Miss Piggy Lunchbox

2009 is so four months ago, I know, but heck, if you’re still with me after all we’ve been through in the last year, then I’m assuming you understand.

As I’ve covered here, last year was a tough year for reviews, due to all the necessary breaks from blogging.  Still, there was definitely enough for me to be able to hand out the 2009 Lunchies, the MPL awards for Song, Album, and Artist of the Year.  Of course, these are awards are based on what I reviewed during the year, with no necessary connection to what was actually released during the year.

2009 saw two Best Song Evers, “How Deep Is Your Love” by The Bad Plus and “9 To 5” by Dolly Parton, so we can start there for the Song of the Year Lunchie.  Those songs are so different as to nearly be incomparable.  They’re very dependent on the moment, as if you’re in the mood for a slow, modern jazz disco cover, you’re going to want “How Deep Is Your Love,” but if you want to boogie, it’s “9 To 5″ all the way.  I think the former is deeper with more beneath its surface, but in the end “9 To 5″ walks away with the Lunchie for being so much more powerful.  The Bad Plus gets honorable mention, though: since their album was actually released in 2009 it was without question the best song from 2009 that I heard.

2009 saw no 5-lunchbox CDs (unless you count Queensryche’s Operation:mindcrime, which I’m not since it was somewhat of an unofficial review…if I were counting it, it would easily win this award), so the short list for Album of the Year starts with the six 4.5-lunchbox CDs reviewed.  Shortening that list wasn’t tough, as I pretty quickly had it down to either The Airborne Toxic Event’s self-titled debut or The Cutters’ Sunday! Sunday! Sunday!, with The Bad Plus’s For All I Care barely missing the cut for the finals. My memory couldn’t decide which was better, so I gave each another close listen and felt that the former was stronger all the way around, despite the latter’s higher peaks of quality.  Besides, ATE’s album had no non-keepers, compared to two on that of The Cutters, so that seems pretty clear cut to me.  Therefore, the 2009 Album of the Year Lunchie goes to The Airborne Toxic Event.

Which brings us to the 2009 Lunchie for Artist of the Year, which again comes down to two candidates in a close call.  On the one hand you have The Cutters clocking in with two albums quite different in style at 4.5 and 4 lunchboxes.  On the other hand, there was Elliott Smith, with consistent, both in terms of style and quailty, 4-lunchbox performances across three releases.  I can’t lay out a solid case as to why, but I’m going with the larger, and, as with the Album award, more consistent body of work of Elliott Smith over the meteoric nature of The Cutters.  Elliott Smith is MPL’s 2009 Artist of the Year.

I barely had enough time or energy to make these, much less write about them.  Still, they’re done and in the hands of their recipients, so I’m going to at least get a blog post out of them.

As always, these are mixes that represent an intersection of what I think the recipients would like and what I reviewed here on MPL in 2009.  Whether the music was released in 2009 is irrelevant, and in fact very little of it was.  Eligible contributing CDs run from The Nields’ If You Lived Here You’d Be Home By Now to A Man About A Horse’s Does Not Exist.

These mixes suck. Hard.  Cuz of that lack-of-time-and-energy thing. And because my busy year gave me fewer songs from which to choose.

Volume K
1. Stand Up Comedy – U2
2. Postcards – The Cutters
3. Government Center – Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers
4. Twa Recruiting Sergeants – The Old Triangle
5. Girlfiend In A Coma – The Smiths
6. Sex Euro and Evils Pop – Messer Chups
7. Wouldn’t Mama Be Proud? – Elliott Smith
8. Catch A Collapsing Star – The Mendoza Line
9. I’m Gonna Be (500 Miles) – The Proclaimers
10. Does This Mean You’re Moving On? – The Airborne Toxic Event
11. Seven Years Gone – Quasi
12. Just To Know You’ve Been Dreaming – Will Johnson
13. Such Great Heights – Iron And Wine
14. The Wrestler – Bruce Springsteen
15. Heavier Than 3 Lbs. – A Man About A Horse
16. Carry On – Spacehog
17. Let Me In – R.E.M.
18. St. Teresa – Joan Osborne
19. (Love Is) The Tender Trap – Frank Sinatra
20. How Deep Is Your Love – The Bad Plus

Volume S
1. 9 To 5 – Dolly Parton
2. Li Li – The Cutters
3. Sometime Around Midnight – The Airborne Toxic Event
4. Barracuda – The Bad Plus
5. Our Haunt – Palomar
6. Wolfman’s Brother – Phish
7. Crazy Baby – Joan Osborne
8. Will The Night – Low
9. Aase’s Death – Grieg
10. Belated Promise Ring – Iron And Wine
11. Then I Met You – The Proclaimers
12. How Soon Is Now? – The Smiths
13. L.A. – Elliott Smith
14. Strangers Out Of The Blue – St. Thomas
15. Try For The Sun – The Old Triangle
16. Preface – Vincent & Mr. Green
17. Mainstreaming – Kaada
18. Flor de Leis – Slow Dazzle
19. Hopeless Bird – A Man About A Horse

2009 MPL awards to follow.

Given that all the other lists of this sort come out on December 1, I’m two months late with this.  But we’ve been over the reasons for that.

This is the second annual MPL’s top ten CD list.  2009, however, was relatively light on the CD reviews, due mostly to busy spring and fall quarters, reviewing massive collections like Beethoven’s symphonies and Melvins v. Minneapolis, and spending a lot of my time reviewing Wagner’s Ring.  As a result, I only reviewed six CDs that came out in 2009.

So here they are, MPL’s top ten six albums of 2009:

4.5 lunchboxes:
1) The Bad Plus: For All I Care

4 lunchboxes:
2) Iron And Wine: Around The Well

3.5 lunchboxes (in no particular order):
3) U2: No Line On The Horizon
4) Melvins: Pick Your Battles, Live in Berkeley 1989/Boston 2008

2 lunchboxes: (in no particular order):
5) Bruce Springsteen: Working On A Dream
6) Covered, A Revolution In Sound: Warner Bros. Records

Last year I reviewed 10 2008 albums that received four or more lunchboxes.  In 2009 I only reviewed two that achieved that score.  And 2009 didn’t have a single five lunchbox album, at least not that got reviewed here and, really, did it even happen if it didn’t get reviewed here?  Sucks to be 2009.  But of course that’s been covered elsewhere.  At least Melvins made the top ten list two years running.

And only three weeks late on this one.  The next one…man, I don’t know when I’ll get that one published.

Anyway, every year KEXP asks its listeners to send in their top ten albums for the year and then lists the top 91 vote getters as it counts them down on the air.  Surprisingly, I actually reviewed more than 10 CDs from 2008 so I went over and voted.

It was a completely onerous process as their write-in functionality didn’t work very well and, despite them listing gobs and gobs and gobs of albums, I had to write in seven of my ten votes.  Come on, KEXP, aren’t you supposed to be diverse?  Okay, I’ll forgive you for not including Terramara, Tom Gabel, and the unreleased pre-master demos of Malfunkshun, but no Rick Springfield, Gutter Twins, or Chinese Democracy?  Get off your high horse, you ass munchers.

Anyway, choosing my top ten was easy because when I sorted the 2008 albums I had reviewed I found that exactly ten received (or would have received) four or more lunchboxes, so there was a nice cut-off there.

You can see KEXP’s list here.  I wouldn’t go look at it, though, as Gutter Twins don’t make the list entirely because they weren’t even on the ballot, I’m sure, because while I can see how they’d look down on such listenable enjoyment as Guns N’ Roses or Rick Springfield and would avoid visceral, no-indie-weenies-allowed rock like Melvins, Gutter Twins fits their sweet spot of huge among young people and obscure to adults that they seem to troll in.  How completely retarded.  Furthermore, KEXP’s #1, Fleet Foxes, doesn’t even break my top ten because it got 3.5 lunchboxes.

Anyway, here are my top ten CDs of 2008:

5 lunchboxes:
1) Vampire Weekend: Vampire Weekend (This was on the ballot and slots on KEXP’s list at number two.)

4.5 lunchboxes:
2) Rick Springfield: Venus In Overdrive

4 lunchboxes (or would have received at least 4 if I’d rated them) (in no particular order):
3) Terramara: Dust & Fiction
4) Melvins: Nude With Boots
5) Black Keys: Attack & Release (This was on the ballot and slots on KEXP’s list at number 34.)
6) Malfunkshun: Friendship Ring
7) The Gutter Twins: Saturnalia
8) Guns N’ Roses: Chinese Democracy
9) Tom Gabel: Heart Burns
10) Mudhoney: The Lucky Ones (I think this was on the ballot but didn’t make KEXP’s list.)

January 1 – An on-the-scenes report from the leadup to the Iowa caucuses.  We predict Barack Obama wins the presidency based on a block’s worth of lawn signs.

January 2 – I start off in the B’s of J-mez’ collection.

January 6 – My car breaks down and visiting Germans try to keep me from my tow truck, all to save themselves a block of walking.

January 8 – It took me over four years, but I finally listened to all of My Baby’s CDs.

January 15 – I ask “Sabotage” if I can sodomize it.

January 29 – “Never-snow” is coined.

Feburary 4 – My buddy has a Super Bowl ad for the second year in a row.

February 8 – In an early candidate for post of the year, a kid freaks out in his choir recital.

February 27 – My car gets vandalized.  Was that seriously this year?

March 3 – There’s Jagrmeister at My Baby’s office’s holiday party.  That exec has since been fired.  I think the only thing he did was throw the party.

March 28 – We have never-snow number five of the season.  A mark we reached this year on January 2.

March 31 – We get never-snowed on on Opening Day and I am not happy about it.  It still pisses me off to think about it.

March 31 – Schwag!  I am sent Walk The Line to review.

April 16 – Soon to be forgotten, the Seattle PI writes an article about how it always-snows in Seattle in April.

April 22 – What a horrible spring…it just keeps never-snowing.  So much so that I lost count.

April 24 – Boldly going where nobody else will, my sister-in-law makes me a mix.

May 2 – All my high school wet dreams come to fruition, as I meet one of Malfunkshun’s founding members.

May 5 – I didn’t blog much about it, but no recap of 2008 would be complete without some mention of the miserable experience I had in the class I took in the spring quarter.  I was an asshole (no, I mean a real big asshole) for two months.

May 23 – A rare immediate post, as Clinton suggests somebody might assassinate Obama.  I still haven’t quite got over that one.

June 11- I’ve now lived in Seattle for the rainiest month on record and the coldest June on record.  It was a miserable, miserable spring, and was followed by a nearly completely absent summer.  All expectations for good weather here are completely erased.  365 days a year I expect chilly rain.  I’m never disappointed and only rarely pleasantly surprised.

June 12 – Is it possible I don’t care about baseball?  Continued self-examination reveals the answer is ‘yes, sometimes.’

June 16 – A rhino is born as the world’s rarest attacks a hidden camera.

June 30 – One of the highlights of the year was a trip to my host sister’s wedding in Norway.  The hospitality from all involved was tremendous.

July 28 – I review the greatest weekend of the year: SP20.

August 4 – A Melvins concert.

August 15 – I mourn the death of the American man as Old Spice is disappearing and nobody cares.

August 18 – I have a Thin Mint Blizzard, a culinary experiment topped in 2008 only by the accidental eating of a mint followed by a Twix.  OMG!  THIN MINT TWIX BLIZZARDS!  I call patent pending!

August 21 – My Baby surprises me with a night out on our fourth anniversary.  I don’t deserve her.

August 25 – A zealousness for finishing up the hot dog buns goes too far in what has become an infamous dinner.

August 26 – I’m just going to announce this now: MPL’s album of the year for 2008 (reviewed, not released) was Jump, Little Children’s Magazine from J-mez’ collection.

September 18 – All 2008 recaps have to include the collapse of the economy, and it happened during my otherwise awesome vacation to see baseball in Florida.

October 7 – This year Brewers fans peed their pants.

October 20 – I turn into a one-track wreck as the election approaches.

November 2 – MPL’s first political endorsement: Barack Obama for President.

November 3 – Honestly, it’s hard for me to remember who did what: Tina Fey or Sarah Palin.  That’s how close to Palin Fey was and how ridiculous Palin was.

November 5 – We should endorse more often: Yes We Did.

November 10 – Self-immolation at UW.

November 14 – The next two months are foreshadowed as I completely lose it in a work-related situation.

November 25 – In a year where I struggled to get through a lot of bad CDs, one stands out as the absolute nadir of bad and boring.

December 9 – Chinese Democracy.  Really.

December 10 – I end 2008 in the N’s of J-mez’ collection.

December 17 – It was Year of the Never-snow, goes out with a vengeance.

December 18 – What more could Melvins possibly do?