The Top Five Albums of 2009

5. Jim O’Rourke – “The Visitor”

“I don’t listen to music much anymore,” Jim O’Rourke told the Times’ Ben Ratliff in September. And yet, he must have been listening to something during the three, lonely years it took O’Rourke to make “The Visitor”—hold up in his tiny Tokyo apartment living off royalties while he recorded every track himself. That, or he’d managed to store a lifetime of influences in his head. By refusing to release “The Visitor” digitally, the former Sonic Youth guitarist seemed to be saying, sit down, shut up—listen. A point his music made just as powerfully. The record, O’Rourke’s first in eight years, is a veritable seminar on musical Americana. Listen closely to its one, vocal-less 32-minute track, and you can hear shades of John Fahey, Aaron Copland, Fleetwood Mac, George Gershwin, and, yes, Frank Zappa—all of  it suffused with O’Rourke’s soft, pliant virtuosity.

4. White Rabbits – “It’s Frightening”

When White Rabbits’ sophomore LP landed last May, critics had a field day pointing out all the Spoon-isms: The relentlessly foregrounded percussion on (natch) “Percussion Gun,” the slow-boiling bar-band drama of “The Salesman (Tramp Life),” the studio chatter that animates the record’s blank spaces. Spoon’s Britt Daniel did produce the thing after all. But the cynics had it all wrong. Why fault a band for knowing what it wants and knowing where to get it?

Particularly, when it sounds this good. The Brooklyn sextet’s 2007 debut, “Fort Nightly,” certainly had its pleasures, but nothing as weird as “Lioness” or as lovely as “Company I Keep.” On “It’s Frightening,” White Rabbits sound like they’ve always wanted to: lean, mean, and a little out of control—a real rock ’n’ roll band.

3. Memory Tapes – “Seek Magic”

In 2005, Dayve Hawk and his band Hail Social, fresh off a tour with Interpol, were all set to release their self-titled debut—a collection of dancey post-punk tunes perfectly in step with their former tour buddies and much of indie rock at large. Four years lager, Hail Social a distant memory, Hawk is making music that sounds like nobody else. Memory Tapes (not Memory Tape, Memory Cassette, or Weird Tapes—all guises under which Hawk released a string of well-received singles this year) is a curious New Wave/IDM hybrid. Or what The Cure might sound like if Robert Smith took a bath in Boards of Canada’s warm synths. Everything comes on like you’ve heard it before—the brooding guitar figure that opens “Swimming Field,” the lounge funk that buoys “Run Out,” the disco synths that close out “Graphics.” Yet on the final minutes of “Bicycle”—one of the year’s most ecstatically beautiful passages—Hawk manages to combine all these bits of nostalgia in entirely unforeseen ways: a Technicolor haze of synthetic vocal harmonies, 80s dance beats, and New Order guitars.

2. The Pains of Being Pure at Heart – self-titled

During a year in which lo-fi became indie rock’s lingua franca (see Wavves, Woods, Times New Viking, the Vivian Girls, etc.), Brooklyn’s Pains of Being Pure at Heart were the genre’s most gifted writers. Anyone can turn up the treble and sing about adolescence and its discontents. But not everyone remembers to leave real songs under all that chilly hiss. Singer/guitarist Kip Berman has a novelist’s eye for detail. His sensitive young things get high on toffee and Vicodin, have affairs with their professors, and copulate in their beloved libraries among the “dust and microfiche.” Yes, it’s all very twee, and yet these guys are no wet noodles. Berman loves his fuzz riffs and starry-eyed solos. And drummer Kurt Feldman never wavers behind the kit. Just because you know your Borges from your Bolaño, doesn’t mean you can’t rock.

1. Phoenix: – “Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix”

If Phoenix was ever going to break the U.S. market and become one of the biggest bands in the world—something they’d always seemed destined to do—“Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix” was the record to do it. Gone is the minimalist art-punk of 2006’s near-flawless “It’s Never Been Like It”—a record critics loved, but Strokes-haters may have found nausea-inducing. In its place are 10 new tunes that manage to focus everything the French quartet has done well for the last 10 years—the taut, pop hooks, the swaggering, post-punk guitars, the retro-kitsch synths, Thomas Mars’ world-weary heartbreak—into a single, sharp point. “1901” is about as good it gets, a song that still sounds as fresh and urgent as it did nine months ago.

Check back early next week for the records that didn’t quite make the list...