Again In No Particular Order...

I have to admit I like end of year best of lists - Top 10's of the year etc. I always read the end of years lists in magazines - and then of course I moan about the ones I don't agree with and think 'really, how, why, what are you thinking putting that in there?'
I don't mean all lists - I can live with and find interesting a 10 best list, but I get annoyed by those '100 Greatest Ever.........(Whatever It Is)' run downs that are just an excuse for 5 hours of cheap TV on a Saturday night.
But anyway, after reading the best albums of the year lists in the various music magazines over Christmas I started thinking which albums I'd loved that were released over the last year, and so made my provisional list of favourite albums of 2009.
So, and in no particular order (cop-out/noncommittal), 10 of the albums from 2009 that I liked;

The Dead Weather - Horehound (I think I love just about anything Jack White's involved in)
Florence & The Machine - Lungs
Wild Beasts - Two Dancers
The XX - XX (One of the best debuts)
Yeah Yeah Yeahs - It's Blitz!
Arctic Monkeys - Humbug
White Lies - To Lose My Life
Manic Street Preachers - Journal For Plague Lovers
Bat For Lashes - Two Suns
REM - Live At The Olympia, Dublin (Yeah, I know its a live album, but I went over to see them play at the Olympia and it reminds me of how great it was to see them play this really intimate theatre.)

This was hard, there were a lot of great new bands appearing this year, and more to come next year, so its a mix of established and new artists.
Actually once I finished writing down these ten others started to come to me that I'd loved this year, so Fever Ray 'Fever Ray' and Animal Collective 'Merriweather Post Pavillion' could easily have been in the ten, and I'm sure once I hit 'Publish' others will come to mind......

Mx