CJLO's finally compiled our year end chart for 2009! This year was packed full of some pretty sweet records but the one that stood out the most amungst many of our DJs and hit the coveted number one spot was none other than Face Control, the second album from Montreal's own Handsome Furs.

With that said our shows are as diverse as diverse can be. We've asked our DJs to come up with their own favorites of 2009, or even the decade! Highlights of the decade have included Radiohead's Kid A, Sonic Youth's Rather Ripped, Talib Kweli & DJ Hi-Tek's Reflection Eternal and Arcade Fire's Funeral. Keep reading to check out a whole slew of top 10's!

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PEACHES and I Feel CREAM in my pants:

After a long day at the office, I was on my way to meet my lady friend Daphne for a night of “the teaches of” the foul-mouthed, feminist, electro-clash, costume changing, shock rapper-rocker, Peaches.

As we walked into the show room, we could hear the crowd buzzing with anticipation.  To my dismay, Amanda Blank had already performed but I could tell the time for Peaches was near.  Suddenly, the lights dimmed.  There was a silence followed by a roar as Peaches and her three piece band, Sweet Machine set the stage. "Oh my god, they are giants vaginas," Daphne said to me, wide-eyed and giggling.  They looked...

If anyone needed proof that Britain’s The XX are a full-blown phenomenon at this point, they’d do well to have attended their debut performance in Montreal, opening for labelmates and fellow Britishers Friendly Fires. Playing the opening slot of a pricey, early-evening midweek show, the very young group packed the not-inconsiderably sized Le National with seeming ease – complaints of scalpers hiking tickets into the $50 range cropped up in the usual places. Their already iconic logo / album cover graced a few t-shirts. All this for a band almost no one (outside of Rough Trade’s surely...

If there's one thing that The Swell Season's Glen Hansard can be applauded for, it's his willingness to wear his emotions on his sleeve. Watching the Irish songsmith slowly seduce a crowd over a lovely evening using both his hard-luck, tough-love theatrics and witty, heartfelt stage banter was a rare sight to behold.

Hansard has an innate ability to be able to take an entire room and reduce the atmosphere to something akin to a show given at a tiny coffee shop, making every audience member count. His mannerisms and ways of speaking brought both the audience and the performer closer together, telling stories, joking and...

Porcupine Tree is a band that makes you forget that there is a world outside the concert hall.

The reason? Well let me start off right away with the fact that Porcupine Tree is a phenomenal live act.  I, like many, am not well versed when it comes to their music, so I enlisted the help of my good friend, Colin MacFarlane, who has been a loyal follower of Porcupine Tree, to accompany me on this melodic adventure and they did not fail to enthrall me.

They always kick off their concerts, as Colin told me, by playing their most recent albums in their entirety.  In this case they played the...

I won’t lie, as I made my way over to Club Soda for this particular round of performances; I made a somewhat mischievous promise to myself that I would hear no Ska music that evening. A lofty goal, given that the show was headlined by none other than Streetlight Manifesto, one of the most popular bands left in the floundering North American Ska scene. However, my interest in the show had absolutely nothing to do with upward guitar strumming or horn sections and had everything to do with the monstrous Bad Religion meets Dillinger Escape Plan sound of New Bedford, Massachusetts’ A Wilhelm Scream. I discovered the band almost four years ago with the release of their sophomore record as AWS, Ruiner (though it...

The odd thing about The Planet Smashers is that I know they're a great band and I know I'll enjoy the show, but I never go see them. My guess is that it’s been at least 6 years since the last time I saw them. The thing that sticks out in my memory about that last time is that it seemed like I and my friend were the only two people in the audience who weren't dancing. Well this time I was flying solo, so take a guess how many people there were standing still…

Me not dancing isn't anything against The Planet Smashers, they're awesome, it's just dancing doesn't make sense. In fact, I have to give them credit for getting the-number-of-people-that-fit-into-a-sold-out-Club-Soda to do something so...

Flogging Molly has a very large fan base, especially in Montreal. The concert was sold out mid-day  of the show and fans of this Irish punk band were lined up outside Metropolis an hour before doors were scheduled to open. Not only is Flogging Molly one of the most entertaining bands to see live, but they have this uncanny talent for picking the best opening bands. This year there were two very different bands that opened for good ol' Floggy and both were insanely good!

Dub Trio, their name couldn't be more different than their sound. Yes, there are three of them in the band but their sound is...

This is the fifth time I’ve attempted to begin this Street Dogs review with some kinda hyperbolic statement about how the show blew my mind and how Foufs is the perfect venue for a punk show and how the Street Dogs revolutionize street punk in 2009 but really? Who wants to read that? Not every show has to be mind-blowing or revolutionary to be good, and believe you me, this show was GOOD…except for one teency little programming snag.

Until about two days prior to the show, Boston’s own Ashers were set to play second as direct support for the Street Dogs while the show was to be opened by Toronto’s...

Wasting no time on hyperbole, I’m just gonna jump right to the quotable: The World/Inferno Friendship Society skirt the line between innovation and outright inspiration and their entirely unique brand of orchestral, cabaret proto-punk may very well bring new life to a genre rife with cliché and stale personalities (and if you disagree you are wrong.)

Being an Inferno fan for quite some time now, I was more than a little stoked to hear they would be making the trip up to Montreal to finally play the city (and indeed Canada proper) for the first time in the band’s 13 year history. That having been said, I still did not know what to expect. Having seen the band three times before this (each time with a slightly different...