2008: Of all my regrets one feels the worst...

Albums/Reissues/Compilations/Whatever Honorable Mentions -

Fennesz - The Black Sea
Sea and Cake - Car Alarm
Luomo - Convivial
Beach House - Devotion
The Clash - Live at Shea Stadium
Hot Chip - Made In The Dark
Sascha Funke - Mango
Sigur Rós - Með suð í eyrum við spilum endalaust
The Kills - Midnight Boom
Wire - Object 47
Santogold - Santogold
Shed - Shedding The Past
Neon Neon - Stainless Style
Move D & Benjamin Brunn - Songs From The Beehive
Benoît Pioulard - Temper

Top 10 Albums (scroll slowly for maximum suspense!) -

10. School Of Seven Bells - Alpinisms

Since I am now a mere five minute walk away from the Doug Fir, I rarely catch opening acts anymore. Maybe I am just getting old, but standing for four hours has lost some of its glamour. So it was rather serendipitous that I caught the School Of Seven Bells priming the crowd for M83. I dug the Deheza twins during their On! Air! Library! days, but School Of Seven Bells explores a slightly different genre: that nervy marriage of dream-pop and shoegaze that seemed to begin and end with Curve. Alpinisms has multiple tributaries - My Bloody Valentine and Cocteau Twins, to name a couple - but also manages enough inspiration to avoid feeling too derivative (the dangerous flip-side of nostalgia). This was a lucky find and extra motivation to get to the concert early in the future.

9. Subtle - ExitingARM

When last we left Hour Hero Yes; left one part endless - two parts death. Or something like that. The narrative has become so dense and sprawling - now encompassing an entire almanac and corresponding website - I think I might have lost the plot somewhere along the way. What I do know, is that ExitingARM reveals Doseone as a true Heideggarian: from the compound nouns to the his obsession with the metaphysics of objects.

The clearest influence on the latest chapter of the Hour Hero Yes trilogy is Subtle's recent tourmates TV on the Radio, but Doseone can never seem to decide how to resolve the tension of being a more mainstream indie rock band with his simultaneous desire to be completely inscrutable -- thus the lack of catchy hooks and the baiting "Unlikely Rock Shock". Really this album sounds like the dialectical synthesis of A New White and for hero: for fool -- which might make it a perfect logically conclusion, but still a little bit of a disappointment emotionally. And unfortunately, except for SmallFear Souvenir, it looks like this is the end of the road -- as of this tour, the band is calling it quits. At least we will always have The Terrible Great Nothing Much.

8. Ladytron - Velocifero

A few months ago, I heard "Ghosts" playing in the Pioneer Place mall. It is amusing that Ladytron, a band which spent its early career wryly critiquing department store culture, would inadvertently score a muzak hit. Not to mention the band spent months during the Light & Magic tour unsuccessfully trying to break into the American market, including a baffling Americanized club version of "Evil" with a music video director who seemed to think the band would top the charts if they looked like more like mid-'90s Republica.

Velocifero starts off with an ferocious opener by Mira Aroyo, largely forgotten in Witching Hour, and continues unflaggingly - much like its name sake - for its duration. One of the largest critiques of the band (one that I hear a lot with the Doves) is that it simply mines the same genre with little variation. While "Deep Blue" might be the most prototypically Ladytron with its aggressive industrial synth lines and technoeroticism, "Versus" - a spaghetti western duet featuring male vocals - might be the band's most adventureous song to date.

7. Deerhunter - Microcastle / Weird Era. Cont.

I am going to make this slot a general Bradford Cox entry (including Atlas Sound - Let The Blind Lead Those Who Can See But Cannot Feel) because the dude released so many quality jams this year, intentional or not.








6. Lindstrøm - Where You Go I Go Too

Electronic artists always seem to be at least a little apprehensive about releasing full length records. Unlike 12'' singles, albums have the rockist demand of being "coherent" and by the time the record hits shelves, the electronic world has already ditched neo-balearic disco for deep arthropod-house. If Lindstrøm has any sort of anxiety, it doesn't show. I mean just look at that cover - he is such a bro. Where You Go I Go Too is about as patient as can be. The titular track is 29 minutes long and has a deliberate pacing that recalls Manuel Göttsching's E2-E4 and LCD Soundsystem's 45:33. And that repeated ping! (you will know it when you hear it) at the end of "The Long Way Home" is so unabashedly untrendy and awesome.

5. Deadbeat - Roots and Wire

Generating an end of the year music list is a completely arbitrary exercise but I have tried to develop a ritualistic structure to make the process as precise and as scientific as possible. After putting all of the year's music through my centrifuge critique, I usually find that it is the albums that I listened to the most, for better or for worse, than end up making their way to the top. But every once in awhile, there is a record that appears at the 11th hour that makes an immediate impression.

Dub Techno is certainly not a genre I would have ever imagined raving about. Like Scott Montieth, I tend to get bored with the Burial-style “minor key, sad, dark shit.” Yet here I am trying to describe an album without using cringe inducing terms like dubscapes. Probably the closest musical touchstone I can think of - particularly in regards to the bookending vocal tracks - is Blue Lines era Massive Attack, but while "One Love" practically crawls at a glacial sub-100 bpms, "Grounation (Berghain Drum Jack)" features blistering dancehall percussion. The whole album has a real dynamic flow built around creative beat structures. It also features some of the best cover art of the year.

4. Max Richter - 24 Postcards In Full Colour

"April is the cruelest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain."

The opening lines of T.S. Eliot's The Wasteland come to mind when I listen to Max Richter. While some minimalist composers are aggressively anti-contextual, Richter has always been haunted by that unwanted reawakening of memories -- real and imaginary. And like his other works, 24 Postcards In Full Colour is fairly conceptual -- hell, it might not even been considered an album at all. Originally intended as 24 separate ringtones, the work can be digested in multiple formats: on the web with accompanying photographs or as a traditional album, where the pieces hang together surprisingly well. It can be a little disorienting listening to it as a record as the tracks cut off fairly abruptly, but discreteness is also a virtue. The term postcards works particularly well in this context, not merely because the songs act as small emotional snapshots, but also because each piece feels rooted in a particular location and time. Even the titles feel incredibly thought out. These little vignettes add up to an astounding mosaic, and are all the more daring and wistful for their fleetingness.

3. M83 - Saturdays = Youth

Leadoff single "Couleurs" was a complete red herring. Despite the Molly Ringwald dead ringer on the cover, the 8 1/2 minute slow burner gave no hint at the unabashed Eighties love affair that was to come. And while "Kim & Jessie" (those Tears for Fears drums!) and "Graveyard Girl" (the spoken word narrative!) seem to reap the most laurels for their John Hughes nostalgia, "Skin of the Night" (the wind and the rain!) strikes me as the most authentic 80s track on the album -- that epic slow ballad that has all but disappeared from the radio.

2. Kelley Polar - I Need You To Hold On While The Sky Is Falling

Most of my techno/house friends can't stand Michael Kelley's voice. Unlike most electronic artists who bury their vocals under blankets of synthesizers, Kelley foregrounds his voice atop the sea of ping-pongy sine waves. To make matters worse, he has a very stylized delivery -- musical theater is probably the best way to describe it, all emotive and breathy. "Zeno of Elea" is the main offender, which is unfortunate because it is the second track of the album. If you manage to survive the opening vocodered new-age gambit, you will hit one of the best runs of tunes this year, including the Human League-esque duet of "Entropy Reigns (In The Celestial City)" and the strangely compelling "Chrysanthemum" that might be the best paean to the A-bomb since OMD's "Enola Gay." The entire album is held together by a running celestial motif, where the surrounding universe mirrors the characters' interiors (and vice versa), perhaps best personified by "Satellites" -- a simple but achingly beautiful metaphor for unrequited love.

1. Cut Copy - In Ghost Colours

Kaleidoscopic. Is there a better way to describe this record? How about indie electro-pop perfection. Every song on the album is ebullient and alive, filled with unbelievably catchy choruses and dancefloor breakdowns. At first, it took me a little while to get through this album -- not because of any steep learning curve, but because I had "Light & Music" on repeat for at least 20 plays. Beyond the obvious singles, this record has some incredibly deep cuts, like "Far Away" which sounds like Mark Hollis if he had performed at the Hacienda instead of going off the post-rock deep-end. Even the samples (ranging from C&C Music Factory to E.L.O.) are subtle and unpretentious.

I am still not sure whether the credit goes to the band (probably not after Bright Like Neon Love) or Tim Goldsworthy (probably after Echoes) and his amazing production. To get a real idea of how glorious the production is, which sounds equally perfect on headphones as on the dancefloor, listen to the over-compression on the latest album from Cut Copy's Australian labelmates The Presets.

In Ghost Colours is glorious and - dare I say it? - Rapturous.