Pitchfork: he Top 10 Tracks of 2009

10. Washed Out
"Feel It All Around"
[Mexican Summer]








A year ago, Ernest Greene wasn't
singing, really. Nine months ago, he wasn't making glimmering lo-fi
electronic pop as Washed Out. Until October, you couldn't buy any of
his stuff in physical form. Not long before you finally could, he
would've had no reason to ask upstart labels Mexican Summer or Mirror
Universe to press more than tiny numbers of his Life of Leisure 12" EP or High Times cassette. Who would be interested in them? A lot of people, it turns out, and "Feel It All Around" is the biggest reason why.
Washed Out's first single doesn't tell you what, exactly, you're
supposed to be "feel"ing, but that's the idea. Twinkling synths,
amniotic vocal drone, undulating bass, and chockablock percussion all
imagine a hazy innocence that's just out of reach. Greene's wispily
multi-tracked ache is no more clearly articulated. Anybody truly
scandalized about this track's sampling of Gary Low's Italo-disco jam
"I Want You" would've been just as pissed at the 1983 original for
having synths. The past isn't as sublime as you remember it. The
present always ends too soon. --Marc Hogan9. Girls
"Lust for Life"
[True Panther]








For a band that's inspired so much
record-collector-rock referencing, it's no shock that Girls would
brazenly swipe a well-worn Iggy Pop title for the first song on their
first album. But if Iggy's anthem was about getting fucked up, Girls'
version is about being a fuck-up-- less a celebration of excess than an
appeal for basic human needs. It's tempting to filter frontman
Christopher Owens' lyrical pleas through the lens of his religious-cult
background, transforming the seemingly throwaway requests for "a pizza
and a bottle of wine" into the song's most resonant moments and
shedding light on an upbringing devoid of the most simple pleasures.
But from that bracing first line-- "I wish I had a boyfriend,"
delivered by an ostensibly heterosexual singer-- it's clear that Owens
is really singing for any outcast who's sick of feeling sorry for
themselves and ready for "a brand new start." That eagerness is
manifested in the song's blurry-handed jangle riff, which makes Owens
sound like he's in such a hurry to turn a new leaf that he doesn't even
take the time to fashion a proper chorus. But just when you expect the
band to kick into a second-verse rock-out, Girls respond with more
playful gestures: cheeky doo-wop harmonies, tambourine shakes and
handclaps-- inclusive, participatory devices that underscore the fact
that "Lust for Life" is less about Owens' life than your own. --Stuart
Berman8. Phoenix
"Lisztomania"
[Glassnote/Loyauté]








Phoenix make it look easy. Their
jeans, tones, scarves, hooks, arrangements; it all comes together on
stage and on record with minimal fuss. But writing succinct and
powerful pop that has the ability to serve grad students and Nano'd
teens is, in fact, quite difficult. Don't take my word for it. Just ask
singer Thomas Mars, who airs out his music-making frustrations all over
"Lisztomania".
"So sentimental/ Not sentimental, no/ Romantic, not disgusting yet,"
he starts (and stops), dragging his side-margin notes to the fore. This
is a behind-the-scenes, neurotic, Woody Allen-meets-8 1/2 meta
anthem that tries to get to the root of universal appeal without
pandering to it. Sure, the song's surface sheen is meticulously catchy,
but there's a lot more here than that. Along the way, Mars is
disgusted, discouraged, misguided, distant, lonely. "From a mess to the
masses," he wails, throwing his hands up at the prospect of converting
a bunch of riffs, beats, and brainwaves into something worthy of a
sold-out crowd. And then he leads his band through something worthy of
several sold-out crowds. No sweat. --Ryan Dombal7. Big Boi [ft. Gucci Mane]
"Shine Blockas"
[LaFace]








That Big Boi's solo album still
hasn't seen the light of day is further proof that the record industry
is irreparably broken. "Shine Blockas" should be more than a rap blog
curio. It's the sort of track that we should hear blaring out of every
passing Civic. The track works as a study in contrasts. Even more than
usual, OutKast's still-rapping half raps in darting, stuttery little
bursts, his flow fighting its way upstream on the beat, dropping
syllables in places nobody would expect. Gucci's guest spot does just
the opposite. It's a fully intuitive vocal, his hoarse, marbled
monotone drifting lazily over the cascading beat like he was born
rapping on it. Cutmaster Swiff's lush, strobing Harold Melvin sample
might be fundamentally opposed to the dinky synth symphonies that Gucci
generally favors, but he makes rapping over it sound like the easiest
thing in the world. Big Boi makes it sound like the most difficult, but
he still sticks it. None of these ingredients seem like they should
work together, but everything piles on top of everything else, and
against odds, the song turns itself into a towering anthem of
self-assurance. --Tom Breihan6. Yeah Yeah Yeahs
"Zero"
[Interscope]








Yeah Yeah Yeahs' take on electro-pop
is all harsh lighting and exposed wires, their machines powering up in
fits and starts while Karen O tells you the cold truth: "You're a zero.
What's your name? No one's gonna ask you." It could be a corporation or
a subculture, but the rules are the same: you start as nothing and you
crawl and claw your way up doing exactly what you're told. But when you
do fight to the top your reward is the most glorious release: the
crunched-up cyber-glam riffing that's "Zero"'s own ladder to the sun.
It lets Karen O cut loose, too, the restrained creaks and tremors in
her voice becoming cries and gasps as the song fills splendidly out. In
another world and a less bombed-out market it could have been their
"Heart of Glass", crossing over to an audience of people who never
cared about their punky pedigree. A shame it didn't find that public,
but this is pop steely enough to need no wider validation. --Tom Ewing5. Grizzly Bear
"Two Weeks"
[Warp]








A better name would be Teddy Bear,
such is the unlikely appeal of this unassuming Brooklyn foursome. But
just how did they manage to charm the indie elite and Jay-Z and Solange and Beyoncé and your mom and scores of Twilight-addled
tweens? It wasn't by pandering-- the carefully honed Grizzly sound has
progressed naturally, organically, from Ed Droste's bedroom recording
days, creeping through the quiet spaces of Yellow House and finally blossoming fully on this year's Veckatimest.
No track better typifies the fully-formed Grizzly Bear than "Two
Weeks", but it's not the craftsmanship that's winning people over and
making them want to spin this one again and again. It's the intangible,
of course, the sound of a band that has struck upon something timeless,
inspired, holistic, and-- it bears (ahem) mentioning-- utterly
wholesome. Some people will hear "Two Weeks" and instantly feel better
about their day, some will want to join a boys' choir, and most will
feel the urge to share this exceptional thing with those close to them.
--Matthew Solarski4. Bat For Lashes
"Daniel"
[Parlophone/Astralwerks]








With a knack for high-concept
storytelling and a distinct visual aesthetic to accompany her rich,
moody pop, Bat for Lashes' Natasha Khan may be the closest thing to a
video star in today's indie realm. Though perhaps not as iconic as her Donnie Darko-inspired clip for 2007's "What's a Girl to Do?", the video for "Daniel", the standout from her Two Suns
LP, matches the song's hope and longing. In it, Khan wrestles with
sorrow (in the form of faceless, black-clad dancers) as she races
toward the titular character and the track's skyward chorus. This
struggle for salvation is central to "Daniel"'s appeal, and Bat for
Lashes play masterfully with shades of light and dark to achieve the
effect. With its dark romance, soaring vocal hook, and skillful
songcraft, "Daniel" does feel like a direct descendant to similar work
by Kate Bush and Sinead O'Connor, though I'm also reminded of songs
like Concrete Blonde's "Caroline"-- the kind of goth-tinged gem that,
sadly, seems to have disappeared from the airwaves. --Joe Colly3. Phoenix
"1901"
[Glassnote/Loyauté]








In Amadeus, Antonio Salieri
wonders how such beautiful music can come from a buffoon like Tom
Hulce's Mozart. There might also be some American indie rock Salieris
stewing over these French invaders Phoenix waltzing over here and
perfecting their genre. Even more than 2006's exquisite It's Never Been Like That, the singles on Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix demonstrate with arrogant ease how disheveled indie rock tropes can be reshuffled into straight-laced pop gold.
When "1901" debuted on the Phoenix website with animated pink shards
slashing across a black backing, it looked like the track's
error-message synthesizers were clawing a neon marquee out from
underneath the sooty abyss. And the song itself is similar restoration,
layering sloppy guitar jangle into a propulsive motor and goosing the
synthesizers into an air-raid crescendo until the whole mess is a
glass-smooth shiny bauble. People in indie rock circles often talk
about hit singles in alternate dimensions, but Phoenix prove you don't
need quantum theory to make pop out of indie rock ingredients... you
just need to be from Versailles. --Rob Mitchum2. Dirty Projectors
"Stillness Is the Move"
[Domino]








When avant-garde musicians try to
engage with pop, they reveal a lot about themselves. People who make
difficult music sometimes act as if the kind of music that catches on
broadly is a dumbed-down version of the "real thing," or a collection
of catchphrases and synth presets. The sharpest avant-gardists, of
course, realize that the real musical vanguard very often enters the
culture via Hot 97: If a song is designed to give pleasure, a dose of
shocking newness can be the element that helps demand it be played over
and over. The high point of Bitte Orca lovingly appropriates
the great innovations that have descended from the top of the charts
over this past decade--the sharply defined negative space, holographic
hooks, chiseled phrasing, and Olympically luxurious vocal arrangements
of Amerie, Aaliyah, and Destiny's Child. Its lyric is partly pop
readymades ("From now until forever baby/ I can't imagine anything
better"), partly lines from Peter Handke's "Song of Childhood" in Wim
Wenders' Wings of Desire ("Like a child it had no habits/ No
opinion about anything"), and in the context of its spiraling melody
and arrangement, they seem like they've always belonged together. And
Amber Coffman's lead vocal is a phenomenon: acrobatic, locked into the
rhythmic demands of the song, and delivered in a way that makes her
voice's thin, conversational tone radiant. --Douglas Wolk1. Animal Collective
"My Girls"
[Domino]








"My Girls", the catchy, gloriously harmonized highlight of Merriweather Post Pavilion,
is all heart-- arguably the most earnest expression of basic human want
recorded in 2009. Panda Bear's promise to provide a proper house for
his wife and young daughter, in the wake of his father's death-- "But
to provide for mine who ask, I will, with heart, on my father's grave,"
he pledges-- yielded a blissful, near-ecstatic song that practically
requires participation, be it hollering along (try to keep yourself
from yelling a synchronized "ooooh!" after the chorus) or shimmying in
your subway seat. Panda Bear and Avey Tare's harmonies here are warmer
(and groovier) than most anywhere else in the band's catalogue, and the
electronics are gentle and buoyant; in some ways, "My Girls" feels like
a life preserver for people tottering on the precipice of adulthood.
Panda Bear might be apologetic about his craving ("I don't mean to seem
like I care about material things," he hedges), but "My Girls" is
ultimately a celebration of the simplification-- of desire, of
priorities-- that comes with growing up. --Amanda Petrusich


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