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Best Of 2009

Mark's Pick

Congo Square, Teena Marie.
The overview of Teena Marie on the www.allmusic.com/ site boldly claims that she is the greatest white artist to ever sing soul music. Hyperbole? Maybe, but it could well be true...Signed to Motown records in the late 70's the 20 year old Teena Marie languished in the studio for a couple of years before funk legend Rick James heard her singing one day. Inspired by her potential he helmed her first album & the two were soon linked linked romantically as well as professionally, and would go on to record several duets together, including the intense 'Fire & Desire', and Teena Marie would become one of the first women in the music biz to produce her own material as well as incorporate rap into her singing. After 4 successful albums with Motown she signed with Epic, releasing 5 albums and scoring a #1 with the song 'Ooh La La' (later sampled by the Fugees for the song 'Fu-Ge-Laa'). After her contract with Epic ended Teena Marie formed her own label & released one more album before retiring in the mid 90's to raise her daughter. She made a comeback in 2004 signing with the New Orleans Hip-Hop label 'Cash Money Records' for a couple of successful albums, before shifting to the newly re-activated Stax Records label for her 2009 album 'Congo Square'. Each song is inspired by the music she grew up with & drew inspiration from, from Billie Holliday, to Marvin Gaye, to Ice Cube, all based around the title track - an imagined place where great musicians go when they die. A fusion of Hip-Hop, soul & her jazz leanings the album features duets with Faith Evans, rapper MC Lyte, & 80's 'old-school' soul singers Howard Hewett & Shirley Murdock; but it's Teena Marie's show all the way, and at 53 she still has melodies and rhymes that singers half her age would kill for.

Vita's Picks

Lungs, Florence & the Machine.
Pretty, soulful, indie-pop songs with a recurrent theme of self-sabotage. Totally adorable.

Electric Dirt, Levon Helm.
Amazing album from start to finish, but in particular for Levon and Amy Helm's completely uplifting version of Nina Simone's 'I Wish I Could Know How It Feels to Be Free'.

Neil's Picks

Aleph at Hallucinatory Mountain, Current 93.
If you are a fan of creepily intense Christian/Pagan/Gothic mysticism, this could be the album of 2009 for you. If you're not, well it still holds many pleasures. David Tibet combines his usual unintelligible acoustic meanderings with some loud guitar riffs and unexpected bursts of noise that perfectly intensify his ecstatic visions.

The sound of wonder.
A collection of classic soundtracks from 1970s Lollywood - the somewhat psychedelic Pakistani movie industry's take on Western pop - from the excellent archives of Finders Keepers Records. These songs are exuberant, wonderful, and often quite bizarre.

Tarot sport, Fuck Buttons.
The Bristol duo's new album combines the experimental noise and intense waves of sound of their 2008 debut "Street horrrsing" with a newly-found hypnotic, cinematic quality, to produce one of the most stunning and inspirational albums of the year.

Shinji's Picks

Manafon, David Sylvian.
'It's the farthest place I've ever been. It's a new frontier for me.....' - David Sylvian's baritone voice opens the album and we see that this once glamorous rock star has moved far from mass pop music to become a lone warrior of the new arts. His interest in free improvisation is the base of this project. Three improvised sessions by the most forward-thinking musicians from all over the world including Christian Fennesz (guitar/laptop), Evan Parker (Sax) and Otomo Yoshihide (guitar/turntable) are truly connected with Sylvian's vocal. Music here is minimal but very intense. All the musicians play every single note with the utmost attention and they sound more like carefully composed contemporary classical music. The centre of the music is Sylvian's voice. It's so impressive and spellbound that you may feel like you are taken to the deep in the forest. It's not music for everyone but truly artistic. David Sylvian has reached a place no one has ever been before.

Radiolarians III, Medeski Martin & Wood.
After leaving Blue Note and setting up their own label, this funky piano/organ trio seem to have revitalised themselves. In 2008, they started the Radiolarian series where they 1) wrote new tunes, 2) toured extensively and 3) recorded the songs, rather than the usual process of 1), 3) then 2). These results are contained here and because the songs were recorded in their evolution, there are a variety of exciting performances. Although jam-feelings and grooves abound they are well organised with most of the tunes around 6 minutes long, so a good level of intensity is kept for the entirety of both albums. Enjoy interesting arrangements, thrilling developments and twists. They have been searching for a music that is compatible with both popularity and the avant-garde and they seem to be almost there. Both 'Radiolarians II' & 'Radiolarians III' are definitely among their best. It's been nearly 20 years since they came into the scene but this marvellous unit still keep moving forward.

Blood from Stars, Joe Henry.
In 2009, Joe Henry produced two veteran artists' albums, Allen Toussaint's 'The Bright Mississippi' and Ramblin' Jack Elliott's 'A Stranger Here'. Both albums are amongst the best of their long careers. These must have kept Henry busy enough but working with these legends probably inspired him and he also made his own master piece. This wonderful bluesy album opens with jazz pianist Jason Moran's exquisite solo like an image gradually emerging from darkness before we are taken to Henry's world. Apparently Henry likes Gabriel Garcia Márquez and short-story writers such as Flannery O'Conner and he really is a story teller. With trusted musicians including Marc Ribot (he plays cornet as well), David Piltch and Jay Bellerouse, he creates simple but complex, bold but sensitive soundscapes. After listening, you may feel like you've watched a sublime black-and-white movie. My man of the year.

Sam's Picks

Primary Colours, Horrors.
When your band is constantly prefixed with "NME favourite" it is both a gift and a curse, the exposure is nice, but it does tend to stamp an expiry date on ones' foreheads. With album number two The Horrors ditched the schtick for substance, and did it ever produce results. By fleshing out their sound with influences as diverse as Shoegaze, Nuggets era Psychedelia and 60's Girl Groups, The Horrors overcame the NME hype-machine and became a mature, rewarding band in their own right.

Merriweather post pavilion, Animal Collective.
Released just a few days into January, lesser albums might have been forgotten when it's best-of list time, Merriweather not only endured, but grew ever stronger with each spin. The upsurge in Animal Collective's popularity and ubiquity this year (I saw this album reviewed in Woman's Weekly of all places) had nothing to do with any compromise or watering down on their part, more to do with a great band finally getting mainstream recognition.

Embryonic, The Flaming Lips.
I'll admit to not being overly excited for a Flaming Lips double album, thinking after At War With The Mystics they'd settled into a comfortable middle age of good, but not great music. How foolish of me. There were enough ideas packed into single songs, that lesser bands could've made an entire album out of them. I shan't be anything less than chomping at the bit ever again.

More Best of 2009 Staff Picks available at our Previous staff picks page.

"But what if I don't like it?" Well, it's true one's meat is another's poison, so why not double check with allmusic.com first to see if it sounds like your cup of meat/poison/tea.
Previous staff picks

Librarian's Choice

Recommended by Wellington City Libraries staff members, these CDs are chosen from all genres of our wide collection and are displayed with gold Librarian's Choice stickers on the cover. Watch out for the display of Librarian's Choice CDs and DVDs in the Sound & Vision Centre. A list of the CDs chosen is available here (Word) and from the Central Library Sound & Vision Centre desk.

Recent books

The underlined titles will take you directly to our catalogue. Some featured items are linked via a book cover to enable you to read more reviews.

Who shot rock & roll : a photographic history, 1955 to the present, Gail Buckland.
"Buckland's visually hypnotic history of rock photography is as much a history of rock as subject as it is of photography. In fact, it is the inseparability of the two that lies at the heart of Buckland's argument. Here are nearly 300 iconic photographs by those photographers who understood the power of the image in the formation and sustenance of rock-and-roll culture from 1955 onward. The care with which Buckland selects representative photographers and their most significant images is matched by her interpretive prowess. In her comparison of photographs by Mick Rock and Masayoshi Sukita of David Bowie's 1973 tour, for example, Buckland demonstrates no discernible difference in affection for the pop star among teenagers on three continents. Such observations stand testament to the scope of Buckland's inquiry, which throughout the book directs us over and over toward the definitive visual responses of rock fans as well as the musicians, be it through the gestures of physical expression or choices in fashion. Buckland carefully but deliberately argues that the art of rock photography has been sacrificed to the paparazzi and corporate art departments. In light of this inclusive, heady and visceral collection of the genre's best, it would be hard to argue otherwise." (Amazon.com)

The protest singer : an intimate portrait of Pete Seeger, Alec Wilkinson.
"In his latest book, New Yorker writer Wilkinson (The Happiest Man in the World) gives due praise to the influential American singer Pete Seeger, who humbly told his biographer that what's needed is a book that can be read in one sitting. It is just such a spirit of humility that emerges from Wilkinson's lovely and, indeed, brief profile of Seeger (who turns 90 in May), at once social activist, environmentalist and, above all, courageous musician, the peoples' singer, who wholeheartedly believed in his father's dictum that music, as any art, is not an end in itself, but is a means for achieving larger ends. Wilkinson's thorough research is artfully couched in his extended interviews with the singer on his wooded property in upstate New York, during which Seeger elucidates his storied genealogy, recounts his times with Woody Guthrie and describes his testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1955 (the full transcript of which is reprinted as an appendix). Wilkinson's biography reads as lucidly as if we were there with him, listening to Seeger's history as he boils maple sap down to syrup and chops his daily quota of firewood. In Wilkinson's writing, one can almost hear Seeger's axe splitting the logs." (Amazon.com)

Superstar DJs : here we go!, Dom Phillips.
"A superb account of the rise of the 90s superclubs and the DJs who invented the idea of largin' it --Observer Music Monthly." (Amazon.com)

100 essential New Zealand albums, Nick Bollinger.
"Music-lovers love lists, and this Top 100 from Radio New Zealand's highly respected music guru Nick Bollinger will not disappoint. As his legions of fans know, Bollinger's taste is eclectic: he's as likely to give space to the Axemen as to Bic Runga. His choices come accompanied by some of the most entertaining writing about music and musicians you're ever likely to read." (Real Groovy)

A freewheelin' time : a memoir of Greenwich Village in the sixties, Suze Rotolo.
"'A mouthwatering prospect. Rotolo was easily the second-most-compelling interviewee on No Direction Home; I hung onto her every word... The interest lies purely in the insight a very intelligent woman might provide on the formative period of a great artist' --The Dylan Daily

'Of all the unwritten books on Dylan, the most thoroughly documented musician of his era, this is perhaps the one most desired by his fans.' --The Guardian, August 16th 2008

'A welcome, page-turning perspective conspicuously absent from the plethora of books on Dylan and the folk era of the 1960s: that of a woman witnessing it all from its cultural and political epicenter.' --Todd Haynes, screenwriter and director of I'm Not There." (Amazon.com)

Rock & roll jihad : a Muslim rock star's revolution, Salman Ahmad with Robert Schroeder.
"The rise of Pakistan's most popular rock musician - unfamiliar to most Americans - is the subject of this well-meaning autobiography. Ahmad, the leader of the band Junoon, recounts his wealthy upbringing at an elite British school in Lahore and then as a Beatles obsessed teenager in New York. He describes his return to Pakistan in the midst of General Zia's military dictatorship, which introduced fundamentalist Muslim codes of conduct into public life. Ahmad is at his best describing the mishmash of 1960s American rock, '80s pop songs and Bollywood music that made up the repertoires of Pakistan's youth musicians in that same decade. Ahmad joins a band called the Vital Signs, which sweeps the country with its patriotic rock song Dil Dil Pakistan, even getting to meet Benazir Bhutto after her election. He leaves the group at the height of its fame to pursue artistic freedom and becomes even more popular with Junoon and its hit song Jazba-e-Junoon, which was the official song of the cricket World Cup. In what is well-intentioned but ultimately clichéd and egocentric memoir, Ahmad describes his more recent years as a self-appointed musical ambassador for peace, standing up for Muslims on Bill Maher's TV show and playing a concert at the U.N. General Assembly Hall, while still finding time to show Mick Jagger the Pakistani nightlife." (Amazon.com)

Krautrock : cosmic rock and its legacy.
"Krautrock: Cosmic Rock and its Legacy charts the history of this influential music genre, from its roots in free jazz, psychedelia and the music of Karlheinz Stockhausen, to the groundbreaking experiments of Faust, Kraftwerk and Can. The late 1960s in West Germany was a period of profound breakthroughs, upheavals and reversals. Out of this climate, a music scene exploded that would forever change the face of western rock; at times anarchic, at others mystical, magickal, or utopian, it pushed rock beyond any known limits. Illustrated with concert photos, posters, record cover art and other rare visual material, and also including essays by Michel Faber, Erik Davis, David Stubbs, Ken Hollings and testimonials from Gavin Russom (Delia and Gavin/Black Meteoric Star), Plastic Crimewave, Stephen Thrower (Coil/Cyclobe), and Ann Shenton (Add N to (X)) this is an essential compendium to a music whose spirit and ideas still vibrate through contemporary culture today." (Amazon.com)

Magazine roundup

Sick of reserving the latest copy of Mojo, only to find a seven-page feature on Val Doonican? Tired of trudging up the stairs to get Rolling Stone, only to find that Yanni review cruelly missing once again? Avoid nasty surprises with our music magazine roundup.

Here's what's happening in:

Acoustic Guitar website
Bass Player fulltext
Downbeat fulltext
Froots website
Guitar Player website
Modern Drummer website
Mojo website
New Zealand Musician website
NME website
No Depression website
Q website
Real Groove website
Record Collector website
Remix website (requires Flash)
Rip It Up website
Rolling Stone fulltext
Songlines website
The Source website
Uncut website
Wire website

For more magazine links, visit our online music resources page.

Popular music collection

At Wellington City Libraries we have a ridiculous number of CDs (well, over 20,000) for you to borrow at the altogether reasonable price of $1 each. Whether Matmos or Minogue, Strokes or Stockhausen, RZA or AWB you may very well find just what you were looking for in our collection.
Try these searches for the latest CDs in these categories

stack of CDs

Popular
Hip-Hop
Electronica
Compilations
Jazz
Soundtracks
Experimental
Country
Punk
Metal
Soul/R&B
A full list of music genres is available on our Catalogue Quicksearch page.

Of course we also take care of classical music.

"Music Ad Lib" radio show

"Music Ad Lib", hosted by our own library staff music enthusiasts, airs monthly on Access Radio 783 AM. The show is on a Saturday afternoon from 4.30-5.00pm on Access Radio 783 AM - look here for the tracks from a recent show.