Top 50 Albums of 2011

Hello 2012.  I'm not sure whether this will be my first post of the year or the last. You might have noticed things dipped off to flatline by December.  Several factors contributed to it enjoyable and otherwise, and I'm not sure they've all been satisfied or assuaged to the point where'll I'll be doing this as intensely as before. Maybe I'll start up a food blog this year, who can say at this stage.  I've got a huge pile of drafts that I really want to post though, so I'm not done.

First thing's first with a new year. Recap the last one and impress some kind of permanency on to it with the year end list.

There's always talk of these things needing new paradigms, how year-end lists are anti-artistic, consumerist, innately meaningless, pointless even.  Nah.  You could create all the artistically worthy paradigms you like, integrity intact to the finest grain, but the question would still arise - yeah all good, but what did you like out of them the best?  It's a totally valid question even if it is nigh on impossible to answer. Every year I take that question on and every year I find it a wonderfully satisfying, exciting, concluding experience. In revising the albums throughout the year I get to relive everything that has happened to me and this year has been off the scale amazing.  So here's its soundtrack, in the correct order, complete with omissions and oversights.

50. Civil Civic – Rules

Self-Released

Fan-funded debut release from London based duo that dropped a slew of incessantly addictive rock instrumentals from the abrasive to the euphoric with a playfulness that belied the serious talents behind the song-writing and musicianship. The tracks tended to cavort rather than progress across their brief lengths, with no piece out-playing its own enthusiasm, conveying infectious attitude in the spirit of people like the Pixies, Sonic Youth, Andrew WK and even a dash of The Smiths.

49.Tree of Sores - Tree of Sores

Witchhunter
Trio from Leeds make epic ep of crushing shapeshifting doom. The production might need a bit of beefing to add some more weight, but it's not so necessary. The gnarly grunting basslines and sheer walls of guitar screed morph between solemn chugging and cyclones of kinetic fury with an intrinsically momentous sense of composition. No aimless drift between segments, just pure atmospheric build and howling release.

48. The Rosebuds - Louds Planes Fly Low

Merge

After a decade of writing albums reflecting their developing relationship, The Rosebuds latest comes to some kind of conclusion in documenting their divorce. It's a beautiful, painful listen with the ex-couple swapping vocals over soulful guitar music and occasional flight into disco fancy as they unpack their relationship out of their hearts and minds and onto a soberly platonic plane.

47. Barghest – Barghest

Gilead Media

From one of the most consistently excellent labels of the year comes the debut from Baton Rogue four-piece Barghest. An unswervingly bleak and fast storm of metal that whips Death and Thrash into a domineering eye of Blackness choking the air from the speakers as its torrid mass of aggressively writhing riffs pours forth across six relentless tracks.

46. Gkfoes Vjgoaf - The Joy of Awakening / Healing / Nature Eternal Striving (Inner Islands) / Spirit Dance (Full of Nothing) / Glacial Ways (Self-Released)

Rustic, naturalistic and for the most part, humid, except the album devoted to icy water, this Californian born globe-wanderer has found himself addicted to the myriad faunal landscapes of New Zealand and has stopped there for over a year now. Four of these five albums were his own solo work, one with his partner but all follow the same languid path of collaged tapestries of nature recordings, ambient sounds, ethnic instruments and guitar playing into states of organic trance.  There's no greatest among them, they all have distinct characters indebted to the changing landscapes around him and the landmarks he picks out of them.

45. Dark Castle - Surrender To All Life Beyond Form

Profound Lore

Two-piece boy-girl doom band bring in a whole load of friends including members of Nachtmystium, YOB and US Christmas, to expand their already huge sound into a progressively constructed record with a scope the same size as their riffs.  The core guitar/drum interplay is the intuitive lead to follow through a course of blackened sludge, caustic noise and flights of melody, but the almost telepathic communion between the beats and riffs expanding and contracting , clashing and complementing makes for a truly great doom record.

44. Dirtbombs – Party Store

In The Red

A garage rock band – one of THE garage rock bands you should be paying attention to - covers Detroit Techno classics, including Sharevari, purportedly the first ever Detroit Techno track produced.  Having previously released an album of Soul covers, they're no strangers to either conceptualisation or recontextualisation and the result is no gimmick, coming from Detroit themselves the Dirtbombs already own the honours to both sounds and restructure the icy electronics through amps and drum skins like they own them.

43. Village of Spaces – Alchemy and Trust

Turned World/Corleone

Incredible psychedelic devotional acid-folk album from Maine based collective that laced its psychotropic spirituality with a haunting revenant atmosphere that recalls Fairport Convention and Incredible String Band. Sounds like both sides of the pond, both sides of the 60's and beyond.

42. Crystal Stilts – In Love With Oblivion

Slumberland

I get the sense that In Love With Oblivion is the album The Horrors tried to make with Skying. They tried too hard and overbaked it, but Crystal Stilts drive their psychedelic rock through a narrower stretch of darkness and come out with a set of songs that, as edgy and uncomfortable as they are, sit fluently together.  The vocals are pitched perfectly with a melancholic distance that suits the reverbed bass jangle of the guitars, the retro stylings of the music flow out of the songs themselves, and it's got a grinding Velvets rip-off that must utterly destroy on stage. Nothing forced or cynically reproduced here.

41. Matthewdavid – Outmind
Brainfeeder

Matthew McQueen runs the psyclobin-soaked Leaving Records but for his own album his friend FlyLo put it out on Brainfeeder, which tells you a lot about the musical territory of this album. A propulsive post-club world, drawn up from the ground with a bass-heavy bed of warped and foggy  drones punctuated by shafts and shards of lighter electronic glitch and melodic throbbing.

40. Run DMT – Dreams

Culture Dealer

Released on his own Culture Dealer cassette imprint after floating about between prospective labels, Michael Collins' Dreams is a very aptly titled tape as it contains his most lucid stream-of-conscious psychedelia to date. Doped out into another dimension it unravels longer episodes of faded-bliss garagey-pop with almost glitch like vignettes of loops that cut in and out of the deeper tracts like the jumps in your hypnogogic states. 

39. The Men – Leave Home

Sacred Bones

In taking their loosely locked down starting points from both Spacemen 3 and MC5 The Men kicked out some pensively drawn out noise-rock, swapping between roaring kinetic riffs and taut threads of tense repetition with a deadly penchant for unleashing killer climaxes out of them both.

38. Wild Beasts – Smother

Domino

The UK's most sensitive mountain men makes their third progressive foray into their own unique underworld of literate, erotically charged ambient indie. With barely any hooks throughout its reflective textures it was almost the antithesis to the practically danceable debauched revelry of Two Dancers, but that was the key to its greatness.  It was that close, slow, intimately swooning shuffle at the end of the night. 

37. The Caretaker - An Empty Bliss Beyond This World / Leyland Kirby – Eager to Tear the Stars Apart 
History Always Favours The Winners

The master butcher eclipses all his previous work to date by developing his soft and sensitive sides with two albums; The Caretaker's unsettling waltz of warped tea-dance with its poignant reflection on the amnesiac loop, and Leyland Kirby's less (or ambiguously) conceptual suite of degraded neo-classical ambience. Both utterly mesmerising.

36. Holy Other – With U

Triangle

The preturnaturally sensual slo-motion cosmic vapours of With U cemented Triangle's reputation as a label and the mysterious Manchester/Berlin born/based artist transcended Witch House to produce a record that effected everyone it touched beyond the internet meme-machine.

 

 35. Craft Spells - Idle Labor

Captured Tracks

Beauty Above All says it all. Another wonderful album from a label that can do no wrong, this one as clear and sharp as cut diamond. No haze, no fog, no dirt, just beautifully clean pop songs loaded with gorgeous melodies and heart-fluttering hooks.

34. Everyone to the Anderson - The Man Born From Inside Of A Horse

Unlabel
Brighton rock band destroys the scene with their long-anticipated full length that bridges post rock and hardcore with a twitchy sense of danger and subtlety that sounds as unlike anything else as much as it does Shellac or Fugazi.  Spiky shards of guitar break low-slung bass rhythms, the beats keep their own wild signatures locked down and over it all Ben Gregory unravels dysphoria and wry observation in graceful and invigorating union.

33. Wolves in the Throne Room - Celestial Lineage

Southern Lord
The final album from this incarnation of WITTR, the closing chapter to a trilogy of albums is also their finest, and a fitting way to go out, disappearing back into the ground that bore them, waiting to be reincarnated in another form when the moment arises. Majestically invoking the feral, harsh, beautiful and feminine spirit of nature, Celestial Lineage Many Black Metal albums strive for this ecological, environmental connectivity but fall way short of what this band can convey.

32. Pure X – Pleasure

Acephale

Summer Sun soaked harmonic pop smothered with tape noise and dredged towards the unlistenable is my kind of Pop Music. Evoking a sense of claustrophobia in wide open spaces through the combination of it's propulsively dank rhythm section and umbral take of surf riffing, the sunshine is clouded over, the joy occluded as it was with the Paisly Underground psych bands who tinged their technicolour acid trips with a dark paranoia. Recorded with no overdubs and a raw vocal performance, this is a brutally naked feeling album.

31. Vatican Shadow - Kneel Before Religious Icons

Hospital Productions

Dominik Fernow has had a good year as Prurient, in Cold Cave and as Vatican Shadow (and probably a whole load more). It's in the latter incarnation that he produced his most awesome work, right at the start of 2011, and it came impressively presented too – 8 tracks across 4 tapes in a reel to reel box, in no order, just there for random assignation to your tape player. Playing games like that has me eating out of your hand, but then when you start flipping the switches down on them and a grimy minimal pulse starts oozing out the speakers, caked in the dust of collapsed industry, burning with the dystopian glow of mechanical failure, things really start to get fetishistic.

30. The Antlers - Burst Apart
French Kiss
Brooklyn's Antlers second album could never hope to continue or better the crushing heartbreak of their debut Hospice, so instead they have greated an almost-equal parallel, an inverted version of that swaps the hopelessness of Mortality for that of Relationship.  It's a highly sexualised record, that chokes the throat of any optimistic romanticism with bitter folly and cold-light of day realities in similar fashion to Wild Beasts' Smother, with whom it also shares a similar sense of the ambient though it eschews electronics in favour of the standard indie-rock kit.

29. Turbowolf – Turbowolf

Hassle

For nearly five years I have been waiting for this band to be one of the biggest in the country, now all those demos and singles that have been keeping me alive for so long finally get underlined with a full album proper from Bristol's Turbowolf. The punk/rock/metal hybrid jams this band kick out are all impossibly infectious stadium-sized cock-rock anthems in waiting, as deadly serious as they are faintly ridiculous.  14 tracks whip past with barely a dip in the adrenaline pumping quality across them, lifted with some great song-writing twists and winding trails there is more to this album than just satisfyingly sharp riffs.

28. Total Control – Henge Beat

Iron Lung

Featuring members of Eddy Current Suppression Ring and The UV Race this Melbourne based super-group of sorts has ample pedigree to be able to deliver a good record, but this is goes beyond the sum of its parts. Surfing a wave of distorted electronics and feral guitar lines as its base, the tracks blend in elements of cold-wave, post-punk and garage rock across their course resulting in a stone-cold classic in waiting.

27. Der Blutharsch And The Infinite Church Of The Leading Hand + Aluk Todolo – A Collaboration

WKN

Leave it to a cave dwelling black metal band and an industrial folk outfit to produce the best industrial cave dwelling black drone album of the year. Unclear which band takes the lead in these four grimly tense torch-lit forays into cavernous netherworld of sound, as the eerily foreboding clanging, chanting and dissolving rhythmic patterns could belong to either act's main works, contorting and igniting ideas planted by each other in a hypnotic procession of dark trance.

26. Hateful Abandon – Move

Todestrieb

Ex-Basilisk man Vin's post black metal band went through another significant shift in sonic direction leaving little trace of black metal at all, even any Metal of any kind except in the vengeful and aggressive vocals.  Mixing post-punk and cold-wave together into a bleak treatise against the    mentally corrosive materialist and corporate ownership of modern existence, the relentless procession of ideas that unfold out of each track result in one of the year's most overwhelming experiences.  

25. The Advisory Circle - As The Crow Flies

Ghost Box

Radiophonic experimentalism from the renowned Ghost Box label didn't get better than Jon Brook's second album for the imprint. A record of two halves, with the more propulsive explorations taking up a first half combining wyrd folk electronics, Delia Derbyshire hauntology and abstracted kosmiche, with a divergent set of shadowy, very English sounding ambient sci-fi soundtracking on the second, there was a lot to absorb from this – not least the fact that, public information services being core to a lot of Ghost Boxes artists, a Tawny Owl's legendary 'Twit Too-Woo' sound is in fact a Shakespearian concatenation of both its alarm and territorial calls and thus, a falsehood.

24. A$AP Rocky – LIVELOVEA$AP
Self-Released

Blog-loved instant hit crew A$AP deserve all the attention their leader A$AP Rocky is clamouring for.  His changeable rap-styles bear the imprints of his influences pretty heavily but that doesn't stop this album from having a character all of its own, be it from the Clams Casino instrumentals or his in-house producer Ty Beats's own seething drones and beats over which he lays down his high-living braggadocio. The other vocalists in the outfit – the awesomely named SpaceGhostPurrrp serve as foils for him to bounce off, and even though he maintains A$AP is foremost a group, the attitude all pretty much revolves around him as the main guy.  The opening track is one of the biggest tunes of the year in my ears, with Brand New Guy coming up close behind it.

23. Aosoth – III

Agonia

Subterranean Satanic Black Metal from France.  A nation so well versed in the most ferocious forms of devotional ritual it should require little further explanation to beset the horrors upon you. Whilst including passages of misty industrial ambience and space, both those elements only serve to enhance the extremely violent and unrelentingly claustrophobic atmosphere, which is again reinforced through a murky production – progressing from the drier sounding first and cleaner sounding second albums. By taking their third full length down an even darker more airless avenue they have found a voice and style that demands attention.

22. Petrels – Haeligewielle

Tartaruga
Processed strings and disfigured electronics were the raw materials used to build this retelling and homage to the story of William Walker – a man who, from 1905, spent the best part of five years swimming through the black waters surrounding Winchester Cathedral, single-handedly replacing peat with cement in order to buttress the foundations to prevent it sinking into the Earth. The near-mythological heroism of the undertaking, coupled with its futility (the sinking cannot ever be stopped) all infuse the epic tone waves ebbing and flowing throughout this album, directing their course through murky passages, shafts of lightness and cruel eddies of distortion with an ever present sense of optimism.

21. The Field - Looping State Of Mind

Kompakt

Axel Willner's third album beautifully eclipses the previous two by gently widening the palette of sounds that make up his already mesmeric meditative minimal techno trance, resulting in an even deeper and more rewarding experience. Expanding the lush throbbing base of loops with the sunset atmospheres of Balearic house and gospel-tinged soul harmonies Willner's organic melding of elements has resulted in an album interwoven with a textural subtlety and density that allows the initial eye-widening impact of the tracks to slowly dilate into an even greater all consuming masterpiece.

20. Ssalvia - Thought Has Wings

Leaving
A treacly nostalgic psychedelic blur of woozy, smoked-up, 70's h-pop hallucinogens blowing your third eye right out, glitter-bomb style into the cosmos, taped to VHS, converted to 8-bit rpg soundtrack. Released on the label run by Matthewdavid producer Matthew McQueen, solo Belgian artist François Boulanger's  Thought Has Wings has kept me totally zoned out all year, sounding like Ferraro or Matrix Metals on a tight leash, this dropped an essential high of a loop, shimmered you briefly in the haze until you were cooked then passed you on to the next trip, nothing ever staying too long to lose its sheen. Absolutely perfect Summer album, pretty much essential at all other times.

19. Thee Oh Sees - Carrion Crawler/The Dream

In The Red

Possibly John Dwyer's greatest ever Oh Sees album, this just drips Cool out of every sweat soaked pore. Everything that sounds wild-eyed and flailing is also the sound of a composed and measured creator – the looseness and spontaneity of it all belies the studied hand from which every note is dealt. Whether Dwyer conceived this set of songs during the same epiphany or held on to them over time to load into a succinctly killer album is almost not worth contemplating. Almost. Here's a guy who's totally in control even when he seems to be about to lose his shit entirely.

18. Colin Stetson - New History Warfare Vol. 2. Judges

Constellation

Distended, warped surrealist poly-timbral/rhythmic/textural/tonal jazz, Colin Stetson's second solo saxophone record blurs musical boundaries, limitations and expectations as much as the physical senses, and apparently the physical realm in which it is performed.  Featuring Godspeed's Efrim Menuck on engineering duties and Ben Frost at the mixing desk, as well a Stetson's own inspired set up – microphones across multiple amps, on the body of the saxophone for percussion and on the keys to produce beats, on the mouthpiece to produce vocals multiplied by his circular breathing technique – the result is a constant stream of sound that totally confounds the one-man one-take live set up of this album.

17. Wreck and Reference - Black Cassette

Self-Release

Old NFR indie-rock favourites Bison disbanded with one member forming this remarkable doomy black metal duo creating one of the most bleakly euphoric albums of the year, eschewing guitars to produce   these jaw-dropping results with just synths and electronics. You might have to be told that the wall of roaring static pouring from the speakers comes from key-tones rather than steel string abuse so stylistically textural is the sound, yet in a similar way to how Servile Sect suck up Metal and Atmosphere and produce something alien sounding out of the familiar, Wreck and Reference also produce a parallel take on metal and subvert the pre-requisite set-up creating a thick, tense and tangible threatening presence all of their own.

16. High Wolf – Atlas Nation (Holy Mountain) / Annapurna Illusion – Life Is An Illusion (Rocket)

Mono-monikered Max releases his two greatest moments of the year across two projects, the former deepening his exotic explorations into equatorial trance, the latter transcending the realms of hypnagogic pop, both of which were firsts for each guise: Atlas Nation is his first relatively major release after a long string of obscuro label and self-releases, while Life Is An Illusion is his first major Annapurna album. Both records resonate with a sense of mysticism, both very heavy in their own styles. The synths from LIAI have a tangible physical presence, driven by a kosmische momentum, that make most other nu-age projects sound like pathetic hokum, and the tribal ritualism of the beat patterns circling the High Wolf guitar loops are as oppressive as jungle humidity.  The true beginnings of a magical mystical tour start here.

15. Cold Cave - Cherish The Light Years

Matador
There's barely one black-clad band that has not exerted some kind of influence on this album. Its heavy with the scent of kohl-stained eyes, dry ice and hairspray but it's even heavier when throwing imposing silhouettes against the walls of beautifully wrought synth tones and enormous beats. This is a huge sounding album, compressed to the max, even the subtleties forced into your face. They want you to be intimidated by even the smallest details, confronting you right in the face with their angst and disillusionment, emphasising every excess of Wes Eisold’s anthemically bleak new wave romanticism.

14. Altar of Plagues – Mammal

Profound Lore
The Irish black doom combo's second album developed their sound way beyond all expectations and the output of most other bands.  A heaving mass of shadowy atmospherics that includes a passage of haunting Celtic folksong that grounds the record in a human and naturalistic setting of craggy fog and bleak inhospitable landscapes.  Perfectly produced with each instrument sounding unlike any in either the Black or Doom metal genres, this straddled both and went further beyond as magisterial passages peaked into raging torrents of ferocious noise. A bass tone that was warm and earthy whilst retaining a dirty grittiness for the drums to pound off – which they did with exceptional speed and ferocity, double kicking themselves into a textural blur for the guitars to tear out shades of caustic drone over the top of.

13. The Psychic Paramount – II

No Quarter

The New York trio hone their instrumental mayhem into an unbridled beast of blown out psychedelic rock that starts of hard and harsh then spirals outwards and upwards in a kaleidoscope of pedal abusive riffing and pell-metal drumming. As frenetic as it is, the build of the tracks follow intuitive paths, loaded with pay-offs like landmarks amongst the dense textures that you can cling on to and hold out for when the noise is threatening to swallow you; each release hovering on the edge of climax for the time-suspended eternity of a moment and then you're in it, swallowed up and consumed in thrall to it and at the mercy of it.

12. The Skull Defects – Peer Amid

FatCat

The four-piece Gothenburg noise-rock combo's latest release adds Lungfish vocalist Daniel Higgs to their line-up and his presence hangs a heavy air of Current 93 over this – providing a sense of umbral religiosity, Higg's parables come intoned from a cosmic pulpit, a preacher-man citing from the Rock vernacular. From there the music bursts into whichever direction the volcanic eruptions take it as free flowing buzzsaw riffs underscore unsettling passages of tribal voodoo, hand drums beat circles round tar-thick guitar tones, showers of fiery noise rain down from sky and amongst it all the growling, snarling roaring voice of exultant euphoria channels it and glories amongst the carnage. 

11. Deathgrips – Exmilitary

Self-Released

“I am the beast I worship” So starts Exmilitary, with a presence that stamps its authority like Eugene Oxbow with just as much boiling violence.  This is the essence of Metal burned through the back catalogue of righteous hip hop and out into the blasted wastelands of a dystopian future.  Fists into the face of modernity, fighting against the slow erosion of values and integrities.  But again; “Fuck where you're from! Fuck where you're going!! It's all about where you're at!!!”, and where Deathgrips are at is constantly up in yours, sonically the juggernaut beats and textures tear hot air from the speakers as they exit, stuttering for space among the airless glitches and steel-crushing gravitas of inhaled silences, sucking vacuums of power into the voids between the noise.

10. Low – C'Mon

Subpop
There's an enormity to the sound in C'Mon, a vastness of space surrounding the sounds and harmonics between instruments and voice that makes the fact this was recorded in a church seem entirely natural. The haunting reverence of Especially Me, the Old Testament style vengeance of Witches, the consoling opener Try To Sleep, the choral coda to Nothing But Heart; all have a sense of hushed veneration about them despite the size to which the acoustics grow. Though they have an ecclesiatical background, the strength of this record lies not in the Heavenly, but the Earthly. It's an intimate paean to the travails of human relationships, of dark and beautiful moments and serves as Alan Sparhawk's grandest gesture not only to the listener, but to his wife.   

09. The Weeknd – House of Balloons / Thursday

Self-Released
When compared to House of Ballons and Thursday, The Weeknd may have overplayed his hand with his relatively featureless third album at the end of the year, but that doesn't take any of the street-grimed glamorous shine off either of these two.  I see House of Balloons in a lot of charts with no mention of Thursday, but for me they are pretty much parallel in atmosphere, lyrics and hooks: That stuttering haunted euphoria of Lonely Star, the hollow-eyed metallic grind of Life of the Party, both parts of The Birds and the incredible Cocteau Twins cover.  All that needs to be said about House of Balloons is that drop into Glass Table Girls. Musical moment of 2011. Ugh. Like the bass went down on itself.

 08. A Winged Victory For The Sullen - A Winged Victory For The Sullen

Erased Tapes

Pianist Dustin O'Halloran and Stars of the Lid's Adam Wiltzie meld their individual production skills together into a hauntingly elegant album of string tones synthesis. A blurred, slow-motion elegy to the Greek goddess of victory, it is characterised by a triumphant sadness, leading the melancholic toward a state of euphoric, enchanted drone.

07. Tim Hecker - Ravedeath 1972

Kranky
Another church recorded album in my top twenty. The sonic results of Hecker's musings on decay, detritus, waste and decomposition – physically rather than musically – found their form through his recordings of church pipe organ, taken back to the studio for a secular styled celestial wash of synth tone and ambient flicker with collaborator Ben Frost. Ravedeath is anything but decomposed though it carries the fertile cloudy murk of silt heavy waters through its tantalisingly paced deliberate progression, it moves beyond beauteous drone and texture, weaving rhythm and melody into the mass of sound which, due to the core elements - the church organ being an instrument of God to instil a sense of holy awe amongst the pews – produces a genuinely awe inspiring record in the truest sense of the word.

06. Mogwai - Hardcore Will Never Die, But You Will

Sub Pop
Still relevant after all these years of slow refinement, Mogwai's latest is their greatest since Come On Die Young and is the sound of a band heeding nothing but their own instincts.  It feels so good to have a Mogwai album back in my top ten and this record has smashed them back into the front of my listening experiences with a hunger and power that has been somewhat lacking from their albums (yet which their live show consistently presents). Slow burning emotional tremors and seismic tectonic rock laced with vocals that are finally beginning to hold a presence all of their own, Hardcore Will Never Die is the sound of a band hitting a glorious new plane of existence.
 

05. Pete Swanson – Man With Potential

Type
Minimal techno infused noise from one half of the disbanded Yellow Swans, Pete Swanson continues to make challenging and engrossing music that ensnares your entire being within its hallucinatory presence.  Mixing ethereal, unnerving electronic elements with cables of earthy noise there's a paradoxically dreamlike and harsh reality to this record that inspires images of long deserted subterranean Eastern block clubs – faint traces of digitised euphoria pulsing inside mildewed analogue shackles. A space haunted the ghastly remnants of beautiful creatures that once writhed hot-blooded reanimated in discoloured organic hues, howling from their dislocated corporeal plane.

04. Liturgy – Aesthethica

Thrill Jockey

As loose and free as it is rigid and constrained by its own dogma, Aesthetica is an album that lived up to its own hyperbole – a concept and mindset which underwent an amazingly high-profile degree of scrutiny and bore extreme negativity for their leader's positivity-laced polemic. He doesn;t need to be sat down to explain himself, he has this album as definitive proof that his musings, however incoherent in the flesh, are peerlessly visionary when pressed to wax.  Challenging and non-conformist, two of the highest held values in a scene which has slowly forgotten itself, Liturgy are the brightest white light to ever blaze out of Black Metal.

03. Austra – Feel it Break

Domino
This album is too long by two songs, although I am never sure which two should have got the cut – all I know is it has two endings, so the final or penultimate pair of tracks could have gone and it would have been absolutely perfect.  That's my negative preamble, the rest of the record deserves nothing but exultant high-praise.  A fantasia of darkly intoned psycho-analytical, psycho-sensual erotica, an 80's evoking synth-fest that sounds as futuristic as it does retro, as psychologically exploratory as it is physically inspiring, eliciting shivers of tension or elation, often simultaneously; I have to bite down hard when The Beat and The Pulse kicks in. The unsettlingly gorgeous voice of Katie Stelmanis just finishes it off.   

02. Ash Borer - Ash Borer

Psychic Violence
Black metal has been on another level this year, and I seem to find myself saying that every single year. It's the most rewarding addiction I've ever initiated.  Epic in scale and grandeur, cinematic in scope and narrative, misanthropically violent and naturalistically meditative, this is a record that achieves and conveys so much without once concerning itself with the composed achievement of any such things.  Ash Borer are a band that play outside of themselves, that creates a sound that seems just that much further from the limits of human potential than any group limited by the boundaries of physical existence could create. That's always the critical essence inherent in a truly great album, when you can drop the needle onto a record and immediately struggle to understand where any of it could have come from and how those energies could have coalesced into the form in front of you. Ash Borer is that kind of album.

01. Peaking Lights – 936

Not Not Fun
It doesn't always happen, but this year my top album is also the one I have listened to the most, far more than anything else released this year.  It's impossible to put this record on and get nothing out of it, it is always compelling and always affecting.  No album this year could compete with the warm intimacy and exotic otherworldliness the duo produce. Snatches of circuit bent sound burst apart and melt back into a mix of beautiful analogue psychedelic successions, interwoven through each track's euphorically soporific spacial dub, with fading ripples of delay, echo heavy guitar vibrations nuancing an intimate tapestry of muted arpeggios and descending melody lines that cross each other like intertwined lovers.  In 2011, this album was the divinity of sensual sonic experimentation.

Top 50 Albums of 2010

Two thousand and ten is officially dusted my friends!  Without too much extra preamble, here is my year that was 2010 in album form.  This was probably the hardest year of writing end of year lists that I have ever had; a phenomenon I would attribute to the ever expanding boundaries of the musical universe.  The more bastardisation and cross-pollination goes on, the harder it is to define anything incontrovertibly, but in spite of that, here it is a massively disparate selection of records from a year that was wall to wall individuality with hard-lined categorising numbers beside them. You will see that I have taken the contraversial step of slamming a couple of albums together into the same place on occasion. this is a slight remnant from my original idea of completely reconstructing the nature of an end of year list, but it starting edging too close to genre-fication and that isn't what I intended. maybe next year you will be viewing a brand new paradigm but right now you get this half-cocked version in which I get a couple of records that can be tied together bundled up with the barest of threads. Works for me.

50. Clair Cassis – I (Full Moon Productions) / II (Starlight Temple Society)

Perfectly executed olde school Norther trance black metal, from Velvet Cacoon's Josh – with the temerity to keep the tracks below three minutes a piece. Shocking.

49. Sleeping Peonies – Rose Curl, Sea Swirl (Khrysanthoney)

Using the romanticism of their local coastlines to inspire an album shrouded in the sounds of salty sea spray, siren calls, dense mists and lowland fog, this two piece produced an affecting record with a ragged core. No matter how many times I say it, I will never tire of the term Norfolk Black Metal.

48. Magic Lantern – Platoon / Sun Araw – On Patrol (Not Not Fun)

The former is the steamy tropical screaming wah-quake full band blues behemoth, the latter is the solo sweat lodge endurance trial before enlightenment, possibly in a spaceship, possibly not – both spun from the effervescent mind of Cameron Stallone.

47. The Steven Lasombras – A Diamond Eye Shines In Failing Light (Wise Owl / To The Neck Recordings)
Industrial pop from a Portland based solo artist who recorded part of it during a year in Indonesia learning shadow puppetry - a beautiful metaphor for the music within as ballroom song structures are outlined in noise and pure tone viscera.

46. Drudkh – Handful Of Stars (Season Of Mist)
Ukranian forest metallers returned with another  in their regular series of blazing bark-thick riffed minimalism that puts torch to sky and fans the flames as the Heavens burn.

45. Twin Stumps – Seedbed (Fan Death)
Ultra overdriven violent nihilism roared and smashed out from the bodies of a band howling their sickness right back into the faces of anyone who might had had the slightest involvement in creating the dystopia they are setting about destroying.  If you mourned the passing of Mayyors, Twin Stumps will be the band for you.

44. Winterfylleth – The Mercian Sphere (Candlelight)

Leading the heathen Heritage Metal wing of the UKBM scene overground with a combination of Cascadian and Scandinavian riffs and undulating song structures, emboldened with a rich narrative of ancient British folklore, this was an album thatmarked its territory in more ways than one.

43. Stag Hare - Sand Paintings (Moon Glyph) / White Stag (Marriage)
Last year's Liight Being Traveler and Black Medicine Musics set the scene for the environment Stag Hare's follow up rolls about in, colouring in the details that were outlined on the previous ventures; from scrubland psych to diving deep into the emerald waves coral reefs, this tape shifted the landscape to one richer in life, a real advance deeper into the heart of one man's soundworld. The second album, White Stag is a collaboration with White Rainbow that blitzes these kinds of tropical drone and White Rainbow's more cerebral resonance into a throbbing disco flux with the massive twenty minute Shhooopeey Shoop Mega Tuff House Remix.

42. Swans – My Father Will Guide Me Up A Rope To The Sky (Young God)A massively unexpected triumph for Gira's 75% reformed Swans as they resurface with a record that forged a new future as strongly as it recognised their past. If anyone was nervous about hearing this 'comeback' (*spit*) album then they were fucking terrified by the time they got to the end of it. Intimidating enough, even without Jarboe's presence, the involvement of children on a Swans album would surely always be enough to chill you to the bone.

41. Je Suis Le Petit Chevalier – Tropical Malady (I Had An Accident)
Definitely something about Portland - this French artist, relocated to Belgium via Portland, dragged a psychic net behind his travels, capturing a dreamscape of late night television frequencies, the ebb and flow of the ocean, hypnagogic volcanic drone bottled up whilst star-gazing over a roaring ocean. Some kind of far out trip and then some.

40. Weapon – From The Devil's Tomb (Ajna/Agonia)
Second release from one Bangladeshi born Canadian occultist who brought tropical Satanism to bear over the ritual bodies fo Black and Death metal.  Dense, claustrophobic, complex yet following some grim, ancient logic that locks its talons into the skin and pulls the listener into its very very violent course.

39. Castevet – Mounds Of Ash (Profound Lore)
Hardcore reformed Black Metal off the streets of New York that led with the backline - bass and drums pushed way out, heavy on the rhythm, guitars that tremeloed in reference to their history, everything else a post-rock crescendo of hammer blows right up to the horn section that blows you away every time.

38. Ikonika – Contact, Love, Want, Have (Hyperdub)
Sampling Streets of Rage was pretty much all Sara Abdel-Hamid had to do to win a place in my heart, but that fact that she dropped it into the highly emotive, atmospherically resonant depths of her individualised take on dubstep and produced an album of consistently nifty beats took her to the next level.

37. †‡† - CDr (Disaro)
Disaro's finest contribution to the Witch House cannon this year, an occult inducted hex on techno and bleak trance overcast with a sinister pall - spine chilling atmospheres juxtaposed an upwardly spiralling mental state that frequently spiked into full on warehouse euphoria.

36. High Wolf – Shangri L.A. (Moamoo) / Iibiis Rooge - Iibiis Rooge (Dekorder)
French based deep jungle trance and cosmic radiation drone with earthen clatter to stamp your feet in circles to. High Wolf is the lone incarnation - a looser, more primitive beat-based urgent sounding instance of the same mind striving for transcendence. Iibiis is HW plus Astral Social Club - a telepathic entity that seduces beats from the ether of its own making, moulding tone into rocking pulses and trickling an almost incomprehensible mix of effervescence into the mix. Heavy heavy, trippy trippy, deeply deeply ppssyycchheeddeelliicc.

35. Actress – Splazsh (Honest Jons)
The efficient minimalism of the cover art belies the level of detail and business of the tracks inside this album - almost like an ariel view of a city, each track formed a block, set out a shape and sound defined by it's own clinically segregated tones - yet the more listens I gave it the closer I zoomed in on it until I was at street level, face to face with the characters in each track and able to see more clearly the smooth transitions between them and the ways in which they interacted. 

34. Horseback – The Invisible Mountain (Aurora Borealis / Relapse)
Black Metal slowly borne from a world of ambience, if ever there was an album that sonically captured the growth of organism from the primordial fog and sludge of the first days at the microbial level, all the way up to the scaly roar of full grown sentience then this was it.

33. Ghost Animal – Summertime In Heaven (Self-Released) / In Your Room (AMDICSC)

An album and an EP from these one-time LA residents, now relocated to..Portland. So yup, this is some scuzz soaked perfection that's got played ad infinitum. Formed in April this year, the mind melts at the idea of their tunes when they hit the 12 month mark.  Tracks formed from the ghosts of New Order, shadows of Joy Division and the spectre of the Cure; influences that mooch attentively at the back of the class as Phil Spector gives them a lesson in the Wall of Sound, all shredded, rolled up and smoked in youthfully hedonistic form.

32. Jack Rose – Luck In The Valley (Thrill Jockey)
The final album before he died well before his time saw Jack combining his impossiblly accomplished understanding of stomping ragtime American Primitive with the sonorous patience of Eastern ragas in a record that almost displayed his full hand or at least outlined it, tying up the threads from all his previous projects into a neat package that pointed towards so many paths, some of which may never get opened up by anyone else.

31. Women – Public Strain (Jagjaguwar)

Updating their sound with a second album of slanted melodies, Women threw down a set of landsliding sound that swept their influences off the rock-face in a torrent of distortion and atonal scree. Public Strain is one of those rare albums that subtly transcends it's influences; when you start to hear Silver Apples in China Steps, they soon follow it up with a sideswipe of detuned Sonic Youth guitars to level the field; Velvet Underground bob up into Venice Lockjaw but the awkwardly uplifiting harmonising dissolves it into something else, and by the first peak of Eyesore you'll have already decided on your song of the year and that's before its moebius strip of interwoven melody and harmony that reworks itself through peak after peak of hauntingly beautiful repetition.

 

30. Solar Bears – She Was Coloured In (Planet Mu)
Really pushing those vintage sounds right out there, holding on to their vapour trails until they solar winds blew them out of their hands, Solar Bears set their controls for deep out into the cosmos to produce this album of retro-kosmiche pulse, technicolour drone and psych electronica; and if those weren't enough they also set about tricking their textural space cruise out with some post rock dynamics, prog riffing and at least one Balaeric sunset comedown.  Maybe there was more sounds than were needed to fill out one album, but what it lost in narrative cohesion it more than made up for in songcraft.

29. Eleh – Location Momentum (Touch)
From something ethereal to another, equally intangible but one formed from a sense of cognisant deliberation rather than free flowing improv. Apparently Eleh has many many releases, but I am not sure I want to sully the stark, diamond cut perfection of this.  The intricacy with which every sound is crafted on this, and the fine granular detail in which they are cast into the mix and moulded is mind melting, moves the body to a different place to the head and disloacted time and space. And then the bass kicks in.

28. Loscil – Endless Falls (Kranky)
An album shrouded in mist and moisture, light refracted, sound subdued, muffled by the environment, and album that lifted something between listener and artist, between the music and the listener. From the opening rainfall there was something alive and fresh sounding in this, and it wasn't until the end that its exact nature was revealed, in the voices the rise during the final moments; a personal warmth, the pulse of life amongst the abstract landscape. An album far beyond the sterility of what Ambient may perhaps signify, Scott Morgan melted the biological energies of neo-classical instrumentation into the electronic undercurrents of his previous work and produced his most intimate and affecting work to date.

27. Autre Ne Veut – Autre Ne Veut (Olde English Spelling Bee) / Games – That We Play (Hippos In Tanks)
Two more inseparable albums from separate entities as far as assessing the year goes, but both occupying the same place in the musical timeline and/or nostalgia/reminiscence curved hypnagogic bubble. Both reconfigure an era I have never been able to tolerate, let alone enjoy, so whether that means I should throw myself on the sword of hipsterism for falling so hard for them I don't know; all I know is that there's tangible atmosphere tied together with more emotional and musical hooks within these tracks than I sensibly know what to do with, so I've had to step outside myself to understand it.

26. Gnod & White Hills - Gnod Drop Out With White Hills II (Rocket Recordings) Manchester's multi-headed psychedelic rhythm band Gnod team up with US psych-rockers White Hills to create the greatest space rock album of the year. Reworking tracks from both their catalogues in a truly intuitive collaboration, this album weaves it's own eternal tapestry of eight smoked-out meditative forays through fractal kraut and tribal rhythm, building sky-high space jams that spiral into the stars.

25. Heavy Winged – Fields Within Fields (Three Lobed) / Sunspotted (Type)
One of my favourite bands ever took to using multi-track studio recording for the first time this year, first on Fields Within Fields – a set of pieces they had been aiming to give the full recording technique to for a couple of years, then later, Sunspotted appeared on Type – both albums fully engaging the listener from their opening bars with clearer definition and thicker, heavier production that highlights all the previously murky brilliance. The slowly coalescing rumbles that build to jet engine screaming peaks, howling vortexes and yawning abysses of sound; the switching of bass and guitar over fore- and back-ground confuses the shit out of the senses and leaves them prone to the mercies of Jed Bindeman's gargantuan drum kit. Heavy Winged produce rock music out of pure sound then pull it apart in slow-motion explosive force.

24. Deathspell Omega – Paracletus (Season Of Mist)
The concluding chapter of their trilogy, Deathspell relaxed their grip eve so slightly to allow slivers of light to bleed into their pitch black metal and offered the listener the most rocking experience of their career. Replacing hyperspeed technicality with hyperspeed groove lost them none of their violent brutality with many of the tracks providing the most memorable riffs of their canon and for me, their greatest achievement in the tortured post-rock climax of Abscission

23. White Medal – Agbrigg Beast (Turgid Animal/Seedstock)
Crust influenced black metal, like a UK rescrub of Bone Awl's spiteful malice, George Proctor offered up an album steeped in English heritage, singing in his Yorkshire dialect, and being wholly incomparable. Downtuned atonal riffs bounce up to major keys in On't Borough and The Last Days adding a shockingly fresh melodic buoyancy that provided a vital sound through fresh violent minimalism.

22. Infinite Body – Carve Out The Face Of My God (Post Present Medium)The previously harsh noise artist Kyle Parker created a second album or lush melodic fuzz that layerd on the dense gauzey beauty like Birchville Cat Motel or Belong, in even softer focus. The field recordings submerged into the shoegazy rhythmic ebb and flow add a sense of life similar to the ending of the Loscil album, and probably give it all 6 places of edge over it in this list; and this album has a greater twist with the almost imperceptibly subtle shifting guitar figure in A Fool Persists – the kind of meditative bliss that I just cannot rate highly enough.

21. Balaclavas – Roman Holiday (Dull Knife)
Unfuckable force to be reckoned with in one of 2010's best savage guitar missives that shifts through as many genres as you could possibly handle in one hyperblast fast sitting, burning a sense of macabre noir through the hearts of some kind of noise/punk/new wave arête that straddles an elevated understanding of the effectiveness of minimalism. So, layers of polyrhythmic drumming and distorted guitar overcoats get blown about into ultra moody backlit shapes over six episodes until the final track where cosmic disco label Italians Do It Better signees Twisted Wires get their hands on Vuitton and send an electric shock through it that jumps it into another dimension altogether - some pretty intelligent tracklist design to finish the album on it, like one final knockout blow to send you spinning, right round to come back for more.

20. Tame Impala – Innerspeaker (Modular)

It took a lot of listens for this album to really sink in and when it did it wasn't so much a sinking feeling as one swinging right at my head and bowling me for six.  On a level with Dungen for psychedelic rock experiences, far-out, far-off out of focus shimmering and some Sabbath heavy slabs of real life 60's patchouli metal kitted out with one of the best drumming performances of the year and strung together with a Lennon-influenced vocal style that I didn't want to punch in the face. Quite an achievement.

19. Drekavac – Drekavac / Grave Dirt and Blood (Self-Released)
A relentless, light-less two-piece whose take on the genre sucks up and spews out energy like they're the Heavy Winged of USBM.  Over two demo tapes this year they have put out a form of black metal that has little regard for anything else going on around it. A blizzard of noise howling in off some inhospitable mountain range. The drumming is like a freight train, heavy and full of momentum, the guitars have the spiteful blown out wrongness of old Vlad Tepes or other Les Légions Noires bands – a sickly caustic fury muffled within the skins of rats (not literally....allegedly). Pretty hard to tell quite what is going on with the riffs underneath it all but they leave an imprint on the speakers and your ears that proves it's not what you do but the way that you do it.

18. Gkfoes Vjgoaf – Light Weaving (Ace Of Tapes)
One of my favourite discoveries of last year who put out a slew of self-released tapes that were like some epic psych jumbalaya drone, stewed up and strung out over a backwoods campfire – Skip Spence time-stretched into modernity along side the likes of Peaking Lights.  Previously there was a chaotic sense to the tracks, like a survival instinct had gripped them, so when Light Weaving came out in the summer I wasn't quite prepared for the beautifully measured, all enveloping slowly revealing majesty with which his drone has become.

 

17. Gr†ll Gr†ll – CDr (Disaro)

Until Salem and Dream Boat came along Gr†ll Gr†ll were the only witch house affiliated artist/s to have anything resembling an album; for a long time back there they were unique in having a full set of tracks that flowed through each other, creating a whole worldview and range of sounds that offered a widescreen view and vision of someone producing these sounds, and with this Cdr they fully delivered, blurring the edges of their degenerate collages, screwing down a Lil Wayne solo piano track that transcended the beauty of the original tracks then flipped that by torturing the ghost of Kurt and kiddy cartoons, scrubbing elements of glitch, drone, and noise deep into the 16 wounds they carved into this disc. Two fingers up. What more could you want?

16. Cosmic Church - Arcana Dei (Kuunpalvelus)

Trilogy of tapes crushed together onto one CD reissue of primal Finnish noise that ate the deathspell album alive in terms of subterannean Satanic might; this was a scream into the heavens from the deepest recesses of the Earth, and the recording sound like it's buried underneath a tonne of soil too - not one for loves of fidelity, this is the some of the rawest sounding music in existance; yet as is ever the Truth within the most transcendent strains of the genre, there are skeins of euphoric trance submerged within, the shapes of the riffs oozing seductively through the muck; the transfiguration from Darkness to Light, the co-existance of ugliness and beauty.

15. Wild Nothing – Evertide (Warmest Chord)/ Gemini (Captured Tracks)
One more solo artist to add to my list of one man bands producing perfectly crafted pop music; every one filtered through a romantic hue of nostalgic (I'm thinking Washed Out, Twin Shadow, Atlas Sound).  Not many albums had as naggingly beautiful hooks as these, with the pillow soft edges of Slumberland shoegaze melted into Cocteau Twins textural harmonies. Drifter, China Town, Rabbit Feet – Jack Tatum sure can write them.

14. Gonjasufi – A Sufi And A Killer (Warp)
I truly do not know what I would have done without Gonjasufi this year. My summer would have been much darker had it lacked the psychedelic positivity and radiant effervescence of this album..  Really not what I was expecting when I first heard it – from the Turkish garage psych to the drippy hippy lyrics (all of which I can tolerate, even Sheep) and now so many months and spins later I am still discovering new magic in each listen.

13. Forest Swords – Dagger Paths (Olde English Spelling Bee) / Rattling Cage 7” (No Pain In Pop)

Hypnagogic Pop continued its mutable coalescence across several forms this year, one of which was the characteristically indistinct form of Forest Swords; a producer whose two releases created their own unique space across a venn overlap between H-Pop, dupstep and all manner of atmosphereic genres.  If Dagger Paths felt claustrophobic and murky - underlined by the huge Dead Flag Blues sample imprinting its apolcalyptic overtones into the centre of the album - the 7” shone a beam of light through the fog and burned a bit of clarity into it with one of the most arresting vocals of the year and a shuffling beats that makes my ears prick up on impact every time.

12. Fell Voices – 12” (Human Resources) / Tour Split (Self-Released) / Ash Borer – Rehearsal / Tour Split (Self Released)
Combined here not just because they toured together in the summer, but because both revel in their chosen aesthetics (or lack of) to the same degree and have produced works that co-exist in the same limnal space, slipping from the transcendental Cascadian path during an illuminated peak in the storm, a backlit flash of inspiration that in both cases translates to seemingly telepathic communion in producing music that defies genre and drops jaws to the floor.

11. Dream Boat – Visions / Fevers (Amdiscs)
This band had an incredible year putting out several singles, splits and eps in 2010, culminating in the full album Visions, all of which I could list here together as they are all infallible extensions of the same...vision.  Dysphoric vignettes of hallucinatory aggression conveying an unease that was Lynchian in tone, twisting a sordid tension up through each track, drum machines building and layering up against synth tones and distorted vocals; voices inciting violence, lust, projecting sexual energy and vibrating with dark malevolence.

10. Salem – King Night (Iamsound)
Nothing this year sounded like Salem, outsiders even within the scene they helped create, Witch House would be nothing without them but they created an album that stands are above and beyond everything that genre has offered up.  For an album pinned to the mechanical signatures of programmed beats King Night sounds loose and dangerous, those cold kicks and slaps like boots to the head and slaps to the chops, the different voices and vocal styles chopping the album up switching about tone and pace, the overall atmosphere conveying a grim pall of dense, airless and claustrophobic might – an album that sounds like the substantiated form of experiments in black magick.

09. Inquisition - Ominous Doctrines of the Perpetual Mystical Macrocosm (Hells Headbangers)

Transcendental olde school black metal that doesn't fuck with the formula just blazes it up in a towering inferno of perfection. Inquisition are one of the old guard back from hiatus with a new album in years and it's as if the silence charged up their energies and increased their potency.  I've said it before but it bears repeating – why is it so many metal bands get better as they get older, yet all other kinds of rock groups go to shit?

08. Yellow Swans – Going Places (Type) / Pete Swanson – Where I Was (Self-Released)
Yellow Swans bowed out at a peak; pretty hard to call anything out from their huge catalogue as the definitive high point, but Going Places definitely felt like one final mass expending of energies until it drew the well dry. An enormous overwhelming record of pure sound manipulation.  The story isn't ending there, as Pete Swanson continues to produce commanding performances on his own:  Where I Was collects tracks from Swanson's first four cassette releases and sews them into a seamless boiling mas of tarpit drone; molasses thick and an equal in every way to his main band's swansong.

07. Deerhunter – Halcyon Digest (4AD)

If this album is not Deerhunter at their creative peak then the only way they can go is with a Kid A style reinvention of style and produce something incomparable. The inextricable link and feedback loop relationship between the theme of this album and the way it is musically realised, the listener's reactions to it and real life invasion are actually mindblowing – the creation of a garage band and the ensuing lifestyle that lets the human slip out of reach, accompanied by soft focus slow motion dream-pop culminating with a song honoring the (pretty torturous) life of a recently deceased garage rocker.

06. A Forest Of Stars – Opportunistic Thieves Of Spring (Transcendental Creations)
For their second album, the most distinguished and discerning gentleman of Black Metal created an aggressively dreamy psychedelic trip that blends completely non metal aspects such as woodwind, tribal polyrhythmic percussion, and vocoder, with a more obviously BM blast beat backed virulent spite, bridged by cosmic influence in both outlook and ambiance that wouldn't necessarily have worked if it wasn't for the masterful crafting of the songs themselves. Six movements, sweeping across grand vistas, leading the listener on a merry dance, each traveling further down the rabbit hole that is this album, churning up seismic conundrums in their wake.  It's rare that a black metal album has such a simultaneous sense of joyful abandonment attached to its violent streak, but this is a record so agile and skillful in the conviction of its creation that the only thing left to question are all the old flat lifeless albums you once thought great, staring with mute force at you from your shelves.

05. Gayngs – Relayted (Jagjaguwar)
Their own strapline of 'sex music for sex people' says it all; if this album didn't give your ears a wide-on from the first beats then you're dead between the legs and numb in the head. Get feeling.  Masterminded by dance producer Ryan Olson featuring a lineup of over twenty five of his cohorts and unlikely interested parties this album takes blue-eyed soul and jazz pop and really doesn't do much to them other than replicate the sounds of it's inspirations perfectly; that would be Godley & Creme and 10cc's I'm Not In Love.  There's some mysterious allure sewn into this, the way it is all seductively segued together, the myriad subtle production tricks it employs and the steady pulse quickening, pun intending 69bpm.

04. Twin Shadow – Forget (Terrible)
2010 was the year in which we happened upon the new incarnation of Prince in the form of Twin Shadow, aka George Lewis Jr, the most ridiculously talented solo artist of the last twelve months, if not longer, who with the help of Grizzly Bear's Chris Taylor, produced the album that Pop Music is on a permanent aspirational journey to achieve.  Taking the personal and turning it into something that can be owned by any listener Forget's nuanced vocal performances nonchalantly dropped the heaviest of lyrics into the catchiest couplets, featured the kinds of basslines people build dancefloors for plus the machine beats to match them, reintroduced hedonistic guitar licks and killer glitter-bomb crescendo solos with the foil of a perfect heartbreaking ballad to stop the show.

03. Demdike Stare – Forest Of Evil / Liberation Through Hearing / Voices Of Dust (Modern Love)
A trilogy of albums that conjured a genuinely unearthly trance from a combination of occult hauntology,  radiophonic workshopping and exotica, evoked ritualistic and religious texts and gloried in the musical properties of spiritual mysticism as much as the more physical aspects of electronic manipulation and magic.  A preternatural album that stylised itself best with the third album's cover of a seductively gloved medium casting runes towards the listener; the final play in enshrouding the listener in an umbral world of dark incantation and conscious elevating drone.

02. Agalloch – Marrow of the Spirit (Profound Lore)
Fourth full length from this band surpasses all that has come before and all other metal albums this year; a year in which I would consider Metal to have had some kind of renaissance or illumination, with so much invention and interesting records being released. Above them all stands this album; one that takes the Earth and bends it to its will as the most empowered Black Metal should, and in doing so refracts every element of Nature through it's prism. It features some beguilingly subtle and beautifully finessed instrumentation, overlapping acoustic passages with electrical storms - echoes of the ancients ringing into modernity. The guitar work is slides gracefully between raggedly harsh  intimidating aggression to beautifully evocative tones using an almost never ending supply of luminous riffs; the drumming from Ludicra's Aesop Dekkar expands and contract in perfect synchronicity with the changing moods of the guitars, all complemented by the year's most accomplished vocal performance; The result is a record that already has the well worn warmth and lived in feel of a decades old classic album.

01. Emeralds – Does it Look Like I'm Here? / Mark McGuire – Living With Yourself (Editions Mego)
Two sides to one story which I just cannot separate from each other; Emeralds is part which takes place in the ultra kosmiche, blurred out night world, a psychedelic hall of mirrors that shifts focus from the pulse to the drift, the ebb to the flow; their entire body of work honed in on, zoomed in on to reveal the most finely grained detail.  In reducing the track lengths they have emphasised everything about them, increased the density of the experience by evaporating out the extraneous to leave an utterly powerful elixir. Mark McGuire's solo album is a beautifully perfect foil to the fizzing noise of his full bandl; a lifetime's reminiscence that happens wide-eyed and out in the sunshine, focus pulled out to reveal a range of human drama in huge widescreen encompassing social landscapes and human occasions, personal, and warm. Serving as the bare bones that lie underneath the Emeralds tracks, the music in Living With Yourself comes as a revelation akin to lifting the veil over your brides face and being able to see the raw beauty in the flesh.