The Strokes – Hard To Explain a record that generates genuine scalp-crackling excitement, a comet-rare synthesis of form, content, attitude and hair that makes the perfect blackout silence in the middle of ‘Hard To Explain’ say just as much Julian Casablancas’ immaculately drawled ”I watch the TV/Forget what I’m told/But I am too young and they are too old” nme

Sea Power – Remember Me has possibly the most urgent, compelling and darn right exciting opening to a record for ages. Almost a minute and a half of pounding drums, spiky guitars and seaside sound effects, and then the vocal enters. A swirling psychedelic, fury filled eruption of a song… and yet still the fragile beauty of the melody, and the charred emotion of the lyric remain clear… It all adds up to one of the most refreshing, vital, cobweb clearing records of the year drownedinsound

Life Without Buildings – Juno no one since has sounded quite like them, and to even try would miss the point. Their music valued invention, risk, wonder, imagination, and—perhaps above all other virtues—fun. And like very few bands, they were smart enough to walk away as soon as the fun stopped pitchfork

For some, the scrape of fingernails on a blackboard is an exquisite sensation. Dentists’ drills provide a satisfying tingle. Animals dying in agony make a heavenly choir. And Sue Tompkins, ‘idiosyncratic’ frontwoman of Life Without Buildings, makes a beautiful noise. Whether or not someone has a good voice is one of those subjective arguments that isn’t usually worth even starting. But really, only mad people and immediate family could warm to Tompkins. nme

That’s John Mulvey of NME, reviewing my favorite album of the last decade, Life Without Buildings’ Any Other City. For the record, I don’t enjoy the sound of dentists’ drills or animals dying in agony, and I’m not related to Sue Tompkins. But maybe I am a bit mad to feel so strongly about an album that has been heard by so few people.

Mulvey’s criticism of Tompkins was a common one when the album was first released in 2001: “The band sounds good, but what’s with the singing?” The thing is, Mulvey isn’t exactly wrong. I totally get why the singing style of Tompkins could be torture on the ears of some listeners, who hear what she’s doing and attribute it to pretentious artsiness or put-on quirkiness. However, for a few listeners like me, what Tompkins does on Any Other City is nothing short of pure magic.

Tompkins instantly stands out to anyone who listens to the band due to her high-pitched voice and talk-singing style, which forsakes traditional music lyricism for repetition, seemingly nonsense phrases, stutters and squeals. Love her or hate her, what’s undeniable is that Tompkins has a completely unique presence with boundless energy, enthusiasm, and charisma, and along with her lyrics it makes her a strangely endearing figure. There’s never been a singer quite like Tompkins, or an album quite like Any Other City. tnmbp

Stephen Malkmus – Jenny & The Ess-Dog this song manages to be, all at once, deliciously tuneful, utterly absurd and yet oddly touching. In just under three minutes of jangling, descending chords, Malkmus takes us through the romance of a slackerish musician and a younger woman (“She’s 18, he’s 31/ She’s a rich girl, he’s the son /of a Coca-Cola middleman“) before – I suppose I should say “spoiler alert” here – their inevitable break-up when she moves away to college.

The song somehow straddles a line between near-mockery – an early line runs “Kiss when they listen to Brothers in Arms/ And if there’s something wrong with this/ They don’t see the harm” – and genuine emotion. Anyone who doesn’t feel something for the chastened Ess-Dog (“Sean, if you will“), who quits his covers band and starts waiting tables after the break-up has a heart of stone…

It remains one of my favourite love songs. theguardian

The Shins – New Slang Both joyful and morose, it’s one of those really human tunes that pierces you, steeped in nostalgia as potent as an autumnal memory of your childhood neighborhood. spin

Camera Obscura – Eighties Fan  starts off with a drum beat you’re sure you’ve before a hundred times, hinting at something upbeat, but Camera Obscura doesn’t go there. Instead, they run up crying to their bedroom and slam the door. They put something sad on the turntable and crank the volume, ignoring the shouts of their mother below. They pull out the tiny bottle of vodka that an older teenager had procured for them and sip lightly but still coughing and sputtering. They curse the name of their more attractive and hipper older sister for catching the eye of the cute boy they had a crush on and cry, tears streaming everywhere. And… well… you get the picture mylifeinmusiclists

Belle and Sebastian – Take Your Carriage Clock And Shove It typically winsome and barbed salon

Spearmint – Scottish Pop some songs are simple, sing-along songs… It’s the tune that the saves the day, a perfect harmony in your head, the joy felt when Smokey Robinson sings. Sometimes it’s a style of music, maybe sweet soul music, F.U.N.K. or the jangling guitars of the indie disco; Scottish Pop is the genre that makes Spearmint feel like they are falling in love theguardian

Ballboy – Donald In The Bushes With A Bag Of Glue buy this one and discover why Scotland is a great nation for indiepop pennyblackmusic

Super Furry Animals – Juxtapozed With U Originally conceived as a duet with East 17’s Brian Harvey (he turned it down? He must be mental!), this is a total surprise and an absolute delight… One second as devastating as a tank through your stereo, the next as bouyant and chirpy as an inflatable panda, ‘Juxtapozed With U’ does the do in almost every way imaginable then turns into Paul McCartney and Stevie Wonder’s ‘Ebony And Ivory’ at the end, as all songs parading any degree of greatness really should. nme

Mull Historical Society – Animal Cannabus it starts with a sea of keyboard noise, bells and unique effects. You enter into a maze of melodies, sounds, and hooks leaving your mind unable to comprehend what it just heard. With ”Animal Cannabus” the sound of confusion never sounded so good. drownedinsound

Bearsuit – Hey Charlie Hey Chuck great on record but incendiary live. It develops from a poptastic driving Cinerama melody, decorated with brass tralalas, that explodes at the choruses with Lisa’s whooping and strange sort of pogoing soundsxp

Destroyer – The Sublimation Hour Rock and roll has rarely been so quotable — there is a hardly a minute that goes by on Streethawk without Bejar enlivening matters with a laugh-out-loud turn of phrase or withering insight — but unforgettable tunes like the monster glam strut of “The Sublimation Hour,” the gorgeous, strumming ballad “Helena,” and the devastating Ian Curtis tribute “Farrar, Straus, and Giroux (Sea Of Tears)” prove more than a match for the lyrical pyrotechnics. stereogum

Elbow – Scattered Black And Whites At the end of all the darkness that permeates Asleep In The Back there is one of the cornerstones of Elbow’s catalog, one of their finest songs and one that in many ways feels like a manifesto for everything that came after. stereogum

The Moldy Peaches – Anyone But You Plenty of great records came out in 2001, but few were as appealing to sing along to as The Moldy Peaches…  I cannot make much of case that the antifolk scene was particularly consequential — a key club, a handful of good records, no particular social or political agenda. But The Moldy Peaches remains pretty compelling for how it captures two young people — a Black woman and her much younger Jewish co-conspirator –trying to imagine a world that they can live in. In that respect, the record’s rallying cry, if it has one, might be found in a line from “Anyone Else But You”: “Don Quixote was a steel driving man.” What a moment! Drawing a line from world literature’s most well-known dreamer to John Henry, the steel driving man — African American folk culture’s heroic and doomed worker — stops me in my tracks every time I hear it.

Melys – Chinese Whispers They won John Peel’s Festive Fifty… they learnt to ‘swirl’ and Andrea Parker’s ultra-soprano voice became the instrument that all their fans knew it was reall drownedinsound

a tender, glacial ballad that sounds like Dusty Springfield backed by St Etienne. Lovely theguardian

Death Cab For Cutie – Movie Script Ending their song about the emotional whiplash of returning to Bellingham after touring only to find themselves right back out on the highway. The track is littered with allusions to the group’s hometown, to the streets they walked and the barstools where they perched. stereogum

Electrelane – Film Music Shamelessly blatant about exploiting the whole “soundtrack for an imaginary film” cliché, at least Electrelane have chosen a non-existent film that would terrify your local Odeon… You’d shout “action!”, but at a guess, these girls don’t take orders from anyone nme

Ladytron – The Way That I Found You They are Bride Of Kraftwerk, an android Blondie, the Atari Teenage Riot you can bear to listen to AND The Human League being roughed up by Can down a back alley in Prague nme

Daft Punk – Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger The sound of a robotic voice intoning mantras like “Hour after hour, work is never over” would be depressing and dystopian in anyone else’s hands, but Daft Punk’s ebullient spirit managed to shine through anyway: they took their work seriously, but it always felt like they got as much of a kick out of it as we did it spin

Lift To Experience – These Are The Days Not content with recycling the Merlins and Gandalfs that have made vintage prog-rock concept albums such an enduring laughing stock, The Texas-Jerusalem Crossroads opts for the fire and brimstone of old time religion. Centred on a celestial vision involving a messenger from the good Lord above, the album charts what follows when an angel of heaven pops down to instruct a rock band to build a new ‘city on the hill’ in Texas, newly declared as the promised land which is in fact at the center of JerUSAlem, in exchange for a smash hit…. one of the most fully realised debut albums ever to be unleashed on an undeserving world, if not quite the all-time masterpiece it’s been routinely hailed thelineofbestfit

Guided By Voices – Glad Girls Look. While I’ll admit that because of the low-fi or because it’s hard to know where to start, or because of Pollard’s tendency to be non-linear with his lyrics, or because of the fake English accent in which he sings, maybe Guided by Voices ain’t for everyone…Except for this song. I can’t imagine anyone who loves rock ‘n’ roll hearing “Glad Girls” and not falling straight in love with it. medialoper

Beulah – Gene Autry Beulah’s previous album, When Your Heartstrings Break, was a masterpiece of orchestral 60s-style pop. From start to finish, it was catchy and unique, taking the style of 60s pop and turning it into something uniquely its own, replete with clever lyrics and impossible-to-shake hooks. On the surface, Beulah appears to have successfully replicated this formula. The Coast is Never Clear sounds a lot like its predecessor, but it lacks the originality and heartfelt delivery that won When Your Heartstrings Break a constant presence in so many disc players a couple summers back pitchfork

Ben Folds – Zak and Sara transforms from a stadium rock intro riff to a bouncy-pop number. What floors me the most, though, is the knowledge that Folds personally played every single instrument on this song and the rest of Rockin’ the Suburbs. Nobody could claim that this man doesn’t have talent thewildhoneypie

Pulp – The Night That Minnie Timperley Died Never one to shy from the dark underbelly of humanity, Cocker mines a dream here, telling the story of a teenaged girl’s murder, lurking in the minds of both the victim and the predator. A song that starts so upbeat (“There’s a light that shines on everything & everyone”) but ends so dark and twisted (“And he only did what he did ’cause you looked like one of his kids”). It feels like Jarvis is playing with us. And if you didn’t pay enough attention, you could be easily fooled and taken in by the funky drum beats, handclaps and jangle, alien synth washes, and Who-worthy rock and roll guitar and bass slam riffs mylifeinmusiclists

Comet Gain – You Can Hide Your Love Forever a beautiful, singalong anthem about young pen pals torturing themselves through romantic repression as they trade cassette tapes through the mail. I mean, seriously, even a character from a Belle and Sebastian song would tell these kids to buck up their courage, leave their bedsits, get on a train and go meet each other somewhere. correctiveless

Trembling Blue Stars – The Ghost Of An Unkissed Kiss drawing from 80s jangle pop and adding in a nicely executed backward guitar solo for good measure. The refrain of, “Dry eyes, dry eyes/ It was never going to end with dry eyes,” is probably the catchiest thing on the album pitchfork

Harper Lee – Train Not Stopping 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.

The song, about a mundane walk home from work with every possible obstacle getting in the way, is essentially an ode to being alone, to making mistakes and tripping up. Howard’s maudlin delivery of the song’s absorbing, poetic lyrics — “Tell me what I’ve done / Am I quite that bad, no really / Be brutal won’t you / Hurt me if you need to” — is so devastatingly pure that he tends to blend into the soft piano vibrations behind him, causing is voice to suddenly become just another instrument. popmatters

Mercury Rev – The Dark Is Rising All Is Dream has some fantastic songs and moments of preposterous pomp, not least The Dark Is Rising, which continues the band’s tradition of brilliant album openers. The song races out of the traps with booming timpani and soaring strings, before settling into one of Donahue’s most sweetly affecting melodies. If Mercury Rev were ever to make a Bond theme, this would be it. theguardian

Spiritualized – Stop Your Crying this stuff is big in a Spector-ized wall of sound kind of way, Pierce’s increasing focus on gospel taking him back to the forms of big orchestral pop songs from the ’60s and ’70s. This album is pure bombast, but this time it’s all swelling strings and movie-soundtrack horns and timpani… the album is dominated by lovelorn songs coated in enough orchestration that in lesser hands would easily spiral into the saccharine, and yet Pierce’s perennially gravelly and world-weary voice seems to ground it all. Let It Come Down is an overwhelming experience, the sort of the album that is just so much that it can be hard to take in one sitting. You can’t really tell if the resulting excess is religious or decadent, and that’s maybe what makes it such a rewarding listen. Spiritualized is always most interesting when the profane and sublime are crashing together. stereogum

Sodastream – Heaven On The Ground muted trumpets fittingly punctuate mournful strings or elegant guitar and bass runs, and emotive lyrics abound… Sodastream knows how to grieve beautifully, or to just observe the absurdity of the way the world seems to work while refusing to be placated by it allmusic

The Pernice Brothers – Working Girls Joe Pernice is the sun around which the whole project orbits. A gifted pop classicist, his pithy songs – imagine a cranked-up Teenage Fanclub – are slathered in sunburnt harmonies, inspirational string arrangements and a keen sense of pathos… The myth about great pop is that it’s disposable. In fact, as Joe Pernice proves, great pop transforms real-life into something extraordinary nme

The Lucksmiths – Self-Preservation The band is utterly content in presenting simple, catchy love songs that make no waves to innovate. And that’s fine, because they’re damn good at it.

Perhaps an even more appropriate description of the Lucksmiths sound is found in the title of Surprise Me‘s opening track, “Music to Hold Hands To.” One could do little more than sway to the cleanly produced, mid-tempo gem, but as drummer/vocalist Tali White explains, “Sometimes something you can dance to/ Is the last thing that you need.” The album’s most infectious track, “Self Preservation,” is frenetically jangly, and bolstered by stuttering, punchy drums. And it’s about breaking up. During the unforgettable chorus, a celebration of horns joins in, and White only seems happier, singing, “And whatever comes next/ If we leave the nest/ Don’t settle for less than what we’ve got.” This optimistic take on the potentially maudlin territory of Splitsville is immediately endearing pitchfork

The White Stripes – Fell In Love With A Girl He went Jurassic Park here, extracting rock DNA and playing God with it, resulting in a song that may not have stomped with rock’s dinosaurs but reigns supreme over their myriad descendants stereogum

The Avalanches – Two Heart in 3/4 Time You could argue that Since I Left You, with its brazen lack of original content, represents the sound of pop finally eating itself… this album is far less cynical in the way that it recycles the past than most contemporary rock and pop. … it’s an album about the evocative power of music, and how just a fragment of it has the ability to open up whole new vistas of the imagination. theguardian

Gorillaz – Clint Eastwood If someone told you in 2000 that the guy from Blur was about the achieve one of the greatest second acts in music history — in the form of a cartoon band of which he’s the only full-time musical member, with an enviable slate of rap guest spots — you’d have been forgiven for giving the time traveler a weird look spin

Ash – Shining Light textbook lessons in finding the G spot on a guitar nme

New Order – Crystal New Order’s comeback single off their (much-needed) comeback album had no business being this good. Coming eight years after their last studio album (1993’s Republic), Get Ready recast the band as something they’d never been: a rock band. Big beat, guitar-driven Britpop from a band known for post-punk and dance tracks? It didn’t feel in line with the times, and it didn’t feel much like the New Order we knew; rather, it was an album-length expansion of their last big hit, “Regret.” But they rose to the occasion, pairing confidence of execution with head-on hooks, and it was good. The strongest song from a collection of strong songs, “Crystal” is all thrust and propulsion; the kind of song meant for a late-night autobahn run as much a late-night roll in the hay. stereogum

The Coral – Shadows Fall a beautifully crafted song, which sounds like it could have been created in 1967. It’s the sound of a haunted ghost returning to its home “silence warms through the halls, since I’ve been gone”. If Lee Mavers sang the songs of Love it would sound something like this, however, to compare it to anything else would take away the fact that you won’t have actually heard anything like this before, for this is a band who are almost uncategorisable. Choral folk? Jazz? Psychedelia? drownedinsound

Mazarin – Suicide Will Make You Happy Mazarin is the brainchild of a single man, the unfortunately named Quentin Stoltzfus… Apparently there was a lot of heartache and perfectionism and Kafka-esque burning of manuscripts before Mazarin released its first album, Watch It Happen. Artistic narcissism aside, the work paid off: its leading single, “Wheats”, was picked by England’s NME as the Single of the Week for December 11, 1999. Generally, our man Q.S. seems to have made the most impression in Merry Old England, whose inhabitants are, as a rule, more receptive of sweet, well-crafted pop than us colonials, who tend to set the bar high and the quota low for such indulgences popmatters

Cosmic Rough Riders – Melanie this is a night of celebration. The five Cosmics don’t really look like stars but are so enthusiastic that charisma radiates from them, whether it’s lanky guitarist Stephen Fleming contorting his face while delivering yet another sun-soaked vocal harmony, or Wylie’s Glaswegian warmth and wit. He introduces the gorgeous Melanie as “our Top 100 single. Unfortunately it only reached number 100.” theguardian

Felix Da Housecat ‎- Silver Screen Shower Scene

Miss Kittin, The Hacker – Frank Sinatra

Electroclash was mocked—and revered—when it emerged around the turn of the millennium. What sounded thrilling to young ears was less impressive to those who’d lived through new wave. “You could make your own generic electroclash record by talking blankly in a vaguely European accent about taking cocaine at fashion parties over the bassline from ‘Sweet Dreams’ by the Eurythmics,” wrote Dorian Lynskey in The Guardian in 2002.

The best electroclash, however, was inherently aware of its own silliness, wearing its stylistic excesses with tongue firmly in cheek… Tommie Sunshine, AKA Thomas Lorello, was among the DJs championing early electroclash records in the US… Lorello and Felix Da Housecat were working on music together at the time, having met by chance in a record store Lorello worked at in Atlanta…. During intensive listening sessions, they cycled through early electro, freestyle, breakdance, new wave and disco, and toured the Midwest as DJs together. “We were playing a gig in St. Louis,” Lorello recalled. “I was playing Miss Kittin & The Hacker’s ‘Frank Sinatra’ and Felix comes running into the booth. He says to me, ‘Who is singing on this record?’ And I was like, ‘It’s Miss Kittin. You don’t know who Miss Kittin is?’ And he was like, ‘No.’ And I’m like, ‘Oh, this is the best record out right now.'” Stallings Jr. met Miss Kittin for the first time when they played at a festival in Switzerland. They then went straight to Hervé’s studio in Geneva to work on music. “She pulls out The Flirts record [‘Passion’] and goes to the outro and finds the sample which became the main sample of ‘Silver Screen,'” says Lorello. They played the instrumental track to Lorello over the phone, who wrote the lyrics and emailed them back. “An hour or two later, Felix called me and played me Kittin singing my words,” he says. “Sweet seduction in a magazine / Endless pleasure in a limousine / In the back shakes a tambourine / Nicotine from a silver screen” The dumbly alluring verse might feature electroclash’s most memorable lyrics, while the pretentious fantasyland they imagine doesn’t seem far removed from today’s Insta-reality. ra

The Rapture – Out Of The Races And Onto The Tracks a headlong pelt into early ’80s punk funk in which The Rapture‘s dance tendencies are already fully-fledged, taken past boiling point thanks to a near-hysterical performance from singer Luke Jenner nme

Erase Errata – Delivery the repetitious, circular nature of the rhythms and the guttural, nearly pre-lingual vocals reflect a conscious attempt to reject the strictures of rational structures, which carries with it the bias of patriarchal society. Erase Errata works in this same vein, sticking it to the man, so to speak, with their cacophonous creations, which are brimful of a liberating musical irrationality popmatters

Murry The Hump – Cracking Up Delightful Welsh nonsense nme

Slumber Party – I Never Dreamed a lovely codeine- and absinthe-tinged pop platter that should put a stupid, happy smile on your face even as it puts you to sleep. If your mom had been the coolest mom on the block she might have sung you these tunes as lullabies pitchfork

Alfie – Bookends a shifting collection of worryingly bearded musicians from Manchester or thereabouts… Alfie construct what are essentially well written pop songs, but with a lightness of touch and an affinity for eclectic instrumentation (cello, french horn, glockenspiel, double bass) that results in an essential, compelling edge to their sound drownedinsound

The Tyde – All My Bastard Children Darren Rademaker and his band of merry janglephiles The Tyde may trot from LA but – lawks-a-mercy matron! – they want to be British so much they’d swap their all-year tans and sexy way with a motorbike to be two specific pasty buttocked Brits: Jim Reid from The Jesus And Mary Chain, and Lawrence from Felt.

Better than the more obvious choices of Chris Martin and Benny Hill sure, and ‘Once’, The Tyde’s debut album, is as faithful and brown-nosing a tribute to Denim and Felt as it could be without being by a band called Lycra. ‘Strangers Again’ and ‘Get Around Too’, particularly sound like they could’ve been written in a sixth-form common room in Sheffield in 1988. The genetic lure of the slide guitar eventually conquers – but ‘Once’ still shines through as a slice of good old, no-arsed, underachieving, crap-in-a-fight British indie brilliance that you’d expect from the Official Home Of Morrissey nme

Kevin Tihista’s Red Terror – Sucker Beautiful as the music is and as gentle as the lyrics are, it is worth saving for the right occasion. If you are wondering what that right occasion might be, here are some of the main symptoms… If you are feeling lonely, the album lets you inside its warm world… If you want, however, just to relax, the album can help you also to completely unwind. ‘Sucker’ allows you to do this perfectly, its wordy but artfully constructed lyrics corresponding perfectly with the simple rhythm of the music. pennyblackmusic

David Kitt – Whispers Return The Sun, Rest The Moon Do not adjust your volume. There’s no point. Because even if you crank him up to 11, David Kitt still sings like a tiny wounded bear in a big, dark forest….

Its lack of volume perfectly adorns the songs though, which magnify the little details (pedestrians, graffiti, that kind of thing) of Kitt’s daily adventures in Dublin… while Ibiza, Ayia Napa and the Summer Of Rock are about to explode, Kitt still has the songs to make himself heard nme

Clinic – Walking With Thee Clinic’s sound banks on the ability to be simultaneously symmetrical and irregular, frantic and oddly at peace. “Walking with Thee”, opens with a standard, open rock rhythm of bass and snare, before being layered by carnival-meets-catatonia guitar and desperate, wild vocals. Guitar lines bleed together, then suddenly become upright, as Blackburn calls out “No!” like a command and a cry for help popmatters

Cinerama – Health & Efficiency The song begins and ends with sadly swooning chords played over what I assume is a ‘field recording’… City noise, squeaking brakes, and the beeps of a truck in reverse can be heard, along with conversation that includes a man holding forth about 78s, Motown, his kids, and how “we’ve become a very cold society.” The drums perfectly, lazily conceal the epic wail of distortion that arrives later, accompanied by a nervy, trilly violin. The lyrics finally fess up to regret and loss, and the listener is saved by one warmly reverbed note that ends the song right before you’ve closed the garage on your monoxide party pitchfork

Pipas – Tout Va Bien The record could be mistaken for Belle And Sebastian — quick, punchy pop songs that reek of ’60s influences and terribly good male-female harmonies. From the onset of “Tout Va Bien”, Mark Powell and Lupe Nunez-Fernandez weave simple melodies over a usually mid-tempo drumbeat that picks up in just the right spots popmatters

Silver Jews – Tennessee Berman’s origin story, complete with a starring role from his wife and bandmate Cassie Berman, a bumper sticker pick-up line (“You’re the only ten-I-see”), and a sweeping arrangement that zings like a pep talk from an old film. “You know Louisville is death, we’ve got to up and move,” Berman sings, “Because the dead do not improve.” Berman never shied away from discussing his struggles with mental illness, but within his catalog, “Tennessee” is alone in its brazen attempt at finding peace and stability—whether in the words of a country song, the promise of young love, or a big city in the next state over.pitchfork

Stereolab – Captain Easychord starts off as a perfect slice of summer pop, complete with bright layers of slide guitar and brass, before abruptly switching gears into something brighter and smoother, covered with synth, almost as if the band cut up several different pieces of music and stitched them back wherever they pleased spin

Stereo Total – L’amour a Trois space-pop at its finest, deliriously euphoric ear candy that has the duo comparing the kinky subject matter to communism popmatters

Mclusky – Lightsabre Cocksucking Blues gets away with being rude, rash and fun (shit, that didn’t begin with an ‘r’. Never mind), whilst also being very short, and very ACE. If there’s a single as vital and COOL released this year, I want it hunted down and brought to my attention immediately. Aye, I fucking love this, me. drownedinsound

The Czars – Drug Lately, I’ve found myself reaching for The Ugly People Vs The Beautiful People with increasing frequency. It’s one of those albums that tends to be a comforting thing, a support group of sorts. Be it at work after-hours, or sitting in my room late at night, this is an album meant for coaxing you through emotional duress. It’s easy to feel, given the wide (and often-battered) emotional terrain covered in these 12 songs, that at least one of them was written for you. opuszine

The 6ths – You You You You You one of Merritt’s best “wedding day” ballads stereogum

Spoon – Everything Hits At Once Britt Daniel’s lonesome lyrics are paralleled by a moody Mellotron solo and a steady pulse of an organ that seems to imitate a beating heart. It’s the very concept of longing represented in song treblezine

Sparklehorse – Piano Fire Mark Linkous’ barnburning duet with PJ Harvey is a near-perfect three-minute pop song. In another timeline, “Piano Fire” was definitely a huge hit, dominating MTV and ruling the FM radio airwaves. But in our reality, it was another in an extraordinary string of gorgeous, critically acclaimed — but commercially overlooked — tracks that defined Sparklehorse’s baffling tenure as a major label recording artist spin

Radiohead – Life In A Glasshouse they bemoan the death of common decency and good graces, those quaint notions replaced by intrusiveness, venom, and scapegoating. Yorke’s clever turns of phrases and subtle broadening of the scope keep this from being just another celebrity bitching about the price of fame. “Life In A Glasshouse,” as aided by those majestically mournfully horns, becomes nothing less than a requiem for empathy americansongwriter

Aphex Twin – Avril 14th It’s ironic that Aphex Twin’s most-played song — famously utilized for Kanye West’s “Blame Game” — sounds most unlike him. Despite his status as electronic music’s alpha madman virtuoso, Richard David James crafted “Avril 14th” as a modest two minutes of tearful, rudimentary solo piano. Forsaking all his synthesized artifex for something this vulnerable and somber is at first jolting. But by God, is it rewarding. Radiating incomparable melancholy, it’s the kind of beautifully understated and soulful work that makes you remember every moment of existential serenity you’ve ever known spin

Hefner – When The Angels Play Their Drum Machines For a good two or three years up until the turn of the millennium, if London had a house band it was Hefner. Championed by John Peel and beloved by a cult following, Darren Hayman and his bandmates built up three albums and innumerable EPs’ worth of indie goodwill with their folk-tinged and acid-tongued brand of guitar pop…

Then Dead Media happened. It was 2001. It should have been a good year for a “new direction” album – that was when we were all supposed to get flying cars, right? – and Hayman and guitarist Jack Hayter had been tinkering in the shed with vintage analog synths, drum programmers and tape-splicing production techniques… The song structures and lyrical subject matter were familiar Hefner, but it was as if The Human League and the ghost of Joe Meek had kidnapped the band. The faithful weren’t having it. The album tanked both commercially and critically… Surprisingly quickly, the band broke up.

Ten years on, it’s still hard to understand exactly why. Dead Media, newly reissued in a two-disc set with a generous helping of b-sides, outtakes and remixes, is now getting a well-deserved second look. The album was indeed a pretty radical departure from the indie rock of yore, but the band’s enthusiastically naïve approach to their new toys was a great foil to Hayman’s more worldly lyrical content… One supposes that the band ultimately fell afoul of certain rockist expectations. That’s a shame, because Hefner were always a rather unrockist rock band — what was special about them was a protean wit in their songwriting and musical approach, evident even in the one-take lo-fi days of their 1998 debut, Breaking God’s Heart. You always knew that these guys were never just going to repeat themselves. But don’t mourn Hefner – four albums is a good innings by any measure. Dead Media is the sound of a band flaming out in the best way. thelineofbestfit

For Stars – How It Goes A mix of ethereal indie rock and space rock with traditional pop that’s so unselfconscious there’s every chance the band has no idea how timeless it is allmusic

Dear Nora – Everyone’s The Same As far as I’m concerned, there’s always room in this world for another band whose main concern is producing the catchiest melodies and backing them up with pretty harmony vocals and some simple guitar strumming popmatters

Royksopp – Eple a jolly work of bleepy whimsy which sails a little too close to big beat for its own good nme

The Reindeer Section – Will You Please Be There For Me a simple two-minute solo acoustic number vaguely resembling a simplified version of Badly Drawn Boy’s “Epitaph” with all of the filtered flutter and bird noises replaced by straightforward white noise in the left channel. The first words we hear are, “If I gave you my heart/ Would you give yours to me?,” and the lyrical banality and romantic lamentations are sustained for the rest of the record against a backdrop that closely resembles Snow Patrol’s acoustic moments pitchfork

Mazarin Mazarin is the brainchild of a single man, the unfortunately named Quentin Stoltzfus… Apparently there was a lot of heartache and perfectionism and Kafka-esque burning of manuscripts before Mazarin released its first album, Watch It Happen. Artistic narcissism aside, the work paid off: its leading single, “Wheats”, was picked by England’s NME as the Single of the Week for December 11, 1999. Generally, our man Q.S. seems to have made the most impression in Merry Old England, whose inhabitants are, as a rule, more receptive of sweet, well-crafted pop than us colonials, who tend to set the bar high and the quota low for such indulgences popmatters