The hazard in any grand cultural survey is that you end up unconsciously reshaping the landscape to suit the current weather, meteorological and metaphorical. This year was predominantly overcast – a predicted summer heatwave failing to turn up and autumn rains so persistent that they threatened to wash parts of Cumbria out to sea. And that matched the economic and political mood, with Labour limping to the end of its third term in office like a pensioner with a dodgy hip and the banks on an expensive form of life support. It’s quite tempting, then (because it soothes our desire for the world to be more coherent than it is), to see the arts as having somehow tracked the barometers and the stock-market indexes

The most wildly extravagant narrative wasn’t found between hard covers at all – but on screen. The apotheosis of Susan Boyle, lifted from small-town eccentric to global star by millions of YouTube hits, and the careful calculation of Simon Cowell. And there is absolutely no way in which that stratospheric inflation of value could be tagged to a slumping market. independent

Camera Obscure – French Navy You’d think love would be written into banality by now, but then Camera Obscura’s new single comes along and sweeps you off your feet– except you’re not sure whether they’ll carry you over a threshold or drop you on your ass. pitchfork

The Pains of Being Pure At Heart – Young Adult Friction At first glance, Pains seemed doomed to be typecast as yet another fashionable group with fashionable influences and a retro looking album cover. And while it was true that nothing about the songs felt particularly contemporary, they definitely didn’t sound stale either.

… the self-titled’s most eternal artifact is probably “Young Adult Friction,” an unselfconsciously twee chant-along about hooking up in a library. The innuendo-laced wordplay is top-notch (“I never thought I would come of age / Let alone on a moldy page”) and Berman and Wang’s call-and-response chorus is pure, jangly joy. stereogum

The XX – Islands impressive for what it doesn’t do as much as for what it does. They employ negative space as if it’s a sound generated by a musical instrument, while employing their actual instruments in an economic fashion, playing just enough notes and beats to construct an irresistible backbeat that manages to both bump and swoon.  pitchfork

Girls – Lust For Life  the background to chasing good times; may his wishes never truly come to be pitchfork

Micachu & The Shapes – Lips This scratchy, bhangra like, chaos clocks in at 79 seconds, but this is all that is needed to provide evidence for Micachu & The Shape’s eccentric and entirely unique approach to music diymag

Iron & Wine – The Trapeze Swinger Beam typically performs this winding narrative on nostalgia solo acoustic, which helps emphasize the already personal lyrics delivered as snapshot memories verse after verse after verse. pastemagazine

Grizzly Bear – Two Weeks  it’s not the craftsmanship that’s winning people over and making them want to spin this one again and again. It’s the intangible, of course, the sound of a band that has struck upon something timeless, inspired, holistic, and– it bears (ahem) mentioning– utterly wholesome. pitchfork

Cold Cave – Love Comes Close The bleary analogue sigh is gorgeous, a wearily pretty hymn to detachment that succeeds in makes numbness sound like the height of romance drownedinsound

Yeah Yeah Yeahs – Zero “You’re a zero. What’s your name? No one’s gonna ask you.” It could be a corporation or a subculture, but the rules are the same: you start as nothing and you crawl and claw your way up doing exactly what you’re told. But when you do fight to the top your reward is the most glorious release: the crunched-up cyber-glam riffing that’s “Zero”‘s own ladder to the sun. pitchfork

Karen O & The Kids – All is Love It’s impossible to tell whether it’s her or a sprog who hollers “one two ready go!” at ‘All Is Love’s commencement, but the blend of their voices is truly seamless, a prismic dazzle of unvarnished optimism. With the children to back her up and bulk her out, O can permit herself her frailest, most open tones – ‘All Is Love’ is a song that revels in purity without recourse to smugness drownedinsound

Dirty Projectors – Stillness Is The Move It’s what attracted Jay Z to the band, and what rocketed the group into esoteric music critic heaven. In every way that it can be, the song is a living, breathing contradiction. Even its title is a paradox. There is nothing simple or remotely hummable about its minor-mode, almost Middle Eastern verse, or its contemporary R&B bridge melody, or its lazy, string-heavy outro, but there is nothing catchier than that “oh-oh” chorus and that distorted rock beat. stereogum

Tune-Yards – Hatari hen you talk about lo-fi more or less inspired by folk, the best stuff always carries with it a sense of discovery. Cheap and tinny acoustic music should feel like something you stumbled upon, like maybe you dug it out of an old drawer or rescued it from the freebee bin in the thrift store. And then the force of the music should sparkle through the grit and hiss and distortion and make you think you understand something about the person making it. It’s a romantic notion, one not necessarily based in reality. But the best music in this vein manages to convey a sense of intimacy, as if it’s a one-to-one conversation between the artist and the listener. pitchfork

Here We Go Magic – Fangela sounds too sophisticated to be the four-track project it is. Though it hardly carries the gloss of a big-budget studio job, the production is immaculate without ever feeling clinical, over-arranged, or prim– just natural pitchfork

Burning Hearts – I Lost My Colour Vision A warm hearts pumps beneath these Finnish indie poppers’ chilly soundscapes popmatters

Wild Beasts – All The King’s Men where most groups are lucky to have one member who doesn’t sound like a hound’s flatulence when he opens his mouth, Wild Beasts are blessed with two corking sets of tubes. Hayden Thorpe’s gymnastics might attract the attention, but they’re ably supported by the rich tones of Tom Fleming thequietus

Swan Lake – Heartswarm Dan Bejar’s contributions, as you’d expect, are much more laid-back than his band mates. “Heartswarm”, despite its breezy feel is a bitter breakup song “I was coming off something particularly strong/you had your gloves on/they looked fucking brutal as a storm” thelineofbestfit

Bon Iver – Blood Bank a soft, hazy homage to the isolation (and, on occasion, the mercilessness) of deep winter. pitchfork

Volcano Choir – Island, IS underneath the tight grid of colorful sound, the drumming is loose and swinging, inviting Vernon to slur his vocals and play around with the beat. And the new setting helps clarify what makes his music special. Vernon’s music isn’t R&B, obviously, but the dude is a soul singer, able to convey a wide range of feeling with small vocal gestures. pitchfork 

Yo La Tengo – If It’s True as Yo La Tengo celebrate a quarter-century of existence with Popular Songs, their twelfth album, there’s still plenty to like without a PR push. The Yo La Tengo repertoire has expanded steadily over the years, and the genre experiments of years past have slowly assimilated into their creative process until it’s hard to remember the mere Velvets-jacking indie pop band they once were… “If It’s True” is pure Funk Brothers karaoke complete with a spot-on bridge and AM-radio strings, but Hubley and Kaplan’s back-and-forth duet is too adorable to nit-pick. pitchfork

The Horrors – Sea Within A Sea no-one’s laughing anymore. Non-believers, cast your doubts aside: it really is The Horrors, and it really is that good. A radical evolution, rather than revolution, of the furious but slightly tuneless and scratchy riot of their debut Strange House, Primary Colours is a brilliant goth-punk hybrid of synth-laced retro-rock which chews up the aggression of The Jesus and Mary Chain, the passion of The Cure and reckless volume of My Bloody Valentine and spits it out in one glorious ball of rock ‘n’ roll thequietus

The School – And Suddenly the School remember when rock was young, when rock ‘n’ roll meant gulping Coca Cola, hickies, teasing your beehive, and giggling. Before all that naughty filth and debauchery popmatters

Jeffrey Lewis & The Junkyard – To Be Objectified You know Jeffrey Lewis already, right? He’s the adorable-existential-witty-socialist-intenselyvulnerable singer-poet-comicbookartist from the same New York anti-folk scene that gave us The Moldy Peaches and Regina Spektor. Without wanting to make it seem like this review is totally biased from the off, I suggest that if you haven’t heard him yet you buy all his albums, listen to them obsessively until every word is etched on your soul, and then follow him round on every date of his next tour. In an entirely non-creepy way, of course. thelineofbestfit

Withered Hand – Hard On You could call his style bedroom pop, chamber pop, folk-pop or all of the above. There are shades of Belle & Sebastian, Jason Lytle, Elliott Smith and even some Americana. More importantly, he knows his way around hooks and melodies, no matter how subtle they are… In “Hard On” he proclaims, “A beard don’t make you a man / No, it takes something else / Something I’ll never have“. Hits home. popmatters

The Clientele – I Wonder Who We Are Some people use pills to relieve depression. Others try therapy, acupuncture, or light visors. But all it took to cheer up the Clientele — who have been writing melancholy-steeped indie pop songs for over a decade now– was a couple of well-received records.  pitchfork

The Mountain Goats – Genesis 3:23 The Life Of The World To Come features a 12-song tracklist made entirely of Bible verses. …the relevant verse: “So the Lord God banished him from the Garden of Eden to work the ground from which he had been taken.” That’ll help you make sense of the song’s break-in and homelessness. stereogum

Bill Callahan – Too Many Birds Stately, sweet and, where it counts, truly progressive in his instrumental augmentations, Callahan has crafted one of the albums of his career…’Too Many Birds’ tells of a feathered friend unable to find a place — “you fly all night to sleep on stone, to return to the tree with too many birds” thequietus

Butcher Boy – React Or Die As Stuart Murdoch continues to dick around with his musical and the Belle & Sebastian sabbatical drags into its third year, Butcher Boy return to seize the demographic marked ‘young, Glaswegian, twee’. Their second album serves up what all good indie-pop comebacks do: more of the same. nme

Voxtrot – Berlin, Without Return I always felt a little bad for Voxtrot. Srivastava wore his heart on his blog, and after the band’s only full-length album didn’t live up to the high expectations set by earlier EPs, he was obviously disappointed. Maybe that accounts for the long break between new music… “Berlin, Without Return,” sounded more like their old stuff.  stereogum

Cats On Fire – Tears In your Cup  I can’t stop playing this Cats On Fire thing. It’s not the greatest album of the year, probably – that’ll be a toss up ‘tween far hipper, more self-promoting outfits from nascent scenes across the planet. Cats On Fire are actually getting dissed on the internet for their lack of self-promotion, and the first thing people seem surprised by is that this be Finnish and doesn’t sound like Darkthrone. If this record slips on by 2009 it’d fit, accidentally, with the sound and the songs – for these are special and precious and perhaps not for these times. For starters, you can hear them (a lot of what I’m about to say sounds like the kind of thing your mum and dad said about pop when you were a kid for which I can’t apologise). No fog, only the fireworks that can happen between clean, pure unpedal-affected guitars and drums. Strong rhythms. Killer tunes. No new production tricks, a 50s radiance and shimmer with a 70s warmth and an 80s pose – down to what’s important, and all is important. Needed at this groggy stage for rock – some purity of purpose linked with a purity of sound, some fucking balls, some proper dignified campness shot through ennui and standing up for a vintage cynicism, an unrequited endless love, a heroic warmth that’s the coolest response to this cold dry age.

Right now who cares whether guitar music’s being ‘inventive’ or ‘innovative’ enough? Cram all that doodaddery, guitar music needs to rediscover the art of songwriting again, wipe the slate clean, earn its right to piss about again ‘cos we’re drowning in the lukewarm yellow stuff down here. And only what’s noble and dignified is gonna save us, something that sinks in rather than sinks us in that fathomless portabog that noughties indierock has become. At times like these the clear and good-hearted stops being a tradition to kick against with confusion and aggression, starts becoming the real alternative to all the faux-extremity and frowning.

So on one level the perfectly-monikered Temperance Movement IS just ‘some good songs’. And hallelujah, it will more than do. It’s an album I love because it’s so likable, possibly that likability wouldn’t survive the perils of modern fame – but I hope Cats On Fire make it because they’ve made this and they deserve it. Tempted to toss it at first. The guys’ voice was so Morrissey I felt furtive. But the band made it impossible to leave. Opener ‘Tears In My Cup’ throws down trump cards and silver with such controlled joy, the sound rich with a swing and punch that aren’t pushy or perfect, just locked-on, confident, beautiful. In a flabby age where even the boiled down seems too loud Cats On Fire make the revolutionary leap of sounding just right, and hit all the right balances. It’s a sound that’s close but not forced down your throat. In the room but not petulantly raw. A sound informed by all sorts but somehow unique to the characters in this room and thus able to fly where the words take it. The sheer chest rush of ‘Tears’ masks its conciseness, how the gorgeous melodic ease (or the illusion of ease which is the neatest trick of all) from Ville Hoppenen’s Fender gets the tune cleaved to the heart within a minute’s exposure. Most miraculously, for the next 30 minutes and nine songs there was no fall-off, only new shapes of the same sweetness and fire, vocals that mattered, harmonies that mattered just as much. thequietus

The Cribs – We Share the Same Skies The Cribs have opted for evolution rather than revolution. Their hallmark relentless aggression has been nurtured into a more expansive, brooding sound. Songs are given room to breathe rather than being crushed by aggression, melodies are able to sparkle instead of being drowned out by mounds of sludge, and the insistent vocal screeches of previous efforts are more varied and subtle. Then, of course, there’s Johnny Marr, whose gorgeous guitar work underpins many of the album’s highlights. His fingerprints are all over the cascading jangling riff that weaves its way through ‘We Share The Same Skies’. With the usual serrated guitars taking a backseat to Marr’s spidery melody, it’s a luxuriant treat that evokes the pulsating pure-pop of The Smiths’ ‘What Difference Does It Make?’  thequietus

Bombay Bicycle Club – Always Like This an album that’s been about three years in the works, it’s difficult to hear much more than further dumpings on the great landfill of mediocre indie that’s been blighting the musical landscape in that time. thequietus

Liechtenstein – This Must Be Heaven poppiest track of the year kisschase.blogspot

Pocketbooks – Fleeting Moments rampages like Los Campesinos! tackling “The Boy With the Arab Strap” in a delirious bubblegum burst thelineofbestfit

Matthew Friedberger – Pennyslvania Rock Oil Company Resignation Letter In the age of Spotify and iTunes, Friedberger is (unconsciously) telling everyone to make their own version of this album, editing it down to a strange, but taut, 60 minutes. There are brilliant moments of genius here, but they just get lost, buried, and forgotten amidst the rest. drownedinsound

Andrew Bird – Fitz And The Dizzy Spells Even his whistling skills are superb. Ask anyone who has seen him live: The man can whistle like he’s part bird, part freight train.

Noble Beast continues Bird’s pattern of releasing strong, reliable records that don’t bring much new to the table. Fans are sure to find plenty to like about this album, and new listeners will be pleased to hear an intelligent, well-crafted album that doesn’t have any major hiccups. More importantly, put on some headphones and turn the album up. You’ll hear intricate layers and careful production that prove Bird isn’t coasting by in the least. consequenceofsound

Richard Hawley – Don’t Get Hung Up In Your Soul it’s hard to escape a niggling feeling that Hawley is here polishing a formula, even falling back on cliche, in his continuing quest to make the local and homely sound lushly romantic. theguardian

Warpaint – Billie Holiday half of a cover, borrowing large chunks of the Smokey Robinson-penned 1964 classic, “My Guy” (a hit for Mary Wells) and rerouting the original’s giddiness to adopt a sort of apathetic haze that’s very much in need of a Xanax, or perhaps the victim of one too many pitchfork

The Antlers – Kettering A concept record about an unnamed abusive relationship, itself framed around the narrative of a terminally ill patient and her loving, doting carer, the combination of those two fragile narratives made The Antlers’ second record an essential, if utterly devastating listen. More than a decade on, the record remains as potent as ever. nme

Edward Sharpe & The Magnetic Zeros – Home Almost 40 years to the day since the Manson murders is, perhaps, not the best time for this bunch of long-hairs to release their debut album. Throw in a messianic group leader, the fact that they drive around LA in a painted bus and write lyrics that include “Run to the desert/ You will be/ All that you need to be” and it’s clear that history, minus the murderous madness (hopefully), is repeating itself as farce in sunny California… If you threw Kings of Leon, Scissor Sisters and Arcade Fire into a blender, this – with an obligatory shot of wheatgrass – is exactly what you would get in your musical glass independent

The Leisure Society – The Last Of The Melting Snow one of the most unfashionable yet brilliant sounding records we have heard in a long time. diymag

Laura Marling – Goodbye England (Covered In Snow) intended as a winter ode – which is a fairer portrayal than ‘Christmas single’, a phrase so often wielded in the pejorative sense. There are no jingle bells here, for the listener is soon shaken from any yuletide bonhomie by a bittersweet song of cold comfort, of early love and frozen earth.

The song meanders and occasionally tumbles through the hopes and fears of the roiling twenties, when love goes wrong and nothing seems to go right, when the only course of action is ‘clearing all the stuff out of my room, trying desperately to figure out what it is that makes me blue’, and running running running, while family and friends wait to catch the faltering soul.

This is a beautiful song of life and love and family and home, and hearing it revives me as middle age riddles my senses. It is a strange journey, this brief life, this long search for an answer, wondering what on earth it’s all about. One by one the lessons write the story. I want to tell you it will be all right; I want to hear it, too. At least we can count on the seasons. herecomesthesong

The Wave Pictures – If You Leave It Alone built on a slow, slinky bassline and featuring a languid brass section before Tattersall attempts to paint himself as a bedsit lo-fi soul man. Albeit one which sees him gather the idea for a song from a note on his fridge. thelineofbestfit

Slow Club – When I Go they’re not really twee, or indie, or folk, or anti-folk, or acoustic roots, but you can see how the confusion might have arisen. Charles Watson and Rebecca Taylor’s harmonies and summery faux-ramshackle approach is one that doesn’t reach out for approval or smug superiority but suggests in an implicit, low-key fashion that people discover them under their own steam.

Opening track ‘When I Go’ is a fine example: while comparisons between a male/female duo and the White Stripes are logically uncalled for there’s echoes of the acoustic moments on White Blood Cells (think ‘We’re Going To Be Friends’) in the simplicity of the guitar structure and direct sentiments, while there’s also a certain resemblance to the Everly Brothers in the simple vocal harmonies and country inflected guitar vibrato.

Slow Club’s strength is that they sound spontaneous and celebratory about the act of being able to make music itself, the very thing that drives a successful debut album before the pressures to maintain that level kick in. There’s a lightness of touch and sweetness of mood even when the lyrics don’t seem to demand it. Slow Club may not belong to any one genre comfortably but they know exactly what they are, and even when they don’t want to be all-out acoustic rock’n’roll they’re pleasingly enthusiastic and naturally infectious enough for it not to matter. thelineofbestfit

Standard Fare – Dancing True, their guitars are occasionally jangly, their vocals are untutored, their lyrics are about thwarted or hopeful love and some of the songs could fall apart if prodded hard enough. But even if on paper it’s all been covered long before there seems something fresh and exciting about the way they go about it, with complete knowledge of highly infectious hooks and a purely melodic pop heart. thelineofbestfit

God Help The Girl – Come Monday Night The song hovers in the liminal zone signaled by its title, when the workweek is in full swing, but the specter of a weekend that didn’t live up to expectations is still palpable. Ireton’s musings on how to slap together one more weekend night sit amidst a wash of cascading strings, faint hints of brass, a strummed acoustic guitar, and a jaunty bassline– in other words, a Belle & Sebastian song. Set aside the chores for a bit, turn off the telly, and open the windows, she urges. Let the sounds of the city wash in and coat the room. And why wouldn’t we want to? If Murdoch himself has taught us anything over the past 13 years, it’s all in capsule form in “Come Monday Night”: we’ll sleep much better if we dream before bedtime. pitchfork

Emmy The Great – First Love deceptively pretty. Her winsome, carefree melodies mask murky depths and a deliciously barbed tongue. There are a lot of babies in her songs, but they’re lobbed around like handgrenades. “Babies are weapons,” she tells me. “My period is a weapon. Everything that a girl has that a boy doesn’t is a weapon.” Her new single is called ‘First Love’, the same as her recently released debut album. Her friend Dan is on the cover because Dan was her first love. “I loved him until I was 11, and he loved me until we were 4,” she says. “But we’re best friends now, so it’s fine.” nme

Stairs To Korea – Boy Bear It In Mind A one man band with uber impressive pop chops that hark back to the eternally sunny days of Postcard Records.thelineofbestfit

The Drums – Lets Go Surfing the perfect summer song, and a perfect introduction to a great new band: joyful, intriguing and irrepressibly memorable. diymag

The Low Anthem – Charlie Darwin These are magical songs laden with imagery and poignancy… A shame, then, that they occasionally burst the atmosphere with hoe-downs that sound like Tom Waits jamming with a bar band. This sounds like the work of two bands, meeting awkwardly. However, one of them is really great. theguardian

Dinosaur Jr – Plans The man who Thurston Moore imagined as Slacker President in Sonic Youth’s “Teen Age Riot” moans about pain, loss, and apathy– “I’ve got nothing left to be/ Do you have some plans for me?” But the music’s adrenalized bounce makes his misery more sweet than sad. pitchfork

Fanfarlo – The Walls Are Coming Down The instrumentation is kitchen-sink; accordion, clarinet, glockenspiel mandolin, melodica, saw, sax, trumpet and violin, plus guitars, bass and drums. Simon Balthazar’s well-crafted songs, though, and the band’s knack of arranging them sensitively, ensures the mix never sounds cluttered or overblown. nme

Vivian Girls – Survival Part of what made Vivian Girls so appealing (and ultimately divisive) was its synthesis of influences– Spector pop, the C86 stuff, shoegaze, it was all in there. But the band was always quick to shrug off those inspirations and there is markedly less pop-canon pastiche this time around… the sound here is decidedly more aggressive (or at least faster) than before…. and standout “Survival” finds a sweet spot by combining it with sugary melodic verses. pitchfork

Florence + The Machine – Dog Days Are Over The best bits feel like being chased through a moonless night by a sexy moor witch. rollingstone

Lee Fields & The Expressions – Ladies There’s a subtle hint of hip-hop in this brand of deep soul, but for the most part, it sounds like something that easily could have come out of some imaginary mid-point between Stax, Muscle Shoals, and Philadelphia International in about 1971 pitchfork

Sharon Van Etten – Much More Than That This the record was the result of one week of sessions, and as such there’s a certain raw vulnerability to it that, while present on her later material, is felt most of all here…. uncertainty … rears on ‘Much More Than That’ as she closes with “I sigh and then I frown, I write this moment down, but I cannot paint pictures with my tongue.” As an audience, we relate how she feels about her own ability, but crucially, she actually can paint pictures with her tongue.

Chew Lips – SoloA terrifyingly compulsive, buoyantly innocent sugar-rush combining Mario-bleeps and heart-in-mouth desperation, the only sane response to which was bouncing, flailing, and then pressing ‘play’ again nme

La Roux – Bulletproof A perfect pop hook backed by bubbly eight-bit bloops and delivered by a ginger-pomp’d cross between Annie Lennox and a replicant. The superhuman league. spin

Manic Sreet Preachers – Jackie Collins Existential Question Time In years to come, this decade will be characterised as one of cheap and cowardly irony and obfuscation. In the realm of alternative rock Manic Street Preachers will be regarded as notable for successfully balancing sincerity and intelligence, regardless of what value those particular commodities hold at present nme

Washed Out – Feel It All Around Twinkling synths, amniotic vocal drone, undulating bass, and chockablock percussion all imagine a hazy innocence that’s just out of reach pitchfork

Marine & The Diamonds – I Am Not a Robot her backing group the Diamonds, like ­Florence’s ­Machine, don’t actually exist theguardian

Ash – Joy Kicks Darkness The same ingredients which made 1977 so thrilling to a whole generation of indie kids all those years ago can be found in the best songs on this collection; the gigantic melodies, the unbridled sense of youthfulness, Tim Wheeler’s boyishly just-about-in-tune vocals and the headrush of the power chord-led choruses. drownedinsound

The Very Best – Warm Heart Of Africa Like most great popmakers, the Very Best understand that if you’ve stumbled upon something indelible and irresistible, it’s not a bad idea to repeatedly cram it down listeners’ earholes to the point where it couldn’t possibly be dislodged from their heads. pitchfork

Tender Trap – Grand National Amelia Fletcher and Rob Pursey, who make up Tender Trap’s core, have played together in one form or another for over 20 years (in Tallulah Gosh, Heavenly, and Marine Research)… their sound is so infectiously giddy – feeling like a beachside drive in a borrowed convertible – that forced progress would feel like a mis-step. musicomh

The Mary Onettes – Dare Their brief major label dalliance a half decade behind them, it’s clear the Mary Onettes’ ambitions haven’t wavered in the least pitchfork

[ingenting] – Halleluja! From “Fre’re Jacques” to “La Bamba” to, um, “Du Hast”, some tunes just transcend the barriers of language, and doggonit if the awkwardly-named [ingenting]– the only Swedish-language act on Stockholm’s celebrated Labrador Records — haven’t cooked up one of them. “Halleluja!” is a song that demands nothing more of its listener than to sit back and bask in its radiance. The torrents of cascading guitars, cadre of earnest voices in unison, and overall sheen are enough to make you forget this thing couldn’t be more conventionally structured, a paragon of verse-chorus-verse-ery that harkens back to the golden days of pop…They could be singing about library science and hot dogs for all I care; what matters is “Hallelujah” feels like just what it is: a godsend pitchfork

Animal Collective – Brother Sport a big warm hug of a song, and would feel loving and supportive even if Panda Bear were not singing lyrics encouraging his brother not to descend to depression following the death of their father. Cynics may grumble, but anyone in need of this sort of earnest, full-hearted empathy will find it here as the music gradually shifts from a gentle exhortation to move on from a state of mourning to a celebratory climax merging elements of rave, psychedelia, and folk jamborees. On a good day, “Brother Sport” is a joyous romp, but in times of trouble, it’s profound and life-affirming song, rejecting self-defeating despondency while showing a deep respect for the agony of loss. pitchfork

Magic Kids – Hey Boy with give-and-take vocals in a back-and-forth between what sounds like an admonishing all-girl choir — “Hey boy, where’s your girlfriend? / She needs your attention,” it begins — and lead singer Bennett Foster that’s timeless in a puppy-love romance kind of way. popmatters

Music Go Music – Light of Love  no one can go near the sub-genre once defined as ‘guilty pleasures’ without raising a defensive wall of irony, the dull sort of irony that sees an LA band of indie strivers called Bodies of Water writing some decently catchy songs, adopting silly back-stories and renaming themselves Music Go Music (MGM= glamour, presumably). And on getting signed for proper money as their alter egos, separating their music from the self-selected image is impossible… So ‘Light of Love’ is Eurovision boogie, circa 1975, with added Lloyd-Webber-isms, thequietus

The Soft Pack – Answer to Yourself while the moves the Soft Pack have chosen to bust on this track are well-studied and well-worn, they’re not proffered without some skill, as well as some wrinkles pitchfork

Brakes – Worry About It Later With no real image to speak of and with little interest from the popular music press there’s more chance of Lady Gaga becoming a Librarian then there is of Brakes crashing in at number one, but they remain one of those bands that are consistently producing good, solid albums musicomh

Cate Le Bon – Sad Sad Feet Her odd, beautiful songs burrow like furtive woodland creatures to a safe nest lodged firmly between tradition and individual talent… It’s not an album that tries too hard – with songs such as the decadently lush ‘Sad Sad Feet’, with its sleepily, lapping wave rhythm and blissfully lazy refrain of “baby, I’m headed for the black”, it doesn’t need to. nme

Super Furry Animals – Helium Hearts drops us off in Eden. With perfect hippie-dippie non sequiturs about wedding rings, togetherness, and vegemite, it’s probably the closest SFA’s latest comes to the swooning, ELO-lite psych-pop of past highlights like 1996’s “Something 4 the Weekend” pitchfork

A Sunny Day In Glasgow – Shy the album’s acme of surrealism – so genuinely dreamlike and ethereal, as to be nearly twilit. All thanks to the broken, disembodied, poorly enunciated sigh that is its centrepiece drownedinsound

Broken Records – Nearly Home the Edinburgh outfit sound like autodidacts who started life on a rich diet of Scottish folk music, then schooled themselves in French art-house film soundtracks before adventuring around Europe and picking up ‘Now That’s What I Call… Hungarian Wedding Floorfillers From The 1930s’ on the way.

Unusual though they may seem on first listen, these far-flung influences power the best moments of ‘Until The Earth Begins To Part’ to wonderfully evocative effect. Opener ‘Nearly Home’ is a case in point; it’s the kind of dynamic slow-burner that goes from skeletal-sounding guitar scrapes to string-laden crescendos effortlessly nme