10 Great 2009 Debut Albums

After making their name via a free online mixtape, London-based trio The Very Best —Malawian vocalist Esau Mwamwaya, Swedish/French producers Radioclit— delivered a killer debut proper. Befitting their backgrounds, Warm Heart of Africa draws influence from all manner of cultures and musics; making no distinction between Eastern or Western, first world or third world. Matching Mwamwaya's sweet Chichewa crooning to bouncy beats and cut-up steel-drums, the album takes place in some magical eternal summer, a veritable ode to joy via dancefloor-bangin' jams. Featuring guest spots from M.I.A. and Vampire Weekend's Ezra Koenig, The Very Best's debut finds them on the frontlines of genre-bending, border-razing, digital-age global-pop.

Fool's Gold are like the music world's digitized global village made manifest. The very model of Generation Broadband's genre-hopping, wholly downloaded way of listening, this Los Angelino social club —whose membership includes Israelis, Argentines, and Brazilians— stirs up a never-before-tasted Afro-Islamic-Hebrew stew in the pop-cultural melting pot. Defenders of ethnomusical purity may stomp their feet in protest, but everyone else can just put on their dancing shoes. Fool’s Gold’s self-titled debut is a dizzying, dazzling blast of pan-cultural big-band jams; the ten-man crew building big, busy, brassy shrines to polyrhythm, huge arrangements in which cascading parts almost seem to topple over each other as the songs march forward.

Befitting their crazy name, this madcap French duo —Èglantine Gouzy on vocals, Frédéric Landini on everything else— sing songs in “baboon English” and go frolicking in the genre-dabbling jungle. On Carpet Madness, Get Back Guinozzi! infuse their post-punk-inspired, indie-pop shambles with tropicalist tones gleaned from reggae, highlife, and surf guitar. Suitably enough, Gouzy sings “I love to surf on the wrong wave,” whilst the music conveys a washed-out, wobbly, seasick feeling in its old-cassette-like audio quality. The sound of the album summons musical nostalgia via such warped tone; turning the lo-fi-as-time-travel trick so familiar to fans of analogue-tape alchemist Ariel Pink.

The XX are a unique musical proposition. Summoning the minimalist spirit of post-punk reductionists Young Marble Giants and dream-pop shape-shifters This Mortal Coil, inspired by the precise production of radio-slaying R&B titans like Timbaland and the Neptunes, and most occasionally reminiscent of the roughed-up electro soul of English oddballs like Tricky and Leila, the young Londoners have found their own individual space in 21st century music. There's nothing iconoclastic or shocking about what they do; in fact, their spartan, barely-there compositions of reverberating guitar, solemn bassnotes, flutters of drum-programming, and soulful vocals are all kinds of lovely. It's just that they're doing something no one else ever has.

Sharon Van Etten just has one of those voices: rich and think and glowing and of such non-professional purity it seems to convey some universal truth. She turns words and slurs syllables, using her throat as an interpretive instrument; taking once-familiar words like “tornado” and “smiling” and “you,” even, and making them sound as if they're being intoned for the first time. Because I Was in Love is, as its title suggests, an album of sad, sad songs; a hushed, heartfelt, heartbroken set in which Van Etten's singing takes center-stage. Like Cat Power —to whom her voice bears more than a passing similarity— Van Etten favors double-tracking; a simple bit of studio layering that turns her every tune into a heartbreaking duet.

All manly evocations of the land, snowcaked heartache, and self-released-LP-becomes-huge-crossover-success back-story, you'd figure the Rural Alberta Advantage —and their suitably bearded leader, Nils Edenloff— would be beating off Bon Iver references with a stick. Yet, Hometowns has rarely copped such a comparison. Largely because there's a far more salient musical one: Neutral Milk Hotel. Edenloff's hoarse-throated wailing is dead ringer for the infamous caterwaul of NMH's indie-rock-Salinger, Jeff Mangum. Edenloff does dodge the Sgt. Pepper's-cum-carnival-sideshow whimsy and nightmare imagery, however; his short, coarse, emotionally ragged tales focusing on emotional states as represented through, fittingly enough, rural environs.

Clues, Alden Penner's post-Unicorns outfit, remind me of the '90s; not by revivalism or nostalgia, but in distance between band and listener. Sounding a little like Blonde Redhead's Amadeo-Pace-fronted moments, Clues play indie-rock all tangled-up. Their songs are typically dense, dark, and distorted; lashings of guitar and crashings of percussion lapping over each other in a thick, initially-impenetrable fog. In some ways the production sounds murky, but it's a studied kind of atmosphere; a form of audio vérité in which the natural bleed of a band in closed confines is played out on an album. Subsequent spins allow the jams on Clues to slowly seep in, rewarding listeners who're blessed with that least-digital-era of qualities: patience.

“Bikini Island” sounds like the name of a post-Porky's, late-'80s T&A teen movie, or a single from Warrant's second LP. It sounds nothing like a figure of lyrical resonance; yet, hearing ultra-loud duo Japandroids —amidst the barrelling, balls-to-the-wall, yelling-'til-they're-red-in-the-face thrills of “Wet Hair”— openly dream of hitching a ride to said imagined fantasia, it summons a potent notion of adolescent nostalgia. Played with a raggedy joy, Japandroids' music speaks of the escapist power of the garage band. As its wilfully-naïve title suggests, Post-Nothing tries to capture the spirit of a band at year zero; embracing a romantic notion of sexless dweebs belting out jams so loud they transcend the confines of their hometown.

Though it's a title bound to evoke sniggers, Watersports is evocative of the music made by Mi Ami. Though built with a rock-trio's standard components —guitar, bass, drums— the Bay Area band play fluid tunes in which splashy playing creates a rippling effect. Inspired by dub production, punk-funk, and African guitar-pop, Mi Ami's music is a whirlpool of chaos kept to its own tidal swells; their freeform parts creating polyrhythms that give off that rippling sense of movement; making for a set as wet as Animal Collective's Predator-inspired Water Curses EP. Nootably, these watery hands belong to dudes formerly of DC's frenetic Black Eyes; this is a more spacious, stretched-out successor to the same ideas they once explored at warp speed.

Dirty Projectors associate Robbie Moncrieff was the brains behind The Advantage, a novelty “Nintendocore” outfit from Sacramento who solely covered music from old-school NES games in a math-rock style. After two LPs of jams like “Super Mario Bros. 2 - Overworld” and “Double Dragon 2 - Mission 5: Forest of Death,” Moncrieff set out to make his own music. Amplifying the stylistic tics of monophonic composition to ridiculous extremes, What's Up? create crazy, chaotic, complex compositions in which thousands of individual notes are splattered in a collision of polyrhythms. It's pure nerd music —fans of Zappa, Hella, and Max Tundra take note— that's scandalously fun; What's Up? everything Battles are supposed to be but aren't.