Still Playing in December
December is when you run the audit—which records actually mattered this year and which just felt like they mattered because you heard them first. By that measure, 2009 was a better year than I expected going in.
The Scottish five-piece The View released Which Bitch? in January and almost nobody paid attention, which remains a genuine failure of collective taste. There’s a crackling, restless energy in that record—five guys from Dundee writing like they have something to prove and the chops to prove it—that most bands spend entire careers trying to manufacture. The press ignored it. Their loss, permanently.
Regina Spektor’s Far got the attention it deserved. She plays piano like she’s arguing with it, and her songs are small novellas: neighbors fucking to music without knowing it, women deciding they’re done being good, love going wrong in every possible direction. Russian-born, New York-raised, writing in English like she invented it herself. Put it on during a long train journey and you will not look up until it’s over.
Peter Doherty—bloated, perennially drunk, Kate Moss’s most famous ex—made Grace/Wastelands, which is the record a man makes when he stops pretending his destruction is accidental. Honest about the drugs, the alcohol, the accumulated wreckage, and the strange clarity that sometimes comes from all of it. He remains one of the finest lyricists working in English. You don’t have to like him to accept that.
On the lighter end: Little Boots brought Hands out of England—no grand manifesto, just clean electro-pop that doesn’t outstay its welcome. Even Kanye West praised it publicly, which is either a meaningful endorsement or just Kanye having a generous week. Lily Allen’s It’s Not Me, It’s You ran in parallel: sharper, ruder, funnier. She spent 2009 doing nude shoots for i-D, dramatically announcing her retirement from music, and releasing one earworm after another anyway. The contradiction is basically her whole personality.
La Roux—Elly Jackson and Ben Langmaid—made Bulletproof and In for the Kill genuinely inescapable. Jackson’s whole presence felt like it arrived from a slightly better decade: the angular red hair, the synths, the delivery that was somehow cold and emotionally devastating at the same time. Their debut, La Roux, held together better than most of its contemporaries. Amanda Blank released I Love You and proved that sex-positive rap doesn’t have to be hollow—she performs like her body is the entire argument, and everything she did on that record, especially alongside Lykke Li, was exactly what 2 a.m. is for.
Natasha Khan as Bat for Lashes made Two Suns feel like it arrived from some ancient candlelit parallel world. It demands your full attention and earns it without apology. The Yeah Yeah Yeahs crept into the year’s top ten almost sideways—It’s Blitz! is too perfectly constructed to resist, the kind of album that sounds right in every room at every volume, which is rarer than it should be.
And then Marina and the Diamonds, whose The Crown Jewels EP is technically a small thing—a handful of songs, a debut statement—but it landed with the weight of something much larger. Welsh-Greek, theatrical, genuinely talented, and clearly operating with a vision that hasn’t fully arrived yet. Her first proper album is coming in 2010 and I’ll be first in line for it. If it delivers on what these songs promise, it’ll be the record of next year easily.