2009 has been a rather interesting year for alt. rock and rock music. The album I was looking forward to the most, Weezer's latest album Raditude, was almost painful for me to listen to as a whole. But on the flip side, there was some decent stuff that graced the air waves in the past year. The Fray's latest self-titled album was really nice to listen to, and Third Eye Blind's Ursa Major was a solid reminder to why I liked them so much.
But really, I think the biggest surprise of 2009 for me was Switchfoot's Hello Hurricane. I've never been a fan of their older albums (or their past musical styles), but in this album they really pulled out all the stops to refresh their sound. Unlike Weezer's Red Album (again Weezer, c'mon), their musical experimentations blend nicely with their patented vocal catches and soft sounds to create an album that's musically diverse and fun to listen to. Before Hello Hurricane, I wouldn't have put 'musically diverse' and 'Switchfoot' in the same sentence. But now I can do that without any sense of sarcasm.
Another solid album that also came out at the tail end of the year is Leona Lewis's Echo. Not that I expected anything less, even with the standards she set with her stellar first album. What is confusing me though, is why Square Enix choose her single "My Hands" as the theme song for the international version of Final Fantasy XIII. "My Hands" is a nice song...but it doesn't match the whole Final Fantasy concept of androgynous Japanese teenagers summoning giant ice-machine-monsters to fight the Greater Evil. The only people who are going to buy Final Fantasy XIII are people who love the Japanese flavor of the series, so why replace the perfectly fine original Japanese theme?
Heh. I knew I'd manage to talk about games somehow.
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