MAX'S TOP 20 SONGS OF 2009

Hey bros! Thanks for checking out my list of 20 songs I liked this year. I hope you like them too. This week, you can check out similar lists from all us Rose Quartzers; next week, we give you our top albums of 2009 - WITH A TWIST. We'll tell you about it next week. Anyway, here are the songs:



1. Bachelorette - Dream Sequence
from My Electric Family

I'd use the word magical to describe the way this masterpiece balloons and unfolds as you listen: tinny beats become drums, synthesiser brass becomes a technicolour Sgt. Peppers horn section. It's fitting that this lush pop imaginarium is called 'Dream Sequence': it treads (actually, waltzes) the line between reality and artifice, incredible flights of fantasy mingling with vivid & eclectic flashes of memory.

[MySpace / buy]

2. Monsters of Folk - Say Please
from Monsters of Folk

So much to love in this song - the swaggering 3/4 time signature, Conor/Jim/Matt trading vocals - but best of all is the motherfucking guitar solo which is both melodic and face-melting in a way I thought only J. Mascis remembered how to do.

[MySpace / buy]

3. Royal Headache - Girls
from Demo cassette

“This absurdly FUCKING good garage pop gem is full of lovestruck madness, but in a way that you can, y’know, respect, because it’s all loose and raw and kinda manly. Girls... is all joyful, lust-fuelled abandon... with its transcendental Guided By Voices supermelody.”

[MySpace]

4. The Pains of Being Pure at Heart - Come Saturday
from The Pains of Being Pure at Heart

In about 10 years when everyone who's cool right now is making overly-sentimental films about their life circa 2009 they're gonna use this song because it's such a golden indie rock gem it's making me nostalgic for this year now.

[MySpace / buy]

5. Washed Out - Feel It All Around
from Life Of Leisure

"...rather than producing big, shiny, plastic beats that sound custom-made to blare out of lousy car speakers, tracks like Feel It All Around have the noise and the dust and the charm turned way up, like Ariel Pink for the dancefloor... all heavenly and shit with twinkly synths and spacewalk harmonies."

[MySpace / buy]

6. No Through Road - Party To Survive
from Winner.

"This is a ridiculously classy jam, like Guided By Voices fucking around with Pavement, and it’s the kind of thang you’d play at a party if you wanted to make sure that it turned out to be UNBELIEVABLY memorable."

[MySpace / buy]

7. Lightning Dust - Antonia Jane
from Infinite Light

The bar's always high for Black Mountain side projects, but this record was even more terrific than I was expecting: narcotic, noir-ish alt.country with a melancholy vibe.

[MySpace / buy]

8. Grizzly Bear - While You Wait for the Others
from Veckatimest

I thought that Veckatimest deserved the hype, but I love While You Wait For The Others because it reminds me the most of Yellow House, which deserved it more but didn't get it.

[MySpace / buy]

9. Yo La Tengo - Periodically Double Or Triple
from Popular Songs

I interviewed Ira Kaplan earlier this year and I was like, "lulz, how did you think of such an amazingly dorky and neurotic and cerebral character for this song?!" and he was like "...". White boy funk is the best and so is the weird Casio breakdown in this song.

[MySpace / buy]

10. Street Chant - Scream Walk
from Scream Walk 7"

Maybe one day New Zealand will teach everyone else how to make three-minute pop songs sound like the freshest, most incredible things ever invented, even better than the chewing gum with the liquid centers.

[MySpace]

11. Animal Collective - Summertime Clothes
from Merriweather Post Pavilion

Man, how about that Animal Collective?

[MySpace / buy]

12. The Daredevil Christopher Wright - Clouds
from In Deference to a Broken Back

"There’s highs and crashing lows, falsetto and handclaps, fucking polyrhythms. Constant surprises: references to the pastoral pop that’s going crazy right now as well as vintage pop and 70s guitar heroism. And really, really good songwriting."

[MySpace / buy]

13. Here We Go Magic - Fangela
from Here We Go Magic

Feels like Here We Go Magic got kinda lost in the hypnagogic pop avalanche despite a) being one of the best things about it and b) touring with Grizzly Bear, which at this stage is pretty much the best thing that could happen to any band. The album's solid but this is an amazing song with basically the best use of that kind of production I've ever heard.

[MySpace / buy]

14. Faux Pas - Silver Line
from Noiseworks

"...rich, lush melodies are kind of a Faux Pas hallmark but Silver Line mirrors the Flaming Lips' recent transition to a more muscular kind of pop glory. It floats and shimmers and throbs, surging forward and dissolving and surging again, all wondrous and cosmic but with a vibe that's ever so slightly unnerving."

[MySpace / buy]

15. Saudade - Hidden Talented
from Lookouts' Journal

"This is some hazed out space-age shit, like getting high through a motherboard in 2200. Pretty fucking creepy, too: the white noise builds and builds and the whole time there’s this melody way up high that’s all noble and righteous yet out of reach, like the human spirit facing the apocalypse or a lone astronaut adrift in a galaxy of evil."

[MySpace / buy]

16. Neon Indian - Terminally Chill
from Psychic Chasms

It's sweet that a Brooklyn band made the perfect record for us here in the Southern hemisphere to have the best summer ever to.

[MySpace / buy]

17. Telekinesis - Coast Of Carolina
from Telekinesis!

At first, Coast Of Carolina sounds like a perfect power-pop anthem but behind the percussive riffs and crunched-out guitars lies a gentle 60s pop gem.

[MySpace / buy]

18. Jeffrey Lewis & The Junkyard - Slogans
from Em Are I

This is like the ultimate combination of exuberant 90s indie rock and Jeffrey Lewis reining in his tendency to be totally verbose.

[MySpace / buy]

19. Ganache - In Pidgin
from A Halter Pardon Him and Hell Gnaw His Bones!

This song is so hilariously wordy and boppy I pretty much listened to nothing else for about a fortnight after I heard it the first time. Feels good to know if anything should ever happen to Stephin Merritt we've got another hilarious dude with a badass baritone to turn to.

[MySpace / buy]

20. Weezer - Can't Stop Partying
from Raditude

I only like this song ironically, but it's such an intense blast of irony it makes my knees weak and I refuse to belive this isn't the way Rivers intended.

[MySpace / buy]