Heartless Bastards: The Mountain – (Fat Possum Records)

It has been my observation that the quickest way to ruin a great record for numero uno is to momentarily let your guard down, slip up and tell someone else about it. One minute you're letting a friend in on something you stumbled across at the library and the next, some loudmouth you intentionally keep on the furthest margins of your social life is wheelin' about town with the windows down, broadcasting the album you had once secretly endorsed as the new soundtrack to their disproportionately flaccid existence.

Sure, I wouldn't want to rob anyone trustworthy of a truly exceptional listening experience and I genuinely feel that artists and musicians should have every opportunity for their material to be heard. But the truth is that some people don't deserve it; that they're better suited living in the past, spinning and re-spinning their U2 catalog, swearing up and down that they're history's greatest band and that their best is still yet to come. Some people simply cannot be satisfied unless they gallop and grind the hooves down to the bone, and it ruins the ride for the rest of us.

However, this blog has somewhat compelled me to reevaluate my stance on the misuse and abuse of the music that I love. I plan to come clean on a lot of stuff I might normally attempt to protect by keeping it on the down-low. So in the spirit of this holiday season and in an earnest effort to reverse my selfish tendency to hoard all of the top-drawer ear candy, I wish to report Heartless Bastards' The Mountain as my first revelation and as my pick for the best album of 2009.

You don't want to miss this understated, sure-to-be-overlooked masterpiece. Nothing I've heard this year even comes close to this complete package. Loaded with crunching rhythm guitar and swirling pedal steel throughout, the core of the album keeps a deliberate pace. Dirty, enduring and powerful even on their own, the songs snap together; a perfect set of magnets linking the underlying themes and wearing a consistent path between hard rocking confessional and the longing and estrangement one often experiences in an overcrowded bar or beer hall when trying to evade the memory of personal tragedy. At only eleven tracks, The Mountain doesn't ever overdo a good thing, easily lending itself to repeat listens in one sitting. Heartless Bastards have recorded a truly timeless, unforgettable gem. In an era where style upstages substance in virtually every endeavor produced, the effort put forth on The Mountain deserves a fate far better than relegation to a distant, drooping shelf choked with pop music's repurposed beats and scads of Auto-Tune addicted also-rans. Buy this record for yourself and, what the hell... for somebody I hate, even if they inevitably will ruin it for everyone else.

Click HERE to listen to the album.