At the end of each year, Turn It Up focuses on the best of Chicago's independent music scene. Here are my top 10 local indie bands/artists who released music in 2009, either on disc or through a Web site:

1. Minsk, “With Echoes in the Movement of Stone” (Relapse): Besides providing the year’s coolest album title, this Chicago/Peoria quartet delivers a cerebral yet crushing mix of tribal drumming, astral guitar texture, monks-in-a-monastery vocals and progressive structure, topped with a sense of the epic. Sanford Parker and his bandmates stand as metal visionaries.

2. Puerto Muerto, “Drumming for Pistols” (Fire Records): Putting a twist on everything from Weimar Republic cabaret to punk-folk, Christa Meyer and Tim Kelley – spiritual kin of Lotte Lenya and Nick Cave -- wrench drama and black beauty from every note. The duo has been releasing albums for close to a decade, and “Drumming for Pistols” is their best yet, “a call to arms” in the words of Meyer. I’ll buy that description because A) it rocks harder than anything they’ve done and B) even at its most inviting, there’s a disturbing undertow to the lyrics, a dark melancholy to the melodies that is not easily brushed off.  
 
3. Califone, “All My Friends are Funeral Singers” (Dead Oceans): The soundtrack to a film directed by Califone major domo Tim Rutili, the music is a movie in itself. The opening “Giving Away the Bride” is unlike anything in the band’s decade-long career, a thrilling blast of sci-fi funk and dub-reggae ghost-in-the-machine production. The rest – a mix of lovely orchestration, rural twang and avant-percussion – finds Califone in top form, topped by Rutili’s confiding yet haunted vocals.

4. The Wanton Looks at myspace.com/wantonlooks: Bad-girl harmonies (think Shangri-La’s) meet fuzzed-up guitar and relentless tempos. Sure it’s been done countless times before, but when it’s done well – with fizzy hooks and towering sing-along choruses – who can complain? “Electromagnetic Force”  is aptly named, “Demons” stomps like Motorhead, the first chord on “Worst Side of Me” sounds like a bomb detonating. (Saturday with the Methadones at Bottom Lounge, 1375 W. Lake St., $10; ticketweb.com.)

5. Green, “The Planets” (GangGreen): Jeff Lescher’s one of the city’s most underrated musical talents. Every few years for the last two decades, he puts out another Green album, and this is one of the best. Gone is the callow exuberance of the band’s earliest incarnation, when influences were proudly worn on flannel sleeves, replaced by a more reflective and sophisticated melodic and arranging aesthetic. What remains are wistfulness and empathy, qualities that have always underpinned Lescher’s soul desperation and given his music a durability that many of his ‘80s peers lack.

6. Helen Money, “In Tune” (Radium/Table of the Elements): Alison Chesley took her classically trained cello technique and brought it into the world of independent music in the ‘90s, and we’re all the better for it. Besides her work in Verbow, she’s collaborated with countless artists and written for movies and dance productions. But her solo albums, recorded under the moniker Helen Money, are her defining statements. “In Tune” is anything but obtuse; Chesley expands the vocabulary of the cello to make it sound like a guitar, a drum or a trash compactor. The inventiveness of her instrumentals will prompt not just respect (and awe) from music heads, but head-banging, fist-pumping approval from folks who just want to rock.

7. The Scotland Yard Gospel Choir, “… and the Horse You Rode in On” (Bloodshot): It’d be tragic if it weren’t so funny --- songwriter Elia Einhorn’s girl trouble, that is. Einhorn works through a busted relationship in a series of songs brimming with bile and humor. His band coaxes him through it with energetic performances that bridge folk-rock and orchestral-pop, a soaring affirmation in the face of heartbreak. Soon after the band released this album, it was involved in a tour-van crash that left several of them seriously injured. They’re slowly recovering, and here’s hoping we see them in the new year to perform the songs from this career-best album on the stage.

8. The Horses Ha, “Of the Cathmawr Yards” (Hidden Agenda): Autumnal melodies informed by folk, country and jazz with co-ed vocals on top from Janet Beveridge Bean (of Eleventh Dream Day and Freakwater) and James Elkington (Zincs). The resolutely unshowy vocals echo the dignity of mountain soul and the British folk-rock of the ‘60s (ala Sandy Denny-era Fairport Convention). But it’s the lucid interplay of the all-star rhythm section, which includes Fred Lonberg-Holm, Charles Rumback and Nick Macri, that is the album’s core strength.

9. Cathy Santonies at myspace.com/theCathySantonies: Riot grrrl velocity combines with the type of guitar solos you might stumble across on a Judas Priest album. The quartet recently added drummer Kaylee Preston and her presence is immediately felt on the three fast, furious songs on the group’s MySpace site.

10. Smith Westerns, “Smith Westerns” (Hozac): The teen quartet from Chicago’s North Side keeps this debut pleasingly unruly and low-tech, as if trying to channel the ‘60s garage-rock aesthetic, right down to the sound of a dirty needle on a portable hi-fi plunging into a scratched-up 45-rpm single. The melodies cut through all the dust, providing a glimpse of a world where jadedness doesn’t exist.  

greg@gregkot.com

More than 100,000 albums were released this year. What were the best? No one’s list is definitive because no one could’ve possibly listened to them all. And, as always, this year’s list could’ve easily been several times longer. But when forced to choose my favorites, I went with the music that I played the most, the albums that kept revealing new pleasures every time I listened to them. Here they are:

View photos of these albums HERE.

1. St. Vincent, “Actor” (4AD): Each song is its own movie, an orchestral fantasy undercut by diabolical guitars and a sweet, innocent voice that doesn’t always say sweet, innocent things. “Actor” is that rare album that manages to both enchant and disturb.

2. BLK JKS, “After Robots” (Secretly Canadian): South African music like you’ve never heard before, with trance-like rhythms echoing the shamans of the band’s home country as well as the psychedelia and progressive rock of the West.

3. Cymbals Eat Guitars, “Why There are Mountains” (self-released): What a great rollercoaster ride --- titanic guitar crescendos, hair-raising screams, the gorgeous drift of keyboards and horns, melodies that make you want to dunk like Lebron. An amazingly sophisticated album for its modest, self-released pedigree, “Why There are Mountains” ultimately wins you over because singer-guitarist Joe D’Agostino invests himself in every note as if his life depended on it.

4. The xx, “The xx” (Young Turks): Not a note or nuanced detail is wasted in this minimalist-pop classic, a must-listen on headphones, preferably with all the lights turned off at 3 a.m. Spidery guitars, a drum machine and a spritz of keyboards frame the sensual, coolly understated vocal interplay of Romy Madley Croft and Oliver Sim.

5. Phoenix, “Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix” (Glassnote): The French quartet effortlessly merges synthesizers and guitars, rave-tastic drums and ambient texture into a series of indelible, perfectly sequenced pop songs.

6. Neko Case, “Middle Cyclone” (Anti): She’s always had a big voice and made fine albums, but now the melodies are more indelible, the arrangements more inventive, the emotional depth matched by the richness of the sound.

7. Kid Cudi, “Man on the Moon: The End of Day” (Universal Motown): Cleveland native Scott Ramon Segring Mescudi puts a new twist on hip-hop, turning his debut into an ambitious five-act journey with ghost-in-the-machine beats, Gothic keyboards and melancholy strings.

8. Rihanna, “Rated R” (Def Jam): The formerly lightweight R&B singer grows up overnight, turning real-life tragedy into transcendent art.

9. Japandroids, “Post-Nothing” (Polyvinyl): A guitar, a drum kit, two voices – an exuberant reminder that there’s still plenty to be said with those simple tools.

10. Kid Sister, “Ultraviolet” (Downtown/Universal): The girl next door (Melisa Young) delivers the dance-pop album of the year, a celebration of everyday life at the crossroads of hip-hop and electronic music.

And the next 10:

11. Amadou & Mariam, “Welcome to Mali” (Because/Nonesuch)
12. Maxwell, “BLACKsummers’night” (Columbia)
13. Screaming Females, “Power Move” (Don Giovanni)
14. Animal Collective, “Merriweather Post Pavilion” (Domino)
15. Mastodon, “Crack the Skye” (Reprise)
16. Dan Deacon, “Bromst” (Carpark)
17. Allen Toussaint, “The Bright Mississippi” (Nonesuch)
18. Yeah Yeah Yeahs, “It’s Blitz” (Interscope)

19. Them Crooked Vultures, “Them Crooked Vultures” (DGC/Interscope)

20. Death, “… For the Whole World to See” (Drag City)

Now it's your turn ...

greg@gregkot.com