Glassnote Records

With the new year approaching, we at PLANET wanted to share our favorite music from the past twelve months. And while there were many worthy contenders, the unanimous pick among the editors as the year’s best record is Phoenix’s Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix. After three albums that seemed to revolve chiefly around a set of artfully crafted, boundary-pushing pop singles, the French four-piece has finally released work that — from first song to last — taps into a potential that has been itching to burst out in full for years. As we wrote in May:
     Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix marks possibly the quartet’s most complete record to date. Its ten tracks may not vastly depart from the band’s now dependable sound, but [Thomas] Mars’ swooning croon and the band’s soft-rock polish mixed with some modest doses of spiky guitar-work (invoking the Strokes) and disco synths (partly guided by album co-producer and “fifth member” Philippe Zdar of Cassius-fame) reach their zenith on “1901”, “Fences”, and “Lisztomania”, among other such standouts. “The more we do music the more we want to do something that no other bands can do,” Mars modestly proclaims. (Check out the full interview with the band here as well as a stream of “Lisztomania” below.)

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

And after the jump, we present the rest of our top fifteen albums of 2009 (with streaming audio).