By David Greenwald

LOS ANGELES, Calif. --

It’s still weeks before Thanksgiving, and already Christmas decorations are lining the streets of Los Angeles – and they’re not the only things that have arrived early this year.

With almost two full months of releases left in 2009, Amazon.com has released its list of the best albums of 2009, the first major musical best-of list of the year.

So how do the popular Web site’s picks stack up?

At No. 1 was Neko Case’s “Middle Cyclone” – a rich collection of intimate alt-country that deserves a spot, if not the top one, on anyone’s list. Neko’s stunning voice is an American treasure, and “Middle Cyclone” finds her applying it to songs more sunny and less serious than her usually dark material.

The list included many strong choices from rock and folk acts just left of the dial – the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Phoenix, Animal Collective, Grizzly Bear, St. Vincent and Dirty Projectors were among the deserving indie rock marquee names to make the cut, along with exciting newcomers The Pains of Being Pure at Heart and Girls. All are picks that should figure largely on critics’ best-of rundowns, including mine.

Other fine selections from the list include Burt Bacharach-loving troubadour Sondre Lerche’s “Heartbeat Radio” and, on the more mainstream front, Kelly Clarkson’s “All I Ever Wanted,” which landed at No. 72.

Elsewhere, though, the list is cluttered with a number of acts that garnered neither major critical accolades nor significant sales – and made music that this critic would call less than stunning.

Under-the-radar bands such as La Roux, Cass McCombs, Mayer Hawthorn, Thao, Cave Singers, and Throw Me The Statue all ranked among the list’s top 50, in favor of well-regarded releases by Paramore, Raekwon, The-Dream and the Flaming Lips, among others. Strangely, the list also ignored such critically approved, commercially robust artists as The Decemberists, Andrew Bird and Regina Spektor – all musicians who made the site’s best-selling CDs of 2009 list with smart, catchy singer-songwriter-based collections.

Still, choices like these point toward the Amazon editors having genuine passion for their picks – given its status as a retail site, On The Download has to give them credit for choosing a number of albums either unknown or weakly rated elsewhere. With two months still to go in 2009, though (and anticipated albums from Clipse, Alicia Keys, Lil Wayne, Susan Boyle, John Mayer and many others still to come), I hope they’ll wait a little longer next year to show their enthusiasm.

Copyright 2009 by NBC Universal, Inc. All rights reserved.
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