With music-industry consolidation, shrinking radio playlists, media mergers, and the aggressive legal action taken against Internet file-sharing enterprises, discovering the year’s best music would seem harder than ever. Still dedicated fans have plenty of avenues at hand, from legal and underground MP3 downloads to peer-to-peer online bootleg trading to college and (what’s left of) Internet radio. music.avclub

It’s possible 2002 will be looked back on as the Year the Indie Kids Started Dancing Again, what with dance-beat influences seeping into the recipes of many a buzz-band, and 24 Hour Party People reminding folks that the gulf between Joy Division and rave culture is only about an hour-and-a-half wide. pitchfork

Young People – Collection  more like a spectacle: you’re detached from the sharp pain they describe, much as it seems like their music is detached from the folk and blues that it cribs from pitchfork

Saloon – Girls are the New Boys begins simply. Gomez’ voice coasts over the galloping drum crashes as she coolly intones, “So this is the new world/ Just like the other one.” But after the chorus and verse, the song extends into a sidelong jam that would have the boy with the Arab Strap swaying to and fro. pitchfork

The Flaming Lips – Do You Realize?  offers childlike lyrics (“Do you realize/ Happiness makes you cry“), congregation-moving arrangements, and bold, Sharpie-on-a-tie-dye-shirt melodies… Sure, its theme is shopworn, but so are love songs. Then again, this track is something of a love song to the here and now– executed masterfully enough to send my inner cynic to an early hereafter.  pitchfork

Baxter Dury – Oscar Brown a work of casual assurance that no family tree can provide, a record that is as majestic as it is wonderfully simple. nme

The Coral – Dreaming of You sounds like Jim Morrison fronting Madness pitchfork

Cinerama – Quick, Before it Melts concerns not evaporating Cornetto but the rather more delicate matter of the wilting erection. There’s medical procedures for that of course, but ‘Hang On Love, I’ve Lost Me Footpump’ may have dampened the romanticism. If we weren’t all fickle, image-worshipping fly-by-night bastards up here this would be Single Of The Week forever. So if we quietly tell you to go buy it, you can quietly thank us later. Deal? nme

M.A.S.S. – Hey Gravity In early 2002 they independently recorded their debut single “Hey Gravity”, which was subsequently licensed to Radiate Records and released in July 2002. This was picked up by several DJs on Radio One, including Steve Lamacq and John Peel. peel.fandom

The Libertines – Time For Heroes It’s 2004, and I’m 15. At the London comprehensive time forgot, I’m either into rap and hip-hop (whereby I’m cool), or I’m a “rockhead”- a slim-jeaned ponce with a taste for punks, piercings and the odd good grade.

But music remains mapped between the isles of Coldplay and N’Sync, a barren wasteland. One day, however, a friend comes into school with a wine stain on yesterday’s shirt. He hasn’t slept. He has long talks with the English teacher, enthusiastically discussing last nights “flat party” antics and the rolled up copy of NME he’s clutching.

So I decide to look up ‘Time For Heroes’ – the subject of their discussion. And to my surprise, it blows me away. There it is. An unhinged, roaring ball of energy. A sense-engulfing fantasia that presents me a buzz so strong, I am unable to shake it off days later.

I’ve never known music to be both exciting and romantic. The sound is unpolished, but the words are resonant, poetic. I am a stylish kid in the riot. This is my rock and roll renaissance. And this, here, is the art of finding one’s self.

The Libertines introduce me to a world where heroes exist. An illicit and charming underworld, where idol and idoliser are interchangeable. They become my homework, my friends, my go-to, captains of the good ship Albion on which I see myself and all those around me sailing. Into infinity, Arcadia. nme

Bearsuit – Drink Ink Back when glorified drug-maniacs The Libertines were the musical bread and butter du jour – and I was the kinda kid who ate bread and butter for breakfast, lunch, tea and supper – the chirpy then-six-piece stirred e-numbers into my metaphorical cornflakes…. more of an “Oh rack off you, with your Union Jack and your supermodel muse and your crack and your silly, skinny arms – yeah I’ve got a library card, and what of it?” sort of affair, which genuinely empowered us lame, straw-clutching nobodies, and offered an alternative to post-Strokes Brit-indie cool. drownedinsound

Harper Lee – Unreciprocated  His technique is a simple one — to create a depressing mood that acts as a calming agent, relating sad, down-on-his-luck stories backed by piercing guitars and sultry bass lines. popmatters

Laura Cantrell – Too Late For Tonight As an artist in the strict non-conformity mould of the likes of Johnny Cash and her heroine Lucinda Williams, she’s seemingly effortlessly able to resurrect the style of the old, with all its sensitivity and authenticity intact, firmly in the present, in the process here creating a record that veritably jumps out of the stereo like a glowing pristine antique. drownedinsound

Ballboy – Avant Garde Music Every one of the band’s EPs and albums opens with a truly memorable number …. it captures perfectly what it is that makes Ballboy such an appealing listen. It is self-deprecating, humorous, catchy and has the most wonderful put-down line of ‘I don’t give a fuck what she says or thinks about me’. Indie attitude at its very best! thenewvinylvillain

Half Man Half Biscuit – The Light At The End Of The Tunnel Even now, there’s still this perception of Half Man Half Biscuit as a comedy band: a post-punk Grumbleweeds, the indie Stilgoe. No group in history can have been so woefully misunderstood – Half Man Half Biscuit are, in fact, an antidote to wackiness, a bulwark against zaniness. Fiercely principled, highly literate, sometimes very close to angry, these are songs of open defiance; their real targets, more often than not, are stupidity as a leisure option, the hollowing-out of British culture, the slow death of the post-war settlement. Half Man Half Biscuit tickle with the left hand, with the right hand they draw blood.  thequietus

Low – In The Drugs The album preserves their defining qualities: superb lyricism and powerful tension. But it’s missing two key elements of Low’s last outing. That is, the engaging songs and captivating production. pitchfork

Jeffrey Lewis – The Chelsea Hotel Oral Sex Song Recorded on two chords so lo-fi you can hear passing traffic, Lewis tells a story of walking up 23rd Street past the Chelsea Hotel, listening to a conversation behind him: ”She was trying to describe a song I knew well/Leonard Cohen’s song about the Chelsea Hotel/And I smiled a smile to myself when she said/It’s the song where he talks about someone giving him head…” Next thing you know, he’s turned round to join in. It’s a little love story about random connections and missed chances – ”If I was Leonard Cohen or some songwriting master/I’d know you first get the oral sex then write the song after”– but most of all, it’s about the way rock’n’roll rubs right up against everyday life. Lovely. nme

Radio 4 – Dance To The Underground They say life is made of moments, well for a slew of NY bands at the moment it appears that life was made of a six month period between the start of  New Order and the end of Joy Division.

In true early eighties style, check the spikey guitars and spaciousness between instruments. Marry that with rhythymic, insistent baselines and a slight nod to ‘dance’ (in the very loosest, old skool sense), and you have the perfect marriage of 1980 and well, 1981.

As good as their influences? Don’t be silly. As good as Interpol? Not quite. Pretty good anyway? Yep. drownedinsound

The Rapture – House of Jealous Lovers I’m surprised that indie rock dudes went from blasting this song on repeat 700 days in a row to vilifying it like the band had committed some horrible sex crime. I’m also surprised how all-kinds-of-music dudes went from vilifying indie kids for not dancing to blasting them even more for thinking dance-punk was “real” dance music. You’re all assholes, frankly pitchfork

Hot Hot Heat – Bandages What distances this modern day classic from skinny-tie bandwagon hoppers is the sheer weight of clever ideas and the ripeness of their stock in trade nme

McLusky – Alan Is A Cowboy Killer sees the Cardiff merry-makers’ patented verse-nuclear meltdown-verse structure grow horns to match its talons. A song about a nutter, it latches inscrutable bellowing to mad-core guitars before shooting the whole thing down in a bloody inferno of heavy metal drums and gravely unpleasant rrrock rrrriffage. It is BSE in a bullet belt; scabies in a faded denim waistcoat. Your mother wouldn’t like it. Nor, in fact, would your doctor or local archdeacon. You, on the other hand, will toast its evil brilliance with a pint of goat semen and the smile of Satan. nme

Cranebuilders – Public Space  starts off sounding like Elastica, before speeding up and getting more into a groove. pennyblackmusic

Beck – Lost Cause the embodiment of self-expression manifested as great art… The reverb on Beck’s voice alone –- rich and full-bodied -– sounds as if it has been worked-over for weeks.” When Beck sings that he’s “tired of fighting,” you hear the fatigue. When he sings “this town is crazy, nobody cares,” his delivery, intimate with surrender, makes the sentiment all the more pitiable. You can have the Francophilic affectations, the postmodern genre-traipsing, and the dada-derived microphone technique — I’ll take Beck the songwriter any day. On the evidence of “Lost Cause,” it’s what he does best. stereogum

Johnny Cash – Hurt Ask someone to name a song that always has the power to reduce them to tears, and the chances are they’ll swiftly reply “Johnny Cash. Hurt.” Most people know that it was originally an (excellent in its own right) Nine Inch Nails song …. When asked if Cash could take on the song, NIN’s Trent Reznor at first said he was “flattered”, but worried that “the idea sounded a bit gimmicky”

Romanek jumped on a red-eye flight to Nashville and began scouting potential filming locations, leading him to Cash’s home and museum, The House of Cash.

“It had been closed for a long time,” the director recalled. “The place was in such a state of dereliction. That’s when I got the idea that maybe we could be extremely candid about the state of Johnny’s health – as candid as Johnny has always been in his songs.”

That idea would blossom into a heart-wrenching music video, that spoke about the transience of life, the gracelessness of death, the Ozymandian crumbling of an oeuvre and the decline of a genre, an era and an attitude.

The ‘closed to public’ sign on the museum. The cracked platinum records. The caviar and lobster banquet with no diners. The clips from earlier in Johnny’s career. His wife June looking on. The closed piano. The tears well at different times for different viewers – for me it’s always the pouring of the wine from Cash’s frail hand.

June would die three months after filming, her husband, seven.

Reznor was sent the video while in the studio with Rage Against the Machine’s Zach De La Rocha, and, when the pair sat down to watch it, any doubts he had about the cover were long gone.

“We were in the studio, getting ready to work and I popped it in,” he recalled. “By the end I was really on the verge of tears…there was just dead silence. There was, like, this moist clearing of our throats and then, ‘Uh, okay, let’s get some coffee.’” independent

The Books – Enjoy Your Worries, You May Never Have Them Again Built on a simple guitar melody consisting of only a few notes, the song crescendos into a hauntingly intense piece as acoustic guitars add dissonant notes over the tranquil melody and a distressed female voice enters the foreground before being suddenly sped up, and just as suddenly interrupted. stylus magazine

Mum – Green Green Grass of Tunnel a nice little song, fragile and pretty as blown glass pitchfork

Ladytron – Seventeen a band in total control of its voice, a moody, romantic synth pulse that makes you want to dress up, go out and have nocturnal adventures nme

Doves – There Goes The Fear Judging by the kaleidoscopic buoyancy of mood encapsulated by the circling guitar figures and priapic bass, a truckload of high quality Ecstasy must’ve been abandoned outside Doves studio during the recording of this track “Think of me when you’re coming down/Don’t look back when you’re leaving town” murmurs Jimmy Goodwin, but the sense of regret is lightly etched. There’s just enough nostalgia for lost summers/girlfriends to link it spiritually to earlier Mancunian beat pop, but mostly ‘Fear’ is a beautifully spun haze of loved-up reassurance… for the time being this is definitely the drunk-bicycling-through-a-meadow record of the week. nme

Sigur Ros – Untitled #3 ( ) ran through eight tracks in a presumptuous seventy-two minutes. It provided no song titles or information in the useless CD booklet, and it contained no dramatic departures from Ágaetis Byrjun. So why give a shit? Because when a band is at the fore of musical innovation, they can get away with this kind of absurd tripe, and probably a whole lot more pitchfork

The Delgados – All You Need Is Hate an artful pastiche of ‘All You Need Is Love’ that transmutes the hemp-scented hippy good vibes of the original into a grand, symphonic paean to humanity’s dark side. “You ask me what you need?” trembles Alun Woodward, “Hate is all you need…”, as two triumphant chords peal out like hell’s distant bells. It’s smart and funny, yet in an age where the warmongers hog the world’s driving seat, rings sinisterly true. nme

Lambchop – The Daily Growl from the Vince Guaraldi-like instrumental intro it’s apparent that the keyword for this outing is “sparse.” Fourteen people (twenty, if you count guests) have never sounded so quiet pitchfork

Beth Gibbons, Rustin Man – Mysteries features Gibbons backed by just a plucked acoustic guitar and multi-layered backing vocals. As soon as she sings “God knows how I adore life…” you’re reminded that you’re listening to one of the most remarkable voices around. She could reduce the listener to tears just by singing the phone book. The pace rarely lifts throughout the record – this is an album to be listened to late at night while relaxing from the stresses and strains of the day. musicomh

Badly Drawn Boy – A Minor Incident After winning the Mercury Prize, beating contemporaries Coldplay and Doves, Gough’s next move was to soundtrack the sweet, but sad, About A Boy adaptation. A perfect vehicle for BDB’s bittersweet strumming, A Minor Incident was one of the film’s most arresting moments, a harrowing harmonica reflecting on a mother’s suicide note. louderthanwar

Badly Drawn Boy – You Were Right verses reminiscing of ‘American Pie‘ with BDB name-checking Jeff Buckley, Cobain, Lennon, Sinatra and Madonna in the same way Don McLean annotated his own history of American music. The Americanisms of whiskey and rye are replaced however, with his own quirky Englishness (“wipe the slime from off your sleeve“) in a sprawling, eventually racing, ballad that builds to a string-laden crescendo in traditional BDB style. Its about acceptance of mortality and embracing domestic bliss, apparently. nme

Cornershop – Lessions Learned from Rocky I to Rocky III You have to see the video for this single. Condensing ‘Almost Famous’ into four minutes, it’s a hilarious and flawlessly accurate ‘documentary’ in which a group of ‘70s cock-rockers perform this song at a massive festival, interspersed with shots of them getting up to no good backstage. And ‘Lessons Learned From Rocky I To Rocky III’ has a similarly tongue-in-cheek relationship with the romance of the past, slagging nu-metal as “TSB Rockschool, the overgrown super shit” while sliding along on Rolling Stones-style boogie riffs.

It’s old-school indie snobbery with a sense of humour, radio-friendly FM rock peppered with swearing, and designed to confuse as many people as possible. It’s perverse. It’s sweaty. It’s a hoot. nme

Supergrass – Grace  there are breakfast cereals more complicated than this group, but they continue to bumble eccentrically and blamelessly on a pleasant and nostalgic track, and now have arrived here – at the early 1970s, and the works of Marc Bolan. It’s development of a kind, of course, but one suspects Supergrass enjoy their status as Britpop Peter Pans. Old in influence, but young at heart. nme

Bright Eyes – From A Balance Beam  a song about the effects of fame, sure, about private failure becoming public spectacle, the light of public scrutiny imbuing that spectacle with a meaning almost unimaginable to its source — there is talk of miracles, angels flying in the streets, though the speaker thinks he saw some pretty mundane machinery behind it all. But here, unlike in his other, more “introspective” songs about the public eye, Oberst is game — he wants to believe in the miracle, even if it means accepting the public projection of him, even if it means drowning the needy, pathetic “this is who I am” of Fevers and Mirrors in a hotel bathtub somewhere across the ocean. popmatters

Guided By Voices – Back To The Lake perfectly contrasting its rhythmically relentless drive with a simple, laid-back vocal melody pitchfork

Brendan Benson – Metarie If the brilliant “Metarie”, the best ballad Evan Dando never wrote and a future single, doesn’t dominate the airwaves, I’ll be amazed, though its unusual title is something of an accident.

“It’s a place in Louisiana. I’ve never been there. I spelt it wrong, too. [Metairie is, in fact, outside New Orleans.] It was going to be called ‘Met a Girl’ after the first line, but I thought it was too similar to Nirvana’s ‘About a Girl’. I’ve never been too good with titles,” he explains. “We’ve had such a great response to that song here. English people really like their ballady, anthemic things.” independent

Richard Hawley – Baby You’re My Light a simple song, that, for want, of a better phrase, says so much. With a haunting croon, a tremelo bar & an echo chamber the size of the Mersey tunnel, he effortlessly conjures up the days when all songs were listened to whilst perfecting a curl of the upper lip, Hawley writes songs born of another era, an age of simple innocence. drownedinsound

The Clientele – Emptily Through Holloway This is music for hangovers, or to be more accurate, for easing yourself out of them and back into some semblance of lucidity. opuszine

Belle & Sebastian – Fuck This Shit consists of Stevie Jackson taking lead on harmonica playing one of the catchiest tunes you are ever likely to hear, slowly gathering pace, meandering its way through the background cello section and delivering a sublime melody that in some way manages to reflect the apathy of the title. drownedinsound

Free Loan Investments – Kick His Balls Out this band has its heart set on flooding the listener with twee pop sensibilities and dance-ready rhythms allmusicguide

The Radio Dept. – Why Won’t You Talk About It it sounds to me like someone’s had a barney with their squeeze and has retreated to a nearby barn to make a noise like a backfiring combine harvester while griping away about how she doesn’t understand him. This is, in all honesty, heroic behaviour and actually the only real reason there is to listen to pop music in the first place. If it weren’t for infuriating partners we’d all have to pack up and go home as there’d be nothing left to say. Luckily, the world is full of them, so there’s no danger on that score. nme

James Yorkston – The Lang Toun a 10 minute folk drone of a song, which can only be compared to motorway noise…. A meandering song if ever there was one, this is a haunting, almost disturbing record. But one which you should own nonetheless. drownedinsound

The Lucksmiths – Midweek Midmorning a punchy, irresistible ode to savoring the moment while it lasts midweek midmorning

Spoon – The Way We Get By  the piano line is pure gold, pitchfork

Silver Jews – I Remember Me There are whiffs of narrative in Berman’s music, but most of it rests in an abstract, internal space. Then there’s “I Remember Me.” Through five-and-a-half minutes, it charts in painstaking, country-esque detail a ballad of two people falling in love. But right when the man gets on his knee to propose, he’s hit by a runaway truck. Waking from a coma years later, he finds his love’s married a banker in Oklahoma and, stuck on the land he’s bought with his settlement, feeling the metal of the truck that tore him from his dreams, remembers the people they once were. It’s a brutal distillation of how it feels like to live in the past pastemagazine

Tullycraft – Twee When ethnomusicologists of the future look back on the cult phenomenon that was twee pop, they need go no further for defining moments than “Twee,” the opening track on Tullycraft’s wonderful Beat Surf Fun: A catalog of icons and totems that includes nods to Sarah Records, 14 Iced Bears, and the Pastels’ Aggi Wright, its quintessentially adenoidal vocals and manic strumming culminate in the rallying cry “You can keep your punk rock, ska, rap beats and house, f**k me I’m twee!” allmusicguide

Tender Trap – Oh Katrina a perfect example of a track that upon first listen had me reaching for the eject button (as my fear and hate of kitschy, vacuous pop arose), but now has me nodding my head like an agitated cokehead stylusmagazine

Sportique – Art & Shopping Focusing on Pink-Flag-like brevity (ten songs in barely 24 minutes) and a Buzzcocks-esque melding of aggression and sweet pop hooks, singer/songwriter Gregory Webster has created an album that is on the one hand, utterly derivative (there is not one song here that can’t be traced back to an obvious source), and on the other, completely wonderful. allmusic

Clinic – Harmony  opens the record promisingly, with a spooky electric piano and hypnotic bassline providing a backdrop for Ade Blackburn’s nasal, reptilian vocals… The song’s ethereal refrain of “fill yourself with dreams” is absolutely haunting, and one of the greatest moments Clinic has laid to tape. pitchfork

Rilo Kiley – Capturing Moods Lewis’ girlish, unaffected delivery takes the sting out of the obscenities that occasionally litter her rocky confessional landscape. The sharp contrast between poetry and impulse rarely seems gratuitous and is often breathtaking pastemagazine

Iron & Wine – Upward Over The Mountain wholly transforms when performed in a full-band setting: The tempo picks up, the acoustic instruments are traded for electric ones (that sometimes take solos!) and the outro breakdown has been known to leave fans in a frenzy. Yet, such a song of forgiveness and hope can still resonates in its barest form pastemagazine

Darren Hanlon – Hiccups  an upbeat anthem that proffers some advice on finding a cure, but it’s really about a woman obsessed with games and mismatched moods popmatters

The Mountain Goats – The Best Ever Death Metal Band in Denton the story of Jeff and Cyrus, childhood friends with big dreams of death metal superstardom. Concerned parents and teachers shut down the band before it even settles on a name, but the dream won’t stay down forever: “The best ever death metal band out of Denton will in time both outpace and outlive you.” A triumphant “Hail Satan!” drives the point home. popmatters

The Mountain Goats – No Children With 2002’s Tallahassee, Darnielle devoted an entire album to the “Alpha couple”, a pair that had appeared in a number of earlier songs. The two were doomed from the start, and Tallahassee‘s “No Children” takes them to their lowest lows. The song runs through a list of “hopes” that starts out bleak (“I hope that our few remaining friends give up on trying to save us“) and quickly turns hateful (“I hope I lie and tell everyone you were a good wife“) — ultimately arriving at “I hope we both die” in the sing-along chorus. popmatters

The Reindeer Section – You Are My Joy  a song so utterly in love with life and love itself that it would be churlishly impossible not to fall in love with it. hotpress uncomfortably anthemic  pitchfork

British Sea Power – The Lonely a beautiful lament for Geoff Goddard which asks some pretty leading questions about the industry British Sea Power are courting (“Since I found out that all of this / Is nothing more than emptiness / Filled with impermanence”). It’s a breathtakingly subtle and bold song drownedinsound

Chilly Gonzales – Futuristic Ain’t Shit To Me Chilly Gonzales is the Jewish MC from East Berlin, a Canadian ex-pat cartoon master-prankster and a media-manipulating supervillain. He’s the compulsive liar who tells it like it is, a man so dope you get high just listening to his rhymes. A successful failure and a serious entertainer, he’s the moron in oxymoron and with ‘The Entertainist’, he’s truly surpassed himself nme

Peaches – Set It Off 20 years since it was released on XL Recordings – and a lot has changed. We have kids dancing to “WAP” on TikTok and Rihanna singing lyrics like “Lick it, lick it better” on mainstream radio stations. But in the early 2000s, it was still not as commonplace to hear women making ultra horny, pro-sex music about female desire – particularly not 33-year-old queer women in silver spandex screaming into the mic with one hand and twiddling the nobs of a Roland MC-505 Groovebox with the other. Peaches was – and is – an anomaly; a punk spirit channelled through electronic beats. vice

Black Dice – Seabird It’s not that the music on Beaches & Canyons was necessarily attractive, but there was a certain allure to the quartet’s futuristic nature hymns and war cries. pitchfork

LCD Soundsystem – Losing My Edge Great singles are commonly described as perfectly encapsulating their era, quickly summing up a time period’s musical fashion or taking a snapshot of current events. More often than not, this synopsis effect is accidental, but not so for James Murphy– his debut single with LCD Soundsystem set out to make a clinical diagnosis of everything going on/wrong in indie music circa 2002, and it may go down as one of the most on-the-mark song statements ever. pitchfork

Liars – Mr Your on Fire Mr grating and electrifying in equal measure music.avclub

The Streets – Weak Become Heroes wordy but never wasteful as it gazes at E-ed up club culture immersion from several angles. The snapshot of the initial excitement is spot on, sketching just enough small details to make the familiar scene come alive, and “Me and you are same/ I known you all my life/ I don’t know your name” captures everything great and tragic about ecstasy in 16 words. The cinematic dissolve to the present day and the weary crowd that refuses to move on is equally well rendered. Beneath it all, the same piano that loops ovah and ovah is neutral enough to reinforce each side of the story. and the chorus hook kills. This ranks with “Tangled Up in Blue” as an epoch-defining impressionist narrative. pitchfork

The Notwist – Pick up the Phone Maybe it’s got something to do with German engineering, or Markus Acher’s moonbeam of a voice, but it was endlessly thrilling to see the canvas of electronic music stretched to the frame of guitar-pop, and so perfectly. Neon Golden made it difficult to believe the two genres were ever separate,… For once, electronics weren’t employed to create a futuristic sheen, but to celebrate and explore what emotional overtones these computerized sounds might be capable of communicating pitchfork

Milky Wimpshake – Scrabble it’s rare to find the voice of the common English punk nerd. You don’t hear much from bookish lads chatting in pubs about “anarcho-syndicalist” politics or crapping about how they never get laid. Such topics, of course, seem gloomy on the surface, but… if you sugarcoat them in some catchy pop/punk you get something pretty damn good pitchfork

Comet Gain – Why I Try To Look So Bad I’ve always sort of felt like the Comet Gain were simply a band solely for me.  austintownhall

Destroyer – The Chosen Few  still the only album Bejar has put out that completely defies any convenient or concise description.

Interpol – NYC an incredibly powerful and affecting album. Loss, regret, and a minor key brilliantly permeate jangling guitars and rhythmic and tonal shifts– and although it’s no Closer or OK Computer, it’s not unthinkable that this band might aspire to such heights. pitchfork

The Polyphonic Spree – Light & Day / Reach For The Sun a three-minute firework display that sounds like Brian Wilson trying to conduct an orchestra of Andrex puppies on E nme

Coldplay – In My Place As their golden lights fell on 100,000 believers from the main stage at Glastonbury, Coldplay became, along with Oasis and Radiohead, one of the most important bands in Britain. And here is a track befitting their place at the top table. Jonny Buckland’s simple, beautiful guitar lick swirls round Chris Martin’s rich, distinctive voice – a voice straddling self-doubt and world domination. It’s ‘Yellow’ to the power of ten and a track that makes everything on ‘Parachutes’ seem a lifetime away. nme

Beth Orton – Concrete Sky Cynics could say it’s a Dido album for people too self-consciously cool to buy a Dido album, but to do so would be to mistake a black cat for a lump of coal. nme

Asa-Chang & Junray – Hana  features a clear, hopelessly melancholy string arrangement but the most distinctive part of the song is its drastically straightforward marriage of melody and rhythm. Asa-Chang’s Indonesian bongo (which sounds remarkably like an Indian tabla) plays in unison to a male/female duet, effectively destroying any expectation for “groove”, yet forming what would be an off-kilter ballad into a futuristic, exotic percussion piece, thanks especially to the band’s secret weapons: soft, ascending sine tones. Although technically speaking, all the old building blocks are intact, the harmony is in tune with nothing, the melody has no notes, and the rhythm is present in name only, happy to exist as a melody-by-proxy. pitchfork

Wilco – Kamera The album’s thesis is clear: take standard Tweedy folk material, rip it to shreds, and tape it back together, slightly askew. Its inspiration is even clearer (cough, cough, Big Star, cough), but the success with which Wilco pull it off is exhilarating. Call it dad-rock if you must, but if the day comes when Dads are mowing lawns to the death rattle of “Radio Cure”, I won’t complain pitchfork

Joy Zipper – Christmas Song these are blissed-out psychedelic lullabies (the sublime Christmas Song professes to “love you more than a thousand Christmasses“), but the beauty is seamed with a jaded, borderline nihilistic ennui theguardian

Oasis – Stop Crying Your Heart Out Change the word “stars” in the chorus to “scars” and you’ve got yourself a classic about the bumpy ride that is life.  nme