You might not believe me, given how much Lana Del Rey’s ubiquity began to irritate me towards the end of last year, but I was actually rather hoping I would like this.

You see, when people get an almighty slagging I automatically end up pulling for them a little even if, as in this case, that kind of means pulling against myself.  And to be fair, Del Rey has received some almighty slaggings both from anyone with any sense at all as well as, a little less enjoyably, from quite a few people with none.  I don’t mind people disliking almost anything about her, or indeed saying so, but some of it has been pretty cruel and delivered in pretty significant quantities.

So there was a part of me who sort of hoped this might end up being really good, just to stick two fingers up to everyone who had been slagging her off.  Yes, including me.

It’s not though, it’s really, really bad.  In fact it looks an awful lot like her label decided to capitalise on her sudden surge in fame and get the damn thing out as soon as possible before it went away.  They have displayed a total lack of confidence in her ability, in other words.  Apart from the timing, what suggests this might be the case is the utterly one-dimensional pop by numbers production applied to most of these tunes.

The singles – the songs which were ready and planned for – have a distinct and well-executed style to them.  The Lana Del Rey Show may have pissed me off, but I will quite happily confess to thinking those are both pretty good pop songs, delivered with character and style.  Listening to the album, they are pretty much the only ones with this kind of fully-developed character to them.

She described herself, I believe, as a gangster Nancy Sinatra, and Blue Jeans and Video Games bear that out quite well.  They manage an odd combination of sultry and vulnerable.  Now, they may also display the rather more worryingly submissive side of her caricature – the side which seems to imply no self-esteem whatsoever – but the retro-fetishist crooner mixed with the pouty sex kitten and obedient, doe-eyed girl next door was a definite and coherent image, both for her and for her music.  It annoyed me personally, but in a crucial way it worked; it was pretty well-developed and people bought into it.

That style has either been abandoned for the rest of the album, or the production team simply didn’t have the time or the courage to work it out properly.  So presumably either through a lack of time, or in a desperate play to capture the absolute maximum proportion of the mainstream market while they had the chance, she and her label have delivered a colossally tedious record of mid-level, by the numbers pop dross of the sort similar dead behind the eyes, scrabbling ingenues sing karaoke alongside on the X-Factor.

National Anthem might be one of the worst songs I’ve subjected myself to in a long time. It’s a bit depressing actually, I kind of like being proved wrong, and I thought she had a chance of doing just that.  But whether she was always a mainstream pop act who accidentally crossed over into something more interesting with a couple of songs, or whether she never really had any talent to begin with, just a desperate craving to be famous, this is still a flaccid travesty of an album.

If they had retained the courage of their convictions and released an album true to the original style of the wounded barroom seductress then this might conceivably have ended up being interesting. It might have even ended with me eating my words.  As it is it is so utterly middle of the road I can’t even hate it – it would seem cruel to hate something this crap.  What it does though is demonstrate decisively that we never need to mention Lana Del Rey ever again and can safely put this tawdry little episode in our collective musical history behind us once and for all.

Lana Del Rey – Blue Jeans

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Lana Del Rey – National Anthem

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 With one EP already to their name, out for free on Glasgow’s brilliant Wiseblood Industries, this is the debut album proper by Now Wakes the Sea.  Contrary to what their name might hint at, they aren’t a nasty emo band, in fact a wonderfully muffled, slow-moving lot.

Most bands who use these atmospheric, lo-fi productions methods do so to produce music which is raw and aggressive, daring you to tease the tune out of the static if you have the stamina.  Now Wakes the Sea, on the other hand, for all they have a couple of upbeat guitar pop numbers like the brilliant Seven Apples, use the muffled fuzz of the recording to create a gorgeously intimate feeling around their slow, pained songs.  It feels like a fireside confessional half the time, but the occasional bursts into full band beef and drifts into what borders on whimsy with songs like Subside make sure you don’t just get drowned in swamp of self-examination.

If the barely-structured ambient daze of The Fire on Hold pulls Fluoxetine Morning in one direction, and Seven Apples pulls it in another, what these songs chiefly serve to do is bookend the emotional range of the album.  Fluoxetine is an anti-depressant, and those two songs seem to express the barely-conscious narcotic daze at one end of the spectrum, and the bursts of determination at the other end, but it treats them like struggling insects who will never escape the spider’s web – one still fighting to get out, and the other on the very cusp of giving up altogether.

I think a couple of things make this stand out for me.  Firstly, on a purely technical level, the acoustic guitar, brief glimmers of noise and occasional use of things like drums cut through the fug of the downbeat, muffled body of the instrumentation, meaning this is a long way from just being a depressing dirge of an album, and never feels one-paced.

Then, in terms of emotional connection, there is something about the vocal delivery which is absolutely gorgeous.  It’s slow, barely even a singing voice half the time, and delivered with near perfect ambiguity between confidence and indifference.  It’s not an intimidated, halting delivery, but at the same time it doesn’t seem to presume that you give a shit. The depression hinted at in both the album and the song titles, whilst it seems present throughout the record, doesn’t feel like something which drags it down.

So, treading a lot of very fine lines indeed, this has ended up being an absolutely fantastic record.  For all the noise and ambience employed, it is still an album defined by its songs, and for all the morose themes explored it still feels like an album defined warmth and caring, and by its relationship with others, rather than just itself.

Now Wakes the Sea – Propranolol

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Now Wakes the Sea – Seven Apples

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 Hmmm, reading the email I was sent by Shift-Static, there is a definite emphasis on their Edinburgh associations which seems entirely absent from any of their other PR material.  So if they were trying to prey upon my nepotistic instincts then they, erm, probably had a point actually.

It’s hard to resist the idea that somewhere round the corner from you there exists a collection of talented fuckers making amazing music entirely out of the view of the world’s music chatterati, so despite the fact that this lot are clearly far more from Newcastle than they are from Edinburgh, I will confess I felt just that little bit more curious when opening this email than when opening many others.  Not least it’s unusual to hear about a band from Edinburgh who no-one’s told me about already.  Even if *cough* they’re really from Newcastle.

The other thing this lot have managed, which is really rather funny, is to make a total hypocrisy of my recent post descrying remixes. I know I joke about it, but this is where the local nepotism possibly did come into play after all.  Generally, finding sentences like ‘here is our amazing song and here is a remix of it’ sends me straight to the delete button, but in this case the combination of Shift-Static being a local band, of the email being nicely worded and the remix being attributed to Waskerley Way, who are a band I know and like, meant that I felt I really should listen.

And if they are reading, the poor fuckers in Shift-Static are probably wondering why I’ve got to the fourth paragraph of a writeup of their music without mentioning the slightest thing about it.  I apologise for this, but I suppose I just wanted to give you some sort of impression of what surfing my inbox every day is actually like.  Things get deleted so fast that even I myself am fascinated by what it is that nudges me to listen more closely to something.

Anyhow, now that I have (apologies to the band) finally got round to discussing the music, it’s not a thousand mile away from the LeThug stuff I wrote about last week.  It’s definitely electronic pop music, although there is perhaps a little more shimmering than shoegaze going on here.  In fact, for all Il-1 is glitchy and uncertain, by the time the second song – Thanks, Thugs -  kicks in, we are into the kind of territory which Goldfrapp and The Pet Shop Boys managed to straddle so successfully: that particular kind of electronic music which, whilst I assume it will please its core audience of electronic pop fans, will also thrill conservative and relatively narrow-minded indie kids like myself.

The remix mention came about because the band themselves highlighted both the original version of Sky Burial as well as the aforementioned remix of the same song, both of which take centre stage here as a one-two in the middle of the EP.

I’ll admit that the clean, clear female vocal delivery of the original, for all it is lovely, strays a little too far into the polished pop world for my own personal taste.  Not that far, because I still really like the song, but perhaps a little further than anything I am likely to end up truly loving.

The Waskerley Way remix, however, for all it doesn’t do much, just seems to add both enough haze and enough heft to get me to really love what really is a simple, excellent song.  By this point Saint Etienne are strongly evoked, or possibly even the briefly incredible Dubstar, and I find myself looking back wistfully to that period in the mid-nineties when I first started to explore electronic music.  This has a lot in common with a lot of the things I first took a chance on when trying to expand my listening palette from indie to broader sounds, back when I was a teenager.  Yes, it was that long ago.  Fuck off.

So whether they’re from Newcastle or Edinburgh, whether you’d call them electro-pop (shudder) or alternative-indie-elec.. oh alright, I’ll stop now.  Whatever you reckon this stuff is, it’s very, very good.  When the band got in touch their only sales patter was “I really think its in your ballpark”.  And they were right, it really is.

Shift-Static – Sky Burial (Waskerley Way Remix)

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Ben Shaw told me about this album when he played up here last August.  He seemed simultaneously hesitant and excited about it, telling me that is was much more layered with noise that his previous EP.

I think he was a little nervous about how people would react to it, and in general I think Shaw's relationship with how people react to his music is a funny one.

However much I enjoyed his performance, there was nothing I could say which would persuade him that he wasn't shit.  And when he introduced 10,000 Sentinels he awkwardly added that it was a 'crowd pleaser' in a way that implied that he had difficulty actually believing people who get excited about his stuff. It's not that I think he wants to be disliked of course, but I do get the impression that if there is one side of the artistic deal with the audience that most discomfits him it is the tacit courting of praise.

Consequently, the noise he mentioned seems more a product of this kind of awkwardness rather than a particular stylistic contrivance, which means that for all there are times when it isn't all that pretty to listen to, it is never as jarring or intrusive as this kind of thing can be.  In fact it fits as naturally and comfortably into the music as the acoustic guitar and piano with which you might more normally associate this kind of internal monologue.

And that seems to be pretty much what this album is: a sort of stumbling, but insistent internal monologue - a sort of stream of consciousness, mixed with a large element of both mea culpa and self-administered pep talk. It's music you have to meet halfway, for sure, and won't just grab you and announce itself unless you yourself make the first steps, but it is an utterly gorgeous record if you pay it some time.

Creaking doors and scraped forks, and self-analytical subject matter could make for something rather uncomfortable, or potentially self-indulgent, but the music is so slow and understated that you feel more lulled into it than forced.  The gentle delivery also diffuses any real sense of self-indulgence, as Shaw seems more weary than angst-ridden, and doesn't sing as if he requires your exculpation. It feels more like a post-catharsis album than one which in and of itself is required to free the singer from anything in particular, and that makes it warm, approachable and a really lovely listen.

Benjamin Shaw - How to Test the Depth of a Well

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 Hmm, well I haven’t heard much music like this being made in Scotland I don’t think – well, not that I’ve liked particularly – but LeThug are really rather good.

They tag themselves as drone on their Soundcloud page, and the sound is dominated by a thrumming, rhythmic buzz, but there are strong elements of experimental electronic pop in here as well, a lot of it is heavily dependent on instrumental textures and it’s almost dancey in places.  Almost.

In Your Head Be It, the EP they have up on Soundcloud, starts with Down, full of quite abrasively glitchy clicks and squeaks.  For someone with my particular taste in music – someone who dabbles in this kind of stuff, but isn’t really particularly familiar with or knowledgeable about it – I was wavering a little at the beginning, I have to confess.

Once that song slowly fitted into context as it gave way to the much more shoegazey Lux I settled a little.  ClydeCoastBeachPlace which follows is altogether more dreamy and ambient, and helps mark out the boundaries of what is an impressively varied EP, particularly considering that there is little sign this is anything other than a series of demos.

In some ways this is like a heavier, denser cousin of the Japanese War Effort, more akin to something like Seefeel perhaps.  It’s hard to get an emotional handle on, given that the lyrics are always so buried you really can’t make out a bloody thing.  Musically though, there is a lot, and the emotional pitch of the music itself drifts from comfort to anxiety, with the latter particularly embodied in the relentless paranoia of 3rd Lanark (a song title of which I think the aforementioned Japanese War Effort would approve greatly).

Most of the songs are available for free download from Soundcloud, and presumably also from the widget below, and I strongly recommend getting hold of them.  I know nothing about this band at all, and their introductory email was cursory to say the least, but this is really, really good.

 Well, after last year’s obsession with rough and ready lo-fi garage rock, this year* has already thrown up two excellent Scottish releases which, whilst they share a lot of the lo-fi aesthetic, are very much more morose, downbeat affairs.

The first of those I’m going to be discussing is Smackvan, who formerly released with the excellent but now sadly defunct Benbecula Records.

I’ve not been particularly prompt about reviewing this album, I have to confess, but that shouldn’t be mistaken for a lack of enthusiasm.  It may be downbeat and low key, but even at the first listen I really enjoyed this album.

It sounds very much like a bedroom recording, but then again it’s a bedroom sound delivered in the style of a late night conversation, so the production really.  It does drift intriguingly though, with the lo-fi growly guitars and rattly drums being superseded at times by something smoother.  It’s almost as if the late night conversation I mentioned had moved from sharing a couple of cans in a bedsit to sharing a whisky in a dark Victorian living room. This contrast shows up most noticeably in the development from awkward opener 4am to the lush and lovely Black Eyes.

It’s an odd stylistic shift, and one you don’t see too often, but it works very well.  On an emotional level it seems to imply that the feelings being expressed are well-contained, resigned on some occasions and raw and bitter on others, which seems to fit well with the emotional range of the songs themselves.

For an album like this the challenge always seems to be to retain the attention for the full length of the record, but this is relatively short and the aforementioned shifts in mood, as well as timely interruptions by the likes of the wonderful instrumental song Cello keep my attention comfortably. I know people like me taking ages to review it is partly to blame, but as Scottish releases and Scottish bands go Smackvan and Sound in Space seem to really be quite criminally underrated by the musically inclined population around here.

Smackvan – 4am

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Smackvan – Black Eyes

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*Time of writing, not time of release, obviously!

01.Easter – Somethin’ American This might be the first time such an unknown song by such an unknown band has ever been given top spot on any of my end of year lists, but they were absolutely brilliant live when they played up here in September, and this song is just fantastic, as are the other two songs on their Soundcloud page.  It’s less lo-fi than a lot of the DIY stuff I’ve listened to this year, and the squalling solos which tease Easter’s songs to an end evoke loads of old school US indie music.  This gives quite tight pop songs a loose, expressive, emotive finale and when they get going live these bits really are amazing.

02.Crystal Swells – Patent Trolls This is another absolute peach of a song which went straight from a PR email to the very front of my brain for the entire year.  I had this on tape in the van for months, and I go back to it again and again.  This one is probably more menacing, compared to the reckless pace of the rest of the album, but that opening riff and the crescendo to which the song builds are just absolutely fucking blinding.

03.Ringo Deathstarr – Do It Every Time Alright, this is the highest-placed pure pop song on this list.  A simple guitar rhythm and a simple tune, delivered with plenty of pace and energy.  This is one to leap around to, pure and simple, and just about the best one of its kind this year.

04.The Low Anthem – Boeing 737 I played this on the podcast last week and struggled to introduce it then, as I probably will now. Firstly, I have hardly heard anyone sing anything about the twin towers attacks without sounding just a little bit forced and uncomfortable when doing so, but this manages it with some aplomb.  And then to have that kind of subject matter twinned with such and incredibly rousing song is an odd and absolutely brilliant juxtaposition.

05.Earth Girl Helen Brown – Hit After Hit This was one of those ‘what the fuck am I even listening to?’ moments, the first time I heard it. It’s old fashioned music, what I can only really describe in my cultural ignorance as soda-stream pop, and it’s not that unusual exactly, there’s just something weird about it.  It’s a bit unsettling, a bit out of focus somehow, and at the same time absolutely brilliant.

06.Josh T Pearson – Thou Art Loosed The solo album may not hark back to Lift to Experience all that much, but this song, the first on the album, seems to have just enough of that shimmering texture to link the two eras of Josh T. Pearson’s music together.  And that repeated “I’m off to save the world” seems to rather sadly presage the tales of personal failure which make this album so uncomfortably compelling.

08.Weird Era – Garage Honeymoon A muffled, growly mess, but it’s got such momentum and drive that I can’t stop listening to it.  It’s rough, muffled, growly shoegazey guitar stuff with a great riff.

07.Jonnie Common – Photosynth Alright, it’s possible I might have included this when it was a Down the Tiny Steps song, so including it again seems like a bit of a cheat.  Doesn’t matter though, this is pop brilliance.  And the video was shot in our back garden too!

09.Timber Timbre – Woman Is that seriously a sax on there?  Why yes, yes indeed it is, and it’s brilliant.  This is one of the biggest songs on the album and one of the most surprising too, given the relatively extravagant instrumentation.

10.Milk Maid – Back Of Your Knees I am absolutely delighted with the band’s Toad Session recordings, not least because I was so apprehensive about the actual recording process.  This might be my album highlight, as much for its more raucous live incarnation as this excellent version.

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11.David Thomas Broughton – Ain’t Got No Sole The first song we heard from DTB’s fantastic album, and perhaps the poppiest of the lot.  Catchy, unusual and immensely hummable.

12.Kurt Vile – Baby’s Arms Another album from which it is tricky to extricate just one song as a highlight, but for some reason I’m giving this the nod above Jesus Fever or Puppet to the Man. I think it’s the most late night and glass of red winey song on the album, but it’s close.

13.The Sandwitches – Lightfoot Are you still allowed to describe songs as joyous romps these days?  Because that’s what this feels like, an idiosyncratic, gleeful romp of a song.

14.Josh T Pearson – Country Dumb It’s hard to pick out just one song from this record, but this one seems to stand out for some reason.  Maybe it’s related to the number of times I’ve heard it and the circumstances, but there’s an unsettling fatalism to this which lifts it above the autobiographical confessional of the rest of the album.

15.John Knox Sex Club – Above Us the Waves This kind of sincere, epic grandiosity is really difficult to pull off without coming across as a bit po-faced or joyless, but this is just spell-binding.

16.Jonnie Common – Summer Is For Going Places There are so many incredible songs on this Jonnie Common album I could easily have picked four or five for the Festive Fifty, but I didn’t want the whole thing to be dominated by one or two artists.  Summer is For Going Places is as laid back and infectious as the rest of Master of None.

17.Crystal Swells – Mellow Californian Another masterpiece of feral, overloaded lo-fi brilliance.  And no matter how messy they make this stuff, Crystal Swells always make sure the pop song isn’t lost, so it may not sound like it, but I reckon they know exactly what they’re doing.

18.Yoofs – John Actor is Monkfish I love the chorus on this, the vocal refrain, how well-controlled the momentum of the song is – and once again we have an unknown DIY band with two songs in my Festive Fifty.  Keep an eye on Art is Hard Records in the new year.

19.Hookworms – Teen Dreams For unheard of DIY bands to produce stuff with this much oomph is unusual.  This is from a self-titled 12″ now out on Faux Discx, and it’s, well, epic, I suppose is the best way to describe it.

20.Easter – Damp Patch For a band with three songs on a Soundcloud page and nothing else, I am a bit wary of over-stating my own enthusiasm for this band.  They have a sort of slow-burn to them, but then that spills over into raucous endings, a bit proggy, a bit krauty and all messy.  This track isn’t their most aggressive, but it’s bloody great.

21.Edinburgh School for the Deaf – Of Scottish Blood And Sympathies Epic, post-rocky, shoegazey awesomeness from a band who threw their biggest beast of a track down right at the very beginning of their debut album.

22.Earth Girl Helen Brown – Girls of My Dreams The weird sense of otherworldly fuzz on this record made it absolutely compelling from the first listen.  It’s like listening to a lost gem from the sixties with a brain so addled you can barely make out the stereo.

23.Jarad Miles – Miles Away Rocketship is a lovely record, and there are some gorgeous, touching songs on it, but perhaps the quietest, most low-key one of the lot caught my attention the most – touching and full of pathos.

24.Pillars and Tongues – Thank you Oaky Grandiose and beautiful, rich and enveloping – if one song sums up why you should own and love this album then I reckon it might be this one.

25.The Sandwitches – Heaviest Head In The West As much as the jaunty, carefree pop songs on this album caught my attention, one of the best songs on the album is this one, which is both far darker and contains one of the most arresting, enigmatic squeals in pop history.

26.Elbow – Lippy Kids I am not all that into the new Elbow album, but this track is an absolute blinder.  It’s gorgeous, and contains some of Guy Garvey’s most poignant lyrics.

27.Crystal Stilts – Shake The Shackles It wasn’t all that consistent an album, but there are some cracking songs – sort of like the Ringo Deathstarr album in that sense – and this is the best of them.  The crooned delivery almost has a New Romantic edge to it, but the rest of the song is shoegazey, garagey goodness.

28.FOUND – Machine Age Dancing The wonky breakdown in this had me sending text messages to the band the first time I heard it.  Songs like Vincent Gallo and Anti-Climb Paint may have been well familiar to FOUND fans by the time Factorycraft came out, but they kept plenty of gems to themselves, and this is one of them.

29.Tom Waits – Hell Broke Luce This is far from a vintage album, but the deranged crashing about of this song is probably as close as Bad as Me gets to vintage Tom Waits.

30.Palms – Wolf Despite the really, really rough recording (those cymbal crescendoes actually quite hurt my ears) this is still clearly a brilliant song.  It’s a more brooding approach to garage rock (and I use that term, as with all genre terms, extremely loosely) than some of the more frantic stuff I’ve heard this year, and is a song I played something like ten times consecutively the first time I heard it.

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Here’s the first installment of the Song, by Toad Festive Fifty for 2011 – a collection of the fifty songs I have been enjoying the most this year.  The fifty themselves and the precise order can hardly be described as definitive of course, because you know how fluid things like ‘favourite’ songs can be, but roughly speaking this is the stuff I have been enjoying the most in 2011.

Just as a note, in order to make it a broader representation of the bands I’ve liked the most, I have made it harder and harder for bands to have a song featured on the list the more they already had on it.  So a band’s second song got a relatively free pass, but their third would be nudged down a wee bit, to try and encourage variation and stuff like that.

31.Anna-Anna – Mirrors of America I’m aware there are very few women represented on this list, and a lot of those who are seem to share the ghostly, incredibly still delivery, albeit in a more folky setting, with Anna-Anna.

32.Sonny and the Sunsets – Home And Exile I could have half of this album on here, but this one always stood out, as a gem of retro, slightly woozy pop.

33.Quiet Americans – Summer House Straightforward lo-fi garage stuff this, but a hugely, hugely hummable tune.

34.TV Girl – Benny and the Jetts Simple and enjoyable summery pop, but another one so hugely infectious you simply can’t stop humming it.

35.Yoofs – Sidewalk I love the guitar effect, the riff, the energy, everything.  Keep an eye out for this lot on the brilliant Art is Hard Records in the new year.

36.Zed Penguin – This Town A bit of a departure for an Edinburgh band, this. I think my favourite part might be the gorgeously tremulous guitar sound Matthew gets from his hand-built amp.

37.David Thomas Broughton – River Lay On an album as good as Outbreeding it takes an awful lot to stand out, but this does.  For someone who can be a little obtuse, this is such a warm, welcoming record and this track epitomises it as well as most.

38.Evil Hand – Returned In Time These guys don’t exactly push themselves forward, and their releases can be a little erratic, but when they nail it their songs are as good as anyone in Scotland at the moment.

39.Powerdove – Sickly City Ghostly, slightly disorientating, and hypnotic.  This is possibly the finest song on an album which makes a gorgeous job of using minimal instrumentation and glacial pace to turn those three characteristics into a truly beautiful album.

40.Emit Bloch – Dorothy (New Version) Given how much I loved the gorgeous acoustic version of this song which I heard last year, it’s almost inconceivable that I should then also love a big glossy pop version too.  But I do.  Good songwriting, it seems, trumps even my lazy habits.

41.The Honey Pies – Hair of the Dog Boisterous and enormous fun, this album is a gleeful romp through rock ‘n’ roll cliches, but done with such verve that you can’t help but enjoy it.  This is a bit of a Clash throwback, the most raucous song on the album and probably my favourite.

42.The Low Anthem – Ghost Woman Blues After the genius of Boeing 737, The Low Anthem show they can have just as much impact at the opposite end of the spectrum with this gorgeous ballad.

43.Loch Awe – I Will Drift into 10,000 Streams For a band who do things I like and things I don’t, this demo came out of nowhere a few months ago, and I love it.  The slow drum beat, the really sparingly used electric guitar, the way the two voices work together… fine work!

44.The Blue Runes – Stream For me to get into a classic/psych rock EP made by a band from Puerto Rico wouldn’t have been a particularly great bet at the start of the year, but The Blue Runes released a brilliant EP, and this track is probably the biggest track on it.

45.Adam Stafford – Shot-down You Summer Wannabes A cracking song by a guy whose music I only got into embarrassingly late in the day, considering how long ago his debut solo album was released.  Nevertheless, a couple of storming live performances did the trick, and I am now entirely converted.

46.Horsecollar – Christopher A jaunty little piano line stands out immediately, but the rest of this song is bloody great too – a presumably unheard monologue delivered to a friend, and a stand out on a fine album.

47.Timber Timbre – Creep On Creepin’ On A gorgeous song on a gorgeous album.  This record is a little more approachable and a little less creepy than the last, and lush, lovely songs like this one are the reason.

48.Lady Lazarus – Nazarite Oath Ghostly, unsettling and lovely at the same time, this has a lot in common with the excellent Powerdove.

49.Silverbacks – Atta Boyz Simple this one: a cracking pop tune, good riff, and extremely hummable.

50.Pet – What You Building Another song which came as a bit of a surprise, given Edinburgh doesn’t generally do this kind of music all that well, but this is lovely.

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 So, ta-daaah, here we go, what all right-thinking people have been enjoying most this year.  And if you haven’t been enjoying these most this year, then dammit, what do you do when I tell you what opinions to have about music, ignore me?  Surely such a thing is inconceivable.

As those of you who listened to last week’s podcast, where I played two songs from the more forgotten albums on my first ever Albums of the Year list (2004), I am actually more fascinated by these lists in retrospect than at the time.

Looking back at this list in five or ten years, the interesting albums won’t be the ones I am still listening to, but the ones I am not.  I am sure practical details, like whether I have them on vinyl or tape or just digitally, will play a role, as will drifting fads and fashions.  But sometimes it really does just seem to be random – albums just drift out of favour for no really obvious reason.  Or, as has been the case with Kurt Vile this year, some albums seem to remain favourites for ages, despite not necessarily being the ones which grabbed you the first time.

So enjoy, this is what I have been mostly enjoying this year.  And a fine list it is too, I hope you will agree.

 10: The War on Drugs – Slave Ambient This is a very late entrant to this list, because for some reason I didn’t really listen to this album at all until the last month or two, but it’s bloody brilliant, managing to drift from ambient dreamers to Springsteen-like rockers to melancholy acoustica perfectly seamlessly. And the other joy of it is: another back catalogue to explore, too!

The War on Drugs – Your Love is Calling My Name

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 9: Pillars & Tongues – The Pass and Crossings This is a stunning album from what I think must be my favourite record label of the year: Empty Cellar.  They have released three albums in my top twenty this year, and worked with the artist who released another, and that’s before we get into the singles.  This album is grandiose, beautiful and all those words like sweeping and elegiac which journalists love to use so much.  Except in this case it actually is.

Pillars & Tongues – Palms to Tell

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 8: Milk Maid – Yucca This record is actually a collection of lo-fi home recordings, but somehow the end result has got real style. Not charmingly rough and ready style, although it has that too, but a real sense of swagger.  It’s not as frantic and noisy as a lot of its lo-fi brethren this year, either.  Recording Milk Maid’s Toad Session was probably one of my favourite things this year.

Milk Maid – Can’t You See

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 7: The Sandwitches – Mrs. Jones’ Cookies A little like Sonny & the Sunsets, this album doesn’t entirely click on every single song, but it does on most.  And beyond the pop tunes, there’s a wild, wailing quality to this which had me scrunching up my face in incomprehension for the first few listens.  ‘What the f…  did they just… are they…serious?‘ It didn’t take too long for it to click though, and I have since been foisting this record on visitors to our house all year.

The Sandwitches – Summer of Love

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 6: David Thomas Broughton – Outbreeding This is a disciplined and polished pop record from a man more commonly known for spending most of his gigs figuring out just how much he can antagonise his audience before they give up altogether.  A favourite of mine since I first saw him at the End of the Road Festival in something like 2008 or 2009, I couldn’t have been much more surprised by this album, but it’s fucking brilliant nevertheless.

David Thomas Broughton – Nature

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  5: Kurt Vile – Smoke Ring for my Halo I am getting into ‘every damn list on the internet has this album on it’ territory here, but balls to it, I still love this record.  I actually struggle to explain why though, because it’s not gripping, weird, striking or anything.  It is, in fact, an entirely straightforward collection of songs crooned over fairly minimal guitar, bass and drums, at a relatively middle of the road pace.  But for some reason I find the whole album one I have gone back to again and again and again all year.

Kurt Vile – Puppet to the Man

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 4: Crystal Swells – Goethe Head Soup This is one of the mostly ferociously-recorded things I’ve heard all year, with barely the slightest quarter given to the listener’s more delicate aural sensibilities.  But underneath all the buzzing, distorted racket, and despite the headache-inducing nine-minute kick in the ears that is the title track, this mini-album holds a half dozen of the finest pop songs I’ve heard all year.

Crystal Swells – Waco, Wasilla, Waikiki

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  3: Jonnie Common – Master of None Pure genius, this one.  This album has charm to spare, but it’s not as straightforward as it seems.  The actual sounds Jonnie uses in assembling his songs are really quite unusual, but the results are pure, joyous pop.  He seems to have pulled off the trick of being an experimental musician, but keeping that fact completely undercover, and making us all think he’s created the pop record of the year.  Which of course he has.

Jonnie Common – Hand-Hand

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2: Timber Timbre – Creep on Creepin’ On I don’t know what it is about the ghostly voodoo stuff these guys do which I love so much.  Certainly with the increasingly deep arrangements there is a certain theatricality to this record, but then instrumentals like Obelisk and Swamp Magic could as easily be found in one of Tom Waits’ more flamboyant nightmares as they could on the stage, or indeed a contemporary pop record. Creep On Creepin’ On is never pompous or overblown though, and displays a remarkable deftness of touch, particularly with the more

Timber Timbre – Creep On Creepin’ On

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  1: Josh T. Pearson – Last of the Country Gentlemen I hesitated a long time before putting Last of the Country Gentlemen at the top of this list. Apart from the fact that at times the word enjoyable isn’t exactly the right one to apply, the whole album seems to belong in a slightly different category to everything else.  It’s just different to all the other albums, and it feels difficult to actually compare the emotional response to this to the emotional response I’ve had to everything else.  But in the end, between SXSW, Homegame, an aborted and a successful Toad Session, the number of times I’ve heard these songs and the effect they’ve had on me, there is little doubt that this, even if it isn’t my favourite album of the year per se, is still the album which dominated 2011 and is almost certainly the album by which I will remember it.

Josh T. Pearson – Thou Art Loosed

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