Berated

2009 concludes with a look at this year's top 50 albums.

by Mike Mineo ——————————————————————————————————————————————- 10. Super Furry Animals – Dark Days/Light Years Try and think of a band that has released 10 albums over the past 13 years, all of them attaining acclaim and stylistic diversity in a uniquely identifiable manner. Maybe if Super Furry Animals existed a few decades ago a few contemporaries could have shared this [...]

The top ten will be unveiled tomorrow, but these albums are just as worthwhile.

Part three of five finds an even mixture of debuts and veteran releases that made a mark in 2009.

Part two of our five-day feature broadens the coverage of this year's finest albums.

And so it begins. The top albums of 2009 are hand-picked and collected for your listening pleasure. Part one of a five-day feature.

As Brian Lightbody and Tom Asselin could tell you, the differences between rural and urban America are plentiful. Lightbody lives in media-centric Brooklyn and works as a creative director, while Asselin resides in northeastern Pennsylvania working as a tree farmer. The sights and sounds of their respective locales differ dramatically by day, but their night [...]

Repetition and pretentiousness are sometimes aligned in music, especially when something not even worth hearing once is repeated continuously. Listeners do not want artists forcing anything on them, especially when it is a frustratingly linear loop. The increasing abundance of quality artists like Animal Collective and Air France suggests that the genre is attaining more [...]

Merely a few months after I started this site, I deemed an album by Beach House to be “the most atmospherically beautiful debut of the year.” Although slightly rough around the edges, their debut showed a band on the brink of something special. This was back in 2006, and seeing the Baltimore-based duo grow into [...]

Canada holds notability for its bilingualism and multiculturalism in addition to their thriving music scene, which itself certainly benefits from this rich diversity. Malajube, Karkwa, and Les Cowboys Fringants are a few the best Canada-based Francophone acts out there today, all diversifying their lingual differences through exceedingly different styles. Malajube infuse an infectious form of [...]