Your top banana Acre here again, back to drop some fat DRM on that ass! Oh, and also music. Yes, it’s part two of my tediously long list of albums of the decade. This week, we have two modern post-rock classics, a depressing Canadian wunderkind, 2009’s best dance album, and a CD with a track called “Trailer Park Jesus”. Truly, this is the dawning of the age of Aquarius.

#20. Neverending White Lights – Act II: The Blood and the Life Eternal

Daniel Victor, the Canadian multi-instrumental mastermind behind Neverending White Lights, is probably best known for the song “The Grace”, which he collaborated with Alexisonfire guitarist/vocalist Dallas Green on. Collaborations were a huge part of his debut album, Act I (every song but one had a guest vocalist on it.) On Act II, though there are still a good number of collaborations with plenty of Canadian artists, it’s more personal and consistent than Act I by miles. Act I was occasionally overwhelming, what with it being essentially 70 minutes of really sad songs. Act II is just as melancholy (and long), but there’s more variety throughout, and the filler of Act I has been all but exterminated. There’s also more of a sense of hope and excitement in the material, and while there are still plenty of heart-tugging moments to be found, they have been successfully balanced by moments of joy and exultation. It’s a trip through the darkest elements of pop, but the payoff is worth every bit of the journey.

“Dove Coloured Sky”
02 Dove Coloured Sky

“The Living”
03 The Living

#19. Sigur Ros – ( )

Yes, the title of this album is ( ). Oh, and all the tracks are untitled, and all of the vocals on the album are sung in a made-up language. As mad pretentious as that sounds, well… it is pretty pretentious, but the album is strong enough that these choices just help propel forward the album’s mystique. In no uncertain terms, ( ) is the defining album of traditional post rock, so you get a lot of slow buildup to some pretty spectacular crescendos. However, unlike so many modern post rock bands, Sigur Ros feel no need to beat the listener over the head with these crescendos, allowing them a certain decent subtlety that really accentuates the beautiful songwriting on display. The prime example of this would be “Untitled 3”, where the simplest change in the world (a piano line that has been repeating since the beginning of the song simply raises an octave) stirs some of the most chilling emotions imaginable. The band rarely push the volume past 8, so when they finally go to 11, as on “Untitled 8”, it’s even more impressive to behold.

“Untitled 3″
03 Sigur Ros 3

“Untitled 1″
01 Sigur Ros 1

#18. Animal Collective – Merriweather Post Pavillion

Stare at this album art for long enough and you'll go insane...

Merriweather Post Pavillion is the only 2009 release on this list, for a couple reasons. While 2009 has certainly been a great year in music, MPP was the only album to come out this year that had a truly profound impact on me. Basically, this was the album that made me like electronic music. It’s more or less a dance album, without any of the pandering bullshit or inane lyrical content. In it’s place, Animal Collective stuff in bucketloads of creative, catchy-as-hell songwriting, never succumbing to cliched beats or repetitive instrumentation (“Lion in a Coma” prominently features a didgereedoo, and “Brother Sport” is basically an African tribal dance beat running headlong into a Dutch yodeler troupe on acid and making sweet, sweet love.) Furthermore, where AC’s previous efforts were nigh incomprehensible by anyone not well versed in the indie-electro scene, MPP is their most accessible outing to date, propelled by a certain joyful abandon and a sense of giddy enthusiasm that’s infectious, if not uncontrollable. Oh, and “Summertime Clothes” is just about the most romantic song I’ve ever heard, and that’s not an exaggeration.

“Brother Sport”
11 Brother Sport

“Summertime Clothes”
04 Summertime Clothes

#17. Glassjaw – Worship and Tribute

If I were to compile a list of the greatest/most influential vocalists of all time, Daryl Palumbo would certainly be in the Top 5. It’s not for his melodic abilities, or his incredible range (although he certainly has that in spades). No, it’s his delivery, the way he stresses words, the way certain phrases roll off his tongue, that make him so incredible. The influence of vocalists like Mike Patton are obvious in his delivery, and one could say that his voice influenced modern vocalists like Anthony Green and Claudio Sanchez. But of course, the vocals are only a small part of what make Worship and Tribute such a stunning album. Sonically it’s a masterpiece, deceptively simple sounding but built on an incredible base of complex techniques to create music that uses dissonance as an tool of enhancement, not a tool to bludgeon the listener. Though it belongs firmly to the post-hardcore genre, it flirts with post-rock and punk in several areas to create a surprisingly varied package. Add to this the absolute brilliance of the lyrics (“Feeding time, an old friend of mine/At the leper zoo, yeah/Que sera? Erotic hurrah with no rescue/It’s cool, be cool girl”), and you’ve got one of the most stunning hardcore albums ever.

“Cosmopolitan Blood Loss”
03 Cosmopolitan Blood Loss

“Two Tabs of Mescaline”
11 Two Tabs Of Mescaline

#16. Godspeed You! Black Emperor - Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas To Heaven

Godspeed You! Black Emperor, prioe to announcing an indefinite hiatus in 2003, were a nine piece post-rock band from Canada. Lift You Skinny Fists… contains four songs (the shortest of which is eighteen minutes, the longest of which is twenty-three minutes), spread amongst two discs. Lift Your Skinny Fists… is also the greatest post-rock album ever released. Earlier in this post I named Sigur Ros’ ( ) as the greatest traditional post-rock album of all time. Fortunately, Godspeed You! Black Emperor are no traditional post-rock band. Each of the album’s four songs is made up of multiple “movements” each contributing something new to the emotion and direction of the song. Unlike most post-rock albums, however, the emotions expressed here are not just variations on sorrow and exultation. There’s a definite sense of tension that permeates much of this material, such as on the ten-minute “World Police and Friendly Fire” movement of standout track “Static” (all the movement listings can be found in the album’s liner notes, and on the album’s Wikipedia entry). It’s beautiful, tragic, occasionally touching (as when an old man named Murray Ostril describes the wonders of how Coney Island used to be when he was young, and how it is now), often very heavy, and always impacting.

(I’ll only post one song for this album as, after all, it is 22 minutes long.)

“Storm”
01 Storm

Other Stuff

In terms of games and stuff, I finished Assassin’s Creed II over the weekend. I’m planning on reviewing it at some point, so I won’t say too much, but in case you were wondering, it’s totally awesome. It basically fixes all of the problems I had with the first Assassin’s Creed (extremely repetitive, lack of mission variety, pointless overworld with nothing to do, bland main character, shitty pseudo-cliffhanger ending), refines all of the elements that made the first game great, and piles on sooo much additional content on top. Buy it, it’s great.

Oh, and sorry for the bump, Nowned. Awesome pics, btw.