Guilty Pleasures

by Brian Howard

Confession: I don't listen to music nearly as much as I did when I wrote about it full time (in another life, I was CP's music editor). Each year, fewer of my favorite records end up on our year-end critics' lists. And I'm learning to deal with it. In our latest issue you'll find the results of our annual City Paper Top 21 records of the year — compiled by senior editor Patrick Rapa — as well as our local artist of the year, Kurt Vile. But I'm going to exercise a little executive privilege and run down the 10 records that mattered most to me in 2009.

10. No surprise that Not Given Lightly, a comp from German electronic label Morr Music, with covers of New Zealand indie rock from the '80s and '90s ("Not Given Lightly" is a song by Chris Knox), didn't crack many other lists. Maybe I'm the single point of overlap on this particular Venn diagram. (Speaking ofkiwi rock and two-disc comps, visit mergerecords.com/stroke to pre-order Stroke: Songs for Chris Knox which benefits his recovery from a June stroke.)

9. Um, still speaking of kiwi rock, The Guilty Office by The Bats is the latest from South Island dour-statesman Robert Scott's four-piece.

8. Speaking of guilt, Get Guilty, from The New Pornographers' A.C. Newman, is chock-full of the gorgeous complexipop that Newman wrote for his criminally overlooked '90s band Zumpano.

7. I've been putting The Mountain Goats on my list for years based on the strength of John Darnielle's storytelling. The Life of the World to Come goes next-level with 12 songs based on a dozen hardscrabble lessons from the Bible.

6. Adam Arcuragi may have skipped town, but his Oppenheimer-cribbing I Am Become Joy is filthy with Philly musicians and, as he told me in an interview earlier this year, "kinda like the Manhattan Project on happiness."

5. Is there a more perfect metaphor for indie rock's ultimate diva/femme fatale than "This Tornado Loves You" from Neko Case's Middle Cyclone ?

4. Bromst, wherein Baltimore über-weirdo Dan Deacon reconfigured his gadget-driven mayhem for a 14-member ensemble, was a master class in dazzling batshitextremism.

3. Speaking again of bats, The Fruit Bats' shimmery, crystalline The Ruminant Band is a slab of gorgeous pop in a year when a little something pretty and perfect was just what we needed.

2. Proving that the Polyphonic Spree was more than just a gang of frocks, former flock member St. Vincent (aka Annie Clark) dropped Actor's spooky/swelling ruminations on the vagaries of the female experience.

(bhoward@citypaper.net)