Glo-fi/chillwave and pleasure-centric pop have been the styles of music thus far dominating year-end coverage the blogosphere over. Well, and Animal Collective, who topped Pitchfork’s list, got the same honor from Spin and won this year’s round of the Gummy Awards. But 2009 also saw a lot of great releases that fell outside of the chillwave label: there was booming post-rock, technically adroit baroque ‘n’ roll, spaced-out psychedelia, and throttling post-punk, sometimes all balled into one.

Following up on my post about 2009’s honorable mentions, below are my 10 favorite albums of the year, all of which I’ve spun into oblivion and lost copious amounts of sleep listening to.

And contrary to many of the blogosphere’s other indie publications, my list is entirely glo-fi-free. But it does have pleasure-centric pop and Animal Collective…

Without further ado, this writer’s top 10 records of 2009:

10.) The Antlers – Hospice
If I may fault the Arcade Fire for two ways in which they changed indie music with their masterpiece debute Funeral: that record did a little too much to encourage out-of-tune vocal histrionics (to borrow a line from a Silver Jews song, “all my favorite singers couldn’t sing”), and that record also made extremely “moody” music cool again, as though angst hadn’t been done to death since the early days of Joy Division to now. However, Funeral worked because Win Butler and Regine Chassagne could sing just in tune enough to be able to harmonize with their instruments, and their angst was always underscored by an untarnished and endless feeling of hope.

I mention the Arcade Fire (and their subsequent effect on the indie scene) because rising Brooklyn bellowers The Antlers have already and will continue to draw comparisons to the Arcade Fire. In a sense, it’s an apt parallel to acknowledge; lead singer Peter Silberman has no problem getting all weepy into the microphone, and his voice cracks and stutters and spits with an intensity matched only by Butler and one other indie singer alive today — Okkervil River’s Will Sheff. Likewise, Silberman’s lyrics and vocals sound completely comfortable floating in a haze of unease and anxiety.

But Silberman’s subject matter is darker than Butler’s, and his voice is more talented and malleable. And while The Antlers might not carry all their tunes on the backs of a makeshift orchestra boasting members of fucking Godspeed You! Black Emperor like the Arcade Fire does, Silberman’s trio of troubled troubadours are equally talented at pushing the limits of sound with their heart-on-sleeve anthems about love, death, and general loneliness. That Hospice gets as rousing and emotional as Funeral at points just proves Silberman’s talents as a songwriter. Hospice is pure pathos, but its emotion is approached with a critical and meticulous bent, and that’s what really makes it stand out from the rest of its histrionic baroque pop competitors.

9.) Wild Beasts – Two Dancers
England’s Wild Beasts take their name from the painting movement known as fauvism, and their music is as evocative as the work of that movement’s spiritual leader Henri Matisse. Two Dancers is an extremely colorful record, even if its palette is often dark and opaque thanks to the band’s love of minor keys and stacatto inflections. Combine their stripped down, moody post-punk with lead singer Hayden Thorpe’s glass-shattering falsetto, and you have the punk rock equivalent of a 19th century opera. Thorpe’s characters fuck, fight, feel lost, become less than human, and are all ultimately redeemed through tragedy. The record plays like Friedrich Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy reads. It’s Oedipal in the most literary sense; it’s a record of dreams made fluid and real through the suffering of the human condition.

But beyond whatever philosophical and artistic foundations the record might contain, the bottom line is that it’s an album just brimming with incredible songs. Wild Beasts began their career with Limbo, Panto, a stunning debut whose singlemost flaw was its shameless shock value schtick born from Thorpe’s quavering, androgynous yelping and yowling. But Two Dancers listens like an acknowledgment of that debut’s failings; the vocals are scaled back in favor of the crisp, brooding production and the band’s tight, technical guitar work. Though Thorpe might insist the band is “just brutes, hoping to have a hoot” on standout track “Hooting And Howling,” repeat listens to Two Dancers reveal that there’s much, much more going on in the band’s music than mere libido set to verse.

8.) Sunset Rubdown – Dragonslayer
Sunset Rubdown — the too often ignored half-brother of beloved indie outfit Wolf Parade — is a band that practically defines what it means to be a Canadian indie band. From the boy-girl harmonies between frontman (and Wolf Parade co-leader) Spencer Krug and Camilla Wynne Ingr, to Krug’s bleating histrionics, to the off-kilter guitar shredding of Michael Doerksen and Jason Robson-Cramer and the absurd lyrical matter rattled off by Krug at lightning speed, Sunset Rubdown’s music boils down an entire musical collective into a single five-piece unit. You can hear in the band’s music hints of all of the other projects in which its members participate and admire — Destroyer’s self-referential verbosity in lyrics, Wolf Parade’s squealing synth pop, Frog Eye’s ear-splitting scream-talking, Godspeed You! Black Emperor’s tremolo guitar shredding, Arcade Fire’s barrage of xylophone and glockenspiel — but ultimately their sound is entirely theirs and theirs alone. They may shade their music with the sounds of their music brethren, but Sunset Rubdown is Krug’s baby, and ultimately it’s his strongest, most consistent project.

Dragonslayer is Sunset Rubdown’s fourth LP, and ultimately it’s their most approachable work to date. Free from the sing-song story telling about god only knows that littered the gapless Random Spirit Lover, and more dynamic and poppy than their breakthrough sophomore effort Shut Up I Am Dreaming, Dragonslayer goes for listeners’ throats from the first seconds of the record. On opener “Silver Moons,” an eery, dissonant feedback loop gives way to a pummeling piano riff, and the song progresses with a series of enchanting melodies that somehow all fit together in spite of their polyphonic independence. The entire record feels precisely like that; every song sounds as though every member of the band is trying to take the lead role, but acknowledging their interdependence, they all compromise by layering solos on top of each other in order to form a positively explosive mountain of sound. And what a beautiful mountain it is, indeed.

7.) Phoenix – Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix
Phoenix have been kicking out dreamy Parisian pop jams now for almost a decade, but if 2006’s It’s Never Been Like That stood as their breakthrough record, then Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix is their victory lap — an album where they run circles around their listeners with their shimmery, dazzling, technically adroit pop anthems without ever breaking a sweat. Phoenix are a band that just pulse with the cool. Their music is self-assured and self-effacing without ever being pretentious; it’s deliriously catchy but also meticulously crafted (Standout two-part epic “Love Like A Sunset” allegedly took them two  years to complete and record!), and in terms of pop music, on Wolfgang Phoenix offer the complete package. From the opening one-two punch of “Lisztomania” and “1901″ — both completely perfect cuts in their own respects, and utterly infallible as a pair — to the incredible closing sequence of “Rome,” “Girlfriend” and “Armistice,” the record never misses a beat.

Frontman Thomas Mars finds himself on Wolfgang having progressed from the status of an attractive frontman with a honey-sweet voice who doubles as a member of the Coppola dynasty to one of the more powerful pop lyricists alive — He outwrites 90% of American pop songwriters, and English isn’t even his first language! He waxes Radioheadishly ambivalent on “Countdown” (“true and everlasting love / true and everlasting couldn’t last that long”), emphatically bitches about how hard it is to write good pop songs (is it for him?) on “Lisztomania” (“From a mess to the masses!”), half-mocks half-consoles a possible lover on “Lasso” (“forever is a long, long time / when you’ve lost your way”). Even at its worst (though there really isn’t a bad track here), it’s still better than any other straight-up guitar pop record released this year. It’s a defining statement in indie pop, and were it to be Phoenix’s swansong (God forbid!), it would be a brilliant closing statement to their already consistently astonishing career.

6.) Animal Collective – Merriweather Post Pavilion / Fall Be Kind EP
Don’t believe the hype. Merriweather Post Pavilion is not God’s gift to music. It is not the best album of 2009. It is not the 14th greatest album of the decade.

But it is very good. Excellent, even. The best thing Animal Collective has ever released. Released at the beginning of the same year that saw them releasing the Fall Be Kind EP, their second best effort to date. I freely admit I’m an Animal Collective fan boy; my fixation with their hypnotic swirls of colorful, uplifting sound borders on unhealthy. MPP standout “My Girls” is a song I’ve spun into the ground — Last.fm tells me I’ve heard it 157 times since January, to be precise. And I’ve listened to the record at least once a week every week since its release Jan. 6. So yeah, I’m not going to lie: I love it. It’s fantastic.

MPP and its companion piece are mostly incredible though because they are demonstrations of how much growth Animal Collective has seen since their original formation in the early ’00s. I still have a hard time getting through all the way through Danse Manatee and Campfire Songs, and in comparison, their latest releases are heavenly and perfect. And the two records together form one delicious whole, an immaculate slab of indie pop that sounds like nothing else in the world. From the delirious 7/4 stomp of “What Would I Want? Sky” to the plinking space-harpsichord licks on “Bluish” to the gypsee-disco of “Brothersport,” MPP and Fall Be Kind never miss a beat. And it’s the kind of record that could only come out of Animal Collective. Dave “Avey Tare” Portner, Noah “Panda Bear” Lennox and Brian “Geologist” Weitz have spent the last nine years honing their sound, and at this point it is completely safe to say they sound like no other musicians on the planet. Panda Bear’s day-glo throat-sung harmonies, Avey’s bestial yelps, Geologist’s slithering synth lines — these are musical attributes possessed and possessable by no one else. And they are all here on these two records, in absolute finest form.

5.) Flaming Lips – Embryonic
When Flaming Lips frontman Wayne Coyne informed the world his band was going to be putting out a double-LP concept record, I feared for the worst. The last time the Lips went and got all conceptual, they dropped Zaireeka on the world, an abominable four-CD album which required all four discs be played simultaneously on different sound systems to get the “full experience.” And after the overall subpar At War With The Mystics, I was already weary of a new Flaming Lips release. Was it even possible for them to come close to the level of brilliance displayed on The Soft Bulletin again? Chances were slim to none.

But they succeeded. Embryonic is after Bulletin the best record they’ve ever created. It’s 70-something minute long acid trip through a druggy world where the ego is in peril, where women have “Silver trembling hand daggers,” where Karen O of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs is an animal simulacrum. And it’s a magical, beautiful world to boot. Embryonic takes the pop-sensibilities of the last three Lips efforts and degrades them into the grating lo-fi fuzz of their early work like In A Priest Driven Ambulance and Clouds Taste Metallic. But it is by no means a pop album; it’s a grandiose exploratory piece that touches the outer reaches of the drug-rock universe, and comes back having made some fascinating discoveries in the world of sound.

Like so many concept albums, Embryonic is terribly radio-unfriendly, but it does have some killer standout tracks. Opener “Convinced of the Hex” rumbles with an intensity completely foreign to ’00s era Flaming Lips, and it sets the tone for what a powerful, disturbed, ravenous rock epic that the LP is. “Worm Mountain” features MGMT playing some super intense fuzz guitar melodies, and it’s the best track that mediocre Fridman-produced band has ever had the pleasure of performing on. “Silver Trembling Hands” is a psych-rock freakout with totally insane and nonsensical lyrics that positively throbs with energy, and closer “Watching The Planets” stomps out a melody so ferocious and infectious you can’t help but start the whole hour-long affair over again when it ends. Don’t let the name fool you: Embryonic is a fully-formed piece of psychedelic perfection, and it shows the Lips still have a ton of tricks up their sleeve. They may be in their 40s, but they are still a band of fearless freaks.

4.) Dirty Projectors – Bitte Orca
Dirty Projectors ringleader Dave Longstreth isn’t a particularly interesting guy. He’s just your typical Yale dropout who poses alongside pictures of Friedrich Nietzsche for his album art, plays a right-handed stratocaster upside-down and left-handed and love Ali Farka Toure and Mariah Carey in equal measure. Nothing special.

Okay, so Longstreth is a genius, and his band is equally talented beyond belief. But Bitte Orca differs from the other half-dozen Dirty Projectors album because it’s the first time Longstreth and crew have churned out an album with any kind of widespread audience appeal. Gone are the days when his band would spend their time recording (from memory) art rock covers of classic Black Flag records, or when Longstreth would craft an unlistenable collection of songs about sheep in a barnyard counting each other every night to overcome insomnia. Bitte Orca features some of the most downright confounding lyrics I’ve ever heard, but it doesn’t really matter what Longstreth intends his words to mean, because this time around he’s positioned them on top of some of the most infectious and interesting pop songs ever created. His guitar playing is as strong as always, his afrobeat-meets-Built to Spill solos bowling over listeners on every track. And the three-part choir of Haley Dekle, Angel Deradoorian and Amber Coffman is just the icing on the cake.

Being the tyrannical frontman he is, Longstreth subjected the girls to absurd amounts of practice before recording and touring for Orca: 12-hour-straight jam and singing sessions, the learning of an ancient style of singing used by medieval monks called Hocket, where each individual ping-pongs melody notes off each other instead of merely harmonizing. In terms of craftsmanship and technical ability, this is the record of the year. In terms of pop perfection, it’s likewise a contender. “Stillness Is The Move” is a prima donna moment for Coffman, and it’s also one of the best songs of the decade, straddling the line between desert blues, discotheque and soulful American dance floor fare like Beyonce or miss Carey. “Temecula Sunrise” is a folk-pop song as bright as its name suggests, brimming with jaw-in-your-lap vocal harmonies and unbelievable guitar solos as tight as those found on Perfect From Now On. “Useful Chamber” sounds like it flew in via UFO from some alternate dimension; it’s an unclassifiable hodge podge of all things well and good in the indie music world, and its genre-bending qualities are perfectly in keeping with the menagerie of magical songs that compose the whole of this remarkable record.

3.) The xx – xx
Bands like The xx make me upset. When you hear about a bunch of teenagers getting a record deal, you can usually chuckle and wait for a sub-par release that demonstrates that while they know how to sing or play their instruments, they don’t really know how to write songs (and usually they don’t: others write the songs for them). This is precisely why The xx are infuriating. Their primary songwriters are 20 and 21, respectively, but they sound like a pair of 40-something R&B veterans who don’t even have to try to pump out hits.

On the first couple of listens, xx is a confusing record. It’s an experiment in minimalism and negative space, but instead of laying long drones and pulses and repeated melodies on listeners a la Stars of the Lid or Windy & Carl, the record is instead comprised of 11 deconstructed pop songs packed with force so subtle it’s difficult to know how to process them. A toy piano plinks its way through the record’s first song “VCR,” its twee-as-fuck tone distracting the audience from the fact that these two young adults are addressing ”big love” with the nonchalance of a couple who has been married for 50 years. This is the way with xx: it’s a record that revels in the glories of casualness and understatement.

It also doesn’t have a standout track. There’s no hit single on this one. “Basic Space” comes close, but that’s only because it’s got a scratchy drum-machine beat propelling its wonky, soulful guitar lines to a more radio-ready level than most of the songs. But the skittering guitars are everywhere on this record, and every melody, every lick, every “solo” is essentially perfect. If there’s a problem with this debut, it’s that it sets The xx’s bar far too high. How do you top something so simple and breathtaking and perfect that you unleashed upon the world at the age of 20? I don’t know the answer to that question, but I’m hoping the band figures it out. Because I’m going to groove holes into my vinyl copy of xx in a matter of months, since it hasn’t left my player more than twice since I purchased it.

2.) Grizzly Bear – Veckatimest
In the span of only three LPs (with the excellent Friend EP thrown in for good measure), Grizzly Bear have done what it took Animal Collective almost a decade to do: funnel a lot of musical commonalities into a sound that is entirely their own. Sure, the four-part vocal harmonies and the shimmering, oddly tuned guitars recall CSNY, The Beatles, The Beach Boys, that whole bygone era of pleasure-centric pop music, but you couldn’t shuffle any song off Veckatimest into a mix containing “Penny Lane” and “God Only Knows” without Grizzly Bear sticking out like a sore thumb.

Even when they play into the hand of their vintage era pop influences, they still turn that style of music on its head: Yellow House standout “Knife” could almost pass on an oldies station, were it not for the bizarro ambient outro; the band’s rendition of The Crystal’s “He Hit Me (And It Felt Like A Kiss)” improves on the Phil Specter-produced original by replacing the “wall of sound” with a wall of shimmer and by adding a contextual ambiguity to the pro-abusive relation described lyrically therein; and “Two Weeks” would fall prey to the perils of pastiche were it not for its counterintuitive flourishes — speed-of-light arpeggios during the chorus, Beach House’s Victoria Legrand slurring nonsense syllables atop Ed Droste’s calming coos, and an omnichord solo at the end of the track? Where did this band come from, and how do they do what they do so well?

Veckatimest is one of those records that at first sounds awkward and hodge-podgy; folky shuffles segue into pop ballads segue into loping musical non sequiturs and then the process happens again in reverse. But with every repeat listen, it becomes obvious that it was the only logical next step that could be taken by Grizzly Bear; it’s an amalgamation of everything they’ve ever toyed with musically — rock and folk guitars, classical piano and string arrangements, almost trip-hoppy rhythm sections. Veckatimest is the sound of one of the most versatile bands in America pulling out all the stops, playing their hearts out with no concern for restraint or conceptual cohesion. If Yellow House demonstrated Grizzly Bear’s mastery of folk music in all its various permutations, then Veckatimest just demonstrates their plain old mastery of the craft of musicianship in general. It makes the listener realize that, no matter what Grizzly Bear does to a song, they are going to do it well.

1.) Fuck Buttons – Tarot Sport
In a year featuring new releases from Flaming Lips, Animal Collective and Grizzly Bear — three of my all-time favorite bands — I really was not expecting my favorite record to come out of Fuck Buttons, a two-piece noise/post-rock outfit from Glasgow. Their debut LP Street Horrrsing was one of my favorite albums of 2008, but it certainly wasn’t something I wanted to listen to every day; their grating synths a la Black Dice and terrifying death-wails a la Wolf Eyes was enough to overwhelm anyone after the 55 minutes it took to listen to that record.

But Tarot Sport blew all of my expectations out of the water. I was expecting more of the same — Playskool keyboards and Nintendo Gameboys churning out hideous gurgles of sound — in new arrangements. Instead, Fuck Buttons delivered a sophomore effort that inverted the formula that defined their debut LP. Whereas Street Horrrsing was a record full of positively ghastly sounds strung over top of quite, pretty, twinkling melodies, Tarot Sport layers shimmering and beautiful melodies on top of noisy synths and hissing feedback. And in the interim between the two records, my perception of Fuck Buttons has changed; they used to be very loud, but very pretty too, and now they are very pretty, but also very loud.

So yeah, Tarot Sport is, against all odds, my favorite record of the year, a perfect culmination of all things necessary for crafting good noise rock: tons and tons of reverb and feedback, infectious but off-putting melodies, destructive decibel levels, and technically adept instrumentation obscured by the sheer volume of the whole affair. It hooks you within the first two minutes of opener “Surf Solar” — which features the most obliterated and deconstructed minimal house-style vocal sample you will ever hear — and it doesn’t let go until the silence finally resets itself at the end of closer “Flight Of The Feathered Serpent.” And in between you get the Gameboy-a-go-go transition track “Rough Steez” – the Fuck Buttons equivalent of a mid-tempo dance song — the positively heavenly synth swirls of “The Lisbon Maru,” and the heart-pounding soundswells of “Olympians” — which basically sounds like “Chariots Of Fire” on fire and 80 times louder.

Tarot Sport is without a doubt the best post-rock record released since Godspeed You! Black Emperor’s Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas To Heaven, and it changes listeners’ perceptions of music in the same kind of way. That an unassuming pair of gentlemen have with a handful of toy instruments, a fleet of effects pedals and a veritable army of amplifiers created one of the most triumphant and remarkable records of the decade is truly astounding on every level.