Not Many Experts

Condensing an entire year of music that you’ve listened to is an absolutely impossible task. And yet, it’s so tempting to gaze at the year that hasn’t even gone and attempt to squash it all into one post. At the same time, end of year lists are exceptionally popular, and yet all anyone seems to do is complain about them. “What the hell? I was expecting your top 50 to be exactly the same as mine!”. Which, blatantly, is a ridiculous way to look at things. Personally, I think that end of year lists are more than a romantic glance back at a year, they’re simply the best way to introduce people to music that they might have missed. I guess that it’s also a great way to stimulate debate about albums, and an interesting way to think about the ways that we find music. For example, I had something of an epiphany back in 2007 when everyone’s end of year lists made me realise that I had better start using blogs to find music and the NME only for mopping up spilt coffee.

Most of all, though, we’re all guilty of using end of year lists as a sort of test. How many of my favourite albums are there? All I can ask is that you take into account that I am not saying that these are not the best albums of 2009. They are my favourite albums of 2009, nothing more. I’m sure you’ll disagree, and I’d love to hear your thoughts below. However, at the end of the day, I couldn’t allow myself to be anything less than 100% honest. These lists aren’t the place for posturing or flexing your musical muscles; the only question I asked myself when ordering these incredible albums was which one I liked more. At the end of the day, the whole compiling of end of year lists process is very time consuming and complicated, but it really shouldn’t be anything more complex than a question of which albums you liked the most. And that is all I intended this to be, so please let me hear your thoughts and which albums I missed that would be on your list, but all I can say is that I am absolutely and completely correct, because these are the second 1/2 of my 27 favourite albums of 2009: (read choices #27-#14 here)

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When poet and author Wesley Eisold formed Cold Cave in 2005, it was clear from his background in the hardcore music scene and his intellectualism that his band was not going to turn out to be a sub Libertines mélange of indifference. It should hardly come as a surprise, then, that their debut LP released on Matador on November 3rd, “Love Comes Close”, almost reinvents pop music. Seriously. Against seedy musical backdrops, Eisold tugs his pop hooks into warped anthems of nihilism, and draws them into avenues that they had barely explored previously. “Love Comes Close” is a subtly intricate album that slowly reveals its secrets, but is also peppered with pop hooks that lend an immediacy.

In many ways, “Love Comes Close” comes across as a clinically depressed Animal Collective, with a cold, metallic heart instead of Animal Collective’s psychedelic, worldly centre . This is because, in the same way that “Merriweather Post Pavilion” was, essentially, traditional pop music that had been twisted and filtered until it was barely recognisable, “Love Comes Close” is also an album that you would never initially assume to be pop. However, once you peel away the lyrics, subversive synths and drones, you are left with a skeleton that is very much indebted to simple pop songs. And just in the same way as “Merriweather Post Pavilion”, this album more than deserves recognition in the imminent end of year lists.

Cold Cave – Life Magazine

Cold Cave – Love Comes Close

Cold Cave – The Trees Grew Emotions And Died