Tune-Yards’ Bird-Brains makes Pitchfork Top Albums of 2009

I’m super glad to see this album make the list of record.

Pitchfork: Staff Lists: The Top 50 Albums of 2009:

44. tUnE-yArDs
BiRd-BrAiNs
[Marriage/4AD]

Originally released on cassette (!) last year, the debut album by Merrill Garbus’ solo project made bigger ripples this year in this slightly expanded edition. Garbus is a fantastic songwriter with a very unusual sense of rhythm (“Hatari” lopes like no other Anglophone song in recent memory), she’s got a creamy voice with a welcome, salty-bitter edge of indignation about it, and there are indelible lines all over these songs. The biggest delight of BiRd-BrAiNs, though, is how much Garbus’ ingenuity milks from the record’s severe economy of means. The album was very clearly made with nothing more than the tools at hand— a ukulele, a couple of pieces of percussion, a yard-sale keyboard, a loop pedal, a crappy cheap mic, some free audio software, and Garbus’ larynx, which gets to express everything her machines can’t take care of. The whole thing is held together with duct tape, but that’s what makes it shiny. —Douglas Wolk