Ragged Glories

The Musical Advent Calendar - The Overall Top 10

2011-12-25T10:00:00.004Z

Merry Christmas!

And welcome to the final door of the 2011 Musical Advent Calendar...the overall top 10. Using our patented, multi-layered and highly sophisticated rating system (one point for a No. 24 nomination, 24 for a No. 1, and everything else in between), we've calculated what the panel rated as the best 10 albums of the year. You can see just how many points each one got under the album name.

Before we dive in, some facts and figures of note. This is our most diverse Advent Calendar to date. A total of 159 different albums got nominated, with no two people having the same number one, while Guy managed to find 24 albums that didn't appear on anybody else's list. The net result is that, while the National's High Violet required 150 points to top last year's overall top 10, this year's winner did enough with just 82.

Enough nattering. Here are the results:

1. Laura Marling - A Creature I Don't Know (Virgin)

82 Points

While almost unanimous in agreeing her third album deserved a place in any top 24 of the year, our panel couldn't quite figure out what to do with it as it finished anywhere between No. 24 and No. 2 on the lists. But sheer strength in numbers saw Laura take the prize.

Andy Welch - As before, Marling gives little of herself away here, and while detractors grumble this makes her music aloof, that enigma, coupled with her fierce, brooding delivery, is the most attractive thing about this sensational record.

Matt Collins - Laura Marling’s folk music is developing an extra level of maturity that makes her age (still 21) quite incredible. Officially indie folk’s elder stateswoman.

Ali Mason - After two albums heavily influenced respectively by Noah And The Whale and Mumford And Sons, it’s good to hear Marling developing a sound which feels more uniquely hers. My brain loves it – though, as ever with Marling, my heart isn’t quite so sure.

Ian Parker - If her debut Alas, I Cannot Swim carried the influence of backing band Noah & The Whale, and I Speak Because I Can was dominated by Mumford & Sons' stylings, A Creature I Don't Know might finally be showing us Marling's own distinct sound. If it is, great. If it's not, even better, because there's genuine excitement in seeing an artist so young already master so many different sounds.

Steve Pill - Whereas I found some of the earlier stuff a little too twee, try-hard or just affected, this record really caught me out.

Rory Dollard - Here her precocious songwriting is on an even bigger scale, with added passion and a spritely, organic flourish that makes good on all those Joni Mitchell comparisons.

Dom Farrell - Ragged Glories panellist picks Laura Marling. Thinks her songwriting is astonishing, her lyrics beguiling, her talent astounding. Wants to marry her a little bit. Standard.

2. = St Vincent - Strange Mercy (4AD)

78 points

Robbed of second spot outright by Dom's late re-jig of his list, Annie Clarke instead has to settle for a share. But she'll probably get over it. In time.

John Skilbeck - Gift-wrapped in ribbons of mini-Moog but still bearing flourishes of fuzzed-up guitar and shimmering keys, it told what could be interpreted as dark tales.

Pranam Mahavalli - Strange Mercy is filled with great hooks, memorable melodies and huge choruses; it’s just they don’t always come where you’d expect them. The songs are huge, occasionally melodramatic, and feature the kind of six-string pyrotechnics that make want to practice more guitar.

Ian Parker - I admit I've never really given St Vincent much time until this year, dipping in, deciding I was a bit confused (happens easily), and retreating. But Strange Mercy was thrust before me and how glad I am to have finally got my feet properly wet. It is never less than a thrill.

Rory Dollard - Clarke’s writing has taken a stellar leap in the last couple of years and her guitar work is as ferocious as her ear for a killer hook is sharp.

Dom Farrell - Third album Strange Mercy is bursting and brimming with a rare verve, from infectious hook-laden single 'Cruel' to plaintive closer 'Year of the Tiger', not to mention some of the year’s most inventive and idiosyncratic guitar work.

= Fleet Foxes - Helplessness Blues (Bella Union)

78 points

With stories of the recording process giving a different meaning to the notion of the 'difficult' second album, nobody was quite sure what to expect of Helplessness Blues. But clearly, what did arrive did not disappoint our panel.

Ali Mason - Hats off to Fleet Foxes – this is exactly what a second album should be: progression without losing what was so good about the debut.

Ian Parker - After wowing us with the timeless beauty of their debut album three years ago, the Fleet Foxes returned with a follow-up that barely strays from the wonderful formula they had already perfected.

Matt Collins - The delicately poised acoustic guitar lines, strong songwriting and harmonies are all there, with the echoing line about owning an orchard the thread that holds it together. Perfect, err, orchard owning album.

Rory Dollard - The element of surprise that greeted their arrival in 2008 has long since gone but both melodies and musicianship are as graceful as before.

Andy Welch - This is a simply mesmerising album; beautiful, timeless and worth every bit of suffering that went into it.

4. PJ Harvey - Let England Shake (Universal)

73 points

Dom Farrell - Let England Shake is a phenomenal achievement by a consistently phenomenal artist. Harvey tackles a heavy, complex subject matter melodically and accessibly, without either dumbing down or straying into holier than thou territory.

Pranam Mahavalli - I do miss the raggedness and dirt of her early records, but this is still at times a marvellously strange record that doesn’t deserve to be purely the preserve of the chattering classes.

Ian Parker - Polly Jean has broken out of her introspective (dis)comfort zone with a startling record about this country we call home.

Andy Welch - In some ways, for all the Mercury Prize-winner’s themes of war and conflict, this tells us more about the enigmatic artist than ever before.

Rory Dollard - "Yeah, but wouldn't it be higher on the list if it was a little less considered and a bit more raw?"
"Yes. Yes it would."

5. Radiohead - The King of Limbs (XL)

72 points

Steve Pill - It felt like this was the record they'd spent the last decade trying to make but were too uptight, conflicted or successful to be able to get across.

Andy Welch - Cynical gimmicks aside, it’s hard to argue with the quality of the music on The King Of Limbs. Just as In Rainbows is now among my favourite albums of all time after a sluggish start, TKOL (not Kings Of Leon, for clarity), to a lesser extent, has wormed its way into myhead with its hypnotic, eerie and sinister songs. Not a masterpiece, but the band’s consistency is staggering.

Dom Farrell - Restless beats and rhythms dazzle in the album’s first half, before haunting piano ballad “Codex” begins the ascent for air, completed by assured closer “Separator”. The monkey is back on Yorke’s shoulders and he’s feeding it loads of bananas.

Pranam Mahavalli - Is the general consensus on this album that it’s not up there with Radiohead’s best? Is this because at eight tracks its too short? Aren’t each of the individual tracks incredibly strong in themselves? Would you even go so far as to put 'Lotus Flower' as among their best songs? Since the release of OK Computer, do we now expect too much from a new Radiohead album? Is The King of Limbs a record that both reinvents the band and sidesteps expectations? Is that a good thing? Does it warrant a place in my top 24 merely because I’ve listened to it so many times? What merits a good album? What do we mean by ‘merits’? What is an ‘album’? What is held by the concept of ‘good’? Do some of us get too hung up about music nowadays? Do some of us not care enough? Do I need a nice sit down now and cup of tea? Do you?

6. Bon Iver - Bon Iver (4AD)

71 points

Matt Collins - Bon Iver is in fact a step above For Emma, Forever Ago, weaving electric guitars and walls of noise in epic, intricate melodies and that unmistakable falsetto. Simply beautiful.

Rory Dollard - Gone are the mournful acoustics, replaced with synthetic, gently manipulated soundscapes that bubble under beneath Vernon’s trademark double-tracked vocals.

Ian Parker - It's an absolutely beautiful, engrossing record that I enjoy more every time I hear it.

Pranam Mahavalli - A belting performance on Jools was all it took to make me revisit this record, which though bigger in scope than the debut, has the same level of ear-candiness and attention to detail that made his first so rewarding.

Steve Pill - Despite suffering in comparison to Justin Vernon’s debut, there are still some flat-out beautiful songs on here, not least the gently rousing 'Holocene'.

7. tUnE-yArDs - w h o k i l l (4AD)

68 points

Rory Dollard - At its best w h o k i l l threatens to break all boundaries in its path and create a whole new genre of politicised afrophile, scat-tastic, horn-blowing, gut-busting pop.

Pranam Mahavalli - Bold, brash, invigorating, and on tracks like Powa beautiful too, Garbus has created a record that shows there’s life in conceptual pop music yet. Life-affirming, inspirational and best served loud.

Ian Parker - w h o k i l l is a big bubbling monster of an album, impossible to define, impossible to contain, and impossible to ignore.

8. Wild Beasts - Smother (Domino)

64 points

Ali Mason - Undoubtedly the grower of 2011, Smother sees Wild Beasts embrace a quality never previously high on their agenda: restraint. Gone are the camp, the madness and the theatrics, replaced by something that throbs gently and invites you to use words like shimmering and ethereal.

Andy Welch - It’s hard to believe music as beautiful as this was written in a dingy room of an East-London towerblock. Clearly the Cumbrian band were thinking of home, as Smother is a sprawling, glacial-sounding record.

Dom Farrell - Endearing and unnerving in equal measure, Smother is an eloquent portrait of terminal relationship decline. Icy, atmospheric synths and throbbing bass provide a thrilling sonic foundation for intelligent flecks of guitar and piano, not to mention an easy resting place for singer Hayden Thorpe’s dramatic, occasionally preening, delivery.

9. Josh T. Pearson - Last of the Country Gentlemen (Mute)

63 points

Rory Dollard - Pearson’s labyrinthine country-tinged laments are not for everyone - and with their lengthy, meandering style and a poetic wordplay that rewards repeat visits, they probably actively discourage the casual listener. But for those who are up for the idea of being immersed in a gloriously bittersweet torrent of self-loathing and lost love, all set to near-virtuoso fretplay, this is set to be a timeless classic.

Ian Parker - The heartbreaking beauty of this stark, bruised record will become apparent immediately. It's not an easy listen, for sure, but it's an entirely compelling one.

Dom Farrell - A few months ago I had an epiphany. The combination of doing about my 20th job application in 18 months and having David Cameron’s Tory conference speech on in the background as the record played created the combined feeling of anger, despair, loathing and anguish that poor old Mr Pearson seems to be getting at.

10. Wilco - The Whole Love (Anti)

57 points

Rory Dollard - The Whole Love is a beaut in its own right, calling in most of the tricks the bands have learned over 20 years. Fearless and experimental ('The Art of Almost'), singalong fun ('I Might'), heartfelt and emotional ('One Sunday Morning')...it's all here.

Dom Farrell - The haunting ‘Black Moon’ is a magnificent mid-album sandwich filling between the good-time guitar pop of ‘Dawned On Me’ and ‘Born Alone’, and when lilting epic ‘One Sunday Morning’ closes the show, it’s hard to shake the impression that this band is incapable of making bad records.

Matt Collins - They haven’t lost the chirpiness from 2009’s Wilco (The Album), and this collection of songs repeatedly brings Paul McCartney’s upbeat Beatles tracks to mind for me. In a good way.

Ian Parker - Every Wilco album now is a reinvention, and given the scale of the ambition on show on The Whole Love, maybe now they will all be reinventions of the wheel.

Andy Welch - There’s not a misguided note on The Whole Love, and Tweedy, in upbeat mood, sounds more focused than ever, yet the spirit of adventure never vanishes. A wonderful record, and easily Wilco’s best since the essential Yankee Hotel Foxtrot.

The Musical Advent Calendar - Door Number Twenty-Four

2011-12-24T10:00:00.008Z

And so the moment of truth - our number one albums of the year.

Have a Merry Christmas, and don't forget about tomorrow's bonus post, when we calculate our collective top 10 of 2011.

Ali Mason

Tiny Ruins – Some Were Meant For Sea (WooMe)

Coming from New Zealand, a country surrounded and divided by water, it’s perhaps no surprise Hollie Fulbrook is a little bit obsessed with the sea. It’s also unsurprising that to her the sea is not just the sea – it is a symbol of adventure, it is travel, it is newness. And it is this spirit of yearning and adventure which informs her debut album as Tiny Ruins. It would be easy to think there was nothing adventurous here musically – little more than a guitar, occasional piano and barely-there backing vocals in support of Fullbrook’s voice, a tremendous instrument which is occasionally tremulous but at the same time rich and thick. But such is the simplicity of the arrangements that a single note, a word or a pause out would be fatal. Fulbrook is a storyteller. Her characters, such as the residents of the ’Adelphi Apartments’, whose loneliness she expresses in heartbreaking detail (“At night she read Cannery Row before saying goodnight to the highway below”) are fully realised. As Tom Ravenscroft, on whose show I first came across Tiny Ruins, points out, she avoids the “applied angst” that can scupper many songwriters, and in doing so has created a debut of simple, devastating beauty.

Old As The Hills by Tiny Ruins

Guy Atkinson

The Wonder Years - Suburbia I've Given You All And Now I'm Nothing (ADA Global)

I've often heard people talk about albums that seemed to 'speak' directly to them. I don't think I'd ever experienced this sensation until this third album from The Wonder Years. Okay, I might not be in a pop punk band from Pennsylvania, but there is so much in the lyrics here I can relate to. Anger at religious brainwashing, homophobia, sexism and racism are just a few of the topics tackled that set these guys apart from most of their contemporaries. Life-affirming stuff.

Ian Parker

Middle Brother - Middle Brother (Partisan)

This one became something of an obsession of mine, to the point that giving number one to anything else would have been a lie. It might not be technically brilliant or groundbreaking, but the members of Deer Tick, Dawes and Delta Spirit that make up Middle Brother have stepped on to the dangerous ground of the side project and emerged with a record that outweighs the sum of its parts. Here is the playful spirit that was missing from Deer Tick’s last LP (having been so apparent on the first two), the edge that, by its absence, held back Dawes’ debut and that little extra craft that Delta Spirit have needed. Middle Brother might fall into the ‘supergroup’ category, but there is a wonderful intimacy here, the sound of three guys unwinding by letting rip on a record of good old-fashioned Americana.

Matt Collins

The Joy Formidable - The Big Roar (Atlantic)

Seemingly coming out of nowhere, but in fact the hardest working band in rock of the last five years, the fiercely independent Joy Formidable’s major label debut is an, ahem, roaring success. The standout singles 'Whirring' and 'Austere' are the joyously chaotic rock tunes that brought them Foo Fighters support slots at Madison Square Garden, and they’ve made the step up from singles and mini-albums to real albums with real aplomb.

John Skilbeck

Wild Flag - Wild Flag (Wichita)

As Dom quite fairly pointed out on day 11, Wild Flag hardly reinvented the wheel with their debut album. But what they did achieve was to replace the worn-out nuts and bolts, upgrade the tyres, attach said wheels to a top-of-the-range convertible and hit the fast lane. Consisting of parts left over from defunct bands, most recognisably with Sleater-Kinney’s high-kicking Carrie Brownstein and tub-thumping Janet Weiss, all high hopes for Wild Flag were exceeded once their songs began to seep out, initially with a double-A-side single, then the live shows on YouTube and finally the finished LP. It’s been repeatedly said they performed with the vim of a band half their age, but bring me evidence of a group of 20-year-olds playing with such ferocity, energy and sheer satisfaction as this quartet did in London earlier in the month. I’ve checked; they don’t exist. Wild Flag rendered the competition, such as it was, obsolete.

Andy Welch

Fleet Foxes – Helplessness Blues (Bella Union)

Fleet Foxes’ debut was pretty much perfect. Following it up was never going to be easy, but few, especially singer Robin Pecknold, could’ve imagined it would be as difficult as Helplessness Blues was. Seemingly driving him to the edge of madness, and the band to the brink of break-up, you can hear the struggle in the music. Not in a laboured sense – the album is anything but forced – but in each meticulous arrangement and lyric, which largely deal with the issues of mortality, responsibility and finding your place in the world. I’ve always loved bands who make music not because they want to, but have to, and Helplessness Blues, on which Pecknold longs for the utopia of Innisfree, where he can be left alone to live in peace, definitely falls into that category. This is a simply mesmerising album; beautiful, timeless and worth every bit of suffering that went into it.

Steve Pill

Radiohead – “The King of Limbs” (XL)

Radiohead were everywhere and nowhere for me this year. Everywhere in that The King Of Limbs was a constant on my iPod and had either influenced or been influenced by almost every pre-2011 album I rediscovered this year, from Caribou and Junior Boys, to Talk Talk and Duke Ellington. And nowhere in the sense that they dropped the album with minimal fuss – no pay-what-you-like gimmicks, Q front covers or whatever else it is that bands of their stature are meant to do. All we got was a viral video of Thom dancing like an epileptic Charlie Chaplin. And yet this was exactly what this economic, far-from-immediate little album deserved. The mood is as experimental as we've come to expect from post-OK Computer albums, but this was something else entirely – in turns soulful and tender, funky and insidious, textured and sparse. The paranoia has all but gone too. It felt like this was the record they'd spent the last decade trying to make but were too uptight, conflicted or successful to be able to get across. And with respective solo albums seemingly having accounted for any excesses, this was leaner and more passionate too. It almost felt too stripped back at first, yet repeat listens revealed subtle personalities to each song: the rhythm of 'Lotus Flower', the yearning of 'Codex', the sense of humour in 'Morning Mr Magpie'. I grew up with Radiohead and I'm as surprised as anyone that this is my number one in 2011, but this album simultaneously moved my head, heart and feet.

Pranam Mahavalli

Bjork – Biophilia (One Little Indian)

When I saw Bjork perform Biophilia in its entirety at the Manchester International Festival in July, I think I’d made my mind up it would be my album of the year. I had to wait a further three months to actually hear it, but thankfully when I did, I wasn’t disappointed. Much has been made of the apps that accompany it, and the bespoke instruments used to record it. But alleged gimmicks aside, and judged merely as a collection of tracks, this record ranks for me among Bjork’s best. Emotive, thrilling, melancholic and at times downright scary, this is ambitious, mind-expanding music, for both the heart and the head. Okay, so it’s not quite perfect (I continue to struggle with track 'Sacrifice'), but I’ve heard nothing else this year which matches it in terms of scope, vision and vitality.

Rory Dollard

Josh T. Pearson - Last of the Country Gentlemen (Mute)

In a year I’d happily chalk up as one of the biggest and best in terms of music that has really grabbed me, I found it astonishingly easy to pick my number one. Pearson’s labyrinthine country-tinged laments are not for everyone - and with their lengthy, meandering style and a poetic wordplay that rewards repeat visits, they probably actively discourage the casual listener. But for those who are up for the idea of being immersed in a gloriously bittersweet torrent of self-loathing and lost love, all set to near-virtuoso fretplay, this is set to be a timeless classic. So essential did it become to the Dollard household this year that we overlooked its subject matter and made it the soundtrack to our honeymoon.

Dom Farrell

War on Drugs - Slave Ambient (Secretly Canadian)

I fell head over heels for Slave Ambient on first listen, totally hooked as The War on Drugs meshed krautrock with psychedelia and Spiritualized with The Verve. You can imagine Dylan and Springsteen nodding their approval as Adam Granduciel drawls through his widescreen dreams of escapism. The highest of the high points comes as ‘Your Love Is Calling My Name’ hurtles into the sonic oblivion of ‘The Animator’ before ascending majestically with ‘Come To The City’. This year my band broke up. If I’m ever in another one, I want them to make a record like this.

The Musical Advent Calendar - A Quick Recap

2011-12-24T09:59:00.005Z

Want a one-stop, at-a-glance guide to what everyone picked? No? Oh. Well, here it is anyway.

Ali Mason

1. Tiny Ruins – Some Were Meant For Sea (WooMe)
2. Wild Beasts – Smother (Domino)
3. Left With Pictures – In Time (Organ Grinder)
4. Jenny and Johnny – I’m Having Fun Now (Warner)
5. Sea of Bees – Songs For The Ravens (V2)
6. Grey Reverend – Of The Days (Motion Audio)
7. Zoey van Goey – Propeller Versus Wings (Chemikal Underground)
8. Fleet Foxes – Helplessness Blues (Bella Union)
9. Dark Dark Dark – Wild Go (Supply & Demand)
10. Shimmering Stars – Violent Hearts (Almost Musique)
11. Emmy the Great – Virtue (Close Harbour)
12. Jonny Kearney and Lucy Farrell – Kite (Rabble Rouser)
13. Hannah Peel – Broken Wave (Static Caravan)
14. Jesca Hoop – Snowglobe (Republic of Music)
15. The Decemberists – The King Is Dead (Rough Trade)
16. Sparrow and the Workshop – Spitting Daggers (Republic of Music)
17. Peggy Sue – Acrobats (Wichita)
18. Alex Turner – Submarine (EP) (Domino)
19. Mechanical Bride – Living With Ants (V2)
20. Metronomy – The English Riviera (Because)
21. Fountains of Wayne – Sky Full Of Holes (Lojinx)
22. Cashier No. 9 – To The Death Of Fun (Bella Union)
23. Florence + the Machine – Ceremonials (Island)
24. Laura Marling – A Creature I Don’t Know (Virgin)

Guy Atkinson

1. The Wonder Years - Suburbia I've Given You All And Now I'm Nothing (ADA Global)
2. Fucked Up - David Comes To Life (Matador)
3. Balance and Composure - Separation (No Sleep Records)
4. Thursday - No Devolucion (Epitaph)
5. Touche Amore - Parting The Sea Between Brightness and Me (Deathwish Inc.)
6. Small Brown Bike - Fell & Found (No Idea)
7. Defeater - Empty Days and Sleepless Night (Bridge Nine)
8. Spraynard - Funtitled (Asian Man)
9. Dave Hause - Resolutions (Paper + Plastick)
10. Into It. Over It - Proper (No Sleep Records)
11. Thrice - Major/Minor (Vagrant)
12. Title Fight - Shed (SideOneDummy)
13. Red City Radio - The Dangers of Standing Still (Ginner)
14. La Dispute - Wildlife (No Sleep Records)
15. Joyce Manor - Joyce Manor (6131 Records)
16. Transit - Listen & Forgive (ADA Global)
17. Pianos Become The Teeth – The Lack Long After (Topshelf)
18. Letlive. - Fake History (Epitaph)
19. Rise Against - Endgame (Polydor)
20. New Found Glory - Radiosurgery (Epitaph)
21. City and Colour - Little Hell (Cooking Vinyl)
22. Mastodon - The Hunter (Roadrunner)
23. Rival Schools - Pedals (Atlantic)
24. Death Cab For Cutie - Codes and Keys (Atlantic)

Ian Parker

1. Middle Brother - Middle Brother (Partisan)
2. Josh T. Pearson - Last of the Country Gentlemen (Mute)
3. tUnE-yArDs - w h o k i l l (4AD)
4. Dark Dark Dark - Wild Go (Supply and Demand)
5. Slow Club - Paradise (Moshi Moshi)
6. Bon Iver - Bon Iver (4AD)
7. St Vincent - Strange Mercy (4AD)
8. Other Lives – Tamer Animals (Play It Again Sam)
9. Los Campesinos! - Hello Sadness (Wichita)
10. Yuck - Yuck (Mercury)
11. BOBBY - Bobby (Partisan)
12. Laura Marling – A Creature I Don’t Know (Virgin)
13. Gillian Welch - The Harrow & The Harvest (Warner)
14. WATERS - Out In The Light (City Slang)
15. Fleet Foxes - Helplessness Blues (Bella Union)
16. Wilco – The Whole Love (Anti)
17. The Leisure Society - Into The Murky Water (Full Time Hobby)
18. PJ Harvey - Let England Shake (Universal)
19. Drive-By Truckers - Go-Go Boots (Play It Again Sam)
20. The Secret Sisters - The Secret Sisters (Decca)
21. Sarabeth Tucek - Get Well Soon (Sonic Cathedral)
22. Wanda Jackson - The Party Ain’t Over (Third Man Records)
23. Danger Mouse & Daniele Luppi - Rome (Parlaphone)
24. Dark Captain - Dead Legs & Alibis (Loaf)

Matt Collins

1. The Joy Formidable - The Big Roar (Atlantic)
2. Fleet Foxes Helplessness Blues (Bella Union)
3. Elbow - Build a Rocket Boys (Fiction)
4. Noah & The Whale - Last Night on Earth (Mercury)
5. Coldplay - Mylo Xyloto (Parlaphone)
6. The Lesiure Society - Into the Murky Water (Full Time Hobby)
7. Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds - Noel Gallagher's High Flying Birds (Sour Mash)
8. Bon Iver - Bon Iver (4AD)
9. This is the Kit - Where It Lives (Dreamboat)
10. The Decemberists - The King Is Dead (Rough Trade)
11. The Uglysuit - Aww Shucks (Quarterstick)
12. Beirut - The Rip Tide (Pompei)
13. Good Lovelies - Let the Rain Fall (ADA Global)
14. The Low Anthem - Smart Flesh (Bella Union)
15. The Spokes - The Spokes (Ninja Tune)
16. Dark Dark Dark - Wild Go (Supply And Demand)
17. Laura Marling - A Creature I Don’t Know (Virgin)
18. Wilco - The Whole Love (Anti)
19. The Middle East - I Want that You Are Always Happy (Play It Again Sam)
20. Tinariwen - Tassili (V2)
21. I Break Horses - Hearts (Bella Union)
22. Baxter Drury - Happy Soup (EMI)
23. Driver Drive Faster - Open House (Akoustic Anarky)
24. Treefight for Sunlight - Treefight for Sunlight (V2)

John Skilbeck

1. Wild Flag - Wild Flag (Wichita)
2. Anna Calvi - Anna Calvi (Domino)
3. The Lovely Eggs - Cob Dominos (Cherryade)
4. Cat's Eyes - Cat's Eyes (Polydor)
5. Comet Gain - Howl Of The Lonely Crowd (Fortuna Pop)
6. David Thomas Broughton - Outbreeding (Brainlove)
7. Las Kellies - Kellies (Fire Records)
8. Bill Wells & Aidan Moffat - Everything's Getting Older (Chemikal Underground)
9. Hunx & His Punx - Too Young To Be In Love (Hardly Art)
10. Ponytail - Do Whatever You Want All The Time (We Are Three)
11. St Vincent - Strange Mercy (4AD)
12. Vivian Girls - Share The Joy (Polyvinyl)
13. Dum Dum Girls - Always In Dreams (Sub Pop)
14. Laura Cantrell - Kitty Wells Dresses (Diesel Only)
15. The Dirtbombs - Party Store (In The Red)
16. The Field - Looping State Of Mind (Kompakt)
17. Veronica Falls - Veronica Falls (Bella Union)
18. Twilight Singers - Dynamite Steps (Sub Pop)
19. Sbtrkt - Sbtrkt (Young Turks)
20. Runaround Kids - Linked Arms (Philophobia)
21. Roll The Dice - In Dust (The Leaf Label)
22. Iceage - New Brigade (What's Your Rapture)
23. Widowspeak - Widowspeak (Captured Tracks)
24. Alex Turner - Submarine OST (Domino)

Andy Welch

1. Fleet Foxes – Helplessness Blues (Bella Union)
2. Laura Marling – A Creature I Don’t Know (Virgin)
3. Wild Beasts – Smother (Domino)
4. Katy B – On A Mission (Columbia)
5. PJ Harvey – Let England Shake (Universal)
6. Noah & The Whale – Last Night On Earth (Mercury)
7. Danger Mouse and Daniele Luppi – Rome (EMI)
8. Washed Out – Within And Without (Weird World)
9. Yuck – Yuck (Mercury)
10. Real Estate – Days (Domino)
11. Sarabeth Tucek – Get Well Soon (Sonic Cathedral)
12. Emmy The Great – Virtue (Close Harbour)
13. The Horrors – Skying (XL)
14. Lykke Li – Wounded Rhymes (Atlantic)
15. Slow Club – Paradise (Moshi Moshi)
16. Wilco – The Whole Love (Anti)
17. Big Deal – Lights Out (Mute)
18. Feist – Metals (Polydor)
19. Unknown Mortal Orchestra – Unknown Mortal Orchestra (Fat Possum)
20. Radiohead – King Of Limbs (XL)
21. Elbow – Build A Rocket Boys! (Fiction)
22. Fionn Regan – 100 Acres Of Sycamore (Heavenly)
23. Anna Calvi – Anna Calvi (Domino)
24. The Joy Formidable – Big Roar (Atlantic)

Steve Pill

1. Radiohead – The King of Limbs (XL)
2. The Antlers - Burst Apart (V2)
3. Gardens & Villa - Gardens & Villa (Secretly Canadian)
4. Washed Out - Within and Without (Weird World)
5. Balam Acab - Wander/Wonder (Tri Angle)
6. Walls - Coracle (Kompakt)
7. Elbow - Build A Rocket Boys! (Polydor)
8. Wye Oak - Civilian (City Slang)
9. Tim Hecker - Ravedeath, 1972 (Kranky)
10. Wu Lyf – Go Tell Fire on the Mountain (LYF Recordings)
11. Tom Waits – Bad As Me (Anti)
12. Toro Y Moi - Underneath the Pine (Carpark)
13. War On Drugs - Slave Ambient (Secretly Canadian)
14. Neon Indian - Era Extraña (Co-Operative Music)
15. Mogwai - Hardcore Will Never Die, But You Will (Sub Pop)
16. I Break Horses – Hearts (Bella Union)
17. Iron & Wine - Kiss Each Other Clean (4AD)
18. The Horrors – Skying (XL)
19. The Pains of Being Pure at Heart – Belong (Play It Again Sam)
20. James Blake - James Blake (Polydor)
21. SBTRKT - SBTRKT (Young Turks)
22. Foster The People - Torches (Columbia)
23. Laura Marling - A Creature I Don't Know (Virgin)
24. Bon Iver - Bon Iver (4AD)

Pranam Mahavalli

1. Bjork – Biophilia (One Little Indian)
2. tUnE-yArDs – w h o k i l l (4AD)
3. Radiohead – King of Limbs (XL)
4. James Blake – James Blake (Atlas)
5. Oneohtrix Point Never – Replica (Software)
6. Martyn – Ghost People (Brainfeeder)
7. PJ Harvey – Let England Shake (Universal)
8. St Vincent – Strange Mercy (4AD)
9. The Horrors – Skying (XL)
10. Gillian Welch - The Harrow & The Harvest (Warner)
11. Feist – Metals (Polydor)
12. Justice – Audio, Video, Disco (Because)
13. Deerhoof – Deerhoof vs Evil (ATP Recordings)
14. Beirut – The Rip Tide (Pompei)
15. Nicolas Jaar – Space is Only Noise (Circus Company)
16. Jali Nyonkding Kwyateh - Jali (Self-released)
17. Unknown Mortal Orchestra – Unknown Mortal Orchestra (True Panther Sounds)
18. WU LYF – Go Tell Fire to the Mountain (Lyf Recordings)
19. Bon Iver – Bon Iver (4AD)
20. Panda Bear – Tomboy (Paw Tracks)
21. Moon Duo – Mazes (Souterrain Transmissions)
22. Tom Vek – Leisure Seizure (Island)
23. Atlas Sound – Parallax (4AD)
24. The Field – Looping State of Mind (Kompakt)

Rory Dollard

1. Josh T Pearson - Last of the Country Gentlemen (Mute)
2. tUnE-yArDs - w h o k i l l (4AD)
3. St Vincent - Strange Mercy (4AD)
4. Bjork - Biophilia (One Little Indian)
5. Emmy the Great - Virtue (Close Harbour)
6. James Blake - James Blake (Atlas)
7. Laura Marling - A Creature I Don't Know (Virgin)
8. Lanterns On the Lake - Gracious Tide Take Me Home (Bella Union)
9. Tom Waits - Bad As Me (ANTI)
10. CANT - Dreams Come True (Warp)
11. Bill Callahan - Apocalypse (Drag City)
12. Beirut - The Rip Tide (Pompeii)
13. Anna Calvi - Anna Calvi (Domino)
14. Typhoon - A New Kind of House (Tender Loving Empire)
15. Wilco - The Whole Love (Dbpm)
16. Bright Eyes - The People's Key (Polydor)
17. PJ Harvey - Let England Shake (Island)
18. King Creosote and Jon Hopkins - Diamond Mine (Domino)
19. The War On Drugs - Slave Ambient (Secretly Canadian)
20. Bon Iver - Bon Iver (4AD)
21. Fleet Foxes - Helplessness Blues (Bella Union)
22. Starfucker - Reptilians (Polyvinyl)
23. Bombino - Agadez (Cumbancha)
24. Summer Camp - Welcome to Condale (Apricot Recording Company)

Dom Farrell

1. War on Drugs - Slave Ambient (Secretly Canadian)
2. Bon Iver - Bon Iver (4AD)
3. Wilco - The Whole Love (Anti)
4. Radiohead - The King of Limbs (XL)
5. PJ Harvey - Let England Shake (Universal)
6. Wild Beasts - Smother (Domino)
7. Gruff Rhys - Hotel Shampoo (Turnstile)
8. Laura Marling - A Creature I Don't Know (Virgin)
9. Josh T Pearson - Last of the Country Gentlemen (Mute)
10. I Break Horses - Hearts (Bella Union)
11. Starfucker - Reptilians (Polyvinyl)
12. The Low Anthem - Smart Flesh (Bella Union)
13. Wye Oak - Civilian (City Slang)
14. Wild Flag - Wild Flag (Wichita)
15. Jamie XX Gil Scott Heron - We're New Here (XL)
16. The Horrors - Skying (XL)
17. Bright Eyes - The People's Key (Polydor)
18. St. Vincent - Strange Mercy (4AD)
19. Elbow - Build A Rocket Boys! (Fiction)
20. Arctic Monkeys - Suck it and See (Domino)
21. Felice Brothers - Celebration, Florida (Loose)
22. Pains of Being Pure At Heart - Belong (Play It Again Sam)
23. Girls - Father, Son, Holy Ghost (Turnstile)
24. Dangermouse & Daniele Luppi - Rome (EMI)

The Musical Advent Calendar - Door Number Twenty-Three

2011-12-23T10:00:00.008Z

The penultimate day of the Musical Advent Calendar means first losers, chief runners-up, the number twos. I'm sure they'll all get over it.

Ali Mason

Wild Beasts – Smother (Domino)

Undoubtedly the grower of 2011, Smother sees Wild Beasts embrace a quality never previously high on their agenda: restraint. Gone are the camp, the madness and the theatrics, replaced by something that throbs gently and invites you to use words like shimmering and ethereal. From lyrics about going deeper, deeper to the orgasmic moans on ‘Bed Of Nails’, this is an album soaked in sex. The band use Thorpe’s famous falsetto and Tom Fleming’s more traditional, mournful delivery to suggest and imply and subvert – hetero or homo is a side issue here, it’s the sexual that’s important. Fans may pine for the grimy majesty of the Two Dancers, or the sheer jaw-dropping audacity of Limbo Panto but with every listen, the album’s own distinct rhythms and subtleties shine through.

Guy Atkinson

Fucked Up - David Comes To Life (Matador)

An 18-track concept album from a hardcore band shouldn't work, but it really, really does. Absolutely rammed with hooks and melody, you still find yourself discovering something new every time you listen to it.

Ian Parker

Josh T. Pearson - Last of the Country Gentlemen (Mute)

It took me a while to crack this one. Or at least I thought it did. It turned out that, in what must have been something of a daze, I spent the first two weeks after I bought it listening instead to the bonus CD of alternate versions. Some of those, for the record, aren't that great. But listen to the album proper and the heartbreaking beauty of this stark, bruised record will become apparent immediately. It's not an easy listen, for sure, but it's an entirely compelling one.

Matt Collins

Fleet Foxes - Helplessness Blues (Bella Union)

Talk about long-awaited. Three years after their eponymous debut with harmonies and 70s-tinged folk, Fleet Foxes have wisely decided not to mess with a winning formula. The delicately poised acoustic guitar lines, strong songwriting and harmonies are all there, with the echoing line about owning an orchard the thread that holds it together. Perfect, err, orchard owning album.

John Skilbeck

Anna Calvi - Anna Calvi (Domino)

The album that kept me sane for the 17 days and nights of the World Snooker Championship, and truly it’s some achievement to remedy the rigor mortis-inducing play of Rory McLeod. Later in the summer I saw Anna Calvi perform in York and all the flamenco flair, the virtuoso vocals, the drama-drenched songs of the record translated across to the live show. Compared in some parts to the works of Buckley (Jeff rather than Tim) and Bellamy (Matt rather than David), the latest in a long line of self-titled LPs on my list perhaps shared grand ambitions with those artists but it was hardly derivative and more signalling the arrival of a major new talent.

Andy Welch

Laura Marling – A Creature I Don’t Know (Virgin)

I Speak Because I Can, Laura Marling’s previous album, took my No. 1 spot on this blog last year. Back then I wrote about how it delivered on the promise hinted at on her innocent debut Alas, I Cannot Swim. Remarkably, this third album, A Creature I Don’t Know, makes similarly giant leaps forward. She’s gone electric for the first time, 'The Beast' being a swirling monster of a song Led Zeppelin could’ve easily recorded, while 'Sophia' comes over like a glorious, tragic hoedown. As before, Marling gives little of herself away here, and while detractors grumble this makes her music aloof, that enigma, coupled with her fierce, brooding delivery, is the most attractive thing about this sensational record.

Steve Pill

The Antlers - Burst Apart (V2)

I know plenty of you on here were fans of 2009’s Hospice but I found it a little too unremittingly bleak – with my Mum passing away in the same year, a concept album based around a terminally-ill patient was a bit too much for me to put on repeat. Burst Apart was a revelation then: shot through with hope and some surprisingly punchy guitars, there was more of an interesting contrast to Peter Silberman’s broken soul vocals this time around. Oddly, something in the jazzy chords and elegant arrangements even reminded me a little of Coldplay’s Parachutes, an album I still have a soft spot for, even after all of the Rihanna-duetting, Paltrow-bonking madness that followed. This was even better and also spared me mental pictures of excruciatingly middle class dinner parties with Jay-Z, Beyonce and Gwyneth. Winner.

The Antlers - I Don't Want Love by Transgressive Records

Pranam Mahavalli

tUnE-yArDs – w h o k i l l (4AD)

Neil Young, referenced in the title of this blog, has always appealed to me because he’s charted his own path. And while Merril Garbus under the moniker of tUne-yArDs sounds nothing like Neil, for me she has the same unique appeal of an artist ruthlessly following their own muse. Bold, brash, invigorating, and on tracks like Powa beautiful too, Garbus has created a record that shows there’s life in conceptual pop music yet. Life-affirming, inspirational and best served loud.

Rory Dollard

tUnE-yArDs – w h o k i l l (4AD)

Choosing between St Vincent and tUnE-yArDs for spots two and three was as easy as deciding who you’d rather have up front, Pele or Maradona. Or who you’d rather punch, Piers Morgan or Jeremy Clarkson. Both solo projects under lavish names, both staggeringly assured female artists with a sense of fun to go with a kitchen-sink musicality. At its best w h o k i l l threatens to break all boundaries in its path and create a whole new genre of politicised afrophile, scat-tastic, horn-blowing, gut-busting pop.

Dom Farrell

Bon Iver - Bon Iver (4AD)

Given Justin Vernon’s previous incarnation as an incredibly talented, incredibly hairy man with a bruised Americana heart, the sonic ambition of Bon Iver is startling. From its intensely evocative opening guitar phrase to the stirring, brass-bursting finale, ‘Perth’ is a blinding way to kick things off. Thankfully, the quality is maintained – ‘Holocene’ and ‘Wash.’ possess a particularly beguiling and aching beauty. Well, it’s almost maintained. Closer ‘Beth/Rest’ sounds like something off the soundtrack of one-time Channel 5 daytime favourite Sunset Beach. It’s surely a gag.

The Musical Advent Calendar - Door Number Twenty-Two

2011-12-22T10:00:00.006Z

While Skillers quietly enjoys some "musical marmite", Pranam quietly suffers a meltdown.

Ali Mason

Left With Pictures – In Time (Organ Grinder)

Coming out of a project which saw the band write, record and shoot a video for one song a month for the duration of 2010, In Time is a remarkably coherent album. At first glance not much has changed since their debut effort – 12 shiny chamber pop songs which draw on the band’s classical training and will have you singing along before you even know the words. But there’s an impressive widening of scope here, whether that be in the a capella of ‘October Waits’ or ‘June’, a jaunty pop song which makes use of the little heard 7/4 time signature. These, and other offbeat treats, come from the second of the band’s two frontmen Toby Knowles. But it is Stuart Barter, whose voice and songs have a more traditional beauty, who produces the crowning glory in 'River Avon', a tale of nostalgia and thwarted young love so heartbreakingly delicate you hesitate to listen to it too often for fear it may break.

Guy Atkinson

Balance and Composure - Separation (No Sleep Records)

After two breathtakingly brilliant EPs, it's little wonder that Balance and Composure were capable of creating a full length that is every bit as dark and brooding as Brand New's masterpiece Deja Entendu. A classic.

Ian Parker

tUnE-yArDs - w h o k i l l (4AD)

w h o k i l l is a big bubbling monster of an album, impossible to define, impossible to contain, and impossible to ignore. Many, many words have been used to try and sum up the contents of this record, of which may favourite is rambunctious (this words should be used much more often in many walks of life) but adding to the list, or just borrowing from it, only serves little purpose. The best thing to do is listen. And watch too, cos this video is a riot.

Matt Collins

Elbow - Build a Rocket Boys (Fiction)

The sickeningly happy title and the global smash of 'One Day Like This' meant there was always a danger Elbow would try to write 12 similar stadium songs, when in fact their strengths lie in the melancholy. 'Open Arms' aside, they do indeed stick to what they know. Jaggedy guitars, complex time signatures, and beautiful lyrics - a great follow up in their new era.

John Skilbeck

The Lovely Eggs - Cob Dominos (Cherryade)

Utter musical marmite from Lancaster’s Holly and David. Either you’ll love the scrambled textures of the Lovely Eggs, as I do, or you’ll hate them and everything they stand for. Having cast my eye over quite a few end-of-year lists, they’ve been nowhere in sight. PJ Harvey, the Kate Adie of alt.rock, is the towering presence, with no Eggs hatching in any charts. Shame that, and surely an oversight John Peel’s listeners would have rectified. I reckon my selected track, the lead single, was the most triumphant moment of their skittish second album but it faced competition from 'Panic Plants', which took a sensitive topic, OCD, and smeared gags all over it, and the call-and-response jest-fest of 'Why Don’t You Like Me?'.

Andy Welch

Wild Beasts – Smother (Domino)

It’s hard to believe music as beautiful as this was written in a dingy room of an East-London towerblock. Clearly the Cumbrian band were thinking of home, as Smother is a sprawling, glacial-sounding record. Much was made of the album’s sexiness when it was release, and indeed it’s a carnal-sounding record too, with slinky basslines and seductive, sweeping melodies and arpeggios lacing most of the songs. Lyrically, Hayden Thorpe is on fine form, somehow managing to be playful, mysterious and obtuse at once. Putting it simply, there isn’t a British band as interesting or idiosyncratic as Wild Beasts at the moment. On paper, they’re preposterous. In reality? Absolutely heavenly.

Steve Pill

Gardens & Villa - Gardens & Villa (Secretly Canadian)

At their first UK gig at the Lexington in Kings Cross, this Santa Barbara four-piece bounded back on stage for an encore and promptly tore Gary Numan’s 'Cars' a new one. “We’ve always wanted to play this in England…” Seeing them live made more sense out of an album that was already a favourite this year. With touches of new wave and even glam rock, there was an edge and variety to the songwriting that belied the slick electro style production. 'Black Hills' throbbed like a sun-bleached Stooges, while 'Sunday Morning' even aped the Beatles, with its beautifully weary psychedelia. Only a slight tail off in the last couple of tracks and an over-use of that note-bending lever you get on the side of 1980s keyboards that Talking Heads used to do on every track stopped this being at number one.

Pranam Mahavalli

Radiohead – The King of Limbs (XL)

Is the general consensus on this album that it’s not up there with Radiohead’s best? Is this because at eight tracks its too short? Aren’t each of the individual tracks incredibly strong in themselves? Would you even go so far as to put 'Lotus Flower' as among their best songs? Since the release of OK Computer, do we now expect too much from a new Radiohead album? Is The King of Limbs a record that both reinvents the band and sidesteps expectations? Is that a good thing? Does it warrant a place in my top 24 merely because I’ve listened to it so many times? What merits a good album? What do we mean by ‘merits’? What is an ‘album’? What is held by the concept of ‘good’? Do some of us get too hung up about music nowadays? Do some of us not care enough? Do I need a nice sit down now and cup of tea? Do you?

Rory Dollard

St Vincent - Strange Mercy (4AD)

Annie Clarke’s previous record as St Vincent, Actor, just missed the cut after the umming and the aahing was done on my 2009 Advent Calendar. This time it took a bucketload of umms and even more aahs to keep it out of the top two. Clarke’s writing has taken a stellar leap in the last couple of years and her guitar work is as ferocious as her ear for a killer hook is sharp. Lyrically, there’s stacks of mischief, double talk and the occasional filthy aside and in 'Cruel', she has my single of the year.

Dom Farrell

Wilco - The Whole Love (Anti)

Wilco begin their best album since Yankee Hotel Foxtrot by echoing its more claustrophobic moments in opener ‘Art of Almost’ - seven intricately woven minutes that Nels Cline blasts into the stratosphere with his thrilling guitar assault. From there on Cline’s new wave flair offsets Jeff Tweedy’s Abbey Road sensibilities. The haunting ‘Black Moon’ is a magnificent mid-album sandwich filling between the good-time guitar pop of ‘Dawned On Me’ and ‘Born Alone’, and when lilting epic ‘One Sunday Morning’ closes the show, it’s hard to shake the impression that this band is incapable of making bad records.

The Musical Advent Calendar - Door Number Twenty-One

2011-12-21T10:00:00.008Z

Important questions are raised by today's list, but none more important than the question as to where the yo-yo finally landed on Pranam's end-of-year chart.

Ali Mason

Jenny and Johnny – I’m Having Fun Now (Warner)

This is one of two albums I’ve picked this year which was also eligible for the 2010 list, which is a shame because, had the vote not been split, it might have had a better shot at the overall top 10. It’s great stuff though: Jenny (Lewis - Rilo Kiley) and boyfriend Johnny (Rice - who cares?) are young, pretty, funny and in love, and they’re positively bloody desperate to let you know how it feels. While I’ve lifted that description entirely from Rory’s review last year because it’s a great line, I can’t help feeling he’s slightly undersold the lyrical ambition of an album which includes lines like “If you lose your fear of God you are an animal at heart” and “You have to be patient, this new administration is doing the very best it can”. Nobody’s going to disagree about the scorching harmonies and perfect pop tunes, though, in a 35-minute offering which never once dips in quality.

Guy Atkinson

Thursday - No Devolucion (Epitaph)

My favourite band of all time regrettably decided to call it quits in November, but after 13 years and six life-changing albums I can hardly complain. No Devolucion hinted at a new direction and was a fitting way for the finest post-hardcore band of all time to bow out.

Ian Parker

Dark Dark Dark - Wild Go (Supply and Demand)

For some reason every time I think about Dark Dark Dark I get all hung up on their supposed genre, 'chamber folk', and what that might mean. I think this is part of a general thing I have about the seemingly endless list of different genres which are said to exist, to the point that every band might as well have their own genre, and then nobody will. I don't know why, but this band provoke these feelings in me more than most - perhaps because I've never read anything about them, now including this review, which doesn't mention the term. But once you get past semantics, you can very easily get lost in a very different, and wonderful, way with Dark Dark Dark. To fully immerse yourself in Wild Go is to live in world of bleak beauty. Their echoing pianos and pulsating rhythms create a haunting soundscape you won't want to leave. The tunes are too good for that.

Matt Collins

Noah and the Whale - Last Night On Earth (Mercury)

Dubbed their worst album so far by the fun-haters, Last Night On Earth is in fact a great collection of tunes. Not sounding out of place on Radio 2 drivetime is in fact a virtue, particularly when bursting from the depths of despair of last album, First Days of Spring. An album for jumping up and down to, whether in the 80s or any other decade.

John Skilbeck

Cat's Eyes - Cat's Eyes (Polydor)

Side-projects shouldn’t trump the day job but the debut LP from Cat’s Eyes was an aural extravagance. News that Horrors head boy Faris Badwan (né Rotter) was working on a side-project with an opera singer, Italian-Canadian Rachel Zeffira, caused a ripple of interest, which became a stir when they apparently performed a track as a stunt inside the Vatican. The neo-gothic duo had chutzpah but they had the tunes too. Zeffira the debutante was a revelation, Badwan a first-class chaperone, their sultry, sun-down orchestral manoeuvres consistently hitting the mark.

Andy Welch

Katy B – On A Mission (Sony)

While millions of people were watching Prince William marrying that ‘commoner’ Kate Middleton in April, I was interviewing Katy B. If any of the flag-waving tourists cheering on the Blue Bloods wanted a real depiction of modern Britain, they could’ve done a lot worse than look at Katy that day, standing in a café in Oxford ordering a falafel, and have a listen to her wonderful debut. As foreign as her influences are to me – dubstep, two-step and garage – I love On A Mission. Maybe that’s why I find it so fascinating. It sounds like club music made by someone who has actually been inside a club. The way Katy sings of getting lost in the music, flirting with strangers and over-indulging makes me think nightclubs might not be gateways to hell, but thrilling places to visit.

Steve Pill

Washed Out - Within and Without (Weird World)

Having played 'Feel It All Around' endlessly last year (the Life of Leisure EP was my number six pick in 2010, fact fans), I had pretty high expectations for Within and Without, which were then crushed by walking into Rough Trade to find they had installed a promotional Washed Out double bed in the store, complete with branded duvet and listening posts. Thankfully after this twattishly misguided introduction, the album itself was a more simple seduction – shoegaze production values, inert rhythms and vocals with a strange, roller-rink sadness to them.

Washed Out - Amor Fati by DominoRecordCo

Pranam Mahavalli

James Blake – James Blake (Atlas)

Like a yo-yo, this has bobbed all over my charts this year. It didn’t have the immediate appeal of Blake’s early EPs, but I kept returning to it, partly because it sounds so unlike anything else. It’s deep, heartfelt music that manages to innovate too, and in that sense reminds me the xx’s debut. I really look forward to see where Blake goes next.

Rory Dollard

Bjork - Biophilia (One Little Indian)

It seems pathetically reductive to sum up the genius of this album in a couple of paragraphs and an arbitrarily selected video clip, but let’s give it a shot while we’re here. If you want to divert yourself reading about the instruments she invented to give this album its distinctive palette, that’d be a good thing to do. Equally, you could research the conservationist/cosmological/philosophical treatise that underpin its themes. If none of that appeals, just take this at its face value: a set of dizzyingly creative, genre-splicing, batshit mental musical experimentation.

Dom Farrell

Radiohead - The King of Limbs (XL)

In making their 2009 masterpiece In Rainbows, Radiohead removed a monkey from their back. No longer did people hope idly for the next The Bends or OK Computer. It seems The King of Limbs has annoyed everybody again by not being the next In Rainbows. However, it must be remembered, Thom Yorke is a contrary bugger who never knowingly gives the people what they want unless you count playing “Creep” at the odd festival here and there. The King of Limbs is not as good as its predecessor, but there remains plenty to admire. Restless beats and rhythms dazzle in the album’s first half, before haunting piano ballad “Codex” begins the ascent for air, completed by assured closer “Separator”. The monkey is back on Yorke’s shoulders and he’s feeding it loads of bananas.

The Musical Advent Calendar - Door Number Twenty

2011-12-20T10:00:00.006Z

As we reach our top five albums of the year, SP has his head turned by a (seemingly) faulty listening post while the rest of us take note of a certain pick and prepare for the almost inevitable Dollard rant in the comments section.

Ali Mason

Sea of Bees – Songs For The Ravens (V2)

This is one of two albums I’ve picked this year which was also eligible for the 2010 list, which is a shame because, had the vote not been split, it might have had a better shot at the overall top 10. It’s great stuff though: joyous and despairing at the same time, individual but familiar. Julie Ann Baezinger’s girlish vocals make everything sound fresh, whether it’s the ecstasy of new love or the pain of heartbreak, while the arrangements are never obvious but always understated enough to let the songs do the talking.

Sea of Bees "Sidepain" from TERROREYES.TV on Vimeo.

Guy Atkinson

Touche Amore - Parting The Sea Between Brightness and Me (Deathwish Inc.)
I'm not sure I've been as excited about a new hardcore band as I am with these guys. This second album clocked in at under 20 minutes and is a relentless onslaught of riffs, breakdowns and screaming, also known as 'heaven' to me.

Ian Parker

Slow Club - Paradise (Moshi Moshi)

Slow Club return two years after debut Yeah So having done a whole lot of growing up. Shaking off an unwarranted 'twee' tag they never wanted, they return with a measure of gloom and despair injected into their trademark sound. Not that this is a morbid listening. The tunes are too engaging and exuberant for that, making for a compelling listen.

Matt Collins

Coldplay - Mylo Xyloto (Parlaphone)

It's always hard to put stadium fillers in your albums of the year list, but you have to hand it to them. Another collection of arms aloft anthems from the band Alan McGee once dubbed bedwetters, this time featuring Rihanna's dulcet tones and Brian Eno's unmistakable guiding hand, the latter taking standard indie sounds and propelling them skywards.

John Skilbeck

Comet Gain - Howl Of The Lonely Crowd (Fortuna Pop)

The first album since 2005 from Comet Gain, and worth the wait, Howl… was loaded with whirling organ flourishes, rhapsodic twirls and punk poetry. Given the pick of co-producer Edwyn Collins’ guitars, it was little wonder they turned out a flurry of cornerstone classics that would have fitted snugly into the Orange Juice canon. My choice was its grandstanding opening track.

Comet Gain - 'Clang Of The Concrete Swans' (What's Your Rupture?) by Independent Label Market

Andy Welch

PJ Harvey – Let England Shake (Island)

So much has been written about Let England Shake – it’s a protest album using centuries-old stories to make a profound point about the present – that it’s not worth going over it again. It’s the first time Harvey has put her head above the parapet in this area, much of her past work being about more mysterious or emotional matters, but in some ways, for all the Mercury Prize-winner’s themes of war and conflict, it tells us more about the enigmatic artist than ever before.

Steve Pill

Balam Acab - Wander/Wonder (Tri Angle)

I’m not ashamed to say that I complained to the staff in a record shop when I first heard this on a listening post. Or rather, I couldn’t hear anything and told them it was broken. Of course, it wasn’t, but Wander/Wonder takes an inordinately long time to get going. In fact, it’s not until a barrage of strings kicks in after four minutes on the aptly-named opening track, 'Welcome', that you’d even know it had really started. Luckily what follows is worth the wait, a perfectly paced mix of distorted R&B, dubstep atmospherics and floating, ethereal vocals. Gorgeous stuff.

BALAM ACAB - Oh, Why by TriAngleRecords

Pranam Mahavalli

Oneohtrix Point Never – Replica (Software)

Wintry, desolate, glacial, minimal, this is an album that doesn’t try very hard to grab your attention. It's a slow-moving, hypnotic album, and as with my top choice of last year (Caribou’s Swim) is for me a good example of how music with electronic sounds can be as affecting as that made with conventional instruments.

Rory Dollard

Emmy the Great - Virtue (Close Harbour)

My fellow panellists - or indeed anyone who talked to me in 2009 – won’t need reminding how deeply I fell for Emmy’s debut album. But while there’s nothing quite like your First Love, this is no rebound fling. The arrangements are more textured than before, providing greater depth and the some disarming musical detours but the songs – and the characters that populate them - remain the key. Emmy’s voice, meanwhile, remains the best in the business.

Dom Farrell

PJ Harvey - Let England Shake (Island)

So, after selecting a run of albums about heartbreak and break-ups, allow me to present a record where everyone gets killed in wars. Tis the season to be jolly after all. Let England Shake is a phenomenal achievement by a consistently phenomenal artist. Harvey tackles a heavy, complex subject matter melodically and accessibly, without either dumbing down or straying into holier than thou territory. Sparse, reverb-laden arrangements set the mood perfectly. Ten years on from her first Mercury win in the wake of 9/11, the fact that an album exploring the horror and futility of war, with a focus on the doomed souls of Gallipoli, should resonate so strongly and profoundly is a sombre and sobering one.

The Musical Advent Calendar - Door Number Nineteen

2011-12-19T10:00:00.009Z

As we reach out No. 6 albums of the year, Ali confronts his blatant sexism, while Pranam drifts back 20 years to discuss his favourite albums of 1991 and Dom expresses serious concerns about the well-being of his chosen pick.

Ali Mason

Grey Reverend – Of The Days (Motion Audio)

While ‘woman with guitar’ forms the backbone of my music collection, ‘man with guitar’ as a genre is oddly underrepresented. But maybe that’s because not many can do it like Grey Reverend. The obvious reference point, in both vocal and musical style, is Jose Gonzalez but, whisper it quietly, I think Grey Reverend might be better. I can’t remember whether he recorded this himself in his Brooklyn apartment, or if that’s a back story I’ve made up because it seems to fit. Either way, there are six tracks of intense, intimate brilliance before the spell is broken a touch towards the end. This is a talent desperately deserving of greater exposure.

Guy Atkinson

Small Brown Bike - Fell & Found (Bridge Nine)

Another collection of bruising emo anthems from one of post-hardcore's most influential bands. Let's not have to endure an eight-year wait for the next album again, eh lads?

Ian Parker

Bon Iver - Bon Iver (4AD)

Much as I liked For Emma, Forever Ago, it was, in some ways, a let down. I don't blame Bon Iver for this necessarily, but all the five-star reviews made it sound, on paper, like it should have been exactly the kind of album I'd adore, and put up with my favourites of all time. That never happened. So when the follow-up came out to a response that was, if anything, even better, I stayed sceptical. The first time I listened to it, I wasn't really concentrating and pretty much forgot about it. Which only made the process of discovering it all over again in September all the more exciting. It's an absolutely beautiful, engrossing record that I enjoy more every time I hear it.

Matt Collins

The Lesiure Society - Into the Murky Water (Full Time Hobby)

The Leisure Society's debut swept in on the wave that brought breezy folkpop back to the masses. The follow-up never quite hits those heights, drifting in the second half more than its predecessor did, but with upbeat songs as timeless and beautifully structured as 'You Can Keep Me Talking' and 'Our Hearts Burn Like Damp Matches', this will do very nicely.

John Skilbeck

David Thomas Broughton - Outbreeding (Brainlove)

Otley’s David Thomas Broughton used to deliver music as theatre, his gigs were anything-goes shows, modern folk warped into performance art. If it creaked, clanged or clunked, it went through the tape loop and came out part of increasingly elaborate mosaics, tangling with Broughton’s deep, tremulous voice. Frankly, though, it was not to everyone’s taste, and walk-outs were not unusual. With Outbreeding, something changed. This intriguing son of rural Yorkshire knitted together sparkling poetry, hammed-up vocals and intricate melodies to create rather conventionally-shaped songs – still thrillingly playing by most of his own original rules – on a monumental second record.

Andy Welch

Noah And The Whale – Last Night On Earth (Mercury)

I loved Noah And The Whale’s second album, First Days Of Spring. It was my album of the year on this very blog two years ago. While it was a brilliant record, it didn’t leave songwriter Charlie Fink much left to give on the writing-personal-songs front. Quite wisely, he went away and concentrated on taking his writing in a new direction, with made-up stories and observations sitting where soul-bearing candour once did. Musically there’s less folk and more 70s AM rock, with Tom Petty and Bruce Springsteen among the biggest influences. Giving credence to the thought that you’re forever bulletproof after you’ve had your heart broken for the first time, Last Night On Earth sees Fink in refreshingly buoyant mood, aiming to live life like the Bukowski tale that so inspired him. Proof, as he sings so triumphantly on the stand-out track, that life does go on.

Steve Pill

Walls - Coracle (Kompakt)

Brighter, funkier and more immersive than 2010’s equally awesome, self-titled debut, Coracle keeps the Boards of Canada/Pink Floyd’s Meddle influences front and centre. This time around there is a strong 3am feel to much of the album, tapping in to the Orbital’s slow-motion epics and early 1990s ambient house music, albeit without all of the wanky gap-year traveller connotations that comes with all of that. Oddly, I don't think I've played this out loud once though - this is definitely an album designed for the earphones; one to make your head swim.

Sunporch by walls_band

Pranam Mahavalli

Martyn – Ghost People (Brainfeeder)

An album I chanced upon completely randomly while browsing ‘What’s new’ in Spotify. I’ve spent much of second part of this year obsessing over LFO’s Frequencies. In fact, if we’d have been doing this calendar in 1991, I can reveal that Frequencies would have undoubtedly occupied my top spot. But I digress. Ghost People is unsubtle, dirty, in-yer-face dance music that aims straight for the jugular. Like Frequencies, it’s all executed with seeemingly effortless confidence and equal amounts of energy. Best dance record of the year.

Rory Dollard

James Blake - James Blake (Atlas)

Okay, he may have been handpicked by the increasingly risible BBC Sound Of... poll, but even a stopped clock tells the right time twice a day. He has some fairly vociferous critics but I’ve come back to this debut more and more as the year progressed and never found it wanting. The fractured dubstep beats are arresting rather than cynical, the vocal amazingly emotive beneath a wall of effects and the sentiments at times devastatingly simple.

Dom Farrell

Wild Beasts - Smother (Domino)

Endearing and unnerving in equal measure, Smother is an eloquent portrait of terminal relationship decline. Icy, atmospheric synths and throbbing bass provide a thrilling sonic foundation for intelligent flecks of guitar and piano, not to mention an easy resting place for singer Hayden Thorpe’s dramatic, occasionally preening, delivery. His vocal style is often a divisive issue, but when Thorpe plaintively mourns “I’ve made enough enemies” before the swelling crescendo of ‘Loop The Loop’, the urge is to place a hand in his shoulder and let him know everything will be okay.

The Musical Advent Calendar - Door Number Eighteen

2011-12-18T10:00:00.006Z

As we reach our lucky No. 7 albums of the year, SP begins name-dropping shamelessly, while Pranam is raging against the Establishment. Occupy The Musical Advent Calendar!

Ali Mason

Zoey van Goey – Propeller Versus Wings (Chemikal Underground)

If we’re giving out prizes for the most improved band of 2011, mine goes to Zoey van Goey. Not a massive amount has changed since their patchy 2009 debut. All they’ve really done is gone and got better. Much better. Broadly, their tunes can be split into two categories: the straight songs, voiced by Kim Moore, and the weird ones, fronted by Matt Brennan. Moore’s vocals skim across tender opener 'Mountain On Fire' like white horses on water, then light up the old-fashioned jazz of 'My Aviator' with rich warmth. Meanwhile, Brennan’s songwriting has matured immeasurably: 'You Told The Drunks I Knew Karate', which ought to be a novelty song, is heartfelt and genuinely funny. Odd moments grate: single 'The Cake And Eating It' underwhelms, while the lyrics at times can feel like they’re trying a little too hard, but there’s so much variety and quality here, it seems churlish to complain.

Zoey Van Goey - Mountain On Fire by Chemikal Underground

Guy Atkinson

Defeater - Empty Days and Sleepless Night (Dear Father)

A second album of crushingly heavy, yet melodic hardcore from another band pushing American punk to new levels. This is a punishing listen, in the best possible way.

Ian Parker

St Vincent - Strange Mercy (4AD)

Despite the obvious respect a resume like hers should bring, I admit I've never really given St Vincent much time until this year, dipping in, deciding I was a bit confused (happens easily), and retreating. But Strange Mercy was thrust before me and how glad I am to have finally got my feet properly wet. It is never less than a thrill. Are all the other albums this good? I'm going shopping.

Matt Collins

Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds - Noel Gallagher's High Flying Birds (Sour Mash)

Finally getting on the life after Oasis bandwagon, the tunesmith of Oasis strikes out alone. Sounds like he's been saving some of his best songs for this record. With the typical mix of acoustic and electric guitars that you'd expect, and at least two or three standout singles, Gallagher Sr has clearly taken the upper hand.

John Skilbeck

Las Kellies - Kellies (Fire Records)

You might not have woken this morning with the thought: ‘What I need in my life is a honking great party record from Buenos Aires’. But pump a little Las Kellies through headphones and you might just hit the pillow thinking that way. Kellies was a record from four energetic Argentinian girls which hit the listener with a barrage of frenetic disco-punk, playful hip-hop, and sidewinding dub. What’s not to like? Not to be confused with: Las Ketchup.

Andy Welch

Danger Mouse and Daniele Luppi – Rome (EMI)

Danger Mouse and Daniel Luppi met when the latter was drafted in help with the arrangements on the first Gnarls Barkley album. It was then they discovered their shared love of Italian film soundtracks, and started planning their tribute to the genre. It might have taken six years to come to fruition, but it was well worth the time and effort. The attention to detail in the way Rome was recorded is joyous in its geekiness. Luppi, for example, drove around Rome looking for someone that would lend him the specific Fender VI used on their beloved 60s soundtracks, while the players, now in their 80s, were reassembled to mimic the period perfection. Impressive as the production may be, it’d be nothing without the songs, and with the likes of 'Season’s Trees', 'Two Against One' and 'Black', featuring Jack White and a career-best performance from Norah Jones, they succeed on that front just as impressively.

Steve Pill

Elbow - Build A Rocket Boys! (Polydor)

After the unexpected success of The Seldom Seen Kid, Elbow looked set to suffer from difficult fifth album syndrome (and I liked the suggestion that they might do a Radiohead and this might be their “Seldom Seen Kid A”). Instead of any radical departures or full-blown pitches for mainstream success (you feel they could have re-written 'One Day Like This' twelve times over, blindfolded), the Bury boys instead simply honed every individual aspect of what made people love them in the first place. The dark-hearted lyrics got more nostalgic, Garvey’s Lancashire accent more pronounced, the glorious production values were polished up to Olympic standards, while the whole band’s modesty and respect for each song became more acute – no solos here. It was another beautiful collection of songs and, like most decisions Elbow have made, it was exactly as you would have hoped.

(I should confess a bit of bias in this pick as I did DJ for Elbow on two short tours and an album launch when I was back in Manchester. Rather proudly, you can now also measure Elbow’s success in a weird mirror of me being anywhere near them – I DJed for them at gigs on their second and third album tours, which largely bombed commercially; I was nowhere near them on albums 1, 4 and 5 , which sold millions and nominated for Mercury, Brit and Ivor Novello awards. I’m like a diseased rabbit foot, me. Mid-level indie rock bands in a need for a career nose dive, you know where to find me…)

Pranam Mahavalli

PJ Harvey – Let England Shake (Universal)

Argh, so apparently this is Samantha Cameron’s album of the year! That shouldn’t make me like it any less, but for some reason it does. With an endorsement from the PM’s wife, does that mean PJ is now a safe part of the establishment? I do miss the raggedness and dirt of her early records, but this is still at times a marvellously strange record that doesn’t deserve to be purely the preserve of the chattering classes.

Rory Dollard

Laura Marling - A Creature I Don't Know (Virgin)

Despite following her career from an early stage, I abstained in the great Laura love-in of 2010 because I found I Speak Because I Can too emotionally distant. I’ve caved in a big way this time, though. Here her precocious songwriting is on an even bigger scale, with added passion and a spritely, organic flourish that makes good on all those Joni Mitchell comparisons.

Dom Farrell

Gruff Rhys - Hotel Shampoo (Turnstile)

Wales’ answer to Jack White when it comes to side-project juggling, Gruff Rhys’ latest solo offering is a gem. Opener ‘Shark Ridden Waters’ slinks into view from beneath a haze of seaside noises and radio static, it unveils a dreamy four minutes of lo-fi pop. “I don’t know what happens to me when you come along, it’s just the way the sunlight catches your hair,” sings Gruff. Isn’t that nice? ‘Vitamin K’ and ‘Take A Sentence’ are lessons in simplicity – quite something from a man who likes to occasionally confuse his audience with Welsh language albums – and ‘At The Heart Of Love’ could easily sit on the Super Furries’ career-high Rings Around The World. A sun-kissed record about love that could blister into a horrible burn at any minute.

Gruff Rhys - Shark Ridden Waters by CulturedeluxeDotCom

The Musical Advent Calendar - Door Number Seventeen

2011-12-17T10:00:00.005Z

Today we find Dollard tackling an elephant and Dom preparing to ask for a hand in marriage.

Ali Mason

Fleet Foxes – Helplessness Blues (Bella Union)

Hats off to Fleet Foxes – this is exactly what a second album should be: progression without losing what was so good about the debut. Less reliant on harmony and less opaque lyrically, Helplessness Blues pushes the hazy Americana folk sounds of their eponymous first release gently into new territory while still feeling as comfortably familiar as this sofa which I’m sitting on right now. Not much more to say really: it’s Fleet Foxes.

Guy Atkinson

Spraynard - Funtitled (Asian Man)

This just makes me want to give it all up and form a band. Three disgustingly young chaps from Pennsylvania bash out life-affirming punk tunes that are indebted to early Blink 182 and The Get Up Kids, what's not to like?

Ian Parker

Other Lives – Tamer Animals (Play It Again Sam)

As if the grand, sweeping soundscapes Other Lives create were not enough to get me hook, line and sinker, they apparently have a very simple moto in the band: "What would Neil Young do?" It's the only question any of us need ask of ourselves to live a better life.

Matt Collins

Bon Iver - Bon Iver (4AD)

There was always a danger that the follow up to a seminal broken-hearted folk album would go soft on us. Well, it sort of did, but in that kind of hope at the end of melancholy way. Bon Iver is in fact a step above For Emma, Forever Ago, weaving electric guitars and walls of noise in epic, intricate melodies and that unmistakable falsetto. Simply beautiful.

John Skilbeck

Bill Wells & Aidan Moffat - Everything's Getting Older (Chemikal Underground)

In the hinterland between the elegant streets of Edinburgh and the grime of Glasgow’s East End you’ll find Falkirk, home to Wells the jazz man and Moffat the grinch. It is the location where for these veterans of central Scotland’s musical dark arts, yes indeed Everything’s Getting Older. Murkier. Sleazy. Filthier of mind and manner. Moffat decorates the ornate strings and piano of Wells with lashings of unsettling, menacing mutterings. The gnarly prose Moffat spews forth is worthy of that other master of Central Belt misery, Irvine Welsh, and while it was easy to admire and enjoy the fruits of this collaboration from afar, soaking up the portrayal of a prosaic 21st century life in the Forth Valley, you’d not want to walk a mile in Moffat’s shoes.

Andy Welch

Washed Out – Within And Without (Weird World)

Chillwave is a pretty nasty word, even if I fell for the post-shoegaze genre hook, line and sinker. Washed Out – or Ernest Greene – rises above the usual crowd, though, thanks to his remembering to write songs to go with the blissful sounds. For music created in a bedroom, there’s a wide-open scale and warmth to the album so lacking in so much chillwave, resulting in an album that you don’t so much listen to, as get absorbed by.

Steve Pill

Wye Oak - Civilian (City Slang)

You’ve gotta love a girl who swigs whisky from the bottle on stage, almost as much as a guy who plays keyboards and bass while he drums. Like The Black Keys and The White Stripes before them, Baltimore pairing Jenn Wasner and Andy Stack make enough noise to shame an orchestra (when was the last time you heard a duo who actually just sounded like two people playing music and didn’t try to multi-task?!). Theirs is a blend of grunge-y dirges, lo-fi girl pop and, in 'Civilian', one of the songs of the year – a keening stomp that explodes into a fidgeting burst of Neil Young guitar epic-ness, while still clocking in under the four minute mark.

Civilian by Wye Oak

Pranam Mahavalli

St Vincent – Strange Mercy (4AD)

Like The Dirty Projectors, St Vincent has a way of making music that, at first, sounds completely abstract to me before eventually making perfect sense. Strange Mercy is filled with great hooks, memorable melodies and huge choruses; it’s just they don’t always come where you’d expect them. The songs are huge, occasionally melodramatic, and feature the kind of six-string pyrotechnics that make want to practice more guitar.

Rory Dollard

Lanterns On the Lake - Gracious Tide Take Me Home (Bella Union)

Okay, as there’s a sizeable elephant in the room I suppose we best confront it. ‘Folktronica’. It’s a load of old ballbags, isn’t it? It’s for wetwipe songwriters with new laptops and old ideas. It’s for Get Cape, Wear Cape Fly. Yet Lanterns On the Lake are the exception to the rule – they’re the kind-hearted Tory, the shit-kicking Brazilian striker. This is classic British songwriting, with attitude and delicacy at every turn and some measured contemporary touches.

Dom Farrell

Laura Marling - A Creature I Don't Know (Virgin)

Ragged Glories panellist picks Laura Marling. Thinks her songwriting is astonishing, her lyrics beguiling, her talent astounding. Wants to marry her a little bit. Standard.

The Musical Advent Calendar - Door Number Sixteen

2011-12-16T10:00:00.009Z

When he starts talking about "queercore electro punks" you know Skillers is back in his element. Unlike Wayne Rooney in the MENSA test SP has entered him for.

Ali Mason

Dark Dark Dark – Wild Go (Supply & Demand)

When Nona Marie Invie is singing, all is right with the world. Or at least, all is wrong with the world, but it makes perfect sense. Because for the majority of Wild Go, Dark Dark Dark do exactly what their name suggests: they give you beautiful, doleful chamber pop (a term which, I’m pretty sure, I heard them claim to have invented) to wallow in. At its best, like 'Something For Myself', 'Robert' or 'Bright Bright Bright', which isn’t on the album but is on a five-track EP which is included with this release, it’s heart-stoppingly good. If you can just skip past the one misguided track on which Invie hands over lead vocal duties, you’re in for half an hour of exquisite sorrow.

Guy Atkinson

Dave Hause - Resolutions (Paper + Plastick)

With only two albums under their belt The Loved Ones have already proven they deserve a place at the top table of punk rock, and diminutive frontman Dave Hause proves he can more than cut it as a solo performer with this collection of stirring semi-acoustic anthems.

Ian Parker

Los Campesinos! - Hello Sadness (Wichita)

Kind of like yesterday's entry, Yuck, Los Campesinos! demands its place in my top 10 on sheer number of times I've listened to it - not bad going for an album released in November. But damn, this stuff is addictive. On their latest album the band seem to have dispensed with the previously customary stylistic change and gone for consistency - and who can complain when the songs are this catchy and well-executed?

By Your Hand - Los Campesinos! from Los Campesinos! on Vimeo.

Matt Collins

This Is The Kit - Where It Lives (Dreamboat)

Homespun folk of the very highest order, Paris-dwelling This is the Kit feature the haunting vocals of Kate Stables over a sparse, ever shifting bedrock of battered acoustic guitars, charity shop banjos and childhood electric guitars. Excellent songwriting, incredibly atmospheric.

John Skilbeck

Hunx & His Punx - Too Young To Be In Love (Hardly Art)

It shouldn’t spoil the treat, more make you aware of it, to point out the influence of those wonderful Ronettes on my number nine pick. After years of fronting queercore electro punks Gravy Train!!!!, Seth Bogart indulged his inner girl-group diva in a chorus line on 'Too Young To Be In Love'. Bogart’s nasal vocals – sometimes spoken, mostly sung - are sugar-treated by his Hunkettes to create textures which would have Phil Spector swooning from behind his prison walls of sound.

Andy Welch

Yuck – Yuck (Mercury)

Formed from the ashes of Cajun Dance Party, Yuck sounding how they do was a surprise to most when they released their debut in February. Owing more than a nod to Dinosaur Jr, Buffalo Tom and Sonic Youth, there’s nothing new about the sound here, but that’s not really the point. Melody, it seems, is the real driving force behind this debut. For a record so fuzzy sounding, powered by beds of heavily distorted guitars, Yuck is impossibly pretty in places, and whether you think it’s derivative or not, it’s impossible to deny the quality of the songs.

Steve Pill

Tim Hecker - Ravedeath, 1972 (Kranky)

An album called Ravedeath, 1972might sound like some lost proto-punk record but nothing could be further from the truth. Recorded live on a pump organ in an Icelandic church, Hecker then built on this with layers of static, feedback and Eno-esque electronic noise. The results are slower than Wayne Rooney taking a MENSA test and twice as scary.

Pranam Mahavalli

The Horrors – Skying (XL)

It was The Horrors’ previous record, Primary Colours, that first got me excited about them. So the change in direction marked by this - dark-krautrock-synth-grunge replaced by baggy psychedelia – has left me slightly cold. But Skying still has its highs, with 'Moving Further Away' and 'Still Life' in particular matching the majestic sweep of Primary Colours’ 'Sea Within a Sea'.

Rory Dollard

Tom Waits - Bad As Me (Anti)

When Tom Waits called his 2006 compilation Brawlers, Bawlers and Bastards he summed up his unique appeal in a way fans and journalists had been striving to articulate for years. There’s a handful of ‘bawler’ style ballads here, one or two of the indescribable ‘bastards’ but it’s the brawlers that define Bad As Me. Backed by Marc Ribot and Keith Richards on guitar, Waits delivers some big, brash, hoary old rockers with more piss and vinegar than the combined output of every UK indie band this year.
*PS even if you don’t like the music, please spare a minute for the classic Waits promo link.

Dom Farrell

Josh T Pearson - Last of the Country Gentlemen (Mute)

It took me a good while to get along with Josh T Pearson. I mean really, come on, is anyone really that miserable? Have a word with yourself, fella. However, a few months ago I had an epiphany. The combination of doing about my 20th job application in 18 months and having David Cameron’s Tory conference speech on in the background as the record played created the combined feeling of anger, despair, loathing and anguish that poor old Mr Pearson seems to be getting at. Each song has more layers than a hefty onion. The closer it gets to the core, the more likely it is to make your eyes water.

The Musical Advent Calendar - Door Number Fifteen

2011-12-15T10:00:00.009Z

It's a big day, the day when the Musical Advent Calendar makes that symbolic step into our top 10 albums of the year. You might think this would call for focus, but instead Ali's getting himself lost in time and SP is running for a plane, leaving his scattered notes across the terminal floor as he goes.

Ali Mason

Shimmering Stars – Violent Hearts (Almost Musique)

It’s the 1950s again! Or is it the 60s? Or the 80s? It’s hard to tell. Violent Hearts is unapologetically moored to the past – not any specific past, just definitely not now. It’s good old-fashioned rock ‘n’ roll for shoegazers, or doo-wop for garage rockers, or grunge for surf popsters. And it’s bloody good fun. Encapsulating the whole contradictory bundle is 'I’m Gonna Try', which sounds like a squeaky clean rock ‘n’ roll band sending sweet harmonies echoing round a hall at a high school prom. That is until you notice frontman Rory McClure is singing: “Walking down the street and I want to kill everyone I meet” - and suddenly the party doesn’t seem so jolly any more. It’s the bubbling tension that lifts Shimmering Stars to a higher level than many of their contemporaries, though, like the thrill of a crowd that might turn nasty at any moment.

Shimmering Stars - I'm Gonna Try from Salazar on Vimeo.

Guy Atkinson

Into It. Over It - Proper (No Sleep Records)

Everything the obscenely prolific Evan Weiss touches seems to turn to gold at the moment and he marked another eventful year with this collection of Death Cab inspired tunes.

Into it. Over it. - "P R O P E R" from Dorian Park on Vimeo.

Ian Parker

Yuck - Yuck (Mercury)

Yuck, much like their name might suggest, don’t go in for anything too fancy. They rip off Dinosaur Jr, Sonic Youth et al and don’t even bother to pretend otherwise. But damn they write a good tune, and this album proved entirely addictive for me for most of the first half of the year, and a good part of the second.

Yuck - Get Away from Yuck on Vimeo.

Matt Collins

The Decemberists - The King Is Dead (Rough Trade)

The one indie band crying out to have a musical made about them. The Decemberists have made the concept album their own, and The King Is Dead smooths out some of the weird edges the Band like to boast, with a fine blend of protest rock taking its place.

John Skilbeck

Ponytail - Do Whatever You Want All The Time (We Are Free)

Baltimore’s Ponytail have split up twice in the past 18 months. Which, considering they have a habit of making great records, is rather a shame. This year they reformed, released an amazing record, and split, before I had the faintest idea they were reunited. While I slept, Dustin Wong and Ken Seen were back lacing together feral guitar riffs, Jeremy Hyman was trying to keep pace with frantic drum rhythms, and Molly Siegel was daubing scattergun vocal brushstrokes – they’re hardly lyrics - over the top. Siegel, a coiled spring of a performer, now uses the name Willy. If a second split of the ranks is terminal for Ponytail, this was some way to bow out.

Andy Welch

Real Estate – Days (Domino)

I’d heard good things about Real Estate and when I got the album I put it on, and four hours later I realised I’d had it on repeat for the whole time. Weeks passed by and I was still listening to Days to the exclusion of almost everything else. There’s an addictive quality to the album, clearly, which perhaps comes from the hazy nostalgia it conjures up so brilliantly with warm, gentle summery surf pop. It’s most definitely a record to get lost in.

Steve Pill

WU LYF – Go Tell Fire on the Mountain (LYF Recordings)

I'm writing this batch of reviews in Heathrow Terminal 3 on my phone, waiting for a flight to Stockholm. Given that I've just had the last call, it leaves me with no time to do WU LYF justice - something of a relief really as this is unclassifiable madness on a deep and dark scale. Play it loud.

Pranam Mahavalli

Gillian Welch – The Harrow and the Harvest (Warner)

Gillian kept us waiting a full eight years for this. I’m not prepared to say whether it was worth the wait yet, but she and guitar player Dave Rawlings will always have a place in my heart, as their album Time (The Revelator) first really introduced me to folk/acoustic music. Nice cameo from a crow in 'The Way It Will Be' too. I love crows.

Rory Dollard

CANT - Dreams Come True (Warp)

It’s a great feeling when a genuine impulse buy pays off big and in terms of gambles, this one paid off much more handsomely than my £25 on Mischa B to win the X Factor. The musical landscape is broadly latter-day Radiohead – densely packed, melodic and industrial in equal measures and never afraid to play hard to get – but I’d take this over King Of Limbs.

Dom Farrell

I Break Horses - Hearts (Bella Union)

As opening gambits go, ‘Winter Beats’ – the first track on Hearts – is pretty special. From the first seconds of whirling synth, you know something is going to happen. Then comes the pulsing bass drum, Cocteau Twins vocals, My Bloody Valentine feedback, razor-sharp snare and then.….. WALLOP. The track is hurtling downhill and you’re utterly enveloped. The grandeur rarely lets up thereafter – the sort of widescreen introspection that cool people from Sweden seem to do better than anyone.

The Musical Advent Calendar - Door Number Fourteen

2011-12-14T10:00:00.011Z

The main question as door 14 slides open is this: which albums just missed out on a spot in our top 10s?

Ali Mason

Emmy the Great – Virtue (Close Harbour)

To the list of artists who released albums in 2011 I liked but not as much as their last album, add Emmy The Great. It took me an implausibly long time to get into Virtue, and I still think it’s problematic in parts, but Emmy is among the best lyricists in the business right now and ultimately that shines through. It’s great to hear an artist exploring ideas and throwing out extraordinary lines at every turn, even if musically it doesn’t always match up to her debut First Love. My personal favourite from 'Paper Forest': “It's like the way I have to write down almost everything I see so that the record does obscure the thing the record used to be.” Beat that, Beady Eye.

Emmy The Great - Dinosaur Sex by Freeman PR

Guy Atkinson

Thrice - Major/Minor (Vagrant)

For ages I was put off Thrice's eighth album because he keeps harping on about God, but its meaty, tuneful charms were just too good to resist and led me to burn my copy of The God Delusion.

Ian Parker

BOBBY - Bobby (Partisan)

Those that know me reasonably well will probably remember that from the first moment I laid ears on 'Sore Spores', I developed an instant obsession with BOBBY. It’s a stunning track, combining Molly Sarle’s angelic vocals with a blissful, mesmeric tune that sounds magical. Quite frankly, it’s still the most beautiful things I’ve heard all year. The good news was that, when it followed, the rest of the album did nothing to disappoint. ‘Sore Spores’ is still the track that stands out, the one that even after several dozen plays still bowls you over time and again with its brilliant ease. But BOBBY are no one-hit wonders, creating a bewitching album full of undulating rhythms that pull you in different directions even as they lull you into a kind of hynosis.

Matt Collins

The Uglysuit - Awwww Shucks (Quarterstick Records)

I loved The Uglysuit's first album more than life itself. It's fair to say the follow up doesn't quite hit those heights, but the wash of dreamy harmonies and indie rock opera-lite means I love it more than a fair bit of life itself.

John Skilbeck

St Vincent - Strange Mercy (4AD)

Annie Clark has been making music as St Vincent since bolting the crammed Polyphonic Spree stable in 2006, and Strange Mercy followed the well-received Marry Me and Actor, which I’d initially missed. Gift-wrapped in ribbons of mini-Moog but still bearing flourishes of fuzzed-up guitar and shimmering keys, it told what could be interpreted as dark tales. “I’ve had good times with some bad guys” she swooned on the confessional stand-out 'Cheerleader'.

Andy Welch

Sarabeth Tucek – Get Well Soon (Sonic Cathedral)

An album about the death of artist’s parent shouldn’t really make for such a captivating listen. While ‘enjoy’ might not be the right word to use about Get Well Soon, there’s real beauty in the melancholy, making it one of the most haunting albums I’ve heard in a long time. 'Wooden', as well, with its massive nod to 'Down By The River', is the greatest Neil Young song Shakey never wrote.

Steve Pill

Tom Waits – Bad As Me (Anti)

Thanks to a couple of myth enhancing books and cult film cameos, Tom Waits stock seems to have risen to insane levels in recent years, despite him not having actually released an entirely great album since 1998's Mule Variations. Thirteen years on and Bad As Me finally rectifies that with an album that feels like a distilled version of everything he has attempted over the last 40 years. The ballads break your heart like prime 1970s Waits, Marc Ribot and Keith Richards add experimental Rain Dogs-esque guitar lines to the darker blues, while the experimental sound effects of recent albums bubble under the surface still. More importantly, he sounds like he was having a ball.

Pranam Mahavalli

Feist - Metals (Polydor)

This record sounds better each time I hear it. I’m a big fan of Feist’s guitar-playing, which ranges from smooth like her laid-back vocal delivery, to deliciously gnarled and ragged. It’s a record that’s slightly more abstract and left-of-centre than previous efforts, but all the more rewarding for it.

How Come You Never Go There by Feist

Rory Dollard

Bill Callahan - Apocalypse (Drag City)

Ahhh Smoggy Bill, you've done it again you old goat. In his third outing under his own name, he makes it a hat-trick of great records following Woke On a Whaleheart and Sometimes I Wish I Was An Eagle. The simplicity is the key, his easygoing guitar and deep, force-of-nature voice sounding at once playful and commanding. The buzz-saw solo on 'America' and the Van Morrison-esque flutes are new tricks, though.

Dom Farrell

Starfucker - Reptilians (Polyvinyl)

It is unlikely you’ll hear a cheerier meditation on death than Starfucker’s Reptilians. Within the first five tracks we’re treated to ‘Bury Us Alive’ and ‘Death as a Fetish’ and it’s hard not to want to dance to both of them. The psych-electro of Reptilians is admittedly of the well-trodden post-Oracular Spectacular lineage, but is easily strong enough and – against all odds given the subject matter – euphoric enough to stand on its own two feet.

Starfucker - Julius by isaidahip

The Musical Advent Calendar - Door Number Thirteen

2011-12-13T10:00:00.010Z

Door number thirteen reveals not only our No. 12 albums of the year but dazzling new analysis of the prog genre from Pranam.

Ali Mason

Jonny Kearney and Lucy Farrell – Kite (Rabble Rouser)

Well, I’m supposed to be the twee, folky one, so here is my tweest, folkiest offering. Fans of my review of my number two choice in 2009 will no doubt remember I love a low-key opening, so I was won over from the first time I heard 'There’s A Disease' with its hazy harmonies, lazy saxophone and laidback tempo. The folk veers towards the trad at times and the influence of The Unthanks, who were involved in the production, is felt strongly in tracks like 'Winter Got Lost', 'Down In Adairsville' and 'Peggy Gordon'. It’s when Kearney and Farrell go twee though that they’re most loveable – particularly the impossibly sweet 'Green Leaved Trees'.

Kearney & Lucy Farrell - Green Leaved Trees from fotomuse on Vimeo.

Guy Atkinson

Title Fight - Shed (Sideonedummy)

It's hardly breaking new ground (like most bands on my list they pretty much rip off Hot Water Music) but who cares when the tunes are so, well, tuneful.

Ian Parker

Laura Marling – A Creature I Don’t Know (Virgin)

With her third album, Laura Marling shows us a third different side. If her debut Alas, I Cannot Swim carried the influence of backing band Noah & The Whale, and I Speak Because I Can was dominated by Mumford & Sons' stylings, A Creature I Don't Know might finally be showing us Marling's own distinct sound. If it is, great. If it's not, even better, because there's genuine excitement in seeing an artist so young already master so many different sounds. There's talk now that Marling might 'go punk' on an upcoming project. We'd have to back her to nail that too.

Matt Collins

Beirut - The Rip Tide (Pompei)

Beirut had to go pop eventually - they have access to too many trumpets not to. This is a wonderfully accessible simple album that replaces the trademark wailing with James Yuill-inspired gypsy folkytronica.

John Skilbeck

Vivian Girls - Share The Joy (Polyvinyl)

Their debut featured six tracks clocking in at less than two minutes, and its follow-up had eight below three minutes, so for Vivian Girls to launch into their third album with a six-and-a-half-minute slow-burning groove was either audacious or reckless. Audacious won out, because while opening track 'The Other Girls' was a dreamy sprawl, it was only a hint of what to expect on an LP which showed a playful, more assured new side to the Brooklyn three-piece. Unfairly written off as C86 fetishists, on Share The Joy they showed occasional psychedelic leanings and much affection for sugary party pop. And that opener was a red herring anyway; the next six tracks all came in under the three-minute mark. Reassuringly brief; a joy. As ever.

Andy Welch

Emmy The Great – Virtue (Close Harbour)

Emmy The Great’s first album was a wonderful demonstration of lo-fi folk. Instruments were recorded by mics wrapped in cotton wool to ramp up the ramshackle. For Virtue, Emmy discarded her homespun, hand-stitched aesthetic for an altogether more sophisticated sheen. And it suits her. Influenced as much by classic mythology and personal heartbreak as much as trivial pop culture, it’s an eclectic album, musically too, and never less than brilliant.

Steve Pill

Toro Y Moi - Underneath the Pine (Carpark)

After the bass rumbles and dark electro of debut Causers of This, Underneath the Pine was a real surprise - a kitsch confection that channelled great French pop from almost every era (Gainsbourg, Air, that band from the early noughties I can't remember the name of) and delivered it with a funky, Beck-like shuffle. 'Still Sound' is a harmony-laden three minute gem; long enough to hook you, short enough to demand repeat listening.

Toro Y Moi - "Still Sound" by Carpark Records

Pranam Mahavalli

Justice – Audio, Video, Disco (Because)

Prog rock, with its penchant for flute solos, wonky time signatures and occasional bouts of yodelling has typically appealed to a certain kind of Tolkein-reading male. Girls probably don’t like it. But on this album, two impossibly cool French dudes are bringing the sexy back to prog. There’s no yodelling, but there are loads of widdly guitar solos and some suitably pompous lyrics. The vid below is the most un-proggy track from their album, but gives an approximate flavour of what to expect.

Rory Dollard

Beirut - The Rip Tide (Pompei)

At the start of the year I thought Beirut were boring beyond words. Then I remembered some words. Words like dreary, overblown and hollow. I got hold of The Rip Tide for review purposes and was probably intending to eviscerate it like a Rambo extra. Imagine my disappointment when it turned out to be a delicately rendered set full of tenderness, understated brass and romanticism. In terms of the band's previous output this was as unexpected as Michael Bay directing a kitchen sink drama.

Dom Farrell

The Low Anthem - Smart Flesh (Bella Union)

Many bands respond to their breakthrough album by disembarking to a swish, high-end studio and throwing a sonic kitchen sink at the follow-up. On the back of 2009’s tour de force Oh My God, Charlie Darwin, the Low Anthem rocked up in an abandoned pasta factory and recorded Smart Flesh. The mid-album raucous stompers of Oh My God…. are conspicuous by their absence here. ‘Boeing 747’ and ‘Hey, All You Hippies!’ do ramp up the volume with their ‘Basement Tapes’ vibe, but the Low Anthem largely provide a lesson in understatement. When the eloquent storytelling is allowed to breathe, as mournful accordion and banjo bounce off the old tagliatelle machine, heartstrings are being plucked all over the place.

The Low Anthem - Smart Flesh - Burn by The Low Anthem

The Musical Advent Calendar - Door Number Twelve

2011-12-12T10:00:00.009Z

Look away, people. Guy is struggling to keep his clothes on. We're just about half way - door number 12 revealing our No. 13 albums of the year.

Ali Mason

Hannah Peel – Broken Wave (Static Caravan)

That Hannah Peel shies away from the obvious should not be a surprise from an artist who announced herself with an EP of 80s pop songs played on her music box. Here the music box takes a back seat for the majority of the album as Peel shows of the multi-instrumentalist skills which have made her such a valuable addition to The Unthanks’ touring party. Another friend of Peel’s is Laura Groves, and 'Solitude', a beautifully sparse short story of a song, could sit very happily on Blue Roses’ debut album. Like her friend, Peel eschews simple song structures for tunes that meander with simple grace. Elsehwere, as in the off-kilter 'Don’t Kiss The Broken One', percussion and strings come to the fore, while the jaunty honky-tonk piano of contrasts perfectly with the sadness of the lyrics and has a touch of musical theatre about it.

The Almond Tree - Hannah Peel by Bejon Mustard

Guy Atkinson

Red City Radio - The Dangers of Standing Still (Ginner)

Okay, so they sound exactly like Hot Water Music but this is honest, melodic punk rock which makes me want to take my clothes off and jump around with hundreds of bearded men.

Ian Parker

Gillian Welch - The Harrow & The Harvest (Warner)

Every Gillian Welch album is a treasure, but maybe more so when you've waited eight years for one to arrive. Sure, she and long-time collaborator Dave Rawlings switched roles as she provided the support on 2009's A Friend of A Friend, but this is the first Gillian Welch album proper since 2003's Soul Journey, and the best since the incomparable Time (The Revelator). Each song is beautifully crafted, quenching the considerable thirst of her fans for new material. Just don't leave it til 2019 for the follow up.

Matt Collins

Good Lovelies - Let the Rain Fall (ADA Global)

I came across these three super harmonisers live. Country tinged folk pop usually relies on those tight three part vocal lines alone - The Good Lovelies drop them on a foundation of fantastically chirpy driving tunes.

John Skilbeck

Dum Dum Girls - Always In Dreams (Sub Pop)

Last year’s debut album, I Will Be, was a lo-fi blast out of California, a welter of scratchy, catchy pop songs. The vampish Dum Dum Girls had the look, but together with their contemporaries they had a hard time proving to cynics they also had the depth. Always In Dreams unmistakably shows they have plenty. The breakthrough year had ended in sorrow for the band’s driving force Dee Dee with the death of her mother, and inevitably the mourning process fed into the writing of album number two. Dee Dee sings, in bringing a lacquered, quite lovely record to an end: “I wish it wasn’t true, but there’s nothing I can do except hold your hand … until the very end.” And I particularly like that my iTunes plays Dusty’s I Only Want To Be With You after that.

Andy Welch

The Horrors – Skying (XL)

Like most people, I thought The Horrors were a bit of a joke when they released their first album. Worse still, a joke without a punchline. Their second album Primary Colours was a startling leap on from their amateurish debut, but with Skying they’ve released their masterpiece. Their influences are wide-ranging and eclectic – The Chameleons and John Hughes’ film soundtracks loom large – but like all great albums, you don’t have to know where Skying is coming from to love it. And songs as epic and euphoric as 'I Can See Through You' and 'Still Life', there is indeed plenty to love.

Steve Pill

The War On Drugs - Slave Ambient (Secretly Canadian)

Okay, so this is a bit of a cheat, seen as I nominated The War On Drugs' eight track EP last year, which contained this very same song. But then, if I’m still playing it a year later it counts for something, no!? Like I think I said last year, this is a stoned collision between almost every landmark record made in 1997 (Time Out of Mind, Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating In Space, Urban Hymns) and no worse for it.

Pranam Mahavalli

Deerhoof – Deerhoof vs Evil (ATP Recordings)

How much do I love Deerhoof? More than Marmite, Cheddar and Onion McCoys and Minstrels, but not as much as Peanut M&Ms. Okay that’s a ridiculous comparison, but weighing up a Deerhoof album against other records is, for me, similarly futile because my love for them is so one-sided. So rather than discuss this album, let’s watch them and their scene-stealing drummer Greg Saunier in action where they work best, before enjoying a track from their new record below.

Rory Dollard

Anna Calvi - Anna Calvi (Domino)

Thirteen. Unlucky for some. Unlucky for Anna Calvi in this instance because this an album that I've had a lot of love for this year. Pitting her against PJ Harvey in the Mercury Music Prize was always going to be a tough one...I mean they weren't going to give the trademarked 'new PJ Harvey' the award over the actual PJ Harvey now were they? But there are other big touchstones on show here - the passive aggression of Nick Cave, the meandering guitar lines and vocal chasers a la Jeff Buckley. Signature sounds rarely come as fully realised as this.

Dom Farrell

Wye Oak - Civilian (City Slang)

Civilian, the third LP by Baltimore noise-folk duo Wye Oak, never completely settles and this is very much to its credit. Jenn Wasner’s desire to slash jagged guitar across her lilting vocals is always wonderfully timed, while hissing and crashing cymbals intermittently turn up to muddy the waters. The shades of grey in between are where the record really hits home and from the visceral intensity of ‘Holy Holy’ to the spiralling wonder of its title track, Civilian is a captivating listen.

Wye Oak - Holy Holy by cityslang

The Musical Advent Calendar - Door Number Eleven

2011-12-11T10:00:00.008Z

Today Ali puts words in Dollard's mouth (as if there's room for many more), Skillers reveals his country side, and Mr Welch falls for a diva.

Ali Mason

Jesca Hoop – Snowglobe (Republic of Music)

One day Jesca Hoop is going to make an album which Rory will describe as a “game changer”. She has such a ridiculous amount going for her – an easy musicality, disparate influences, a killer voice, an ability to veer away from conventional structures. She also has a rare willingness to subtly change her vocal style from the breathy maturity of 'City Bird', a song of urban unease, to playful and almost childlike at times. This mini-album is a big step forward from 2009’s Hunting My Dress, so much so that it’s difficult to know whether to be frustrated at her for not expanding Snowglobe into a full-length album or commend her for knowing when to stop.

Guy Atkinson

La Dispute - Wildlife (No Sleep Records)

Although part of 'The Wave' scene which has taken US punk by storm over the past 18 months, La Dispute are out there on their own in terms of individuality. Brutal, almost spoken word lyrics, are set to a backdrop of inventive hardcore music.

Ian Parker

WATERS - Out In The Light (City Slang)

After completing a messy divorce from Port O’Brien, Van Pierszalowski took himself off to Norway, where he wrote the bulk of the album for his new project WATERS. It is the sound of a man released, of pent up frustrations let go. The sound of Port O’Brien is there, but the intensity level is cranked up, and so are the guitars. The influence of Neil Young – never one to let personal relationships and bands get in the way of his muse – is all over this, never more so than on the stand-out ‘O Holy Break of Day’, where Pierszalowski seems to be trying to bridge the gap between two of the great man’s masterpieces, marrying the desolation of On The Beach with the guitars-distorted-to-the-point-of-broken noise of Rust Never Sleeps.

WATERS - O Holy Break Of Day by cityslang

Matt Collins

The Low Anthem - Smart Flesh (Bella Union)

The Low Anthem are nothing less than a solidly dependable band delivering solidly dependable, good quality songwriting. Smart Flesh is far more accessible than the Radiohead side project that its name suggests.

John Skilbeck

Laura Cantrell - Kitty Wells Dresses (Diesel Only)

The loveliest album I heard all year, as Laura Cantrell affectionately tackled the songs of her fellow Nashville native Kitty Wells, country queen of the 1950s and 1960. Apart from the title track, a Cantrell collaboration with Amy Allison, the album is a covers project, carefully refreshing Wells’ best-loved hits for a new audience. Wells sung of heartbreak, a case in point being 'I Gave My Wedding Dress Away', a half-spoken, half-wept lament, and her biggest hit, the vengeful 'It Wasn’t God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels'. Such recordings could have been in no safer hands with this project. Kitty Wells, meanwhile, turned 92 this year.

Andy Welch

Lykke Li – Wounded Rhymes (Atlantic)

Lykke Li is a good old-fashioned musician; contrary, difficult in interviews, and prone to the odd bout of diva-ish behavior. When she makes music as good as 'Rich Kid Blues', one of my singles of the year, it really doesn’t matter. Her fiery personality comes over on every song of Wounded Rhymes; there’s the overt sexuality of 'Get Some', for example, and Spector-esque high melodrama on 'Sadness Is A Blessing'. Lykke sounds like her heart’s been shattered, but sings as if she’s enjoying it, and that’s what makes Wounded Rhymes such a fascinating, listen.

Steve Pill

Neon Indian - Era Extraña (Co-Operative Music)

In the first week this album went on sale, Rough Trade were offering a £29 set comprising Era Extraña on vinyl with the added bonus of a crazy handheld sequencer that looked like it was made in your Dad's shed. The pulsing rhythms it emitted were all over this fantastic lo-fi day-glo pop record that survives almost entirely on bass and treble, no mid range to speak of. Well worth a listen but avoid seeing them live - the bad hipster dancing and Morrissey impressions are likely to sully your enjoyment of an album that might have been top 10 otherwise.

Neon Indian + Arcade Blues by Soulson25 on Mixcloud

Pranam Mahavalli

Beirut – The Rip Tide (Pompei)

It’s winter, but let’s re-re-rewind for a second and head back to the summer. Beirut have a canny way with affecting melodies that I find irresistible. This album marked a slightly worrying move towards MOR territory for me, but if it brings them more fans, and more reasons to play the UK, then I for one shall not be complaining.

Rory Dollard

Typhoon - A New Kind of House (Tender Loving Empire)

I've no recollection of how I came across this EP, but I do recall it arriving complete with a handwritten thank you note from the band. A nice touch that, and probably enough to earn it a no.24 pick even if it was a load of old carp. Fortunately, it's not. The lead track, included below, is a killer: a soaring chorus, rising horns and cracking lyrics. Bright Eyes are no more....long live the new Bright Eyes?

Dom Farrell

Wild Flag - Wild Flag (Wichita)

Guitar music in 2011 – largely grim, grim scenes. In an often male-biased genre an all-female super group have had to come along and show everyone how it’s done. Armed with a truckload of attitude, killer tunes and distortion pedals set to “destroy”, it is hard not to be bowled over by Wild Flag. Sure it’s not reinventing the wheel, but it leaves it spinning at a 100mph.

Wild Flag - Short Version by fromgotowhoa.com

The Musical Advent Calendar - Door Number Ten

2011-12-10T10:00:00.008Z

Door number 10 means one thing - there's two weeks left to finish your Christmas shopping. Oh, okay, two things - it's also time for our No. 15 albums of the year.

Ali Mason

The Decemberists – The King Is Dead (Rough Trade)

Famous for their complex and challenging concept albums, The Decemberists play things uncharacteristically simple this time around. While some bemoan a lack of ambition, others just enjoy a blast of raucous country folk. The album, which flits from stompalongs like 'Rox In The Box' to countrified ballads like 'January Hymn' with admirable ease, would have been higher that 15th but for 'This Is Why We Fight', an abomination which, unforgivably, sounds like Newton Faulkner.

The Decemberists - Rox In The Box by Vicente P.S.

Guy Atkinson

Joyce Manor - Joyce Manor (6131 Records)

Harnessing the spirit of scene legends Jawbreaker, this 18-minute debut from Joyce Manor is a carefree, joyful and ramshackle take on punk rock.

Ian Parker

Fleet Foxes - Helplessness Blues (Bella Union)

After wowing us with the timeless beauty of their debut album three years ago, the Fleet Foxes returned with a follow-up that barely strays from the wonderful formula they had already perfected. They’ve tweaked the sound just a little, Robin Morton having the confidence to turn up his own vocal and take just a small step away from the harmonies that power their sound, but what wasn’t broken wasn’t fixed. Helplessness Blues lacks a killer hook on the scale of ‘White Winter Hymnal’ but it has the sound of a band with all the potential in the world spreading their wings.

Matt Collins

The Spokes - Everyone I Ever Met (Ninja Tune)

In the same vein as Dark Dark Dark, the Spokes have a big piano and aren’t afraid to use it. Added to shoegazey vocals over guitars of sadness and hope, the mix is a beautiful, string- and harmony-drenched clamour.

John Skilbeck

The Dirtbombs - Party Store (In The Red)

Ah, The Dirtbombs, garage-soul rockers par excellence, fronted by Detroit scene lifer Mick Collins, the towering subject of quasi-fanboy adulation from Jack White and.... and hitherto closet techno-house buffs. Party Store began as a small-scale project but soon mushroomed into an album-length tribute to the colossal contribution the band’s home city has made to the spectrum of dance music. All covers, the centrepiece is the 22-minute freak-out, 'Bug In The Bass Bin' (originally, in 1992, released by Innerhouse Orchestra); late 1980s chart-watchers will remember Inner City’s 'Good Life' and enjoy its faithful revamp. Lesser bands would have tackled such a challenge with tongue in cheek, but Collins and his band went for it full-heartedly and the result was nothing short of triumphant.

Andy Welch

Slow Club – Paradise (Moshi Moshi)

Slow Club’s debut Yeah So was a good album. Exuberant, idiosyncratic and, most importantly, lots of fun. Charles Watson and Rebecca Taylor seemed like a duo with one thing on their mind. On their second album, they left behind the lusting and started focusing on altogether darker matters, namely death, and, more precisely, a fear of it. As we as the moremature themes, Slow Club advanced their arrangements too, 'Never Look Back' and 'You, Earth Or Ash' proving that emphatically. For all the delicacy, 'Where I’m Waking' and 'Beginners' show they didn’t forget how to cause a thunderous riot, either.

Steve Pill

Mogwai - Hardcore Will Never Die, But You Will (Rock Action Records)

Okay, this is fast turning into a rundown of bands that I love who've made not-their-best-but-still-pretty-good albums but stick with me. Mogwai hit a peak for me with the grumpy Pixies impersonations of Mr. Beast and this is the closest they've come to that high since. 'White Noise' kicks things off with a punishing wall of sound, yet they never get distracted by the fuzz and FX. Instead melodies and breathing room begins to reveal themselves with each subsequent listen.

Mogwai - San Pedro by TheArtOf...

Pranam Mahavalli

Nicolas Jaar – Space is Only Noise (Circus Company)

My local indie record shop Piccadilly Records were playing this record the first time I heard it. I was sold within seconds of hearing the first song. The tracks that work best for me are the ones that are sparsest. It’s like house music, but redacted to its bare essentials.

Rory Dollard

Wilco - The Whole Love (Anti)

If there was a parallel advent calendar for live gigs (give it some thought Agent Parker), there's a very good chance Wilco would be rearing their head on Christmas Eve. I'm naturally disposed to love all their albums, if only because when they release one it means they'll be hitting the road again soon. The Whole Love is a beaut in its own right, calling in most of the tricks the bands have learned over 20 years. Fearless and experimental ('The Art of Almost'), singalong fun ('I Might'), heartfelt and emotional ('One Sunday Morning')...it's all here.

Dom Farrell

Jamie XX Gil Scott Heron - We're New Here (XL)

So often when a revered icon dies, we are forced to sift through a stack of “return to form” records before playing their defining work on repeat. Of course, Small Talk at 125th and Lexon and its signature ‘The Revolution Will Not Be Televised’ received heavy rotation when Gil Scott Heron passed in May, but how wonderful that I’m New Here and its subsequent reworking We’re New Here stood as such impressive contemporary documents to the man’s phenomenal talent. Jamie Smith manages to skilfully etch his own increasingly recognisable mark onto the tracks without hindering the bruised vulnerability of the original and often enhancing it. Heavy beats provide many thrills, and on ‘My Cloud’ and ‘NY Is Killing Me’ there is an unmistakable beauty.

Gil Scott-Heron & Jamie xx - My Cloud by Martin Fält

The Musical Advent Calendar - Door Number Nine

2011-12-09T10:00:00.011Z

It's been apparent for a while now that Pranam is out to steal Skillers' reputation for nominating the most obscure of bands (and, judging by some of his picks this year, that Skillers is open to relinquising it), but today he has well and truly taken it to a new level.

Ali Mason

Sparrow and the Workshop – Spitting Daggers (Republic of Music)

Having come third in the World Stone Skimming Championships back in 2008, Jill O’Sullivan, lead singer of Glasgow-based trio Sparrow and the Workshop, knows a thing or two about causing ripples. With Spitting Daggers, she started to make a few waves. Their debut release, Crystal Falls, sagged under the weight of towering single 'Devil Song', but here spiky, angular 6 Music favourite 'Snake In The Grass' is backed up by 'You Don’t Trust Anyone', 'Against The Grain' and 'Old Habits', with touches of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Sleigh Bells and the Long Blondes added to their old-fashioned folk rock sound.

Guy Atkinson

Transit - Listen & Forgive (ADA Global)

A cameo from scene poster boy Patrick Stump, formerly of Fall out Boy, should tell you everything you need to know about these emo/pop-punk upstarts. Frighteningly tuneful.

Ian Parker

Wilco – The Whole Love (Anti)

Every Wilco album now is a reinvention, and given the scale of the ambition on show on The Whole Love, maybe now they will all be reinventions of the wheel. Jeff Tweedy and his crew are clearly getting more and more adventurous with age, and the band's eighth album makes clear its intentions right off the bat with the seven-minute audio adventure that is 'Art of Almost'. But from there they flit about all over the place, from the simplicity of single 'I Might' to the near-endless 'One Sunday Morning (Song for Jane Smiley’s Boyfriend)', let down by a lack of focus compared to other recent efforts. Still, we won't hold it against them too hard - not when they are spawning as many ideas as this.

Matt Collins

Dark Dark Dark - Wild Go (Supply and Demand)

Dark Dark Dark’s wonderful 'Daydreaming' alone would almost certainly be my song of the year. Angular, catchy and epic, it’s the standout track on a solid debut whose other tracks tread a similar path.

John Skilbeck

The Field - Looping State Of Mind (Kompakt)

What was I saying about Sweden? Here's further proof it was the computer nerds rather than Stockholm's indiepop progeny who we all had to say 'Tack!' to in 2011. I don't particularly do the clubbing, so wouldn't dare to speculate how they've crossed over, but The Field, like Caribou last year, unleashed a potent, precision-cut record this year, extending the rehabilitation of techno. Seven tracks sprawled over 64 minutes. This must have been the soundtrack to thousands of intoxicating nights.

The Field - Then It's White by Kompakt

Andy Welch

Wilco – The Whole Love (Anti)

After eight albums, most bands have found their sound and, for better or for worse, refuse to adapt it. Wilco aren’t most bands, though, and despite almost 20 years together, they continue to challenge themselves, and their fans. It doesn’t always work – Sky Blue Sky was pretty dismal, for example – but when it does… Oh my. There’s not a misguided note on The Whole Love, and Tweedy, in upbeat mood, sounds more focused than ever, yet the spirit of adventure never vanishes. A wonderful record, and easily Wilco’s best since the essential Yankee Hotel Foxtrot.

Steve Pill

I Break Horse – Hearts (Bella Union)

With an icy electro sheen that is particularly suited to this time of year, the aceness of Hearts largely hinges on one song - 'Winter Beats'. Like LCD Soundsystem's 'All My Friends' or Chemical Brothers' 'Star Guitar', it is a song powered almost entirely by momentum. The chorus is pure keening joy and the drop to silence about four minutes in only heightens the drama of the last 60 seconds.

Pranam Mahavalli

Jali Nyonkding Kwyateh - Jali (Self-released)

For those who don’t know him, Jali is a kora player who often busks in Piccadilly Gardens, Manchester. Last year, I wittered on about how the council should give this man a job for keeping folk in good spirits with his sublime playing. However, times are hard, and we currently have overfed zealots in power making savage cuts to council spending who are unlikely to fund such lofty aspirations. So gentle reader next time you’re in Manc, dig deep and pass Mr Kwyateh a dime. He’ll need it, as he’s not relying on Britain’s Got Talent for success, unlike certain other Mancunian street performers.

Jali by Crooked Rooks

Rory Dollard

Bright Eyes - The People's Key (Polydor)

Billed as the final installment in the Bright Eyes canon, this is a fitting - though not defining - farewell. At its best it reminds you of everything you ever loved about Conor Oberst's songwriting - melodic, literate, frantic, emotional. It doesn't scale the heights of his 2002 classic Lifted (what does?) but after so many offshoots, side projects and detours it was good to know he still had something to say and great to hear he still knew how to do it.

Dom Farrell

The Horrors - Skying (XL)

With 2009’s Primary Colours, the Horrors had things easy. Written off in most quarters as a shambolic NME fad dreamed up in a haze of public school mascara, the fact they’d made a fantastic sounding record with decent songs was enough to garner gushing, if slightly dumbfounded, critical acclaim. Skying delivers amid expectation. This assured album with bold, brash psychedelic touches hits the highest points when dance influences throb through its core. Psychedelic Furs and Chameleons armbands are proudly worn on each sleeve, but when ‘Moving Further Away’ throws some Chemical Brothers and LCD Soundsystem into the mix over nine glorious minutes, the results are skyscraping.

The Musical Advent Calendar - Door Number Eight

2011-12-08T10:00:00.006Z

Today Guy is issuing parking tickets, Dollard is talking to himself, and Skillers is taking aim at the eponymous album title. But what intrigues us most is that Pranam's review of Unknown Mortal Orchestra starts with pretty much the exact same sentence as Andy Welch's two days ago. It's day eight, and our No. 17 albums of the year.

Ali Mason

Peggy Sue – Acrobats (Wichita)

Brooding. That’s what this album is. Thick with menace, heavy rock guitars (yes Guy, this to me is rock), Acrobats is the album that announces Peggy Sue have grown up – and grown up painfully. Still present and correct from the first album are the perfect, lazy harmonies and the driving percussion. Thrown into the mix is a palpable sense of hurt and injustice. Being objective, this is a better, more focused album than Fossils & Other Phantoms – especially lyrically. But sadly the one thing that’s missing – the unpredictable manic energy which spawned songs like 'The Sea, The Sea' and 'Watchman' – was what I loved most about them.

Guy Atkinson

Pianos Become The Teeth – The Lack Long After (Topshelf)

This is essentially a grown man crying and screaming over really loud and really brilliant music. It's so far up my street, it needs a parking permit.

Ian Parker

The Leisure Society - Into The Murky Water (Full Time Hobby)

The Leisure Society are perfectionists. You don't have to listen to their albums, either this or debut The Sleeper, for long to realise that. The delightful folk-pop stylings of songwriter Nick Hemming are brought to life by the wondrous, lush instrumentation of this eight-piece, every song carefully polished to sound note perfect while maintaining plenty of charm. Where The Sleeper was a slower, winter-warming album, Into The Murky Water - its name aside - sees the band step out into the sunshine with a string of fine melodies.

You Could Keep Me Talking by The Leisure Society

Matt Collins

Laura Marling - A Creature I Don’t Know (Virgin)

Not my favourite Laura Marling album thus far, but well worthy of a top 24 place. Laura Marling’s folk music is developing an extra level of maturity that makes her age (still 21) quite incredible. Officially indie folk’s elder stateswoman.

John Skilbeck

Veronica Falls - Veronica Falls (Bella Union)

I blathered around this subject last year, but here’s more incontrovertible proof that the demise of the Royal We, a short-lived Glasgow-based indiepop ensemble, has been a good thing, rather than the earth-shattering event it initially seemed to the handful of folk who were aware a) that they had formed in the first place, and b) had disbanded on the day their eight-track LP was released. Anyway, last year’s number eight pick Neverever were Royal We offspring and so too are Veronica Falls, with lead vocalist Roxanne Clifford among the spawn. Their album was hugely enjoyable, but let me nitpick a little. They were playing most of these songs in summer 2010, so for the album to be released in autumn 2011 smacks of trouble somewhere; also, you’ve had a couple of years to consider an album name. Points dropped for this being another self-titled release.

Andy Welch

Big Deal – Lights Out (Mute)

It’d be pretty easy to take one look at Big Deal and think “There are quite enough attractive, oh-so-cool-looking boy/girl duos making introspective indie music out there, thank you very much,” and leave it at that. What a mistake that’d be. For all the intrigue in the pair, largely due to the 11-year age-gap between members Alice Costelloe and Kacey Underwood, the music is all you need. Lights Out features some of the best duet singing I’ve heard, this year or any other. There’s a fragility to the record that I love, too, helped by the absence of any drums or bass, like if you listened to it too loud the songs would crumble. In the space of their delicate, haunting debut, Big Deal have proved they’re exactly that.

Locked Up by Big Deal

Steve Pill

Iron & Wine - Kiss Each Other Clean (4AD)

Sam Beam's latest dispatch from rural America is a wheezy, almost psychedelic collection that soothed like no other in 2011. It lacks the bite of the Shepherd's Dog but more than makes up for it in weary melodies and sonic detailing.

Pranam Mahavalli

Unknown Mortal Orchestra – Unknown Mortal Orchestra (True Panther Sounds)

I know little to nothing about this band, apart from that it's a bedroom project from a New Zealander. Introduced to me by a friend, it got an instant replay on first listen – always a good sign. It’s the record's wayward song structures, warm fuzziness and loose grooves that all really appeal. And in it’s playful, childishness, it recalls early Syd Barrett, which is always a good thing.

Rory Dollard

PJ Harvey - Let England Shake (Island)

"You know that PJ Harvey album?"
"The new one?"
"Yeah, the new one. The clever one about war and stuff."
"Yeah, I know it. It's harrowing and literate and it echoes from the past to the modern day in a way that shows history will always repeat itself if man does not heed the lessons of the past."
"Well, we all know that. PJ Harvey is, after all, clearly the defining female rock British artist ever."
"Yeah, but wouldn't it be higher on the list if it was a little less considered and a bit more raw?"
"Yes. Yes it would."

Dom Farrell

Bright Eyes - The People's Key (Polydor)

Bright Eyes’ first album in four years could perhaps be best described as mystic power-pop. Actually that’s a terrible description, but taking ideological cues from the Rastafari movement and Vonnegut (there’s no new religious movement dedicated to Kurt as yet. So it goes) among others, The People’s Key grapples with the human condition through a prism of sci-fi and technology, complete with occasional contributions from a quasi-spiritual narrator. Funnily enough, an occasionally flabby concept does not always hold firm, but with infectious hooks practically bursting out of every seam, I’m not sure who is complaining.

The Musical Advent Calendar - Door Number Seven

2011-12-07T10:00:00.006Z

Ali Mason

Alex Turner – Submarine OST (Domino)

Yes it’s an EP. Yes the opening track is so short it barely counts. But there’s still enough here to justify a place in the top 24 albums of the year. Putting aside how much I loved the film this EP soundtracks, there’s just something glorious about hearing Turner’s trademark lyrical poetry given chance to breathe and shine, without the attitude and posturing that comes with the Arctic Monkeys. Submarine earns the number 18 spot as much for what it might hint about Turner’s future as for what it is. 'It’s Hard To Get Around The Wind' was also one of the standout singles of the year.

Guy Atkinson

letlive. - Fake History (Epitaph)

These frankly unhinged gents have been working the hardcore punk circuit for what feels like forever but it was only this year that they broke through, thanks largely to a truly pulsating live show and a deranged front man in the form of Jason Butler. Their wonderfully chaotic and sprawling record, which has more than a few nods in the direction of Glassjaw, didn't do them any harm either.

Ian Parker

PJ Harvey - Let England Shake (Universal)

PJ Harvey has confounded our expectations before, but probably never more so than with Let England Shake. Polly Jean has broken out of her introspective (dis)comfort zone with a startling record about this country we call home. It's a fantastic mish-mash of sounds, a jumble of beats that keeps you off-balance throughout, but it is rarely short of thrilling.

Matt Collins

Wilco - The Whole Love (Anti)

Clocking in at a whopping 16 tracks, The Whole Love is the latest from indie stalwarts Wilco. They haven’t lost the chirpiness from 2009’s Wilco (The Album), and this collection of songs repeatedly brings Paul McCartney’s upbeat Beatles tracks to mind for me. In a good way.

John Skilbeck

Twilight Singers - Dynamite Steps (Sub Pop)

I tried excluding this and dropping a new band into the 24. Another Greg Dulli record… big deal, there’ll be another blowing through next year (and lo, since the time of writing, a live album has sprung up). Yet Dynamite Steps refused to go quietly, instead tickling away at the taste buds and persuading me it might just be Dulli’s best record since the Afghan Whigs buckled and broke up a decade ago. His rasping voice growled one minute, soared the next, and never ceased to throw up an air of menace. But that’s just what Dulli does.

Andy Welch

Feist – Metals (Polydor)

Unlike Elbow, who wanted to carry on in the vein they’d carved out for themselves, Leslie Feist, since the success of 1234 on that iPod advert, seemed to be an artist desperately trying to get away from her most-famous song. That theory is backed up by Metals, which, while a stunning album, doesn’t feature anything that sounds like a hit single. The album is downbeat and melancholic, miserable even, but there’s something uplifting about the whole experience. Perhaps it’s the glorious, rousing vocals? Or the intriguing arrangements? Whatever. If avoiding writing singles suits Feist this well, may she never have a hit again.

Steve Pill

The Horrors – Skying (XL)

Three albums in and the Horrors have finally shaken off their influences and produced an album that justifies the early hype. What makes this all the more compelling is the slightly uneasy and haphazard approach to songwriting that recalls Primal Scream, 13th Floor Elevators and other unconventional eccentrics. By sacrificing obvious choruses and twisting their own sound, The Horrors have found a blueprint for a long and interesting career ahead.

Pranam Mahavalli

WU LYF – Go Tell Fire to the Mountain (Lyf Recordings)

I first saw these chaps in Chorlton in 2009 who were then going under the name Wu lf Wu lf. The week before that I believe they were called something else. And the week after they’d changed their name again. Four disinterested looking teenagers strolled to the stage, one of whom wore a red baseball cap backwards in the manner of Fred Durst. I was ready to be underwhelmed. But goodness was I unprepared for what followed. A noise outfit backed by Tony Allen? Check. Abstract song structures executed preternatural self-confidence? Double check. Guys with guitars, making guys with guitars sound relevant? Check again. Okay the album doesn’t match the early promise of the demos, which were truly bonkers, but it’s been great to follow them and see a truly original, local band get the recognition they deserve. Bring on album no.2.

Rory Dollard

King Creosote and Jon Hopkins - Diamond Mine (Domino)

After several dozen self-released albums, Fife folkie King Creosote (Kenny Anderson to the missus) made an unlikely - and, despite some great tunes, unsuccessful - play for the big leagues with 2005's KC RULES OK. Diamond Mine was no such bid for mass acceptance and has perversely become his biggest hit. It's a whisky-worn, nostalgiac work with some real emotional clout, with Jon Hopkins' delicate electronics a neat foil.

Dom Farrell

St. Vincent - Strange Mercy (4AD)

If anyone still refers to St Vincent as “that girl who used to be in Sufjan Steven’s band”, it is unlikely they will for much longer. Annie Clarke is going over-ground. Third album Strange Mercy is bursting and brimming with a rare verve, from infectious hook-laden single 'Cruel' to plaintive closer 'Year of the Tiger', not to mention some of the year’s most inventive and idiosyncratic guitar work. Talk of collaborations with Madonna persist. Hell, she could probably even make that sound good.

The Musical Advent Calendar - Door Number Six

2011-12-06T10:00:00.004Z

Day six sees us move into the troublesome teens with our No. 19 albums of the year. Today we find Dom skilfully avoiding the superfluous schmaltz, Pranam indulging high levels of ear-candiness, while Guy looks to rebound from yesterday's surprise slating in the comments section by nominating an album of somebody farting. Or not.

Ali Mason

Mechanical Bride – Living With Ants (V2)

I can’t help but think of Nancy Elizabeth when I listen to Mechanical Bride, with her low key beginnings, her haunting piano riffs and her gently experimental songs. Lauren Doss has been kicking around for a while now in the guise of Mechanical Bride so it should be little surprise just how accomplished her debut album sounds. Strings, brass and funny noises are all expertly deployed – never out of place and always given the space to shine – but it’s when a few precisely-played piano notes and Doss’ voice do most of the work, as on 'Magpie' and 'Colour Of Fire', that Living With Ants is at its arresting best. She’s not quite as good as Nancy Elizabeth yet – but she’s not too far off.

Guy Atkinson

Rise Against - Endgame (Polydor)

More stadium-sized protest punk from these absolute giants of the scene. Frankly, they've got so big that they could churn out an album of fart sounds and they'd still sell a bucket load. Fortunately, they've still got enough hooks and melodic hardcore treats up their sleeve to ensure they don't need to resort to 'The Gas Sessions: Volume I' just yet.

Ian Parker

Drive-By Truckers - Go-Go Boots (Play It Again Sam)

I have an odd relationship with the Drive-By Truckers. Their 2004 masterpiece The Dirty South would occupy a place comfortably inside my all-time top 10 favourite albums, and Southern Rock Opera wouldn’t be far outside, but while the records that have followed have only seen their critical acclaim grow, none of them have connected with me on anything like the same level. Maybe it’s just taken me seven years to accept that, with the band realigned after the departure of Jason Isbell, they are never going to make another Dirty South, but with Go-Go Boots I’m finally ready to get back on board. The hard edge of those old albums is gone, but no band combines such powerful, thoughtful lyrics with kick-ass southern rock like this lot.

Matt Collins

The Middle East - I Want That You Are Always Happy (Play It Again Sam)

Ironically not an album for the cheerful, I Want That You Are Always Happy is like a long sad hymn. Unlike a hymn, its pianos, beautiful vocals and melancholy make for absorbing music.

John Skilbeck

SBTRKT - SBTRKT (Young Turks)

SBTRKT, aka London producer/DJ/performerAaron Jerome, is a solo artist surrounded by, and building an empire around, a glittering cast of collaborators. Jerome had a rather phenomenal 2011, putting out a slinky debut album in June which cut across the dance, electronic and modern r&b scenes, dipping a foot in each pond and avoiding perils of cross-contamination. There'’s more than one track you might compare to material on the XX's album of last year, others you'’d maybe imagine Janet Jackson arm-wrestling her brother for a decade ago (which is not to say SBTRKT sounds dated, just futuristic). It was meant to be a huge year for James Blake: SBTRKT rendered him almost irrelevant.

Andy Welch

Unknown Mortal Orchestra – Unknown Mortal Orchestra (True Panther Sounds)

I don’t know anything about Unknown Mortal Orchestra, other than they’re signed to True Panther, and I think they’re from New Zealand, or Portland, or somewhere. Anyway, none of the details are important, and despite the fact I’ve slowly fallen in love with their heavily distorted psychedelic garage funk – try that for a genre – I’ve not once felt compelled to find out any more. In truth, I got the album because I liked the cover, but now its Unknown Mortal Orchestra’s contents that fascinate me most. It’s just a brilliant record.

Steve Pill

The Pains of Being Pure at Heart – Belong (Play It Again Sam)

Fey, fun and flimsy, the first Pains album was enjoyable but could never have prepared us for this. The Brooklyn quartet looked to Smashing Pumpkins/Depeche Mode production team Flood and Alan Moulder to toughen up their sound and in the process found inner depths in their wistful indie pop. Title track 'Belong' is a brutal three-minute distillation of their new ambitiousness, mixing brutal Mellon Collie-style multi-tracked guitars with My Bloody Valentine sub aqua effects and shoegazing introspection.

The Pains of Being Pure At Heart - Belong by Slumberland Records

Pranam Mahavalli

Bon Iver – Bon Iver, Bon Iver

As in yesterday’s post, here’s an artist that had a lot to live up to for me. Having listened to Bon Iver’s debut endlessly, I was a bit disappointed with this at first. But a belting performance on Jools was all it took to make me revisit this record, which though bigger in scope than the debut, has the same level of ear-candiness and attention to detail that made his first so rewarding.

Rory Dollard

The War On Drugs - Slave Ambient (Secretly Canadian)

Okay, so I’m aware that a lot of guys who well and truly lost their loads over Kurt Vile this year but I was left cold by the whole affair. Much better to my ear was the band he left behind to peddle his own brand of guff. Slave Ambient was a real grower for me - the drone-rock vibe started out as merely diverting but, once I’d realized it was essentially a Pennsylvanian version of Spiritualized fronted by a Pensylvanian version of Tim Burgess, it became an ipod regular. There are few fireworks on show, it’s a more distant, moody work than that and all the better for it.

Dom Farrell

Elbow - Build A Rocket Boys! (Fiction)

With the exception of the 'Lippy Kids' – a wondrous, majestic six minutes of occasionally tear-inducing perfection – Build A Rocket Boys! rarely scales the heights of predecessor The Seldom Seen Kid. Nevertheless, there remains plenty to admire amid Guy Garvey’s peans to the idle dreams of his north Manchester youth. The hushed patter of 'Jesus Is A Rochdale Girl' (being from nearby Middleton I find this to be incredibly unlikely) is profoundly touching, although the “Jerry’s Final Thought” vibe of 'Dear Friends' provides superfluous schmaltz.

Elbow: Lippy Kids from percy dean on Vimeo.

The Musical Advent Calendar - Door Number Five

2011-12-05T10:00:00.009Z

Day five finds Ali stepping out of his comfort zone to enjoy a little 'dance' music and Dollard putting his cards on the table. We're down to the our No. 20 albums of the year.

Ali Mason

Metronomy – The English Riviera (Because)

There’s something alluring about the contrast of the sounds of waves and seagulls which open up The English Riviera and the metallic electronics that follow. It’s the tension between the old and the new (the sea is old and electricity is new. Yeah, that works) is at the heart of this album, a tribute to frontman Joe Mount’s native Devon. It’s a tension that will be familiar to anyone who has spent time on the British coast, and also one that perhaps reflects a band moving in a new direction, from their dance (sorry, that’s probably not right – I’m the folky one, it sounds like dance to me) past to a more melodic present, complete with harmonies, synths, Roxy Music influences a host of other contradictions.

Guy Atkinson

New Found Glory - Radiosurgery (Epitaph)

So saccharine it should come with a dental warning, this is more of the same pop punk goodness from these legends of genre. Lacking some of the punch that their classic cuts from the early 2000s packed, this is still a worthy addition to a sun-drenched cannon of melodic punk brilliance.

Ian Parker

The Secret Sisters - The Secret Sisters (Decca)

It’s a desperately old-fashioned thing to start out with a debut album dominated by covers and featuring only a couple of your own compositions. Like something artists from the 50s would do…Which kind of makes it fitting that this is how the Secret Sisters have kicked things off. The Alabama pair sound like they’ve arrived direct from yesteryear, their beautiful vocals breathing life into country standards with no modern fanfare required to give them a fresh sound. That the two originals, 'Tennessee Me' and 'Waste The Day' don’t sound out of place alongside George Jones and Hank Williams classics is about all you need to know.

Matt Collins

Tinariwen - Tassili (V2)

Tinariwen pick up where they left off with their brand of hypnotic desert blues. They have added little to their sound that wasn’t present on 2009’s companions, but they didn’t need to. If only we could accurately sing along.

John Skilbeck

20. Runaround Kids - Linked Arms (Philophobia)

Wakefield'’s Runaround Kids supported the mighty Shrag in the cellar at Leeds’ Royal Park, the Brudenell'’s ugly sister, in September 2010. To give you a clue, there were around 20 people there, but dang they were great. I bought up their early singles, saw them play a few more times, and then Linked Arms came out in the summer on the tiny but rather marvellous Philophobia label (check Imp, also The Spills). And it was well worth the wait. They'’re obviously in thrall to the early Cribs records, also Sebadoh and maybe …Trail of Dead. But the three-piece (check the video, they'’re sickeningly young) play with such zest, write so wittily, that their own charms are rather difficult to resist.

Andy Welch

Radiohead – King Of Limbs (XL)

I found the way King Of Limbs was released, with no notice or build up, infuriating. In fact, Radiohead in general wind me up something terrible these days, but that’s an argument for another day. Cynical gimmicks aside, it’s hard to argue with the quality of the music on King Of Limbs. Just as In Rainbows is now among my favourite albums of all time after a sluggish start, KOL (not Kings Of Leon, for clarity), to a lesser extent, has wormed its way into myhead with its hypnotic, eerie and sinister songs. Not a masterpiece, but the band’s consistency is staggering.

Steve Pill

James Blake - "James Blake" (Polydor)

If you’d have asked me in January, this might have been higher up, but the unrelenting bleakness meant it slipped down the playlists over the summer and an average live performance in an oversubscribed Field Day tent left me wondering if I’d been sold a dummy. In truth, I’d been sold Portishead’s Dummy, but remade for 2011 hipster dubstep fans: haunting, experimental but with a crippled heart beating deep inside.

Pranam Mahavalli

Panda Bear – Tomboy (Paw Tracks)

Person Pitch was a phenomenal, era-defining, hugely influential album. Right, now I’ve got that out of the way I can move onto the next inevitable point, which sadly is that I don’t think this record is quite as good. I miss the dense samples, heavy choral layering, and hypnotic repetition of Person Pitch. But the newfound minimalism works nicely for me, especially on tracks like 'Drone'.

Rory Dollard

Bon Iver - Bon Iver (4AD)

Cards on the table time: I fell in love with For Emma, Forever Ago and if I had to listen to that or this it wouldn’t take me more than a millisecond to make the call. But part of the beauty of that record was its encapsulation of a place and a time and (thankfully for Justin Vernon’s mental health) both are firmly in the rearview mirror. Credit is due, then, for the boldness with which he has changed tack. Gone are the mournful acoustics, replaced with synthetic, gently manipulated soundscapes that bubble under beneath Vernon’s trademark double-tracked vocals. Closing track 'Beth/Rest' is a cheesy aberration but when the formula works it’s a killer.

Dom Farrell

Arctic Monkeys - Suck it and See (Domino)

Despite being the weakest offering from the Arctic Monkey’s canon thus far, Suck It And See is not without its share of memorable moments. 'Library Pictures' fizzes and slinks before exploding all over again, while 'Hellcat Spangled Shalalala' is punch-perfect pop driven home by Matt Helders’ sledgehammer blows. However, there is at times the unwelcome clinical feel of a band comfortable in its own skin. As the man from whom this blog takes its name might put it, they need to drive it into the ditch again, as with “difficult” third album Humbug. The good news for everybody but Alex Turner is he and pin-up girlfriend Alexa Chung have parted ways, meaning there’s probably plenty of the exquisite, bruised rejection aired in the likes of 'Love Is A Laserquest' on the way.

The Musical Advent Calendar - Door Number Four

2011-12-04T10:00:00.013Z

Today's advent calendar is a "maximum head noddage" zone. Apparently. It's day four, and the No. 21 albums on our lists.

Ali Mason

Fountains of Wayne – Sky Full Of Holes (Lojinx)

It’s a cause of great sadness to me that the only contact most music fans have had with Fountains of Wayne came through their 2003 single 'Stacy’s Mom'. Taken on its own it sounded like novelty one-hit wonder material, but in the context of a rich catalogue of songs detailing the minutiae of American suburbia, it makes more sense. It’s more of the same here: sunny pop tunes with lyrics about faded party girls trying to recapture past glories, underappreciated dads dreaming of being action heroes and life on the road watching Will Ferrell movies. It’s not up there with their first two albums, but a new FoW release is always a cause for celebration.

Guy Atkinson

City and Colour - Little Hell (Cooking Vinyl)

Dallas Green's commitment to his solo side project was allegedly responsible for the demise of one of my favourite bands, Alexisonfire, so I'm not sure how much I should enjoy this album. But its relentlessly downbeat and mainly acoustic laments are just too much for me to resist. Dallas, you swine.

Ian Parker

Sarabeth Tucek - Get Well Soon (Sonic Cathedral)

At first, I struggled with this one. Get Well Soon is so heavily influenced by Neil Young that he deserves a share of the writing credits, single 'Wooden' borrows so extensively from 'Down By The River' that Tucek may as well have just covered the original and left it at that. For some reason this didn't sit right. Why not stick on Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere and have done, right? Well, much as that is a recipe for a full and rewarding life, what I should have known then, and what I realised after repeated listens, is that a female musician so much in thrall to the great man is not one who should be shunned, but instead pursued for marriage. Well, okay, we won’t go that far, but she still deserves a little love.

Sarabeth Tucek 'Wooden' by Sonic Cathedral

Matt Collins

I Break Horses - Hearts (Bella Union)

Like Beach House with synths, I Break Horses have created an album full of epic, churchy synths that’s both blissed out and as dark as their name suggests. Can’t understand a word.

John Skilbeck

Roll The Dice - In Dust (The Leaf Label)

Of course it’s been a momentous year for minimalist Swedish electronica. Why, you can’t have helped but notice. Roll The Dice was the collaborative project cooked up between whip-smart Stockholm studio sorts Malcolm Pardon and Peder Mannerfel. No doubt aided by the Swedish secret service, they managed to keep the red-tops off their tails for long enough to produce a dark gem of an LP. In Dust rewards the patient listener, frowns on cheap thrill-seekers, and makes up for Roxette.

Andy Welch

Elbow – Build A Rocket Boys! (Fiction)

Following The Seldom Seen Kid was never going to be easy. Had Elbow gone too big, they’d have risked losing their loyal fanbase. Too introspective and they’d relegate themselves to the little leagues they’d fought so hard to escape. What, then, does Build A Rocket Boys! sound like? It sounds like a band being brave enough to know what they do best and serving up more of the same without ever repeating themselves. No easy task, and one failed by so many. You can’t force another anthem like 'One Day Like This', so they didn’t try. Hats off to them.

Steve Pill

SBTRKT - SBTRKT (Young Turks)

So many of my listening habits in the second half of 2011 hinged on a radio show - Thom Yorke sitting in on the Gilles Peterson show. The BBC DJ has a tendency to favour records with super-slick production but he revelled in Yorke's company, in turn teasing out the inner fanboy in the Radiohead singer as they joined the dots between Duke Ellington and Burial. The SBTRKT album was one of the finds of the session, a pulsing, dark collection of soul-tinged electronica that didn't stray into the glitchy meandering of so many records of their ilk. A guestspot from Little Dragon only added to the atmosphere.

Pranam Mahavalli

Moon Duo – Mazes (Souterrain Transmissions)

This record sounds to like stuff that I think will always be cool – Neu, Suicide, Yo La Tengo...Where my 24th choice this year was good commuting music for the go-getting, yet louche, salary-man, this for me is the perfect soundtrack for getting the strut on. Infectious, minimal grooves for maximum head noddage.

Rory Dollard

Fleet Foxes - Helplessness Blues (Bella Union)

The torturous recording process behind Helplessness Blues suggested all was not well in the Foxes’ den. It is, then, a surprise to here just how serene the end product is. The changes are minimal from their critically-acclaimed debut - though Robin Pecknold’s lead vocal is perhaps more prominent among the harmonies than before and 'The Shrine/An Argument' includes a fun detour into free jazz - but the basic formula remains sound. The element of surprise that greeted their arrival in 2008 has long since gone but both melodies and musicianship are as graceful as before.

Dom Farrell

Felice Brothers - Celebration, Florida (Loose)

One of the more revered folk/Americana bands of their generation, Felice Brothers have gone electro. Well, not quite, but the occasional drum loops and samples daub a fascinating sonic graffiti onto Celebration, Florida. It doesn’t always work, but there is enough of the familiar brilliance on offer to indulge them. 'Cus’s Catskill Gym' is the second fantastic song about boxing of their career, with Crazy Horse guitars underpinning some particularly sound advice for a young Mike Tyson to stay away from Don King. After an occasionally bumpy ride, only the most miserly judge would fail to raise the Felice Brothers’ hand at the final bell.

The Musical Advent Calendar - Door Number Three

2011-12-03T10:00:00.015Z

And on the third day, we turn to our respective 22nd favourite albums of the year. Read on as Mr Skilbeck (temporarily) renounces the indie music that has soundtracked his life to date, Guy goes goat shopping, and Pranam takes up a position with the Croatian tourist board.

Ali Mason

Cashier No. 9 – To The Death Of Fun (Bella Union)

In what was not an auspicious year for guitar bands, one of the best had one of the worst names. Their hazy, lazy pop tunes are unashamedly catchy and, if the shimmering, retro atmosphere feels like a lack of originality at times, there is a welcome willingness to nod in the direction of unusual – never more so than on lead single 'Goldstar', in which frontman Danny Todd sings: “I look better with my high heels on.”

Guy Atkinson

Mastodon - The Hunter (Roadrunner)

As far as opening lines go it doesn't get much better than "I killed a man cause he killed my goat". It seems the indie press got together this year and agreed that Mastodon were 2011's metal band it was okay to like. However, if you didn't like their sludgy riffs and gruff vocals before you'll be unlikely to rush out and buy a goat after listening to this.

Ian Parker

Wanda Jackson - The Party Ain’t Over (Third Man Records)

Every year (okay, in each of the previous two years – it seems easy to overestimate the history of this advent calendar) I plan a Boxing Day post looking ahead to next year, and then fail to find the time to do it. I intend to write about the albums that are due in the next 12 months to try and predict what might be on next year’s calendar. If I’d ever got round to doing this last year, I’d have waxed lyrical about the stunning cover of Amy Winehouse’s ‘You Know I’m No Good’ that the now 74-year-old Wanda Jackson had cooked up with Jack White (yes, him again). Based on that, I had high expectations for this record, and I was not disappointed, not least as things got even better with her take on Dylan’s 'Thunder On The Mountain'. Apparently Dylan himself suggested she cover it for the project. Maybe he had one eye on the royalties, or maybe he just knew it would sound this damn good.

Matt Collins

Baxter Dury - Happy Soup (EMI)

More famous for being Ian Dury’s son than a musician in his own right, Baxter Dury now surely deserves his own attention. This is a gloriously oddball album, managing to be accessible, poppy and experimental at the same time.

John Skilbeck

Iceage - New Brigade (What's Your Rapture)

I developed acute indiepop nausea over the summer, after years of overexposure to the family twee, and Danish punks Iceage (together with ace American noise merchants The Men) served as part of the cure. Four teens from Copenhagen, Iceage prescribed 12 tracks to be taken over the course of 25 minutes, frequently repeated. Happily the heavy medication worked a treat, but wouldn’t you know I’m now addicted to the hard, powerful stuff, needing a frequent fix to stave off a return to the cardigan crew.

Andy Welch

Fionn Regan – 100 Acres Of Sycamore (Heavenly)

I listened to Fionn Regan’s debut The End Of History endlessly, and believed his talent to be up there with that of Nick Drake’s. Even a cheerleader like me found his second album, The Shadow Of An Empire, disappointing, but thankfully the man from Co Wicklow managed to rediscover what made him so special the first time around. There’s plenty to love here; 'Sow Mare Bitch Vixen', 'The Horses Are Asleep' and 'Golden Light' are all sublime, but 'For A Nightingale', a beautiful promise to the girl of his dreams, is in another league altogether.

Steve Pill

Foster The People - Torches (Columbia)

Following hot on the heels of Young The Giant in the shamelessly-joyous-young-rock-band-with-definite-articles-in-the-middle-of-their-name, Foster The People was definitely this year’s good time band. 'Pumped Up Kicks' was the pinnacle, just pure derivative cool, with little more than a phoned-in vocal performance funking along on a drumbeat that Meg White would dismiss as too primitive.

Pranam Mahavalli

Tom Vek – Leisure Seizure (Island)

Visit Hvar! I was in an internet cafe in Hvar when I saw the video below. It was for Vek’s first new material in five years. Hvar’s a beautiful place, and every time I hear this song I’m taken back there. Perhaps this memory association coloured my opinion of the album a little, which on sober reflection back in wintry Manchester, isn’t quite as good as his debut but is still groovesome in all the right places.

Rory Dollard

Starfucker - Reptilians (Polyvinyl)

With a name like ‘Starfucker’ you’re immediately given to thinking this Oregon three-piece are either headline-seeking halfwits or the latest, unneccesary breed of Rolling Stones copyists. Happily, they are neither. On Reptilians they gleefully pick up the hedonistic, dance-rock baton that MGMT discarded recently in favour of something entirely less appealing. There are brash synths, the odd endlessly hummable melody, a choice sample here and there and some nice vocal work reminiscent of My Bloody Valentine.

Dom Farrell

The Pains of Being Pure At Heart - Belong (PIAS)

Picking up the subtle nods to the future given by their Higher Than The Stars EP, The Pains of Being Pure at Heart’s second effort has not inspired the outpouring of affection garnered by their eponymous 2009 debut. This is largely because the scuzzy, fuzzy guitars apparently lifted from the fantasy rock’n’roll band dreamed up by many an adolescent have been replaced by Youth’s trademark kitchen-sink production. However, no big-name knob-twiddler can bury the way Pains effortlessly find their way around superb guitar pop. This is satellite-navigation songwriting, best displayed here by the magnificent 'Heaven's Gonna Happen Now'.

The Pains of Being Pure at Heart - Heavens Gonna Happen Now by IKilledMarloweA

The Musical Advent Calendar - Door Number Two

2011-12-02T10:00:00.017Z

If yesterday's were the statement picks, the flare picks, today we get down to the hard graft for real. Or maybe not, because as you'll see, Pranam is calling the whole process into question and Dollard is spreading his wings and skipping the country, so it could be this thing has fallen apart already.

Ali Mason

Florence & the Machine – Ceremonials (Island)

I loved Lungs and, despite every single song having been released as a single and played to the point of surrender, I still do. Ceremonials isn’t as good, obviously, but it’s still better than it ought to be. It feels like a Hollywood sequel where the producers have taken everything the audience feedback told them was good about the first album – those drums, that epic echo, the on-the-edge-of-control vocals – and turned them up to 11. The result is an album with breathtaking moments that is ultimately a little bit exhausting.

Guy Atkinson

Rival Schools - Pedals (Atlantic)

This was never going to rival the magnificent post-hardcore highs of the classic United by Fate, but there's still enough here to rekindle memories of those heady days back in 2001 when this band pretty much exclusively soundtracked my life.

Ian Parker

Danger Mouse & Daniele Luppi - Rome (Parlaphone)

If the soundtrack to a film that doesn’t exist is this good, I can only suggest one thing: somebody should make the film. Danger Mouse has turned his considerable skills to yet another project and roped in fellow master of the random off-shoot, Jack White as part of an all-star cast, and some of the results are astonishing. Like many a soundtrack, it can drift in places, not least as this one doesn’t even have a plot to follow along to, but the high points easily outweigh the low.

Matt Collins

Driver Drive Faster - Open House (Akoustic Anarky)

Maybe not album of the year, but certainly band name of the year. Open House is an atmospheric indie gem, all chirping electric guitars and double tracked vocals. Death Cab fans will approve.

John Skilbeck

Widowspeak - Widowspeak (Captured Tracks)

Shriek and ye shall find a fast-track to fame, but coo and it might just find you. Molly Hamilton reminds me of so many of my favourite singers, from Beth Gibbons to Hope Sandoval, Kristin Hersh to Romy Madley Croft: her voice being delicate yet capable of delivering lines of devastating emotion. On Widowspeak’s exquisite and concise self-titled debut LP, Hamilton's voice is the sweet murmur which weaves dark themes into layers of spindly guitar to create an overall picture of blemished beauty. I think.

Widowspeak by WIDOWSPEAK

Andy Welch

Anna Calvi – Anna Calvi (Domino)

I first saw Anna Calvi in a support slot at a dingy venue in Camden. She walked on to a pitch-black stage, looking like a cigarette-toting film-noir femme fatale, picked up a Telecaster and within a few bars, every jaw in the room dropped. Calvi has since picked up the inevitable comparisons to PJ Harvey, and there is definitely something of Harvey’s sexually charged, Rid Of Me sound in this debut record. The artist she most reminds me of, though, is Jeff Buckley, particularly Live At Sin E. Just as the songs on that phenomenal record benefit from the space they’re given, Anna Calvi is beautifully arranged; dramatic and full of bluster when needed, sparse and haunting elsewhere, but never less than devastating.

Steve Pill

Laura Marling - A Creature I Don't Know (Virgin)

Okay, so everyone on this blog has raved about Marling for an age so you don’t really need me to add to this, only to say this is the first time that I’ve actually vaguely got what you were on about. Whereas I found some of the earlier stuff a little too twee, try-hard or just affected, this record really caught me out. So yeah, you win. Gits.

Pranam Mahavalli

Atlas Sound – Parallax (4AD)

There’s a good chance I’ll look back on this calendar sometime in 2012, and wonder “Why didn’t I place this album higher up on the list?”. In fact, I might have the same thought for many of my other choices. What makes one album better than another? Why didn’t certain albums make this list despite me loving them? (Peaking Lights, dammit, how’d I forget about you!?) Do hierarchies even have a place in art and music? I couldn’t possibly say. So, 23rd album of the year is this, whatever that counts for. Bradford Cox, is consistently good whether he’s doing music with Deerhunter or Atlas Sound, and for that reason alone I suggest this deserves your attention.

Rory Dollard

Bombino - Agadez (Cumbancha)

I won’t profess to being a connoisseur of world music, or a fan of how it is typically packaged for British consumption, but there is a strain of desert blues guitar music that is consistently exciting and perennially undervalued. Bombino is the latest breakout artist of the genre and his distinctively hypnotic guitar lines - more nimble and mantra-like than anything you’re likely to hear from these shores - have definite crossover appeal.

Dom Farrell

Girls - Father, Son, Holy Ghost (Turnstile)

Girls’ evocatively titled second album wears their San Francisco base on its sleeve, never more so than on the sun-drenched harmonies of opener 'Honey Bunny'. The west coast thread does help to hold together an at times schizophrenic album. Alex’s brisk indie pop is followed by the bizarre guitar wig-out of 'Die', which gives a largely plaintive record an unexpected Wayne’s World moment. Such problems are largely overridden by melodies you think you’ve known all your life, and when songwriter and frontman Christopher Owens offers glimpses into his troubled childhood as a religious cult member on 'Vomit' and 'Forgiveness', Father, Son, Holy Ghost exposes its fragile emotional core.

Girls - Alex by artsandcraftsmx

The Musical Advent Calendar - Door Number One

2011-12-01T10:00:00.022Z

Hello, and welcome to the 2011 Musical Advent Calendar. If you're new to this thing, this is where our panel of 10 count down their favourite 24 albums of the year, one a day, until Christmas. If you've been here before, welcome back.

The advent calendar might only be three years old, but when putting it together we somehow already talk in terms of 'traditions' and what 'usually happens', as if we've anything to go on. One thing that may well come to be a mainstay of future advent calendars is using the opening pick as something of a statement, a marker, rather than just the last thing on the list.

Whatever they represent, here they are. The Musical Advent Calendar is under way.

Ali Mason

Laura Marling – A Creature I Don’t Know (Virgin)

Twenty-four is a difficult and important spot to fill – much more so than, say, 23. For a long time this statement position was going to be occupied by Build A Rocket Boys! because it was inconceivable to me that Elbow would not feature on my list. Ultimately, though, I had to concede: it’s just not that good an album. A Creature I Don’t Know is a good album: intelligent, coherent, melodic. After two albums heavily influenced respectively by Noah And The Whale and Mumford And Sons, it’s good to hear Marling developing a sound which feels more uniquely hers. My brain loves it – though, as ever with Marling, my heart isn’t quite so sure.

Guy Atkinson

Death Cab For Cutie - Codes and Keys (Atlantic)

Considerably more jaunty than we've come to expect from Death Cab For Cutie, this album is the sound of a man head over heels in love. However, here's hoping Ben Gibbard's recent divorce signals a return to their melancholic best as this is a little 'wet'.

Ian Parker

Dark Captain - Dead Legs & Alibis (Loaf)

Dark Captain, Light Captain and their debut album Miracle Kicker totally passed me by. Perhaps there were too many syllables and I lost concentration half way through their name. That would make sense, at least, because now they've returned under the more efficient moniker Dark Captain, I'm absolutely on board. Dead Legs & Alibis is all pulsing rhythms, marshal beats, and softly spoken lyrics. The results are infectious.

Matt Collins

Treefight for Sunlight - Treefight for Sunlight (V2)

Treefight for Sunlight have that relentlessly cheery thing going on and aren’t going to give it up. A gorgeous combination of Flaming Lips, Polyphonic Spree and the long lamented Captain.

John Skilbeck

Alex Turner - Submarine OST (Domino)

Submarine was a charming, rum movie, but I enjoyed this particular coming of age story just as much. Turns out Alex Turner is not quite so wrapped up in American stoner rock as he once perhaps was. This short but enchanting soundtrack EP featured five sweetly sung laments to youth, each of them rather becoming of Turner’s old pal Richard Hawley on peak form. The boy has a soft side; more of this please.
:: I’m staring at a list of records which failed to make the cut on my chart, and boy I really love some of these. What a brilliant year it’s been.

Andy Welch

The Joy Formidable – Big Roar (Atlantic)

I don’t just love The Joy Formidable because they’re from the same neck of the woods as me – singer Ritzy’s mum lives on the same street as my nanna, no less. I love them because they’re about the most exciting British rock band to release an album in 2011. In a time when guitar music is as unfashionable as I can ever remember it being, their expansive, stadium-ready music still seems fresh, urgent and essential. 'A Heavy Abacus' is the obvious standout track, but you don’t have to delve too much deeper to find many more brilliant, emotional songs.

Steve Pill

Bon Iver - Bon Iver (4AD)

From the highest highs of For Emma, Forever Ago (and the equally ace Blood Bank EP), this would have been filed under “2011’s most disappointing comebacks” if that particular folder wasn’t already too full (I’m looking at you REM, The Strokes, My Morning Jacket …). Despite suffering in comparison to Justin Vernon’s debut, there are still some flat-out beautiful songs on here, not least the gently rousing 'Holocene'. Just make sure you turn it off after track 9 and avoid the auto-tuned Phil Collins-esque tragedy that is album closer Beth/Rest

Pranam Mahavalli

The Field – Looping State of Mind (Kompakt)

Hypnotic, minimal, and repetitive (all compliments), I’ve found this album great for filtering out the noise and bustle of city life. It’s not quite ambient, nor as meditative as other music I like. But it is refreshingly free enough of incident to counteract the busy tide of the turning world. As an aside, the bpms of some of the tracks here set at perfect strolling speed for what could best be described as an ‘assertive amble’ – a walk that gets you places, but not in a fluster.

The Field - Then It's White by Kompakt

Rory Dollard

Summer Camp - Welcome to Condale (Apricot Recording Company)

As any self-respecting Ragged Gloryist knows, the number 24 pick is a little bit different. It’s about laying down a marker. Making a statement. I considered Elbow’s Build A Rocket Boys! as a sort of back-handed compliment (The Seldom Seen Kid would have been a clear Number 1 had the calendar existed in 2008), I almost caved on the patchy Tyler the Creator album because I noticed I had no rap this year but I’ve settled on Summer Camp as my wild card. I haven’t lived with it as long as some of the other contenders but there is something infectious about this snarky 80s love-in that drew me in. In a couple of months I may like it even more, or it may have slipped off the radar entirely...but that’s what the number 24 slot is for.

Dom Farrell

Dangermouse & Daniele Luppi - Rome (Parlaphone)

The soundtrack to a film that doesn’t exist. Inspired by, and often just plain old lifting from, the sweeping accompaniments to classic Spaghetti Westerns, Dangermouse and Daniele Luppi’s odyssey has endured a long gestation. In its best moments it is worth the wait. Jack White and Norah Jones are the hero and heroine of the piece and the latter’s vocal contributions are often mesmerising - something quite at odds with the rest of her career. It is hard to escape the feeling that the lush orchestration provided by a group of wily Italian session veterans would benefit from a smattering of White’s head-shredding guitar work. You know, for the scene where everyone blows each other’s heads off.

4 - Season's Trees by muzzninu

The Musical Advent Calendar - The Overall Top 10

2010-12-25T10:00:00.011Z

Merry Christmas!

And welcome to the final door of the 2010 Musical Advent Calendar...the overall top 10. Using our patented, multi-layered and highly sophisticated rating system (one point for a No. 24 nomination, 24 for a No. 1, and everything else in between), we've calculated what the panel rated as the best 10 albums of the year. You can see just how many points each one got under the album name.

And here, without further ado, they are.

1. The National - High Violet (4AD)

150 points

Track - England

It didn't appear on the calendar at all until door number 20, but once it had arrived, it came in a flood - seven nominations in all making High Violet our runaway No. 1 of the year.

"High Violet is a world weary, intellectual record, battered by the pressures of modern middle class life and perfect for a faceless commute across the city" - Steve Pill

"This is an era defining band, who continue to outshine their peers with effortless ease and deserve a place in everyone's life" - Guy Atkinson

"High Violet is not Alligator. But it is damn close, and it reminds me what I fell for in the first place, the aloofness, the quiet power, and the assuredness of touch" - Ian Parker

"Each time I listen to High Violet I seem to discover something else lovingly stashed down there in the thicket of the mixing desk and the onset of the English winter seemed to place the whole thing in its aptest context" - Rory Dollard

"The National could release their shopping list rapped over a soundtrack of Elmo bashing his bin lids together and be hailed as the saviours of rock" - Matt Collins

"Tender but still forceful, downtrodden but also euphoric, it is an unrelenting triumph and sits proudly amid the lineage of sweeping blue collar rock that Americans tend to do so well, while we get stuck with The Enemy and some other such rubbish" - Dom Farrell

2. Laura Marling - I Speak Because I Can (Virgin)

90 points

Track - I Speak Because I Can

Like the National, she left it late, but Marling's sophomore effort came steaming through with a string of high nominations.

"I love everything about this album; the wider issues such as her transformation from delicate nu-folk flower to devastating, Greek-mythology-steeped heroine, to smaller nuances like the “We will keep you” refrains of Goodbye England that sound like the Bagpuss mice" - Andy Welch

"She played a part in one of 2009's stand-out records when her break up with Noah from Noah and The Whale resulted in the latter's uncomfortably heartbreaking The First Days Of Spring. But Marling's response smacks more of an unflinching defiance, assurance and no little devilment" - Dom Farrell

"The switch in backing bands from Noah and the Whale (no going back there now, of course) to Mumford & Sons is clearly in effect, with Mumford's pounding rhythms powering these songs along (except, that is, for Goodbye England) and creating a very different sound, but what stands out is Marling's own songwriting, establishing her as an artist to be reckoned with" - Ian Parker

"It’s a definite step up from Alas I Cannot Swim, and there are some absolute stunners here – the huge Alpha Swallows, the exquisite Goodbye England and breakup track Blackberry Stone, which could teach Charlie Fink a thing or two about restraint" - Ali Mason

3. Best Coast - Crazy For You (Wichita)

64 points

Track - When The Sun Don't Shine

"Surf-rock, doo-wop and smirk-inducing dorky teenage lyrics are a fun mix, though they may not hint at longevity" - Rory Dollard

"Best Coast make that sort of breezy, lo-fi west-coast pop that I pretty much find it impossible not to like" - Ian Parker

"With the nursery rhyme lyrics of social media junkie Bethany Cosentino to the fore, elements of surf and sixties girl group chic are also thrown into the mix to produce a honey-sweet debut effort" - Dom Farrell

"Bethany Cosentino knows good love. Whether it’s for her cat, her boyfriend, or her weed, she’s either smitten or she’s smarting. And if you can tolerate those lyrical obsessions, you’re halfway to going crazy for Best Coast" - John Skilbeck

"Bethany Consentino sounds like a simple character – she’s heartbroken and she likes smoking weed, but nowhere on this record does she get boring" - Andy Welch

4. The Arcade Fire - The Suburbs (Mercury)

63 points

Track - Month of May

"The Suburbs is Arcade Fire's most varied effort to date, although the lack of a common thread over a sprawling 16 track collection is sometimes to its detriment" - Dom Farrell

"The Suburbs has a handful of tracks that still set the pulse racing and would be highlights of any Arcade Fire collection. Month of May still burns with a little of the old righteous fire, The Suburbs takes a stab at Kinks-ian pop and even Rococo manages to be irritatingly addictive" - Steve Pill

"If Arcade Fire’s career had gone in reverse, they’d probably be the best band in the world: you’d’ve been impressed by the ambition of their sprawling debut The Suburbs, you’d’ve noted the definite improvement and increased coherence of follow-up Neon Bible and seen The Funeral as a perfect, glorious realisation of their potential" - Ali Mason

"Yes, it’s about four songs too long. Yes, it’s got some filler. Yes, it’s not as good as Funeral. But when the tunes are this good who the hell cares?" - Guy Atkinson

"I admire the passion, the energy and thought that’s gone into this album. I admire that Arcade Fire show they’re keen to recognise the album as an art form as opposed to a mere collection of tracks. The marketing and execution was inspired (different album covers, a Google chrome video, interactive download). It could be a handful of tracks shorter, but it’s a grand folly of an album featuring my favourite closing track of the year" - Pranam Mahavalli

5. = LCD Soundsystem - This Is Happening (EMI)

61 points

Track - Home

"LCD Soundsystem make me pull shapes so obtuse they’d even be disowned by Ann Widdecombe. So while those who associate with me might be heartened to hear that this album could be LCD’s swansong, me and my malcoordinated limbs will miss them dearly" - Pranam Mahavalli

"Following Sound of Silver was never going to be an easy task and so it proves because only rarely does James Murphy touch upon those dizzying highs again. But when he does, he shows the countless imitators how this 'dance-punk-electro' shit is done" - Guy Atkinson

"This Is Happening apparently marks the end of James Murphy’s indie-dance monster. If so, it all goes down in a stunning blaze of glory. From Bowie to Byrne, the influences are all worn proudly on a vibrant sonic sleeve that is euphorically invigorating throughout" - Dom Farrell

"James Murphy is a guy who loves downbeat British music but comes from uber-cool New York, who frequently stumbles over his words but regularly finds genuine poetry, who loves dumb frat-rock but can’t play guitar, who fronts a hip dance band but whose age and waistband passed the mid-30s mark some time ago. The combined effect is by turns exhilarating, nostalgic, romantic, reckless and righteous" - Rory Dollard

= Anais Mitchell - Hadestown (Righteous Babe)

61 points

Track - Hey, Little Songbird

"The whole thing also works as a pin-sharp allegory of the financial crisis, with a sub-textual caution against isolationism in times of hardship - but I think that sounds a bit pretentious coming from my mouth. So here’s a cock joke. It is brilliant, though. The album, not the cock joke" - Rory Dollard

"At once huge, sprawling, almost boundless, and yet also delicate, almost reserved, Hadestown is a rich album of many layers" - Ian Parker

"Hadestown, Anais Mitchell’s folk opera transporting the Orpheus myth to depression-era America, is a truly impressive achievement. It boasts a variety of influences and styles - evoking speakeasies and jazz bars as well as the wild American outdoors - but coheres wonderfully, it’s allegorical without being preachy and it captivates from start to, well, almost finish" - Ali Mason

7. Foals - Total Life Forever (Warner)

58 points

Track - Total Life Forever

"Brimming with heart swelling tunes, introspective lyrics and typically spine-tingling denouements" - Guy Atkinson

"Like Bloc Party before them, some of the lyrics are cringeworthy, over earnest 6th Form nonsense on paper but they win you over through the sheer force of the band's collective attack, while cribbing from The Lemonheads showed they did have a sense of humour after all" - Steve Pill

"From opener Blue Blood onwards the arrangements are bold and the musicianship strong, while the high-energy songs positively bristle" - Rory Dollard

8. = Beach House - Teen Dream (Bella Union)

56 points

Track - Take Care

"It’s a little puzzling why Teen Dream put the Baltimore duo on the map to the extent it did. Perhaps the key lies in Norway, easily one of the best songs of 2010. Whatever the reason, Teen Dream is a magical album" - Andy Welch

"Beach House’s trade is a combo of one-setting synths, dreamy girl vocals and drum machines churning out chilled out beats, and it is beguiling" - Matt Collins

"I love this album as a whole and its combined effect as one long, occasionally mournful, dream sequence" - Rory Dollard

"Teen Dream, Beach House's third full-lengther but the first to have come to my attention, is a truly spellbinding piece of work" - Dom Farrell

= The Smoke Fairies - Through Low Light And Trees (V2)

56 points

Track - Morning Blues

"Seductive and bewitching, the Smoke Fairies create a world you can sink in to, that you may not have a choice but sink in to as their hypnotic compositions swirl about your ears. Don't fight it. Let yourself go" - Ian Parker

"It’s rural and eerie and lonely and, even when the country guitar kicks in on Strange Moon Rising, peculiarly British" - Ali Mason

"Drawing on the English folk tradition, reverb drenched guitars weave a beguiling pattern behind harmonies that are as haunting as they are beautiful" - Dom Farrell

10. Grinderman - Grinderman II (Mute)

54 points

Track - Evil

"There are no pretensions towards the poetry or piousness of the Bad Seeds so instead it’s guitars set to warp speed, rabid sexuality fit for the offenders’ register and Cave in his wild-eyed, scenery-chomping pomp" - Rory Dollard

"Ah, more high-kicking, finger-pointing, no-pussy, apocalypse-preaching blues from Cave and co. Noisy, funny and occasionally appalling – I found it a well-needed blast of high-octane fun" - Pranam Mahavalli

"Never has four randy old goats trying to relive their promiscuous youth sounded so triumphant, repulsive and down right sexy. His worm is not for taming" - Steve Pill

"Lean, primal and full of delicious insults, there are far too many highlights to list, but mocking an ex’s children sticks in my mind as particularly malicious" - Andy Welch

"When he sneers “you think you’re government will protect you, you are wrong” in Heathen Child, you find yourself marching, grizzled, right behind him" - Dom Farrell

- And that brings the 2010 Musical Advent Calendar to a close. Thanks for reading, and a Merry Christmas to all.

The Musical Advent Calendar - Door Number Twenty-Four

2010-12-24T10:05:00.002Z

And so we reach the promised land, the No. 1s, where we find that, after a good amount of pontificating, Ali eventually talks himself into liking his favourite album of the year...

Pranam Mahavalli

Caribou - Swim (Co-operative Music)

Track - Sun

I read somewhere that Dan Snaith set out to make an underwater dance record with this album. Well if that was his aim, then he’s executed it beautifully. An album that smuggles in some of the most gorgeous melodies I’ve heard this year and shows that electronic music can be just as emotive as that played on other instruments. Laibela is the standout track for me, but works much better in the context of the rest of the album. So here’s another album highlight – the rather unseasonal, but utterly glorious, Sun.

John Skilbeck

Allo Darlin’ - Allo Darlin’(Fortuna Pop)

Track - The Polaroid Song

It was on a rainy Cambridge day in August that I concluded it must be love. Sheltering in a convenient record shop, the soft voice of Elizabeth Morris poured through the speakers. I was soaked through, peeved the weather had ruined a day of sight-seeing, but all of a sudden calm descended over me. I might just have found a quiet corner and sung along a little. Just three weeks earlier I’d watched Allo Darlin' play a swoonsome late-evening set at Indietracks, since when I’d kept a distance from an album I had grown much too close to. But it was the unexpected chance meeting which confirmed I harboured more than a crush for this band. There’d been an instant attraction to the early EPs and then came the LP, its 10 hot-to-trot flirty pop songs which managed to live up to all expectations. Some might have found it as wet as that Cambridge day, the NME reckoned it sounded like “the Beautiful South playing for an early ‘90s Christian book fair”, and yes, sure, it was twee, but so was Tigermilk, and for me this belongs up there with that very great debut.

Steve Pill

Steve Mason - Boys Outside (Double Six Records)

Track - Am I Just A Man

I interviewed Steve Mason in 2006, a fortnight before the release of Black Gold, his first post-Beta Band solo album as King Biscuit Time. The following week, his record label revealed he was quitting music. Now, this might say something about my interviewing skills but in truth it was just one of many self-sabotaging acts, following on from his denouncing of the first Beta Band album and Mason's general struggles with depression and an apparent lack of confidence. Never in the history of pop music has one man damaged his own reputation on quite so many occasions and never has one man's sheer talent brought himself back into contention again and again. Stripped down by Richard X’s production and proud in his declarations of his own failings, this is every bit the equal of Three EPs. Even better, call it an electro-tinged Blood On The Tracks for the 21st century. It's that good.

Matt Collins

The National - High Violet (4AD)

Track - Anyone's Ghost

The National could release their shopping list rapped over a soundtrack of Elmo bashing his bin lids together and be hailed as the saviours of rock. Essentially, this is more classic National. They never really get out of third gear, but with songs as broodingly intense as Anyone's Ghost, Lemonworld or the epic England, who cares? The guitars are unique, the production prevents repeat listens being anything but repetitive and Matt Berninger’s baritone vocals bring the endlessly sexy brooding to indie.

Andy Welch

Laura Marling – I Speak Because I Can (Virgin)

Track – Rambling Man

After Laura Marling released Alas, I Cannot Swim, the general consensus seemed to be that it was a lovely album, but the real excitement lay in this outlandish talent’s potential, kind of ‘this is good, but she’s going to be GREAT.’ To fulfil that promise two short years later with I Speak Because I Can, rather than, say, four or five albums into a long career, is mind-blowing. I love everything about this album; the wider issues such as her transformation from delicate nu-folk flower to devastating, Greek-mythology-steeped heroine, to smaller nuances like the “We will keep you” refrains of Goodbye England that sound like the Bagpuss mice. Above all, as with that debut, and despite the Leonard Cohen-esque levels of gravitas on display, I love the idea that we still haven’t heard the peak of this incredible young lady’s talents.

Guy Atkinson

Deftones - Diamond Eyes (Warner Bros)

Track - Sextape

When considering that Diamond Eyes was set against the backdrop of bassist Chi Cheng's near-fatal car crash (he's still in a coma) it makes this even more jaw-droppingly stunning than it already is. Scrapping a full album's worth of material and starting again after the accident, this album is a triumphant 'fuck you' to all those who had written them off after 2006's Saturday Night Wrist, which JUST failed to live up to the ridiculous standards set by their first four albums. The atmosphere is as brooding and ethereal as ever and the riffs as crunching as you've come to expect from the band with the most distinctive guitar sound in metal. Long live Deftones.

Dom Farrell

The National - High Violet (4AD)

Track - Bloodbuzz Ohio

I really hate Q magazine. You see, I actually really used to like it. Then the television station happened. All objective journalism was placed on the back-burner so any old piece of tripe could be awarded three stars and the rubbish artist's corresponding video aired on the publication's sister channel. Then there's the sodding awards. This year they doled out "Idol", "Inspiration", "Hero" and "Icon" awards. The only solace I take in not being able distinguish between this shower of guff is the entirely pointless nature of the whole thing. Imagine my horror, when the very same awards proclaimed The National's High Violet as the best album of 2010. In darker moments, this has made me question the very point of my existence. Good thing that at such times I can simply stick High Violet on and immerse myself in all its sweeping, majestic, life-affirming grandeur. Tender but still forceful, downtrodden but also euphoric, it is an unrelenting triumph and sits proudly amid the lineage of sweeping blue collar rock that Americans tend to do so well, while we get stuck with The Enemy and some other such rubbish. Next year The National should be poised to received the "These Lot Are Really Proper Good and Stuff" award from Q.

Ian Parker

The Smoke Fairies - Through Low Light And Trees (V2)

Track - Summer Fades

Just think, I was actually worried about the Smoke Fairies' debut album. When I saw they'd chosen not to include a single track from any of their outstanding EPs (which I spent all of the year before this thing was released utterly addicted to), I figured it was going to be a let down. They'd take a different direction, and it wouldn't be as good. How could it be as good? But from the first time I heard the opening bars of Summer Fades, I was in love. Seductive and bewitching, the Smoke Fairies create a world you can sink in to, that you may not have a choice but sink in to as their hypnotic compositions swirl about your ears. Don't fight it. Let yourself go.

Rory Dollard

Anais Mitchell – Hadestown (Righteous Babe)

Track - Way Down Hadestown

I’m not going to pretend this is an easy sell, but here goes. Hadestown is a concept album based on the ancient Greek Orpheus myth, relocated to a post-apocalyptic America and told in the form of a ‘folk opera’. It is also, perhaps improbably, the boldest, brightest and best realised album of 2010. Anais Mitchell has crafted the story expertly, honing a welter of cracking songs and set-pieces and balancing them off beautifully against the narrative demands of simply telling the story. The cast list who’ve signed up to play parts – Bon Iver, Ani DiFranco, Ben Knox of the Low Anthem among them – are testament to the calibre of the songs, while the musicians move effortlessly between genres. The whole thing also works as a pin-sharp allegory of the financial crisis, with a sub-textual caution against isolationism in times of hardship - but I think that sounds a bit pretentious coming from my mouth. So here’s a cock joke. It is brilliant, though. The album, not the cock joke.

Ali Mason

Avi Buffalo – Avi Buffalo (Sub Pop)

Track - Summer Cum

I’m not going to claim Avi Buffalo was the best album released this year - it probably wasn’t. I’m not even 100% sure it was my favourite. But it was the only one which evoked in me a palpable sense of excitement. It’s sunny and breezy and serious and weird, but mostly it just pulses with youthful energy. Try to ignore the fact that frontman Avigdor Zahner-Isenberg has given two of the most infectious songs of the year, Five Little Sluts and Summer Cum, two of the most unfortunate names and just let the sunny, fuzzy soundscapes wash over you. Even Remember Last Time, which, clocking in at seven and a half minutes, is pure youthful self-indulgence, sounds tremendous. In fact the more I think about, the more I think this really was the best album released this year.

- And there we go. Don't forget, tomorrow, we'll be revealing the overall top 10, based on an elaborate* scoring system that tallies up the all the panel's votes.

*Not remotely elaborate.

The Musical Advent Calendar - A Quick Recap

2010-12-24T10:01:00.007Z

Yep, we made it. Or almost, anyhow. Join us tomorrow for our overall top 10, but in the meantime, here's a quick recap of all the top 24s so you can mock those that missed off the essentials, and congratulate those who threw in the hidden gems.

Pranam Mahavalli
1. Caribou – Swim (City Slang)
2. Arcade Fire – The Suburbs (Mercury)
3. Deerhunter – Halcyon Digest (4AD)
4. Gonjasufi – A Sufi And A Killer (Warp)
5. Vampire Weekend – Contra (XL Recordings)
6. Bob Dylan – Bootleg Series Volume 8: The Witmark Demos 1962-64
7. LCD Soundsystem – This Is Happening (EMI)
8. Joanna Newsom – Have One On Me (Drag City)
9. Gorillaz – Plastic Beach (Parlaphone)
10. Phantom Band – The None of One (Chemikal Underground)
11. Flying Lotus – Pattern And Grid World (Warp)
12. Medicine Show 1 – Ode To The Ghetto (2010 Now Again Records)
13. Warpaint – The Fool (Rough Trade)
14. Neil Young – Le Noise (Reprise)
15. Huun Huur Tu – Ancestor's Call (World Village)
16. Charanjit Singh - Ten Ragas To A Disco Beat (Bombay Connection)
17. Liars – Sisterworld (Mute)
18. Janelle Monae – The Archandroid (Atlantic)
19. Ariel Pink's Haunted Graffiti – Before Today (4AD)
20. Tame Impala – Innerspeaker (Republic of Music)
21. Grinderman – Grinderman II (Mute)
22. Ali Farke Toure – Ali and Toumani (World Circuit)
23. Konono No.1 – Assume Crash Position (Crammed Discs)
24. John Adams - I Am love OSM (Nonesuch)

John Skilbeck
1. Allo Darlin’ - Allo Darlin’ (Fortuna Pop)
2. This Many Boyfriends - Getting A Life With EP (The Sheffield Phonographic Corporation)
3. Best Coast - Crazy for You (Wichita)
4. Shrag - Life! Death! Prizes! (Where It's At Is Where You Are)
5. The School - Loveless Unbeliever (Elefant Records)
6. Sleigh Bells - Treats (Mom & Pop Music)
7. Lucky Soul - A Coming of Age (Ruffa Lane)
8. Neverever - Angelic Swells (Slumberland Records)
9. Summer Camp - Young EP (Moshi Moshi)
10. Quasi - American Gong (Domino)
11. Male Bonding - Nothing Hurts (Sub Pop)
12. Nina Nastasia - Outlaster (FatCat Records)
13. Warpaint - The Fool (Rough Trade)
14. MGMT - Congratulations (Columbia)
15. Black Mountain - Wilderness Heart (Jagjaguwar)
16. Betty & The Werewolves - Tea Time Favourites (Damaged Goods)
17. Standard Fare - The Noyelle Beat (Melodic)
18. Marnie Stern - Marnie Stern (Souterrain Transmissions)
19. The Corin Tucker Band - 1,000 Years (Kill Rock Stars)
20. Robyn - Body Talk pt 1 (Island)
21. Dum Dum Girls - I Will Be (Sub Pop)
22. Rose Elinor Dougall - Without Why (Memphis Industries)
23. She & Him - Volume Two (Double Six Records)
24. Shonen Knife - Fun! Fun! Fun! (Tomato Head)

Steve Pill
1. Steve Mason - Boys Outside (Double Six)
2. Caribou - Swim (City Slang)
3. The Foals - Total Life Forever (Warner)
4. National - High Violet (4AD)
5. Yeasayer - Odd Blood (Mute)
6. Washed Out - Life of Leisure (Mexican Summer)
7. !!! - Strange Weather, Isn't It? (Warp)
8. Houses - All Night (Lefse Records)
9. Julian Lynch - Mare (Olde English Spelling Bee)
10. The War On Drugs - Future Weather (Secretly Canadian)
11. How To Dress Well - Love Remains (Lefse)
12. Aloe Blacc - Good Things (Epic)
13. The Album Leaf - A Chorus of Storytellers (Sub Pop)
14. Hot Chip - One Life Stand (EMI)
15. Four Tet - There Is Love In You (Domino)
16. Morning Benders - Big Echo (Rough Trade)
17. Toro Y Moi - Causers Of This (Carpark)
18. Arcade Fire - The Suburbs (Mercury)
19. Broken Social Scene - Forgiveness Rock Record (City Slang)
20. Grinderman - Grinderman II (Mute)
21. Walls - Walls (Kompakt)
22. The Walkmen - Lisbon (Bella Union)
23. Maximum Balloon - Maximum Balloon (Polydor)
24. I Am Kloot - Sky At Night (Shepherd Moon)

Matt Collins
1. The National - High Violet (4AD)
2. The Climbers - The Good Ship (Willkommen Records)
3. I Am Kloot - Sky At Night (Shepherd Moon)
4. Larsen B - Musketeer (Old Radio Tunes)
5. Rufus Wainwright - All Days Are Nights (Songs For Lulu) (Polydor)
6. Jonsi - Go (EMI)
7. First Aid Kit - The Big Black And The Blue (Wichita)
8. The Acorn - No Ghost (Co-operative Music)
9. The Miserable Rich - Of Flight & Fury (Humble Soul)
10. Frightened Rabbit - The Winter of Mixed Drinks (Fat Cat Records)
11. Anna Kashfi - Survival (Little Red Rabbit)
12. Beach House - Teen Dream (Bella Union)
13. Gorillaz - Plastic Beach (Parlaphone)
14. Broken Social Scene - Forgiveness Rock Record (City Slang)
15. James Yuill - Movement In A Storm (Co-operative Music)
16. Kathryn Williams - The Quickening (One Little Indian)
17. Paul Weller - Wake Up The Nation (Island)
18. Caitlin Rose - Own Side Now (Names Records)
19. Tired Pony - The Place We Ran From (Fiction)
20. Sea of Bees - Song For The Ravens (Crossbill Records)
21. Lone Wolf - The Devil And I (Bella Union)
22. Band of Horses - Infinite Arms (Columbia)
23. Allo Darlin' - Allo Darlin' (Fortuna Pop)
24. The Mystery Jets - Serotonin (Rough Trade)

Andy Welch
1. Laura Marling – I Speak Because I Can (EMI)
2. Janelle Monae – Archandroid (Atlantic)
3. Best Coast – Crazy For You (Wichita)
4. The Coral – Butterfly House (Deltasonic)
5. Warpaint – Exquisite Corpse (Manimal Vinyl)
6. Paul Weller – Wake Up The Nation (Island)
7. Tame Impala – Innerspeaker (Republic Of Music)
8. Grinderman – Grinderman 2 (Mute)
9. Flying Lotus – Cosmogramma (Warp)
10. Rose Elinor Dougall – Without Why (Memphis Industries)
11. Manic Street Preachers – Postcards From A Young Man (Columbia)
12. Laura Veirs – July Flame (Bella Union)
13. Gorillaz – Plastic Beach (EMI)
14. Stornoway – Beachcomber’s Windowsill (4AD)
15. Darwin Deez – Darwin Deez (Lucky Number)
16. Gold Panda – Lucky Shiner (Notown)
17. Sarah Blasko – As Day Follows Night (Dramatico)
18. Belle & Sebastian – Write About Love (Rough Trade)
19. Band Of Horses – Infinite Arms (Columbia)
20. Goldheart Assembly – Wolves & Thieves (Fierce Panda)
21. First Aid Kit – The Big Black And Blue (Wichita)
22. Beach House – Teen Dream (Bella Union)
23. Toro Y Moi – Causers Of This (Carpark)
24. Tracey Thorn – Love And Its Opposite (Strange Feeling)

Guy Atkinson
1. Deftones - Diamond Eyes (Warner Bros)
2. Pulled Apart By Horses - Pulled Apart By Horses (Transgressive)
3. The National - High Violet (4AD)
4. Foals - Total life Forever (Warner Bros)
5. Arcade Fire - The Suburbs (Mercury)
6. Circa Survive - Blue Sky Noise (Atlantic)
7. Against Me! - White Crosses (Sire)
8. Blood Red Shoes - Fire Like This (V2)
9. The Hold Steady - Heaven is Whenever (Rough Trade)
10. The Gaslight Anthem - American Slang (Side One Dummy)
11. Alkaline Trio - This Addiction (Hassle)
12. Los Campesinos - Romance is Boring (Polydor)
13. 65daysofstatic - We Were Exploding Anyway (Hassle)
14. Your Demise - The Kids We Used To Be (Visible Noise)
15. Yeasayer - Odd Blood (Mute)
16. LCD Soundsystem - This Is Happening (EMI)
17. Les Savy Fav - Root For Ruin (Wichita)
18. Tokyo Police Club - Champ (Memphis Industries)
19. Crystal Castles - Crystal Castles II (Polydor)
20. Broken Social Scene - Forgiveness Rock Record (City Slang)
21. Errors - Come Down With Me (Rock Action)
22. Sky Larkin - Kaleide (Polydor)
23. Interpol - Interpol (Soft Limit)
24. Jonsi - Go (Parlophone)

Dom Farrell
1. The National - High Violet (4AD)
2. Dangermouse & Sparklehorse - Dark Night of the Soul (Parlaphone)
3. Laura Marling - I Speak Because I Can (Virgin)
4. Beach House - Teen Dream (Bella Union)
5. The Smoke Fairies - Through Low Light And Trees (V2)
6. The Coral - Butterfly House (Deltasonic)
7. Neil Young - Le Noise (Reprise)
8. Grinderman - Grinderman II (Mute)
9. Massive Attack - Heligoland (Virgin)
10. The Morning Benders - Big Echo (Rough Trade)
11. LCD Soundsystem - This Is Happening (EMI)
12. Gorillaz - Plastic Beach (Parlaphone)
13. The Family Band - Miller Path (Family Band)
14. Broken Bells - Broken Bells (Columbia)
15. The Chemical Brothers - Further (Parlaphone)
16. The Dead Weather - Sea of Cowards (Third Man Records)
17. Black Rebel Motorcycle Club - Beat The Devil's Tattoo (V2)
18. Dum Dum Girls - I Will Be (Sub Pop)
19. The Strange Death of Liberal England - Drown Your Heart Again (The Strange Death of Liberal England)
20. The Arcade Fire - The Suburbs (Mercury)
21. Paul Weller - Wake Up The Nation (Island)
22. Belle & Sebastian - Write About Love (Rough Trade)
23. Best Coast - Crazy For You (Wichita)
24. I Am Kloot - Sky At Night (Shepherd Moon)

Ian Parker
1. Smoke Fairies - Through Low Light And Trees (V2)
2. The Mynabirds - What We Lost In The Fire We Gain In The Flood (Saddle Creek)
3. Laura Marling - I Speak Because I Can (Virgin)
4. Admiral Fallow - Boots Met My Face (Lo-Five)
5. The National - High Violet (4AD)
6. The Dead Weather - Sea of Cowards (Third Man Records)
7. Dylan LeBlanc - Pauper's Field (Lost Highway)
8. Anais Mitchell - Hadestown (Righteous Babe)
9. Karen Elson - The Ghost Who Walks (Third Man Records)
10. Mary Gauthier - The Foundling (Proper)
11. The Duke & The King - Long Live The Duke & The King (Silva Oak)
12. Best Coast - Crazy For You (Wichita)
13. Warpaint - The Fool (Rough Trade)
14. Caitlin Rose - Own Side Now (Names Records)
15. Johnny Flynn - Been Listening (Transgressive)
16. The Dave Rawlings Machine - A Friend of A Friend (Acony)
17. Allo Darlin' - Allo' Darlin' (Fortuna Pop)
18. She & Him - Volume Two (Double Six)
19. Frazey Ford - Obidah (Nettwerk)
20. Neil Young - Le Noise (Reprise)
21. Titus Andronicus - The Monitor (Merok)
22. Chief - Modern Rituals (Domino)
23. Pete Molinari - A Train Bound For Glory (Clarksville)
24. Dan Michaelson & The Coastguards - Shakes (Editions)

Rory Dollard
1. Anais Mitchell - Hadestown (Righteous Babe)
2. Joanna Newsom – Have One On Me (Drag City)
3. Bruce Springsteen – The Promise (Columbia)
4. The National – High Violet (4AD)
5. LCD Soundsystem – This is Happening (EMI)
6. Beach House – Teen Dream (Bella Union)
7. She and Him – Volume Two (Double Six)
8. Massive Attack - Heligloland (Virgin)
9. Jenny and Johnny – I’m Having Fun Now (Warner)
10. Foals – Total Life Forever (Warner Bros)
11. Tunng - ...And Then We Saw Land (Full Time Hobby)
12. Dylan LeBlanc – Paupers Field (Rough Trade)
13. Tallest Man on Earth – The Wild Hunt (Dead Oceans)
14. Grinderman – Grinderman II (Mute)
15. Tricky – Mixed Race (Domino)
16. Gold Panda – Lucky Shiner (Notown)
17. The Roots – How I Got Over (Def Jam)
18. Janelle Monae – The Archandroid (Bad Boy)
19. Chemical Brothers – Further (Virgin)
20. Best Coast – Crazy For You (Wichita)
21. Black Keys – Brothers (V2)
22. Meursault – All Creatures Will Make Merry (Song, By Toad)
23. Big Boi – Sir Lucious Leftfoot Son of Chico Dusty (Def Jam)
24. Bonnie “Prince” Billy and the Cairo Gang – The Wonder Show of the World (Domino)

Ali Mason
1. Avi Buffalo – Avi Buffalo (Sub Pop)
2. She & Him – Volume Two (Double Six)
3. Laura Marling – I Speak Because I Can (Virgin)
4. Mountain Man – Made The Harbor (Bella Union)
5. Anais Mitchell – Hadestown (Righteous Babe)
6. Peggy Sue – Fossils And Other Phantoms (Wichita)
7. The National – High Violet (4AD)
8. Fyfe Dangerfield – Fly Yellow Moon (Polydor)
9. Warpaint – The Fool (Rough Trade)
10. Sleigh Bells – Treats (Columbia)
11. Sky Larkin – Kaleide (Wichita)
12. Bombay Bicycle Club – Flaws (Island)
13. Smoke Fairies – Through Low Light And Trees (V2 Coop)
14. Kate Nash – My Best Friend Is You (Polydor)
15. Broken Records – Let Me Come Home (4AD)
16. Broadcast 2000 – Broadcast 2000 (Groenland)
17. Arcade Fire – The Suburbs (Mercury)
18. Caitlin Rose – Dead Flowers (Names)
19. Los Campesinos! – Romance Is Boring (Wichita)
20. Pearly Gate Music – Pearly Gate Music (Bella Union)
21. Dark Night Of The Soul (Parlophone)
22. Eliza Doolittle – Eliza Doolittle (Parlophone)
23. Belle & Sebastian – Write About Love (Rough Trade)
24. Curl up with a cup of tea and a good book