Best of Music 2009

Everyone puts out their end-of-the-year lists in November. Have they no patience? What if something really good comes out in the last week?

Anyway, here are my picks for the best of 2009 in music.

Best Children’s Album
They Might Be Giants
Here Comes Science

This album works on a lot of levels. First, it has great songs that kids and grown-ups will enjoy — but this is TMBG’s fourth kids’ album, so they’re good at this by now. Then, the science content covers a lot of ground: biology, physics, astronomy, engineering. I think I can now name five different jobs that the bloodstream does!

But the most encouraging thing is that the songs have an appropriately skeptical bent, even referencing religious dogma as being inferior to the scientific method. Lyrics from the title track:

I like those stories about angels, unicorns and elves
Now I like those stories as much as anybody else
But when I’m seeking knowledge either simple or abstract
The facts are with science

This is a great TMBG album, maybe their best.

Best Classical Album
Catrin Finch
Goldberg Variations

Mastering Bach’s Goldberg Variations on piano made Glenn Gould famous in the 50s. Now Welsh harp virtuoso Catrin Finch has scored and performed her version. This alone should be enough to merit her place in the classical pantheon. (Not to mention, I love the rock chick look. Brings in the young folks.)

Finch performed the work live several times over the last year, which to my thinking constitutes some kind of marathon of skill and concentration.

Best Album I Missed Last Year
The Daysleepers
Drowned in a Sea of Sound

Saying that this album is Lush meets Cocteau Twins doesn’t cover it, even though it’s true. The surprise here is how good this shoegaze revival sounds. Smooth yet engaging.

Song of the Year
Lusine
‘Two Dots’
A Certain Distance

Compulsively listenable. It’s a little unusual to hear vocals on an ambient electronic track, but here it contributes to make ‘Two Dots’ part IDM, part chill, and very sophisticated.

Album of the Year
The Leisure Society
The Sleeper

I found out about this amazing band via fans of the Lilac Time, and it’s not hard to see the connection. Both bands feature beautiful bucolic (and unmistakably British) folk-tinged music. Both use a diverse range of instruments. And the Leisure Society, like the Lilac Time, makes music that is unfailingly pleasant, and melodic to a degree I haven’t heard in quite some time — every song has its own hummable melody that seems not so much written, as having always existed.

Take the title track. Structurally, it begins and ends with a quiet meditation of mortality and the transience of human achievement.

Someday we all shall cease to exist. 
Someday our towers will fall. 
Roots will reclaim the bricks that we lay. 
Worms will reclaim the soil.

But the middle opens up with a beautiful revelation: ‘Sometimes you need someone.’

At the time I discovered the Leisure Society, I was conducting my own meditations on mortality, and this album provided a soulful but joyous soundscape, perfect for walking, meandering, or dancing down a quiet Perth street. Any life would be enriched by this magical music.