sillygwailo

Best Records of 2009

via @al3x. Click through to the original article to get download links. 

5dots:

An Introduction:

For several years now, I have done some kind of end-of-year wrap up of music I’ve enjoyed. Because I like to give, I make all of these albums available to you to download as good quality mp3s. Read closely, here: the links in this post are all .zip files of full albums, encoded as mp3 at a totally reasonable bitrate. The links will stop working at some point - likely before new year’s day - so grab them while you can.

That said (because I have gotten flack for giving away music before): I trust that you have a conscience, and will figure out how best to support these bands if you enjoy their records (e.g., see them live, buy merch, or actually purchase their CD, if that’s something you like to do).

But really, the downloading is sort of beside the point. Mainly, I just like to take stock of things from time to time and look back. What I present to you here is a list of records I liked a lot this year, with some explanation as to why I liked them. Standard caveats apply: firstly, that there is a ton of music released this year that I simply haven’t gotten around to listening to, and if any of that turns out to be good in subsequent listening I’ll try to note it; secondly, that exclusion from this list does not necessarily mean I didn’t like the record, but only that I didn’t love it - every record on this list I would be happy to listen to at will; and thirdly, that this list is in no particular order, because ranking these things seems pretty futile to me - they’re presented instead in iTunes alphabetical order.