My 10 favourite albums of 2014

If there's one thing that's characterised 2014 for me, it's the realisation of how streaming affects my engagement with music. How much I get out of listening to music is only partly down to what I'm listening to – the rest is determined by the mood I'm in, what device I'm using to listen on, what kind of day I'm having, and what I'm doing at the time. Working in an office during the week, a lot of my music listening has been pretty passive, streaming stuff on Spotify while I do other things. My favourite albums have largely been those that really grabbed me while they were on in the background, so I had to save them for later to listen with focused attention, either on headphones during my commute or blasted in the car.

2014 has also been the year in which I've made a concerted effort to pay for more music. Streaming services like Spotify and SoundCloud are an incredible discovery tool, but it’s easy to forget that you can further support an artist you love by purchasing a download or CD via Bandcamp or at a bricks ’n’ mortar record store – if you can find one...

10. Morgan Delt – Morgan Delt (Trouble In Mind)
Although this album invites plenty of comparisons with classic psychedelic rock from the '60s and '70s, Morgan Delt doesn't remind me of any artist specifically, nor does it overemphasise any obvious production tricks to signify the psychedelic experience without actually embodying it. This magnificently warped half-hour is so deftly executed and full of memorable songs that it's almost too much. It wobbles and surges and oozes between your brain-fingers like chocolate. This is music to subject your consciousness to, and goosebumps are bound to follow.

9. Eiko Ishibashi – Car and Freezer (Drag City)
The only reason I've even heard of Japanese musician Eiko Ishibashi is because this album prominently features the multi-talented Jim O'Rourke, one of my musical heroes, plus it's just been released on Drag City. With vocals in both Japanese and English (not that it's necessary to follow the words to appreciate its beauty), Car and Freezer is a lovely album of feather-light jazz-pop that will surely sate any O'Rourke enthusiasts waiting for a follow-up to The Visitor, or fans of bands such as The Sea and Cake. And if you like this, its predecessor, Imitation of Life, is superb too.

8. Richard Dawson – Nothing Important (Weird World) 
I have an old friend to thank for introducing me to the wonders of Richard Dawson. Lyrics are more likely to turn me off a record than draw me to it, but in the case of Nothing Important's two vocal tracks, these are some of the funniest sung lines I've ever heard. Pair them with Dawson's overdriven acoustic guitar and it's truly something special – and the perfect antidote to over-earnest singer-songwriters. His guitar playing may be chaotic and astringent, but this whole album is infused with a warmth and humour that's infectious.

7. Fennesz – Bécs (Editions Mego)
While most fans of Fennesz's music favour the seminal Endless Summer, I'll go out on a limb and assert that Bécs is his best album, containing his single best piece, the staggering 'Liminality'. From just a guitar and a laptop, Fennesz constructs mighty edifices of shimmering sound, from the gentle and reassuring to the terrifyingly dense and imposing. Unlike Ben Frost's A U R O R A, which was thrilling on first exposure and quickly palled, Bécs has an approachability and melodic nous that rewards repeat listens.

6. Owen Pallett – In Conflict (Domino)
In Conflict's appeal is immediate, its beauty obvious, but its motivations and through-lines feel like they’re just around the corner, dissolving into air or ducking into the shadows as you move thuggishly towards them. Pallett is a master at this stuff: melodies move in delicate arcs, lovingly coloured with brass and strings, his soft, supple voice reaching and harmonising with itself. Tracks flow together like water and the arrangements feel like natural, billowing things – part of the songs’ DNA rather than a later addition to make the music sound more epic and emotive. Rapturous stuff.

5. Daniel Lanois – Flesh and Machine (Anti)
Although perhaps best known for his collaborations with Brian Eno (yay) and U2 (boo), Daniel Lanois is a stunningly effective musician and producer in his own right, and this new instrumental collection plays to his strengths (dense overdubbing, hands-on mixing techniques, fearless sound manipulation). Veering from chaotic processed jams with drummer Brian Blade ('The End') to utterly gorgeous solo pedal steel ('Aquatic'), Flesh and Machine is a sensuous, immersive experience, abrim with kaleidoscopic textures.

4. Deerhoof – La Isla Bonita (Polyvinyl) 
The 10 songs on Deerhoof album number 12, recorded in guitarist Ed Rodriguez's basement, were originally intended as demos, but the band wisely decided to develop the rehearsal room recordings into final songs. If you've seen Deerhoof live, you'll know that their kinetic energy and instrumental interplay are a large part of their magic. The immediacy of these performances demonstrates that this approach has paid off dividends. This is easily among Deerhoof's best, and after the crushing disappointment of their last two full-lengths, a wonderful surprise.

3. Ian William Craig – A Turn of Breath (Recital)
Despite sharing three tracks with his wonderful 2013 album A Forgetting Place, I can forgive Ian William Craig because A Turn of Breath is the perfection of his art thus far. With just his voice, old reel-to-reel tape machines and some occasional guitar, Craig conjures forth an awe-inspiring, heavenly sound, akin to angels singing through a broken radio. Listening to this transcendent album feels like witnessing something crushingly beautiful in the process of falling apart forever. Thankfully we can listen to that process again and again.

2. Timber Timbre – Hot Dreams (Arts & Crafts)
Their name may be clunky, but Timber Timbre's music is masterfully conceived and executed. On the cover of Hot Dreams, we see the twin icons of Western material success, the car and the house, in a palm tree-lined street in (perhaps) the Hollywood Hills. Yet against the bleached-white sky, these parched husks take on a tragic dimension. Therein lies the key theme of this record: promises of glamour and happiness glow like neon in a strip club, yet behind this facade is a loneliness and despondency that threatens to erupt into violence.

1. Adult Jazz – Gist Is (Spare Thought)
This debut album by Leeds-based quartet Adult Jazz is such a thing of rare beauty, that to try and parse its singular appeal feels overwhelming and unnecessary. Overwhelming in the sense that there's so much wonderful stuff going on here that it's difficult to know where to begin. Writing about the music feels redundant, in the sense that it feels meaningless next to the experience of actually listening to it. All I can really say is listen to this album, because it's deliriously beautiful, inspiring and addictive. When I first discovered it, I listened to it on repeat for two weeks straight. 


Also recommended:
Amen Dunes – Love (Sacred Bones)
Bohren und der Club of Gore – Piano Nights (PIAS)
Children Of The Stones – The Stars and the Silence (Saint Marie)
Christina Vantzou – No. 2 (Kranky)
Flying Lotus – You're Dead! (Warp)
Locust – After the Rain (Editions Mego)
Peter Escott – The Long O (Bedroom Suck)
Protomartyr – Under Color of Official Right (Hardly Art)
Steve Gunn – Way Out Weather (Paradise of Bachelors)
Tape – Casino (Hapna)

Thom Yorke – Tomorrow's Modern Boxes

Thom Yorke's new solo album has arrived at an opportune moment for me. I'm in the midst of re-listening to all my favourite Radiohead albums, prompted by the news that the band are back in the studio working on the follow-up to The King of Limbs. I've even gone back to Atoms For Peace's disappointing Amok in search of Yorke-related goodness. Surely I'm primed to lap up this new surprise release? 

Before I even heard any of the music, the first thing Yorke got right is the pricing. I'll happily pay $6 for the digital download of an album by an artist I like, even without hearing any pre-release singles. (I'm less enamoured with the BitTorrent process, but that's an aside.) As far as the music's concerned, although there are some worthwhile tracks, mostly found in the first half, the album is bogged down by the limitations of Yorke's solo musical explorations: glitchy beats and bloops, plus Yorke's inimitable whine, trapped like a ghost in the machine. 

Single and opener 'A Brain In A Bottle' is probably the most fully realised song, counterbalancing ominous bass throb and eerie synth melodies with shuffling beats and Yorke's vulnerable, periodically echoed voice. However, it's immediately followed by the less-than-inspired 'Guess Again!', where the insistently crunchy rhythm really grates over its run-time.

For me, the one true stunner on this album is track 3, 'Interference', perhaps because it's not cluttered with Yorke's busy beatwork. In under three minutes, he runs a warm bath of electric piano and synth tones, then breathes his lonely vocal through the steam. It's followed by the very different but equally strong 'The Mother Lode' (note the correct spelling of 'mother lode', Mastodon). Even though I instinctively wince at the bass bounce and Burial-esque drum sounds of this lengthy upbeat workout, there's no denying it's catchy.

In contrast, 'Truth Ray' is almost sublimely dreary, its excruciatingly foot-dragging tempo made even more leaden by Yorke's moan of "Oh my god, oh my god". It's almost unbearable, but that's probably the intended effect. Boxes' longest track, 'There Is No Ice (For My Drink)', is punctuated by irritating high tom hits and vocal manipulations, richocheting around with very little direction before seguing into the piano and tape warble of 'Pink Section'. Patience is rewarded by the plaintive finale, 'Nose Grows Some', which oozes with ethereal atmosphere.

What's most frustrating about this release is the feeling that the songs are underdeveloped. Sounds are mostly looped then left to run for the duration of each track, with little to no variation or manipulation. When you place this music next to something like Syro by Yorke's beloved Aphex Twin, it sounds especially crude. Nevertheless, as with most of the music Yorke produces, there's a definite something that draws me back repeatedly. The aesthetic may not be especially original or groundbreaking – or even consistently effective – but there's no doubting that his morose songcraft can prove hypnotic.  

Circulatory System – Mosaics Within Mosaics

When Circulatory System's second album Signal Morning finally arrived in 2009, there was no way it could live up to the expectations I had built up during the eight-year wait for a follow-up to their self-titled debut, which is easily one of my favourite albums of all time. (I gave it another listen yesterday, and it still sounds absolutely incredible.) Where Circulatory System was rich, vivid and immaculately realised, Signal Morning felt scrappy and cobbled together, blasted through with fuzz and battered by the attack of twin drum kits. Although intermittently brilliant, Signal Morning was a massive disappointment compared to their debut.

With a comparatively short wait of five years since Signal Morning, it's great to have a new Circulatory System album. However, Mosaics Within Mosaics essentially comprises an hour of Will Cullen Hart's home demos later embellished by his bandmates. It sounds lo-fi, minimal and underdeveloped compared to their earlier work, including that of Hart's previous band Olivia Tremor Control. (The two tracks shared by the band prior to the album's release – 'If You Think About It Now' and 'Stars and Molecules' – are probably the most full-sounding, comparable to some of the songs on Signal Morning.)

When the bigger picture is taken into account – Hart's diagnosis with multiple sclerosis several years ago, and the tragic death of his OTC songwriting partner Bill Doss – the frail, forlorn sound of Mosaics Within Mosaics begins to make sense. While there were plenty of sad, reflective songs on Circulatory System, they were also densely orchestrated and swirling, the melancholy counterbalanced by impossibly kaleidoscopic multitracking. Here, with most songs left relatively naked, the eerie atmosphere of Hart's songwriting sounds incredibly fragile. I find it hard to discern whether this effect is intentional, or that the band has simply done the best they can with Hart's home recordings without dampening the feel of the original off-the-cuff performances.

As a result of the consistently skeletal nature of these song fragments, the overall sound of the album certainly feels considered, its tonal palette muted and washed out. And, with repeat listens, certain chord changes or melodies snag on my brain, harking back to previous Circulatory System tracks. However, it feels more like a starting point than a finished work of art; a sketch rather than an oil painting. Opener 'Physical Mirage/Visible Magic' is typical in this regard, its scuffed groove barely hanging around long enough for the listener to enjoy before the song dissolves and heads in another direction. Contrarily, the pieces that feel the most satisfying are the intermediary sound sketches ('Mosaics', akin to the 'Animation' pieces on OTC's Black Foliage). At four-and-a-half minutes, 'Mosaic #1' is by far the longest track here, its sustained drone deep enough to lose yourself in. Later in the album, 'Mosaic #4' has an almost industrial feel to it, an uneasy ambience that really pricks up my ears.

In a rare recent interview, Hart likened his creative process to that of Frank Zappa, who recorded obsessively and cobbled together albums from recordings that may have spanned years – decades, even. If Mosaics Within Mosaics comprises songs recorded years apart, the band has done an excellent job of constructing a flowing suite out of Hart's home experiments. Even then, it still feels frustratingly unfinished. If this can be attributed to exhaustion arising from Hart's multiple sclerosis, that's sad but inevitable. If it's an aesthetic decision, that's sad, too, but far less tragic – it just means Circulatory System are moving in a direction that holds less interest for me. Who knows? Signal Morning certainly took plenty of listens to appreciate, so maybe this one will come into focus down the track. For now, its ramshackle nature is proving too loose and distant to fully engage me.

Owen Pallett – In Conflict

Although it's not much to look at, the cover of Owen Pallett's new album In Conflict is a telling reflection of the music's beguiling appeal. The four columns of text contain the lyrics from the songs on the first half of the album, but a cancerous blob of ink obscures a good portion of the words. Everything may be laid out in black and white, but part of it is deliberately obscured, frustrating any attempts to apprehend 'the big picture' and grasp its full meaning. Perhaps as a result, In Conflict holds me rapt. Its appeal is immediate, its beauty obvious, but its motivations and through-lines feel like they're just around the corner, dissolving into air or ducking into the shadows as you move thuggishly towards them.
 
Such a response feels appropriate when the music is this shamelessly sophisticated, this swooningly gorgeous. Having never heard Pallett before, I have no idea if this is his usual MO, but initial spins of In Conflict make it abundantly clear he's a master at this stuff: melodies move in delicate arcs, lovingly coloured with brass and strings, his soft, supple voice reaching and harmonising with itself. Tracks flow together like water and the arrangements feel like natural, billowing things – part of the songs' DNA rather than a later addition to make the music sound more epic and emotive.

From opener 'I Am Not Afraid' through to awesome single 'The Riverbed', I simply can't fault this record. That's about 40 minutes of beautiful, orchestral pop music, with 'The Secret Seven' and 'Chorale' its delirious apex. If I was nitpicking, I'd say that after the heady rush of 'The Riverbed', the final three tracks feel like too much – the wafer-thin mints that bust the gut after a hearty, satisfying meal. Ultimately, though, this is music that leaves me clawing for superlatives and eager to experience more of Pallett's music.

Spoon – 'Rent I Pay'

Spoon are fundamentally a rock'n'roll band. Generally, I can't stand rock'n'roll's boozy good-time glow, its recycling of songwriting tropes, its leaning on bluesy riffs and classic rock posturing. So why do I love Spoon so much?

They tread a fine line, that's for sure, between cutting loose and holding back. In their new single 'Rent I Pay', the chorus gets a bit cringeingly pub-rock – the line "That's what my brother would say", doubled by the backing vocals, being the prime culprit – but there's that Spoon rhythmic jag to the song that not only keeps it afloat, but renders it pretty damned crankable. 'Cos prime Spoon is, if nothing else, all about tense, meticulously produced momentum and hip-snapping swagger. Everything locks in and charges on, dragging you behind it, panting.

'Rent I Pay' isn't doing anything particularly unique in Spoon's discography, but the production hand of Dave Fridmann nudges all the instruments into the red, giving the whole song an overdriven glow that suits Spoon down to the ground, especially as this is one of their songs where Britt Daniel's voice (The Best Voice in Rock'n'Roll Bar None TM) is at its limits, controlled but straining into its golden, throaty glory.

Spoon are a rare beast – a singles band and an albums band. Their new album They Want My Soul (due on Loma Vista in August) is eagerly awaited by my earholes. This will do nicely for now.

Timber Timbre – Hot Dreams

Aside from the fact they have one of the clunkiest band names I've ever heard, plus an affinity for groaningly bad puns (see Creep On Creepin' On and 'This Low Commotion'), Timber Timbre's music is masterfully conceived and executed. On the cover of their fifth album, Hot Dreams, we see the twin icons of Western material success, the car and the house, in a palm tree-lined street in (perhaps) the Hollywood Hills. Yet against the bleached-white sky, these parched husks take on a tragic dimension. Therein lies the key theme of this record: promises of glamour and happiness glow like neon in a strip club, yet behind this facade is a loneliness and despondency that threatens to erupt into violence.

The way in which vocalist/guitarist Taylor Kirk and multi-instrumentalist Simon Trottier juxtapose the elegant with the ominous is spectacularly satisfying. Production nerds can geek out on the gorgeous sounds found throughout – the wonderfully precise and crisp rhythm section; the chewed-tape warble on the guitars and keyboards; Colin Stetson's deliciously greasy saxophone lines. But it's the consistently strong songwriting and sustained mood that bring you back time and again.

The first half of the album, from hypnotic opener 'Beat The Drum Slowly' through to instrumental 'Resurrection Drive Part II', is absolutely flawless. Although Hot Dreams is far from aping Portishead's sound, the wonderfully noir 'Curtains?!' and 'Resurrection Drive Part II' are strongly reminiscent of the seminal Bristol band's self-titled second album.

Though the second half of the album is less immediately gratifying, partly due to the ongoing downbeat vibe, it certainly develops with repeat listens. 'Grand Canyon' sounds like a knowing update of 'Rhinestone Cowboy', its swagger undermined by existential dread, while 'Run From Me' puts a murderous twist on its Elvis-indebted execution with Kirk's sinister lyrics: "Run from me darling / Run my good wife / Run from me darling / You'd better run for your life". The way in which Kirk's ambiguous words subtly undercut the luxuriance of the music, preventing it from slipping into pastiche, is another of Hot Dreams' more enviable qualities. 

If you fall under the spell of this record it's tempting to seek out live versions of the songs on YouTube, but to see Taylor Kirk sweating his way through a performance, looking strangely like Bond villain Mr Kidd from Diamonds Are Forever, is to break the spell. Though there's something eerily pristine about the production on Hot Dreams, it's part of what makes this album so mesmerising. Passing these songs through the rigorous filter of the studio has rendered them phantasmagorical; sublime. It's a work of art.

Charles-Eric Charrier – Petite Soeur

I think I missed the boat on this one. There was a moment a couple of weeks ago when I was listening to Petite Soeur on the train and I started weeping to '8 Minutes'. At the point where the guitar feedback burns through like too-bright sunlight, it was too much for me. After minute-upon-minute of those insistent, tumbling drums, that slovenly bass, the uneasy tinkling of the piano, the feedback felt like it was saving everything by killing it stone-dead. Sweet euthanasia.

I let that moment get away from me, and now, after a dozen or so listens to this album, I still appreciate it, but it doesn't move me quite as much as it did, because I know exactly what's going to happen. Don't get me wrong: something interesting/moving happens in each of these six long instrumentals, led by pianist/bassist Charrier. But if I'd have pulled my finger out and written this review that day – well, I'd have been waxing rhapsodic, I can tell you.

If you're into instrumental rock or Necks-esque jazz, you'll definitely get something out of this release. It's patient in its execution, adroitly played throughout, and, if it catches you at the right/wrong moment, exquisitely moving. 

Man Meets Bear – Buffalo Comets

The internet is such a fucking blackhole. And when you make music with the primary purpose of trying to fill that blackhole, to reach people for the sake of being known, to try and grab attention and build a "career", you're likely to turn yourself inside-out in the process and become a monumental dick. Most of the time, anyway. Some people are built for being famous, being out there touring and being in front of people – the whole band-in-a-van and photoshoots and fashion spreads and blah. But then there are people who just make music in their own little corner of the world. Once it gets sucked out into the blackhole, you can sometimes tractor-beam it in if you've got the coordinates and have the time to familiarise yourself with that speck of detritus floating in the blackness of cyberspace. Or something.

Man Meets Bear is one such cosmic drifter, a guy called Soren Little Brothers. He sent me this album and it means something simply for the sake of it being a connection beyond the clawing-through-the-blackhole shitfight of internet music discovery. Thankfully it's right up my alley. It's lo-to-mid-fi psych-folk-rock-etc and it's got a craft and an intimacy and a melodic sensibility to it that really rewards the time I spend with it.

It pivots around a gorgeous piece of drifting psychedelia called 'Sun Goes Down', which basically sounds like how it feels to watch the sun go down. It's sad as the day is ending and the light is drawing in, but you feel safe as you can get close to someone, get warm, hunker down and slow your bloodflow and maybe have a cup of cocoa while you're at it. The music is little more than a delayed guitar and some field recordings and Soren's forlorn voice. The drummer starts to tap away at something for a while, then decides the song doesn't need drums, so he stops. (He's probably gone to warm up the milk for that cocoa we've been looking forward to.)

Either side of 'Sun Goes Down' the songs get noisier and hookier, but always muffled and intimate and mid-fi at best, arranged in an hour-long arc that rarely drags. When those lead guitar lines on 'Spores of His Mind' reach out, they really reach out amid the song's desolate shuffle. The lyric sounds like "You will leave me", until the line resolves on "all the way home" and you realise he's singing "You will lead me", which is much more hopeful – but also a bit sinister. I get that feeling of ambiguity, of feeling alternately embraced and smothered, by most of the songs here. Then occasionally he'll shift gear and blast through the fog with something like 'Northern Lights', which is shyly anthemic, like your geeky mate busting some dance moves and really nailing it for a couple of minutes before he starts getting self-conscious again.

Sometimes the folksiness approaches Bon Iver in terms of the cosmic backwoods vibe ('Buffalo Commons', 'My Fire'), thankfully minus Justin Vernon's signature vocal affectation, which everyone must be getting pretty tired of by now, surely. Soren can play a nice fingerpicked acoustic guitar without trying to heavy-lift people's souls with it. Guitar and keyboard textures wrap around the songs so they feel held, like cruising in a homemade spaceship with just enough insulation for re-entry. You'll know you're in space because it'll get a bit bleak and rickety for a while as the blackhole is trying to pull everything apart, but it will hold. Soren's a seasoned pilot. He knows which buttons to push. I'm guessing he knows his Yo La Tengo, his Sparklehorse – all the indie-rock constellations.

As home-spun as they may be, these Buffalo Comets race across the sky like furry stars. Watch them burn, listen close, let them go. It's more than enough for a while.

Wild Beasts – Present Tense

In this era of over-stimulation and perpetually prodded hand-held devices, less is more. Or is it? If recent interviews are anything to go by, Wild Beasts have rethought their working methods upon relocating to London, taking the time away from touring to explore alternative sounds and rebuild their songwriting from the ground up. They sound confident they've arrived at a workable new direction. However, while their new palette of sounds may have enlivened their creative process, assuaging their fear of repeating themselves or becoming irrelevant, there's something strangely unsatisfying about Present Tense. They sound like they're second-guessing themselves, as if in stripping back their instrumentation they lean too heavily on the emotive powers of Tom Fleming and Hayden Thorpe's beautiful voices (which have strangely become more similar and less singular over time), plus their new studio toys (including a Dave Smith Instruments Prophet synth). For better or worse, they've upended the delicate balance they achieved on Smother.

One thing that's immediately apparent to anyone with a passing familiarity with their previous albums is just how different Present Tense sounds, right from the off. I'm fairly certain that if I heard this album without having loved Wild Beasts' previous records I would discount it as fluffy synth-pop and move right along. Indeed, if I was trying to persuade someone of Wild Beasts' singular brilliance, I certainly wouldn't start here. Not that this is a bad album by any means, but this latest iteration of their evolving sound is probably the least immediately gratifying, the slowest to reveal its charms. And those charms pale pretty fast.

My first listen to Present Tense was massively disappointing. Admittedly, singles 'Wanderlust' and 'Sweet Spot' took a while to win me over, suggesting that the album would follow suit, but the only song that stood out on early listens was penultimate track 'A New Life', which felt like it should be the closer, with its spine-tingling atmosphere of deflation. With each listen, different tracks rose to the fore. Aside from 'A New Life', I was initially drawn to the other songs featuring Tom Fleming on lead vocals ('Nature Boy', 'Daughters' and 'A Dog's Life') because they seemed to have a degree of ambiguity and depth. The tracks that have taken the longest to reveal their charms ('Mecca', 'Simple Beautiful Truth' and 'Palace') stray furthest from the Wild Beasts sound I've come to know and love, with superficially pretty synth lines and the simplest of melodic gestures.

Present Tense may prove to be a transitional record in Wild Beasts' discography. It's not without its merits (the production is flawless, as ever), but it leaves me frustrated – especially given how much I've been looking forward to enjoying it, which counts for a lot when the bombardment of new releases is so relentless. They're walking a fine line here. On the one hand, the music could be praised as diaphonous, equine, poised; on the other, it could be damned as flimsy, trendy, insubstantial. I appreciate the way these delicate, crystalline compositions glisten as I hold them up to the light, but I worry they won't bear close inspection for much longer.

Wild Beasts – 'Sweet Spot'

As if to put paid to any speculation that they've abandoned guitars completely on fourth album Present Tense, Wild Beasts' new track 'Sweet Spot' deploys both guitars and synths in a sensuous, slowburning way, gently ramping up anticipation of the album's release at the end of this week.



What makes Wild Beasts so good is all over this song: the interleaving of Hayden Thorpe and Tom Fleming's distinctive yet beautifully complementary voices; arpeggiated guitar parts that simultaneously suspend the song in place and twirl it elegantly; the nagging sense that the song will serve as a small yet essential part of the bigger picture to come. In itself, it doesn't really go anywhere radical, but the subtle melodic pirouettes behind Fleming's voice and the cascading vocal harmonies are rather elegant and lovely.

What I am cynical about, however, is the deployment of synth. It's nothing too egregious, but it feels a bit anticlimactic given how recent interviews with the band have highlighted their eager adoption of synths on the new album. The tone of the synth in this track feels a bit flat, and features too prominently in the mix – and the song stops abruptly after the synth hints at a new direction towards the song's conclusion. Sadly, Wild Beasts appear to be the latest in a long line of guitar bands waxing rhapsodic about the inspirational power of the synthesizer and how it enlivened their compositional process. The question of whether it works for them will be answered once Present Tense is released. But is this synth rite of passage something that every band has to go through, even a band as singular and seemingly abundant in inspiration as Wild Beasts?

The Caribbean – Moon Sickness

When I shared The Caribbean's last album Discontinued Perfume with my best friend and bandmate Jono, his initial response was similar to mine – the music's too busy, there are too many words, frontman Michael Kentoff has a nasal vocal tone akin to Yo La Tengo's Ira Kaplan on a caffeine buzz. It's hard to find a way in. Jono persisted, thanks in part to the appearance of the wonderful 'Mr Let's Find Out' on a mix CD I gave him, plus my continued insistence on the band's idiosyncratic brilliance. Given time, he had to admit The Caribbean have a certain something, a unique magic that I attempted to put my finger on in a write-up about my favourite albums of 2011.

On their new album, The Caribbean are more immediately persuasive. Although their attention to detail makes repeat listens a necessity, both to appreciate the smooth songwriting and to luxuriate in the wonderful production, Moon Sickness feels more vivid than Discontinued Perfume. Most notably, first single and album standout 'Imitation Air' juxtaposes guitar parts so sonically differentiated that the effect is deeply psychedelic – a warbling, chewed-tape guitar in the left channel, a clean phased guitar in the right – especially when the vocals, bass and drums sit soberly between them, carrying the song forward with a crisp clip. It's my favourite Caribbean song to date, perhaps for the band too – after all, that's a snippet of the song's lyrics on the album's front cover.



Second single 'Jobsworth', premiered late last year on rollingstone.com no less, is almost as appealing, with its chiming guitar refrain, shuffling drums, and some of Kentoff's most resonant lyrics to date:

American Jobsworth
Sends us out to scan the city
We've got nearly zero asshole factor here
No real shouters
In fact, everyone speaks quietly
And smiles your soul to sleep.

'Electric Bass' has a propulsive groove and the cheeky line "Cue electric bass!" prompts that goosebumpy feeling when a song's bassline kicks in and the energy level jumps. Except it's a feint. Nothing changes for a few bars – very funny, fellas – then some delicious instrumental colours begin to expand the song's horizons, tingling the extremeties. The guitar licks on this one are hot shit, too. Similarly tasty fretwork crops up later on 'Echopraxia', the song title potentially pointing to another sly Caribbean "joke". Are those guitar licks aping the earlier song? Or another band? Or both? Whichever way you cut it, it's smooth without being smarmy. A suburban Steely Dan.

Given Kentoff's fondness for chatty, literate lyrics, with his vocals pretty much guaranteed to start up as soon as the song gets going, the feel of The Caribbean's verses can get a bit samey, but just as you start to wonder whether you should skip a trick, something changes – beautiful instrumental details will pop up or drop out, a fresh chord sequence will evolve. They judge exactly when to make things interesting again to persuade the listener from tuning out, whether between songs or within songs, maximising the impact of each twist and turn. And on the title track, the band muster a rare extended instrumental coda for some much-needed breathing space. Smart songwriting.

I love how succinct The Caribbean are, and how much they cram into these 35 minutes. I love how I feel when I listen to their smart, deftly executed songs. Moon Sickness is a beauty, and probably their best album yet. If you need further convincing, producer Chad Clark's overview at the Hometapes website should do the trick.

Wild Beasts – 'Wanderlust'

Seeing as BoC's 'Reach For The Dead' is ace and Tomorrow's Harvest is not, Mogwai's 'Remurdered' is ace and Rave Tapes is not, what does it mean for the forthcoming fourth Wild Beasts album Present Tense that 'Wanderlust' is pretty damn good? Here's the digi-goods:



I couldn't care less about the video, apart from the ending where all the characters multiply and overlap, but the song has been growing on me one hell of a lot in the past couple of weeks. Since falling in love with Smother I've become similarly besotted with Two Dancers and Limbo, Panto. Going backwards in their discography takes one further away from the sound of 'Wanderlust'. Evolution is fine, but wouldn't be worthwhile if the Beasts were losing what's made their music so essential with each release. Limbo, Panto was fruity and feral; Smother was spacious and elegant; Two Dancers, fittingly, saw a dalliance with both Beastly directions. 'Wanderlust' is something else again.

Part of the song's appeal pivots on the way in which the basic rhythm seems to see-saw between kick-kick-snare and snare-kick-kick. The rhythm doesn't change, but the way the accent of the drums plays a trick on my mind is hypnotic. It's the difference between a rock drummer thumping out a beat and a horse cantering. It's refreshing to hear Chris Talbot abandon his usual modus operandum of making every drumbeat fidgety with tikkity-tokkety rototoms and cowbells and the like, and it suits the song's general sense of momentum, moving forward without thinking too much while still possessing a human feel.

It was only after a dozen or so listens I registered there are no guitars discernible in the mix, which is usually such a pleasing feature of WB's sound. Replacing guitars with synths would, on the surface, seem like a trendy move, but the band have never come across as being fussed by such considerations, which is part of their appeal. The instrumentation just serves the song's sleek form, spiralling around and around on itself, but never really going back over the same ground.

The song appealed a lot more after I learned that it's Perfect Tense's opening track. Dunno why – just feels right. I hope the tracks that follow are as beguiling.

Favourite Albums of 2013

In 2013 I vacillated between hungrily vacuuming up as much music as I could fit into my earholes via Spotify, and savouring those precious albums that stood up to repeat plays and spoke to me more vividly than the rest. These 10 I cherished the most.

10. Woods – Bend Beyond
As Alex Griffin has so wisely scribed about Parquet Courts in his Top 10 of 2013 on LifeisNoise, it's good to hear bands playing guitars like they're actually enjoying themselves rather than inflicting their emotional suffering on you. Even though they're many albums deep, Woods still sound like they're having a blast, weaving vintage tones into melodic shapes for half an hour's worth of '60s-inspired guitar pop. Tunes in this genre are rarely as lovely as 'Cali in a Cup' or 'Size Meets the Sound', and though there's sadness and reflection here too ('It Ain't Easy', 'Something Surreal'), Woods never sound anything other than vital and inspired on this, their latest and best.
(Turns out this was released in September 2012. Doh.)

9. No Joy – Wait to Pleasure
The biggest event in the shoegazing calendar was obviously the return of MBV, but it was a trio from Montreal who dropped the best album of the genre. Despite the fact that most music labelled 'shoegaze' is tuneless rubbish put through a dozen effects pedals, and that No Joy shamelessly plunder prime Slowdive ('Uhy Youi Yoi') and Ride ('Lunar Phobia'), Wait to Pleasure still sounds magnificent. I put it down to canny songwriting and a keen ear for guitar density and dynamics. Few albums sound so mighty blasted in the car. Listen loud and listen good.

8. Thee Oh Sees – Floating Coffin
At the Drones-curated All Tomorrow's Parties festival in Melbourne, John Dwyer blew up a Fender Twin Reverb. If you know how loud a Twin Reverb goes, you'll know just how loud they were playing. (Thankfully it was in a big sports hall, so the echoing riffs had plenty of space to reverberate, and everyone in the audience emerged relatively unscathed.) Floating Coffin brilliantly conveys the sheer maniacal force of Thee Oh Sees' live show, while occasionally dialing back the chaos to employ fuzztones that sound like bassoons, chugging psych-rock expanses and mind-numbing stomps. These guys are so good at what they do, they can keep making the same album ad infinitum and I'll keep listening.

7. Cass McCombs – Big Wheel and Others
Cass is a ramblin' man, and on Big Wheel he rambles majestically across the American Dream, tongue in cheek, with the kinds of songs that send you back through your record collection to find where he's stolen the hooks from. He makes everything his own, of course, and what's more remarkable is how many highlights there are across the two discs. I never skip a track, but simply dive in and bask in the songcraft for a while before emerging refreshed. The bass work from Phish's Mike Gordon is inspired, too. 

6. Dawn of Midi – Dysnomia
Despite the colossal volume of excellent music released during 2013, I've probably spent less on music this year than ever before. The fact that the musicians I stream via Spotify will only receive a measly scattering of cents irks me if I love the music. (Conversely, I'm happy to have not forked out $20 for a CD if an album I listen to via Spotify is shit.) In short, I owe Dawn of Midi the price of an album. I've listened to this album right through countless times, lapsing into a blissed-out state every time. Imagine The Necks playing minimal electro. The whole thing was scored in full and then recorded live in the studio, which blows my mind.

5. Frog Eyes – Carey's Cold Spring
I wish I could listen to Carey's Cold Spring without knowing that Carey Mercer's father died during the recording, or that Mercer received a diagnosis of throat cancer after the mixing was completed. Although this album is invested with the same emotional intensity that Mercer invests in all of his songwriting, it speaks of something more profound and universal than just pain and loss. Compared to previous Frog Eyes records, Mercer's vocals are less histrionic, the music's less fitful, the tempos are down. It's a slow-burner, a heart-melter, an elegant collection of songs that each take their turn to sit up and engage with you earnestly. 'Claxxon's Lament' in particular is devastating.

4. The Drones – I See Seaweed
The first time I heard the title track of the new Drones album I felt an unsettling mix of terror and awe. The Drones have finally found a way of conveying the disgust in Gareth Liddiard's polarising voice and the roving intelligence of his lyrics through their music. New member Steve Hesketh adds eerie instrumental colour on keys and Dan Luscombe's guitar playing goes head to head with Liddiard's six-string mangling for some truly incendiary noise-rock. Between the highlights of opener 'I See Seaweed' and gorgeous finale 'Why Write A Letter That You'll Never Send', the band spit bile, spray sweat and cast transformative magic throughout what may prove to be their definitive statement.

3. These New Puritans – Field of Reeds
Field of Reeds is an exercise in hammering down a nail so mercilessly, you have to hammer down everything else around it in order to approximate a veneer of perfection. It's a neurotically engineered machine, fine-tuned to within an inch of its life, but once it starts spinning like some sadist's zoetrope, turning slowly enough that you can inspect the composition of each frame, the ride is spinning just fast enough that you can't help but be mesmerised by its ghostly flow. (Let's hope the fact that producer Graham Sutton considers this to be the best album he's ever worked on will give him a kick up the arse to work on the next Bark Psychosis album.)

2. The Besnard Lakes – Until in Excess, Imperceptible UFO
The Besnard Lakes make classic/psych-rock that is big and hairy, but also friendly. Their albums are massive sonic hugs full of glowing vintage tones, swirling strings, skyscraping melodies and kick-ass guitar solos (see '46 Satires' and 'Colour Yr Lights In'). All of their albums thus far have been great, but Until in Excess is particularly magnificent – beautifully arranged and sequenced, with enough space amidst the epic rock bluster for the listener to breathe a contented sigh (see 'The Specter' and 'Catalina'). I'm absolutely gagging to see them live next time they come to Australia.

1. Machine Translations – The Bright Door
The eighth album from J. Walker has had a lengthy gestation period while he earned his crust making music for TV. There's something significant in this. While there are countless 'careerist' bands around the traps, touring endlessly and creating music with their livelihood in the back of their mind, it's reassuring to hear music that has taken time to brew until it's absolutely ready for consumption. The Bright Door is rich, sad, intricately layered and staggeringly lovely. The more aggressive songs have a droning timbre, their detuned guitars amassed in glorious chorus ('Perfect Crime', 'Water Met The Sky'), while the immersive ambience of the slower songs ('Cloudface', 'Applecore') is positively hypnotic. There are no mis-steps here, just beautiful, beautiful folk-rock of a complex hue. And there's 'Needles', my favourite song of the year. Perfect.

Also very good (in alphabetical order):
Alkali Fly – Race To Victory Mountain
Chris Forsyth – Solar Motel
Grooms – Infinity Caller
Tim Hecker – Virgins
Holden – The Inheritors
Julia Kent – Character
Julian Lynch – Lines
Last Days – Satellite
Mutual Benefit – Love's Crushing Diamond
My Bloody Valentine – m b v
V.O. – On Rapids