Take a second and imagine all of the music that’s produced in a year. You’ve got the Top 40 artists, jazz musicians, metal thrashers, pasty dudes singing in the shower – it’s really quite mind-boggling. So, last week, Amazon.com, one of the largest media retailers ever, puts together a list of the 100 Outstanding ’09 Albums You Might Have Missed. Guess who is #17? Well, seventeen is some generic pop-sounding outfit with a vaguely Dylan-esque lead singer called Brookville. But #18? Yeah, that’s Eau Claire’s favorite electro-indie-pop group Laarks. And #78? Funny you should ask, because that’s local orchestral-pop wunder-group The Daredevil Christopher Wright. And after picking through this list, I can assure you this is not just some laundry list of all the indie albums from the year that Amazon would like to unload – it features jazz, hip-hop, country, and even some classical, which means some thought actually went into these picks.

This really is a cool moment for local music fans – whenever the national press speaks of the Bearded One, they always mention Eau Claire as a hotbed of rock talent. Although quite a few local groups have been touring their little keisters off and earning some very respectable blogosphere attention, they have not yet garnered the type of attention that crosses over into the non-musical-hipster realm, i.e. where real people live. Inclusion on this list, though, definitely elevates Laarks and Daredevil to a different level of national notoriety.