Winning '11: 1 - Patrick Wolf

Patrick Wolf - Lupercalia

The Magic Position was meant to be Patrick Wolf's commercial breakthrough back in 2007. Major label, bright presentation, glittery songs in (clap, clap) the major key. It didn't really happen. He went away and made The Bachelor, a darker, more personal and dense album funded by fans and released on his own label. It was a tremendous album but one that was stylistically all over the pace and took a lot of living with to get. I assumed that that was it as far as his chances of making it to the mainstream, and that a future of similarly difficult albums as a self-releasing cult act was ahead. Hopefully not involving Twitter as a full time job and auctioning off his possessions Amanda Palmer style.

In 2011, though, he was back on a major label again, and released a fifth album which finally saw his music more widely embraced and in the top 40 and on the radio (albeit the previously unlikely Radio 2!). Not only that, but Lupercalia is his best album yet, a cynicism-destroying celebration of love with his talent and ambition as forceful as ever and his strength at maximalist pop finally given free rein over a whole album, inspired by his engagement to fiancé William. He even gets namechecked on the brief electro interval of the same name, which yes, really does end with the line 'William, will you be my conqueror?'. As made clear by that and Patrick's rant last time I saw him about negative responses to the saxophones in "The City", this is not an album which recognises the concept of cheesiness.

Patrick has always had a way with writing grand, sweeping songs which hit with an elemental force but are still believably intimate and personal. Lupercalia drops some of the more ornate detailing for comparably straightforward love songs, but that's all still true and he manages to bring new perspectives to even this oldest of topics. "Bermondsey Street" is the biggest statement on love in the wider rather than personal sense (and its chorus is ridiculously, gloriously big, swelling with feeling and pride). Love is for everyone and anyone, it says, illustrating it with two mirrored proposals, both couples declaring theirs 'the greatest love of the century'. The obviously striking detail is the way its first line 'she kisses him on Bermondsey Street' is swapped out in the second verse for 'he kisses him on Bermondsey Street'. After reading so many suggested wedding vows with that phrase 'You may now kiss the bride', I can't help but see 'she kisses him' as a pointed reversal of the norm too, though. 

"House" brings a great deal of sophistication and thought in to its hymn to the possibilities brought about by the security of a relationship, but Patrick still sings it with a heart-on-sleeve urgency: never has contented domesticity sounded so bloody exciting. Its something repeated in "The Future" which eventually builds to 'The threshold appears and I am carrying you over/Carrying me over!/Into the best days of the rest of our lives' as the track bursts into life, guitars and choirs driving home the all-encompassing joy.

On "Together”, which combines Patrick’s mile-wide romanticism with a deep disco pulse to incredible effect, the message is not “I can’t go on without you” but “I can go on without you, but it would be a bit rubbish, so let’s not, please”. It feels entirely natural but is uncommonly refreshing. It still allows his love to feel monumental, turning the ordinary into the extraordinary and powering the most ecstatic chorus of the year. And oh, the strings! The sweep up and out of the spoken bit! I don’t know how many times I’ve listened to it (last.fm says 32, I'm not sure I trust it), but like Lupercalia as a whole, it still makes me so happy every time.

Winning '11: 2 - Emmy the Great

Emmy the Great - Virtue

I very much see my top two albums as a pair. They came out within a week of each other in June and helped immensely to get me through some of the worst weeks of my year immediately at the same time. They were by the two singers who I've seen more than any others over the last couple of years and the albums are almost mirror images of each other. Both are open hearted intimate and make no secret of their autobiographical elements, but one is celebratory and one mournful, one marking the beginning and one the end of serious, marriage-bound relationships. They even both have a superb second track and single which is superficially about a house but really about the relationship.

Virtue is the end album of the pair and one which I'm very close to in probably unprecedented ways. I've exchanged more words with Emma-Lee Moss than any other musician (not that that's hard). I've seen her play more times than anyone else bar Elbow and Hard-Fi, and over a much shorter period of time than either. I've witnessed the songs on Virtue evolving before they were recorded and in fact, thanks to Pledgemusic, I heard several of them for the first time in my friend's front room, played to an audience of twelve people and a cat. It's maybe not surprising that I feel such a strong personal connection to the songs as a result, but on the other hand it's the strength of her songs which brought me into doing all of that in the first place. "Secret Circus" knocked me out before knowing anything about her apart from the name, which is probably worse than nothing. First Love was my favourite album of 2009.

Virtue shows all the same wit, insight, poetry as that album and is more complete and focused with it, musically as well as lyrically. Still playing indie-folk of a sort closer to Bright Eyes than to Laura Marling, every single song now sounds stripped to the bare essentials to make every moment count in service of the stories she's telling. Not to say that it's all acoustic all the way, but every additional touch is perfectly fitting - the yawning guitar echo in "Dinosaur Sex" that marks the creeping power of the uncertain and unknowable; the gothic choral backing vocals that convey the full horror of "A Woman, a Woman, a Century of Sleep" as her relationship turns suffocating and the very walls around her seem to be closing in.

The overall back story to the album is that it was written in the aftermath of a breakup triggered by Moss' fiancé finding God, and religious and fantastical imagery and considerations haunt the whole album. "Paper Forest (in the Afterglow of Rapture)" casts love as a blessing and the rapture of the title, but one that she's left unsure what to do with. Its words and sense of rueful deflation ring very true in capturing what happens when you spend so long believing something to be true, documenting and analysing and reaffirming it, that you can’t find your way back to actually living in and feeling the moment as it happens. "Creation" plays powerfully with the idea of becoming the author and God of your own story, or of someone else's and the weight of responsibility that results.

The album ends with "Trellick Tower", her saddest and best song yet. It lays everything as bare and as clear as can be, music reduced to a few piano notes which sound afraid to intrude on its grief. Her lover is now cast as a departed saint, as unreachable as the top of the brutalist block of flats from which the song takes its name. She prays in vain to a voice which he hears and she can't, everything around her and eventually herself turned into lifeless relics of something now gone forever, all greeted with a numb acceptance, like she's just setting out the facts but in the only language able do them justice. It's another fairly audacious idea but like all of Virtue it really, really works.

Winning '11: 3 - Einar Stray

Einar Stray - Chiaroscuro

This first album from young Norwegian Einar Stray reminds me at least as much of Sufjan Stevens (when constructing delicate, intricately pretty chamber pop arrangements) and Hope of the States (when exploding them into an angry mess) as it does of Sigur Rós. Yet the feeling of listening to Chiaroscuro reminds me very much, and very specifically, of listening to Ágætis Byrjun for the first time. It has the same effect of almost overwhelming beauty and the same magic feeling that a strange new music and world is being created in which anything is possible (the latter being both the more unusual and what Sigur Rós have lacked since, it all now tending to feel a bit too forced and planned).

The album has three key songs which between them make up the bulk of its time and which it all hangs on, and it's perfectly structured around those peaks. They sit at the start, middle and end of its seven tracks. In between are two pairs of songs which are lighter, but bring their own joy on a smaller scale, and are a welcome breather to ensure that epic fatigue doesn't set in.

The three, then. "Chiaroscuro" deals in vivid wild elemental forces - its few lyrics sketch us in as 'rockets fall to the ground like snow' and Einar urges us to 'Make a red, red, riot/Make a big, bright fire'. We tour through great clouds of violin, a wilderness of whistled wind, molten rivers of feedback, the enthralling journey held together by a few elegantly recurring motifs sung and on piano. "We Were the Core Seeds" at the album's centre starts off with urgent plucked strings and skittering drums but emerges as a gentle and expansive lament for opportunities glimpsed and lost (note that whatever Core Seeds are, it's We Were, not We Are). It is though plainly backed up by a heart of steel that only completely emerges in the words 'They said trust the Bible/Trust the bankers' over crashing cymbals, the last word practically snarled. It's a terrifically startling moment in an album that exists so often in a reality of its own.

At the end, "Teppet Faller" is an instrumental and the album's big concession to the standard post-rock build and release format. But what a build and release! A piano tentatively emerges from the gloom and plays solemn notes, first obscured by the speaking of strange voices and then backed up by strings. It settles into a loop, growing in power, strings squeaking around the edges like a great old rusty machine being reluctantly forced into action again. The sound continues to grow imperceptibly until a bass rumble announces that everything is just about to kick off and then... nothing does. Everything grinds to a halt. There's a terrific unresolved tension. But it starts again, and this time the strings are squealing and the bass is becoming a ferocious roar and BOOOM. The strings go mental, the drums kick in like they've been restrained for the last ten minutes and are free at last. It's a life affirming bit of barely controlled noise that the whole track, probably the whole album, has been working up to and the pay off is worth it.

Winning '11: 4 - Elbow

Elbow - Build a Rocket Boys!

Time flies and Elbow have been my favourite band for more than a decade now. Take the fact that Guy Garvey has the most amazing voice and that their every note is made to sound completely gorgeous as read for this review, really. This marked the first album of theirs which I approached with anxiety though, being as it was their first after achieving massive commercial success off the back of That Song. It turned out that I needn't have been worried that a whole album of deliberately soundtrack ready anthems was going to emerge to capitalise.

First, if anything Build a Rocket Boys! is the most considered and dense Elbow album since their first, the least concerned with immediate thrills and sing along choruses. It starts off with "The Birds", simultaneously big in musical scale and intimate in its emotions, unfolding in languorous stages. It has a hint of Pulp's We Love Life to its organic portrayal of nature and love but has a mix of romance and realism which is pure Elbow. It has an old man looking back at his life, interspersed with the dismissive interjections of those looking after him. 'What are we going to do with you?... looking back is for the birds', backed up by a puffed-up bass stomp. There's a lot more where that comes from album goes on to meditate on different aspects of memories and the past in every song, always one of my favourite of Guy Garvey's topics and one which once again sees him in evocative and impressive form.

The other thing, though, is that the album does have its own one obvious single, and "Open Arms" is unreservedly fantastic in a way that "One Day Like This" never was. An ode to community that it seemed clear, from the first time I heard it live before the album's release, was seemed destined to bring together its own wherever it went, so utterly welcoming and big-hearted it was. It even reaches out into space in the end - 'The moon is out looking for trouble/The moon wants a scrap or a cuddle/The moon is face down in a puddle/And everyone's here'. There remains no one better to go to for totally endearing and warm poetry on the subject of drink and friendship and nostalgia.

Winning '11: 5 - Lykke Li

Lykke Li - Wounded Rhymes

In some ways, the most unexpected album on this list. Lykke Li's first album Youth Novels had its moments, but for the most part I found it too limited, with too many incomplete sketches relying on cuteness and not much else. For Wounded Rhymes she came back transformed - still recognisable and still with the same producer and mostly the same instruments, but powered-up, focused and angry. "Get Some" was the early statement of purpose, all shyness or hesitancy blown away in a storm of sex and thumping drums which remains fantastically fun.

Mixing indie sensibilities with a new widescreen pop classicism, her sound and songs now hit a spot in a way that no one else has quite managed. The "Be My Baby" beat's inevitable appearance comes on "Sadness is a Blessing", the zenith of the album in its masterful control of melancholy. Confident and accomplished, even her voice took on a new deeper force which was barely hinted at previously, one which is as well suited to the scathing blitz of "Rich Kid Blues" as to the bare heartbreak of "Unrequited Love".

Winning '11: 6 - Austra

Austra - Feel It Break

I just have to look at my year end lists over the last decade to see how crucial my year writing for Stylus Magazine in 2006 was to the development of my tastes. Exposed to a community of passionate and inspiring people who knew very different things, and saw things very different ways from me, I tried out stuff which I probably never would have done otherwise and took me at least a little away from the (British, male) indie rock which made up all. And some of the new stuff was awesome. One of the most critical records of that year was the haunted forest electro-pop of The Knife's Silent Shout. Maybe as a result I'm slightly over-inclined to see its influence, but there do seem to be a succession of new acts in the last couple of years who have been inspired by it and Austra are my favourite.

Not to say that Feel it Break is a mere imitator. It uses many similar sounds and tones and has a very similar stark and alien beauty - the deep throb of single "The Beat and the Pulse" is probably closest of all - but Feel it Break doesn't have the same fearful, cold distance or crushing force of sound. There are no mental rave-outs or pitch-shifted voices and Austra are more pop and less electro, have more open spaces. The plain piano backdrop of "The Beast" is the most extreme case, but "Lose It" and "Shoot the Water" both let in a lot more light. At least as far as it's possible to with a chorus of 'I want your blood/I want it in my hair'.

That couplet is an illustration of the way that Austra get much of their intensity and uniqueness from Katie Stelmanis' lyrics and voice. She specialises in an straightforward and unstinting darkness and while there are plenty of inspired moments like the evocative flashed images of "The Choke" ('The lamp. The slip. The floor.'), there's no obliqueness or indirectness. Together with the fact that she's front and centre and very clearly putting across the words to be heard and considered it kind of inevitably ends up with songs which could easily be considered quite silly. By neither steering away from ridiculousness or ever quite letting on that they're aware of it, though, Austra are able to use the reaction of humour and turn it into part of the heightening of emotional reaction. At least, that's how it works for me. "Hate Crime" being called "Hate Crime", having verses of struggling with avoiding sympathy with the darkness, and then in its chorus having Katie sternly intoning, over catchy synthpop, 'who signed the consent forms??' is amazing and somehow even more intense and sinister. The effect is quite similar to what I get from a lot of Editors songs and what I was the only person on the Jukebox to get from The Vaccines' "Post Break Up Sex", though Austra have crafted a set of songs which make making the bargain of accepting pomp as part of the appeal for their length much, much easier.

Winning '11: 7 - Perfume

Perfume - JPN

2011 has been a hell of a year for Japanese writer/producer extraordinaire Yasutaka Nakata. A fine album from his Daft Punkish project Capsule (seriously, watch that video), an EP and another single of uniquely garish and infectious hyper pop from Kyarypamupamyu (watch that one too, though for different reasons). Oh, and providing easily the best and most complete album yet for all conquering trio Perfume, who fall somewhere between those two in sound but do more than that.

I first came across them almost three years ago and it's been rather exciting to see them both getting better and getting a bit of wider attention this year. Manufactured pop in the best sense, their songs always feel precision-designed and constructed more than written - a pursuit of pleasure in sounds and their interaction above all else. Yet their gorgeous interlocking synth lines and piled up anonymised voices still always have a certain ticklish warmth.

The patriotically titled JPN comes at the end of a mindblowing run of singles from A-Chan, Kashiyuka and Nocchi across 2010 and 2011 (and doesn't even include their endearingly bizarre cover of "Lovefool" - I guess it would rather have disrupted the flow). "Natural ni Koishite" kicked it off with a relaxed swing and a chorus of bubbly happiness. "VOICE" was next with a big English chorus and a concentrated sugar rush of sound that more closely resembled classic Perfume. "Nee" took that, applied a darker synth pulse and introduced the unhinged madness of sampled fragments of voices as percussive bridge. Then "Laser Beam", which took that abstractness a step further and barely even bothered with the standard song part, beeps and stuttered words taking over until barely distinguishable, a mess of WHAT IS HAPPENING sound as constant stimulation which is one of the most exciting three minutes of pop released this or any year. Finally "Spice", a gently gorgeous and crystalline thing which even allows a natural voice out for a minute, and now closes the album with a satisfying contentment. And in Japan they were all #2 singles!

As if that wasn't enough, there are even more treasures on the album, including some very Perfume sounding rapping on "575", the synthetic jazzy whimsy of "Have a Stroll" which falls into the subgenre I'm never going to stop thinking of as Katamari music, and synth siren banger "GLITTER". Especially to anyone who liked "Spice", I strongly advise checking the whole thing out, despite the difficulties in doing so (Kyarypamyupamyu's new single is on Spotfiy and JPN isn't even on iTunes? Even though Perfume got used on Cars 2? That sucks).

Winning '11: 8 - Braids

Braids - Native Speaker

Braids' unconventional music is big on swirl. Thick, indistinct swirl. Murmuring guitars, bubbling keyboards, vast drifts of sound that arrive like avalanches. The 8 minute title track of Native Speaker (which, now I come back to listen to, I realise even has 'swirls' as its first word!) best demonstrates their success at a glacial pace. They tease full import out of every musical element before Raphaelle Standell-Preston snuggles into the warm drones in a half-asleep bliss, repeating 'having you beside me' and 'having you inside me' before hitting the title line with a wide awake force. 'Oh, you are my native speaker!' she cries and the music turns into a great raw rush with big slabs of bass saying, in the most gorgeous way: this is a definitive statement, this is all that matters right now.

As good as Braids are at the slow life, they also mix that slow swirl up elsewhere on the album, with fast rhythms and little trebly bursts of tunefulness. I've seen many comparisons of them to Animal Collective, but don't understand that band's appeal enough to have got to being able to confirm or otherwise with much confidence. Certainly Raphaelle as a singer is a massive asset in raising Braids above anything at all similar I've heard. Her elastic voice both handles the deep emotional moments and brings a wide-eyed glee, brittle and unpredictable, to the mixture of oblique and seriousness-shattering lines which make up much of their songs.

She brings a range of escalating emotions through in "Lammicken" despite just repeating a single line of 'I can't stop it'. The circling, liquid guitars of "Lemonade" introduce soft first lines - 'I don't want to go back there/I don't want to know what you're wearing/'There are black diamonds in your eyes/And just so you know, your skin is scaly', sung with humour and gentle concern, before she tears into 'HAVE you FUCKED all the stray kids yet?' with an almost scary delight.

The rest of the band manage to find a way to be in tune with her and each other even at the weirdest of lyrical or musical combinations. For all that Native Speaker is a deeply strange record at times and its narrative can be difficult to grasp at, it's one whose emotions come across loud and clear and always fulfils its impressive musical ambitions.

Winning '11: 9 - Los Campesinos!

Los Campesinos! - Hello Sadness

I suppose We are Beautiful, We are Doomed and Romance is Boring weren't exactly album cheery titles but this one does clearly signals where they're going on their fourth album in as many years. The playful sex-and-snooker-metaphors single "By Your Hand" is a red herring, although even that centres around a refrain of 'By your hand is the only end I foresee'. This is an album which largely takes the crushing, magnificently emo, career highlight "The Sea is a Good Place to Think of the Future" as its closest template.

As such it's harder going than any of their albums to date. The music is the most developed and complex of any of their albums, and shows a marked move towards the highest priority being scoring the emotion rather than scoring the punchlines, which is what they have often done so well to date. There are still plenty of big hooks in there, but they're much less emphasised. It takes a bit of adjustment, but makes for another set of great songs.

"Every Defeat a Divorce (Three Lions)" is the song which Gareth has probably been waiting his life to write, a definitive account of the emotional turmoil of both his parents' divorce and supporting England's football team through repeated and inevitable failure. Over cello and barely musical squawks of guitar it turns the symbols of the latter into physical sources of pain - 'These three lions that were sitting on my chest are clawing hard into my skin as I am gasping for my breath... I have to screw up both my eyes as it goes into sudden death' - and is possibly the most darkly funny song they've released, but powerfully moving with it.

"To Tundra" moves from flattened, resigned verses into a giant swell of cathartic emotion even bigger than those of "The Sea...", Gareth's voice straining almost painfully at the edges. "Hate for the Island" sounds too tired and depressed to even manage that. 'It's no lie if the waters rose and drowned that place from coast to coast you wouldn't see the smile leave my face for all eternity' it ends, but there's no real hint of joy in there, just a statement of fact.

I hope that they won't move permanently to this level of darkness, but it's an area which they have explored very rewardingly.

Winning '11: 10 - The Joy Formidable

The Joy Formidable - The Big Roar

I first got into The Joy Formidable on the basis of "I Don't Want to See You Like This", which I repeatedly heard on the radio and mistook for a new single by The Hot Puppies. This was partly due to the strength of its brash and snappy rock but mostly because Ritzy Bryan's voice and accent sounds so similar to Becky Newman's (which therefore ought to mean, as pointed out about Becky by Ian Mathers, that she sounds like a Welsh Gwen Stefani. Hmm, not exactly).

That talent for instant power-pop thrills is carried on through the album but with few exceptions like that and fellow single "Cradle" (whose 'my vicious tongue cradles just one' chorus lyric is a good short cut to their aesthetic), the songs are drawn out into long jams and buried in shimmering, pummelling noise. The band they most remind me of across the album is actually Ash, but much artier and a bit less bubblegum - there's something about the way that they lean towards punk and metal in sound and use its loudness and impact while being pop through and through which is very similar.

Even their biggest single, "Whirring", sees its candied hooks and chorus put through a layer of fuzz and shifts after the song into four minutes of ear-splitting, exhilaratingly harsh instrumental. It's never quite clear whether they are a noise band who can't help but write immediate pop melodies or vice versa, but either way it works.

Winning '11: 11 - Säkert!

Säkert! - På Engelska

Did I say that Girls' Generation was the album in this list which stretched the limits of being released in 2011 the furthest? I did? Well, somehow I completely forgot that there was an album ahead of it which entirely consisted of songs recorded into a different language. And it's a somewhat more significant change to me than theirs from Korean to Japanese.

Annika Norlin was responsible, as Hello Saferide, for my favourite album of 2008. Säkert! is her Swedish language band, and this is a record of their songs (mostly from their second album) rerecorded in English. That's what På Engelska means. Apparently they are particularly literal translations designed to give a Swedish feel but in English, but given that one of the most touching lines on More Modern Short Stories From Hello Saferide was 'years later I can still vision that forehead' I'm happy to largely think of this as a new Hello Saferide album.

It's a bit less country leaning than Short Stories but still heavy on a full band sound and a long way away from the acoustic twee-pop of her début. "Honey" and "Weak is the Flesh" feature jagged eruptions of guitar which go beyond anything previous from her and it also has a few songs which largely hold musically to a minimal loop and very effectively put across a sense of numbed melancholy, in particular "November" and single "Can I", which is a new and effective feel.


As charming as the music remains, what is mainly in På Engelska for me is how it combines with Annika's fantastic lyrics. Which is why the Swedish versions of her albums did little for me. Her words are a touch more abstract and less autobiographical narrative heavy than previous, but remain witty, self-aware but not in an overstated way, intimate and sometimes beautifully poetic too.

"Dancing, Though" is like Robyn's "Dancing on my Own", with Annika just as determinedly dancing to hide (and escape from) her heartbreak, except relocated to a wedding. It includes both 'Right where your shoulder meets your neck is where I hid all of my dreams' and, directed to the wedding singer 'I would beg you to stop singing but you're covering up the sounds of telephones not ringing'. "The Lakes We Skate On" zeroes in on one crucial line from "Parenting Never Ends", '[people] depend on me now/If they only knew how thin the ice they walk on is' and offers a fuller exploration of the insecurity and ways of getting away from it, as well as skating on literal lakes. 'We're walking on the crust on the ice that broke under you when you were young', it starts, and then 'There lies a melancholic joy in knowing you'll never again be with those who know who are' which says it all about escaping to somewhere where people can believe in a different you.

Winning '11: 12 - Anna Calvi

Anna Calvi - Anna Calvi

When  I was playing this album one more time ahead of writing it, my girlfriend came in and said that it sounded like Florence + the Machine. Now, I really don't like Florence, but I can see where she's coming from. Anna's voice has a similar tone and her songs do a similar line in struggle and overpowering emotions, with her début featuring plenty of wailing about love, the devil or both.

My problem with Florence's music, though, is how preposterously overstuffed and frilly it is. Anna Calvi, by contrast, has a wonderful straight to the point directness. Besides supporting drums, her voice and guitar playing are central and there is very little added to them. Plus any shows of virtuosity are pretty much confined to the guitar rather than the vocals, which is a good thing.

She plays with a dark rock and roll energy and gets across a primal intensity that's really raw and thrilling. When she sings the chorus of "First We'll Kiss" it's like she's willing the rest of the world into non-existence for getting in the way of her perfect moment. "I'll Be Your Man" is mostly just that one line and makes that sound like a powerful promise and a threat at once. "Desire" manages to do the 'fire/desire' rhyme and get away with it through sheer fierce force.

It's a necessarily short album and I'm not sure where she can go from here, but for now it's REALLY EXCITING IN CAPITAL LETTERS.

Winning '11: 13 - Hannah Peel

Hannah Peel - The Broken Wave

I first came across Hannah Peel from her Reboxed EP, on which she covered '80s pop hits accompanied only by her modified music box contraption into which she feeds self made paper rolls for each track, sometimes looping them round (if you get the chance to see her live, it's definitely worth it for this). That EP showed off a neat trick and a fine voice but was inherently limited. The Broken Wave shows off both a wider range and a songwriting talent.

A long way from "Blue Monday" and "Tainted Love", there is a very strong folk influence to an album. It's heavy on stripped back piano and acoustic guitar. It also includes a cover of "Cailin Deas Cruite Na Mbo" with its references to pretty maids extended into her own songs, as well as a version of "The Parting Glass" as a final ending (the not otherwise similar Ed Sheeran later did the same on his album!). The influence is also clear in the playful mix of old and new of "Don't Kiss the Broken One", a dissection of negative relationship dynamics tempers its hopelessness through a mixture of plucked and fiddling strings and the lightest electronic burbling, and uses antiquated language interspersed with references to handbags and (metaphorical) drugs.

Indeed, one of the keys to her new songs is how ageless they sound in their simplicity and universality. Their emotions are laid out with a calm ease and sparingly highlighted in the spacious arrangements - the gorgeous comforting warmth of the brass for the chorus of "You Call This Your Home", "Solitude" going from piano into Nitin Sawhney's incredible swelling strings as it reaches its emotional climax, the music box closing "Unwound" in onomatopoeic fashion as its peaceful contentment gradually falters. It's a beautiful sounding album and one which is really easy to fall in love with.

Winning '11: 14 - Gotye

Gotye - Making Mirrors

"Somebody that I Used to Know" is easily one of my favourite singles of the year. Half musing thoughtfully and quietly (with glockenspiels), half unstoppable emotional outpouring, with a delicious right to reply coda supplied by Kimbra, it's actually even greater than the sum of its parts. It may yet be as big a hit in the UK as in Australia, Belgium and the Netherlands. It may not. We'll find out in a couple of months. Either way, those who haven't ordered the album from Australia (or, er, listened to it by either means), have been missing out on that and much more.

What Gotye does so well is doing the sensitive, singer-songwriter with 'organic' sounds and vintage sounding production thing and yet not in any way being hard work to listen to. Instead his album that's an approachable joy from start to finish. He even manages to get by with a frequent vocal resemblance to Sting and (on "Eyes Wide Open") lines like 'it's like to stop consuming is to stop being human' without ever coming across as pompous.

He's great at atmospherics, like the way that "Smoke and Mirrors" winds its way tentatively through downbeat self-doubt with the occasional shaft of light from harpsichord or brass, before turning into full echoing creepiness and bringing the brass back over clattering drums as a demonic fanfare. Or the softer but equally powerful creepiness of "Don't Worry, We'll Be Watching You". Or indeed the opposite, the happy jazzy devotion of "I Feel Better" and "In Your Light".

It's definitely to the album's benefit that he happily and effectively takes on so many different styles, just as comfortable with retro pop leaning towards MOR as with the albums odder moments. This is probably best demonstrated by the combination of the two on "State of the Art", an joyful ode to the transformational power of his keyboard which sees him narrating its buttons and settings on it as they trigger all kinds of noises. It's totally instant and warm, and totally unique.

Winning '11: 15 - St. Vincent

St. Vincent - Strange Mercy

Annie Clark has, on her third album, perfected a recognisable formula. She sets up gorgeous and dreamy songs, with light and drifting arrangements, helped by her lovely voice. Then she slowly introduces a subtly unsettling element or two, through touches in the music but mostly in the lyrics. Finally in come her guitar riffs, bracing and fuzzy, to thrillingly blow the song apart.

Amazing single “Surgeon”, for instance goes from “You Only Live Twice” waltz through choruses of ‘find a surgeon to come cut me open’ into a surprisingly funky ending and a proggy guitar and synth explosion which could fit on Wish You Were Here. Strange Mercy as a whole does shift the elements around a bit rather than follow that exact order - "Chloe in the Afternoon" takes almost no time before the fuzzy riffing and leaves its uneasy peace until later; "Cruel"'s almost comically buzzy guitar doesn't so much puncture the song as emphasise its existing strangeness; "Champagne Year" is pure melancholic reverie all the way. The album's strengths, though, are very clear and consistent. That’s no bad thing because it really does work and keeps sounding fresh. This is helped a great deal by Annie's expertise in writing songs perfectly balanced between too much mystery and too little, on a borderline where they ring emotionally true but are not tied down and have full scope for musical flights of imagination.

A special word is needed for closer “Year of the Tiger”, one of my favourite songs of the year. It takes the same Bond theme aesthetics as “Surgeon” and blows them up bigger still, dreamscapes stretching gorgeously into the distance. It also sees Annie on the run from unknown forces with a suitcase of cash in the back of her car, calling on the whole of America to do her a favour yet still sounding quietly assured. The song finishes with the narrative still tantalisingly unresolved but it’s romantic, funny, and really moving.

Winning '11: 16 - Girls' Generation (SNSD)

Girls' Generation (SNSD) - Girls' Generation

For half a year now I’ve been one of those pulling the strings behind the Singles Jukebox machine (that’s a really mixed metaphor, isn’t it?) when it comes to what songs we cover. One of the things I’m most proud of doing (though at least as much credit goes to the far more knowledgeable Edward Okulicz and Frank Kogan) is introducing regular coverage of Korean pop music. Our writers have gone on to do a great job with it. We gave a sneak preview in our review of After School’s “Bang!” last year and South Korea has been where a lot of the most exciting things in pop-as-genre have been happening in 2011 – 2NE1’s fearsome bosh, Dal*Shabet’s glittery exuberance, HyunA’s self-explanatory “Bubble Pop”.

However, my limited experience with K-pop albums has found them either non-existent (ditched in favour of a sequence of mini-albums) or deeply disappointing, generally full of laboured ballads that bear no resemblance to the singles material. Girls' Generation actually released an uninspiring new Korean album of their own in 2011, The Boys, but they also released one which breaks the trend. This self-titled Japanese release is easily the most dubious 2011 album in my whole list, given that many of its songs are a couple of years old, but there are some new ones and they have all been rerecorded in Japanese, so I'm having it. (Listening in Japanese is a slight improvement from Korean because it makes the occasional fragments of comprehension more evenly spread than just getting the English bits. Also I can enjoy lyrical constructions like 'risky な business'). It doesn't seem right to leave out an album so addictive which seemed so new and which I kept returning to.

Girls' Generation are actually well suited to the album format anyway. They are less fearsome, glittery, or bubbly than a lot of the other groups, but they have a more adaptable, slightly more lasting strength which stretches across all of the songs and their many, many hooks and production tricks. They tend to use nine voices at once (if at all) not as overpowering force but as a rounded sound that you can’t hear a flaw in.

“Gee” is the song you’ll have heard of if any, taking sounds you’d associate with pop ballads and subverting expectations to turn them into an incredibly catchy thing of sweetly nagging insistence. My favourite is "Hoot" with its surf guitar verses, electro exclamations and towering choruses leaping off each other's backs to ever greater heights. I love the C64 beats of "You-Aholic" and "The Great Escape" too, and "Run Devil Run" and its big brassy warning of a chorus. In fact, I could easily make a case for the particular greatness of at least 10/12 of the tracks, which is quite something given the low rates for anything similar in sound.

Winning '11: 17 - The Indelicates

The Indelicates - David Koresh Superstar

There are issues which are unique to this album among this year’s offerings. Chiefly: is it right to produce a concept album, verging on being a musical, with moments of comedy as well as tragedy, about real events in which real people died?

Certainly you can see why they felt it was necessary, in that the couldn’t-make-it-up details of the progression of the story are a crucial part in illustrating the mental state of its central character and how it gets to the tragic ending that it does. The accompanying lyrics booklet complete with annotations and explanations makes clear that the band thought long and hard about every line on the album and in many cases were very careful not to present a one sided view of the story where they found the actual facts to be unclear. In the chaos of "Something Goin' Down in Waco" it really isn’t clear who fires first. Ultimately, though, being in a different country and with little existing awareness of the events may be crucial to being able to take this as art on a fairly standalone basis, and I can understand if others feel differently.

Onto what I enjoy in it: The Indelicates have never shied away from theatricality and a multi-character on-going narrative allows them to move even further in that direction. The country tones and ever-so-slightly hammy accent of “The Road From Houston to Waco”, the glam defiance of "I Am Koresh", the Chinese whispers that their large cast of vocalists play for humour before "Something Goin' Down in Waco" turns more serious, the base creepiness of "McVeigh". The way in which all of the melodies, voices and narratives are musically threaded together towards the end of the album in “Gethsemane” is fantastically well crafted.

Their scabrous wit is clear and present as ever, and the album poses some big questions in intelligent ways. They start with “Remember the Alamo”, a call to (a partial version of) history which establishes the mind-set that goes on to make some sense of what happens. Their central thesis, as I understand it, is that if you are brought up with a widely accepted belief in conspiracy theories and the irrational, it makes you more susceptible to believe in truly mad and dangerous things. Not guaranteed to fall for them, but more susceptible, and it’s a case they argue very creatively and persuasively. In particular “What if You’re Wrong?” grapples beautifully with the idea of faith and what happens when it gets to be so central to your mental picture that depending on your tenets of belief becomes the only way to keep belief in your own sanity.

Even with the aforementioned distance from the events described, it’s not exactly an easy listen, but one which feels rich, worthwhile and wholly unique.

Winning '11: 18 - Johnny Foreigner

Johnny Foreigner - Johnny Foreigner vs. Everything

Here's how I described Johnny Foreigner's first album in 2008:

High energy compressed melody, taking handclaps and pop sensibilities and burying them in enough fuzz that you're carried on along on its wave, barely stopping to glimpse meaning here and there. Equipped with some seriously inventive guitar playing and drumming, they frequently change direction completely with barely a pause for breath, or speed up songs beyond what seems like it should be breaking point. Throwing in noises and feedback as punctuation marks, they rush headlong from A to B to A again, coherance sacrificed if necessary.

Now at album number three, all of that still stands. Theirs is a distinctive sound and they've stuck with it to the extent that certain snatches of melody seem to crop up repeatedly from album to album. So do lyrics, though slightly less so here than on Grace and the Bigger Picture. It seems to be a concious decision, as part of the same consistent aesthetic that sees the same Pac-Man ghosts appear on all their artwork (lurking on the back cover in this case). It still works. Only a few drum machine pulses and "You! Me! Dancing!" in reverse post-rock coda make "Hulk Hoegaarden, Gin Kinsella, David Duvodkany, etc" anything particularly new for them but it's as enjoyable a sugar rush rock song as they've ever done.

The sprawling and unprecedented 55 minutes and 17 tracks of Johnny Foreigner vs. Everything does see them do new things well too, though. The chiming nostalgia of "200X", Kelly giving a fragile and emotional lead vocal with Alexei as barely more solid moral support for the chorus. "(Don't) Show Us Your Fangs" acting as the flipside to their manic early Idlewild tendencies by sounding like a superior The Remote Part ballad. "You vs. Everything" takes what may be their best and perkiest chorus ever, makes brass blasts an integral part of its feel and goes on to a meta 'you can slow it all down...' middle section with mournful brass before the triumphant return of the chorus. Elsewhere there are stylophone duets, two rather charming spoken word things, and a band beginning to grow into a wider vision which could yet see something different and even more special emerge..

Winning '11: 19 - Deerhoof

Deerhoof - Deerhoof vs. Evil

It's funny how sometimes certain things a band does just click with me and others don't. I loved Deerhoof's indie pop "Matchbook Seeks Maniac" when we did it back in the Jukebox of old (I would link, but Google is turning up nothing and I don't feel like searching through 50+ editions for it). Its parent album Friend Opportunity didn't do much for me though, and neither did its follow up. Deerhoof vs. Evil, though, I keep coming back to.

It's such a perfectly formed (and small) package of melody and intrigue, as accessible as it is unpredictable. Take the single "Super Duper Rescue Heads!" which combines a lovely crystalline synth riff, cutesy chants, crunching guitars and a couple of sections of clattering  noise. Clattering, but somehow friendly. Which goes for the whole album, really - they manage to take great numbers of hooks and ideas (and occasionally rock out - see "Secret Mobilization") but fit them all together in such a way that it just seems like a natural and inclusively fun thing to do. And, on the likes of "Must Fight Current" and "I Did Crimes for You", imbue them with a heart-melting level of sincere emotion too.

Winning '11: 20 - Boris

Boris - New Album

So as previously mentioned, Boris' unique approach to organising their music saw them offer three albums in 2011. The first pair were Attention Please and the self-explanatory Heavy Rocks. The last one, a short while after those, was New Album. Which as well as being one of the less inspiring album titles is slightly misleading, given that its newness was reduced six of its ten songs appeared on one or other of the previous albums.

The songs reused from Attention Please are a revelation, though. The relatively straightforward guitar feedback sound of Attention Please is reinforced by all kinds of electronic and production trickery. Just like the album's cover painting with the figure dripping paint and additional structures and growths to the point where she looks like the final form of a Final Fantasy villain, there are layers and depths added to the songs to give them a whole new power.

"Hope" and "Spoon" are back and again the highlights, but massively improved. For "Hope" they put the beat further forward and give a new urgency, as well as adding demented electronic spirals and extra guitars and bookending its already disruptive and mighty guitar solo with warped tape effects. "Spoon" gains percussion made up of shattering glass and someone tapping out Morse code, and an extra chiming counter melody, both bringing new dynamics to life.

Elsewhere on the album "Jackson Head" does pounding techno rock, with a confrontational Takeshi re-assuming vocal duties instead of Wata and having great fun shouting a lot. "Flare" is also a lot of fun and as close to the commercial J-Rock sound as I've ever heard them get, with all the ridiculous guitar solos and driving beats that entails. Other songs take on different styles of rock, incorporating dance elements to various degrees. Though the album doesn't have the same consistency of tone as Attention Please, the experiments are generally more successful.

Winning '11: 21 - Radiohead

Radiohead - The King of Limbs

It's difficult to write about The King of Limbs without starting with why it's sitting at number 21 when all their other recent albums were significantly higher up my lists.

So, the loose and simplified tale of Radiohead's 2000-on career path as I see it: Kid A and Amnesiac made a statement that they could, and would, now do something really different from anything they had before. Hail to the Thief said that they could continue with that alongside more traditional songs, but had an awkward fit between the two. In Rainbows lacked the highest highs of any of those three but finally managed to reconcile the new and old and was their most consistent record in songwriting, sound and quality since OK Computer.

The King of Limbs is a weird step back, built on much the same sounds and atmosphere as In Rainbows but without the songs. 'There are no songs' was a futile protest at Kid A,  not only because it frequently wasn't true, but because where it was true it was pretty much the point. The King of Limbs is the first time it feels like a valid complaint, because they've already shown that they can write catchy and moving songs that sound like it! "Morning Mr. Magpie" has been around unreleased for quite a while but does make you wonder whether this was deliberate or at least something they're aware of - it's difficult not to read into its wry final lines 'now you've stolen all my magic/took my melody'.

Negatives out of the way, The King of Limbs is a really very gorgeous album, something to sink into and explore and which for its similarities does still sound very fresh. And at its brief length every song counts, as it has to.

"Bloom" with its loping rhythms, Thom and the universe sighing over the top, pulling itself into an amazing swirl of strings and brass sounds before retreating into the forest with whispers all around. Jittery "Morning Mr Magpie" which starts from the none-more-Radiohead opening taunt 'You got some nerve/Coming here' and goes from there. The twisted groove of "Little By Little" existing in uneasy but compelling harmony with a delicate melody. "Feral" and its journey into the dark unknown.

Then the second half (and this is an album with a very obvious split in two) when things open up. There is still a wealth of details but what melodies there are are less crowded in, given more room to breathe. "Lotus Flower" taking the shuddering beats of "Idioteque" and setting them to something as pretty as it as panicky. The embracing serenity of both "Codex" and "Give Up The Ghost", one hopeful and one hopeless. The twinkling and elegiac parting gesture of "Separator".

Plus they did give rise to one of 2011's better memes.

Winning '11: 22 - Lady Gaga

Lady Gaga - Born This Way

Easiest to start this off with what I said about the first two singles at the time:

"Born This Way" - For the past year or so, watching the “Just Dance” video has been a sure way of inducing cognitive dissonance. After the awesome, meticulous realisation of vision that was The Fame Monster and associated campaign, it’s a bizarre and unreal feeling to go back to seeing and hearing a document of Gaga not as unstoppable phenomenon but as mere ordinary pop star. “Born This Way” will not have as ordinary looking a video, and doesn't give up a large section of its lines to some guy called Colby, but it produces a bit of the same feeling. There are more moments of buzzing excitement in its multiple layers than “Just Dance”, and it has an even more hugely constructed chorus, but for the first time in a while you can see the joins.

"Judas" -  This is more like it! The recycled elements are of minor consequence next to the way the beat clangs with awesome industrial force like nothing else she’s done, the best thing about it. Then there’s the sweet and addictive hi-NRG chorus and the way that that and the heavier elements are not so much stitched into a song as crammed violently together into the same four minute space. The effect is actually to make both of them sound all the more strange and exciting and the straight-faced nonsense delivered over the top works perfectly in that context.


The album carried on from there really, covering the whole range of points between those two, as well as a surprisingly enjoyable foray into Shania Twain/80s pop balladry for its closing two tracks and singles. It's overly long, especially the bonus edition (but that does get you the less stupid cover art), and undoubtedly a bit of a mess, but when it works it's amazing. "Government Hooker" and "Scheiße" sound like no one and nothing else in a fantastic way, and even when she doesn't pull things off to the same extent there's such likeable personality alongside the ambition that it's easy to forgive.  

Winning '11: 23 - Chapel Club

Chapel Club - Palace

I used the word 'epic' again yesterday. I should really stop that, it's a bit overused. Plus it's going to difficult not to bring it into play for Chapel Club, since 'epic indie rock' is kind of the genre they operate in. Think  more guitar-heavy early Doves stuff like "Catch the Sun" and you're nearly there. Lewis Bowman's voice is a little more tuneful than Jimi Goodwin's, but almost as deep and just as naturally set on transmitting overpowering emotion.

Their lyrics are perfectly pitched evocative vagueness (the only way they can get away with a song called "All the Eastern Girls", and even then it's touch and go), the interpolation of "Dream a Little Dream" on "Surfacing" is fantastic twisted romanticism, absolutely everything sounds appropriately HUGE. There's not enough range, and this isn't a genre which I can love in unalloyed form, for them to get any higher up than 22 (or to give me much more to say), but they are great at what they do.

Winning '11: 24 - Help Stamp Out Loneliness

Help Stamp Out Loneliness - Help Stamp Out Loneliness

Help Stamp Out Loneliness are, as you could probably guess from that name, indie pop. But not of the fey and twee variety, or the sharp and scratchy variety. Maybe it's also in part the resemblance of their album cover to that of "Slight Return", but there's something in their jangly, richly melodic sound that puts me in mind of The Bluetones. Long time readers will know that that is very much a good thing in my books.

Both the voice of D Lucille Campbell and the words she's singing take them to a different place from The Bluetones though. Somewhere between Nico and Morrissey, she sings in a knowingly witty, self deprecating way, expertly treading a line between humour and emotion as she suffers breakdowns in record shops and sings lines like "She said maybe he is not a real man/I'm not so sure, cos you don't even like Wham".

The album is also bookended by two joyful epics. "Cottonopolis & Promises" slowly builds anticipation before twinkling keyboards and guitar riffs which wouldn't be too far out of place on  Los Campesinos!' début take over. "Split Infinitives" bounds to a huge singalong chorus finale of its own, and then steals one from Arab Strap to take things up even further.

My year in Jukebox

A friend said recently that she had difficulty keeping up with everything I write for The Singles Jukebox. Which is pretty reasonable with three posts a day! So I thought for her and other interested friends it would be good to bring some of my highlights this year together in one place.


The Vaccines - Post Break Up Sex
Mainly for the fact that I got named in the intro, and how funny the gap between me and everyone else was.


Jessie J - Do It Like a Dude
Jessie J - Price Tag
An exploration of why "Price Tag" is one of the worst songs ever, preceded by her previous hit for context.

The Wombats - Jump into the Fog
Something else I didn't like, but was slightly more conflicted on.

Lady Gaga - Born This Way
I'm happy that my fairly instant reaction to this still stands up so well.

Patrick Wolf - House
Patrick Wolf - Time of my Life
Patrick Wolf - Together
This was the year that Patrick Wolf finally broke through to something approaching mainstream success and we (and I) did three of his songs and loved all of them.

Robyn - Call Your Girlfriend
Another song that I really love and tried to explain. There were some interesting discussions around its somewhat ambiguous narrative, as there were with...

Lana Del Rey - Video Games
My first mammoth blurb of the year. Originally even longer, but got edited down by me and the editor. Not entirely happy that my drawing of parallels between the song and the game I talk about came through as well as I'd like, but that wasn't down to the editing.

Emmy the Great - Paper Forest
I explain my love at length; song gets a total non-reaction from everyone else.

Coldplay - Paradise
I just liked how this one turned out. And the dubstep joke in the comments.

Sak Noel - Loca People (What the Fuck)
Most credit due to my friend George here!

Charlene Soraia - Wherever You Will Go
I detail what's wrong with (some) British pop at the moment. I hope at least someone appreciated 'Twincest tweebags'.

Perfume - Spice
Me giving the background to this particular strain of (amazing) Japanese pop. Everyone else actually liked the song too. Got my first compliment in the comments since, ooh, Owl City?

AKB48 - Ue Kara Mariko
Another mammoth blurb, about a different and less amazing strain of Japanese pop. Rather more fact-heavy than I usually get, but I was pleased with how it turned out.

Little Dragon - Ritual Union
Mammoth blurb number three. My single of the year and the very personal reasons why.

Winning '11: 25 - Boris

Boris - Attention Please

Boris are a Japanese group, not one person or any relation to the mayor of London. I became aware of them at the start of the year through their presence alongside Radiohead and The xx on the soundtrack to Confessions, my favourite film of 2011. There are several overhead and slow motion shots in the film which would not have had anything like the same power if not scored by Boris' brooding post rock.

This discovery was just in time for a year in which Boris released three albums, none of which sounded anything like that! Well, it's a bit more complicated than that, but Attention Please certainly was very much new territory for them - guitarist Wata (I presume that's her on the cover) taking lead vocals for the album and the band making an attempt at a 'pop' record.

Certainly they remain a long way away from AKB48 or Perfume style J-Pop, but on the two singles "Hope" and "Spoon" they hit upon an exhilarating blend. Those songs sound like shoegaze played without the same slurred thickness but with the same sense of overwhelming sweetness masking a harshness beneath. "Hope" makes that harshness particularly clear when it suddenly breaks into a vicious guitar solo near the end before the sweetness takes back over even stronger. "Spoon" does wind tunnel noise and double drumming over the top of what passes for a chorus. The sense that Boris are making it up as they go along and don't really understand the genre they're playing just adds to the exhilaration.

The rest of the album is not on the same level and offers a more uneasy compromise between their noise past and pop wishes, but has plenty of other compelling moments, from the stripped back breathy pleading of "Attention Please" to the malfunctioning machinery rhythms of "Tokyo Wonder Land", to the calm of their best Sigur Rós impression on "Hand in Hand"

Now for the spoiler - this is not the last Boris album in this list, and things are going to get both better and weirder from here.