Los Campesinos! – You! Me! Dancing! The clattering minute-plus intro is misleading and bewildering, allowing no hints as to what will follow and then it explodes! In come the guitars, then the xylophone, drums and whatnot, the nod to Comet Gain’s underlying ramblings in the closing moments (nice touch), and of course, the cheerleading call to break social awkwardness and just get out there and dance. The message is that simple, and despite the grammatical turmoil, the exclamation points are certainly required to help communicate the staggering volume of youthful might that flows through this band’s veins. Anyone who doesn’t feel the urgent rush to break into a dancing fit, no matter how inappropriate the situation, must already be dead. exclaim

The Pipettes – Pull Shapes Happy, innocent songs about dancing are few and far between these days; happy, innocent songs about dancing that aren’t annoying are even rarer. “Pull Shapes” begs to be replayed not just for pure enjoyment, but to discover all the little quirks that punch heart-shaped holes in the song’s shiny girl-group façade. Quirks like the usages of “rock’n’roll” and “hip-hop” as verbs, the faint crowd noise at the end, the half-time record skip after “I like to hip-hop.” And, of course, the hint of a feminist agenda behind the song’s premise: a girl asking a “pretty boy” to dance. Because the personal is always political, and a dance is always more than just a dance– even if you just wanna move– you don’t care what the song’s about pitchfork

The Pipettes – Because (It’s Not Love) an impeccable, manicured balance is struck; between the past and present, the real and the cartoon: under the cherry- red magazine lips and Broadway glamour, there’s a girl next door. So scrap the unclean, unstrung, defaced, debilitated body of culturally ‘cool’ music as it is today. Let it snort its chemicals into tainted bloodstreams and wallow in murky pools of fuzz. Then whack a splurge gun in its face, let your imaginations run rampant with quirky tales of growing up and bounce about instinctually, hormonally-driven, determined and fuelled with feistiness – because even hurt deserves a tune.
Beam from blushered cheek to teardrop earring, step in front of the mirror and hold your head up high. ‘Cause The Pipettes just made you happy. planbmagazine

Ronnie Spector – Hey Sah Lo Ney Ronnie Spector is a fantasy figure of rock’n’roll. The Beatles and the Stones lusted after her, punk rock musicians adored her and Madonna based her style on Spector’s trashy but vulnerable voice. Yet Spector’s career, with classic girl group the Ronettes, lasted a mere five years, stolen from her by the man who not only made her a star and his wife but also a prisoner, according to Be My Baby, Spector’s 1989 account of life with hubbie Phil.

Following her divorce in 1974, the Spanish Harlem-born singer released two solo albums, 1987’s Unfinished Business and 1999’s acclaimed but quickly forgotten She Talks to Rainbows – the latter produced by one of her longtime fans, the late Joey Ramone. Spector turned again to Ramone for The Last of the Rock Stars, which stands as a tribute to his belief in her not as a victim, but a survivor… Though there is nothing approaching the beauty of Baby I Love You here, Ronnie Spector leaves you in no doubt that she is flesh, blood and undiminished spirit. theguardian

Yeah Yeah Yeahs – Cheated Hearts does all the things that great Yeah Yeah Yeahs song do: Ripcord solos from Nick Zinner, a breezy melody that spirals into freakish yelping from Karen O, and sky-bomb crescendos throughout. Nobody locks in and out of momentum like this band when they’re flying pitchfork

The Strokes – You Only Live Once Finally, a Strokes song you wouldn’t feel silly blowing up an inflatable crocodile to independent

The Long Blondes – Separated By Motorways this is music made for the outsider – designed as much for dreamers as it is for the dancefloor. Like their heroes Pulp (well-worn copies of ‘His ’N’ Hers’ drew most of the band to the Steel City), these are songs for the misfits, the bedroom intellects who always wondered why their peers preferred bingeing on WKD to discussing the merits of Nuts In May. Also like Pulp, they’re not afraid to use smart lyrics as weapons. Many of the words were penned by guitarist Dorian, and may have ended up sounding a bit weedy from a male perspective. But handed over to Kate’s knee-quivering vocals, it’s anything but twee. Instead she’s telling – nay, ordering – teenage girls to ditch their boyfriends (‘Once And Never Again’), warning them away from crap lovers (‘Heaven Help The New Girl’) and teasing boys about their lacklustre relationships (‘Giddy Stratospheres’). Only a fool would argue that Jackson – smart, sexy and chic – isn’t the coolest pop star around right now. And if they did, she’d eat them for breakfast nme

Arctic Monkeys – A Certain Romance We all knew the tales that Turner was speaking of, we just never lassoed the words to crystalise them in the amber of nostalgia quite so poetically… There is a timelessness that will live on to pastiche of the line “over there, there’s friends of mine,” which is just as well, considering ‘A Certain Romance’ may well be the last of its kind—the last joyously unpretentious offering of collectivism that defines an entire generation with poetic sympathy rather than the cool kid stance of cynically singing for the chosen few in a manufactured gang spawned from the fractured internet age where all the friends have moved online. faroutmagazine

Monkey Swallows The Universe – Sheffield Shanty perfect sliver of folk indie that name checks various places around the city, as well as stealing a little bit from Paul Simons You Can Call Me Al backseatmafia

Cat Power – The Greatest with its evocative lyrics of nostalgia and regret is bleakness at its most pristine pitchfork

Neko Case – Star Witness Her voice is like a billowing sail, a tattered flag, a red dress, a pillow fight.
There was always a vague injustice about the deification accorded to Chan Marshall, which seemed to put Neko Case arriving on the scene at roughly the same time, playing the same-ish music, at a point where women songwriters of this kind seemed slightly unfashionable – in Cat Power’s shade….But this album is the colour of red wine and sunset. It’s a reminder in the strengths of solitude, singing and strength itself. Neko’s handsome voice blows her delicately-chosen words into balloons and thought bubbles that float away on the breath of huge, soul-emptying sighs. Don’t forget about her. planbmagazine

Camera Obscura – Lloyd, I’m Ready To Be Heartbroken A loving rejoinder to Lloyd Cole & the Commotions’ 1984 ballad “Are You Ready to Be Heartbroken?”, the opening track from Camera Obscura’s third album opens with a dirge-y organ intro and an endearingly awkward rhythmic chug that belies the terrifically massive hook that’s about to swoop down for the chorus. “Heeeeeeeey Lloyd!” booms Tracyanne Campbell, at once demonstrating the difference between singing your heart out and singing about having your heart ripped out, “I’m ready to be heartbroken!” And, like a great soul singer laying waste to the microphone in the name of heartache, you love her all the more for it pitchfork

Belle and Sebastian – Another Sunny Day You know that romantic moment when you’re trying to lick something out of someone’s eye, miss completely and ‘accidentally’ snog them instead? No? Us neither, but it sounds, rather euphorically, like this nme

The Mountain Goats – Woke Up New Maybe you don’t need an earth-shattering breakup to get this one; maybe your partner went on a long vacation and you’re finding yourself mind-numbingly bored. The soft strumming of “Woke Up New” might sound limp at first listen, but John Darnielle has the storytelling stones to match the soundtrack to his protagonist’s mood, laid out in the song’s second line: free, lonely, and scared. What follows are rudimentary details and tactfully-deployed similes detailing the First Day After. It’s hesitant and almost meandering, but when the chorus comes and Darnielle pleads “What do I do?” over and over in his lilting falsetto, it’s less panicked than genuinely puzzled. Few songs chart such a particular emotional state so excruciatingly closely pitchfork

Hello Saferide – The Quiz plays new-relationship 20 questions before popping the big one: “If I’d fall, would you pick me up?” I start to melt every time pitchfork

Sally Shapiro – I’ll Be By Your Side makes for an unlikely meeting: a Swedish producer who rekindles the cold flame of 1980s italo disco, and a pseudonymous chanteuse who brings out the genre’s inner shyness. While Johan Agebjörn’s four-on-the-floor beats and faraway synths make for beautifully nostalgic trappings, it’s Sally Shapiro’s soft voice that gives the song its fragile strength. “I’m with you all the time,” Shapiro promises, but in so doing admits the possibility she might not be for long pitchfork

The Concretes -On The Radio Kicking off an album with a piano riff right outta ‘Daydream Believer’ should tell you a lot about a band: that they are knowingly in thrall to the magic of Pop; that they understand the importance of looking back in wonder and of never standing still. With sugar-coated melodies encrusted in diamond tears, The Concretes have again made marvellous Pop Art. It is the sound of Super-8 for the iMovie generation; the artful collision between gaudy confidence and head-in- hands shyness; the sound of the raggedly beautiful people running to hide out in the dunes, burdened by haunting visions of improbable rejection and a knowledge of beauty too pure to survive. planbmagazine

Peter, Bjorn & John – Young Folks Like record collectors jaded by the last Next Big Thing, PB&J’s Peter Morén and ex-Concretes singer Victoria Bergsman bring low expectations: “No one will surprise me unless you do,” Bergsman shrugs. But soon the two are inseparable, promising it’s not about style– young, old, or even their own– and it’s not about the kids, the oldsters, or anyone else, either: “All we care about is talking/ Talking only me and you,” they enthuse, unwilling to spoil so rare a feeling with pointless comparison pitchfork

Love Is All – Busy Doing Nothing Only in a socialist haven like Sweden could you live a life like Josephine Olausson’s. According to “Busy Doing Nothing”, the Love is All frontwoman spends about seven hours a day watching DVDs (“five movie marathon!“), another 30 minutes with her iPod on repeat (“nine times the same song!”), 10 hours in bed, 12 hours on the phone, an hour in the shower, and two more shining her shoes (even though she could probably pay a guy at the train station to do it in two minutes), which leaves her about, oh, three minutes and 20 seconds to brag about her sedentary existence while pogoing to a strobe-lit sax-punk groove. But even if it’s a life of privilege that few of us can afford, “Busy Doing Nothing” lets us live it out in the privacy of our own rec-room discotheques– just like Tom Cruise in Risky Business, but with the button-downs and briefs replaced by safety-pinned sweats and ripped stockings pitchfork

The Fiery Furnaces – Benton Harbor Blues a seven-minute trip that begins with a fuzzy, layered drum intro, segues into the lead melody, segues again into something completely different, then returns to that same melody. And what a melody it is, simple, almost Motown-like, with what sounds like an Optigan doing much of the work. Yet, once the band gets into a groove, layers build upon each other into a mighty, yet subtle masterpiece treblezine

Yo La Tengo – Black Flowers  bears a sonic similarity to Pet Sounds. It’s more than just the presence of strings and horns—it’s McNew’s voice, the echo of the drums, that combination of wide-eyed positivity and silent, internal sadness. No other Yo La Tengo song quite sounds like this one pastemagazine

Herman Dune – I Wish That I Could See You Soon hides nothing. It’s about wishing that I could see you soon. It’s about seeing a photograph and hearing trumpets; it’s about talking to yourself; it’s about wanting, wanting, wanting; about there being no way to say and nothing you can do. Part of me wants to re-record it at half-speed, just murmur and lazy-strummed mandolin, singing all the sadness that the song submerges. Herman Dune don’t wallow even for a second: they consider the worst-case, they sing it, but then they move on to the more important stuff. To wishing. And wishing is fast enough to dance to saidthegramophone

Beirut – Postcards From Italy This song sells a nostalgia that Zach Condon should be too young to understand…he gets novelty points for opening the track with a ukulele… It’s just the right detachment to take when eulogizing someone else’s memories. pitchfork

Midlake – Roscoe Out of step with anything else released in 2006, “Roscoe” fabricated a backwoods world that nobody had quite yet fathomed, conjuring all the dogged integrity those creamy Crosby Still Nash &Young harmonies yearned for pitchfork

Swan Lake – All Fires Every few bars, someone opens a cage and lets something loose. I don’t think they even know what they’re letting go. And the magic here is that amid all these weird-wood sounds, these industrial groans, are hooks and melody and catchphrases easy-on-the-ears. A pop song yoked to the cyclops, with Dan Bejar singing its tale saidthegramophone

Regina Spektor – Samson Spektor imaginines herself as a new Delilah for whom Samson abandons his destiny of bringing down the temple of Philistine: Spektor simply wants to forgo any epic tales and find someone to lie down with… underpinned with gentle piano and subtle strings, the delivery is both beautiful and heartbreaking theskinny

Kimya Dawson – Loose Lips In Kimya’s world, everything’s lo-fi and rapped and clapping-rhyme fast. Her appeal has always been her vulnerability — her humanness. Her wilful innocence -even though she’s clearly well aware of the world and its malfunctions, even though she sees things with a cynic’s eye. Which is why, of course, she chooses the child’s eye, singing about rubber ducks and tyre-swings, tsunamis and surviving, alongside that basest of all human maladies: love. ” I Heart You ! ” says Kimya with this album, wishing a big bunch of spring daffodils on anyone in need of a little sunlight. planbmagazine

Absentee – We Should Never Have Children deceptively vulnerable songs about banging, boozing, and the weird bootleg chemistry of the whole boy/girl/bed gestalt. Beerlight punk’d baritone Dan Michaelson undermines his macho-ironist pose with subtle sissydom which, along with sharp tunes and still sharper wit, creates a tension that makes Schmotime more than just another indie-country-rock moper…. “Some people never should have met,” he explains– but kids actually sing in the background, so haha pitchfork

The Gossip – Standing In The Way Of Control this song is D I S C O; not punk disco or no wave disco, but the kinda shit that gets your auntie moving at family weddings. You could almost call its kitsch if it wren’t for Beth Ditto’s anguished righteous screams, and that tension heavy breakdown where she opens her mouth and a Mississippi of pain pours out planbmagazine

C.S.S. – Let’s Make Love and Listen to Death From Above Kitsch sci-fi, bouncy guitar hooks and glittering electronica all adorn singer Lovefoxxx’s endearing pronunciations of her naughty English lyrics. “Wine then bed then more then again?” she suggests, and even on the evidence of this single alone, you’d be a fool to say no theskinny

New Young Pony Club – Ice Cream NYPC’s latest electronic delight has plunged us, chopped-nuts deep into Vienetta-based sexual innuendo, on a fast track to highly inappropriate references to chocolate fudge brownie nme

The Rapture – Whoo! Alright-Yeah…Uh-Huh Right off the top, everything appears to be just as they left it on 2003’s Echoes : 4/4 hi-hat beat? Check. Stacatto guitar riff? Yup. Cowbell? Of course. But eight seconds in, it’s “House of Jealous Lovers: Extreme Makeover Edition”: The stark funk of the Rapture’s 2002 breakout 12-inch has been given a radiant, lipstick-cherry-glossed polish by producer Paul Epworth pitchfork

The Killers – When You Were Young If the lead single from ‘Sam’s Town’ was any more heavily indebted to Bruce Springsteen’s ‘Born to Run’ the authorities would have to get involved. As it is, the song aims for the stars with such belief and conviction not even the Boss himself would deny it status as a classic nme

Futureheads – Thursday Doves-friendly melancholia meets shimmering Beach Boys harmonies. Inspirational stuff. guardian

Tender Trap – Talking Backwards If indiepop’s uber-girl Amelia Fletcher ever publishes her autobiography- and she really should, as an inspiration for so many bands for so long she must have a pretty unique perspective on the changing musical tides -she should call it How To Remain A Girl And Not Die In The Attempt. This distaff Peter Pan first made her mark in 1986 with girl-group paradigms Talulah Gosh, and her distinctive gurgling, sighing teen cutie-pie voice is still startlingly intact from those days.
Sly pop dispatches from the dating game ‘Talking Backwards’ and ‘Ampersand’ are as refreshingly infectious and as downright fab as anything she’s done in the past. Respect is entirely due. planbmagazine

Voxtrot – Mothers, Sisters, Daughters, Wives Like so many indie pop bands before them, they worship in the chapel of the Smiths, genuflecting at Morrissey’s wry offhandedness and Johnny Marr’s room-filling effects. But Voxtrot offset this devotion by piling up choruses like a wedding cake, spending enough hook capital for four songs in four minutes pitchfork

The Dears – There Goes My Outfit Live, their music was incredible. Incredible gigs. Incredible band. Conversely, this is meandering, forgettable-like-higher- algebra-maths, chest-beating bog-fucking- standard sub-stadia indie bullshit. Oh dear planbmagazine

The Flaming Lips – The Sound Of Failure With its sideways lyrical shots at Britney Spears and Gwen Stefani, the song seems to suggest that hyper-positive, self-empowering Top 40 hits inevitably ring hollow to those in most serious need of a pick-me-up… a timeless triumph that expands the Lips’ orchestral-rock template to absorb the wondrous textures, trippy flutes and tastefully chicken-scratched guitars of early-‘70s soul masterworks like What’s Going On, resulting in a swirling lava lamp of sounds anchored by a divine chorus that’s as elating as it is devastating stereogum

The Polyphonic Spree – Sonic Bloom Here DeLaughter reimagines a song from 1998’s Jesus Hits Like the Atom Bomb by his prior band, Tripping Daisy, festooning the original’s romantic surge with Sgt. Pepper‘s strings, horns, and his choir’s swaying, love-giddy response: “I do.” … DeLaughter’s songwriting these days is rarely so pure and cathartic pitchfork

I’m From Barcelona – We’re From Barcelona If Christianity was half this euphoric I’d be down the front each and every week. A 40-strong indie choir sways from side to side, and sings rapturously about love. Of course, they’re from Sweden planbmagazine

Broken Family Band – Alone In The Make-Out Room Time was when music associated with the English countryside upheld a sense of conservative tradition. Not so, indie country rockers the Broken Family Band. On their appropriately titled third album, their rural idyll is raucous and booze-sodden. It’s also a place where acid-tongued singer Steven Adams indulges his most morbid alt-country fantasies (‘Alone In The Make-Out Room’)… Mercifully their world-weary malevolence sparkles with ebullient wit. theguardian

Bob Dylan – Workingman Blues #2 a sequel to Merle Haggard’s upbeat 1969 blues stomper… While Haggard chose to write about a working-class family man who gets through the weeks by blowing off steam in the tavern on the weekends, Dylan sings about someone who is out of options: “They burned my barn, they stole my horse, I can’t save a dime.” Instead, the character surveys bruised relationships and lost battles on this hidden gem. rollingstone

Vetiver – I Know No Pardon ‘Confessing’s just an honest way of lying,‘ he observes sagely… Vetiver have made a record that’s as summery as a field full of butterflies. observermusicmonthly

Akron/Family – Gone Beyond the hypnotic harmonies make ‘Gone Beyond’ such a treat, Akron/Family are at their best when they compress their talent planbmagazine

Guillemots – Made-Up Lovesong #43 Dangerfield lavishes the bridge of a near-perfect lovesong (in the self-aware Divine Comedy mode) with gut-pounding avian squawks that blur the line between lover and madman, while a backing choir oohs and ahhs as if Phil Spector were there pistol cocked. “There’s majesty in a burnt-out caravan,” Dangerfield explains in advance pitchfork

Band Of Horses – The Funeral the supreme weeper of the year, proof that indie guitars can be tender and gentle and that indie songwriting doesn’t have to sacrifice intimacy for size… a song that people connect to… So long as it doesn’t end up soundtracking some crummy indie movie, it’ll be ours forever pitchfork

Destroyer – European Oils a gorgeously wistful love song simmering with menace stereogum

just what the hell does “European” mean anyway? Like any other continent, Europe’s films, music, theatre, and visual arts vary depending on region, and yet “European” has somehow become an umbrella adjective that defines a very specific aesthetic. The term frequently gets tossed around by critics when discussing Destroyer’s mid-career songs, and even by the artist himself. It would seem that Bejar’s lyrics are European in the same way the works of Thomas Pynchon are categorized as European (it’s worth pointing out that neither man is actually European) — that is, cryptic, intellectual, idiosyncratic, jumping through time, surrounded by war, drowning in wine, referential to both high and low culture, rife with doomed characters, and driven by plots of intrigue. Maybe postmodern (yuck) or ambitious art-house is a better descriptor, or maybe we should just compare it to a very, very artsy spy movie.

If we’re operating under that criteria, then no Destroyer song is more “European” than the aptly titled “European Oils”. Bejar strums and describes a transcontinental romance, which starts off calm, but gets crazy whenever there’s a spike in the structure: the bass line runs away, Bejar tries to squeeze in more syllables than will fit in one line, and the lyrics move into wartime, when the narrator apparently likes to get it on with the hangman’s daughter (“the fucking maniac!”). Despite bombs dropping, guitars wailing, and no one really understanding anything, it’s also the catchiest thing Destroyer’s ever recorded and manages to hang together through the singular constant of a waterin’-hole piano. It’s the kind of ivory-tickling you’d hear at a non-existent saloon on the banks of a non-existent (i.e. idealized) Suwannee River — something not European at all, but decidedly American. consequence

Howling Bells – Low Happening a brilliant advert for their unlikely yet hugely seductive blend of Mazzy Star-esque dreaminess and primal, down and dirty rock ‘n’ roll. It really shouldn’t work, but somehow it does and, frankly, it’s bloody brilliant drownedinsound

The Manhattan Love Suicides – Suzy Jones Bubblegum pop and popcorn horror have more in common than namesakes that end up beneath movie-theater seats. Beyond the critical disdain heaped on each genre, both the music and the movies are drawn to the clichés of rock ‘n’ roll-era American teenagerhood: innocent girls, bad boys, proms, and the occasional bloody knife murder…

The Manhattan Love Suicides take their name from director Richard Kern’s lo-fi 1985 short films, one of which starred Zedd in a gender-bending nymphomaniac dual role. This Leeds foursome’s fuzzed-out dream-pop recalls not only Jesus And Mary Chain, but also the willowy female vocals of C86 alumni the Shop Assistants. However, rather than revive the sexualized gore of the 80s movie underground the Manhattan Love Suicides’ self-titled debut throbs with the giddy vulnerability of the scene that the NME’s C86 compilation helped spawn pitchfork

Sambassadeur – Kate Anna Persson sings softly and fluidly, favoring held notes that sound like they might dissipate into the music around her. Her voice often seems more typical of shoegaze or introverted folk than 1980s-cribbing pop, but she strikes the right note of dreaminess and cool drama in Sambassadeur’s songs. The band gently buttresses her vocals with guitar and synth rhythms that percolate playfully, creating a wistful contrast with her sustained vocals. This combination of textures– like tweed under silk– lent singles … their melancholy charm and distinctive personality among their Swedish contemporaries. pitchfork

Irene – Stardust This year, every time I turned around there was another great band from Sweden: Love Is All, I’m From Barcelona, Pelle Carlberg, Suburban Kids With Biblical Names. My favorite, though, was probably this quick and breezy gem, filled with forever-summer anthems of crushes that may or may not blossom into eternal love, sung by a suave, handsome-in-voice frontman amidst horns and harmonies and bountiful positive energy. It’s one of those albums that seems so perfectly put together, capturing one specific mood popmatters

Lucky Soul – Lips Are Unhappy remembers the Motown lesson on amplifying emotion by seeming to suppress it, as Howard calls for us to “shake, shake, shimmy, shimmy” (for sure!) over sunny-day tambourine and velveteen harmonies pitchfork

Lily Allen – LDN easy, pedestrian, brassy and breezy. If it’s been good enough for schoolgirls and boys from Maidenhead to Hackney all summer then it’s good enough for me in this Indian one that’s come shining through the leaves today drownedinsound

Jamie T – Sheila T plays humble narrator to a sad cast of boozers and ne’er do wells, soaking their personal tragedies in alcohol – Jack, whose girl left him for another man, drowns his sorrows in cider; Georgina, fleeing from an abusive home life, declared dead by paramedics after a self-administered drug overdose; and most prominently the titular Sheila, who gets tanked up and shouts, to no-one in particular, across the Thames. Sad scenes, but borne up on a rattling hip-hop backbeat in T’s croaked, Joe Strummer-esque patois, such tales become strangely uplifting.

It’s the incidental details that make it, though: the bellowed “Loondooon!” that interrupts the chorus, the passages of poet John Betjeman’s The Cockney Amorist inscribed between the crunching beats. “The blue-blooded murder of the English tongue”, declares a plummy English voice. “Brap!”, exclaims Jamie. And the spirit of London town finds its newest mouthpiece nme

The Tacticians – London’s Alright aiming at providing an urchin’s take on contemporary living in London, but rather than grit and filth the end result is just that little bit bland… ‘London’s Alright’ is as non-committal as its title suggests drownedinsound

The Essex Green – This Isn’t Farmlife shoots a Motown charge into either/both the Kinks’ “Victoria” or Belle & Sebastian’s “Like Dylan in the Movies”, as Bell tosses off lines about the Iliad in her deceptively plainspoken voice pitchfork

M Craft – Love Knows How To Fight Craft’s downplayed take on mainstream folk failed to hook anyone statesde other than the odd mp3 blogger. The virus spread, died, and was picked up again as the record made it onto scattered year-end lists. Unified by a punchy timbre and muted, shimmying percussion– a combination that sometimes results in memorable tracks– the album’s quiet, solitary perambulations around cyberspace fit the character of a lonely, lovely, and modest work pitchfork

M Ward – Chinese Translation That comfortable, gravelly croak is one of the most disarming voices out there, and it’s never sounded better than it does on “Chinese Translation”, a song you could throw a thousand adjectives at without getting it quite right pitchfork

Micah P Hinson – Jackeyed a country-tinged, violins-and-whiskey-round-campfires sort of noise. Harmonicas, wailing strings, horns, weird anti-harmonies drawled out randomly over the top of each other drownedinsound

David Thomas Broughton – Ambiguity He’s a real original… and doesn’t get anything like the attention he deserves. Cut in one take in a church hall in Leeds, the album aimed to capture something of the attitude that even then came across in his live performances. There’s never a clear line between anything that sounds intentional and anything that sounds like a mistake and attempts to polish out the imperfections would have diluted the work’s power. It’s all there, fragile and trembling… It’s quite brilliant, and 6 Radio ought to be spending the next eight to ten days celebrating fifteen years of The Complete Guide to Insufficiency, “the album that changed music forever”, and encouraging their listeners to tweet stories of where they were when they first heard it and how they chose ‘Execution’ for the first dance at all their weddings. Unfortunately, we don’t live on that timeline. I keep hopeful though godisinthetvzine

Hot Chip – Boy From School exudes a kind of sadness that feels earned without sounding meek…. energized downtempo electronic with vigor, and took the heart-pounding to ever greater heights nme

Slumber Party – 10-9-8-7-6-5-4 Life is too short for songs like this to ever end. But wait! There’s 10 more equally serviceable and slick sonic psych-outs. planbmagazine

Amy Winehouse – Back To Black The greatest example of the synergy that existed between Winehouse and Ronson. Her melody line sounds effortless, her lyrics switch between romantic agony and earthier concerns – “you like blow and I like puff” – while his production is the ideal companion: a brilliant homage to 60s girl group melodrama that feels original, never like pastiche theguardian

The Zutons – Valerie written about Valerie Star, a make-up artist who previously dated Zutons frontman Dave McCabe. Both Star and McCabe have recalled how the song told the story of how she almost ended up in jail after several driving offences, which ultimately halted her plans to move to the UK to be with him.nme

The Veils – Advice For Young Mothers To Be a gloriously symphonic paean to the joys of defying one’s elders and getting up the duff theguardian

Math and Physics Club – Darling, Please Come Home This Seattle group’s songs didn’t drop from the sky…that is, you can clearly hear the influences of other pop music from the last few decades in its songs. But it seems so beside the point, considering how perfectly crafted they are. It’s hard to offer a music-critic’s defense of this music as 100% new, but it’s so easy to hear these songs as truly special popmatters

Tilly And The Wall – Sing Songs Along Incessant tapping isn’t life’s most pleasurable sound. But when it’s created by the rhythmic feet of Tilly & The Wall it becomes a captivating privilege theskinny

Fields – Brittlesticks is as it sounds – a tandem bike ride down a village road, bouncing in the backseat nme

James Yorkston – Woozy With Cider James starts talking. Straight from the heart… ‘Woozy With Cider’ is all about now and all about love, its future and – maybe most importantly – about music. Does anyone care what I have to say? Will anyone listen to my songs if they don’t appear in commercials selling oranges? Or lemons? Yes, James, we do care and we will listen. You really shouldn’t worry, since music rarely gets more beautiful, comforting or truthful than this planbmagazine

Fionn Regan – Put A Penny In The Slot This is the song that’s repetition, repetition, repetition, the same little lines of verse and chorus with different words slid in. Some rhymes are more natural than others, some scenes tenderer, but this is what real artists do: they let you see the sleight of hand now and then, they remind you that not everything’s precious-perfect. When Regan namedrops Paul Auster and Saul Bellow it’s not a name drop – it’s just two names dropped, like each one had been sitting on a bench in Regan’s mind and it would be rude to ignore them. Is this a song about love? About heartbreak? I’m not sure. Better listeners might figure it out – me I get caught in the images of a man with his matches; or “tears like flashbulbs“; or a girl ignoring her phone, hunting for a taxi, a “batallion” searching for her. For me it’s the intersecting circles of this full, interspersed, greengreying life saidthegramophone

Adem – Warning Call Shuffle, creak, begin. The most soothing, sighing, fluctuating balm this side of the cindering hearth and rag-rug, ‘Warning Call’ holds moleskin, dust, spider’s webs and ancient wax in its soft hands. Adem llhan, copper-crowned king of a certain breed of rustic futurism and fire, has his guardian angels surround you, drizzling their ubiquitous glockenspiels and ethereal sheens of shimmer over ‘Human Beings Gather Round’. planbmagazine

Frida Hyvönen – You Never Got Me Right  a Swedish pianist with a bent for twinkling flurries of notes slamming into clanging, chunky chords– periodic ticks of dissonance tucked into harmonies pitchfork

The Blow – Parentheses a treat for anyone who’s ever wondered what it would sound like if the Shangri-La’s had laptops and USB keyboards pitchfork

Grizzly Bear – The Knife The prettiest song about backstabbing that you’ll ever hear saidthegramophone

The Mary Onettes – Lost  a driving, up-tempo number that captures the feeling of cruising around town at midnight after getting dumped. Gorgeous misery? None finer therecoup

The Raconteurs – Steady As She Goes a nice pop song with nice harmonies and crunchy (White Stripes) guitars nme

Isobel Campbell & Mark Lanegan – Deus Ibi Est On paper it’s a potentially disastrous pairing: on one side of this five-inch plastic disc we have Campbell, twee scene pin-up and possessor of the most delicate voice this side of one of Heaven’s own chanteuses; Lanegan, meanwhile, is the Devil’s own baritone, voice hoarsened by a life spent chasing rats and dragons down gutters and alleyways, choking on the dust of a dozen near misses. One sits upright in the library, re-arranging the bird watching sub-section into species-specific order, small to large; one rests hunched upon a bar stool, gently cradling the last whiskey his coppers can buy, a cigarette burning itself out over an ashtray already brimming with spent butts. This shouldn’t work at all, right?drownedinsound

Erase Errata – Another Genius Idea From Our Government one of the bleakest, most visceral cuts and basically sounds like a thought rushing headlong toward its conclusion planbmagazine

¡Forward Russia! – Twelve The aural equivalent of a punch in the face… Broken glass guitars, breakneck bass and the singer’s yelped vocal delivery are the most immediate highlights of ‘Twelve’, but it’s the hooks that stick in your brain and make you ponder whether this could prove to be ¡Forward Russia!’s knock-out blow. drownedinsound

Maximo Park – I Want You To Stay (Field Music / J Xaverre Mix)

Colossal Yes – Just Like A Mademoiselle

Loney Dear – A Band He wraps the ups and downs of a whirlwind romance into tiny packages. You’re left hungry, fully certain that 34 minutes– let alone five– will never be enough of this very, very good thing pitchfork

iLiKETRAiNS – A Rook House For Bobby Gloominess is next to godliness. Alright, not next per-se, but it’s a damn sight closer than cleanliness, and besides we’ve just about had it with your relentless pedantism and insistence on applying the “rules” and the “laws” to every little thing that ever happens. Anyway, if you’re looking for a slice of reality to flavour the gazpacho of your review, glockenspiel is actually next to gloominess and that wouldn’t have made much sense at all. musicomh

The Maccabees – First Love a song that transcends its surroundings so effortlessly it makes everything around it look grey. “Do you miss home?” quivers Orlando Weeks, his voice a febrile spectre. “First love/Last love/Hold me love, it’s only love” he coos, as instruments fall in and out of step – a Jonathan Richman guitar chug, a startling snowfall of Johnny Marr-style feedback, a quick burst of hi-hats that vibrate like a hummingbird’s wing. It’s explosive, and romantic, but importantly, sounds totally unforced; completely natural. A lifetime of experience crushed into 193 precious, breathless seconds. nme

Lambchop – Paperback Bible gracefully slotting fresh inspiration into their distinctive Americana template. Opener ‘Paperback Bible’ is especially poignant. As Wagner deadpans “I have always thought that handguns were made for shooting people/Rather than for sport. . . “, it’s tough to imagine life without Lambchop planbmagazine

Young People – Forget a rumbling, libertarian chug of lustrous delectation planbmagazine

Brakes – Mobile Communication a bittersweet mourning of a time when people, I dunno, spoke properly as opposed to through bits of beeping apparatus. Its sadly wistful harmonies skirt delicately around despairing lyrics so well that you can almost see a little lonely text message fluttering through the ether on silver wing planbmagazine

Jarvis – From Auschwitz to Ipswich OK, I have a confession to make. I’ve always loathed Pulp’s foppish intellectual sex pest. Still, I promised I’d listen with an open mind. And you know what? I don’t hate it! Damning with faint praise, perhaps, but strong words from someone who couldn’t hear a Pulp song without feeling like I needed a bath. Then again, perhaps the things he’s done to make this record palatable to me might alienate his core audience – gone are the gurgling sex yelps and the burbling electro synths. Actually, I was surprised by how, well. . .normal – retro, even – it sounds, with vibraphone and twinkling guitar and samples of Sixties pop singles. planbmagazine

Badly Drawn Boy – Promises It’s all about getting older and slightly wiser, accepting who you are and what really matters. This Boy is approaching 40, loves Bruce Springsteen more than life itself and, god, he still wishes he could one day write his own Born To Run. The beautiful, and almost sensible, thing is that he has instead settled for a Tunnel Of Love, albeit with ~a happy ending. It dares to be sentimental, nostalgic and almost embarassingly straight to the point planbmagazine

Jeremy Warmsley – 5 Verses brilliant storytelling – a vignette of a relationship “started as a lie” drownedinsound

The Decemberists – The Crane Wife 1&2 the first part of the song is a band growing brave, unafraid of expanding the scale of their music without drifting into proggy genre territory or relying on a gimmick. More importantly, the song provides a few minutes that you can legitimately dance to and not look like an asshole. stereogum

Frida Hyvonen