Domingo 3 Jan 2010, 18h:42
25. Lily Allen - It's Not Me, It's You
24. Camera Obscura - My Maudlin Career
23. Grizzly Bear - Veckatimest
22. Dan Deacon - Bromst
21. Shakira - She Wolf
20. Paloma Faith - Do You Want the Truth or Something Beautiful?
19. The Veronicas - Hook Me Up
18. Yeah Yeah Yeahs - It's Blitz!
17. Datarock - Red
16. Fever Ray - Fever Ray
15. Memory Tapes - Seek Magic
14. Jack Peñate - Everything Is New
13. The xx - xx
12. Annie - Don't Stop (and All Night EP)
11. Vienna Teng - Inland Territory
10. Phoenix - Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix
These French indiepop personages have been around for a fair few years, but 2009 seemed to be when they finally broke-through and hit the hype lists big time. And with good reason. The title makes sense when you get to the majestic Love Like A Sunset, the epically-constructed two-track centrepiece which uses computer bleeps and growling guitars to build into a delicate, powerful percussion piece, with a vocal and guitar finale which is hard to come down from. But the album flits between flourishing exuberance (those crowing vocals!) and heavier beats with robust ease, and it's really just a pleasure to have in your ears.
Essential track: Rome
09. Dragonette - Fixin to Thrill
From the violent, strident opening Dragonette make it clear that they've still got their attitude, and they've jazzed it up a bit with some headbanging, some banjo, some enormous eyewear. Martina's unmistakable vowels lord over the jagged electropop, swirling into some unexpectedly tender moments, especially in the album's final stretches, which take a while to match up to the stylistic bursts of the rest but eventually reveal themselves to be up to the pace. Thrilling stuff.
Essential track: Stupid Grin
08. Sally Shapiro - My Guilty Pleasure
Like, as the opening tracks says, swimming through a blue lagoon. Shapiro's thin vocals lilt over the gossamer italo-disco production as synths zoom around her head. At least that's the image produced here. It's music to listen to just before the dawn breaks, as ghostly tinges of light streak across a black sky. Oh, I'm being all romantic. It's what this does to me, makes me want to kiss on a heath below the twinkling stars.
Essential track: Moonlight Dance
07. Animal Collective - Merriweather Post Pavilion (and Fall Be Kind - EP)
The internet lost its shit over Animal Collective this year and their unpredictable, delightful merging of rock with synths, particularly potent on the singles My Girls and Summertime Clothes with their several enormously catchy hooks spread across some field of psychadelica. Add the Fall Be Kind EP to the mix and you see them step it up even further - perhaps a tad more impenetrable, but equally layered and textured in the smooth, enrapturing sounds.
Essential track: Summertime Clothes
06. Lady GaGa - The Fame Monster
The undispitable popstar of the year, Lady GaGa's reissue of her debut album was so good they ended up releasing it as it's own album. It's impossible not to see why. She retains the pop hooks of The Fame but embues them with a darker, denser feel - how many layers of sounds are there on these tracks? - that seems to have led from Paparazzi and its famous VMAs performance. It isn't flawless - sticking the ballad Speechless midway through rather disrupts the intensity - but as a collection of songs and a hint of what may be to come, it's immense.
Essential track: Dance in the Dark
05. Bat for Lashes - Two Suns
Rising like a ghostly apparition, Bat for Lashes' second album keeps the haunting, echoing feel of her debut but deepens it, becomes even more immersed in the dark recesses of the night. It's utterly compulsive, an album full of rich imagery and bewitching lyricism, all tied together with Natasha Khan's magnificently straining vocals that feel as much of an instrument as all the drums and bells and strings around her. Utterly gorgeous in its unnerving majesty.
Essential track: Two Planets
04. Antigone - AntigoneLand
Like some kind of magnificent peacock, Antigone's feathers come to intoxicating, beguiling flourish from the very start of her ridiculously underheard debut album. Her voice is a rich well of different sounds, from the plaintive, playful self-reflection on Promiscuity to the deathly screaming middle-8 of Into Your Head. And the music… a dense variety of delicious pop hooks and electronic swizzling that twists in and out of the equally bizarre vocals. It sounds weird, and it is, but it's still hugely accessible, because it's very, very good.
Essential track: Mirror
03. Röyksopp - Junior
A majesty of electronica. From the joyful, bouncing opening it seagues into a dark, swirling world of heavy beats and light bleeps backed by flourishing orchestration, employing a variety of rich female vocalists to make the music really soar. On Vision One the lyrical depth makes itself apparent, but where the album's power lies truly seems to lie is in the fragility of Anneli Drecker's haunting vocals on three tracks, and in Röyksopp's innate sense of the beauty possible within a synth.
Essential track: Vision One
02. Rihanna - Rated R
Who expected this? Rihanna bounced back from that infamous incident neither obsessing over or ignoring it - it's there, in the background, infusing the tracklisting with an extra power, but it isn't strictly necessary. Rated R has Rihanna proving why she has become a global superstar. The feel shifts between fierce attitude and delicate fragility, but it all coheres somehow, feeling as if it all comes from this one woman, Robyn Rihanna Fenty, a woman we feel we know better but we really don't know at all. What's truth and what's pretence? Is this all a fiction, rated R? And does it even matter, really, when the songs on display are as ingenious in their melodies and lyrics as so many of these are? No, it isn't flawless. But neither is Rihanna, and that's why she has become the woman we see before us, no matter how true that image is.
Essential track: Cold Case Love
01. Florence + the Machine - Lungs
This year, Florence Welch swept me off my feet. How could she not, with that billowing yell of a voice? She could knock anyone over with a mere breath if it pleased her. It's most certainly the centrepiece of her stunning debut. It wails powerfully over the cacophony of harps and drums that create the bewitching world of Lungs. It's something that you can either buy into, her flourishing vocal tics, the flushing harp strings, the dancing tambourines, or push away, but Florence is one of those artists who seem to have been made especially for me. I immediately lost myself in the spacial beauty of Cosmic Love, the angry vitriol of Girl With One Eye, the frenetic angst of Rabbit Heart (Raise It Up). It feels intensely personal; both to Florence, and to me. I've lived this album this year, and so it could hardly fail to be my favourite album of the year.
Essential track: Rabbit Heart (Raise It Up)