It's not too often (or…ever) that the best album of a year is released in January, but 2009 graced us with the legendary masterpiece that was Animal Collective's Merriweather Post Pavilion just weeks in and nothing ever surpassed it. True, bands such as The Decemberists, Grizzly Bear and legendary mainstays The Flaming Lips came close with their opuses and Annie Clark of St. Vincent released one of the best solo female releases I've come across in years, but Merriweather Post Pavilion just had that certain instant all-time classic feel to it that made it live up to all the internet hype that had surfaced months before it was finally released. Strange that only five short years ago I called Animal Collective one of the most pretentious and overrated bands to come along in a great while only to have to eat my words and gladly ask for seconds at the close of this decade. Not only are Animal Collective at a pinnacle that few bands ever reach in their career, I have feeling that they've only begun to blow minds and I can't wait to see what they concoct from here on out.

1. Animal Collective – Merriweather Post Pavilion

2. The Decemberists – The Hazards of Love

3. The Flaming Lips – Embryonic

4. Grizzly Bear –Veckatimest

5. St. Vincent – Actor

6. Raekwon – Only Built For Cuban Linx 2

7. Metric – Fantasies

8. Them Crooked Vultures – Them Crooked Vultures

9. Dirty Projectors – Bitte Orca

10. Yeah Yeah Yeah's – It's Blitz

11. Cotton Jones – Paranoid Cocoon

12. Big Business – Mind the Drift

13. Black Moth Super Rainbow – Eating Us

14. Fuck Buttons – Tarot Sport

15. Kylesa – Static Tensions

16. Baroness – Blue Record

17. Paul Burch – Still Your Man

18. Pearl Jam – Backspacer

19. Tanya Morgan – Brooklynati

20. The Soundtrack of Our Lives – Communion

21. Edward Sharpe & The Magnetic Zeroes – Up From Below

22. Buddy & Julie Miller – Written in Chalk

23. Naomi Shelton & The Gospel Queens – What Have You Done My Brother?

24. The XX – XX

25. Jay Farrar & Benjamin Gibbard – One Fast Move or I'm Gone

26. Wye Oak – The Knot

27. Cracker – Sunrise in the Land of Milk and Honey

28. Allen Toussaint – The Bright Mississippi

29. Justin Townes Earle – Midnight at the Movies

30. Florence + The Machine – Lungs

31. Devendra Banhart – What Will We Be

32. Dinosaur Jr. – Farm

33. Neko Case – Middle Cyclone

34. Magnolia Electric Co. – Josephine

35. Kid Cudi – Man on the Moon: The End of Day

36. Pissed Jeans – King of Jeans

37. Mastodon – Crack the Skye

38. Anna Ternheim – Leaving on a Mayday

39. BLK JKS – After Robots

40. Buraka Som Sistema – Black Diamond

41. Major Lazer – Guns Don't Kill People…Lazers Do

42. Great Northern – Remind Me Where the Light Is

43. Megafaun – Gather Form & Fly

44. Heartless Bastards – The Mountain

45. J.J. Cale – Roll On

46. The Big Pink – A Brief History of Love

47. Bibio – Ambivalence Avenue

48. Clark – Totems Flare

49. The Love Language – The Love Language

50. Scott H. Biram – Something's Wrong/Lost Forever