Wounded Messenger’s Best of 2009 Week Begins!


With not only a year but an entire decade of music to celebrate, we’ll be bringing you our “Best of” 2009 lists all week long. We begin with our favorite 10 live shows of the year, followed later this week by our favorite albums of the year and our 101 favorite albums of the decade.

Nothing could be more regionally subjective and personally oriented than naming the ten best live concerts you saw in a given year. But for the sake of my own memory and comparison with other such lists, here are the best 10 shows I saw this year, with free download links and reviews when available.

Salute to DJ Premier & Pete Rock – 12/12/09, Cat’s Cradle, Carrboro, NC (review)
Phish – 12/5/09 John Paul Jones Arena, Charlottesville, VA (dl) (review)
Widespread Panic/Allman Brothers Band – 10/11/09  Raleigh, NC (review)
Nine Inch Nails – 6/13/09 Bonnaroo, Manchester, TN (dl) (review)
Wilco – 6/13/09, Bonnaroo, Manchester, TN (dl) (review)
Okkervil River – 6/14/09 Bonnaroo, Manchester, TN (review)
Eric Bachmann – 7/22/09 Duke Gardens, Durham, NC (review)
Umphrey’s McGee – 2/21/09 The Orange Peel, Asheville, NC (dl) (review)
Janiva Magness – 7/17/09 Blue Bayou Club, Hillsborough, NC (review)
Phish – 3/8/09 Hampton Coliseum, Hampton, VA (dl) (review)

We hope you’ll come back to check out our favorite albums of the decade and the year! Putting together these lists has been a labor of love, and we think they’re a lot of fun. We hope you do too!

Merry New Year!

I hope everyone had a wonderful Christmas and Hannukah, and I wish you all the best as we move into 2009! The Wounded Messenger is taking a break until the new year, but there’s a whole lot of good music lined up waiting to be reviewed, like Animal Collective, N.A.S.A., Howling Bells, DJ Signify, Six Organs of Admittance, and more. So bookmark me and stop on by every once in a while to check out the latest message!

Cheers!