The Best Albums of 2009
10. Ian Brown – My Way
9. Miike Snow – Miike Snow
8. White Lies – To Lose My Life
7. Raekwon – Only Built 4 Cuban Linx… Pt. II
6. Alicia Keys – The Element of Freedom
5. Editors – In This Light and on This Evening
4. Florence and The Machine – Lungs
3. Kid Cudi – Man on the Moon: The End of Day
2. Clipse – Till the casket drops
1. Jay-Z – Blueprint 3
I was fairly disappointed to see that my choices for the best ten albums this year were all quite mainstream acts, as it doesn’t really reflect what I have been listening to this year. Stylistically, choices such as both the Editors and White Lies albums do bare some similarities to the electronic based 80’s music that I have been listening to of late. Yet there is nothing in the list that really sounds much like dubstep, which has become the staple genre in my music tastes recently, mainly due to the recent emergence of numerous blogs which cater solely for it.
Although the list is a top ten, it must be said that all of the albums apart from Jay-Z’s Blueprint 3 are on an equal par with one another, and that even Jay-Z’s 11th studio album was not a particularly stellar offering.
Alicia Keys once again displayed her talents as one of the best songwriters in the world. Similarly, Ian Brown showcased an ability which places him amongst a select few talented modern artists, who despite having achieved fame and fortune still write songs which people from a similar working class background can relate to, perhaps something Jay-Z no longer possesses.
The Miike Snow album was a masterful blend of Andrew Wyatt’s understated vocals with electronically tinged pop production from Scandinavian super producers Bloodshy & Avant. Whilst the morbid overtones in Florence and the Machine’s debut album Lungs, made it an unassuming yet not unsurprising hit in the album charts.
Both borrowing strongly from Ian Curtis’ short lived legacy, Editors In This Light And On This Evening and White Lies To Lose My Life restored my faith in Indie music, after offerings from the genre in the last few years proved that quantity is most definitely not better than quality.
The four rap albums in my top ten display the diversity of a genre in which, of late, artists appear to suffer from chronic inconsistency, pardon the pun.
Raekwon’s Only Built 4 Cuban Linx… Pt. II was a triumphant return for the Wu-Tang rapper and also featured some of Ghostface Killah’s best verses to date. Man on the Moon: The End of Day, the debut album from Kid Cudi was a breath of fresh air; playing out like a sci-fi opera for the Hip-Hop generation.
The third album from brothers Clipse, Til the Casket Drops, was a fitting end to the decade with Rap’s hottest duo and arguably the decade’s most consistently entertaining producers The Neptunes once again producing quality rap music.
But ultimately it was the Blueprint 3 which I went back to time and time again, and not just for one song. It is by no means revolutionary, although the wordplay is often brilliant, Jay-Z is far to content to talk about money; the trappings of it, how he makes it and how he spends it. But it’s a fortunate thing to be able to find an album where you can happily listen to every track and for that reason it is my number one album of 2009.
