ACE FREHLEY
Anomaly
(Bronx Born)
Available on CD, double-LP, iTunes and AmazonMP3

It’s amusing how Gene Simmons must have thought that laying Wal-Mart’s money on the line would result in Kiss’s best album ever in the hype that led up to Sonic Boom (which did make it into Billboard’s Top 5, despite the fact that, as noted when I reviewed the album, it’s a rather weak effort that’s only a shade or two better than their previous two studio releases, the boring Carnival of Souls and the quick-buck-fake-reunion exercise Psycho Circus). As revealed a month prior to Sonic Boom’s artistic bust, Ace Frehley had something more valuable to lay on the line with his first solo studio album in twenty years: his balls and his word. And he delivered simply by putting the music first. The result? A reminder of the one element that attracted a great deal of people to Kiss in the first place – as well as of the fact that you can stick a six-figure salary, a few Les Paul guitars, and a Space Ace cosplay kit into the hands of a former hair-band failure turned Gene Simmons lackey, but he’ll never play, sing, or write even a fourth as good as one Paul Daniel Frehley. Or in other words, this was a repeat of how badass Ace’s first solo album in more ways than one – he outshined his (now-former) bandmates yet again.

MEAT PUPPETS
Sewn Together
(Megaforce)
Available on CD, colored-vinyl LP, iTunes and AmazonMP3
GIRLS GENERATION (SDSN)
Genie: The Second Mini-Album
(SM Entertainment)
Available on CD

One of the reasons this year’s list took me awhile to finalize is because there were some albums I simply couldn’t bring myself to cut out of the list. This installment is one of the most extreme cases.

The Pups’ first album since brothers/founding members Curt and Cris Kirkwood reconvened, Rise To Your Knees (Anodyne, 2007), was a nice restart, but wasn’t completely up to the level of their classic back catalog. This time around, however, the group returned with all cylinders firing, recalling much of their glory days (Up On The Sun, Mirage, Too High To Die, Huevos) without breaking as much of a sweat. The album’s title seems more indicative of the band’s unlikely label for this release (the more metal-oriented Megaforce label) than for the state of the band’s lineup, which is playing like they never left in the first place.

As for the group known in their native Korea as So Nyeo Shi Dae: K-Pop isn’t something that I ever seriously delved into, and to be honest, I still really haven’t, except for this particular band (via the recommendation of my female counterpart, Vee from PinkWota.com). Genie, their current EP, got me hooked in with the title track and went from there. Besides the very catchy title song, the shameless 80’s pop of “Girlfriend” and the Strauss-interpoating “My Child” are the EP’s other high watermarks that had me going back and getting the rest of the group’s back catalog, which didn’t hook me as quickly as this EP did. But that’s OK, because if this EP is their current creative high point, then that’s enough to have me looking forward to future releases from them.

The tradition continues. For the fourth year in a row, I’m listing the albums that for me musically defined 2009. Unlike last year, when the posts for this series were so damn irregular, I’m sticking to a more regular schedule and am actually going to cram in ten pieces between now and Christmas Eve… which means that at some point there’s liable to be a day or two when I put installments up within minutes of each other.

For those of you that remember the previous three years of the best-of list from here and from this blog’s predecessor, you know that there’s going to be a mix of primarily J-Pop and Western music. You also may remember that on at least two of those three occasions, Morning Musume’s then-current studio albums held the top spots (the first time being when Rainbow 7 was in a three-way tie for first with Panic! At The Disco and The Game.

It’s anybody’s ball game this year. I’ve had my list for this series written down in a Word file for at least a week, and now is the time to unleash it. The first few installments for this year-end series are already completed and the rest are in their draft phases as we speak, so things are going to be a little busier and more on time than before. There’s also a tentative Best Singles of 2009 that is in a rough stage draft right now (which in this case means I have a bunch of candidates sitting in an iTunes playlist), but that may be a bonus installment more than anything if it gets completed. For now, stay tuned – I’m already doing the final edit and the HTML coding on the #10 and #9 installments, and those will be up within hours… maybe even within an hour of this post going up.