The Year. 1. Occident, out on the weekend.

1. Vampire Weekend - Vampire Weekend
XLTake a simple, relatively formulaic guitar, bass and drums construction. Adds subtle keys and collegiate vocals. Tacks on an occasional baroque string flourish. And end up with what? Well, with the keys transformational steps in the process mired in the cloudy confusion that obscures the reasons for all great pop music, you end up with the best album of 2008. Nothing to it.

It couldn't have been any other way. No other album dominated my headphones like this one did, or wrapped up my consciousness in its deceptively simple folds. I first encountered Vampire Weekend late by blogger standards (having missed out on the blue CD-R and attendant hype), but early enough by normal person standards. Some time after Christmas last year, I saw the video for A-Punk and thought it was by-numbers NME bollocks. Then, after returning to college, I was handed a promo copy of the album, a white disc in a clear plastic sleeve. Thanks XL for splashing out there.

I was expecting it to be bad, to be honest. I convinced myself it was for a little while. But it's impossible to resist it. It's insidious. Once I'd heard it twice it would not leave the jukebox in my head. Waking up in the morning I would hear the harpsichords of 'M79', disembodied, and be unable to remember where I knew them from. Walking down the street, I'd tap the syncopations of the drum pattern in 'Mansard Roof' once it kicks in, subconsciously.

But the key song was one that doesn't sound a whole lot like the quintessence of the album - it doesn't have African rhythms, fruit-flavoured keys or particularly referential lyrics. Walcott. Sounds like the Walkmen if they'd had a wash. Perfect pop song, perfect length, perfect builds and breakdowns.

Then I saw it. It's like that all over. I listened again and again, so that it was whole verses, with the lyrics lodged in my memory, that would appear when I was reading newspapers or playing games or walking through college corridors. It became a daily thing for me, one of the few bandnames that survived the initial wearing-off of novelty on my mp3 players.

If they were slipping out of my consciousness towards the end of the year, the gig brought them right back again, and the fact of interviewing them forced me to look at them in different ways, to question different angles, to probe and see what happens. Doing a degree in English literature at the same time as writing for an indie music magazine probably leads to unnecessarily prosaic and theoretical approaches to things. But whatever.

I asked them about it, they told me what they thought, and I really enjoyed hearing it. It changed what I heard again. It became more African just because people elsewhere were talking about it being African. But the interview challenged that too:

"I think the idea that you can only appreciate African music by associating it somehow with poverty is just as ridiculous as saying you can only listen to African music if you’re some rich safari hunter. It really is nothing to do with it. I hope that people who listen to African music, just because they like the sound of it, would also take it upon themselves to be a moral, ethical person. But, you know, those are two separate things. I find that the people who get angry about an American band being interested in African music aren’t offering any alternative. They tend to be the people who exoticise African music, and ghettoise it, as something that can only be appreciated in this particular way."

And as if to pull things back out of the theory and back to the real world, they play a new song that sounds like Strawberry Jam and a cover of a Fleetwood Mac song at the gig. As if to say "we are a pop band, stop over-thinking it".

As I listen to it tonight, it's no less exciting than it has been in the year I've heard it. It might be, yet again, an overly subjective choice for best album, but I know other people think it too. And there's no reason to deny that I've listened to it most and enjoyed it more than anything else, more cerebral or more wrought, put out in 2008. I had it clamped to my ears for 12 months. When it wasn't, it was bouncing around my head. It even made me go to see a band from the Congo with my afro-enthusiast friend. That's something.

The Year. 2. In Berlin I saw two men fuck in a dark corner of a basketball court.

2. Why? - Alopecia
Anticon
What is this album about? That's the question that has kept me coming back to this album, something that I never thought I would like so much even when I heard it first in the shadow of a newly-wrought appreciation for oaklandazulasylum and Elephant Eyelash. On every listen, a new line stands out and seems to colour the whole differently, but then on closer inspection it all disappears, like some imagined structure in the clouds of the cover.

It's impossible to pin down, or I find it impossible anyway. There's so much to it. For one thing, death is unavoidable on Alopecia, no matter where you look. The first line: "I'm not a ladies man, I'm a landmine, filming my own fake death". On 'Fatalist Palmistry', he sleeps on his back "because it's good for the spine (and coffin rehearsal)". On 'The Song of the Sad Assassin', Yoni and the perpetual female "you" find a dead body floating in water, and wrap its wound anyway.

So that's the first step. It's about death. But that's just a black background to paint on. All human existence is about death. There are layers still to unwrap. The other universal which is omnipresent on Alopecia is sex, as seen inside the head of Yoni Wolf. Everyone's normal is someone else's perverted, but some of the lyrics challenge by most standards. "I'll suck the marrow out and rape your hollow bones, Yoni". "I never said I didn't have syphilis, Miss Listless". "Stalker's my whole style, and if I get caught, I'll deny."

Now sex and death are universal, and obviously they've been done to death [ugh] but when they're unearthed in such a bizarre and obsessive manner, it's hard not to see things differently. Need more ingredients? Try Christian imagery. Son of a rabbi, talking about a past or future girlfriend as the "female young messiah", "what the church-folk mean by the good news" on 'Simeon's Dilemma'. It gets thicker than that, though. Perhaps aware of the trade-off sometimes known as 'selling out', or perhaps for some other unknowable reason, the martyr references are nothing short of messianic. "If I get lost, or die on a cross, at least I wasn't born in a manger." "Does the cock crow thrice until someone is denied?"

I'm not going to get any further with that sort of approach, I doubt. New parts will reveal themselves, but there'll never be a whole. That's the thing about lyrics like this. To twist the meaning of what one of the ghostly fathers said about language, it has both a social and an individual aspect. Social is what we can get.

It's the sex, the death, the weirdly incongruous religious imagery. But individual is what we miss, and what we can never know. When you write a diary, you write, first and last, to yourself. And that's what Why? is. That's why it'll never be see-through. It might not even be see-through to Yoni. It really is something literary though, and it makes me a little sad to think back to those fist-pumping fans singing back to him about raping his hollow bones at Andrew's Lane. If you say it yourself, maybe it's a personal sort poetry. If someone else says it to you... isn't it a threat?

The Year. 3. The kind of guy who would leave you in a K-hole to go play Halo in the other room.

3. Of Montreal - Skeletal Lamping
Polyvinyl
Word on the street has it that the album format is dead, and that pick ‘n’ mix downloading from mp3 megastores like iTunes and eMusic is the way of the future. Well, even if you’re naïve enough to believe that money will continue to change hands as the generations who have never had to pay for music march resolutely on, you’d have to be pretty deluded or incredibly narcissistic to believe that you’d be able to play God with an album and come out the better for it, telling from 30 second previews which songs are worth having and which are likely to be skipped over anyway. Like, on your iPod.

If you do believe that, though, I doubt you’d have much fun with Skeletal Lamping. Following up what seemed to be a perfect synthesis of the Pop Song and incredibly complex, cerebral structures and lyrics on ‘Hissing Fauna, Are You The Destroyer?’ (my erstwhile favourite album, though a late challenger may have emerged), Skeletal Lamping eschews the ultimately superficial shell that is the 2-6 minute song. If you were trying to figure out which songs you’d like from 30 second samples on Skeletal Lamping, you’d literally only be hearing about a quarter of the songs, or ‘sketches’ as they might more properly be called.

The concept, as I grasp it, is as follows: Kevin Barnes comes up with what is known in the trade (maybe) as a “bit”. Normally, this would be hewn through hard labour into something approaching a four-minute song. But on Skeletal Lamping, the bit exists in its own right. It segues into another bit, which could be completely different. This process repeats, and occasionally bits might reappear, or an extended sketch which goes verse-chorus-verse-chorus might show up, but the net result is, at the end of an hour or so, a fairly volatile mass of styles.

Could be terrible. Probably sounds terrible. Some people did think it was terrible, perhaps misguidedly expecting that most sacred of taboos, a repeat of the last record. It’s not terrible though. It is, very basically, a mind map. 50%, say, of Kevin Barnes’ mind is reasonably funky. 20-30% is concentrated in doe-eyed pop, some of which crosses over into the 50% funk. Sometimes he turns into Aladdin Sane for about a minute and a half. Sometimes he’s normal and he sings nostalgic love songs. Sometimes he is fucked up and sings from the perspective of a middle-aged pre-op transvestite named Georgie Fruit, who you may have met in the latter stages of Hissing Fauna.

The pieces of the jigsaw often don’t make sense in isolation. But of course they don’t. Who has ever looked at a single jigsaw piece and exclaimed in recognition of genius? That doesn’t happen. It’s a mind-map. It doesn’t make sense by itself. It makes sense as a whole, though, and probably gives a clearer picture of a particularly interesting person/character/person than any of Of Montreal’s previous efforts did, even though they weren’t half as veiled. At moments there is unbearable tension, such as a pitch-black invocation of the ubiquitous “ladies of the spread” who overlook Georgie’s existence. At other moments, there is reckless, screwy disco abandon that would seem like kids’ TV if you hadn’t heard the half-hour of music that came before.

Cokemachineglow said there weren’t moments of transcendence. I got into an argument about this, and shorn of the weapons of sobriety and reasoned detachment, I did what I always do. I got vaguely hysterical and threw my hands to heaven. There are moments of transcendence. So many. First track, Nonpareil of Favor. Its title is a fucking moment of transcendence in itself. Anyone who uses words that are almost exclusive to Macbeth in the title of a song is permanently invited to my house (familiarity with my sometimes musical project is not expected – but about 75% of the songs have Shakespeare references, mostly to Macbeth). The measuredness of the build-up is transcendent. Kevin/Georgie celebrating a love realised in the first (and only) verse is transcendent. Turning the first corner of the album is transcendent in itself, and the sleaze of the second sketch is, through contrast with the first one, transcendent too.

But let anyone stand in front of me and tell me that the three minute wig-out that follows is not transcendent. It struck me (on a bus, as these things are wont to do) that the wig-out at the end of Nonpareil of Favor is both a representation of chaos in the perceptible universe in general and inside the head of Kevin/Georgie. That somebody can make noise sound like something that specific and that complex is surely a sign of genius?

I realise that this review moreso than probably any of the other album reviews I’ve done here is based totally on a subjective view of the album. But in the end, every review is subjective. This CD, complete with David Barnes’ insanely detailed, analogous-to-the-music fold-out cover art, took over my life for a while. So it commands this place. The only question I have: how do you follow this?

The Year. 4. Humming tomorrow's nursery rhyme.

4. Beach House - Devotion
Bella Union

How important is style to music? I don't mean style in the sense of the 'skinny jeans and tight t-shirts' that the bouncers of certain London "indie-rock" club nights require. I mean the layers, the arrangements, the how of the music. Its realisation. The fact that there is a piano playing that melody instead of a flute. The fact that that word is slurred, rather than sounded properly.

It's probably a society-wide assumption that style is something that goes on top of music, especially in the essentially post-punk landscape of indie music. I first came across that idea reading about poetry and the debates various crusty Oxbridge types had about the concrete universals and intrinsic beauty or values, below rhyme and rhythm, below the mere words.

I thought it was missing the point then, and I think it's missing the point now, in the context of music. There's no such thing as style in that sense. It's not a paint that you put over some song that you've plucked from the ether, or your arse, depending on how flighty your aspirations. The song is its style, nothing more.

And it's from this theoretical standpoint (very sorry about all that, casual observer) that I oppose the criticism that Beach House's songs are boring, samey plods with an interminably sickly layer of style-paint coating them. These songs are made up of their lush organ sounds, reverb-soaked guitar lines and misted spider-web shakers. In the very same way that Times New Viking aren't a noise band with pop songs underneath, but a band with great noisy pop songs, Beach House aren't playing regular songs and then making them pristine and pretty with layers. It's a house, if you'll excuse the pun, built from the ground up. An impressionist faces a blank canvas and ends up with a masterpiece. He doesn't just colour in between the lines.

It's another world. There's a truth somewhere in those low organ chords that seem like they came from nowhere and have nowhere to go. Victoria Legrand's voice, reminiscent of Nico, gives her romantic evocations a sense of nobility that few peers manage. The album feels like a dream, a Xanadu trip, even though it's largely about domestic love. There's also something to be said for its timelessness. It could pass as a 60s album if it tried, but it doesn't sound derivative or retro. That's a surefire sign, I think, that it will last.

The Year. 5. Your face is on fire, your hair is a mess.

5. Times New Viking - Rip It Off
MatadorI just watched a documentary made by a very embittered middle-aged man about the obsession of record-collecting, the individuals who indulge in it, and what they sacrifice to do so. When offered "warmth" as an explanation as to why one would accumulate 20,000 LPs, one collector retold something that Geddy Lee (of the prog band Rush, who you never have to listen to) explained to him: vinyl isn't really warmer. The light distortion is just creating that impression, and he only prefers it to CD because it is recreating a recording embedded in his mind.Those sound waves that Neil Young claims are missing - they're just being filled up with the crackle of static and pick-up buzz. It's a self-created myth of nostalgia for a youth on the bedroom floor, a fondness for the ritual maybe, but nothing more.

It's an interesting thought. "Warm". What does that even mean, in a musical context? How do you describe it? Is cold something like Merriweather Post Pavilion, where every note occupies its own space and the entire song is preserved in crystal? Is warm... Times New Viking?

It certainly fits with Geddy Lee's theory. Live, Times New Viking are a reasonably polite, guitar-led indie pop band. It has elements of Flying Nun kiwi lo-fi, elements of surf rock, elements of 60s beat bands. Obvious elements of Yo La Tengo's moments of smaller scope. But on record, it becomes something transcendent. Because Times New Viking create noise. They create those in-between waves, the static. They do it on purpose, too. This isn't like the Royal Trux or something like that, people kicking their guitars and groaning. These are good, catchy songs. Recorded clean. And then forced, like the weight of the world turning coal into diamonds, into this muddle of colliding music, this mess.

When you can barely hear lyrics, the phrases you think you hear become so much more important. It's the same thing that made Murmur by REM so great, and that gets people through the sonar-bleep Sigur Rós songs while they wait for the drama to build again. Drop Out equates getting up late and being a wreck so perfectly, even if it doesn't mean to, that I can't wake up at 5 ever again without hearing it. And My Head? I'm not sure what's wrong with my head, but I know there's something, and it was probably caused by the noise.

Songs like The End Of All Things are made into something unreal by the gain-knob abuse. It sounds like the song that plays out over the credits after the actual, factual apocalypse... "that's all for everyone, that's all for you". And when the noise cuts out, the smoke clears and you can survey what is left of your house and your possessions (and your hearing, after half an hour of this on headphones)... there are about five seconds when you can see into the heart of all of this, and you know that it makes sense. I don't know why. I can't tell you why, just like I got the why of it wrong when I did my initial review for Analogue. It just makes sense.

The Year. 6. Do re mi fa so's star will scream.

6. Deerhoof - Offend Maggie

Kill Rock Stars

It's hard to say anything about Deerhoof that hasn't been said before. These guys are hardened vets of the highest rank. Satomi Matsuzaki and Greg Saunier plus others have been making genuinely fantastic albums with a barely plausible regularity, given their complexity, for a decade and change. Their music is a dichotomy. It's pop in its purest, most child-like sense, the sort of thing you could put on at 10 o'clock in the morning over Play-Do figures dancing in a meadow and have some sort of success with those aged 2-5. But it's also experimental, almost avant garde. And these two senses don't trade places. They exist simultaneously, in a captivating sort of musical messianic duality.

To be honest, I'm not really qualified to talk about Deerhoof on their own terms. Most people aren't, I would think. To talk about Offend Maggie in purely indie rock terms is probably as off-base as that Beatles review where he talks about their augmented shifts. But I don't know anything about Ornette Coleman. So I have to say that, when you jam an absolutely manic musical genius drummer/songwriter into a band with a Japanese woman who was essentially hired because she was quiet but who turned out pretty well, you get weird things. Like the Large Hadron Collider. And about as inexplicable to the man on the street.

So, some specifics about Offend Maggie then. It's probably the most focused album they've ever made. The guitars sound more in charge than ever, and the rhythm makes a serious point of upsetting that authority. Many of the songs are perfect. Offend Maggie the song is fussy but articulated, folky but assured. Basket Ball Get Your Groove Back is the best knowingly insane song Deerhoof have ever knowingly included. Snoopy Waves skips around with some fantastic riffs that I can only describe as groovy. On This Is God Speaking, God has nothing interesting to say, or if he does, it pales in comparison to the instrumental genius on every song surrounding it. Man has come too far.

The Year. 10-7.

10. Xiu Xiu - Women As Lovers
Kill Rock StarsWhen Women As Lovers was released, it was billed as the most accessible Xiu Xiu album yet. There are several reasons to support this assertion: one might be that every song is melodically-based, a departure from the frictive noise pieces that have appeared and sometimes defined the band's albums to date. You could also point to overtly accessible songs: the cover of Under Pressure, with vocal duties split between the worldly Michael Gira, the enchantingly innocent-sounding Caralee McElroy and the manic homosexual street preacher style of Jamie Stewart himself. No Friend Oh! with its pop chorus and non-difficult melodies is another example. However. However, however, however.

Who could be taken in by this idle talk? Women As Lovers might seem consumable, but it's not, and it's probably not meant to be. It is, as with everything from Jamie Stewart, concerned with the unbearable heaviness of existence. Torture in Guantanamo. His dead father's sex life. Intolerance. Percoset. Self-consciousness. Loneliness. In a voice that could be used to terrorise children into bed for fear of being cut into pieces and taken away in a black bag. This is heavily depressing stuff to listen to, and no doubt it's heavily depressing stuff to make.

But that's why Xiu Xiu exist. Seekers of happiness stroll no further. Women As Lovers is everything bad, set in high contrast on a stage with nightmarish gargoyles carved where the gold leaf and pegasi should bed. When it leaves itself room to seethe, like on Master Of The Bump (Kurt Stambaugh I Can Feel The Soil Falling Over My Head), it evokes empathy. When it builds itself up in balls of tension, it calls forth a more inexplicable sense of sadness. But the emotion never ceases, like a bumpy rollercoaster that only goes down. Music as nightmare.


9. El Guincho - Alegranza
Young TurksIt's a rare treat to be able to use words like "spectacular" or "extravaganza" about an album that is even remotely listenable. Imagine the joy, then, of finding Barcelona resident El Guincho's Alegranza. Straddling the hitherto underrated no-man's-land between latter-day Animal Collective and tropicalia compilations, Alegranza is essentially a beach party in a can, the soundtrack to an imaginary ur-summer. The result of applying lo-fi looping techniques to the cheesiest of musical sources is an unrelenting, swirling, euphoric experience. It is not mere reckelss abandon, however, with the same notes of childish wonder (and a couple of melodies) from Panda Bear's Person Pitch making appearances. The highlight, Kalise, is repetitive almost to the point of infuriation for three and a half minutes, until it recedes without warning into a chorus that approaches anaesthesis in its fulfilled joyousness. Just like the inevitable but slightly embarrassing situation of involuntarily singing random words that sound vaguely like the original Spanish, any words I use to try to explain how much fun El Guincho is on a sunny day are meaningless. Alegranza means joy. In translation I mean. But you get what I'm saying.

((This is from Analogue. Last one from there, I promise.))


8. Jeremy Jay - A Place Where We Could Go
KTake the Everly Brothers. Strain off their smile for the benefit of Good Christian Television Viewers, and remove the harmonies. Put more reverb on everything. Then imagine what would happen if a very strange, soft-spoken Patrick Wolf-esque Californian in a v-neck and tie took the first verse of any classic song and just repeated the lines with more and more emphasis every time. There's something very ordinary about Jeremy Jay's music, referential as it is to 50s teen drama ballads, David Bowie, Buddy Holly, Jonathan Richman and French chanteuses. But there's also something spectacularly surreal about it. Maybe that's what an absence of audible influences from after 1972 will do.

Jeremy Jay is as tall and thin as a Topman model, and to be honest, he looks exactly like one. Jeremy Jay grew up in California but for some reason his family was Francophone within the household. Jeremy Jay is on K Records. Jeremy Jay seems like a cookie-cutter hyper-literate bohemian type, but a brief MySpace exchange revealed that he's not much of a speller. There's a lot that doesn't make sense about Jeremy Jay, and that's what makes him so impossibly intriguing. I mean, what is this guy picturing when he closes his eyes and listens to his own music? Much more pertinently, what should the listener be picturing?

The mystery of Jeremy Jay is a part of what endeared him to me. But he definitely doesn't lack the songs to back it up. Beautiful Rebel and Heavenly Creatures as a tandem would blow the shit out of most of the crackly remasters they sell in infomercials late at night on the lesser channels. Escape To Aspen, just like everything on the album, seems barely held together with thread, but it is still toe-tappingly catchy and strangely beautiful. But the title track is the highlight. "We'll meet super late. And we'll go for a walk. Dream kisses. Danger. Romance. No-one knows." Not sung, but spoken urgently. Is he poking fun at himself or is he serious? Does it matter?

7. So Cow - I'm Siding With My Captors
Covert BearIf success in music came proportional to merit instead of by fickle democratic means, So Cow would be sitting on a multi-platinum catalogue, appearing on "OMG! The 90s!" specials on Channel 4 and marrying Zooey Deschanel. Alas.

What are the best Irish albums ever? Loveless? U2? Something by that glut of late 80s bands that are held in such high esteem? I've got a suggestion. Nobody would ever print this in a broadsheet, but I'm Siding With My Captors is genuinely up there. It's short, seamless and literally spotless in terms of the absence of chaff. There is no such thing as a highlight, because there aren't any low points. Only the style of delivery changes.

Greetings is a plaintive, self-doubting, heartrending love song, perfectly measured over two minutes, and it would be perfect for radio in a parallel universe. On the more unwieldy end of the guitar pop is the 52 second One Hundred Helens, a semi-surreal and deceptively unhurried piece enumerating the Helens on So Cow's street.

Shackleton is another in the line of Brian Kelly songs about inadequacy and love, led by a wavering synth-organ sound over what sounds like a Casio preset drum track. "One day I'll write the song you deserve babe, I'll give it all I have/One day I'll write the song you require, until then, la-la-la".

Lines like that are the overt signs, but throughout the all-too-brief 29 minutes of the album, there is an all-pervasive sadness that sets it apart from These Truly Are End Times. These aren't character songs, and they're not all that cased in metaphor either. It documents a life, not just lyrically, but in the reverb-soaked chords, the impossibly knotted riffs over weird bar lengths, the progressions that feel just slightly wrong. I probably say this online at the same rate that poverty claims victims in the developing world, but So Cow is the real thing . Though I am confident that ongoing lack of recognition will thankfully still provide no obstacle to his making albums as good as this.

The Year. Interlude 3: Free Download

((To take you through this, Brian Kelly a.k.a. So Cow. The man needs no introduction, but if you need one, try here. See what I did there?))

Dublin Duck Dispensary - Luanqibazao

Rack and Ruin

Luanqibazao was the best Irish album released this year. I think. Not many will agree. But then they will have had both the advantage of actually listening to a lot of Irish music (I don't really bother keeping up anymore, save GPO and Adebisi) and they will most likely have had the disadvantage of not even knowing this collection exists.

It's been tagged as no-fi. Incorrect. This is fi. It's pop-fi and it's smile-fi. It's gallop-fi and it's fist-fi. It's a selection of timeless pop moments run through a single adventurous, curious mind, that of Bobby Aherne. This isn't about your Times New Vikings and your Lovvers', this is about your Abbas (Mamma Mia!, not Mahmoud) and your early Beatles singles. Peg it with Slanted and Enchanted if you must indie-schmindie it up, but it's far lovelier.

I can't claim to have any idea what Aherne is singing about. I'm content not knowing either. It's his world, after all. The arrangements on these songs are ridiculously more interesting than most others I've heard this year. There's thought going into this, people. Original thought in that most played out of musical arenas.

There are standouts. Happy Holidays fizzes and spazzes. Break A Leg falls over itself in restrained giddiness before becoming something really quite beautiful. Roald Dahl is perfectly-judged childish pop dramatics. Brain Damage shames and embarrasses most contemporary bands in its 25 seconds.

Then again, I think Deerhunter and Beach House suck shit, so what do I know.

((I play in Bobby's live band, so I felt awkward posting about the album, but I couldn't let a list of 25 go without mentioning it, purely for the way it got into my head and fucked shit around this year. You can still get it for free on Rack and Ruin, along with acupofteaandasliceofcake and They Do The Police In Different Voices))

The Year. 15-11.

15. Fight Like Apes and the Mystery of the Golden Medallion
Model Citizen
A disclaimer: I know the production is dodgy. I know Something Global sounds bizarrely like Avril Lavigne. I know all that. It took me a month to get over minor differences in inflection on the songs that were on the EP. But I got there in the end. And as a collection of songs, it'd be remiss of me to leave this out just because it wasn't the album to put Dublin on the world indie map. So many of these songs are undeniable. Lend Me Your Face, Jake Summers and Do You Karate are all the pulse-raising clumps of alternapop they were last year. But it's heartening to note that the rookie Digifucker is, in all its abstraction, dejection and aggression, probably the album highlight. And Tie Me Up With Jackets, the lyrical high point of the Apes so far, wraps up a Side A that could fight almost anything and win. The second half is patchier, but that's forgivable. Hot Press insanely said that it was the best thing in the world in 2008. It's not, but it's a remarkable display of off-kilter songwriting ability, and I have a feeling it will still stand on its feet in ten or twenty years because of it. Now, who has Steve Albini's phone number?
MySpace, or if you're interested, this is a blog named after a line from Jake Summers.


14. Roots Manuva - Slime and Reason
Big DadaHaving watched Dizzee Rascal and Estelle zoom past him to worldwide audiences and financial reward with half the lyrical talent,‭ ‬it would be easy to forgive Rodney Smith some bitterness.‭ ‬However,‭ ‬Slime and Reason's opening line,‭ "‬A lot of people don't know about Smith‭"‬,‭ ‬seems more like a simple statement of fact than a complaint.‭ ‬This album doesn't acknowledge anything in its surroundings.‭ ‬Rather,‭ ‬it is the newest chapter in an isolated musical portrait of the artist.The music channels the place-in-time feeling of Jamaica's Studio One recordings from the‭ ‬1960s and‭ ‬1970s.‭ ‬However,‭ ‬the dancehall carnival feeling is skin deep only.‭ ‬Smith is one of the difficult school of rappers that fight with their demons on acetate for the world to hear.‭ ‬Consistently throughout,‭ ‬but especially on closer‭ The Struggle‭‬,‭ ‬we find him enumerating the difficulties of balancing artistic advancement and the need to provide for others.There are few rappers in the world who can deal with real internal turmoil and lyrical skill in a successful way.‭ ‬Nas is one.‭ ‬Roots Manuva is another.‭ ‬There is enough universal wisdom in Slime and Reason to make it one of the most vital hip hop albums I've ever heard.
This review originally from Analogue. The video to Again and Again is pretty excellent, and you should check this uninformed review against that of the experts.


13. Stephen Malkmus & The Jicks - Real Emotional Trash
Domino"Of all my stoned digressions, some have mutated into the truth". That's the first line of Real Emotional Trash, and that's the premise. Follow the music where it wants to go. Wait for the beauty to reveal itself. In a world of indie rock that Malkmus perceives to be divided between the Gang of Four devotees and those who love Pavement, an album in the milieu of long-deleted 60s bands in the psychedelic slipstream of the more cocksure likes of Hendrix and The Doors is likely to be a curveball. Many felt it didn't work, but my gut feeling is that comparative listening is hurting Malkmus. You can only judge an album on its own isolate merits. And Real Emotional Trash is not devoid of those, even if they are longer and a little more esoteric than those that preceded it. Simply following the music where it wants to go paints pictures with subtle and novel shades. But it is the clearings in the dense forest of fretplay that provide the true transcendence. When Out of Reaches or Gardenia pop out of the furore, context makes them something strangely, and differently, beautiful.
SM is at least my second favourite interview I've ever done. This video might be better though.


12. Wolf Parade At Mount Zoomer
Sub PopSpencer Krug is a font of genius. This is a truth self-evident. Picture his input to anything as a white light. The question is not whether or not the germ of inspiration is going to be there, the question is how it's going to translate to music. In front of the white light, you could put any number of things. You could have slides of colour, or you could cast shadows, or block it off, or whatever. That all comes from the context. How do you listen to a new Wolf Parade album when the guy who wrote almost all of the truly great songs on the last one has spent the last three years taking his music into new, complex and much more developed regions with a different band? You just have to go with it. It works, too. It's not quite the opus that the unjustly underrated Random Spirit Lover unfolded into, but the spidery, proggy character of Mount Zoomer stakes its own claim. It's surprisingly unified for what is now essentially a side project for both primary songwriters. Songs such as Boeckner's bare, aching Fine Young Cannibals and Krug's more knotted but equally aching Call It A Ritual sit well together and create a slightly gothic feeling that evokes the wildness that the title describes.
Dan Gray did an interview which was pretty good, and Pitchfork did several.


11. No Age - Nouns
Sub PopI read a lot of magazines and blogs, and a lot of my friends do too, so I've slowly developed quite a stockpile of indie rock anecdotes. With some of them, I can remember the page and issue of the magazine it came from. With others, it's just a vague recollection, or something I was told in passing. My favourite No Age anecdote is one of the latter. I was once told that Nouns was recorded and mixed in full, then played through a guitar amp and recorded again with a single microphone. This recording is the one that ended up being released. I'm not sure if this is actually true, but it sounds a lot like it and it's a good story. It's loud and it's muddy. Everything is distorted. But it has more going for it than the half-attentive stoner shoegaze it might be, just on production values. Eraser bristles with static electricity before releasing it and heading into a hooky chorus. And Teen Creeps, as I have noted here before, is one of the tracks of the year. It's not often that music perceptibly explodes on your speakers, but this does.
Metacritic is an interesting one here for such a divisive record, but bring the band and you have two friends for life.

The Year. Interlude 2: Homemade, stapled-together super-limited EP

((So Cow will feature on this list more conventionally, don't worry, but as well as the excellent I'm Siding With My Captors, his output this year featured another work worthy of note. Destined to be apocryphal, this CD-R in a hand-daubed canvas sleeve did not fit the mandate of the list. But, being Ireland's best ever musical product, it would be criminally remiss to leave anything he made out the yearly reckoning. So I asked the infinitely more qualified Bobby Aherne of HiFi Popcorn, State and Dublin Duck Dispensary to do it.))

So Cow - Wackity Schmackity Doo
Unreleased
Like Mr. McCausland before me, I shall begin this intermissionary kudos by speculating as to why our Stupefied host has neglected from including my assigned album on his rundown. Perhaps it's because the status of Wackity Schmackity Doo as an actual album is ambiguous; despite its 13 tracks, its creator instead prefers to refer to it as an EP. Or perhaps it's because it remains sinfully unreleased; its existence confined to 25 CD-Rs sold in Galway's Roisin Dubh on a night in early September. Another likely reason is that it would be slightly unorthodox and overly-enviable for one young man to hog two spaces on a 'Top 25' list for a year in which hundreds of very worthwhile albums reared their heads; a fact testament to Brian Kelly's high status as Ireland's Europe's very own Jay Lindsey.

Wackity Schmackity Doo (taking its title from a Patton Oswalt gag) was conceived and birthed in a single weekend in So Cow's garden shed. This might explain Kelly's less-wrought-than-normal lyrics, as well as some of the more off-kilter bits, but it does little to explain the colourful splashes of snotty yet adorable punk rock (like the any-other-band-would-kill-for 'Outskirts' or 'The 'You're Nice' Mysteries') or the band-jamming cohesion of this curt solo experiment as a whole. It may not be a concept album, but it does have a conceptual timeline: So Cow welcomes you to his radio station (102.4FM), So Cow wants to be your boyfriend, So Cow thinks he was a bad (shitty, even) boyfriend, So Cow gets bored singing about relationships and instead composes some R.P.G. video game soundtracks and strums a mandolin for a few minutes before returning with an earnest reimagining of the 'Only Fools and Horses' theme tune. The Wall it ain't, but these impromptu eccentricities are what make it - only twelve weeks after its creation - a lost classic.

So actually, in summation, the most likely reason that Those Geese Were Stupefied is omitting this strange and sparkling gemstone from his 'Best of 2008' list is so that he can feature its inevitably celebrated reissue on his 'Best of 2028' list. For those who wait, good things can't fail to come.

((Bobby is the default James Boswell to So Cow's Dr. Johnson, as proven by this interview. If you need this CD-R, your best bet is some sustained pestering.))

The Year. 20-16.

20. Port O'Brien - All We Could Do Was Sing
City Slang
You know how your English teacher in school told you not to start your story with waking up? Well, Port O'Brien don't care what your English teacher says. All We Could Do Was Sing opens with a fantastic, cathartic track called "I Woke Up Today", sung (or shouted) by everyone in the band in unison. It's one of those songs that turns into the only thing you can think about for a couple of weeks. Communal and celebratory. Other than this, Port O'Brien do a good line in nautically-themed folky indie. From 'Moby Dick' to 'The Old Man and the Sea', the ocean has always been an excellent paradigm for the more solitary emotions in the spectrum. Port O'Brien sell the sea myth pretty hard, but the fact that main songwriter Van Pierszalowski genuinely does commercially fish for salmon makes for heightened fascination with his lyrics. 'Fisherman's Son' is a particularly salient example of this, expressing the conflict that arises from having to drop real life and go to sea for several months. The closer, 'Valdez', is a short, sleepy ditty that begins with the line "Exxon, Exxon, clean it up" and sounds like it was recorded on a dictaphone buried under a large pile of laundry. The album is varied enough to be continuously interesting, and if ever you wanted a break from the stresses of real life, there are worse places to look for it than Port O'Brien.
This review differs to the others, and is kind of spazzy, because I did it for Analogue right after I got the CD. The original print review, a live review and a full length interview all archived on the Analogue site.

19. Parenthetical Girls - Entanglements
Slender Means Society
A sprawling orchestral pop album conceived and realised over the course of four years by a man who claims not to "know a G from an A". Worried? Don't be. The defining moment of this album comes at its very beginning, as if to rebut scepticism and speak for itself before anyone has a chance to second guess it. A piano key is tentatively struck. A few chords are sounded, as if to test not only the instrument, but also the ear of the listener. Then, a flourish of violins and Zac Pennington appears to take it the rest of the way. 'Four Words' is very much emblematic of the album as a whole - a vocal narrative of literate lust, familiar from previous releases, but carefully supported by an impossibly complex artifice of hundreds of individual instrumental tracks from bumbling brass to Andrew Bird-esque pizzicatos. One possible criticism is that the arrangements, while all orchestral or at least "big" in some way, don't necessarily follow any central theme, and the mood can swing between the baroque and the Disney soundtrack from song to song. But that is a small price to pay for a record of such sustained poise and elegance. And the pop tunes are here too, by the way.
Here's a music video, and here's a good interview from The Torture Garden blog.

18. Santogold - Santogold
Atlantic
So what is Santi White, if not a high-end cash-in on Maya Arulpragasam's adoption as culturally "important" in the UK, and as hot shit in the USA? What is this, if not M.I.A.-lite? Let's investigate - similar vocal style, similar sense of style writ large, but without the pervasive politics and fear underwriting the pulp tendencies. 'Creator' is the first single off the album, produced by Switch, the man responsible for much of Kala, and it very much recalls M.I.A.'s atonal sung-rap and dirty beats. But the true standout is the second single and opening track of the album, and it blocks that line of thought completely. 'L.E.S. Artistes' is three and a half minutes of perfectly juxtaposed artiness and emotion rolled into a pop song, and it casts its positive shadow on the rest of the album. It's not Maya A, it's... Karen O? 'Shove It' sees White ride a dub bassline into the future, and 'I'm A Lady' comes across like a new 'Gigantic' by the Pixies with Kim Deal's puerile lyrics subbed out for considered maturity and an updated genius pop chorus. The mish-mash of styles that makes up the album could make it awkwardly disjointed, but instead it creates what comes across as a fantastic extended demo-tape to spite the world. What Santi White is essentially saying is that she can do anything, and she can do it well. Compelling listening.
The magnificent L.E.S. Artistes from Pitchfork.tv, and the nuclear weirdness of an unrelated Santo Gold at his site.

17. The Mae Shi - Hllyh
Moshi Moshi
I'm sure there's a perfectly reasonable explanation for all of this. I just don't know what it is. You see, I literally walked in on the Mae Shi by accident, having been guestlisted for another band. I missed the write-ups, the historification by blog and trial-by-comments-section that usually characterise my introduction to an American band. So I'm not completely sure what I'm supposed to think of Hlllyh. All I know about their context is that one of them was wearing a No Age bandana, which he gave to Coady, possibly assuming it would be returned. This lack of grounding makes it very hard to know what to make of spazzy, synthy, poppy hardcore with very overt Old Testament rapture influences in the lyrics. It's more than influence, really. It's at the point of being a concept album. When the singer says, speaking as God, "they lost the scent, and I don't even care why they didn't repent/We need a new creation" on 'Pwnd', it's so left-field compared to anything else I've ever heard that I really don't know what to think. Maybe I'm supposed to be perplexed. I could do the research, but I'm not sure I want to, like the apocalyptic evangelists the Mae Shi reference/are. If missionaries put this kind of perverse pop punk energy into proselytising, I'm sure millions more would be saved.
Only a link to a previous post here because, like I said, I'm not doing the legwork here.

16. Department of Eagles - In Ear Park
4AD
You know what? Grizzly Bear have taken way too long following up Yellow House. That album was, and still stands as, a work of singular originality and genius. But what do Rossen, Droste and company spend their time doing nowadays? Well, Ed Droste leaks Animal Collective songs. And Daniel Rossen? Well, he makes interesting albums with pre-Grizzly Bear bandmates. Much of Rossen's trademarks from the fatherband are still present: the guitars are split between folky fingerpicking and 50s palm-mute plucking, and the arrangements are largely no different. However, the influence of Fred Nicolaus adds a certain spice, and his Destroyer-esque voice is a welcome change of pace to Rossen's effortless drawl. In fact, Nicolaus' 'Teenagers' is a definite highlight. There is also, I fancy, a vaguely perceptible hint of GB touring partners Radiohead slipping into some of the lush arrangements. On the whole, though, the mood is the same as that of Yellow House - play this alone, late at night, and let it work its magic.
Plenty (including a rooftop P4K session and a Takeaway Show) to be had on the DoE site and then also a great Daytrotter to enjoy.

The Year. Interlude 1: Compilation

((Some things didn't fit into my conception of this list. Compilations, EPs, other... surprises. So I'm bringing in the big-hitters to help me out. First in a series of linking guest-posts is Darragh McCausland, of Analogue, State, Asleep On The Compost Heap and his kitchen.))

Jay Reatard - Matador Singles '08
MatadorSo Karl is delegating out the artists who he doesn’t think fit the criteria for his albums of the year list. I don’t know whether to admire or worry about such fastidiousness. Any frozen heads in your fridge Karl? We shouldn’t give a fuck that Jay Reatard’s singles collection is not technically an album because

A: it sounds like one (a brilliantly coherent one too)

B: Jay certainly wouldn’t give a fuck either

For what it’s worth, the music on this collection of singles isn’t futuristic, world-changing or anything like that. It’s just a bunch of reatardedly awesome pop/punk tunes, which doesn’t for one second dip in quality, tempo or attitude. Jay is a rare creature in the current rock landscape, an old school songsmith who just gets on with the business of churning out these thrilling songs, hopefully oblivious to the hurricane of hype building around him.

((Watch this snivelling interview with Nitsuh Abebe and then watch the blistering live set, all on Pitchfork.tv.))

The Year. 25-21

25. This Is The Album Of A Band Called Adebisi Shank
Richter Collective

Adebisi Shank emanate from one of the most productive scenes in Irish music, that of bands who seem to have spent adolescence listening to metal but have now discovered their inner maths geek. What sets Adebisi Shank apart from other purveyors of spastic, geometric rock is the direct connection between feeling and music. It's like a print-screen of a hyperactive, manic depressive mind. They are not simply showing off rhythmic ability, rehearsing the different ways in which you can play fast in an unusual time signature. It's much more measured than that. While at points, songs can seem like the individual band members are battling each other with their instruments, the whole is as tempered in its way as a piece of classical music. Nothing happens for longer than it has to, and the result is something intensely expressive and almost incandescent. I also saw, while sharemining for new music, a post on an American forum saying that this album was fantastic, and I felt a little happier in the knowledge that a song called 'Mini Rockers' is getting onto Floridian iPods. Fitting ambassadors.
This picture pretty much says it all, and then this collective commits it to wax.

24. Correcto - Correcto
Domino

Indie rock from the island of Britain is in ebb at the moment, and the cartoonised post-punk sound that launched a number of bands to the mainstream in the first half of the decade has tainted everything with its own descent into pastiche. That's a pity, because Correcto, from Glasgow, make the kind of catchy but clever music that is almost ingrained enough in British music since 1976 as to be the new traditional at this point. On the upbeat songs, Danny Saunders' flawed voice rides large Buzzcocks-esque guitars to places at least as interesting as the Postcard Records offspring of Glasgow circa 1980, and on the quieter arrangements he channels the pint-and-a-bag-of-crisps-at-the-battle-of-the-bands style of Half Man Half Biscuit. Self-awareness is the order of the day, with the self-portrait 'Walking To Town' carrying the refreshing admission "I look like a fucking goon". Another perceptive observation on the next track: "No-one over thirty can do the Watusi". And 'Joni' is one of the most criminally-overlooked pieces of pop genius in the last decade. A self-deprecating running commentary on popular culture is a welcome respite in a world where much of the good music is coming from the no-child-left-behind sincerity of North America.
Check out Joni if you haven't heard its infectious strains, and then head to MySpace to commiserate with the band over the fact that no-one actually seems to care about them at all.

23. The Dodos - Visiter
FrenchkissI have never had much of a tolerance for Americana. Those straightforward, folky albums that tumble down through the filter of the make-or-break American indie axis have always been unavoidably naff to me, no matter how hard I tried to see what so many people were seeing. Years of this mean that I'm no longer excited by acoustic music. It needs to have a really big twist to win me over. The Dodos have. With an acoustic guitar and a drum kit, they paint layers and more layers, and then go digging in them for the elusive melody that no-one has found yet. The magically liberating tool that is the loop-pedal has been around for a while now, but few have avoided the potential for excessive meddling like Meric Long. His rapid strums, along with the outdoorsy drums of Logan Kroeber, provide a bustling backing for the introverted-extrovert songs he sings. The freak wins the battle with the folk, and the likes of 'Red and Purple' or 'Fools' are some of the most memorable songs of the year.
Ball it over to Pitchfork.tv for the fairly stunning video for Fools, and then stall the ball to Daytrotter for the old songs/new songs/demos/unreleased songs/explanations you've come to expect and love from them.


22. Ponytail - Ice Cream Spiritual
We Are Free
Ponytail are a band who have a lot of fun. This becomes immediately apparent at the 15 second mark, as Molly Spiegel releases forth a piercing, feral peal to conjure up the full glory of her Baltimore bandmates' instrumental assault. Ponytail channel Cool bands like Sonic Youth and their lesser-known (or simply lesser) comrades at times, but they bring an enthusiasm to the table, often in the form of simply playing fast, that makes this effectively instrumental 8-song effort excitingly original. There is also a definite Japanophile tendency that goes a ways to explaining the unselfconscious mentalness of tracks like 'Late For School'. It's also fun to see that, just like post-Strokes bands began to show up in the aftermath of Is This It?, there is such a thing as post-Deerhoof in the world today.The cover art, trippy and hand-daubed, is a pretty good indication of how this sounds. But the real tell is the exclamation mark snuck in at the end of the title. ! pretty much sums it up.
Check Ponytail out on, looking exactly like they sound, on MySpace, and then check out the perpetually useful about.com for advice on how to sport your own.

21. Marnie Stern - This Is It And I Am It And You Are It And So Is That And He Is It And She Is It And It Is It And That Is That
Kill Rock Stars

More notes required. Exponentially more drums hit per bar required. More words per title required. Marnie Stern's second album is an explosion of unrelenting excess from the first avalanche of music halfway through the opener 'Prime' to the last tapped arpeggios of closer 'The Devil Is In The Details'. On first glance, Marnie's music seems to reside in a bizarre psychedelic-perceptive cave within the milieu of Van Halen-esque classic rock, but better touchstones would be the life-affirming likes of The Mae Shi, the hemidemisemiquaver hi-hat proggishness of Battles, or the positive apocalypticism of Lightning Bolt. It's rather refreshing to see guitar virtuosity of this magnitude attached to someone with their head in the real world. And though she has a tendency to declaim the poetry of whatever comes into her head, her stream of consciousness aphorisms make it all the more urgent.
Read Matthew 'Fluxblog' Perpetua's interview with Marnie Stern at Pitchfork, then regret missing her kissing booth.