Best of 2009 (Psych/Prog/Avant Rock)

1. 

   1. Woods: Songs of Shame

   Words will never quite be enough for Woods. Not to suggest this Brooklyn outfit is The. Greatest. Thing. Ever!, just that when I tell you Songs of Shame is a collection of ramshackle floaty folk-ro...read more

2. 

   2. Fuck Buttons: Tarot Sport

   Andrew Hung and Benjamin John Power of Bristol-based electro duo Fuck Buttons are noisy experimentalists, but they are devoted to rhythm. On this gorgeously assaultive second LP, a typical track wi...read more

3. 

   3. Nisennenmondai: Destination Tokyo

   Nisennenmondai is a Japanese group, as if you couldn’t tell from their name (which means Y2K Bug) and album title. Here at Sound Fix we greatly enjoyed their previous offering, 2008’s compilati...read more

4. 

   4. White Rainbow: New Clouds

   Another hard-to-classify gem from Kranky, the latest from Adam Forkner‘s one-man project, White Rainbow, is pure bliss: sprawling, meditative and hypnotic, full of rich textures and spacey el...read more

5. 

   5. Oneida: Rated O

   Oneida, a band that has spent more than a decade mixing grand statements with grand absurdity, tops itself yet again with Rated O — a triple-disc (in both formats) release that is worthy thro...read more

6. 

   6. A Sunny Day in Glasgow: Ashes Grammar

   Yes, they’ve got the shoegaze guitar sound down perfectly, but what makes this band interesting is the magnitude of their ambition (this is a 22-track opus) and how much more than guitar they occ...read more

7. 

   7. Tortoise: Beacons of Ancestorship

   Association with such a debated term as “post-rock” has made it difficult to hear *Tortoise*’s music for being just music, you know? The modern Chicago legends’ first album ...read more

8. 

   8. Serpentina Satelite: Nothing to Say

   Boy, did this one throw us for a loop back in January, when a coupla kids from Peru walked through our doors and handed us this CD. I’m not sure what’s more surprising: that this thorou...read more

9. 

   9. To Kill a Petty Bourgeoisie: Marlone

   Any time a Kranky promo arrives in the mail, our ears perk up, but even those high expectations were exceeded when we heard the latest from To Kill a Petty Bourgeoisie, a Minneapolis-based duo who ...read more

10. 

    10. Wooden Shjips: Dos

    Wooden Shjips have a bunch of small-press vinyl releases, singles and even cassettes (a recent cassingle benefited SF’s Food Bank—nice one, dudes), but their one previous “proper&...read more

Tags: angular , avant-garde , drone , electronic , folk , indie , krautrock , noise , post-punk , post-rock , prog , psychedelic , rock , shoegaze , stoner , williamsburg