The Best Songs of 2009

Click on the turntable on the left to listen to a continuous stream of music featured on Pretty Much Amazing - updated every day. For more, you can check out the Best Songs of 2011, or our Best Albums of 2011.

Artwork by the talented and generous Adam Sarpalius.

25. Girls – Hellhole Ratrace

Girls front-man Christopher Owen isn’t asking for your sympathy on the deeply nostalgic “Hellhole Ratrace”, but instead asking for your good times. If “Lust For Life” was Girls’ summer-fun anthem, these seven minutes of unadulterated genius is their heartbreak moment. A moment that does not drag on with song’s repetitive nature, but instead grows more powerful with each renewal, until you finally hear “Hellhole Ratrace” for what it really is.

24. White Rabbits – Percussion Gun

Percussion Gun is a masterful coming together of many disparate parts, one at a time until we wind up with a breathtaking finished product – a perfect, precise mix of several things that just fit, just barely, just tenuously enough to communicate that hurried energy of possible total disaster. And that energy is evenly matched with that of Steve Patterson’s lyrics: “Even rats would jump this ship.” Masterfully, effortlessly, even though that ship may be sinking, White Rabbits manage to keep it afloat until the very end. -Genevieve Oliver

23. Matt & Kim – Daylight

Cabaret-style piano and “we cut the legs off of our pants, threw our shoes into the ocean” is how Brooklyn’s happiest indie-duo open their catchiest and most reflective song yet. With Matt’s celestial synth and bass line and Kim’s stuttering drums, wrapped up in one of the biggest hooks of 2009, “Daylight” can brighten up the gloomiest of days and make Bacardi mojitos even more appetizing.

22. Dragonette – Fixin’ To Thrill

An unapologetically brash opener, “Fixin To Thrill” offered up one of 2009’s best beat drops, a mere 20 seconds in. From there on, we were ready for the floor, Martina Sobrara’s oddball lyrics complementing the crashing drum beats: “And the boys they offer diamonds/But they’re giving them quartz”

This was a pivotal song, built around a dutty synth line and call to arms: “Get on the floor, don’t make a fuss, just do it!” Who gives a f**k about strategic track listing? “Fixin To Thrill” was all about cojones, and this band certainly has them. -Will Hines

21. Phoenix – 1901

There is something very classic about Phoenix, something that must have existed before it existed. Upon the guitar entrance about fifty seconds in, when Thomas Mars distills a sentence like “I’ll be anything you ask and more” into a series of sweet and mindless “hey”s – there is a weird, joyous pop perfection in that, transcendent of any era. “Past and present, eighteen-fifty-five-nineteen-oh-one.” – Genevieve Oliver

20. Yeasayer – Ambling Alp

“Ambling Alp” is the type of bright, weird pop gem that you yearn for, without knowing it. But the satisfaction that comes after the first few listens is undeniable. Yes, Animal Collective reference have been thrown around, but aside from the obvious Animal Collective loop-over-loop-over-loop stylings, there is a lot going on here. The squishy electropop bass line and funk horns will save “Ambling Alp” from being pigeonholed, and with some justice, being written off as the Poor Man’s “My Girls”.

19. The Golden Filter – Solid Gold

In 2008, with a single mp3, The Golden Filter captured the attention of thousands of listeners from both sides of the Atlantic. In 2009, “Solid Gold” was released making the Golden Filter’s presence official. With this singular, but brilliant single, the mysterious Golden Filter played big gigs at this year’s SXSW, toured with the Presets,  and filled sizable dance halls in the US and UK. The last artist to see so much success with sporadic single releases, without an album to support them, he was called LCD Soundsystem, and we all know how that worked out.

18. Harlem Shakes – Sunlight

Unique-voiced frontmen might be de rigueur in the world of indie pop music today, but there is still something special and endearing about Lexy Benaim, always singing “so close to true” around some kind of lump in his throat. Regardless of the bright titular joy of Sunlight and the band’s uplifting keyboard-driven pop, the melancholy in this song exists: “I did what I thought I was supposed to do” implies a kind of failure. Masterfully, despite this, there’s a blind ecstasy to Sunlight that’s absolutely unmatched. -Genevieve Oliver

17. The xx – Crystalised

No matter how good “Crystalised” is, I don’t think anyone expected The xx to accomplish what they have with their debut xx (according to Last.fm, nearly 100,000 users listen to them regularly).  But that’s not to say they don’t owe most of their success to the polarizing “Crystalised”, our introduction to The xx’s brand of melancholy pop, the perfect marriage of lulling, yet lively guitars and soul-penetrating percussion work. The juxtaposition of the light, airy guitars and the heavy percussive tones make “Crystalised” indispensable.

16. Florence + The Machine – You’ve Got The Love

‘You’ve Got The Love’ began life as a one-hit-wonder soul-disco track for The Source, feat. Candi Staton, in 1991 – but in the hands of Florence Welch and her Machine, it becomes a soaring paean; an unwavering declaration of faith and resolve. The song makes a grand enough statement (“When food is gone, you are my daily meal/When friends are gone, I know my savior’s love is real”) to merit, as well as suit, the magnitude of Welch’s voice, and she comes into her own. “As a kid, going to clubs and raves, this song made me feel love,” Welch said of the original Source track. Now, her reinvention of the hit acts as a grander, more contemporary expression of strength for those times it seems that life is just too much. -Elle Hunt

15. Grizzly Bear – Two Weeks

“Two Weeks”, is impossible to dislike – the piano notes dance sweetly while Droste’s honeyed voice does the real work, giving the track legs that stick it firmly in your mind for the duration of Veckatimest. It’s the kind of song that you listen to once and immediately make up your mind about, tell your friends about, write home about. I bet hundreds of hipster kids will have their first kiss to this song. -Chris Barth

14. Phoenix – Lisztomania

The lyrics on “Lisztomania” are almost as hard to work out as they are to interpret, but the song’s instant appeal can be spotted from a mile away. Drawing the song’s title from a term used to describe the massive public response to German composer, Liszt’s virtuosic piano performances, Phoenix write a compelling song about coming to terms with mainstream success, a success that Phoenix must have foreseen. As I write this, Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix is sitting in iTunes’ Top 40 and Phoenix are sitting on their first GRAMMY nomination.

13. The Antlers – Bear

Nothing was sadder or more beautiful in 2009 than the Antlers’ Hospice, and of those ten songs there was nothing sadder or more beautiful than Bear. The centerpiece of an album about the tenuous connection between a decaying life and a decaying romance, Bear sums up the whole thing. It begins gently and ends powerfully, guitar and vocals gaining reverb and depth and volume and losing the toy keyboard but retaining that same punch in the face of a lyric: “We’re too old. We’re not old at all.” -Genevieve Oliver

12. Animal Collective – Brother Sport

“Brother Sport” actually starts off with one of Animal Collective’s most accessible, catchy refrains to date. “Open up your, open up your, open up your throat,” sing Avey Tare and Panda Bear, bouncing off each other as quickly as the springy noises in “Lion In A Coma.” It’s all on top of a simple guitar hook and the usual AC “whoops” and “whaps.” Then comes the kicker: you’ve got to open up your throat “MATT!” The song explodes. “Support your BROTHER sports BROTHER” ping-pong Tare and Bear back and forth as “Brother Sport” evolves into layers of sound building and building until your mind is about to explode.

And finally, to end this brilliant, epic track, AC close out with some more afro-beats, sing-along lyrics, and a sense of pure, simple, unadulterated joy that is so perfectly conveyed throughout Merriweather Post Pavilion. -Adam Offitzer

11. Music Go Music – Warm In The Shadows

“What kind of heart would break so easy as my own?” sings Gala Bell with disco in her heart and dance in her voice. So is Music Go Music’s calling card single, “Warm In The Shadows”, complete with a discotheque bass-line, ABBA guitars loops, and even a sterling, face-melting guitar solo. This 9-minute journey in epic disco funk is centralized around Gala Bell’s oracular voice, the most important instrument in Music Go Music’s arsenal. Bell’s lucid tones are harmonized against each other, dubbed into endless reverberations, and wrapping themselves around our lonely hearts.

by Luis Tovar on December 21, 2009 ‡ 296 reactions