Strangeglue Writer's Best Of 2009: 40-31

The Empire Strikes Back is the bench-mark for the second part of any series, mostly because it recognised that as long as you have a happy ending to the series you can end the middle bits on as depressing a note as you can muster.

Positions forty to thirty-one aren't exactly saturated in cheer, yet such is what makes them great: the recognition that the world is not full of happily-ever-afters and riding off into the sunset. Sometimes it ends in the vein of The Mist. The Antlers are in store for such an allusion. Any album purporting to chronicle love in the spite of a slow and painful death yet still maintaining a sense of purpose and wonder deserves all the accolades coming its way.

While we doubt that all the names listed below will ring bells in your ears, we heartily recommend them to tide you over the winter months. Why? Because it's around this part of the chart where you find the visionaries, people with grand ideas and stylish execution who may not quite have found as clear as path as some would like. Undoubtedly though, there is genius in these there hills.

40 BLK JKS - After Robots

Whether you class it as 'experimental-rock', 'world-music' or just simply 'alternative' is down to you but what can't be debated is just how good BLK JKS' début full-length really is.

There's more directions and routes to take than a road-map, more profound lyrical content than a twelfth-century poem and more ambition and drive than Richard Branson himself. Quite simply a miniature masterpiece.

39 Patrick Watson - Wooden Arms

Hailing from Montreal and really more of a collective than just a singular musician, Patrick Watson are near-indescribable as an entirety.

Their 2009 long-player Wooden Arms was a dreamscape, ready for any music-lover with an imagination to disappear within and never re-emerge.

Even now, eight month after it's release, we're still encapsulated within his world, soaring around with the fairies and staring in awe at the beauty that surrounds. You should join us...

38 Phoenix - Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix

Phoenix's resurrection this year has been almost biblical in its scale but the fact that most of us had written them off as alternative-rock has-beens seemed to make the band raise their game.

Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix is by far the coolest sounding record the band has ever produced, it healthily pilfers from Foals-esque math-rock which blends nicely with the band's suave vocal style.

Best of all there's not a weak track on the album - from Listzomania through to closer Armistice, Amadeus is the come-back record the Strokes can only dream of making.

37 Exile - Radio

You wouldn't have heard anything like Exile's Radio and to be honest, we doubt you ever will again.

Pieced together entirely from a years worth of radio-station excerpts and somehow transformed into an alt-hip-hop-electro masterpiece, the LP is unmatched in its creative originality and hasn't left our side since its early 2009 release.

36 Metric - Fantasies

It could have been one of those albums that never happened, it is after all nearly four years since they burst into mainstream view with 'Live It Out'.

Fantasies effortlessly recreates the tuneful art-rock of its predecessor and with an added twist of songwriting maturity this could well be considered a better record.

Throughout the entire ten tracks, and especially as the album explodes out of existence with closer 'Stadium Love' this was a rare chance to experience a band with the ability to create a rock 'n' roll sound laced with the kind of intelligence the genre desperately needs.

35 The Antlers - Hospice

Another album borne of isolation. On this occasion, however, no cabin in the woods (do these guys not watch horror movies) was required as this was a case of social isolation.

Family, please exit the building, friends, adiós and wax your ass so it can polish the door as you leave. The juice was definitely worth the squeeze though as Hospice was met with universal acclaim.

Charting the course of a relationship between a man and a woman dying of bone cancer it's an album finding the humanity in pain, grief, suffering, death and sorrow. The post-rock and indie styling embellish these themes with quivering accuracy.

34 Jack Rose & The Black Twig Pickers - S/T

The passion and vigour that imbues this record (which saw Jack Rose re-unite with old Pelt flame Mike Gangloff and his banjo-fiddlin’ Black Twig Pickers) is almost tangible enough to soften the blow that came with the passing of Mr Rose a few weeks ago.

He was living when he died, we can say that much. His solo records sung a spell from the spaces in-between the shimmering thud of those string pickings, but the magic of this record is found in the blood-brother pact that these four make with the old-world, a world that they still hear singing in the Virginia soil and the Philadelphia back alleys.

The old-time became the no-time through musicians who know that reference and reverence don’t keep tradition ticking; only living the music does.

33 Bill Callahan - Sometimes I Wish We Were an Eagle

For many Callahan fans (including this one) this record has been a slow and steady mind-blower; a collection of beautiful songs that radiates endurance, a lifetime companion for some here at SG.

The acoustic picking patterns are no more convoluted than the man’s evermore concise poetry, but the manner in which they are delivered, juxtaposed and unified, betrays all manner of emotion.

Emotions and visions that are deftly augmented by arrangements for cello, violin and piano. It’s strangely warming to know that he agrees; when asked for his “final thoughts” in an interview with Prefixmag.com, Callahan replied “Can I just say that I made a really great album?”

32 Why? - Eskimo Snow

Slower and more delicate than anything they've ever created before, Why?'s Eskimo Snow didn't full settle into it's genius until a good ten or twenty listens in for us here at SG.

We missed the dark-rap underbelly of earlier releases but couldn't help getting lost in the intricacies strewn across their latest attempt. It could still kick your ass if you weren't concentrating hard enough though...

31 Wintersleep - Welcome To The Night Sky

There are many, many adjectives we could use to describe Wintersleep's material - fragile, mournful, beautiful, delicate, tragic, depressing, rousing - but not a single one could possibly even begin to describe their overall atmospherics and audible topography.

For three full albums, the band have never once faltered, growing ever-stronger with each release and apexing with their latest and greatest, the flawless Welcome To The Night Sky. If you haven't managed to grab it yet then we'd leave now, HMV might have a few copies left.