I am Kyle's self-indulgence

10. One Foot In The Grave Deluxe
Normally I don't consider re-releases in my top ten lists, but the deluxe edition of One Foot In The Grave that came out this year goes above and beyond what is typical for these things. It features 16 tracks not included on the original album. Even if you take into account those that were released as B-sides or on compilations, it still leaves 12 songs that have never been heard before. They're mostly great songs, too. They're lo-fi acoustic folk recordings, but so is the original release. That's part of the reason it remains one of my favorite Beck allbums.

9. Up
Maybe I've just developed unrealistically high expectations for Pixar, but this year's Up didn't impress me quite as much as some of their other recent films. The first act is flawless with its silent montage of a man's entire life and the fantastic premise that could potentially take the film literally anywhere. It's a little baffling, then, that the filmmakers chose to take their protagonists straight to their destination in a matter of minutes, then spent the entire third act having them walk the final several hundred feet. I like movies to have unexpected turns, but this just seemed to not live up to the promising set-up. I'm also not too keen on the standard hero vs. villain conflict that emerges in the third act. Despite these faults, Up is still a great movie: the characters are warm, the talking dogs are funny, and I like the old man's personal revelation at the end; I just think the movie could have been much more. Still, even a so-so Pixar movie is good enough to rank among the year's best.

8. Beck.com
Beck's official website was revamped this year with a dearth of new and archival material. It's still not as navigable as I would like (and features the hated mystery-meat links), but if you're willing to do some digging you'll find music videos, live performances, album pages with (for the first time ever in print) authoritative lyrics and streaming audio, interviews with other famous figures (check out a surreal conversation between Beck and Tom Waits), and lot of other random weirdness.

The best thing about the site's new content, though, is the Record Club, a series of projects in which Beck and assorted guest musicians spend one day to cover an entire classic album with no rehearsals. These recordings are a return to the loose, spontaneous spirit of Beck's earliest albums, which I love. The results tend to be a little hit-or-miss, but there are enough great performances to make listening worthwhile. I recommend checking out "Venus in Furs" and "Hey, That's No Way To Say Goodbye."

At Beck.com the songs are available only as streaming video, but fan-made mp3 rips can be found. Here are the completed covers of The Velvet Underground and Nico and The Songs of Leonard Cohen, plus a solo acoustic recording of Beck's most recent studio album, Modern Guilt. Beck.com is currently in the process of releasing Skip Spence's Oar, as performed by Beck and Wilco.

7. The BQE
Sometimes it feels like Sufjan Stevens is purposely teasing his fans. After announcing plans to record an album for each of the 50 states in the union, he followed up the greatest album of the decade with a full-length disc of outtakes, a box set of previously bootlegged Christmas music, and now an album of original music that is an instrumental soundtrack to a film about a divided highway. In case it weren't obvious that Sufjan is just going to do whatever the heck he wants, he recently admitted in an interview that the whole 50 States idea was just a gimmick he made up after Illinois came out, and that he has no intentions to fulfill his promise. Although nobody ever believed he would really record 50 albums, hearing him admit the deception actually helps me to relax a bit and enjoy these other projects as more than stops along the way.

So anyway, how is The BQE? Musically it's very good. I still would prefer something with vocals and more rock and folk instruments, but this is quite nice to listen to. It has all the bombast, quietness, and weirdness we've come to expect. The movie that accompanies the music is surprisingly good too. It's nothing but shots of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, but is edited in a collage style that lays three simultaneous screens side by side. The effect is oddly mesmerizing and quite interesting at times.

The DVD and CD set is supplemented with a View-Master disk (you'll have to borrow your kids' View-Master to see it) and a booklet with an essay by Sufjan Stevens. The DVD also includes after the credits two bonus songs: one that is an unnamed electronic noise jam and a beautiful new song (with vocals!) called "The Sleeping Red Wolves." So while The BQE isn't the new album fans have been anxiously waiting for, it is a lovely little assortment of wonders.

6. The Cartoon History of the Modern World, Part 2
Over thirty years after starting, Larry Gonick published the the final volume of his Cartoon History series. It began as The Cartoon History of the Universe, then continued as The Cartoon History of the Modern World in the last two volumes. The final book continues with the winning formula of the rest of the series: very brief summaries of major events with cartoon illustrations and jokes. It's great for filling in the gaps of history that I really don't know much about (I finally understand something about the political state of the world before World War I) and even illuminates a few points about more recent history that I didn't know, such as Iraq's stated reason for invading Kuwait in 1990.

I was also impressed with Gonick's relative objectivity in this book. The previous volume, written in the midst of the Iraq war, tended to look at past events through the lens of Bush-era politics. This book, though, tends to deal with historical events strictly within their own contexts. And while Gonick certainly has his own biases (as all historians do) I think he addresses the political issues of the modern world pretty fairly, even when he gets to the conflict between capitalism and socialism.

This is a great end to a great series of books. Obviously a cartoon history of all of existence is bound to be rather superficial, and as Gonick catches up to recent events it becomes a bit more obvious how compressed his history is (the Iraq war is addressed in just two or three panels), but if you want a survey of history that is informative and entertaining you can't do much better than this.

5. Dark Night of the Soul
Danger Mouse teamed up with Sparklehorse to write and record an album with a wide range of guests. Due to a dispute with EMI, the resultant album may never be released, but you can still stream it at NPR (I'm not sure how they managed that legally) or download it through extra-legal channels.

Normally Sparklehorse's music is a little too flat for my taste, but all the special guests help to make Dark Night of the Soul a dynamic and very enjoyable album. Of course I recommend "Revenge," one of the strongest songs to feature The Flaming Lips in recent years. "Angel's Harp" with Frank Black (or Black Francis) and "Pain" with Iggy Pop are also terrific. With no commercial copy for sale and the creators encouraging fans to download it, there's no reason not to try it for free.

4. Wait For Me
It seems that 2009 was a year of renewal for several of my favorite musicians. I first fell in love with Moby when he released Play ten years ago, but his next several releases after that were disappointing. 18 and Hotel seemed like radio-friendly imitations of what worked on Play, and Last Night is just not at all my cup of tea.

Moby has acknowledged that during this time he often followed the wishes of record company executives against his own better judgment. Then he heard David Lynch say in a speech that creators do best when they are left alone to do what they feel is good, rather than consider market pressures. Moby then decided to make the kind of album he wanted, alone in his home. The result is the best music he's recorded since Play. It is a very quiet and personal album, and it captures the more gentle bits of Everything Is Wrong and Play. For me this is the musical equivalent of wrapping up in a warm blanket.

3. Where The Wild Things Are
I had very high expectations of this film and it was still better than I expected. Spike Jonze does a fantastic job of making blending computer with practical effects to make Max's monsters into believable characters. I love that their personalities reflect the way that kids really think and act. I know that some people thought the story lacks direction, but I thought it was entirely appropriate. Kids are unpredictable: one minute they're laughing and having a great time with a dirt clod fight, and the next they're fighting and yelling at each other because someone's head got stepped on. This is a nice change of pace from movies that just treat children as little adults who think and act rationally. It's ironic that the most realistic children's interaction I've seen in a film in recent memory come from actors in giant fur suits with CG faces.

2. The Hazards of Love
Concept albums have gotten a bad rep in recent years, and a lot of bands try to avoid the label, even when their fans try to interpret their work conceptually. I don't see any objective reason, though, that a 12-to-15-track collection of music can't carry a narrative just as easily as writing or film. After all, music itself began as a way to tell stories. This also happens to be what The Decemberists have been doing with their music, making little stories into songs. On the Tain and The Crane Wife they even told a longer story over multiple tracks, so it was probably inevitable that they would eventually go for a full-length album built around a fairy tale. It's my favorite Decemberists album yet: it has an engaging story, an interesting cast of characters (with corresponding guest vocals) and absolutely flawless songwriting. I know that one complaint people sometimes have about concept albums is that songs that work within the larger context don't really hold up on their own. That is not at all the case here. With the exception of the instrumental prelude, I think any of the songs can easily be enjoyed individually. Within the story, though, they take on even greater emotional power as they build toward the emotional climax.

1. Embryonic
The Flaming Lips have made a career of reinventing themselves, from their early freak-out punk days, to the effects-driven guitar rock of the 90s, to the totally unexpected orchestral space-pop of the past decade. After releasing three albums in that last incarnation, there was a sense that they were marking time, which is death for a band that makes its business to be experimental. So they went into the studio and recorded an album unlike any before.

For starters, they brought Kliph Scurlock, their touring drummer, into the studio for the first time (for years Stephen Drozd played drums and the majority of other instruments when recording). Instead of recording prewritten material, the band spent time just jamming in-studio and chased after whatever hook or fragment interested them. Somehow they grew and assembled these bits into enough songs to fill out a double album. The result is something that is new and original, yet unmistakably The Flaming Lips. It's noisy, adventurous, and rough, which is a refreshing change after the polished production of their last two albums.