225BatonRouge.com

Every year I do this list, Baton Rouge seems to get a little more interesting. It is flattering to think the list has anything to do with it, but really Baton Rouge has always been a great incubator for interesting music. It’s just lately that more of it has been sticking around. Here are 5 of the discs that really caught my ear in 2009, the ones that push past what we’ve already done and reach for what we can do.

5. Super Cooper & Teddy’s Sharecropper Band—As I reported back in September Selwyn Cooper shakes up the Baton Rouge blues formula so that some interesting things rise to the top. “Country Boy,” Cooper’s Isaac Hayes-style soul recitation about zydeco, never fails to astound me when it comes up on shuffle. It’s not zydeco, but perhaps meta-zydeco. Whatever it is, it stops me in my tracks. Click here for their Myspace page.

4. Secret Annexe - The Nights are Growing Long—One of Baton Rouge’s most densely populated and musically diverse bands, Secret Annexe has over the years zeroed in on the places where the six members of the group overlap. Viola lines meet jangly guitars against throbbing bass lines and layers of carefully wrought songcraft. Released digitally on their site, The Nights are Growing Long provides a model on how a band can find its voice on its own terms. Click here to check them out online.

3. Don Juanabe – The White Album—Some records dazzle you with an ironclad concept, others—like this one—leave you delightfully unsure about what’s going on. Baton Rouge music veteran James Fogle is the mastermind behind this often-hilarious yet spot-on set of R&B slow jams, smoother than high-class satin sheets, tighter than, well… you get the idea. The extended booty calls that comprise this record touch on every smooth operator from Teddy Pendergrass to Prince, performed with a true lover’s delicate touch. It is a rare thing to find a record this funny that is also this fine. Click here for his Myspace page.

2. Prom Date – The Demo—Most bands wish they had a demo that sounds as mature, as self-confident as that of the rising stars of the Phantom Party cabal. Prom Date’s songs are serpentine, frenetic things built of hundreds of small moving parts, a mechanism that allow Brett Burke and David Fuller’s often theatrical vocals soar above what a local band will attempt. This is not art rock for art’s sake, nor is it for rock’s sake. You get the feeling that these are kids who have really found what it sounds like to be alive right now in their own skin, and are brave an talented enough to share it. Click here for their Myspace page.

1. Frozen Bears – 2000—Adam Waller and Kevin Hurstell recorded these twenty tracks on a crude four-track in an even cruder apartment almost 10 years ago, and yet these songs are among the most urgent, the most “right now” things I’ve heard all year. They run the gamut from clever experimental sketches to roughly hewn pop mini-masterpieces, the likes of which the Guided By Voices’ Bob Pollard would give his last beer to create. Some of the country’s most eclectic tastemakers, namely freeform radio titans WFMU and freeform critical voice Chuck Eddy have sung this little record’s praises. I listen to a lot of music and it takes something really fresh, something in the grips of its own beauty to surprise me, and 2000 has twenty little surprises in store for me every time I put it on. Click here for their Myspace page.