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Top 10 Albums of 2009

来源：网络发布时间：2009-12-15

　　1. American Saturday Night by Brad Paisley
　　Country's most underrated star capped a decade-long run of crisp, self-penned hits with his most complete album yet. The Obama tune ("Welcome to the Future") attracted its share of ink, but Paisley's liberalism, optimism and multiculturalism fall safely within the confines of Nashville's most important ideology: commercialism. (The title track praises our mongrel nation for such revolutionary impulses as Dutch beer, Canadian bacon and Brazilian leather.) The real risk-taking emerges on his songs about women, which, as on the brilliant "The Pants," manage to be funny, sexy and sensitive: "In the top drawer of her dresser there's some panties/ Go try on that purple pair with the lacy frill/ With your big old thighs I bet you can't get in 'em/ With that attitude of yours, hell, I bet you never will."
　　2. Bitte Orca by Dirty Projectors
　　The job of a music critic is essentially to describe music. For the past few years, the job of Dirty Projectors mastermind Dave Longstreth has been to make the critic's job undoable. On Dirty Projectors' fifth album, Longstreth doesn't cede his affections for octave-jumping and abstraction so much as redirect them, allowing his female band members to do the bulk of the singing while he clips some of his stranger musical impulses into less meandering, more memorable phrases. There are real live melodies here, notably on the standouts "Stillness Is the Move" and "Two Doves," which are no less accomplished for being riveting pieces of pop, and the Led Zeppelin–ish "Cannibal Resource," which is no less a pop success for being completely incomprehensible.
　　3. Crack the Skye by Mastodon
　　The band name doesn't inspire confidence. Nor does the warlock-strewn album cover. Nor the fact that Crack the Skye is the last of a four-album cycle about Earth's elements. But before you sneer, "Hello, Cleveland," listen to Mastodon's thunderous, disciplined and expansive brand of metal. There are plenty of bass-drum carpet-bombings, and "The Czar," a four-part ode to Rasputin — O.K., go ahead: "Hello, Cleveland!" — has all the whiplash rhythm shifts of vintage Metallica. But the album also has nods to European folk, free jazz and prog rock, and as produced by Brendan O'Brien (Bruce Springsteen, Pearl Jam), it fronts a brawny sound that doesn't overwhelm the clarity of individual notes. Chuckle at lyrics about "the space-time paradigm" if you must, but the ambition and tenacity of Mastodon's music makes Crack the Skye sonically unforgettable.
　　4. Revolution by Miranda Lambert
　　"I got a mouth like a sailor, and yours is more like a Hallmark card," snarls Lambert on "Only Prettier," one of several songs that cement her role as Nashville's best tough chick. Her vengeful side gets plenty of play on Revolution — there's a dig at country radio as well as a scorched-earth love song co-written with her boyfriend, Blake Shelton — but there are also prolonged episodes of maturity, from the pointed cover of Fred Eaglesmith's "Time to Get a Gun" to "Dead Flowers," a song that proves she can build an emotionally convincing performance atop even the lamest of metaphors. With each album Lambert gets better — and inches closer to becoming country's next great superstar.
　　5. Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix by Phoenix
　　There are those who find this Versailles quartet's choruses a little too catchy, their perfectly honed hooks a shade too perfect. Could these Frenchmen be rocking out ... ironically? Perhaps a little. You can't write a wonderfully sunny song about Franz Liszt as a teen idol ("Lisztomania") or have an appreciation for the comic potential of disco without at least some sense of the absurd. But these 10 economical tracks are hardly without feeling. For proof, just listen to lead singer Thomas Mars on the wonderful "1901," as passion subsumes wit and he's left warbling the purest rock lyrics of all: "I'll be anything you ask and more/ You're going hey hey hey hey hey hey hey."

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