Best of 2009

Album: Cracked Latin: The World Is Cracked Latin. Holland’s Mother (EP) was my favorite release of the year – and Ike Reilly’s Junkie Faithful my favorite in my eternal play of catch-up – but Cracked Latin’s debut LP, The World Is Cracked Latin, was the most surprising and pleasing album of the year.

It is the LP I ask others about, the myriad of styles and influences the band displays – and the fun being had – certain (I’m so sure!) to impress any sort of listener. ‘Caracas Shakedown’ is the catchiest thing I’ll never dance to, ‘Wicked She’s Wicked’ is lovely and creepy, ‘Your Miami’ ends the LP continuing the work’s endless come-ons: ‘Your Miami /Is my Miami / Let’s have some fun / In our Miami.’ Everything is shaking in a Latin-have-to-dance percussive attitude, but influenced by so much rock n roll (et al) that it’s the one I’m talking about when I need something to say, and the one I’m listening to when I need something else.

Live Show
Harvey Danger @ The Bell House, August 8th
Harvey Danger put itself to rest in 2009, their swan song a 6-date tour from Boston to New York to Los Angeles and, finally, hometown Seattle. On August 8th they played Brooklyn’s Bell House, and were introduced by John Hodgman, played until 2 in the morning (including ‘Private Helicopter,’ ‘Carlotta Valdez,’ ‘Flagpole Sitta’; including ‘Sometimes You Have To Work On Christmas (Sometimes)’) and even took questions. They took questions and answered some of them. (Q: What’s your favorite novel? A: Lolita. Next. Q: Where have all the merrymakers gone? A: Impossible to answer!) The band that attracted misfits who fit in enough to be miserable, Harvey Danger played with a curtain calling and made wonderful rock music. For those not sick but not well, for those who would use the phrase ’soupcon of melancholy’ in their website’s farewell announcement, for those who ‘Come in out of the weather / For Christmas alone together.’ Desperate to laugh at themselves, but too smart to be content with where they are, Harvey Danger said goodbye in top form, laughing at, with and for those publishing zines and raging against machines in our dumb junket of time. It doesn’t hurt, it feels fine….

Wildcard
Meat Puppets: Sewn Together
‘Here I am again / Like a monster hanging from a tree.’ Meat Puppets’ bandleader, Curt Kurtwood, is aware of the group’s somewhat bedazzling persistence. 2009’s Sewn Together is the sound of the veteran band sometimes going darkly and heavily back to 1995’s No Joke!, one of the band’s best in post ‘Backwater’ world. Sewn Together is less a wonderful album – predecessor Rise To Your Knees was more consistent with itself – and rather a letter from the perpetual road of songwriting Kirkwood has been recording for decades. There’s whistling (‘Monkey and the Snake’), there’s anger (‘You’re not me no matter what you see / The things I say and do should be of no concern to you’), there’s desert insect lead guitars (‘Go To Your Head’). ‘It’s all sewn together this time.’ A gift from one of the best, most obscure one-hit bands in the generation.

Song
‘Cry’ by Slaid Cleaves from Everything You Love Will Be Taken Away
Slaid Cleaves has been making records in Texas and traveling around the Lone Star State, and environs, since the early 90s. His third LP this decade, Everything You Love Will Be Taken Away, begins with one of Cleaves’ best and most simply sophisticated songs in his prolific catalogue, ‘Cry.’ ‘Cry for your mama / Cry for your dad / Cry for everything you know they never had / The love they never had.’ The song is big hopes of new love, the dissolve of the relationship, and the consequences and reflections that echo afterwards all the way through to the lonely ‘Come December when the lights go out / You know you can’t count on anyone.’ Cleaves’ acoustic guitar / bass / drumkit approach is here brushed and swelled in piano and electric guitar reverberating over the persistent enterprise and Cleaves’ distinct, earnest, doomed but resilient vocal. ‘Every bond is a bond to sorrow / Every blue sky grey / Everything you love will be taken away.’ It’s heartbreaking, and the most attractively melodic thing on the well-written LP. If the song reads as a life-lesson to a child, it’s a desperate but wonderfully frank one. This is how he writes such catching songs.