Before I get in to it, I just want to give a couple disclaimers. First of all, I don’t claim for this list to be a “best of” list. It’s my favorites of the year. Of course I do think that some of my picks are objectively the best music from the year, but I realize it’s difficult to separate my subjective tastes, let alone the fact that I have not and could not possibly listen to all the music released this year. The second disclaimer is that I wanted to put more thought in to this. I started giving some albums a second chance that maybe I originally only gave a cursory listen to originally. But time kept passing, and it’s already 2010, and there’s no point living in the past. I want to move forward and get this list out of the way. I’m just already so excited about some of the music being released in 2010, it just makes trying to figure out what I liked about 2009 kinda lame. So, having said that, I could probably have made a list I’d be more happy with in terms of ranking and such, and I wanted to include my favorite song from each album and have it streamable via Grooveshark. But that is all too much work considering I’m not getting paid for this. So here it is, my top 25 albums of 2009.
- Grizzly Bear – Veckatimest
- St. Vincent – Actor
- Volcano Choir – Unmap
- Mew - No More Stories / Are Told Today / I’m Sorry / They Washed Away // No More Stories / The World Is Grey / I’m Tired / Let’s Wash Away
- Passion Pit - Manners
- Jónsi & Alex – Riceboy Sleeps
- Dirty Projectors – Bitte Orca
- Phoenix – Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix
- David Bazan – Curse Your Branches
- Ramona Falls – Intuit
- Animal Collective – Merriweather Post Pavilion
- Asobi Seksu – Hush
- Atlas Sound – Logos
- Paper Route – Absence
- Do Make Say Think – The Other Truths
- Wilco – Wilco (The Album)
- The Antlers – Hospice
- Andrew Bird – Noble Beast
- Neon Indian – Psychic Chasms
- Black Moth Super Rainbow – Eating Us
- Sufjan Stevens – The BQE
- Tiny Vipers – Life on Earth
- Harlem Shakes – Technicolor Health
- Camera Obscura – My Maudlin Career
- Kings of Convenience – Declaration of Dependence
