This 2011 selection marks the end of my lockdown project a couple of years late. Perhaps it’s appropriate I end here; with my favourite Christmas song and Aidan Moffat’s reflection on everything getting older. What was intended as a summary of music I’ve loved in the years since 1994 has become as much, if not more, a thank you letter to all the professional and amateur journalists writing for blogs, magazines, newspapers or websites. They introduced me to so many new artists, broadened and deepened my love of music, made me think, reflect and laugh. Really hard. I’m middle aged and still hope the next song I hear will become my favourite of all time. Thank you.

Smith & Burrows – When The Thames Froze A festive team-up between Editors frontman Tom Smith and Razorlight songwriter Andy Burrows… Invoking the famous frost fair of 1814, when ice covered the London river, it was written amid contemporary political strife in England’s capital, most notably marked by the Tottenham riots and austerity cuts by the coalition government. “I wanted a Christmas song that kind of acknowledged that and felt connected to the times that we were in,” Smith told James Corden on The Late Late Show. With a deeply melancholic sound that will thaw even the iciest hearts, When the Thames Froze goes down like a cup of hot chocolate on a frosty morning. thisisdig

Iron & Wine – Tree By The River his hit-that-never-was. But don’t let the vocal harmonies fool you; this is no simple love song. Lost relationships aren’t mourned in “Tree” so much as reflected upon, with Beam’s narrator less fixated on his teenage relationship than with how he and Mary Anne faced the world, living for the present and “strangers to change” popmatters

Destroyer – Kaputt Dan Bejar is sometimes knocked for his use of ironic humor, as though any trace of such a device instantly renders the music heartless. But while “Kaputt” may be clever in its references and lite-jazz affect, it’s incredibly evocative on a gut level, with its swirl of woodwinds and synth-pop textures setting scenes as vivid in detail as old photographs and as vaguely defined but deeply felt as a dream.

At its core, “Kaputt” is a celebration of imperfect memories and the world of the past that we construct in our minds from bits of pop culture. In this case, it’s a world built of stray lines from old music magazines: “Sounds, Smash Hits, Melody Maker, NME/ It all sounds like a dream to me.” Only one of those publications still exists today; the back issues are mostly lost to time. But even if these snapshots of a particular era were meant to be disposable, their ideas linger on in the back of readers’ minds as, say, biases against certain musical instruments. Like saxophones.

“Kaputt” almost entirely comprises sounds that were considered extremely uncool (if not outright taboo) by rock fans up until recently, but Bejar isn’t trolling his audience. The listener’s knowledge of fickle rock fashion is part of the song, and this context is essential to its poignancy: Every cultural moment eventually passes, and each will seem alternately ridiculous and romantic in hindsigh pitchfork

Aidan Moffat and Bill Wells – The Copper Top

Aidan Moffat and Bill Wells – The Greatest Story Ever Told

With age comes decay, and with decay comes death. In ‘The Copper Top’ a man retreats to the pub after a funeral to be alone with his thoughts, so sick, as he is, of hearing everyone else’s memories of the recently deceased. Sitting in his fitted suit, only worn twice, he decides: “birth, love and death, the only reasons to get dressed up“. Pint sunk, he leaves, glancing back at the copper roof of the pub as he leaves. Having oxidised over the years it’s now “a dull pastel grey’“. “Everything’s getting older” he decides, before a mournful trumpet carries the rest of the song away.

By pure chance I come across a copy of D.H Lawrence’s Apocalypse soon after I begin listening to ‘Everything’s Getting Older’. It catches my attention because the front cover of this particular edition also has a decaying portrait of its author, in this case, a bust of Lawrence on his deathbed by Jo Davidson. Acting as a protest against the limitations of Christianity and rampant individuality, in this final work, Lawrence argued that man should seek to realign himself with the natural world and lead a more spiritual existence. He writes: ‘whatever the unborn and the dead may know, they cannot know the beauty, the marvel of being alive in the flesh. The dead may look after the afterwards. But the magnificent here and now of life in the flesh is ours, and ours only for a time. We ought to dance with rapture that we should be alive and in the flesh, and part of the living incarnate cosmos’. Wells and Moffat have created a stunning album that assures us of the death and decay that is to come, but equally, they tell us, as long as we are still around, there is life to be lived, and music like this to be heard.

The album’s penultimate track sees the birth of a child, with Moffat declaring, “All life is finite, so use your time wisely, look after your teeth… and remember, we invented love, and that’s the greatest story ever told“. drownedinsound

Clap Your Hands Say Yeah – Mispent Youth On its debut, CYHSY’s frenetic sadness came to define it. This pathos comes out more elegantly on Hysterical…within and alongside the grandiose arrangements, gorgeous strings, and minimal synths… you can still hear the raw, delirious emotion that made Clap Your Hands Say Yeah a band to pay attention to in the first place.consequence

M83 – Midnight City All it takes is four synthesizer notes. That’s it. Smothered in reverb, coated in ’80s nostalgia, teetering on the edge of full-on explosion, those four notes pack more heart and energy than most albums released in 2011… layer upon layer of keys, arena-sized drums, and vocal atmospherics (not mentioning one of the tastiest sax solos this side of a Springsteen record). The result? The synth Sistine Chapel popmatters

Factory Floor – Two Different Ways Relentless synth lines, snares that have the air of the slap but the caress of a kiss. What the squares never mentioned in their disdain for music from warehouses, was just how transcendentally calm those concrete walls were; how there was a truth in it, however chemically motivated it might have been. Factory Floor have a purity of approach that appeals to the minimalist I know I will never be drownedinsound

Tune-Yards – Bizness It’s at once nervy and lush, ferocious and beautiful: the ripple of synths, the tangle of uke, the lap of voices, the surf of sax. A jump of bodies, muscles flexing saidthegramophone

Standard Fare – Suitcase Emma Kupa’s very unfetteredness is the thing I like most about Standard Fare, she has such an enormous gob and nothing horrible ever comes out of it. What a magnificently plain, and plainly magnificent voice she has drownedinsound

The Lovely Eggs – Don’t Look At Me (I Don’t Like It) One dashed racket, caterwaul and cheer. The Lovely Eggs are charging like punks, happily shouting, issuing insults. “Look at ‘im wif ‘is sausage-roll thumb! Look at ‘er with ‘er dressing-gown nose!” None of the insults really make sense. This is at least one half of the point. Pure dead brilliant saidthegramophone

Comet Gain – Clang Of The Concrete Swans For years I felt like my adoration for Comet Gain was unjustified, as very few, if any, of my friends had even listened to the band….

As a new listener, you can easily breeze right into the opening three tracks of the record, fueled with the usual bit of jangling pop and David Feck poetry. Depending upon where your allegiance lays, you’re either going to adore opener “Clang of the Concrete Swans,” or its successor “The Weekend Dreams.” Personally, I’m going with the former, as I love Feck’s affecting vocals, not to mention the stuttering guitar/vocals just before the 2.5 minute mark…. none of it really matters in the end, as no one’s going to write a better indie pop record than this group. The more you listen to the lyrics, the more they suck you in, and the more you fall in love–which is how it should be with your favorite bands austintownhall

King Creosote and Jon Hopkins – Bats In The Attic Scottish singer-songwriter legend Kenny Anderson hooking up with London based ambient electro wizard Jon Hopkins? It looks quite dubious on paper….

Put all those doubts aside, if you would. The labour of love that is ‘Diamond Mine’ deserves to be noted as one of the most exquisitely beautiful and affecting records of the year. Input-wise, it’s very much an even split between the pair: King Creosote’s contributed lyrics and vocals to Hopkins’s music, and the combination is equally heartrending and euphoric… ‘Bats In The Attic’ stands head and shoulders above its counterparts, displaying Anderson’s soaring voice and intimate lyrical bent (‘The hours go by like sips of water […] I read your simple novel that uses all our real names’), matched with a steady beat and Hopkins’ rademark synth backdrops. Throw in a superlative vocal harmony and you have a song that can be accurately described as perfect diymag

When Saints Go Machine – Kelly If every song sounded like this, if every song was this good, we would all age faster, and be happier, and scowl less at the radio in the coffee-shop. We would stroll with our lovers, blissful, dying twice as quick. I am not sure whether it’s our hearts that would go, or whether it’d be something at the cellular level. (I am not a scientist.) Just that we wouldn’t be able to keep it up. Too much, too soon. Before we knew it, we’d hit the fade-out. saidthegramophone

Darren Hayman – I Know I Fucked Up During the first month the year he set himself the challenge of writing a song for every day of the month and recording it on that day. He kept a record of this process via webcasts on the internet…

By Hayman’s own admission January Songs is not his best work. Evidently the pressure and time-constrictions inherent in the project would make producing a work of greatness pretty near to impossible…. ‘I Know I Fucked Up’ (sung and co-written by Allo Darlin’s Elizabeth Morris) … renders feelings of isolation… and could bring one’s serotonin levels right down. drownedinsound

Emmy The Great – Paper Forest (In The Afterglow Of Rapture) written after hearing “a line from Patti Smith’s ‘Dancing Barefoot’ – “the knowledge that she is blessed amongst all women”. I wondered what that meant, and the song came out of it. It also came out of a conversation with a Spanish journalist where we discovered we both take too many notes thelineofbestfit

Kate Jackson – Wonder Feeling three years since The Long Blondes split, but Kate’s lyrical obsessions – running away, motorways, classic love affairs – remain undimmed. As does her ability to knock out rollicking dancefloor-primed indie pop nme

Veronica Falls – Come On Over complete with ‘Paint It Black’ style drum overtures and all brings the album to a close in the most climactic possible way. Rhyming “crimson and clover” with the title in nursery rhyme-like fashion while guitars twirl and collide like fireflies in the night sky drownedinsound

Cults – You Know What I Mean balancing 1960s girl-group winsomeness with the darker impulses that lay beneath the best songs from that world, fleshed out with elements from shoegaze, post-punk, and contemporary pop pitchfork

Dum Dum Girls – Coming Down the ladies leave the mystery of their personas to find bliss in the wake of something awful, the death of front woman Dee Dee Penny’s mother… fuzz can still be found, but this time there’s more emotion and urgency. Penny wanted fans to feel something, and it’s hard not to at 3:31 with Penny’s declarations of departure. Lo-fi becomes a thing of careful beauty on “Coming Down” consequence

Crystal Stilts – Flying Into The Sun  their sound is what you’d expect to be hear played at your local indie record shop, perhaps marking the presence of the clerk who works Saturday afternoons, or whenever you stop in. It’s garage, it’s psych, it’s indie, it’s basically the sound of any band heavily influenced by the Velvet Underground popmatters

The Horrors – Still Life “A-listed on Radio 1” threw us. The siren song that drew their biggest audience yet was scarcely less of a shocker. The dark, krauty thrums of ‘Sea Within A Sea’ smoothed and rippled into a gorgeous groove, Faris’ voice rich and devoid of ire and irony as he promised “When you wake up/You will find me” over that deliciously dripping bassline nme

John Maus – Believer In interviews, John Maus makes efforts to articulate the complex intellectual framework that guides his songwriting, frequently dropping Heidegger and Adorno references to scribes who just wanted to chat about chillwave. But these heavy ideas shouldn’t obscure the simpler truth that “Believer” is appealing in part because the keyboards are cranked up really, really loud pitchfork

Craft Spells – After The Moment owe much of their musical inspiration to 1980s Britain. However, whereas the majority of their contemporaries seem to have developed an underlying fascination with the NME’s C86 cassette, Craft Spells influence lies far beyond that scenes’ confines but occasionally drifts within its head space for posterity… One can imagine hours spent studying the entire back catalogues of Fiction Factory and New Order respectively, yet at the same time, Vallesteros manages to convey a youthful exuberance throughout Idle Labor to suggest this is no elaborate exercise in plagiarism. drownedinsound

Bon Iver – Beth/Rest This song has been maligned. One year after he called Justin Vernon’s the “best voice ever”, Radiolab’s Jad Abumrad complained that Bon Iver, Bon Iver “reminds me a little too much of 1980s Journey”. He meant this song in particular. I can tell because it reminds me a little of of 1980s Journey. Or of REO Speedwagon. Or of other things that I don’t often listen to. And as I play it (again), my girlfriend says: “I don’t like Auto-Tune.” And I say: “I do, sometimes.” And I do, sometimes. And I love this song. It is not like some of Bon Iver’s other songs but I love this song: the way it strains and seeks, lost and finding, swimming in its own feelings. There is too much here – soprano sax, reverby piano, cheesy guitar solos, falsetto – but this too-muchness is the thing that disrupts the yearning, indicates the complications of a certain sort of love. It’s what elevates “Beth/Rest” from something sentimental to something unsettled. (& this is a powerful elevation.) saidthegramophone

Beirut – Santa Fe I think this might be a song about faith, or just the big cross that hangs out above Santa Fe. But the important thing is that Zach Condon has made a great and unlikely pop song, bringing together sounds from across Beirut’s history – that plaintive trumpet, the MOR chanson, his early bleeps & bloops saidthegramophone

Widowspeak – Gun Shy melds 1990s nostalgia with dusty Western thematics. Frontwoman Molly Hamilton … breathes coolly over a haunting guitar jangle pitchfork

Alex Turner – Piledriver Waltz So good he recorded it twice – once by himself for the Submarine OST followed by a full-band version on the Monkeys album – but it was its bashful first incarnation, with Turner as sheepishly adorable as Oliver trying to bang Jordana for the first time, that was the real heart-melter nme

The Antlers – I Don’t Want Love should be reserved for when you are at your most self-indulgent and WHY ME – that sharp tang of pure ruddy drama, when NOBODY UNDERSTANDS and NO ONE EVER FELT LIKE THIS. It is filmed in Panaramico, MagnaScope, VistaVision and Thrillarama and is the very definition of gnawing agony. drownedinsound

The Strokes – Under Cover Of Darkness bears all of the hallmarks that made Is This It such a success. It comes in the same package of world-weary attitude and effortless cool. Its lyrics tap into the same universal anguish and include phrases you might hear outside of any dorm in America. (The lyrics to the big, rousing chorus are “Don’t go that way, I’ll wait for you.”) “Under Cover of Darkness”, however, surpasses its predecessors by moving beyond the droning guitar sounds and allowing for more playful melodies, keeping the Strokes from, as they put it, “singing the same song for ten years” popmatters

Smith Westerns – Imagine Pt. 3 a luminous chunk of Liverpudlian-provoked pop… Just make sure you hang around for the final breakdown for things to really burst into full bloom pitchfork

Stephen Malkmus & The Jicks – Tigers The best (and perhaps the only) song that starts out referencing Birkenstocks flavorwire

Yuck – Get Away the years best chorus – coupled with the fact that they keep it hidden until halfway through the song goldflakepaint

Summer Camp – I Want You If every Summer Camp song has its ’80s movie equivalent then this is ‘Fatal Attraction’, Elizabeth Sankey threatening to “kiss your lips so hard your entire face would bruise” as it breaks into a synth-pop strut. A stalker’s anthem to rank alongside ‘Every Breath You Take’. nme

Eleanor Friedberger – One-Month Marathon Fiery Furnaces’ Eleanor Friedberger sings a song about the end of two lovers’ separation. Sexy and tripping, faintly doomed saidthegramophone

The Pains of Being Pure At Heart – The Body Awkwardness in your own skin is a supreme subject in music, especially so in the indie-pop bands the Pains of Being Pure at Heart musically take after. With sexual and religious matters at hand, the song plays up the shy romantic tension in their music. popmatters

Those Dancing Days – Can’t Find Entrance Normally the sort of thing parped out by Katy Perry whilst she gyrates in pink knickers on a cloud, it’s almost refreshing to know “Can’t Find Entrance” is the product of four scruffy-chic indie chicks from Sweden popmatters

The Mummers – Call Me A Rainbow In June 2009, the Mummers, a loose amalgam of instrumentalists fronted by singer Raissa Khan-Panni, her collaborator Paul Sandrone and Sussex-based arranger Mark Horwood, were having the lavishness of their album, Tale to Tell, matched with some equally extravagant praise.

This was, reviewers decided, the sort of music – all playful brass parps and gorgeous string glissandos – that really only belongs in the dreams of children. Khan-Panni approached every song with suitably childlike wonder, while Horwood’s opulent orchestrations were as far-out as any psychedelic rock you care to mention.

And then, one night in September 2009, in the treehouse studio deep in the Sussex countryside where they had recorded their marvellous music, a place that Khan-Panni had described as “magical”, reality intruded, when Horwood killed himself.

… the opening song, Call Me a Rainbow, is her attempt to, as she puts it, “out-Judy Garland Judy Garland”… “Mark’s dying was terrible for a long time, but I feel as though we’re honouring his spirit completely with these new recordings,” she says. “I do feel like he’s there with us, and he guides us – he could have written the stuff we’re coming out with now.” theguardian

The Sound of Arrows – M.A.G.I.C. goes straight for all that cheesy innocence-and-magic shit that makes some of you out there want to puke your guts out pitchfork

Ducktails – Killin’ The Vibe a summation of everything Ducktails has released… both charming and genuine at the same time beatsperminute

Still Corners – Endless Summer There are two types of music fans in this world. There are the philistines who are totally sick of all the bands who swipe the iconic opening drum-cracks from the Ronettes’ “Be My Baby”. And then there are those of us who feel an instant wave of warm bliss wherever and whenever we hear it… For the latter group, “Endless Summer” is as gooey and refreshing as a long afternoon in a hotel jacuzzi. The wispy London dream-poppers put those drums front and center of the track, and everything else here– the ghostly goth-sprite vocals, the organ purrs, the delicate guitar flutters– exists just to back up that thump-thumpthump-smack. And so the whole thing works as a floaty, ephemeral treat, a happy flirtation with the song’s gushy girl-pop ancestors. This sort of blissed-out, subconscious-needling pop music, after all, works best when it remembers that it’s still pop music pitchfork

The Twerps – Who Are You It embodies everything magical in a song: catchy bit of guitar playing, a cool bit of vocal delivery and relatable lyrics austintownhall

Fleet Foxes – Helplessness Blues A monument to folkrock beauty, courtesy of six Seattle guys who sound like they grew up on a steady diet of Crosby Stills Nash & Young and the Beach Boys… At heart, this is a soulful coming-of-age record: Check out the title track, where Robin Pecknold laments growing up while a skyward rush of harmonies makes it clear his sense of wonder is still intact rollingstone

Woods – Pushing Onlys  On one hand, Woods are a straight-ahead (albeit lo-fi) pop group that craft sweet-as-candy tunes that could melt even the hardest of hearts, yet, underneath the hood there’s an experimental element at play thelineofbestfit

Stephin Merritt – Forever And A Day classic Merritt romanticism, just his ukulele, spare piano notes and knowingly soppy lyrics “ You’ll never be alone/You’re my sine qua non/and I’m a baritone/Marry me” drownedinsound

Bill Callahan – Riding For The Feeling The focus at first sits with his perfect baritone, handing out a common refrain on departures– “It’s never easy to say goodbye“– with patience as steady as the tune itself. With each successive verse, though, the scope of Callahan’s concerns expands; he’s restless not with a lover but with himself, his art, his audience, and his need to say something profound. And so he arrives at the title’s mantra, an axiom of intentional ambiguity that he repeats almost playfully. After more than 20 years, Callahan’s music still feels uncomfortably personal, as if writing and singing allow him to tease though his troubles on tap pitchfork

Robert Pollard – Touch Me In The Right Place At The Right Time just Pollard-pop at its most grin-inducing and infectious popmatters

The Vaccines – Nørgaard A rip-through-your-skull punk guitar riff. Whiplash-inducing pace. A girl. Yelling. A chorus you can’t not sing along with. Instrumental break with falsetto humming. “Going steady.” A boy. The Vaccines’ single “Nørgaard” had it all. That it happened to be about an actual Danish model was a nifty side note. That it all happened in one minute and 39 seconds was the very definition of rock ‘n’ roll popmatters

Slow Club – If We’re Still Alive Saw a Twitter exchange some time back in June, it went word-for-word like this:

@RLUnsworth: Hello

I don’t wanna stereotype, but I need to know… Do you like Juno, and other Michael Cera films? Slow Club = ❤

@SlowClubRebecca: no

– awkward silence, and then, a minute later –

@SlowClubRebecca: sorry, don’t mean to be blunt, just despise all that lo fi twee shit!

The stark ‘no’ was brilliant. The ‘no’ should have been enough. The follow-up is the key though; says so much about the Slow Club mindset, about their inspirations and, more importantly, their aspirations.

The briefest of internet trawls with ’Slow Club’ typed into the search box spews out damning evidence: ‘twee ’60s twang’, ‘twee C86 anorak jangle pop’ and even ‘impossibly twee’. Amongst the chaos and clatter in the early records you can kind of see why, but mostly you should be trying to see why not. Could you hear Ellen Page and Michael Cera bouncing ‘It Doesn’t Have To Be Beautiful’ coyly off each other? Well, yeah, maybe. The reason, though, isn’t that the song is all sweet-natured cuteness but because it‘s pure and simple great pop. Anyone / everyone could sing it, it could be a boy / girl karaoke standard, but let’s adjust the ambition levels here; don’t imagine Kimya Dawson and some indie schmoe mangling it, imagine Beyoncé and Kanye absolutely fucking killing it. Slow Club were never wilfully shambolic and never dealt in faux-naivety. Slow Club are the anti-anti-folk. Slow Club, just to be clear, ain’t twee. diymag

Once an earnest indie singer with Slow Club, Rebecca Lucy Taylor is now take-no-prisoners pop diva Self Esteem….

Taylor’s dispatches from the frontline of millennial womanhood began life in 2017 as an Instagram account. Back then, she was still in Slow Club; she used the account to free herself from the restrictive image she felt people had of her. “This sweet, heterosexual lady in a band. I just wanted to prove I was a whole being that had other stuff going on.” (Taylor came out as bisexual in 2013.) Early on, she used the platform to post “a picture of me in my pants with a box of Dominos, which is nothing, but if I’d represented myself in that way via the Slow Club channels it would have been like, ‘What the fuck are you doing?!’” she laughs, comparing her transition to Miley Cyrus’s brash emergence from the cocoon of kids TV.

At that point, Slow Club had dominated Taylor’s life since she was a teenager in Rotherham. She met co-founder Charles Watson on the Sheffield gig circuit, where she was playing with her high school outfit the Devlin Project. “I could die thinking about how cringe it was,” she says. “I’m in skinny jeans oversinging the fuck out of a Smiths song.” In her late teens, Slow Club won a small indie record deal: cue a decade of critical praise, moderate success and frequently miserable touring. “We said yes to everything, apart from one Wombats support tour. We did one show with them and everyone [in the crowd] was shouting ‘Get your tits out’ at me. We got loads of laddy shit. It was before it was cool to be not a dickhead” theguardian

The Bats – Fingers of Dawn The basics of what they’re doing haven’t changed much since 1987: melodic guitar-pop, with a lot of atmosphere and feeling, wrapped up in melodies that will haunt you, and keep coming back at you when you aren’t paying attention. And yes, newcomers will hear in their songs, the old or the new ones, traces of a lot of bands you’ve come to love over the last couple of decades. The Bats were here first, and they’re still here, and in great form popmatters

PJ Harvey – The Words That Maketh Murder the folly of war could hardly have been captured more succinctly in song. The sombre opening lines: “I’ve seen and done things I want to forget/I’ve seen soldiers fall like lumps of meat”. A haunting indictment of what happens when diplomacy and humanity fail us nme

Real Estate – It’s Real It does what indie music does best: weaves poetic, charming lyrics with a hooky chorus. However, it’s unique to many other love songs, which usually express the pains of heartbreak or the dark side of obsession; this love song is a revelry, an exposition of energy and enthusiasm that comes with the fascination for a loved one. It’s real consequence

Jonathan Wilson – Can We Really Party Today? calming music routinely attracts scorn. We can probably lay the blame with new age music or its 90s descendant, chill out, the genre of sonic ointment with which clubbers still salve themselves, their critical discernment abandoned, like lip balm, by the club sinks. Calming music never quite gets the respect that euphoric music, or troubled music, attracts. It’s puzzling, because the ability to bring about the momentary, salutary suspension of disbelief in the harsh realities of life requires skill theguardian

Josh T Pearson – Honeymoon’s Great! Wish You Were Her not a record you will play every day, but when you do you will listen to it transfixed from beginning to end.  There will be moments, and they will come as sure as night follows day, when the only record that you are able to listen to will be Last Of The Country Gentlemen…

It is Pearson’s utter sincerity expressed in his songs, and perhaps his belief that in sharing his experiences of a turbulent relationship he might provide succour to others undergoing the same emotional tumult, that imbues Last Of The Country Gentlemen with a haunting abiding resonance.  louderthanwar

EMA – California It must be a common enough feeling to go through your teenage years in a small town, yearning to escape the petty-mindedness, violence and boredom, just to hit the big city in your twenties and discover that you don’t fit in there either. To discover the streets are paved with dogshit, not gold. ‘Fuck California‘, sings Erika M Anderson balefully on this quietly astounding debut album, in a dedication to her adoptive West Coast home, ‘you made me boring.’  thequietus

Low – Especially Me Having decided that in order to make a successful song one need only repeat strong sentiments ad infinitum until menace and drama gather as if at a free money party, Low then prove an important point; useful in life, as well as music. You see, you can always add aural tinsel – here a synth twinkle, there a bass whomp – but the real talent, the real ACKFING GENIUS, is when you let simple ideas stand for themselves, almost entirely unadorned drownedinsound

Tennis – Long Boat Pass The wonderfully simple lo-fi jangle perfectly matches the water imagery, but more importantly, it perfectly captures the naïve freedom and enchantment of youth, from aimless drives along the coast to late nights in diners to innocent prom-night romance avclub

Seapony – Dreaming combine in their sound a few of my favorite indie-pop styles of the last couple of decades: amateur songwriting in the Beat Happening tradition, pretty melodies over drum machines, and a woman’s voice sweetly singing about sad things, like — what else? — heartbreak popmatters

Acid House Kings – Would You Say Stop? mixing the ghostly female tones with a Belle and Sebastian backing track that bumbles along like giddy young love, tumbling down a soft green hill thelineofbestfit

Jens Lekman – An Argument With Myself Of all the loveable things about Jens Lekman, my favorite is how he tosses banana peels on the paths of conventional taste. Seldom does such wonderful music sound so comically awful when you try to describe it to someone. “Man, he’s amazing, like Neil Sedaka with a bit of a head cold singing over the Love Boat theme song.” By the time you get that far, dude is already backing away slowly pitchfork

Burning Hearts – Into The Wilderness arranged around a layer of wedding ceremony synths, and Jessika Rapo’s excellent Debbie Harry impression. She’s backed by two guitars to create a song about walking away from it all, and what to do after you’ve stopped feeling homesick. The band must’ve read up on Alexander Selkirk, the 17th Century Scot who stayed sane on a desert island by teaching cats to dance (true story), because “Into the Wilderness” is exactly the alternative to drinking water you’d want in the wild. “Into the wilderness / Away from the loneliness,” coos Rapo, confirming you’ll feel more accepted amongst tundra than you will in a small crowd of strangers. She holds together some brilliant sighing harmonies, but then goes on to describe walking with foxes, not realising her own goof: doesn’t she realise fox dung will attract every labrador walker for miles? cokemachineglow

Lana Del Rey – Video Games it’s easy to forget how striking her first appearance was… the kind of once-in-a-career song that stops you dead in your tracks: the slow building strings, the funereal beat, the lyric’s unsettling combination of romance and dread, the glassy-eyed vocal, the sense that it was utterly unlike anything else happening in pop at the time. As introductions to a new pop phenomenon go, it may well be the best of the past 20 years: the passing of time has done nothing to dim its potency theguardian

Charles Bradley – Why Is It So Hard? Daptone Records has established a reputation not only as a cohesive record label, but also as a cultural institution responsible for curating a neo-soul revival with a distinct sound. It’s out of this tradition that 62-year old singer Charles Bradley finally overcame a lifetime full of setbacks to debut No Time For Dreaming… The soul-stirrer cries out with utmost conviction with six-plus decades of pent-up emotion pouring into his songs pastemagazine

Wilco – One Sunday Morning Jeff Tweedy warns us that this majestic 12-minute closer to The Whole Love is long in the very first line, but it’s a caution that proves to be moot. Despite the length and refusing to change its basic rhythm or structure, the song never tires, keeping the listener’s attention by sneaking in layer upon layer of instrumentation at strategic moments, then pulling it away. The whispering patter of Mikael Jorgensen’s piano may not drive the melody but blossoms and wilts at the mention of key words like “bells” and “the Bible.” Lyrically, it’s a meditation on the relationship between Jeff Tweedy and a past acquaintance that only they understand. But its autumnal feel and confessional tone mean something different to everyone, the perfect tune for looking back on the year in non-linear terms consequence

The War On Drugs – Come To The City  all about ascension… gradually accruing all the confidence and verve of Live Aid-era U2. But rather than work up a chest-thumping, Bono-worthy wail, Granduciel is happy to sit back and ride out the song’s dense waves of sound, to prolong the euphoric feeling of anticipation pitchfork

Wild Flag – Romance Straight-up rock and roll this irresistibly catchy is a rare treat in this day and age; “Romance” should be finding its way onto feel-good mixtapes for a long, long time consequence

The Rural Alberta Advantage – Two Lovers  a spare and lovelorn shuffle in which Edenloff bays, “If I ever hold you again/ I’ll hold you tight enough to crush your veins,” pitchfork

Amor De Dias -Season of Light an ineffectual whisper of an album ensconced in a haze of Spanish vocals and hushed melodies. A collaboration between Clientele frontman Alasdair MacLean and Lupe Núñez-Fernández of Pipas, the album functions as a low-key meeting point for two genteel personalities, whose voices gel nicely but also merge somewhat flatly. The songs are murmur lullabies, two-to-three-minute wisps that are strong on atmosphere but often feel lacking elsewhere slantmagazine

Daughter – Youth makes traditional folk elements into something far bigger, spellbinding, sometimes even exquisite diymag

The Joy Formidable – Whirring Big sound, really an immense rock sound from this Welsh trio. I’m not sure I’ve heard guitars like this on a pop/rock record in quite a while… sure, Swervedriver, Teenage Fanclub, those bands really crank them up, but even at their loudest, I don’t recall hearing their guitars shred like they do on some of these songs. And that doesn’t even mention the drumming, which is gigantic, too. I’m reminded of Big Country, remember them? Look, I know my Welsh from my Scots, but still, there are similarities… the guitars are loud, strong and make all kinds of cool sounds, the drumming propels and anchors the big sound and of course, music like this requires a very strong vocalist. Singer Ritzy Bryan has the vocal presence to stand in front of a band with a gigantic sound, which is saying quite a bit, and the harmony vocals are outstanding, too. whenyoumotoraway

Sea Power – Who’s In Control an anomaly amongst their contemporaries. In this era of hyper-consumption of culture they appear reassuringly old-fashioned – though not in the way you perhaps might expect. They’ve been around a decade, yet appear more enthusiastic towards their work than ever; they are ambitious, but not in the way most British guitar bands are. They don’t write hit singles and they wear the same clothes for entire tours. But as their recent road-mates the Manic Street Preachers noted, they are ‘an ideas band’. They confuse, enrapture, divide and inspire in equal parts, and Lord knows we need a band like this now more than ever thequietus

Cornershop – Natch  the album is audibly Cornershop, which is odd given that it doesn’t feature frontman Tjinder Singh on vocals once. Up front instead is Bubbley Kaur, an old friend of Singh’s whose lyrics are delivered entirely in Punjabi. The New Delhi-born, Preston based housewife was introduced to the singer by a taxi driver friend. On meeting, they realized that they’d met at a party some years previously and discussed their mutual love of Punjabi folk music. Kaur a mother and launderette operative hadn’t heard much in the way of Western pop and rock music, let alone anything by Cornershop… something that probably made her ideal for this project thequietus

Help Stamp Out Loneliness – Record Shop Campbell’s androgynous voice is the Manchester-based sextet’s most distinctive feature, but rarely is it allowed any breathing space. Instead, she is swamped by glittery keyboards, jangly guitars and a superfluity of extraneous sounds. Dig deep and you’ll unearth some priceless, ferocious lyrics, involving stalking rock stars and regrettable actions with bananas, but the cluttered surface of the songs is never interesting enough to make you want to put in the work theguardian

The Hobbes Fanclub – The Boy From Outer Space It’s true. Psychocandy never moved me. Maybe I’m too young. But what I do appreciate, and what I imagine others recall fondly, too, is how much swathes of space were cut in the mid- to late-eighties. From the lingering burn of Galaxie 500 and Red House Painters, to the magenta haze shrouds of My Bloody Valentine and Slowdive, to the astral heartache of Spaceman 3, some gathering of souls were freezing their own moments in time. Probably wasn’t a conscious gathering of any sort – and how could it be – but nevertheless those eternities coalesced into an ethereal plane drifting away from the jangly C86 lot. Some twenty years on, lines mingle. The Bradford-based The Hobbes Fanclub strike some balance between skipping and floating, between basking on rooftops and sharing mixtapes in basements, the vocals resonate with the reverb of the cosmos – but the songs, with their bright pop structures and romantic scenarios, are grounded firmly on this planet, in the here and now. goldflakepaint

The Very Most – Alien Girl a sextet from Idaho, specialized in soundtracking the bittersweet stories of always; claps and coos to warm your heart while slowly enjoying your favorite fruit revista69

Florence + The Machine – Shake It Out finds Welch trying to shake an almighty hangover by exorcising it from her body by sheer force alone theguardian

Kurt Vile – Baby’s Arms He makes it seem so simple, this pretty drawlin’ love song. But through the haze and glitter there’s a careful craft, a discarding of excess saidthegramophone

Wild Beasts – Bed of Nails distilled ‘Smother’’s splendid brand of smooth sleaze into four minutes of sublime synth-pop sauciness. Nods to Mary Shelley and Shakespeare, as well as spellbinding beats, lifted it from pure perversity into something quite beautiful, yet still utterly shaggable nme

Elbow – Lippy Kids it celebrates the follies and triumphs of childhood, perfectly straddling the line between sentimentality and northern English grit popmatters