. There’s some really outstanding tracks on it, highlighted by the opening track “North.” The whole first half of it is really good, though the last half is a little uneven. The important part is that it’s got some quality, high energy songs that are great live, which is how everyone should experience the Sunparlour Players. That’s number five on my list.

I’ll call Röyksopp’s Junior fourth. After a good debut in 2001 (Melody A.M.) but a slightly less inspiring follow-up (2005’s The Understanding), I wasn’t seeking this album out too eagerly. But Röyksopp went a little more dance-pop, a little less artsy electro, and brought The Knife’s Karin Dreijer back into the studio to sing a couple of songs after she contributed vocals for one on their last album. The result is their best effort to date, which means I must apologize to Torbjørn Brundtland and Svein Berge of Röyksopp for ever having doubted them.

I was also foolishly beginning to doubt Imogen Heap as a solo artist. I really liked Details, a collaboration between Immi and Guy Sigsworth under the band name Frou Frou. But I don’t really like her solo debut, i Megaphone. I thought Speak For Yourself, released in 2005 with Immi doing pretty much everything on it down to the cover art, had high points, but too many low points. But Ellipse, which she also did virtually everything on and was delayed from late 2008 to August of this year, is really good. Not only does it sound like she learned a lot from Speak For Yourself, it also sounds like she gave Details another listen and figured out what made her lyrics and voice really work with the quicker pace Frou Frou employed. That and her quirky songwriting and artistic sense makes Ellipse a very strong album, and #3 on my list.

If you were making a list of musicians who had a particularly good 2009, Stephen Wilkinson, also known as Bibio, would be near the top. Three Bibio albums came out this year: Vignetting the Compost, Ambivalence Avenue, and The Apple and the Tooth. The best part for him is that the latter two came out on Warp Records, as preeminent an indie electronic label as there is. Ambivalence Avenue is quite good; I put it at #6 on my list, though I’m having trouble getting used to actual lyrics in Bibio tunes (a couple of songs on AA even have choruses in them. What’s up with that?). The less said about The Apple and the Tooth the better; a remixes and b-sides disc, it really should’ve been a throw-in with AA rather than its own release.

But his last release on Mush Records and first of his three releases this year is excellent, and it’s my second favourite album of the year. Outside of Warp Records flagship Boards of Canada, nobody does what Bibio can with a handful of samples, some found sounds and a mixer. It’s such fertile ground for interesting music that he hardly changed anything through his three Mush Records albums, and despite the similarities and even though 2004’s fi was great and  Hand Cranked was my favourite of 2006, Vignetting the Compost still amazes. A simple folk tune on guitar, made to sound scratchy like an old record, blends into a chorus of birds chirping, into a jaunty fairground tune and on to a dreamy electronic synthscape. And that’s just tracks four and five. “The Ephemeral Bluebell” is probably the standout track; if you don’t know Bibio at all there’s really no better tune to introduce you with. It starts with a simple guitar melody that underlies the whole song, and is layered with so many other melodies and samples that it becomes a song of amazing complexity that seems to move from one part of your head to another (if you’re wearing good headphones), finally reaching an achingly beautiful climax. Bibio is the best soundtrack to a rainy day in The Hague (or an equally rainy city), staring out the window of a tram car or wandering around the quiet streets by yourself, maybe a little lonely but otherwise content, that anyone could ask for.

But the best album of the year was Yppah’s They Know What Ghost Know. It was an oddly quiet year for Ninja Tune, my favourite record label. Only a handful of new albums came out on the label at all in 2009, although Bonobo’s new single “The Keeper” is pretty promising and Jaga Jazzist is back recording again. They Know What Ghost Know, from Houston’s Joe Corrales Jr., aka Yppah, makes up entirely for that inactivity. It’s so good that it deserved to be the only new thing the label put out all year. This album has, without hyperbole, got it all. It’s loud (“Sun Flower Sun Kissed”), it’s quiet (“The Tingling”), it’s introspective (“Shutter Speed”), it’s danceable (“Bobbie Joe Wilson”), it’s deliriously happy (“Playing with Fireworks”), it’s strangely sad (“City Glow”), it’s terrifically cool (“Gumball Machine Weekend”), and more. In the end, it’s just brilliant, and the best album I’ve heard this year.

I thought 2009 was a great year for music. But even so, I found a handful of albums to be a little disappointing. Georg Levin’s Falling Masonry isn’t nearly as good as his last album or his work with Jazzanova. Flunk’s This is What You Get has a cute cover of Radiohead’s “Karma Police” on it, but not much else worth noting. Two Phazed People, a collaboration between Alpha and Horace Andy, sounds like the rejected cuts from a day of Andy recording with Massive Attack; even understanding that Alpha’s whole reason for being is to follow in Massive Attack’s footsteps, it’s a disappointing record.

Still, it was a pretty spectacular music year. Here’s my whole top ten in list form:

1. Yppah – They Know What Ghost Know
2. Bibio – Vignetting the Compost
3. Imogen Heap – Ellipse
4. Röyksopp – Junior
5. Sunparlour Players – Wave North
6. Bibio – Ambivalence Avenue

7. Zero 7 – Yeah Ghost. An impressive fourth release for Zero 7 with some great tracks, but outside the top five on my list because of a few weak songs that bring the whole thing down.

8. Tosca – No Hassle. A surprisingly timid album from Dorfmeister and Huber considering the adventures in downtempo they’ve taken fans on previously. Not all bad, though, and worth noting because of the duo’s sheer talent.

9. The Thermals – Now We Can See. Straightforward indie from the Portland power trio that wraps up nicely in less than 35 minutes.

10. Neko Case – Middle Cyclone. A solid release from Neko, but one that never quite captured my full attention for some reason.

Honourable mentions: Doom – Born Like This, Federico Aubele – Amatoria, AC Newman – Get Guilty, Air – Love 2, dZihan & Kamien – Music Matters, Great Lake Swimmers – Lost Channels, Patrick Watson – Wooden Arms.

I’d like to say thanks to Ricky for signing me up for this gig. I had some good times “working” for the Panic Manual this year. To everyone still reading this, I hope your 2009 was full of good times and that 2010 will bring you contentment and be everything that you try to make it.

 

 Yppah - Gumball Machine Weekend: Play Now

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