ModeratAnd now we're at the final stretch, so expect plenty of nominees and a few out-of-leftfield surprises... Aww, who am I fooling??! If y'all know me, you'll know exactly what's coming, so let's just cut to the chase...
20. xx by The xx
Vessalis Music Award Nominee = Best Debut Album Of The Year
Best Alternative Album Of The Year
Pitchfork: "Xx is nervy and self-contained, the product of a new band thinking a lot harder about topics-- sex, composition, volume-- than we are accustomed to new bands thinking. It is so fully formed and thoughtful that it feels like three or four lesser, noisier records should have preceded it." Link
Guardian: "The Xx's debut seems to have arrived out of nowhere ... the album will win many friends for its beautifully haunting, understated charms." Link
What I Said: "The kind of dream-pop/indie rock debut that merits repeat listens even after those post-night out sessions with close friends, it's the first album I've come across that has done well to stay homegrown rather than spun into something recognizably hip for fad-listeners."
19. Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix by Phoenix
Vessalis Music Award Nominee = Best Rock Album Of The Year
Pitchfork: "While the album's 10 songs are arranged and executed with virtuoso pop-rock precision, they chronicle nothing but angst, confusion, disappointment, and despair. It's truly universal-- everybody live, love, and die." Link
NME: "It’s often said that writing about music is like dancing about architecture. Conversely, Phoenix are what architects should dance to ... Emotionally neutral but texturally rich – they’re the sound of Richard Rogers’ Utopian future." Link
What I Said: "More tolerable in its perky pop riffs than Passion Pit, whilst certainly being more adept at harnessing the electronic signatures that permeate throughout, Phoenix guilessly straddle the line between sophisticated indie and dancey rock to offer up a swoonsomely sonic treat."
18. jj n° 2 by JJ
Vessalis Music Award Nominee = Best Debut Album Of The Year
Best Alternative Album Of The Year
Pitchfork: "They're as naive as they are cynical-- or is it the other stupid way around?-- and they manage to be pretty, touching, funny, and motivating, in different ways, in all the right places, for nine songs lasting 28 minutes." Link
PopMatters: "At low volumes, and heard all the way through, jj n° 2 is like putting a seashell to your ear and hearing the waves crash off in the distance. Pick up that same seashell ten years later, and the water will still be there." Link
What I Said: "Little is known, except their releasing this debut album from the Sincerely Yours label; mind you, with harmonies and buoyant melodies this lovely perhaps a visual identity isn't necessarily needed."
17. Complete Me by Frankmusik
Vessalis Music Award Nominee = Best Male Solo Album Of The Year
Best Pop Album Of The Year
Guardian: "In thrall to the cheesiest end of 1980s electropop, Complete Me matches gleaming textures to catchy choruses and grandiose, bleeding-heart ballads to svelte disco stompers." Link
NME: "From its opening few bars, Frankmusik's debut is annoying. Like, 'how can I turn this off, smash the stereo and contact a hitman simultaneously?' annoying. It's just nothing." Link
What I Said: "Vincent Frank adds further fuel to the fire surrounding his hype with a really quite fabulous power-pop record that, unlike many of his presently more popular contemporaries, is blessed with both an unlikely emotional investment in the music as well as a resourceful intelligence."
16. Lovetune for Vacuum by Soap&Skin
Vessalis Music Award Nominee = Best Female Solo Album Of The Year
Best Debut Album Of The Year
Best Alternative Album Of The Year
Pitchfork: "Plaschg recorded Lovetune For Vacuum, her debut album, while still a teenager, and the record is in many ways a document of what an ugly, awkward, erratic-- and, occasionally, glorious and transcendent-- process growing up can be." Link
NME: "She avoids the trap of presenting us with an exercise in self-loathing; this is a brutal dissection of love and innocence crushed. From among Teutonic swine, a dark and clouded pearl emerges." Link
What I Said: "'Prodigious' is a word often tossed around when writing about breakthrough artists, but the assured hand with which she composes and produces these works promises an interesting future ahead of her."
15. Man Of Aran by British Sea Power
BBC: "n a world where most indie shufflers are so desperate to cling to success that they would never risk surprising their audience, British Sea Power are to be cherished for their originality and daring. The strange and beautiful Man Of Aran demonstrates why." Link
PopMatters: "At the end of the day, the likes of Mogwai and Sigur Rós all do this kind of music better ... Nevertheless, props are due for the effort as I shudder to think where they could have gone with it. At least they tried." Link
What I Said: "The result is at once classical and rock-oriented, admirably almost-entirely instrumental and further proof that some UK acts aren’t all redundant swagger and facile chants."
14. Miike Snow by Miike Snow
Vessalis Music Award Nominee = Best Dance Album Of The Year
Pitchfork: "Pop's biggest producer-to-artist success stories, such as Kanye West, have become exceptions thanks in part to their outsize personalities. That's where Miike Snow start to fall short ... Miike Snow aren't half as potentially infuriating as a Kanye or a Timbaland, but they aren't half as lovable, either." Link
NME: "Most ‘proper’ bands would hack off their own genitals to get a sniff of the hooks Miike Snow piss away. Then again, for all the deft artistry on display here, it’s a bit bloodless." Link
What I Said: "Awash with plaintive, elegant and sophisticated pop that seems to be running throughout most Scandinavian musicians’ blood these days ... Snow’s eponymous first release only shocks in how wonderfully wrought some of these pop masterpieces are."
13. The Resistance by Muse
Vessalis Music Award Nominee = Best Rock Album Of The Year
Pitchfork: "Judged on its own terms-- out of control scale, genre-smashing ambition, musical and vocal virtuosity-- The Resistance is a success ... It's an album you can embrace or get the fuck out of its way. There's really no in between." Link
Guardian: "The wholeheartedness with which this album hurls itself into the abyss of cod-symphonic astral pretension is to be commended." Link
What I Said: "The album confounds still with some of the most bonkers grandstanding that rock music has to offer this year ... such an excessive, relentless explosion of an album."
12. Entertainment by Fischerspooner
Vessalis Music Award Nominee = Best Dance Album Of The Year
Pitchfork: "So Entertainment might be music for their performances, it might be for others' dance performances, but it's not for the dance floor. Those halves that don't quite fit? They're begging to be pulled apart and put back together by heavier hands." Link
Allmusic: "A mixed bag, then, but with enough classicist synth pop pleasures to satisfy the committed and the curious. It's far from revolutionary and it's certainly not deep, but as often as not, Entertainment at least manages to live up to its title." Link
What I Said: "Messrs Fischer and Spooner have fine-tuned their music into the now-popular electro-pop movement just enough to sound radio friendly for a new listenership, but still retain some awesome electro-squelches and darker-than-most lyrics to keep their dance-head followers pleased."
11. Moon by Clint Mansell
Vessalis Music Award Nominee = Best Male Solo Album Of The Year
NME: "we’ll review anything with even the most tenuous link to David Bowie so here goes: this is a truly beautiful ambient work, achingly sad and really quite eerie." Link
Drowned In Sound: "In searching for a soundtrack composer, Duncan Jones couldn’t have found a more perfect choice than the schizoid, career-hopping Mansell, who appears to have completely rewired his musical DNA ... the music insidiously becomes a deeply rooted part of the overall experience, rather than a piece of art that simply supplements the action." Link
What I Said: "With subtle electronic effects, a quietly devastating string motif and moving piano pieces, Mansell has crafted his finest score yet ... rich with tenderness, melancholy, fear and sheer beauty."
10. Dear John by Loney, Dear
Vessalis Music Award Nominee = Best Male Solo Album Of The Year
Best Country/Folk Album Of The Year
BBC: "Dear John is Loney Dear's moment. It's the sound of an artist starting to fly. It's also an invitation to you to discover what came before, and a chance to envelope yourself and investigate a whole new world of a new favourite artist." Link
PopMatters: "It’s not easy to pinpoint what it is about Dear John that has such a powerful, lasting effect. Its tools are exceedingly familiar, but the results aren’t—don’t think Loney, Dear’s latest direction has been cribbed from anywhere. Let it sink in, and Loney, Dear soon whispers/sings/shouts out." Link
What I Said: "It’s always something to admire when an album’s more uptempo licks seamlessly ebb alongside its more languid moments of introspection and heartbreak without summoning too much attention to itself. In a year already bursting at the seams with wannabe promoters of Jeff Buckley’s legacy, Emil Svanängen’s latest effort is an early standout."
9. Junior by Röyksopp
Vessalis Music Award Nominee = Best Dance Album Of The Year
Pitchfork: "While it might be oversimplifying matters to suggest that it splits the difference between the cute, poppy Röyksopp and the darker, techno-friendly Röyksopp, the most satisfying thing about Junior is how convincingly they've bridged that divide." Link
Guardian: "There's a gorgeously indulgent quality to Svein Berge and Torbjørn Brundtland's third album. As if determined to shake off their simplistic yet lingering reputation as purveyors of pleasant musical wallpaper for clothes shops and TV soundbeds, the Norwegian duo have gone for broke this time around." Link
What I Said: "[It] will surely be spun many times leading up to and during the summer months, a flirtily electric affair positing some of the finest joy-pop moments of their career ... Don’t you love it when bands spoil their fans like this?"
8. Fantasies by Metric
Vessalis Music Award Nominee = Best Group Album Of The Year
Best Single/Video Of The Year
Best Rock Album Of The Year
Pitchfork: "In the end , Fantasies' other crowd-pleasers are, unsurprisingly, songs with big hooks, bursting choruses, and slick synths ... and despite the fanbase-building qualities of their new-wave past, the more the group embraces an inky, ambient future, the better it could get." Link
Guardian: "The stridency is turned down for Fantasies, and the losses - the punky urgency - are outweighed by the gains. Haines still has much to say about the state of the world, but the slinky, sexy tones are the spoonful of sugar that helps the medicine go down." Link
What I Said: "It would appear that the band are more eager to grab the brass ring of international breakthrough status than ever before, Fantasies being chock full of rock pop ditties that do well to sate appetites of both respectable genrehounds and the more passing listener."
7. Merriweather Post Pavilion by Animal Collective
Vessalis Music Award Nominee = Best Group Album Of The Year
Best Alternative Album Of The Year
Pitchfork: "Music obsessives talk a lot about originality-- whether it's important, or why having a new sound should or shouldn't matter ... This album feels like the crucial next step in that conversation. What they've constructed here is a new kind of electronic pop-- one which is machine-generated and revels in technology but is also deeply human, never drawing too much attention to its digital nature." Link
NME: "Listen hard. Focus on each sound, analyse it, pin it down, pull it apart. It’ll just shift under your gaze and run off laughing. Or you could just run with it." Link
What I Said: "Harnessing the thrillingly misshapen chaos that characterised their earlier works with a heavier bent towards electronic music, AC have served up their most commercially appealing album yet, but that doesn't mean that there is a dearth of avant-garde surprises to be had."
6. Seek Magic by Memory Tapes
Vessalis Music Award Nominee = Best Male Solo Album Of The Year
Best Debut Album Of The Year
Best Electronic Album Of The Year
Pitchfork: "A record of achingly gorgeous dance-pop that captures both the joy of nostalgia and the melancholic sense that we're grasping for good times increasingly out of reach." Link
Drowned In Sound: "I waited for Seek Magic's release tingling like a tuning fork and hoping he wouldn't pull a The Big Pink on me. He didn't. Seek Magic is probably my favourite album of the year. A slightly overdue thank you, Mr. Hawke." Link
What I Said: "It’s a lovely, ruminative, serene and spiky record that always manage to offer up something new every time that you listen to it and an immensely accomplished debut from a singer/songwriter/producer who defies the blogpop generalising afforded by so many solo-producer albums with assured talent and credibility."
5. Yesterday and Today by The Field
Vessalis Music Award Nominee = Best Male Solo Album Of The Year
Best Dance Album Of The Year
Pitchfork: "Yesterday And Today calculatingly comprises three songs that extend the known rush of [debut album] From Here We Go Sublime ... and three very different potential future directions for the Field discography." Link
Onion: "Though it’s on par with its predecessor in terms of repetition, Yesterday And Today is also on that level in terms of quality—which should mean no disappointments." Link
What I Said: "Nothing on his sophomore effort quite betters the minimalist sophistication on his debut, but it certainly demonstrates that Willner isn’t afraid to incorporate more live percussive elements in his work ... Expect this to be played at A LOT of chill-out sessions this summer."
4. Begone Dull Care by Junior Boys
Vessalis Music Award Nominee = Best Group Album Of The Year
Best Electronic Album Of The Year
Pitchfork: "It is hard not to marvel at how assured the Boys have grown as producers ... when I call Begone Dull Care a "mature" album, know it skirts both the positive and negative connotations of one of the most divisive adjectives in pop's lexicon." Link
Allmusic: "At first, these songs seem to lack distinction from one another, but the duo's painstaking attention to detail and nuance gradually glints through." Link
What I Said: "One of the most beguilingly curious facets to emerge from electro-pop over the past decade is the fact that most of the funkier, sexier sounds to emerge from this genre happen to be coming from the most unlikely of progenitors ... the Boys have single-handedly concocted one of the most charmingly flirty records of recent years... The fact that they look like stand-ins for The Big Bang Theory only makes them evermore charming!"
3. Moderat by Moderat
Vessalis Music Award Nominee = Best Group Album Of The Year
Best Dance Album Of The Year
Pitchfork: "The good news is that (for the most part) they pulled it off. Long stretches of Moderat find the three producers locked into a healthy creative symbiosis that accentuates the best parts of their individual styles." Link
ResidentAdvisor: "The music that pops out the other end of the BPitch Control sausage factory is messy, at times grating, but for the most part, a tour de flavor worthy of the English mustard." Link
What I Said: "At once unremittingly grimy and urban, urgent and primal with some unquantifiably fabulous dance-rock thrown in, it’s the most consistently brilliant work of the year so far..."
2. Riceboy Sleeps by Jónsi & Alex
Vessalis Music Award Nominee = Best Group Album Of The Year
Best Alternative Album Of The Year
Pitchfork: "Really, as long as you don't give it your undivided attention, Riceboy Sleeps can keep you company in your cubicle or gridlock traffic, though I realize that's not exactly as riveting as "if there's one ambient album you own this year...!" Link
NME: "Sigur Rós once set a gold standard in pomposity by writing songs in an invented language. In releasing this, Birgisson outdoes himself." Link
What I Said: "For those who prefer their alternative music curios funky and headturning, this will do little to abate the Rós backlash inevitably mounting after their last album; but for those who enjoy beautiful music, it is essential!"
And so, that just leaves for my Album Of The Year and all of the other awards to be announced tomorrow... for those bothered enough to follow my dirge through 2009 over the past week, I applaud you... let's hope 2010 is that much better!
Keep listening and see you tomorrow! xxx
20. xx by The xx
Vessalis Music Award Nominee = Best Debut Album Of The Year
Best Alternative Album Of The Year
Pitchfork: "Xx is nervy and self-contained, the product of a new band thinking a lot harder about topics-- sex, composition, volume-- than we are accustomed to new bands thinking. It is so fully formed and thoughtful that it feels like three or four lesser, noisier records should have preceded it." Link
Guardian: "The Xx's debut seems to have arrived out of nowhere ... the album will win many friends for its beautifully haunting, understated charms." Link
What I Said: "The kind of dream-pop/indie rock debut that merits repeat listens even after those post-night out sessions with close friends, it's the first album I've come across that has done well to stay homegrown rather than spun into something recognizably hip for fad-listeners."
19. Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix by Phoenix
Vessalis Music Award Nominee = Best Rock Album Of The Year
Pitchfork: "While the album's 10 songs are arranged and executed with virtuoso pop-rock precision, they chronicle nothing but angst, confusion, disappointment, and despair. It's truly universal-- everybody live, love, and die." Link
NME: "It’s often said that writing about music is like dancing about architecture. Conversely, Phoenix are what architects should dance to ... Emotionally neutral but texturally rich – they’re the sound of Richard Rogers’ Utopian future." Link
What I Said: "More tolerable in its perky pop riffs than Passion Pit, whilst certainly being more adept at harnessing the electronic signatures that permeate throughout, Phoenix guilessly straddle the line between sophisticated indie and dancey rock to offer up a swoonsomely sonic treat."
18. jj n° 2 by JJ
Vessalis Music Award Nominee = Best Debut Album Of The Year
Best Alternative Album Of The Year
Pitchfork: "They're as naive as they are cynical-- or is it the other stupid way around?-- and they manage to be pretty, touching, funny, and motivating, in different ways, in all the right places, for nine songs lasting 28 minutes." Link
PopMatters: "At low volumes, and heard all the way through, jj n° 2 is like putting a seashell to your ear and hearing the waves crash off in the distance. Pick up that same seashell ten years later, and the water will still be there." Link
What I Said: "Little is known, except their releasing this debut album from the Sincerely Yours label; mind you, with harmonies and buoyant melodies this lovely perhaps a visual identity isn't necessarily needed."
17. Complete Me by Frankmusik
Vessalis Music Award Nominee = Best Male Solo Album Of The Year
Best Pop Album Of The Year
Guardian: "In thrall to the cheesiest end of 1980s electropop, Complete Me matches gleaming textures to catchy choruses and grandiose, bleeding-heart ballads to svelte disco stompers." Link
NME: "From its opening few bars, Frankmusik's debut is annoying. Like, 'how can I turn this off, smash the stereo and contact a hitman simultaneously?' annoying. It's just nothing." Link
What I Said: "Vincent Frank adds further fuel to the fire surrounding his hype with a really quite fabulous power-pop record that, unlike many of his presently more popular contemporaries, is blessed with both an unlikely emotional investment in the music as well as a resourceful intelligence."
16. Lovetune for Vacuum by Soap&Skin
Vessalis Music Award Nominee = Best Female Solo Album Of The Year
Best Debut Album Of The Year
Best Alternative Album Of The Year
Pitchfork: "Plaschg recorded Lovetune For Vacuum, her debut album, while still a teenager, and the record is in many ways a document of what an ugly, awkward, erratic-- and, occasionally, glorious and transcendent-- process growing up can be." Link
NME: "She avoids the trap of presenting us with an exercise in self-loathing; this is a brutal dissection of love and innocence crushed. From among Teutonic swine, a dark and clouded pearl emerges." Link
What I Said: "'Prodigious' is a word often tossed around when writing about breakthrough artists, but the assured hand with which she composes and produces these works promises an interesting future ahead of her."
15. Man Of Aran by British Sea Power
BBC: "n a world where most indie shufflers are so desperate to cling to success that they would never risk surprising their audience, British Sea Power are to be cherished for their originality and daring. The strange and beautiful Man Of Aran demonstrates why." Link
PopMatters: "At the end of the day, the likes of Mogwai and Sigur Rós all do this kind of music better ... Nevertheless, props are due for the effort as I shudder to think where they could have gone with it. At least they tried." Link
What I Said: "The result is at once classical and rock-oriented, admirably almost-entirely instrumental and further proof that some UK acts aren’t all redundant swagger and facile chants."
14. Miike Snow by Miike Snow
Vessalis Music Award Nominee = Best Dance Album Of The Year
Pitchfork: "Pop's biggest producer-to-artist success stories, such as Kanye West, have become exceptions thanks in part to their outsize personalities. That's where Miike Snow start to fall short ... Miike Snow aren't half as potentially infuriating as a Kanye or a Timbaland, but they aren't half as lovable, either." Link
NME: "Most ‘proper’ bands would hack off their own genitals to get a sniff of the hooks Miike Snow piss away. Then again, for all the deft artistry on display here, it’s a bit bloodless." Link
What I Said: "Awash with plaintive, elegant and sophisticated pop that seems to be running throughout most Scandinavian musicians’ blood these days ... Snow’s eponymous first release only shocks in how wonderfully wrought some of these pop masterpieces are."
13. The Resistance by Muse
Vessalis Music Award Nominee = Best Rock Album Of The Year
Pitchfork: "Judged on its own terms-- out of control scale, genre-smashing ambition, musical and vocal virtuosity-- The Resistance is a success ... It's an album you can embrace or get the fuck out of its way. There's really no in between." Link
Guardian: "The wholeheartedness with which this album hurls itself into the abyss of cod-symphonic astral pretension is to be commended." Link
What I Said: "The album confounds still with some of the most bonkers grandstanding that rock music has to offer this year ... such an excessive, relentless explosion of an album."
12. Entertainment by Fischerspooner
Vessalis Music Award Nominee = Best Dance Album Of The Year
Pitchfork: "So Entertainment might be music for their performances, it might be for others' dance performances, but it's not for the dance floor. Those halves that don't quite fit? They're begging to be pulled apart and put back together by heavier hands." Link
Allmusic: "A mixed bag, then, but with enough classicist synth pop pleasures to satisfy the committed and the curious. It's far from revolutionary and it's certainly not deep, but as often as not, Entertainment at least manages to live up to its title." Link
What I Said: "Messrs Fischer and Spooner have fine-tuned their music into the now-popular electro-pop movement just enough to sound radio friendly for a new listenership, but still retain some awesome electro-squelches and darker-than-most lyrics to keep their dance-head followers pleased."
11. Moon by Clint Mansell
Vessalis Music Award Nominee = Best Male Solo Album Of The Year
NME: "we’ll review anything with even the most tenuous link to David Bowie so here goes: this is a truly beautiful ambient work, achingly sad and really quite eerie." Link
Drowned In Sound: "In searching for a soundtrack composer, Duncan Jones couldn’t have found a more perfect choice than the schizoid, career-hopping Mansell, who appears to have completely rewired his musical DNA ... the music insidiously becomes a deeply rooted part of the overall experience, rather than a piece of art that simply supplements the action." Link
What I Said: "With subtle electronic effects, a quietly devastating string motif and moving piano pieces, Mansell has crafted his finest score yet ... rich with tenderness, melancholy, fear and sheer beauty."
10. Dear John by Loney, Dear
Vessalis Music Award Nominee = Best Male Solo Album Of The Year
Best Country/Folk Album Of The Year
BBC: "Dear John is Loney Dear's moment. It's the sound of an artist starting to fly. It's also an invitation to you to discover what came before, and a chance to envelope yourself and investigate a whole new world of a new favourite artist." Link
PopMatters: "It’s not easy to pinpoint what it is about Dear John that has such a powerful, lasting effect. Its tools are exceedingly familiar, but the results aren’t—don’t think Loney, Dear’s latest direction has been cribbed from anywhere. Let it sink in, and Loney, Dear soon whispers/sings/shouts out." Link
What I Said: "It’s always something to admire when an album’s more uptempo licks seamlessly ebb alongside its more languid moments of introspection and heartbreak without summoning too much attention to itself. In a year already bursting at the seams with wannabe promoters of Jeff Buckley’s legacy, Emil Svanängen’s latest effort is an early standout."
9. Junior by Röyksopp
Vessalis Music Award Nominee = Best Dance Album Of The Year
Pitchfork: "While it might be oversimplifying matters to suggest that it splits the difference between the cute, poppy Röyksopp and the darker, techno-friendly Röyksopp, the most satisfying thing about Junior is how convincingly they've bridged that divide." Link
Guardian: "There's a gorgeously indulgent quality to Svein Berge and Torbjørn Brundtland's third album. As if determined to shake off their simplistic yet lingering reputation as purveyors of pleasant musical wallpaper for clothes shops and TV soundbeds, the Norwegian duo have gone for broke this time around." Link
What I Said: "[It] will surely be spun many times leading up to and during the summer months, a flirtily electric affair positing some of the finest joy-pop moments of their career ... Don’t you love it when bands spoil their fans like this?"
8. Fantasies by Metric
Vessalis Music Award Nominee = Best Group Album Of The Year
Best Single/Video Of The Year
Best Rock Album Of The Year
Pitchfork: "In the end , Fantasies' other crowd-pleasers are, unsurprisingly, songs with big hooks, bursting choruses, and slick synths ... and despite the fanbase-building qualities of their new-wave past, the more the group embraces an inky, ambient future, the better it could get." Link
Guardian: "The stridency is turned down for Fantasies, and the losses - the punky urgency - are outweighed by the gains. Haines still has much to say about the state of the world, but the slinky, sexy tones are the spoonful of sugar that helps the medicine go down." Link
What I Said: "It would appear that the band are more eager to grab the brass ring of international breakthrough status than ever before, Fantasies being chock full of rock pop ditties that do well to sate appetites of both respectable genrehounds and the more passing listener."
7. Merriweather Post Pavilion by Animal Collective
Vessalis Music Award Nominee = Best Group Album Of The Year
Best Alternative Album Of The Year
Pitchfork: "Music obsessives talk a lot about originality-- whether it's important, or why having a new sound should or shouldn't matter ... This album feels like the crucial next step in that conversation. What they've constructed here is a new kind of electronic pop-- one which is machine-generated and revels in technology but is also deeply human, never drawing too much attention to its digital nature." Link
NME: "Listen hard. Focus on each sound, analyse it, pin it down, pull it apart. It’ll just shift under your gaze and run off laughing. Or you could just run with it." Link
What I Said: "Harnessing the thrillingly misshapen chaos that characterised their earlier works with a heavier bent towards electronic music, AC have served up their most commercially appealing album yet, but that doesn't mean that there is a dearth of avant-garde surprises to be had."
6. Seek Magic by Memory Tapes
Vessalis Music Award Nominee = Best Male Solo Album Of The Year
Best Debut Album Of The Year
Best Electronic Album Of The Year
Pitchfork: "A record of achingly gorgeous dance-pop that captures both the joy of nostalgia and the melancholic sense that we're grasping for good times increasingly out of reach." Link
Drowned In Sound: "I waited for Seek Magic's release tingling like a tuning fork and hoping he wouldn't pull a The Big Pink on me. He didn't. Seek Magic is probably my favourite album of the year. A slightly overdue thank you, Mr. Hawke." Link
What I Said: "It’s a lovely, ruminative, serene and spiky record that always manage to offer up something new every time that you listen to it and an immensely accomplished debut from a singer/songwriter/producer who defies the blogpop generalising afforded by so many solo-producer albums with assured talent and credibility."
5. Yesterday and Today by The Field
Vessalis Music Award Nominee = Best Male Solo Album Of The Year
Best Dance Album Of The Year
Pitchfork: "Yesterday And Today calculatingly comprises three songs that extend the known rush of [debut album] From Here We Go Sublime ... and three very different potential future directions for the Field discography." Link
Onion: "Though it’s on par with its predecessor in terms of repetition, Yesterday And Today is also on that level in terms of quality—which should mean no disappointments." Link
What I Said: "Nothing on his sophomore effort quite betters the minimalist sophistication on his debut, but it certainly demonstrates that Willner isn’t afraid to incorporate more live percussive elements in his work ... Expect this to be played at A LOT of chill-out sessions this summer."
4. Begone Dull Care by Junior Boys
Vessalis Music Award Nominee = Best Group Album Of The Year
Best Electronic Album Of The Year
Pitchfork: "It is hard not to marvel at how assured the Boys have grown as producers ... when I call Begone Dull Care a "mature" album, know it skirts both the positive and negative connotations of one of the most divisive adjectives in pop's lexicon." Link
Allmusic: "At first, these songs seem to lack distinction from one another, but the duo's painstaking attention to detail and nuance gradually glints through." Link
What I Said: "One of the most beguilingly curious facets to emerge from electro-pop over the past decade is the fact that most of the funkier, sexier sounds to emerge from this genre happen to be coming from the most unlikely of progenitors ... the Boys have single-handedly concocted one of the most charmingly flirty records of recent years... The fact that they look like stand-ins for The Big Bang Theory only makes them evermore charming!"
3. Moderat by Moderat
Vessalis Music Award Nominee = Best Group Album Of The Year
Best Dance Album Of The Year
Pitchfork: "The good news is that (for the most part) they pulled it off. Long stretches of Moderat find the three producers locked into a healthy creative symbiosis that accentuates the best parts of their individual styles." Link
ResidentAdvisor: "The music that pops out the other end of the BPitch Control sausage factory is messy, at times grating, but for the most part, a tour de flavor worthy of the English mustard." Link
What I Said: "At once unremittingly grimy and urban, urgent and primal with some unquantifiably fabulous dance-rock thrown in, it’s the most consistently brilliant work of the year so far..."
2. Riceboy Sleeps by Jónsi & Alex
Vessalis Music Award Nominee = Best Group Album Of The Year
Best Alternative Album Of The Year
Pitchfork: "Really, as long as you don't give it your undivided attention, Riceboy Sleeps can keep you company in your cubicle or gridlock traffic, though I realize that's not exactly as riveting as "if there's one ambient album you own this year...!" Link
NME: "Sigur Rós once set a gold standard in pomposity by writing songs in an invented language. In releasing this, Birgisson outdoes himself." Link
What I Said: "For those who prefer their alternative music curios funky and headturning, this will do little to abate the Rós backlash inevitably mounting after their last album; but for those who enjoy beautiful music, it is essential!"
And so, that just leaves for my Album Of The Year and all of the other awards to be announced tomorrow... for those bothered enough to follow my dirge through 2009 over the past week, I applaud you... let's hope 2010 is that much better!
Keep listening and see you tomorrow! xxx
