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2009 featured a good mix of offerings from nearly every genre imaginable. But I was most impressed by the work done by harder rock and metal bands over a lot of the standard auto-tuned hip-hop and over-shined pop. Some of the indie lovefest for certain bands (*cough*Animal Collective*cough*) seemed to be based on the strength [...]

Animal Collective has been getting slightly more consistent with each release, from Sung Tongs through Strawberry Jam. Even Panda Bear’s solo joint Person Pitch was pretty listenable given AnCo’s droning love-it-or-hate-it sound. So Merriweather Post Pavilion will no doubt continue their upward trend in popularity with the indie set. Combining a Beach Boys sensibility for [...]

Another year, another list of the tunes I obsessed over. Some of these are likely to be popular picks all over the internet, but I also want to mention a bunch of albums that haven’t gotten the props they deserve. My favorite albums of 2008:

30. Cool Kids, The Bake Sale
Sparse electronic samples drip and drop [...]

Apparently Bloc Party are big Radiohead fans, in more ways than one. They’ve adopted the online-album download paradigm that so famously sold huge for last year’s In Rainbows, along with the same piracy-dodging last-minute album announcement. But business aside, they’ve also paralelled their art rocker cousins’ penchant for dabbling with programmed rhythms and sampling. Not [...]

Only halfway through the Aught Eight, there are a handful of standout discs I would recommend. There are others in the running, but the following have earned the most play time and mindshare at the halfway point.

British Sea Power, Do You Like Rock Music?
The bravado in the critic-baiting title is equaled only by the rafter-shaking [...]