Best of ‘09

Trevor Risk’s Best of ‘09

5. Girls – Album
Kip Berman from The Pains of Being Pure At Heart turned me on to Girls. Their band name and album name are cumbersome, but their music is a broad collection of Attractions-era Elvis Costello tunes, but narrowed down lyrically for the youth of today. Wanting a pizza and a bottle of wine is a perfectly acceptable topic to sing about, don’t you think?

4. Major Lazer – Guns Don’t Kill People… Lazers Do
Major Lazer had the best publicity campaign of 2009. Switch and Diplo collaborated with a virtual plethora of artists to make a full LP of dance music, which isn’t easy to do. Their campaign started with the idea that Major Lazer was actually a guy, some fictional Central American commando thug who had a lazer for an arm, and in his spare time his cartoon image was seen canoodling with Angelina Jolie and Jack Nicholson (helping children and at a Lakers game respectively). Release these photos, remix and re-edit old sounds and songs, press record, and collect your cash. It’s just that easy.

3. Passion Pit – Manners
Music geeks from your high school are getting more ass than you now. That’s the way it works. They went to Berklee College of Music and Emerson College and wrote songs for girls they met there and then they were on Jimmy Fallon and then they made a bunch of money and then they came back to town with girls who looks like Brazilian Kelly Bundys and then you buried your feelings under a pile of PBRs because all you did in high school was chase teenage sixes and get real high behind the hotel where your prom was.

2. The Pains of Being Pure At Heart – S/T
Early My Bloody Valentine records like Ecstacy and Wine were unjustly never really appreciated, and The Pains of Being Pure At Heart are going to make sure that they are. This is the band that many of us in our twenties wished existed in the cassette era. They would have been the perfect wine pairing for a plate of Black Tambourine with a side of Felt. What a beautiful, fully realized record. The best album I’ve heard in three years.

1. The Raveonettes – In and Out of Control
I think this record is probably the best one I’ve heard in about five years, and if I think about it with serious scrutiny, it’s definitely in my top five of all time. I listened to this three times in a row from start to finish when I first heard it, not doing anything but listening. I haven’t done that since I was probably 15. This is their best record, their forever remembered record, and that’s saying something because, in this writer’s opinion, they haven’t ever made a bad song.

Trevor Risk is Ion’s Music Editor. With the rest of his time he writes and produces music, smokes cigarettes, pets cats, watches football, fears whales, DJs, buys scotch, drinks scotch, wears glasses and sneezes.