OUTERGLOW PRESENTS: Our Favorite Albums Of 2009

We know outerglow has only been around for a week or two, but we love year-end lists (making, reading, insulting) and we hope you will enjoy ours. It's been an amazing year in music and it was a stressful process weeding down our top 15 albums of the year. We also stray from using the qualifier 'best' because this list is in no way objective, and we're really not qualified to talk about music in that way. This is simply shit that we loved. Oh, and please bear with us through our ramblings in our top five; we just get excited about these things and we're starting to suspect our cat isn't really paying attention when we tell him why disco will never die, so this is our venting place as much as anything. Oh, and each artist/album title has a link to where you can purchase said album if you see fit. Okay. Without further ado, the

OUTERGLOW TOP 15 ALBUMS OF 2009:

15. Phonat- Phonat (MoFoHiFi)
God damn did Phonat kill it this year. Italian Michele Balduzzi came out of nowhere with a totally unique blend of choppy, psycho-Falke-ian, A.D.D. french-house-nu-disco-electro-thrash-pop (what? for real); the first times hearing 'Set Me Free' and 'Learn to Recycle' (the 2:25 mark at which we just go apeshit) were straight up magical. If this album hadn't contained a lot of odd, discordant moments (too thrashy at times, least for our liking), the strength of four of five of the tracks could have put this much higher.

14. Animal Collective- Merriweather Post Pavilion (Domino)
Fine. We don't think it's their best, and we don't think it's as pants-shittingly perfect as everyone else in the world seems to; oh, and 'My Girls' is not, by a long shot, the best track on here. But we all know this is a dope album. No more to say.

13. Dan Deacon - Bromst (Carpark)
Dan Deacon has always been entertaining, but he used to do it in an ironic, funny-fat-geek sort of way. His second album, 'Bromst,' stops messing around; he's still making oddball party music, but this time it's really kind of profound, and you can actually tell he's a musician as opposed to a dude who likes to party. It's the dense, buzzing wall of overlapping modem-synth sounds we expected, but we didn't expect it to have as many calms before storms, and it's really nice.

12. God Help The Girl- God Help The Girl (Matador)
If Belle & Sebastian weren't our favorite band of all time, this (B&S frontman) Stuart Murdoch-penned soundtrack to an in-the-works musical-film project probably wouldn't make it into this list. But guess what? Belle & Sebastian is our favorite band of all time, and this album, featuring the totally wonderful vocals of Catherine Ireton (in whose hands 'Funny Little Frog' transforms from okay B&S ditty to charming soulful perfection), sounds like them. Sooo...

11. Here We Go Magic - Here We Go Magic (Western Vinyl)
Softly experimental pop (we guess? electro-folk-psych-pop?) from art school boy Luke Temple's band is a woozy, romantic wash of lo-fi folk swooped out of lo-fi with textured synth sounds. Temple's fragile voice and captivating lyrics are the icing on the cake; if you've yet to hear 'Only Pieces,' drop everything and do so now.

10. Lindstrom & Prins Thomas - II (Eskimo)
Duh. It's Lindstrom and Prins Thomas, Scandinavian cosmic disco kings. It's Eskimo, arguably the best disco label right now. What more do you really want us to say?

9. Linkwood- System (Prime Numbers)
We wrote about Linkwood here. Criminally underlooked funky deep house. This shit is delicious.

8. TIE: Memory Tapes- Seek Magic (Sincerely Yours/Acephale)/
Washed Out- Life Of Leisure EP (Mexican Summer)
Hate the stupid Carlesian title, but we like everyone else in the universe loved the fuck out of 'chillwave' this year– so much so that we couldn't pick between our favorites, and easily the most talented of the genre, Dayve Hawk's Memory Tapes and Ernest Greene's Washed Out. We'll spare you the descriptions with which you've probably already been inundated. These guys sound good, they sound like summer, and 'Plain Material' and 'New Theory' are some of the year's most stellar tracks, period. (We also highly recommend checking out Hawk's blog, weirdtapes.blogspot.com– tons of downloads from Memory Tapes and its previous iterations.)

7. Fear of Tigers - Cossus Snufsigalonica (no label)
Fear of Tigers (UK's Ben Barry) produced our favorite song of 2008 (Study Hard Drugs School), and the unapologetically-happy-nu-disco-powerpop-house buck sure as fuck does not stop there. Ecstatic, one of a kind, and FREE! We expect big things from this guy; 2010 will be no doubt be the year of the tiger (gag, sorry, we couldn't help it).

6. Atlas Sound - Logos (Kranky)
Warm, glimmering, fuzzy dreampop from indie's smartest, most lovable weirdo Bradford Cox. Each song on Atlas Sound's second album was recorded in one take, making Cox's songwriting genius even more apparent; Cox exists for and by his songs, you can tell, and while often insensely personal, they're also inviting and relatable. But mostly just fucking gorgeous– Panda Bear collaboration 'Walkabout,' 'Quick Canal' featuring Stereolab's Laetitia Sadier, and the stunning 'Shelia' are three of the best pop songs we've heard in a long time.


...and now for the best of the best... ready?


5. Royksopp- Junior (Astralwerks)
We didn't immediately fall for 'Junior'; using 'Melody AM' (ohmygod) and 'The Understanding' (less so, but incomparable moments–'What Else Is There,' 'Only This Moment,' oophh) as measuring sticks, 'Junior' on first listen didn't do what we know the masterful Norwegian electropop duo can do. But we were so wrong. Royksopp has previously focused on either downtempo 'chillout' soundscapes or on uptempo melodies with dark techno inflections; 'Junior' is their middle ground that gets less 'middle' with each listen and still manages to maintain variation and the unmistakable Royksopp was here stamp. The album brings two powerfully catchy pop gems right off the bat: the infectious, P-funk sampling album opener, 'Happy Up Here,' is one of the feel-good songs of the year, and leads into Royksopp's most dancefloor-friendly yet, 'The Girl & The Robot' with Robyn slamming the vocals. But it's where 'Junior' goes next– the smooth-yet-growling, Royksopp-to-a-T 'Vision One' (a remake of a remix they did for j-pop star Eri Nobuchika), the dark and driving 'This Must Be It' with Karin Dreijer-Anderssen's vocals unsurprisingly owning the best chorus on the album, and the total standout 'Royksopp Forever,' the massive string-filled instrumental with a jaw-dropping mid-song chord change– that makes 'Junior' stand as tall if not taller than its predecessors. The Royksopp we love (earnest, dramatic, almost manic in their mood swings from saccharine to moody but with the chops to back it up) didn't go anywhere.

Royksopp- Royksopp Forever (212)


4. Woods- Songs of Shame (Woodsist)
Windblown, comfortably psychedelic, and (ah, fuck it) woodsy, Woods' fourth album 'Songs of Shame' does the lo-fi-psych thing in a way that seems immediately more mature than the slew of wannabes that popped up like dandelions in the past year. Unlike many of these conveniently noisy and rough-around-the-edges (*cough* underwritten) acts that got hyped, 'Songs of Shame' is cohesive and meticulously put together even in it's more 'jammy' meanderings and lo-fi aesthetics. Woods has reached an immediately intoxicating balance of unhinged clamor and catchy pop-ish hooks, naturalism and organization, strung together with random guitar wailings and Jeremy Earl's wistfully nasal choruses that kind of remind us of Built To Spill (which is a good thing). 'Songs of Shame' is a collage of evocative, campfire-suited gems somehow simultaneously eerie and strange and familiar and accessible, with moments of totally charming rustic bliss ('Rain On,' 'Gypsy Hand,' 'To Clean') leading up to the short but so heart-wrenchingly sweet 'Where And What Are You' that makes us want to start it again every time.

Woods - To Clean (224)
Woods - Gypsy Hand (224)


3. Bottin- Horror Disco (Bear Funk)
We read a lot of reviews that harped on the album title, turning it into some sort of Goblin-homage disco concept album. Anyone who actually listens, and has listened to Italo disco before in their life, can figure out that Italian producer William Bottin made something far less shallow than that. 'Horror Disco' is an impeccably-crafted (unsurprising given his background as a sound designer), kitschy-yet-classy, contemporary-yet-classic, focused-yet-surprising album that shows his unmistakable knowledge of, and passion for, pure Italo and rare synth sounds. Sure, the giallo influences are there, and Bottin's sounds are Italian to the core, though with a healthy dose of American funk. But the sprawling 78-minute album is much too varied, briskly jogging from the uber-camp ('Disco For The Devil,' 'Undercover Monkey') to the spacey and hypnotic ('Mary Lewis,' 'Endless Mother') to the dancefloor-ready boogie-and-funk-injected ('Sciarando El Scuro,' 'Venezia Violenta'), and far too subtle in its 'horror,' to be as one-trick as the title could have doomed it to be. The best moment is 'No Static,' cosmic and danceable, steadily arcing into what we can only describe as disco at it's most sublime. This is not the work of a bandwagon-jumping disco fan, nor is it 'nu-disco'; 'Horror Disco' is Italo at its freshest and truest.

Bottin - No Static (320)


2. YACHT- See Mystery Lights (DFA)
There were a lot of highly-acclaimed artful pop albums this year, and we pretty much liked them all (ya know. Various animals etcetera). But there was only one that totally melted our hearts, that stood the test of warm weather and cold weather and road trips and parties and sitting alone, and that was 'See Mystery Lights,' the light but never shallow, exuberant, sincere experimental-electronic-pop album from Portland duo YACHT. Jonah Bechtolt's playful creativity often got the best of him in his work with The Blow and with YACHT's previous album (2007's 'I Believe In You, Your Magic Is Real,' before Claire Evans joined), at times a bit too precocious and don't-ya-think-I'm-unique? But Bechtolt has figured out the perfect ratio of weirdness to coolness to earnestness by now, thanks in part to now being under the DFA roof. The DFA influence is apparent in tracks like 'Summer Song,' the album's most danceable track, with its chanted/shouted lyrics and strutting disco-punk baseline. But the album isn't carried by its DFA-ness; rather, the Murphy touch only adds to the loops and layers of bright simple sounds (skittering, minimal beats, off-kilter speak-singing) crafted with equal parts cheekiness and reverence. We've yet to meet anyone uncharmed by 'Psychic City' and its slow build from a simple chant over a quirky water-droplet beat (pretty sure that's sampled from 'Trapped In The Closet,' btw) to a totally anthemic affirmation of all that is right and good and weird in the world. But for us, even that doesn't top the album's randomly guitar-driven two-part song 'It's Boring/You Can Live Anywhere You Want,' the adventurous, frantic, hypnotic rumblings of which resonate in the pit of our stomach. What we love most about YACHT is their effervescent energy, the fact that everything they do (not just their music but their album art, their blog, their clothing, their live performance) comes off as both endlessly thoughtful and totally natural, injected with their unique ideology in which things are full of mystery and wonder and meaning under their shiny pop surfaces.

YACHT - Psychic City (320)
YACHT - It's Boring/You Can Live Anywhere You Want (320)


1. Mondkopf- Galaxy of Nowhere (Asphalt Duchess)
We're fairly emotionally hinged, but there's a list of about ten tracks/albums that for some intangible reason unfailingly send us into tears. This summer we randomly came across 'Galaxy of Nowhere' by previously-unknown-to-us Mondkopf (23-year-old Parisian Paul Régimbeau) and popped it on at our desk at work; half an hour later, fuck if there weren't tears flowing freely onto our totally forgotten spreadsheets. Mondkopf is best described as a melding of Aphex Twin, Vitalic, Modeselektor and Vangelis (seriously– we wouldn't toss those names around flippantly), and 'Galaxy of Nowhere' is a dark, monumental electronic journey with serious emotional heft, suited less for the dancefloor than for night driving on a mission. These aren't the 'ambient' tunes you put on when you study, because there's no chance in hell you can separate yourself from what you're hearing. It's the closest thing I've ever heard to ambient bangers (not in the lame Aoki sense of the word, but in that... it fucking bangs). Maybe it's because Régimbeau is new to dance music production and grew up creating Dilla-inspired hip-hop beats that reflect in the fat, crunchy claps giving backbone to waves of cosmic synths. One thing's for sure– he's dug out his own little world within the dance music sphere, glistening, echoing, intense, lonely. There's a religious somberness running through the album, subtly throughout, overtly in the swelling hymnal choruses of 'La Dame En Bleu' and 'Speaking With The Noise' and head-smashingly in the album-closer 'Ave Maria,' and it's a shock-and-awe, brooding-then-exploding religiousness rather than anything comforting or familiar, surrounding us, keeping us constantly on edge, apprehensive, in a reverent stupor. There are tracks that stand above the rest, but we don't feel it's relevant to discuss them– this is a rare occurrence of a modern album, an album with the total synergy albums were created to have, not for separating and ranking but a true sum so much greater than its parts.

Mondkopf - La Dame En Bleu (320)
Mondkopf - Valse Dans L'Ombre (320)
Mondkopf - Planetes (320)


Check back in later this week for our favorite tracks and remixes of 2009!