Tris McCall

Best Singer

Catherine Ireton.

Best Vocal Harmonies

Catherine Ireton. She’s a one-woman girl group on “Musician, Please Take Heed”, and she’s right there to spot the other GHTG acrobats when it’s their turn on the beam.

Best Rapper

Joell Ortiz. His verses on the Slaughterhouse album split the difference between Supreme Clientele-era Ghostface and Sir Mix-A-Lot. In other words, they go straight to my sweet spot.

Best Bassist

Jamie T.

Best Guitarist

Max Bemis.

Best Drummer

That kid from Passion Pit is crazy good, or his beat replacement software is. But I’m going to go with Tyler Minsberg of the Dangerous Summer. by a hair over Paramore’s Zach Farro. I gotta love these art-punk kids who make every part ten times more complicated than it needs to be. I mean that. Needless complication rocks.

Best Drum Fills

They’re all on the outro of “Lost At Sea”, the saddest song the Friedbergers have ever written. And they’ve written some sad ones.

Best Pianist/Organist

Yoni Wolf. But wait, I’ve got more to say about drummers. How about that immensely-entertaining fella from The Blackout? Everything he does is straight-up cliche, and he makes a damned good case for cliche.

Best Drum Programming

And while we’re on the subject of cliche, let’s give this one to Adam Young. Nothing he does on Ocean Eyes hasn’t been done a thousand times before, but it’s all so effective that it’s impossible to mind. Strip away the fey vocals and the lyrics about getting hugs from lightning bugs, and you’re left with a track that Prince Be might have rhymed on in 1992. You cannot say the same for any of those Postal Service hits.

Best Synth Playing

Kendrick Strauch of the Harlem Shakes. They’ll be missed.

Best Use Of A Non-Traditional Instrument

I’m partial to the electric didgeridoo on the Loney, Dear album, but it might just be a sample. The electronic tamboura that imparts the ghostly texture to the Clientele’s “Harvest Time”? — that was actually played by a human. With an electronic tamboura. Not too many folks have one.

Best Backing Vocals

Why?, “This Blackest Purse”. The funniest backing vocals were Matt Friedberger’s ultra-deadpan “what I would do”s on “Drive To Dallas”. I laugh every time, and it’s not otherwise a humorous song.

Best Instrumental Solo

More Matt Friedberger: pick a solo from I’m Going Away. They’re all great. You might be partial to those tentative telegraph signals on “Even In The Rain”, or the berzerk tickertape stutter of “Charmaine Champagne”, or the slack-string chaos on “Ray Bouvier”.

Best Instrumentalist

If she really did do all the bass and guitar on New Worlds (I don’t have liner notes, but I’m guessing she’s responsible for everything but the drums), the answer has to be Charlotte Hatherley.

Best Songwriting

Stuart Murdoch. Have we given him his lifetime achievement award yet? Where does Murdoch fit, I wonder, in the greatest-of-all-time discussions that we like to have around the hot stove? You can call him the songwriter of the decade, and I won’t fight; call him the songwriter of the past two decades, and I’ll put together a meek counter-argument with the words “Liz Phair” in there somewhere. But I don’t think he’s passed Ray Davies yet. He definitely hasn’t passed Townshend yet. Standards were higher in the Sixties and Seventies. Sorry, they just were.

Best Production

Lukas Burton claims to have co-written an album that even I won’t defend: James Blunt’s bazillion-selling debut. He’s got a lot to make up for. Luckily for Alison Sudol of A Fine Frenzy, she’s the current instrument of his penance. There are one or two Lilith Fair-style missteps on Bomb In A Birdcage, but for the most part, it’s the most arresting-sounding singer-songwriter album I’ve heard since… well, since Brooke Fraser’s set last year. But if you obey Satan and pretend Fraser doesn’t exist, you’d have to go back to Mitchell Froom’s mid-Nineties creative demolition of Suzanne Vega’s operating paradigm. My favorite production on a single song was done by the underrated Shondrae “Bangladesh” Crawford on Gucci Mane’s “Lemonade”. Pulling out the backbeat on the chorus was an outrageous choice.

Best Arrangements

Elizabeth & The Catapult. Also heavily indebted to the Vega-Froom albums. Folks were ambivalent about 99.9F and Nine Objects Of Desire when they were released, but they suggest a way forward for singer-songwriters tired of making wannabe iPod commercials.

Best Musical Moment Of 2009

On “Down And Dusky Blonde”, the last song on God Help The Girl, the operatic narrative conceit disappears completely: the story is ostensibly Eve’s, but just about every singer on the record gets a crack at a verse. They’re all pretty good, or at least game; some of the God Help The Girl singers do sound a little too thrilled to be there to do justice to Stuart Murdoch’s typically-ambivalent lyrics. After four different vocalists have taken their turn on the microphone (including two who he probably really did turn up on the Internet), Catherine Ireton ends amateur hour abruptly, clearing the bases with a grand slam. “It’s a drag that you’re getting old” is her first line, and of course she’s singing to Murdoch himself, and about the May-December love affair that they didn’t have to have because she’s on his record instead. For months, I wondered what Ireton’s performance reminded me of, and then it hit me. It’s exactly like Q-Tip’s entrance in the middle of “Scenario” — but exactly. The rest of the emcees on the posse cut are having a good time, engaging in friendly competition, trying to outdo each other. Then the voice for the ages comes in and makes them all sound like the secondary characters they are. It’s a Leader Quest mission, and she’s got the goods here.

Best Lyrics

The Roadside Graves, “My Son’s Home”. John Gleason is turning into Stephen Crane, right before our eyes. He’s got better tunes, too.

Best Lyrics Over A Full Album

Darren Russell Hayman, Pram Town. Nobody stateside picked up on the French, Hayman’s first post-Hefner band, which is a shame: Local Information, their first album, was a stupendously funny (and sad, of course; Hayman specializes in sad) examination of the London suburbs. He’s back to the satellite towns, and this time, he’s digging even deeper. If you don’t find urban design moving, you’ll probably be taken aback by Pram Town at first, but if you can’t get into “High Rise Towers In Medium Sized Towns”, you aren’t from New Jersey. Or any place like it.

Band Of The Year

Paramore by an eyelash over Metric. I go for the traditional stuff. Also, before we go any further, I’d like to say that Metric’s decision to leave “Waves” off of Fantasies was the most inexplicable thing anybody did in 2009, and quite possibly the most inexplicable thing any big league band has ever done. With “Waves”, that’s a five-star album, and at least number four on the year-end list. Fantastic melody, great performance, excellent lyric; sure, Emily, throw it in the crapper. Sometimes I think they’re taking too many cues from Elvis Costello.

Best Live Show I Saw In 2009

Roadside Graves @ Pianos.

Best Music Video

Mos Def, “Casa Bey”. The Ecstatic took awhile. Some of the world music experiments are brilliant, especially “The Embassy”; others struck me as gimmicky. For the first time, Mos Def seemed (intermittently) self-conscious. After I saw the “Casa Bey” clip, all was forgiven. It did everything a video is supposed to do: reinforce the star’s charisma and underscore what’s essential about his work (the rapping, dummy). Also, for the first time in decades, he flashes us a smile.

Sexiest Person In Pop Music

Valerie “Lights” Poxleitner. To paraphrase David Cone after he got a glimpse of Darryl Strawberry’s member, I’d like to look like that for a couple of days. I’d like to see how my life would change.

2009 Album You Listened To The Most

Fantasies.

2009 Album That Wore Out The Quickest

Wale, Attention Deficit. In retrospect, the warning signs were on the mixtapes. His faux-sympathetic songs about girls in the club are taxing on second listen and impossible on the third. I move we go back to the days when rappers pretended that women didn’t exist. We’ll make an exception for Kanye West, just so we don’t forget what the prohibition is there for.

Most Romantic Song

Say Anything, “Crush’d”. Never mind the cheesy pick-up lines — when was the last time you heard a boy this excited about a girl on record? Honorable mention: The Clientele’s “Never Anyone But You”.

Funniest Song

“Hardcore Gentlemen” is apparently funnier to Von Pea than it is to anybody else on earth, but give him this: the public access radio sketch on Brooklynati really is hilarious. That’s not a song, though. My vote goes to “Perfection As A Hipster” from God Help The Girl. Neil Hannon plays it deadpan — absurdly so — and Catherine Ireton’s backing vocals are seriously LOL.

Most Frightening Song

On Hospice, Peter Silberman of The Antlers falls for a dying girl while working in the cancer ward, watches her kick the bucket, and then gets chased around by her ghost. Some of it is chain-pulling, some of it is emotionally manipulative, and, considering the subject matter, it all sounds much more like “Streets Of Philadelphia” than it ought to. But when it works, boy, does it work. In the epilogue, he’s buried alive in the morgue, and the screaming face of his dead lover is pressed up against his. He sounds scared shitless. Listen to it in the dark and you will be, too.

Most Moving Song

“High Rise Towers In Medium Sized Towns”. Since community can’t be planned, planned communities are a tragedy in concrete.

Sexiest Song

“Electric Twist”, by A Fine Frenzy. A crazy-horny performance by a wordy young woman — an intellectual’s pinup — who is teased by her bad, bad boyfriend and told not to think or talk. By the end of the song, she wants it so bad that she can’t do either. She can only “uh uh uh uh” in a fetching sort of way. She may as well be pointing to her genitals and screaming. I reiterate: this is a wordy young woman and an intellectual’s pinup.

Meanest Song

Morrissey, “It’s Not Your Birthday Anymore”. Even if you haven’t heard it, can’t you just imagine?

Most Inspiring Song

In “Do Better”, Max Bemis disses Scientologists, Will & Grace, Harvard, and athiesm in the first eight lines. He really knows how to get my Irish up. But I can’t imagine you have the same afflictions that I do, or Max does, so the answer is “Face Up”, by Lights. That is some first-rate self-actualization pop. Which leads us to my favorite category (now in its third year):

Song That Most Makes Me Wish I Was A Christian

Lights, “Lions”. Brooke Fraser she is not, but I am sure Hillsong would appreciate this ferocious chorus: “Lions make you brave/ giants give you faith/ death is a charade/ you don’t have to feel safe to feel unafraid.” Charles Martel notwithstanding, Christianity didn’t become a world-famous belief system by accident.

Most Inspiring Moment

Hayley Williams gets the feeling that if she sings it loud enough, you will sing it back to her. Then she sings it, loud enough. Did I sing it back to her? What do you think?

Rookie Of The Year

Drake. No, I don’t care that he was on DeGrassi. I don’t watch that junk, and I am pleased as hell that he’s not watching it anymore, either.

Best Cover

Bryce Avary’s solo YouTube version of “Maps”. He turns it into the Johnny Cougar heartland number it always begged to be. YYY fans, line up to smack me.

Most Unwelcome Cover

The lazy-ass iconoclast who did that wretched cut-time version of “All You Need Is Love” for the Blackberry ad.

Best Guest Appearance

Shara Worden as the Queen on Hazards Of Love. Holy crap, she sounds remarkably not unlike Grace Slick! If she’d ever sang like that on her My Brightest Diamond records, I wouldn’t have sold them back to Princeton Record Exchange. How did this happen, I wonder? Colin Meloy says to her “I think you ought to sing this one like Grace Slick”, and she says “okay!”? And then she leaves the studio and goes right back to the operatic hooey? How many hundreds of thousands of pop starlets have tried to sound like Grace Slick on “Mexico” or some other far-out Airplane number, and flopped? Don’t waste the gift, Worden.

Most Convincing Historical Recreation

More Lights. This time, it’s “Second Go”, which is ‘87 like the Debbie Gibson who never grew up and starred in Broadway schlock. Poxleitner wins extra points for playing a keytar with zero irony. Warms my dayglo heart. Don’t give me Jesus & Mary Chain, folks, give me Jesus and Taylor Dayne.

Crummy Album You Listened To A Lot Anyway

Fever Ray.

Thing You Don’t Know, But You Know You Should

Love Vs. Money by The-Dream. Also, MUSE sounds right up my alley, as long as it is, as advertised, more Queen than Radiohead.

Album That Felt Most Like An Obligation To Get Through And Enjoy

Working On A Dream. God forgive me.

Album That Sounded Like It Was The Most Fun To Make

Passion Pit, Manners. Proof positive that college rock doesn’t have to be joyless.

Album That Sounded Like It Was A Chore To Make

Honestly, Abnormally Attracted To Sin. Tori Amos’s bona fides as a concept-master can never be questioned; here, the concept seems to be her bizarre S&M fantasies. “To get off, he screams ’slutty goth’/ but I’m a brightly colored person!”, she complains on “Police Me”. Hoo boy. Part of her appeal is that she’s always been about a centimeter away from losing it altogether; these days, she’s posing for pictures with an iguana while wearing a leather bustier. I will always love her to death, and she is entitled to a mulligan and as many orgasms as Kevin Barnes has, at least. But I’m damned glad I’m not her manager.

Man, I Wish I Knew What This Song Was About

“Outlaw Pete”. Also, is “Queen Of The Supermarket” a joke?

Most Overrated

Lil Wayne. He’s a caricature now, totally displaced; he doesn’t even bother to talk about New Orleans anymore. He could be from the moon for all the average American pop listener knows. Sure, he’s a good rapper. So what? There are plenty of those. The task for Weezy now is coming up with something worth saying. Freddie Gibbs packs more meaning into an average couplet than Wayne has in his last two albums.

Song Or Album That Should Have Been Shorter

Every single track on the Diane Birch debut wears out its welcome, especially the interminable “Rewind”. The jam just goes on and on, even after the drummer falls down drunk on his snare (okay, maybe it just sounds that way.) She needs an editor, and a real producer.

Song Or Album That Should Have Been Longer

Farmer Dave Scher, Flash Forward To The Good Times. Also, after nine tracks of lyrical wheel-spinning, the Golden Bloom album concludes with a minute-long hidden track about Rod Blagojevic. It’s over far too soon, but it still makes the rest of the album seem indirect and limpid by comparison. Sing about stuff, people! It won’t make you cool or get you positive notice in Showpaper, but it will make your songs memorable.

Album That Turned Out To Be A Hell Of A Lot Better Than You Initially Thought It Was

Eskimo Snow.

Worst Song Of The Year

Lil Wayne & Chris Brown, “I Can Transform Ya”. “I can transform you/ like a transformer/ I can turn you from a human into a Carter.” See, he admitted it!, he has no interest in being a person anymore. I guess if there’s a place for Disco Duck on the pop charts, we can still make room for Weezy, but there was a time when I believed he was after something a little more significant than that. No longer.

Worst Video Of The Year

Pink, “Please Don’t Leave Me”. The pop star in an evil nurse uniform, torturing her boyfriend with a golf club. She really knows how to press all of the gauche buttons at once. This is a shame, because it’s a good song, and I don’t necessarily want to turn the channel when it comes on. The backing vocals reminded me of Trembling Blue Stars (no joking). Later, George Pasles told me “Please Don’t Leave Me” sounded like “Room Enough”, a song by George Pasles. So there you have it from two cupcake-pop makers: Pink is on some straight-up Sarah Records shit. Appearing at Cake Shop this Wednesday: Pink, with Hospitality and Metric Mile.

Worst Singing

Fuck it, I’ll say it: I like him a lot, but I’ve got to admit that Peter Silberman strangles the hell out of his own excellent writing from time to time. Antony Hegarty can get away with singing like that because he’s basically an art buffoon. Silberman wants to be a real reporter, but real reporters don’t ululate.

Worst Rapping

I was thrilled to hear Leighton Meester spit, because I didn’t want to have to vote for Ke$ha in this category. But the real answer is Bruce Hornsby’s ten-year-old kid on “Space Is The Place”. I know music is the family business, but that bordered on child abuse.

Worst Lyrics

Phoenix. At some point “we’re French” ceases to be an excuse.

Worst Lyrics By A Good Lyricist Who Should Have Known Better

Tracyanne Campbell, “French Navy”. It is intelligence-insulting and borderline racist for the author of “Teenager” to write a Motown fake containing the following refrain: “you make me go oooooh/ with the things that you do”. Also, “you with your dietary restriction/ you said you loved me with a lotta conviction” is the lamest couplet to come out of Glasgow since Stuart Murdoch rhymed “poet” with “you don’t even know it” in “Funny Little Frog”.

Worst Song On A Good Album

“In The City”, by Rahim Samad. Travel Properly represents Tampa well, but this one is a misstep. Detuning the sample during the verse in order to change key: a big, sick-sounding no-no. Not to mention that it speeds up and slows down the beat. Who knows?, maybe he thought it was avant garde.

Most Thoroughly Botched Production Job

All the college rock that came from the hipster centers in 2009. We’re going to look back on the past two years and wonder what the hell we were thinking. Now, you might live in some wholesome place like Franklin, Tennessee, or the Biosphere, so let me share with you what you’re missing. The fashion in Williamsburg and (especially) Bushwick is to get a crappy guitar, like a Danelectro or a weatherbeaten imitation Strat, put it on the shrillest pickup possible, and run it through a tube amp with the treble cranked to eleven. Then, just in case there’s somebody in the listening audience who can still make out the words, the vocals are smothered in reverb and distortion. This is then home-mastered by some kid with a laptop and thirty seconds of recording experience: he believes that pegging the VU meters into the red is intrinsically awesome. Oh, you’re looking for a scapegoat? You want me to name names? How about Vivian Girls?

Best Sounding Album Of 2009

Holly Williams, Here With Me.

Most Appropriately-Named Album or Artist

The Leftovers, Eager To Please. They sure are.

Most Inappropriately-Named Album or Artist

Forever The Sickest Kids.

Song That Would Drive You Craziest On Infinite Repeat

Architecture In Helsinki, “That Beep”.

Song That Got Stuck In Your Head The Most This Year

“Carry On Wayward Son”. I heard it in the grocery store in April, and didn’t stop singing it until October.

Thing You Feel Cheapest About Liking

Barack Obama.

Hoary Old Bastard Who Should Spare Us All And Retire

Sufjan Stevens, apparently. Everything you need to know about college rock in the ’00s: Stevens went from “I’m going to do an album about each of the fifty states!” to “there is no point in writing any more songs” in five years. It would be funny if it wasn’t sad, and sad if it wasn’t funny. Okay, I admit it’s a little funnier than it is sad.

Young Upstart Who Should Be Sent Down To The Minors For More Seasoning

It’s still Natasha Khan, and after the shapeless mess that was her last album, I think she’d better get some at-bats in the Arizona Fall League, too. Here’s a statement about contemporary college rock that’s sadder than it is funny: the obscenely-talented Charlotte Hatherley, who could not get her album released stateside, spent much of the the year touring as a sidewoman in Bat For Lashes. That’s like hiring Mario Batali to be a line cook at the Olive Garden.

Artist Most In Need Of Some Fresh Ideas

Rich Burlew. Maybe seven hundred stick figure comics is enough.

Most Unsexy Person In Pop

Jay-Z.

Best Line Or Rhyme

Slaughterhouse is nonstop vulgar witticisms, and of course I loved them all. But my favorite line on the album wasn’t clever or poetic, and doesn’t even scan very well. Joell Ortiz: “There’s no reason a musician should wanna watch a television/ instead of be listening to the radio”. Words to live by.

2009 Album You Feel You’ll Probably Re-evaluate in 2010

Eskimo Snow might be a bit low at #12.

Place The Next Pop Music Boom Will Come From

Moneterrey, Mexico, if Todd Patrick has anything to say about it.

Will Still Be Making Good Records In 2019

Max Bemis. He’s over the suicide thing, and the drug overdose thing, and about to settle in for a long run as a loudmouth social observer/big brother.

Will Be A One Hit Wonder (Tinted Windows Doesn’t Count)

Ida Maria, but you’ll be hearing “I Like You So Much Better When You’re Naked” for the rest of your life once it’s placed on the soundtrack to some screwy romantic comedy.

Forbidden Concepts For 2010

No rapper is allowed to write another song about hip-hop that rehashes Common’s dead-in-the-water “Used To Love Her” metaphor! No rapper is allowed to write a “love” song to his gun! 50 Cent, are you listening? You’re better than this, man.

Biggest Musical Trend Of 2010

Bands rediscovering — and then rehashing — Pavement and Guided By Voices.

Best Album Of 2010

Of Men And Angels.