The time has come to start our official countdown, from 50 to 1, of the definitive best albums of 2009 – according to our industrious, illustrious bank of writers. Click here for how we got to this list – it’s very important that you understand the workings of our musoisms, mathematicalisms and y’know, stuff.

And now, let’s go! Excuse the dissent slipping through…

50) HEALTH – Get Color: This album is the sound of strobes, of a crashing, thrashing apocalypse. I deem it ‘andrgynisco’, a sound that entirely succeeds in its aim to destroy.

49) The Flaming Lips – Embryonic: Wayne Coyne resumes the role of paranoid professor, and his minions follow. A return to form.

48) YACHT – See Mystery Lights: Frenetic, catchy and triangle-obsessed, this lithe and sinewy album stood out from the crowd. Don’t let it slip you by – and it comes from the same ballpark as The Blow.

47) Sonic Youth – The Eternal: Slower-burning than much of their ’00s output, the stop-start stuttering of this album made it a real grower. Special kudos to ‘Sacred Trickster’, the album’s highlight.

46) Atlas Sound – Logos: Featuring Laetitia Sadler and Panda Bear, this album is its own world. Bradford Cox creates human-sounding ambience, wrestling with himself via aid from some damn unusual production.

45) Placebo – Battle for the Sun: Apparently a lot of our writers have nostalgia? I won’t try and explain this. Will I? No, for as I am not their mother, I am not responsible. Read the ruddy disclaimer, yo, and don’t quote this on your billboards, Molko.

44) Slow Club – Yeah So: Back to form, writers! An impressively no-nonsense debut from the duo, full of unique traipses and tales jaunty, anecdotal into the future. Still sounds fresh post-summer, too.

43) Eels – Hombre Lobo: 12 Songs of Desire: Primal, howling. You know the sort. Can you tell that this one’s addition is a bit of an, ahem, surprise? Oh writerlets… I don’t understand. This just meanders. But thankfully I totally stand by the remaining 42 albums. PHEW.

42) The Cribs – Ignore The Ignorant: Johnny Marr passed his induction phase, and The Cribs went colossal on the guitars. More righteous and definitively angrier, it saw them go mainstream.

41) Noah And The Whale – First Days of Spring: Beautiful tears were shed by our writers on this second, heartbroken album from the not-so-stiff upper-lip folk-popsters.


Stay tuned for tomorrow’s countdown from 40 to 31, if you can hold your baited breath for long enough… there’ll be more for me to gush about and none for me to get mouse-trapped by. Thank you, karma.

Who's the winner going to be? Stay tuned to find out!

Is it hypocritical to write an end-of-year list comprising ranked opinions gathered and analysed from a large pool of writers if you’re a website sat so staunchly against ratings-out-of-whatever? Or is it more a case of prized reflections, paeans to our favourite albums – the chance to step back from just how much music is at our disposal and do a critical evaluation, if you will, of what we’ve been listening to this year?

Perhaps arbitrarily, it seems fairer to rank them now as they’re being approached at the same time. Perhaps, even more arbitarily, it seems less so; the albums after all are being ranked separately by people with different experiences of them, different amounts of time with them, different personalities. But that we’ve come up with a top 50 receiving multiply high-placed rankings from our pool of writers means that our point of intersection has finally hit the spot.

See, I can’t just look back at the albums that got 9s – there are no 9s, there are no scores! But this is a great thing, as lists require this distance. And so to re-start by asking the writers to send me their top 20s…

Now how did we get to the stage of holding in our precious hands The List? Was it via a magical formula, albums pulled out of a massive hat, did they come from above? Let me hand you over to our very own Excel Guru, a mysterious character who lurks behind spreadsheets in a mysterious way:

“We asked all of our writers for their top 20 albums of 2009. Their number one got 20 points. Using the formula (Max*(1+(NB/Max)))/(Pos+(NB/Max)) where NB is number of ballots (38), Pos is the place from 1-20 in the list and Max is the largest possible list-size (20), the points were assigned. The more points you got, the higher up the final list you finished.

Essentially it’s a more refined version of 1st =20 points, 2nd =19…. 20th =1, which is too clunky because the difference between 19 and 20 is as heavily weighted as the top two.”

There’s more? Why, yes…

“With all the formula in place the points distribution worked as -

1       20.00
2       14.87
3       11.84
4       9.83
5       8.41
6       7.34
7       6.52
8       5.86
9       5.32
10      4.87
11      4.50
12      4.17
13      3.89
14      3.65
15      3.43
16      3.24
17      3.07
18      2.91
19      2.78
20      2.65

- with a few more numbers after the dp in each case of course. 1st place got 20 points and the number of points awarded to 2,3… 20 was in ratio to the descending position and the number of ballots cast.”

We’re Musos alright! And here’s a fact: some 277 albums received nominations! We’re a knowledgeable bunch.

50-41 revealed…