2009: A Year in Review

Happy slightly belated new year! 2009 was a pretty darn decent year for pop music. Kanye led a charge of autotuned robots to hold the charts hostage, then led a one-man assault on the VMA's attempt to give redundant awards to every pop star, then stormed a few late-night talk shows before going home to watch "Single Ladies" on repeat and sulk. Miley Cyrus embarrassed everyone else in the recording industry by outselling all their albums with the subpar pop (and hip-hop-country fusion) of The Hannah Montana Movie soundtrack, then really rubbed it in by outselling their singles with her supremely catchy and critically tolerated (if not adored) "Party in the USA." Lady Gaga appeared. And the Black Eyed Peas lured Fergie and will.i.am's egos back to make a few more number one hits as a group.

But as a girl who loves lists and statistics, no year in review can be complete without a countdown of the year's greatest albums. My dreams of reviewing every single significant pop album released this year were crushed when I realized there were five days left in 2009 and I probably had at least 30 albums to listen to, half of which I hadn't even heard of yet. Then my dreams of creating a purely objective list of the undisputabel best albusm of the year were crushed when I looked at Rolling Stone's list and realized I had only listened to one and a half of the albums on it. And so, I settled for my top 20 favorite albums. Still 10 better than Rolling Stone's list. Suck on that.

I'm kind of irrationally terrified of being perceived as some wanna-be hipster indie snob, then being mobbed by the masses of people who secretly despise hipsters (oh, you know you want to strangle them with their designer scarves), so here's a bit of a rationale for why the upper reaches of my list are very indie-heavy:

As great as 2009's singles were, most of them came from albums released in late 2008. Lady Gaga, Beyonce, Taylor Swift, Kanye... all fall 2008 releases. The Black-Eyed Peas, Shakira, and Rihanna were three of the only major pop artists to release popular albums and singles in 2009. And so, I'd say 2009 was not a great year for the radio-ready pop album. And heck, pop-punk hasn't had a good year since '04. That means it was up for indie, electropop, and alt dance to pick up the slack, and I am happy to report that they stepped up to the task.

And I'd love to list all the albums I meant to listen to but didn't (Adam Lambert, Shakira, Little Boots, Noisettes, Cascada, Florence + The Machine, Andrew Bird, The Bird and the Bee...) and all the perfectly good albums that I'm not including because I don't consider them to be pop albums (Green Day, U2, Jay-Z...), but that would take days, and I would still probably forget somebody important like the Black Eyed Peas and make their fans at least mildly annoyed.

Also, I should note that I am reviewing albums, not EPs, because if we started lumping together compilations of roughly four to eight songs with compilations of roughly nine or more songs, it would just be chaos and anarchy. Sorry Lady Gaga, Miley Cyrus, NeverShoutNever!, and that other release from Andrew Bird; you won't be on the list.

I'm going to post one review per day for the first 20 days of January, to draw out the suspense. And because writing these reviews can take an effing long time. So without further ado, I will post today's review. And yesterday's I missed. And the one for the day before. Oh gosh, school hasn't even started again, and I'm already behind...

In the meantime, if anyone reading this has their own list of favorite albums and cares enough to post it in the comments section, I'd love to hear some other opinions! [Not that I need ideas... I honestly do have the full list ready; I just like suspense...]