Letters Have No Arms !: Lists and subtitutions.

photographs via Esther K.

My most played albums in 2009, according to Last.fm*:

1. Au Revoir Simone: Still Night, Still Light

2. Metric: Fantasies

3. Slow Club: Yeah So

4. The Thermals: Now We Can See

5. Emmy the Great: First Love

6. Sin Fang Bous: Clangour

7. Passion Pit: Manners

8. Fanfarlo: Reservoir

9. Nurses: Apple's Acre

10. Dead Man's Bones: Dead Man's Bones

11. Mew: No More Stories Are Told Today, I'm Sorry, They're Washed Away

12. Cymbals Eat Guitars: Why There Are Mountains

13. Casiotone for the Painfully Alone: Vs. Children

14. The Woodlands: The Woodlands

15. Animal Collective: Merriweather Post Pavillion

This top of course doesn't necessarily - actually cross that, it definitely DOES NOT coincide with my favourite albums of 2009. First Love, for example (Emmy the Great's debut album) was a bit of a disappointment for me. Sure some of her old songs - previously unreleased but available online of course - were as good as I remembered, but the new ones left me decidedly unimpressed. The fact that the Thermals' Now We Can See is in this top is due almost exclusively to the song of the same name, which I must have played ad infinitum ever since I first heard it. The rest of the album however, apart from one or two songs, is unexceptional. And, while I enjoyed Yeah So, Fantasies, and Clangour, Fanfarlo's Reservoir should have been higher on the list than all of those if the aforementioned list were to reflect my preferences. So basically what I'm saying is that this list is just a lazy substitute. It's a lazy substitute for the Best Albums of 2009 list that we're not going to make. And we're not going to make it because, just like last year, we want to focus on individual songs rather than albums that may or may not have more than one or two good songs on them.

One album I was surprised to see on that list was the Woodlands' self-titled debut. Not because I didn't think it was great but because I hadn't realized I'd listened to it so many times. I'm glad that it did get to be there however, because that means the video we received in our inbox yesterday came just in time: