Musing

Top Ten Albums of 2009 - #2 Doves' Kingdom of Rust Surprised? Yeah, I bet you are. This was an early pick for the best album of the year before I'd heard a single note. It's Doves! And thankfully, it IS awesome (despite the miserable wait while songs were recorded, re-recorded, scrapped, re-re-recorded, etc.). It flows a little better than Some Cities , if not so well as the first two. Yet the one thing that gets me is the tracklisting. Four new b-sides were released in various ways from this album (counting "The Last Son" and "Ship of Fools") and every single of of them was better than "The Outsiders." Too harsh and with little direction, "The Outsiders" is the biggest reason this album derails at all. The best album of the year, along with the usual year-end awards and the "But What About Album [X]?" list will be out just after New Year's. Happy Holidays!

Top Ten Albums of 2009 - #3 Sea Wolf's White Water, White Bloom I was really excited when I finally read that this album was finished. Sea Wolf's first album is in my top 10-15 albums of all time, and it's one I desperately hoped to see released on vinyl (never happened). When WWWB was announced and pre-orders were listed online, I took the enormous step forwards (or backwards?) of ordering it strictly on vinyl. It came with a download card that included the two vinyl-only tracks, so luckily I didn't have to wait till I could grab a copy of the CD, because it's that damn good. True - it's a different beast. Leaves In The River was a far more stripped back, acoustically-driven effort. Yet WWWB retains just the right measure of the past and mixes in enough lateral progress to make itself a different kind of amazing. Also, the bonus tracks should have been full album tracks on every format. "Fighting Bull" is one of the best songs of the year.

Top Ten Albums of 2005 - #4 Muse's The Resistance The top four albums posed a bit of a problem - they're all so damn good. The all-important album flow is finally and deeply present on each of these albums. At this point it comes down to who controlled that flow best. This is a very classical album - Matthew Bellamy brings the piano to the forefront in a manner that recalls their breakthrough album Origin of Symmetry . We're not talking about simple three chord structures anymore. "United States of Eurasia/Collateral Damage" even ends with part of one of Chopin's Preludes. So why is it #4? While the Exogenesis Symphony is great, it's a long slow piece following the frantic heights of "MK Ultra," which leaves you expecting an upward jump in tempo which just never comes. Quibbles really, but that's all it takes to separate albums at this level...

Top Ten Albums of 2009 - #5 Andrew Bird's Noble Beast [Limited Edition] This may come to a surprise to long-time readers, who might remember that I pegged this as having the potential to be in the top 20% of the year end list. But this is the point at which I start really picking apart the contestants. For me, the measure of an album is very much related to the material which proceeded it. And while NB has a couple of the best tunes that Bird has ever written, the album as a whole suffers from a slightly disjointed sense of the whole, particularly when compared to his last album. I feel like the instrumentation lends itself more to the label "pop," with the violin taking a decidedly back-row stance in many of these songs. Maybe it's because he let his virtuoso side roam so freely in the limited edition disc; maybe that's why that disc exists at all - it's either to appease us or to appease himself. Either way, the combination of the two is much greater th...