2009: fragments of genre-confounding greatness; a parallel overview

With all the best of the decade lists being flung about at the moment, 2009 is in danger of getting overlooked. You can kind of forgive a few people for wanting to get the ’00s out of the way with to start a fresh in the next decade – in terms of world events it’s been a particularly shocking ten years – but this is a music website (usually) and we must avert our gaze, stick our headphones on and enter the parallel universe that is popular music.

New York cast a long shadow over the independent music world in 2009, just as it had done way back in 2001 – the internet and, more surprisingly, large sections of the mainstream fell for albums by The Pains of Being Pure at Heart, Dirty Projectors, Animal Collective and (Jay-Z’s new favourite) Grizzly Bear. These bands made sonically unique albums that still retain a certain amount of insularity – these are carefully-crafted other worlds on record, and they were a little too careful and too crafted for some.

A lot of bands took the lo-fi path in response – either with guitars (Wavves) or laptops (Memory Tapes). One band stubbornly taking their own path was HEALTH – the LA band occupied that largely deserted space between dance and noise music, producing one of my favourite tracks (and videos) of the year, ‘Die Slow’.

In the UK, we were lucky enough to witness the continued emergence of a few unique bands, contentedly removed from any particular scene – Camera Obscura, Future of the Left, The Twilight Sad, The Wave Pictures, Wild Beasts and The XX all made impressive records this year It’s worth noting that The XX are the only band on their with a debut album – perhaps one of the after effects of illegal downloads and the decline in record sales will be that bands will be under less pressure to have hit albums (money will come from touring now, presumably) and so will be able to develop a recorded body of work at their own pace.

Dubstep, another aspect of 2009’s musical fabric that has grown away from the mainstream, seemed to be bigger than ever this year. Hyperdub’s compilation was a fitting summary of its first five years, and if Skream’s remix of ‘In For The Kill’ and the dubstep-inspired tracks on Rihanna’s (slightly disappointing) new record are anything to go by, more mainstream artists will be plundering the ever-shifting sounds of dubstep into the next decade. New Joker and Burial in 2010 anyone? Yes please.

One overlooked aspect of the musical year was the abundance of albums from artists who resist categorisation – if 2009 has stood for anything in terms of music, it is the continued fragmentation and expansion of listeners’ habits and musical tastes. File sharing has made more music available for less (or no) money, and the new musical landscape means success (in varying amounts admittedly) for records such as the atmospheric, otherworldly Heavy Ghost by DM Stith, the foreboding, domestic Fever Ray, Patrick Wolf’s extravagant, determined The Bachelor, Micachu’s pop experimentation on Jewellery, Bibio’s late flowering with Ambivalence Avenue, PJ Harvey’s continued journey with John Parish on A Woman A Man Walked By, Antony Hegarty growing into The Crying Light, and Bradford Cox’s solo work as Atlas Sound on Logos, which could easily turn out to be a more fruitful artistic outlet for him than Deerhunter.

These are all relatively marginal acts and albums of course. I’ve intentionally ignored the large, X Factor-shaped elephant in the room because the abundance of musical alternatives allows me too. Televisions and radios can be turned off, newspaper headlines ignored. 2009’s musical landscape, superficially at least, looks grim – Simon Cowell’s golden grip may appear to be tightening if you look to the charts, but who does nowadays? He’s not killing music – he’s just making money. Off the beaten track, but within reach, 2009 has produced some strange, unique, joyous, heartbreaking music.

Read more:
2000 | 2001 | 2002 | 2003 | 2004 | 2005 | 2006 | 2007 | 2008