The 2009 Magazine Albums Of The Year Thread For Posting Lists and Discussion.

Basically what I'm getting at is that there's been a big tilt away from club/gig/otherwise socially-experienced guitar music in favour of bedroom indie.

I just clocked that that NPR poll was actually voted by the listeners - I know next to nothing about NPR aside from the (seeimgly strawmannish) way it gets referred to on here but the extent to which it lines up with what writers from every fucking magazine under the sun have apparently been voting for is... a thing

i'm with the good colonel on this one.

i think that so much of this (actually quite retro) american indie only sounds "forward thinking" because their american 70s references have an exotic appeal you're not entirely familiar with

I preferred it when they were championing dreadful haircut indie bands because at least there was a sizeable audience for that stuff. Animal Collective, Grizzly Bear, Wilco, Dirty Projectors... these records just have no cultural context over here.

there seem to be plenty of people here who like these bands tho and have done for a few years tho - it's not particularly surprising for mags to recognise this (or even disappointing in that they're probably better than wha. in NME's case i don't think its any different to 10 years ago when they were rating Mercury Rev, Flaming Lips and co above all.

by here i mean UK (or at least London)

i don't think its any different to 10 years ago when they were rating Mercury Rev, Flaming Lips and co above all.

Exactly my point, this is the period they're now viewing as the dark days before The Strokes came and revitalised rock and roll or whatever nonsense they're peddling. The difference is that at the time Rev/Lips didn't have any cultural context here either (although the Flaming Lips grew into one) and the Strokes clearly did - people were going out in their droves to dance to them, dress like them, photograph them, etc.

THEY'RE ALL SHIT and should not be on anyone's lists

i'm still totally perplexed as to the "cultural context" or relevance or whatever chord it was that the strokes touched in people

The Strokes = NME brainwashing teenagers

those evil bastards

no, not in that way. but so much of their appeal at the time seemed to be based on "omg nyc is so kool!" - again the appeal of the exotic

Didn't NME used to include at least token r'n'b and reggae and whatever acts in their top 10? Maybe that way back in the early '80s.

I think they did that even as recently as 2001, then it died out completely. In the 80s and early 90s it was widespread rather than tokenistic, before the NME retreated into its tightly defined indie ghetto.

Lex: Have you been out drinking at lunchtime again?

I wonder if any writers there have been discouraged from writing about non-rock, or do the editors there now just don't hire anyone with such interests or seek out such writing from freelancers. Or are there not enough writers interested in those genres to have an impact at year-end time.

the only substances i've ingested today are sudafed and sudafed and lemsip and more fucking sudafed

Basically what I'm getting at is that there's been a big tilt away from club/gig/otherwise socially-experienced guitar music in favour of bedroom indie.

Well I guess that's your cultural signficance. Smoking ban + recession = people more reluctant to go out and spend money on gigs and fashion I guess. I still see the quashing of haircut indie and a swing towards the (admitedly more cerebral) leftfield as 100% a good thing. While right now it's very much a US trend, I'm looking forward to the Brits getting spurred into picking up the slack a bit - the Horrors album is a good example of this. Don't wanna get all "good-old-days" about it, but I'm thinking of the days when Parklife, Holy Bible, His'n'Hers, Dogmanstar, Snivilisation, Protection, SAWII could all come out of Britain, have culturally significant context, be good and relatively original, and be commercially worthwhile.

sorry significance/context interchangeable in that last post

What's SAWII?

Selected Ambient Works II by Aphex Twin.

Aha thanks.

If we're talking about the UK music press at that time, my recollection is there being as much Ned's Atomic Dustbin, Wonderstuff and (later) Cast and Ocean Colour Scene as Orbital, Aphex Twin and Pulp. At least the NME was more catholic in its tastes though.

Smoking ban + recession = people more reluctant to go out and spend money on gigs and fashion I guess.

what? no

I still see the quashing of haircut indie and a swing towards the (admitedly more cerebral) leftfield as 100% a good thing.

both shit. if the choice is between the libertines and animal fucking collective then god help us all

While right now it's very much a US trend, I'm looking forward to the Brits getting spurred into picking up the slack a bit - the Horrors album is a good example of this.

the horrors = the slack slackens further

Don't wanna get all "good-old-days" about it, but I'm thinking of the days when Parklife, Holy Bible, His'n'Hers, Dogmanstar, Snivilisation, Protection, SAWII could all come out of Britain, have culturally significant context, be good and relatively original, and be commercially worthwhile.

the good old days of 4 x indie albums and 2 x indie-friendly electronica being used as evidence of a greater range of stuff covered? lol

if the choice is between the libertines and animal fucking collective then god help us all

luckily it's not, though i pity those for whom it is

I think we're definitely moving towards a more 90s-esque openly pluralistic and overlapping UK music scene (we have been since about 2006 really) and the renaissance in British dance music has helped.

My main gripe is that the music press, especially those aimed at younger people, isn't reflecting that. I don't really care if the NME or whoever focuses almost exclusively on guitars when we're in a boom period for guitar music. It's glaringly obvious from both the charts and these lists that that's no longer the case.

xxposts Yeah, and I think that's where it's going back to. Open up its pages and there's starting to become a much better spread of bands, from haircut indie bores to US PFork stuff, to electro-fashistas and a bit of Dizzee and dubstep thrown in for good measure too. It's an incremental sea-change but a huge leap away from the ConnorMac rigidness of the last decade.

it's the increasing retrenchment of genre that i see as problematic here

what everyone says again and again about as having been "better" about the 90s (don't know if that decade is a function of the 30-something age bias of ilx) was the broader coverage of all genres within very mainstream press. it seems quite ironic to me that it's the very opening up of the media - the huge amount of information available on the internet - that has driven people further and further into genre bifurcation and specification

the fewer organs you have, the more they have to cover in order to reach everyone. but why would you rely on a mainstream organ when you can go to a dozen specialist blogs covering exactly what you want? so the mainstream press (thinking of the nme here) has to make itself into a niche in order to claw any kind of audience at all

i just see this "nme recognising p4k indie" not as a giant move forward, but a switch from one kind of haircut indie to a lack-of-haircut indie

^^^ OTM.

who me? my first otm! i feel so proud

Sorry Matt, I refuse to believe the 00s have been a boom period for British guitar music, speaking qualitatively rather than quantitatively. People bemoan Britpop these days, but I'd take bullshit like Sleeper or Menswear over half the crap NME have been trying to get their readership to jump on over the last few years.

xposts - you guys type too fast!

if the choice is between the libertines and animal fucking collective then god help us all

luckily it's not, though i pity those for whom it is

― lex pretend, Wednesday, 9 December 2009 13:32 (2 minutes ago) Bookmark

Straw man alert! No one's claiming this so far as I can see.

i just see this "nme recognising p4k indie" not as a giant move forward, but a switch from one kind of haircut indie to a lack-of-haircut indie

Maybe so. I guess time will tell - but I'll give you another OTM all the same :-)

i think that so much of this (actually quite retro) american indie only sounds "forward thinking" because their american 70s references have an exotic appeal you're not entirely familiar with

― Karen Tregaskin, Wednesday, 9 December 2009 12:50 (47 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

Just out of interest which bands (new and 70s) do you have in mind here?

i am kinda more annoyed by Phoenix doing so well on so many lists. i like a few of the songs but most over-rated album of the year after F+TM imo (not heard Grizzly Bear).

wow nice seeing AV Club put Fall Out Boy in their list, came out in December '08 and really didn't get its due on year end lists last year or this year

I'd take bullshit like Sleeper or Menswear over half the crap NME have been trying to get their readership to jump on over the last few years

why take either?

narcissism of *no* differences :/

there's nothing wrong with being influenced by something if you expand on it or take it in a new direction. i'm trying to think of a retro band by whom animal collective might have been influenced, and the only one i can think of is the beach boys, and that influence stopped making itself apparent ages ago.

Grizzly Bear/Wilco are just the most common denominations of a huge amount of very current acts from Devendra to Spoon to Iron and Wine to Fleet Foxes who wear their Americanian influences on their sleeves, but to give them credit do each have their own specific sound and often write incredibly good songs without ripping off their influences or each other too much. Compare this to the vast majority of Brit-guit indie bores from the last ten years and their sound is entirely defensible.

I would take the worst landfill indie over Eagles-wannabe Devendra Banhart tbh.

Is time the first one to include the-dream?

first I see

what everyone says again and again about as having been "better" about the 90s (don't know if that decade is a function of the 30-something age bias of ilx) was the broader coverage of all genres within very mainstream press. it seems quite ironic to me that it's the very opening up of the media - the huge amount of information available on the internet - that has driven people further and further into genre bifurcation and specification

My sense is that media sites cover a broader range of stuff in terms of actual reviews but then the end of year polls end up more focused around the site's home turf.

My pet theory for this is that writers within a single media site don't engage with one another as much as they used to because everything is handled online - I have to admit that I've made zero effort to "win over" other pitchfork writers to the stuff i've liked of late because, well, I don't know them personally, and they're not the only online community I'm involved with. I come here to talk about e.g. uk funky.

Whereas maybe if I'd written for the NME in the 90s and I really got into a dance album, the only way I'd be able to engage in discourse about it would have been to turn my fellow NME writers onto it.

i guess since lindstrøm & christabelle's been released (through rough trade only) it'd be 09-eligible. hmm.

i want to clarify that i'm not making any sort of better-in-the-90s argument; i didn't grow up reading the music press, but as far as i can tell it was just as limited and overlooked pretty much the same type of things that it does now.

It's also partly a feeling of resentment at the Pitchforkisation of the UK music press...there's been a big tilt away from club/gig/otherwise socially-experienced guitar music in favour of bedroom indie.

weird, it's almost as if people are now discovering new music via their home computers ;)

wow nice seeing AV Club put Fall Out Boy in their list, came out in December '08 and really didn't get its due on year end lists last year or this year

― some dude,

I wish I could take the giving faint praise approach--hailing one major-label emo rock among the AV Club's list of mostly the same ol' indie, with 3 rap out 25 and no r'n'b, no country, no Southern soul, no African, no Latin, no Caribbean. I'll bet metal and dance folks won't find much in the AV Club list either.

i don't actually think i'm arguing that it was "better" in the 90s (my own personal opinion is that it's just different) - but that i could see why people see 90s music coverage as being better (or at least more diverse)

and listening to it on personal portable devices that soundtrack their individual day rather than listening in any sort of more socialized setting

Yes but people are still going out to listen to that music in clubs and bars with other people, and these clubs and bars are in general not playing the Dirty Projectors.

tim otm. for all the zeitgeist created by e.g. pitchfork, there's less sense "impact" when an album comes out these days. i guess this is what sreynolds was saying in his recent blog post, that while there's a LOT of good music coming out, fans and critics aren't so inclined to jump on it all at once like they used to - it's VERY difficult for an album to rock the world now. Even though MPP has topped a lot of critics' lists, I doubt many people in my office would have even heard of them, which is a very strange phenomenon.

there are still several albums which have felt like "events" this year - the rihanna one in [articular