Man, it was a hot one. 1999 was the year music exploded, the year when nothing made any damn sense, the year fans had to throw out any old-school rules for how pop worked. The radio was suddenly full of shiny new stars. So many timeless classics. So many shameless one-hit wonders. So much crazed innovation, all around the margins. Teen-pop happened. Nu-metal happened. Every genre was booming. Let’s put it this way: If you spend an hour at your local karaoke bar, you’re going to hear somebody belt at least one hit from the summer of ’99. It was one of those pop moments when all that glitters actually is gold.

Fans bought more music (with money! in stores!) than ever before or since. Nobody realized Napster was about to change everything…. There was so much to hear, even great music could get lost in the rush — which is why going back means discovering new surprises. The world was cramming in as many pop thrills as possible before the Y2K crash. No rules. No shame. No scrubs. rollingstone

Mazarin – Wheats Have you ever been trampolining, bouncing happily away and looking up at the sky and wondered if it might be possible to jump a bit higher? Maybe even to reach escape velocity, slip the earth’s gravitational pull and just keep on flying? It’s physically impossible of course, but – hey – it’s a beautiful afternoon, why not give it a try anyway?

Philadelphia’s Mazarin, aka Quentin Stoltzfus, would make the perfect soundtrack to those moments of graceful whimsy. nme

Spearmint – Sweeping The Nation It starts like this: “This song is dedicated to some of the best bands in the country. Some of the bands we never got to hear. Bands who never got any records out, bands who never got played on the radio, never got written about in the press…”

This, then, is a song about losers. The beat kicks in – that legendary Dobie Gray ‘Out On The Floor’ rhythm – and Spearmint singer Shirley Lee starts to tell his story. And it’s a tragic story about how all of the bands he ever loved disappeared without even registering a vague quiver on the seismograph of the public consciousness, but it’s implausibly euphoric too. A series of little
crescendos building up to a sudden explosion in which Lee suddenly realises that he’s not singing about a bunch of poor unfortunates whose careers never took off; he’s singing about himself. nme

Murry The Hump – Thrown Like A Stone Despite being named after one of Al Capone’s henchmen, they sound like they would quite possibly cry if you said anything nasty to them nme

Clinic – The Second Line the best rock music has very little to do with having one standout element. Not to slip into gestalt or anything, but the best rock truly is that which manages to be infinitely greater than the sum of its parts. It’s an inexplicable quality, really, but the most important in rock. It’s what sets apart the true playas from the sucka MCs. And Clinic has it in truckloads. pitchfork

Le Tigre – Deceptacon for my money, there are few dance tracks—and especially few socially conscious dance tracks—better than “Deceptacon.” The sound of Kathleen Hanna’s monotone “who took the bomp” going straight into that gritty guitar riff at the beginning just slays me, and every time I hear it, I’m immediately transported back to dark, dirty bars, overly crowded off-campus house parties, and dancing much too close to all my friends who didn’t wash their hair. music.avclub

Brassy – I Can’t Wait  a sly combination of what the youngsters call ‘phat beatz’ and the kind of punky sass that has had certain berks convinced that Luscious Jackson were cool, streetwise Noo Yoik chicks rather than the Beastie Boys in blouses. nme

Wilco – Nothing’severgonnastandinmyway (again) Perhaps the most moving element of the song is the apparent self-delusion of its major claim…It is hope against hope, set to a Beach Boys melody, becoming ever more poignant as it appears ever less credible. stereogum

Pavement – Major Leagues Pavement’s last hurrah might actually be expressing just a tinge of regret over what coulda-shoulda-woulda been. It’s hard not to argue that “Major Leagues” came at a time when Pavement was past its prime, still good enough to hit for a solid average on muscle memory alone, but no longer at the top of its game. pomatters

Guided By Voices – Teenage FBI Widely regarded as geniuses by people who only like music that other people don’t like, this lot have been going for about 46 years and still I’m too criminally pointless to ever have bothered listening to them. Here goes then… Hmmm, yeah. It’s quite alright. A fairly likeable faux-innocent pop tune that sounds like it was originally performed by The Cars in 1981 while jerking around self-consciously in skinny ties and hedgehog haircuts. Or searingly unique, subtly witty maverick indie genius. You decide, I can’t be arsed.

Bonnie “Prince” Billy – I See A Darkness music is a wounded, corrupted, vile, halfbreed mutt that begs for attention as it scratches at your door. You let it in and give in a warm place to reside. It licks its paws and whimpers for store-bought snacks. You tolerate the fact that it shits all over your lovely Persian rugs because it seems so cute and vulnerable. It becomes your center for a while. Time passes, and it learns no new tricks. You begin to grow apart. It shuffles about in the background while you microwave your popcorn, and while you’re vaguely aware of it, it seems less important to you.

I’m firmly convinced that Bonnie “Prince” Billy’s new record, I See a Darkness is not music. It doesn’t register in the familiar ways of a pop record (although conceptually speaking, it is one). You can’t dance to it, and… it makes you feel small. A friend of mine said this: “I was listening to it the other day and someone called. I had to turn my stereo off. I couldn’t just have it on in the background. It felt wrong.” pitchfork

Sigur Ros – Svefn-g-englar Before Ágætis, post-rock was a niche concern, a tiny sub-sub-genre centered around a dozen or so bands in England and North America. After Ágætis, the sound—massive, surging, triumphal; melancholic and soothing and mostly major-key; wreathed in strings and horns and ripe with melodrama and headlocking you into transcendence—is a global phenomenon. They opened for Radiohead; they turned down a slot on “Letterman” because the host wouldn’t give them enough time. They even appeared on “The Simpsons.” Twenty years into their career, they tour arenas and command a massive following. They are a cultural institution. pitchfork

Badly Drawn Boy – It Came From The Ground sounds like Badly Drawn Boy as a jam band. It takes a cool drumbeat and a basic guitar riff, adds a couple of verses in the beginning, and then improvs on those musical themes for a full five minutes. popmatters

The Fall – Touch Sensitive A jubilant “Heyheyheyhey!” chorus, a bassline you’d swap your soul for – there’s a wildly spirally sense of free-booting lunacy here nme

Supergrass – Pumping On Your Stereo If, when your children ask you, “Daddy, what did you do in the Britpop war?” you can answer, “I can’t remember, I was listening to Supergrass,” then you are a good parent popmatters

Beth Orton – Central Reservation (The Then Again Mix) Her songwriting was always personal, visceral, and relatable, and despite a half-decent promotional push on Central Reservation. Beth Orton was more of an artist that fans were always discovering on their own — a secret among hardcore music aficionados e — but never one suited for mainstream success. popmatters

Ladytron – He Took Her to a Movie Sometimes you have to wonder whether alien brain-beam machines are sucking information out of your mind and creating the perfect Photofit composite of everything you love about pop music. Ever had one of those days? This is such a fantastic record I keep having to play it again and again just in case I dreamed it into existence. nme

Marine Research – Parallel Horizontal Sometimes, the best things in life are twee nme

Ben Folds Five – Army has a lot to say about modern youth being uninspired by their world. And hey, why not enlist? There’s nothing really good on TV now, anyway. thewildhoneypie

The Make-up – Born on the Floor one of the most influential and interesting bands to come out of DC in the mid-to-late ’90s djdmac

Trembling Blue Stars – Doo-Wop Music a lonely waltz which is so calculated, down to the scratchy vinyl pops, that it’s like the band doesn’t want to give you the opportunity to feel anything but wistful. popmatters

The Clientele – Saturday The songs sounded as though they were recorded inexpensively but they didn’t sound careless; with rich, heavy reverb and careful arrangements, they had the whiff of a band with big ideas who didn’t yet have the resources to realize them. And so, instead, they huddled together in a rented room somewhere, turned on the tape machine, and created a world as best they could. pitchfork

Half Man Half Biscuit – Look Dad No Tunes may well be their best song of indie band failure, with its magnificent closing response to a new band member – “I think we’d better lerrim in / I heard he’s got a theremin.” spank-the-monkey 

Hefner – The Hymn for the Cigarettes Setting aside all issues of bigness, cleverness, the responsibility of tobacco cultivation for the scourge of slavery and other such bagatelles, surely bedsit poetry used to be more profound than this? nme

Cinerama – Pacific Etched in fetching pink vinyl, here is a late-summer romantic trifle from sweet Sally Murrell and nice David Gedge, who is clearly hell-bent on restoring karmic balance to the pop cosmos after The Wedding Present‘s chicken-strangling latter years. nme

The Flaming Lips – Race For The Prize

The Flaming Lips – The Gash (Battle Hymn For The Wounded Mathematician)

Hailed as a masterpiece upon arrival, the album is still arguably the Lips’ finest creative output… the one where they cemented their status as legends and established the archetype they’ve been tweaking ever since.

The version of the Flaming Lips we have today, the one that has long since calcified into a shtick? With Wayne Coyne in a suit playing ringleader for a fantastical circus, spewing blood or rolling atop his audience in a giant bubble while Steven Drozd leads the band through psychedelic symphonies? That began here in spectacular fashion, with a dozen tracks that rewired the Flaming Lips …. The Soft Bulletin is a world to be explored, and it has continued to beget new galaxies as fellow visionaries discover it.

… press play on “Race For The Prize” and let it sweep you away. With a jarring thwack, Drozd’s drumbeat begins bashing away at the front of the mix, a disorienting production choice that contributes to the feeling of a demo transposed into holographic 3D. Instead of overdriven power chords, we’re treated to a swirl of synthesizers mimicking orchestral strings, sighing wordless harmonies, Michael Ivins’ steadfast bass, and an assortment of other pretty instrumental flourishes. Atop the ruckus is Coyne’s Neil Young mewl crying out about a pair of scientists racing to save mankind from some unspecified threat even if it costs them everything: “They’re just humans with wives and children!”

“Race For The Prize” is both epic and completely ridiculous, a balance The Soft Bulletin strikes throughout its hourlong runtime…  the Lips funneled a vast array of instruments and wanton studio trickery into an aesthetic that made Coyne’s avant-twee pop songs feel truly otherworldly…. Making full use of their budget, the Lips and Fridmann concocted a lush yet hard-hitting update on Brian Wilson’s pocket symphonies, a style that exists at the intersection of chamber-pop and noise-pop and plays out with the pomp and circumstance of a Broadway production.

The resulting voyage is as captivating now as it was back then…. “The Gash” faces down depression with the Disney version of a military march,

Coyne’s lyrics matched the music’s larger-than-life scope. He’d always had a thing for outlandish narratives, and now he had a proper canvas to truly geek out. Thus, The Soft Bulletin is filled with stories of dreamers who dared to lift up the sun in the name of love(?) and revolutionaries who stood up and said “Yeah!” at the risk of being struck down by “the softest bullet ever shot.” Yet as the album rolls on, he makes plain the connection between these hero journeys and the daily struggles of human life. The Lips endured some big ones while creating this music. Coyne’s father died of cancer. Ivins suffered a traumatic car accident. Drozd’s heroin abuse — one factor that caused Jones to leave the band — got so bad that doctors worried his hand might have to be amputated…

The further you get into the tracklist, the more Coyne lays bare the pain at the heart of these epic sagas…. On “The Gash” he poses a question that looms larger as modern culture grows ever more comfortably numb: “Will the fight for our sanity be the fight of our lives?”… Again and again he urges his listeners to hold on, buckle down, keep going. “What choice do we have?” he recently told the NME. “Do we live half a life because we don’t want to get hurt so much? Do we love half a love because we might lose it?” stereogum

Elf Power – Will My Feet Still Carry Me Home? There might be a whole world out there, but sometimes it’s easier to ignore it entirely. Therefore, judging by songs about wishing wells, birds with candy bars for heads and minor accidents on camping trips, it’s safe to assume Elf Power aren’t too concerned with day-to-day events outside their Athens, Georgia hometown nme

Wheat – Don’t I Hold You? Atmosphere is pumped courtesy of Mercury Rev’s Dave Fridmann, who appears to be taking it upon himself to produce every band that makes writers spit “fields,” “crystalline,” “glow,” and “…like the Flaming Lips. pitchfork

Luna – Superfreaky Memories an instant pop gem pitchfork

Stereolab – The Free Design it’s Stereolab and they are important and they make records quite unlike anybody else… How were Stereolab at Reading? someone was asked. Like… clockwork, he replied nme

Waltz For Debbie – He Loves Anna this is Formula 1 club pop for the dance floors as well as the lounge bars labradorrecords

The Auteurs – The Rubettes a masterwork of subversion, appropriating the Rubettes’ hit “Sugar Baby Love” and mangling its sweet sentiment of young love into a far more realistic and deviant coming of age narrative. It also contains Haines’ most sarcastic delivery in the line “Weren’t the ‘90s great?” popmatters

Smog – Cold Blooded Old Times Like many people, I was introduced to Smog by High Fidelity. That’s where I discovered “Cold Blooded Old Times,”… has a good rocking chair beat, some sonic slaps, and—if you actually listen—absolutely chilling lyrics. Callahan uses the romp of a song to expound on “the type of memories that turn your bones to glass.” Describing a domestic abuse situation or at the very least an incredibly contentious divorce, Callahan sings about how “mother came rushing in / she said we didn’t see a thing” and “father left at 8 / nearly splintering the gate,” all while you, the “little squirrel… understood every word.” That little squirrel line breaks me up every time, as I imagine a wisp of a kid who’s as fragile as a little tree-dwelling rodent having his whole life rocked with just one nasty adult conversation. It’s almost too much, even if it is just a song. popmatters

Gorky’s Zygotic Mynci – Spanish Dance Troupe There are Spanish-tinged strings, luscious, laid-back acoustic guitars and Euros Childs‘ gorgeous lilting voice detailing the problems of school life. First, his uniform is three sizes too small, then he’s got an essay to write and he’s basically left with only one option. Barmy old Euros runs off with a dance troupe from Spain to find love because he’s sick of the teachers and it rains in his school holidays. We’ve all done it, haven’t we? nme

Beck – Sexx Laws The authenticity police are really going to have his punk white ass this time. After eating the previous four decades of popular culture and dropping the ornate, star-spangled, almost infinitely pleasurable aural turd called ‘Odelay’, now Beck Hansen has the temerity for its spiritual successor to offer up what is, in substantial part, a Prince album. nme

….And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead – Mistakes and Regrets renders romantic longing as an apocalyptic event drownedinsound

Broadcast – Echo’s Answer something of a technical revolution has been worked in the Brummie cadre of the state. Out go the Maoist 5/4 business formerly pushed as a matter of policy by their elders in Stereolab, and then solemnly emulated by them and in come a pretty spooky set of drones, rattles and hums. All in keeping with their new home at Warp you get the suspicion that with a bit of perseverance you could have trained sea lions, or indeed even the Stereophonics, to have accomplished much the same task. Still. Skill. nme

Salako – Look Left the songs on Musicality were recorded in a bedroom, on the beach, in a supermarket, in a church, and in a newsstand where one of the bandmembers worked. allmusic

The Olivia Tremor Control – Hideaway  Its mix of brightly melodic, supremely catchy pop songs and unruly sonic experiments sounds like colorful flowers blooming in a bed overgrown with weeds, dead leaves, spider webs, suspicious mushrooms, a menagerie of creepy-crawlies, black foliage stereogum

Blondie – Maria adds one more alluring woman to Blondie’s collection of characters, merges a pumping New Wave beat with the churchy chimes Blondie last used in its 1981 hit ”Rapture.’ newyortimes

Birdie – Let Her Go deserve some reverence, but they already pay themselves far too much. ‘Some Dusty’ is like a beautiful house of cards. But as long as Birdie tiptoe around it, it stands to reason they’ll never bring the place down. nme

Gene – As Good As It Gets a factory-constructed stadium anthem – but with the added pathos of only worth playing as the house lights go back up and the crowds depart. thelineofbestfit

Slumber Party – Sooner or Later cool, fuzzed-out guitar pop that recalls the Velvet Underground allmusicguide

Idlewild – When I Argue I See Shapes All the qualities that set Idlewild apart from the sprog-punk masses are here: a sonic vocabulary culled from early-’80s American hardcore prototypes, tempered with a refined sense of melody and a pervasive, jagged antagonism. And, as in every Idlewild song, there’s something in the cadence and repetition of Roddy Woomble‘s deceptively simplistic lyrics and tortured Tourette’s delivery that allows a raw emotional impact to creep in through the cracks. nme

Shack – Natalie’s Party an album that seemed to fall out of a clear blue sky. It seemed astonishing to learn that Shack were still going—though they’d surfaced briefly in 1995, they were widely assumed to have completely disappeared sometime in the dying days of the 1980s. After a few plays of H.M.S. Fable, it seemed more astonishing still that everyone had forgotten what they were capable of. Shack, who appeared doomed to skulk through posterity as one of those ghostly never-were bands that are more talked about than listened to, had ignored the script. H.M.S. Fable commanded, and was granted, centre stage. Of course, it probably helped matters for the elusive Liverpudlians that Oasis had become the biggest band in Britain pretty much by doing Shack’s act, though not quite as well. If H.M.S. Fable is any one thing, it’s the album Oasis like to think they’ve been making. Shack lift from the same sources (the Beatles, mostly) but have the wit to do more than just giving the heisted riffs a quick respray before selling them on. Shack have taken it apart and put it together again in a way that suits them: in terms of pop guitar balladry, this album reinvents the wheel. That Michael Head sings like an angel with a hangover doesn’t hurt. 1001albumsyoumusthearbeforeyoudie

Angelica – Why Did You Let My Kitten Die? an utterly fantastic single, being as it is about two-and-a-half minutes of girl group heaven-hell. The intro is a little girl asking “Why did you let my kitten die?” It is then followed by some recorders (think flutes but ten times shittier), leading into a turbo-powered shang-a-lang about how all Sunday school teachers are bastards, resplendent with handclaps, gorgeous harmonised backing vocals, overdriven bass drum, bit of glockenspiel, and a good three or four separate choruses. stylusmagazine

Vyvyan – Going Out a gloriously inept burst of oestrogen-fuelled anti-harmonies and feckless punk pop ranting. Vyvyan have the tunes in abundance, sure, but while they might lack the slinky licks to make them sound as great as they might, they’ve got enough of that ‘don’t give a shit’ punk attitood to have a bash at it anyway… They could be as big as Kenickie one day. Now imagine that nme

Ooberman – Shorley Wall starts with a pleading, hopeless answerphone message before exploding into a magical twinkly anthem about lost love and big, overwhelming emotions in suffocating small towns. nme

Bright Eyes – A Perfect Sonnet guided by a principle not dissimilar to the red thread of fate, an East Asian belief that two individuals connected by this thread are ineluctably destined to become lovers. A prime example of why Oberst simultaneously captivates and alienates… Yes, he was green at the time, but the sheer conviction and bile with which he delivered such quixotically romantic lyrics flirted with genius stereogum

Love As Laughter – Margaritas a welcome return to their shambling pop roots pitchfork

The Magnetic Fields – Absolutely Cuckoo

The Magnetic Fields – Grand Canyon

The modestly recorded, immodestly conceived grand revue that is the Magnetic Fields’ 69 Love Songs still doesn’t get the credit it deserves. At least not for me. For this is the slow-creeper that stole my heart, blew my mind, broke my funny bone in 12 places and practically dislocated my shoulder carrying the sodding thing everywhere I went in the pre-iPod age.

It’s one of the most avidly dissected yet little-known albums in recent years, for three reasons. First, as a “critics’ band”, the Magnetic Fields are lavished with torrents of slavering rhetoric and respect (particularly in the US), yet eschew the styling, attitude, production value and onstage pizzazz demanded by radio and mainstream; the notoriously downbeat and reticent Stephin “New Sondheim” Merritt is far from your typical pop star. Second, even pared down from the originally intended 100 songs, the 69 tracks here run to three hours, an insurmountable Clarissa of a record to a generation of Spotify surfers for whom “value for money” in music is as archaic as a student grant. Finally, it fell between the gaps of the end-of-decade polls, released too late in 1999 in the US to be considered in time, and still thought of as a 20th-century album in the UK despite its early-2000 release date here.

I, on the other hand, vividly remember those buzzing few months as American copies from some shadowy Stateside source slowly leaked, CD-by-CD, into the NME office where I was a staff writer at the time, surreptitiously passed under desks between the small coterie of Merritt devotees like contraband. Accidentally, it turned out to be the best way to digest the beast.

A few weeks with the CD1 convinced me these first 12 tracks would be the best album of the decade on their own. The vivacious opener Absolutely Cuckoo tripped over itself in its eager rush for the melodic beaches…

Then, at track 12, there was The Book of Love; the stark yet stunning ukelele love letter that’s become the album’s most celebrated escapee, covered by Peter Gabriel and given the full Hollywood rom-com climax treatment in Shall We Dance? After that, the further 12 tracks on CD1 felt like out-takes.

Yet out of that bewildering mass drifted more magnificence: the sweeping Parades Go By, the maudlin hillbilly twangs of The One You Really Love and the all-out comedy of A Pretty Girl Is Like … (“… a minstrel show/ It makes you laugh/ It makes you cry/ You go/ It just isn’t the same on radio”). CD2 provided an equally expansive array of more traditional styles – folk, country, Irish jigs, jazz, world music – alongside a smattering of synthy clatter-pop and one track (Long Forgotten Fairytale) that sounded like Erasure doing panto. And CD3 was the most experimental of all, attempting Swedish jazz (It’s a Crime), avant-garde electronica (Experimental Music Love) and industrial surf tunes about domestic murder (Yeah! Oh Yeah!). It was, arguably, the correct home for the dying Dalek of CD2’s vocoder masterpiece I Shatter.

For the first six months, 69 Love Songs was a skip-to-the-hits album: it seemed to be a legendary album buried between brilliant song ideas left half-written (Very Funny, Boa Constrictor) and tokenistic genre nods to pad out the numbers (Punk Love, Love Is Like Jazz). But interviewing Merritt in mid-2000 I was amazed to find he was as artistically and theoretically dedicated to the thinking behind Experimental Music Love – a 30-second computerised loop of the title that, he explained, took on a new tone and meaning with each overlap – as he was to a heartbreaking C&W showstopper like Papa Was a Rodeo. So I let the CDs run, and found myself immersed in Merritt’s widescreen panorama of influence – Johnny Cash, Gilbert & Sullivan, Abba, the Velvets, Can, Steve Earle, the Beach Boys, Nick Cave – and falling for seemingly throwaway numbers such as Grand Canyon, Meaningless and Strange Eyes as deeply as the album’s big tune cornerstones. Context was irrelevant, continuity a sham; 69 Love Songs was its own all-encompassing world, and one that, 11 years of adoration later, I don’t feel I’ve spent enough time

Even today, just looking back at the rolling reams of tracklisting fills me with a kind of bittersweet longing, of joys remembered and heartaches overcome. I shared some of the toughest years of my life with it, and many of the most wonderful nights. It made the Magnetic Fields a band for all seasons, and it abides in me like the lost lover from arguably the most moving song I’ve ever heard, Busby Berkeley Dreams: “I should have forgotten you long ago, but you’re in every song I know …” Mark Beaumont in The Guardian

Harvey Williams – Her Boychart the one in which the fickleness of female desire is compared to the fickleness of the pop charts shinkansen newsletter number 3tree

Of Montreal – Nickee Coco and the Invisible Tree The Gay Parade is indie pop’s very own Sgt. Pepper, a richly detailed, grandly ambitious concept record which forgoes the ponderous pretensions the phrase implies to instead exult in the simple joys of everyday life. allmusic

Dressy Bessy – You Stand Here This cutsie indie pop, with its girl- group style vocals, sing- songy melodies, jangly guitars and sunny outlook just seems so… I don’t know… inconsequential. pitchfork

Pernice Brothers – Clear Spot clearly unaware of the credibility death sentence that comes with the crime of breaking, entering and indecently fiddling about with ‘Pet Sounds’. So, like The Webb Brothers, Fountains Of Wayne and every other decent American pop band of the last five years, they sleigh-bell jauntily down the path of summery pop loveliness towards their inevitable slaughter. A travesty of justice all round: any party manifesto promising to legalise the Pernice Brothers gets my vote on the spot. nme

Super Furry Animals – Wherever I Lay My Phone (That’s my Home) For years I felt that Guerrilla was Super Furry Animals‘ untidiest album by some distance, never quite really holding it as close to my heart as I have their other albums, despite SFA being one of one of my favourite bands.

… however over the years I have grown to appreciate that it is one of the band’s most creative albums. As my own tastes have expanded to the point where tracks that once inspired slightly baffled disappointment, those same songs now stand as highlights of Guerrilla. For example, I long grizzled that I felt “Wherever I Lay My Phone (That’s My Home)” was at least three minutes too long, but I can’t deny that it’s an absolutely brilliant tune….

Listening back to it 20 years after its initial release, Guerrilla is a brilliant technicolour psychedelic pop-rock statement on which Super Furry Animals continue to expand their sound. Sure, there’s the odd one where you wonder if it might have worked better without the production overload, but that’s missing the point of the album a little. I know, because for years, I did. backseatmafia

Kleenex Girl Wonder – Tendency Right Foot Forward there’s nothing particularly innovative about his ’60s-inspired pop… Even when he’s just running along power chords and tossing out quick melodies, Smith’s songs are little short of brilliant — right up there with early Beatles or Monkees Monkees tunes in terms of sheer pop appeal. allmusic

Beulah – If We Can Land A Man On The Moon, Surely I Can Win Your Heart Add to this joyful collision of low technology and high spirits 18 additional accordions, violins and harps, and you have the unmistakable sound of synchronicity, of heartstrings swelling fast. nme

Departure Lounge – the New You an amazing sleeper of an album that reveals its charms on first listen and grows more vital with each listen thereafter. allmusic

The Beta Band – Round The Bend Arguably the most focused moment on a very unfocused album stereogum

Primal Scream – Swastika Eyes – Chemical Brothers Remix Hey multinational organisation! Hey industrial fat cat! Hey right-wing government! Hey unprincipled chemical-tester! Hey persistent double-parker! Heeeeere we go!

For the good, the bad and the mad this implies, this could only be Primal Scream. To move on the game by making a pretty bloody basic and bloody-minded dance record. To get a bit lost in a lot of books about political theory, and come out a bit hot and bothered. To think about solving the problems of the world, and what’s more doing it with the assistance of The Chemical Brothers. Fair enough. Only Primal Scream would get everything a bit out of proportion to consider such a thing. And under the circumstances, realistically, only they could pull it off. nme

Stereo Total – I Love You, Ono With its immediate, lo-fi sound and enthusiastic performances, My Melody is a charming, sprawling journey through Stereo Total’s diverse pop world.

Blur – Trimm Trabb Blur’s 13 is a weird album. Overtly emotional, full of yearning and upset, yet scratchy, scuzzy, sonically abrasive. When I first put it on the stereo I was told: “Give it a couple of listens.” “A couple of listens!” I remember scoffing to myself. “For Blur!” That’s not what Blur were about, surely? They were easy on the eye and the ear. They made great pop songs, even when they were being difficult. You didn’t have to try with Blur….

Before that, though, there was 13. If I’m being a proper critic, I can acknowledge that perhaps other Blur albums are stronger: Parklife poppier, Modern Life… more of an underground classic. But 13 is my favourite. Why? It’s something to do with the way William Orbit’s production adds inner and outer space to Blur’s sound, how it contains two of Damon’s most devastatingly open lyrics in Tender and No Distance Left to Run, how much I love Trimm Trabb (about Adidas trainers) and Mellow Song. I love the way everything in it sounds hungover. How Damon finally bares his soul. How you can hear the beginnings of Gorillaz in Trailerpark, the full-stop to Blur Mark 1 in B.L.U.R.E.M.I. But what I really love about 13 is how much of a struggle it is. It sounds like cats scrapping in a sack, like a hug from a friend that turns into a brawl. Life is a fight and this album knows it. The central, most difficult track on it called Battle.

Growing up, moving on, leaving your youth behind: all more serious than you might think. You don’t leave your twenties without being damaged. At some point, your heart will be shattered, you will scar and never heal, you will spend your nights wasted and your days in bits, you will lose your certainty in everything you thought was true – love, friends, talent. But that’s OK. It’s just the way it is.

Soon after the release of this album, I split with a long-term boyfriend and got together with the man I’m now married to. It wasn’t easy; it was tough and dark and devastating. But worth it, for all involved. So, if you’ve ever come down hard, seen the havoc that love can cause, then picked yourself up and tried to move on – 13 is for you. If you know how terrible it is to grow apart from people and still try to be friends – 13 is for you. It pin-points that awful desperation in trying be happy when you’re not, that desire to be out of the house and out of your mind when you’re all messed up. And it shows that, if you really work, beauty can come out of chaos. It aims high – musically and emotionally – and, for me, it’s an inspiration. Miranda Sawyer in The Guardian

The Lucksmiths – Southernmost They also are keen chroniclers of weather, geography and time, and how they relate to our emotional lives. Some of their most beautiful, melancholy songs find them contemplating stretches of time or place, and how the changing seasons represent them – “The Great Dividing Range”, “Southernmost”, “The Year of Driving Languorously” popmatters

Kissing Book – Superman vs Lloyd A three-minute sliver of guitar crushdom, the kind of tune you could randomly hear on the car radio late one night and remember the rest of your life… He sighs about how he once felt like Superman, back when his ex still liked him: “Now I feel more like Lloyd Dobler, driving around at night, trying to figure out where everything went wrong.” The song lilts to the final chorus (“I’m sure you don’t want to hurt me/But you do”), then collapses, with nothing figured out at all.