The Best Albums of 2008

#86 Don't overlook this great hard-bop record

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  From The Heart by Bobby Watson Pick

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  It took chutzpah for alto saxophonist Bobby Watson to liken both From the Heart and his band Live & Learn to the storied tradition of Art Blakey’s mentorship of young hard bop talent in the Jazz Messengers — and then musically justify the comparison. With Live & Learn as with his previous band Horizon, Watson features effervescent, driving grooves, original material from various band members, and the heartening frisson of seasoned vets (like himself and bassist Curtis Lundy) with unheralded but capable young guns.
  
  “Wilkes BBQ” continues his delightful penchant for leading things off with a zesty and arresting new tune. Lundy contributes a hip-lifting bass line, drummer Quincy Davis provides the snappy-slappy riposte, and then the catchy melody takes hold. Other highlights include “Deep Pockets,” where pianist Harold O’Neal referees torrid exchanges between Davis and trumpeter Leron Thomas, then Watson; a title track with the sort of durable groove and tear-a-hunk solos reminiscent of Blakey’s classic Jazz Messengers discs on Blue Note; and the closer, “Marcus Vein,” that gives everyone a chance to let off steam. Last but not least, don’t sleep on secret weapon Warren Wolf on vibes, who is unlike Steve Nelson and other modern mallet men in that Wolf is more percussive than diaphanous. His “For Milt” is a loving tribute to Milt Jackson, replete with Jackson’s signature traits, such as the lingering resonance of the notes combined with stealthy-quick phrasing.

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#85 One day, jazz and hip-hop meet in the club...

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  Ninja Tuna by Mr. Scruff Pick

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  Born in Macclesfield in the north of England in 1972, Mr Scruff started DJing in nearby Manchester in 1994, a short while after the euphoria of the "Summers of Love" of 1988 and 1989 had fizzled out. Intent on incorporating soul, early hip-hop, jazz, reggae, dub, pop and electronic dance music into his sets, Scruff (originally Andy Carthy) developed a tapestry aesthetic that hooked into the mood of dancers who wanted to keep smiling and knew that the amphetamines would no longer do the trick. Scruff started spinning music in the right place at the right time, and his distinctive "potato style" artwork suggested he also had the potential to become the UK's answer to Keith Haring, whose work combined the playful street style of early 1980s hip-hop with the transcendent optimism of downtown dance.
  
  Scruff's distinctive blend of sounds and sensibilities can be heard on Ninja Tuna, his fourth studio album. The album opens with "Test the Sound," on which a disembodied voice asks the rhetorical question, "Who wanna mess around and test the sound?" The answer, of course, is Scruff. After that, "Music Takes Me Up" draws on uptempo dance-jazz; "Donkey Ride" develops a Latin groove; "Hairy Bumpercress" edges into the territory of soulful house; "Whiplash" punches out breakbeats and samples; "Nice Up the Function" puts a West Coast break onto the breakbeat groove; "Bang the Floor" layers low-fi synth grumbles onto an even slower, funkier groove. Rounding off the album, "Get On Down," "Hold On," "Give Up to Get," "Kalimba" and "This Way" develop an explicitly soulful outro, while the final track, "Stockport Carnival," sums up Scruff's intention nicely. Stockport, like Macclesfield, might lie on the outskirts of Manchester, but the rhythms of North America, South American and the Caribbean permeate its streets and clubs.

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#84 Young and flammable UK post-punkers dance dance dance

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  Friendly Fires by Friendly Fires Pick

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  The sleepy suburb of St Albans in Hertfordshire is hardly a hotbed of English rave culture. But Ed McFarlane, Edd Gibson and Jack Savidge have gone some way towards putting their humble corner of the Home Counties on the musical map, releasing a series of fashionably danceable, nu rave EPs and singles over the last two years. Their short, sharp, ten-track debut album largely consists of re-recorded versions of those songs; a disappointment, perhaps, for established Friendly Fires fans. But FF virgins will find plenty to admire — particularly if the likes of Klaxons and Midnight Juggernauts have left you begging for more radio-friendly, '80s-referencing indie-dance.
  
  Friendly Fires opens with "Jump In the Pool," in which Bloc Party/Kate Nash/Sam Sparro producer Paul Epworth blends the band’s funkier instincts with their penchant for shoegaze and dream pop. The album’s highlights — "In the Hospital," "Lovesick," "Photobooth," "Paris" — head straight for the hips, as McFarlane’s lightweight vocals and lyrics are (thankfully) overwhelmed by tough, percussive disco beats and punchy art-funk bass. It’s the trio’s natural flair for grooves that makes Friendly Fires an entertaining contribution to the dance-rock revival.

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#83 A beautiful, twangy goodbye to the indie world from some future superstars

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  The Second Gleam by The Avett Brothers Pick

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  It’s almost redundant to state that on this release the Avett Brothers return to the slowed, stripped down sound of the first Gleam EP. The acoustic pickings and strumming accompany vocals in a way that highlights the perfection in their vocal imperfections. Avett’s voice strains as he laments that “not even the hands of God can hold me back from you,” on “The Greatest Sum.” This audible proof of his efforts makes his pain that much more real and relatable. Their inclusion of the electric rendition of “The Greatest Sum” serves as a good point of reference. While just as enjoyable, once the drums and electric reverberations cloud over vocals, the power of the longing and loneliness in the original version of the love song are lost. The decision to clip The Second Gleam at EP length keeps you from getting lost in a pit of emotions, but the lyrical prowess begs for each track to be played on repeat.

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#82 A delicious, funhouse-mirror trip through '90s rave

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  Where Were U in '92? by Zomby Pick

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  You might have expected Zomby's debut album to be an exercise in head- spinning futurism. This is, after all, the guy (he's from London and doesn't give out his real name) who gained a name with the rough-and-slinky dubstep of "Spliff Dub" and "Mu5h", not to mention Rustie's dizzying remix of the former (on "Mu5h"'s B-side). Instead, Where Were U in '92? is a sharp jump backward — and a welcome one.
  
  Every track is drenched in the tumultuous sound of that year's new dance-music model: clattering breakbeats, nattering piano lines, belch-and-zoom low end and vocal snippets that, run through cheap samplers, sounded alien even if you'd heard them in their original environments a zillion times. "Tears in the Rain" utilizes a muddy snippet from the Supremes' "Come See About Me" ("I've been, I've been crying") that gains surprising poignancy atop wobbling bass and tinny snares; "U Are My Fantasy (Street Fighter II Theme Remix)" relentlessly works a bit of Baby D's gurgling-euphoric '92 classic "Let Me Be Your Fantasy" into videogame music, an apt crossing of two forms' golden age. One of the cheekier, and most resonant, aspects of Where Were U in '92? is that the songs segue, if not slam, right into each other, as if taped off pirate radio and run together with a cassette deck's pause button — the sure mark of a true fan.

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#81 Beautiful, hypnotic pop from Iceland

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  Við og við. by Ólöf Arnalds Pick

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  Ólöf Arnalds plays a gentle brand of folk music that won’t strike anyone with a soft spot for Vashti Bunyan or Joanna Newsom as unfamiliar; her songs have an unusual way of freezing out the external world during the few graced minutes in which they’re alive. Arnalds is all about subtle moments of breath-taking, stop-you-in-your-tracks beauty, and none of them owes to more than the simple aggregation of voice and guitar. Sometimes it’s a lute or something else with strings, but the general pattern remains the same. In “Englar Og Dárar,” Arnalds employs a dexterous finger-picking style made all the more intimate by the close-miked squeak of her hand changing chords; more striking is her voice — a high, round, fleshy coo that sounds both overwhelmed by wonder and weathered by regret. “Klara” makes good use of the lute and finds Arnalds climbing higher in pitch, while the title track makes for a prime singalong lure with a glorious “la la la” refrain. Arnalds has been known to stretch out and experiment (she used to sing in Múm), but Við Og Við answers to a kind of delicate loveliness that is in no way provisional — and certainly not fleeting.

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#80 A jazz violinist decides to go folk. And succeeds.

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  Jenny Scheinman by Jenny Scheinman Pick

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  Of the two Jenny Scheinman discs simultaneously released in mid-2008, Crossing the Field is the typically adventurous jazz set featuring guest spots by Bill Frisell and Jason Moran, and Jenny Scheinman is the eye-opening singer-songwriter vocal debut. There are six covers among the ten tunes here, and some are wonderful, including the dirt-rural traditional folk blues, “I Was Young When I Left Home,” arranged by Bob Dylan, a classic-rocking rendition of Jimmy Reed’s last hit from 1963, “Shame Shame Shame,” and a faithful take on the creamy swing of the Platters’ “Twilight Time.” But Scheinman’s four originals are gems, too — the top quartet of tunes on the entire record, in fact. The gift for melody so apparent in her jazz writing is paired with poetic lyrics and intrepid sense of rhythm, creating free-verse double entendres and twists of inflection that change, and frequently charge, the narrative.
  
  On “Newspaper Angels,” for example, delightfully pregnant pauses twice alter the context: One has a “sister looking at her baby [pause] brother” and another describes how “there’s five miles between them [pause] and the nearest neighbor.” These subtle bits of wordplay enable her flat, honest vocals — reminiscent of Sheryl Crow — to create depth and wisdom and surmount her tonal limitations. “Come On Down” is an unabashed rocker (and makes the Crow resemblance more explicit). “The Green” is a fascinating, erudite whodunit that opens and closes with “Where is my mother’s sister?/ Did she climb in the back of a shiny El Camino?” And “Skinny Man,” the highlight of the collection, is a lament so beautifully sad you won’t know whether to cry or celebrate.
  
  In addition to her cutting-edge jazz work, Scheinman has backed up Norah Jones and other refined pop stars, which makes this eponymous disc vulnerable to cries of sellout from jazz purists. But check the way Scheinman plays fiddle with a haunting bluegrass reverence on Mississippi John Hurt’s “Miss Collins,” and then uses the same instrument as a grand violin to bring home the complexity of emotions on Tom Waits’ “Johnsburg, Illinois.” Or check Frisell’s guitar lines on “Rebecca’s Song,” which modulate from a whisper to a murmur. Jenny Scheinman sings on Jenny Scheinman, it’s true. But the music ain’t half bad either.

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#79 Canadian disco-house that kills it, from start to finish

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  As High As The Sky by The Mole Pick

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  Disco has been so extensively plundered for samples and melodies by house producers it's a wonder there's anything left that hasn't already been regurgitated through someone's mixing desk. But Canadian producer Colin de la Plante not only preserves disco's youthful sheen, he creates a timeless frame for new and old beats to co-exist and to thrive.
  
  The key is in the selection. La Plante uses short sampled loops and instrumentation; by letting these elements run together in the mix, avoiding interruptions or abrupt edits, he allows the pristine and the vintage to steadily diffuse into each other — to take on each other's DNA. Vocal snatches, bubbling synths and percussive breaks all move together, frictionless, and the perpetual motion has effortless grace rather than explosive sensual charge.
  
  "Ain't the Way It's Supposed to Be" interpolates Patrick Cowley electronic pulses and slow, Kraftwerk-style melodies, making for a gliding midnight cruise; "Alice, You Need Him" plays tremolo chords against liquid synth pops that sound like they were recorded in a metal box. As High as the Sky at times evokes the slow riding groove of France's Motorbass or the sample-scapes of Thomas Brinkmann's Soul Center project. But really, La Plante just lets his source material do all the talking, framing translucent grooves through which three decades of dance music do their thing.

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#78 Mystic, melodic and moving

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  Na Na Ni by Fredrik Pick

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  Funny how during this era of diminished dreams and drastic economic downsizing (Hummer anyone? 'Cuz we got 'em here, cheap), large indie ensembles a la the Polyphonic Spree have become, uh, bigger than ever. Whether flaunting a spiritual halo (like Los Angeles' Bodies of Water), hurriedly spending their Canadian arts grants (such as Broken Social Scene or one of the Toronto community's bazillion splinter projects) or taking advantage of legendarily generous local labor laws (such as the decidedly un-Catalan I'm From Barcelona, whose membership swelled to 29 contributors on its debut recording), the New Law of Big Numbers has given rise to groups such as Sweden's Fredrik, a duo that began simply enough as an offshoot of indie-electro combo The LK but began ballooning to its present sextet size the minute the studio doors were flung open.
  
  The group's preferred M.O. is somewhat typical of the Large Band mentality in that various obscure instruments and approaches are employed throughout the album's eleven tracks (vibraphone, multi-part vocal harmonies, strings of various shapes and sizes), all backed by martial beats given voice by an orchestra of drums, creating the impression of what a toy marching band raised on a steady diet of DeVotchka and Fairport Convention might sound like. But that doesn't account for songs like "Hei Hei" (a tidy bit of Japanimation fluttering by in the breeze of the album's first third), "1986" (perhaps New Order's most pastoral song) or "11 Years" (hey, who the hell let Elliott Smith in here, anyway?), all of which stray significantly from any sort of pre-made playbook that multi-instrumentalist Fredrik or his The LK compatriot Lindefelt might have dreamed up. Na Na Ni is instantly likeable puzzle-pop with a couple of pieces lost — a prismatic, unapologetically weird survey of the musical landscape circa 2008, given a steroid bath of instrumentation that nevertheless sounds deliciously smaller than the sum of its many parts.

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#77 A breathless plunge off the deep end

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  Un Dia by Juana Molina Pick

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  Juana Molina has gone bananas. Her previous records were intriguing but mostly unobtrusive, foregrounding Molina's angelic voice and feather-light guitar playing. They were springtime songs, light and breezy but also oddly transient — here and gone like the afternoon sun.
  
  Un Dia on the other hand, opens with a holler, Molina yammering and yelping over a frantic cluster of notes that just repeats and repeats and repeats. Welcome to the aural equivalent of Goya's Black Paintings, the precise moment when a dedicated formalist drops off the deep end of experimentation. More Tom Ze than Chan Marshall, Un Dia is a breathless and bracing collection of sounds, a record that dices Molina's voice into tiny syllables and scatters it like seedlings across weird, rocky terrain. Her vocals aren't just the melody, either: in "Vive Solo," they're the percussion, half-second snippets of sound that blip like radar beneath a wandering bass line. In "Los Hongos De Marosas," Molina's voice acts as a keyboard, plinking out a string of "Da da da"s over a dizzying loop of acoustic guitar. Repetition is the watchword: most of the songs on Un Dia consist of single phrases looped and layered which make for a kind of fascinating monotony; the songs don't grow outward so much as upward, stack and stacks of sound that build steadily while remaining stock still. In "No Llama," easily the closest thing to the balladry of Molina's yesteryear, her voice is stretched and detuned so it sounds absolutely otherworldly, a strange mist coiling and twisting over rippling guitar. Percussion enters and it all goes even darker, sharps and flats colliding fiercely, angrily. Nevermind its title: Un Dia is as black as night.

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#76 These grooves need no translation

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  Nigeria 70 - Lagos Jump by Various Artists Pick

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  Whatever else you call 2008, you can add “the year of the Nigerian reissue compilation.” With a trio of goodies in Soundway’s Nigeria Special series, and now this collection on Strut, there’s never been a better time to live in the past a little and survey the amazingly rich terrain of Nigeria in the 1970s.
  
  The primary differences between Nigeria 70 and the Soundway albums is that this one emphasizes tunes and skews more toward highlife than the rock-era styles the Specials highlight. Which isn’t to say that Nigeria 70 stints on rhythm by any means — or that it makes no concessions to US/UK styles, as the straight-up disco-funk of Peter King’s “African Dialects” and the British Invasion soul of the Immortals’ “Hot Tears” prove. But there’s something refreshingly basic about the propulsion of these cuts in aggregate; something like Eric (Showboy) Akaeze & His Royal Ericos’ “Wetin De Watch Goat, Goat Dey Watcham” just builds and builds without letup for ten solid minutes, and most of the shorter cuts (in the three-to-six-minute range) are more immediate. Olufemi Ajasa & His New Nigerian Bros’ “Aiye Le” propels on a Bo Diddley-ish rhythm, modestly intricate vocal back-and-forth and an arresting, astringent little guitar line, while Rex Williams’s stone simple “You Are My Heart” is like lemonade on a sunny day.

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#75 Beautiful, sprawling and weird. Very Animal Collective.

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  Music for Spaceships and Forests by twi the humble feather

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  Twi the Humble Feather like to aim high. The hyper-ambitious trio have named their first album Music for Spaceships and Forests, and it's full of lofty reference points — a two-part, castle-themed song suite, a ten-minute centerpiece, falsetto chanting. They even shoot for the heavens: the delicate, droning mini-epics on Music are informed by the "holy minimalism" of modern classical composers like Arvo Pärt and John Tavener. Layered, staccato acoustic guitar and rhythmic sing-chants are the sole instrumentation on Music; the album feels hushed and ceremonial.
  
  Despite the classical lineage and repetitious nature of Twi's tracks, the sound of Music is accessible and warm. The sprawling title track nails the album's m.o.: dual guitar interplay, vocals-as-sound-effects, deep and resonant harmonies. "Adventures of Castle One" winds itself from a gentle acoustic tip-toe to a mesmerizing, spiraling vocal round (think "Row, row, row your boat"). It's "Finale," the bite-sized album ender, though, that proves most thrilling. Sprightly guitars dance all over the track, anchored by a simple (catchy, even!) chanted refrain.
  
  Their debut is a carefully constructed and ascetic-sounding album, at once subtle and bursting with energy. Comparisons to other modern avant-folksters or similarly high-minded indie rockers (Animal Collective being a close cousin) are inevitable, but with Music, Twi manages something unique and beautiful.

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#74 Ground zero for hipsterdom's impending Middle Eastern obsession

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  Kabukimono by Rainbow Arabia

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  Married duo Danny and Tiffany Preston have an affinity for making loud, sweaty dance tracks saturated in Middle Eastern intonations. On their debut EP as Rainbow Arabia, the Prestons shove their way to the heart of the dance floor, pumping a wayward cohesion of keyboards, bass and strings into eager limbs. Tambourines get their groove on; guitars are grated into crude fragments; each layer of sound is bonded by Tiffany Preston's nearly incomprehensible, M.I.A.-evoking battle shrieks.

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#73 Indie rock gets famous, goes country and acts naturally

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  Volume One by She & Him Pick

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  A high-minded few might stand opposed, on principle, to the very idea of Zooey Deschanel, crushee du jour of countless fickle indie boys, torching her way through a stylized set of '70s retro pop. Their loss. Truth is, Deschanel ably channels the brassy cuteness of her acting persona into her singing with a savvy that's always likeable and often sly. And her musical helpmate, M. Ward, shuffles musical clichés of laid-back yore — lagging piano chords, country guitar licks, AM-ready strings — with a dexterity that adds up less to pastiche than to alternative history. Phil Spector should've had a countrypolitan phase, and now, thanks to "Sweet Darlin'," he kinda has.
  
  Deschanel can be a bit more googly-eyed about lyrical clichés — we all know that "self" rhymes with "shelf," and we all know it shouldn't. But her commitment to the material more than compensates, especially when she affects a moderate drawl — on the weathered and worn "Change Is Hard," on the jaunty "Black Hole" and even on her goof on the Beatles' "I Should've Known Better." Sure, she may sing an awful lot about unhappy love. And yet, regardless of what its lyric implies, the title of the opening mood-setter "Sentimental Heart" tells us not so much how she feels about boys, but how she feels about music.

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#72 An excellent performance of an exceptional work

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  Brian Eno: Music For Airports (Live) by Bang On A Can All-Stars Pick

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  When Brian Eno almost single-handedly birthed the ambient music movement with 1979’s Music for Airports, he made tape loops of piano, voices and electronic sounds; staggered their entrances; and let them run. It was not meant for people to play and, in fact, Eno felt that it couldn’t be played by human musicians. (“They’d never allow the long gaps that occur,” he once said.) But Eno didn’t reckon with Bang on a Can. The oddly-named composers collaborative is now a mini-empire of new music, with an annual series of concerts, a record label and its own electro-acoustic house band, the Bang on a Can All-Stars. Founding composers Michael Gordon, David Lang and Julia Wolfe decided to arrange Eno’s spare, moody soundscapes for real musicians to play in real concert spaces. And in airports too when the occasion arose. They each took one of the four parts and enlisted Evan Ziporyn, clarinetist, composer and the All-Stars’ primus inter pares, to do the final part. The result is a subtly glittering piece, with Eno’s long, flowing tones distributed among acoustic instruments (cello, clarinet, even Chinese pipa in the last part) and electric ones (guitar, sampler).
  
  Eno wanted his “ambient music” (his term) to be “as ignorable as it is interesting.” Music for Airports is both. With a stillness that belies the fact that its minimal musical materials are constantly cycling through, the piece serves to tint the sonic atmosphere but also reveals unexpected juxtapositions of sounds — especially in the BoaC arrangements. A studio recording by the All-Stars was released 10 years ago. This is a live performance from 1998, and demonstrates that even with humans playing it, Music for Airports still does what Eno originally wanted it to: it challenges our most basic notions about what is or isn’t music, and it creates a spare, contemplative inner space.

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#71 Otis Redding live. What more needs to be said?

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  Live In London & Paris by Otis Redding Pick

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  "We got to take the easy way out," sang Otis Redding in his delightfully garbled version of "Day Tripper," but taking the easy way out was never an option for Stax's greatest singer. Whether ripping it up on the chitlin' circuit or in front of the "love crowd" at the Monterey Pop Festival, Otis always worked extremely hard, wringing every last drop of soul from his material and every last bead of sweat from his ecstatic audiences. His passion, playfulness and commitment to music and entertainment come through loud and clear on this exhilarating 19-song package, which contains two complete shows recorded during the Stax/Volt Revue's European tour of March 1967. The London show, recorded March 17 at the Finsbury Park Astoria, absolutely smokes, with Otis and his hybrid MGs/Mar-Keys backing band barely stopping for breath as they burn through seven songs — including Otis's classic reworking of "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction." But it's really just the appetizer for the soulful feast that is the ten-song Paris set; recorded only four days later at the Olympia Theatre, the show is a stunning example of just how gloriously deep and dynamic Otis could get whenever he added ballads like "I've Been Loving You Too Long" and "These Arms of Mine" to the set list.

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#70 Exquisite steel-string guitar

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  Litany of Echoes by James Blackshaw Pick

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  Twentysomething twelve-stringer James Blackshaw has ascended to the forefront of the steel-string tradition in just a few short years. At an age when most young musicians are instead enamored with the high-metabolism and angst of overdriven rock (or hip-hop) outbursts, it’s startling how patient and focused on craft Blackshaw is — not to mention how prolific. Where Blackshaw outshines other modern-day practitioners (many of which can be found on Imaginational Anthem 1, 2 and 3) is how he weds such skill to the timbre of other instruments, so that his finger-picked flurries might sparkle all the more.
  
  Already on his sixth album, with Litany of Echoes Blackshaw addresses his curious position — young yet enamored with elders like John Fahey and Robbie Basho, living in the 21st century yet plying a sound centuries old — with “Past Has Not Passed” (a William Faulkner quote). A sterling, moving piece, Blackshaw takes the acoustic guitar and plunks it firmly in the present, his cycling figures hewing to the slow-rising sympathetic figures of a viola. Elsewhere, he even foregoes the guitar altogether, as on the bookends “Gate of Ivory” and “Gate of Horn,” where Blackshaw shows that he’s been taking on the restless, repetitive piano meditations as practiced by folks like Charlemagne Palestine and Terry Riley. Who knows what other instruments he might master before he hits thirty?

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#69 Straight outta 1986

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  Ladyhawke by Ladyhawke Pick

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  Some artists are content to merely evoke the '80s, but Pip Brown opts instead to mimic it outright. The opening of her debut as Ladyhawke — name taken from, you guessed it, an '80s movie — sounds like "Heart of Glass," ('78, but you get the point) and the remainder plays like a freewheeling shuffle through the back catalogs of Cyndi Lauper and Belinda Carlisle.
  
  If you read this as a bad thing, you're being too harsh. Brown's not just a good stylist but a gifted songwriter — it's just that any one of those songs could have been written twenty or so years go. "My Delirium" is all pulse and snap, toothy Gang of Four guitar sinking deep into sugary synths. "Another Runaway" has the best pre-chorus since "The Lady in Red," a string of cascading "oh, oh, oh"s gliding into a supremely pouty refrain. Keyboards provide the backbone of these songs — bright, glimmering synths that blink and blurt and provide the perfect backdrop for Brown's husky voice. And even if at times it seems like Brown's main aim is to spin off a dozen or so rewrites of "Bette Davis Eyes," she does it with such vigor and determination that it's hard to fault her.
  
  At times it's tempting to play spot-the-reference. The silvery synths streaking up the back of "Professional Suicide" are so similar to Gary Numan they could coax greedy grins from the lawyers at Beggar's. But just when the whole enterprise threatens to topple across the line from homage into Xerox, Brown leans into the microphone and sings, "I see you had a hit in '89/ Too bad we all don't age as good as wine." Her intent, then, is obvious: she has come not to honor her forefathers, but to replace them.

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#68 Mountains taste metallic

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  In The Future by Black Mountain Pick

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  Despite the plethora of critical plaudits thrown their way, there was something “off” about both Black Mountain’s self-titled 2005 debut and the following year’s Drugonaut EP. It was as if the Vancouver quintet had amassed all the tools and the concepts necessary to create a 21st Century update of 1970s-style prog/psych, but couldn’t quite figure out how to put the pieces together. Not this time, however. To invoke the bell-bottomed parlance of the Nixon era, In the Future is a stone mutha, a fully formed, thoroughly mind-bending opus that sounds like it flew in on the wings of those silver spaceships Neil Young used to dream about.
  
  Black Sabbath and early Pink Floyd are some of the more prominent sonic touchstones in the mix (the devastating riffs of “Stormy High” and “Tyrants” would fit right in on Sabbath Vol. 4), but there are also traces of the aforementioned Mr. Young in the prickly “Angels” and the cosmic campfire sing-along “Stay Free.” Ziggy-era Bowie briefly pops in on “Wild Wind,” which sounds too short by itself, but makes the perfect lead-in for the dizzying sixteen-minute epic “Bright Lights.” By the time the chilling “Night Walks” brings the album to a close, you realize that Black Mountain could easily conquer the Earth if they didn’t already have their sights set on other galaxies.

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#67 Smart, '80s rock from New Zealand

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  Happy As Can Be by Cut Off Your Hands Pick

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  The four good-looking kids who comprise Cut Off Your Hands know their pop music, and they are eager to show it. Happy As Can Be, their second EP of the year, aspires to nothing more than pitch-perfect '80s UK shoegaze-style pop. Like the Smiths? You'll like Cut Off Your Hands. Like Echo and the Bunnymen? Ditto. Now, I don't want to pigeonhole these New Zealanders as just tribute artists; they are more than that, certainly. No matter its origins, a good hook is a good hook, and none of the six songs here are hurting for melodies, triumphant choruses or exuberant affirmations of teenage rebellion. Life and vigor, that's their bag, and they wear it well.

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#66 A posthumous release from a cosmically talented mezzo-soprano

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  Lorraine Hunt Lieberson at Emmanuel by Lorraine Hunt Lieberson Pick

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  When Lorraine Hunt Lieberson died, the classical music world mourned as if Earth's mother spirit had perished. People wrote to their newspapers, telling stories of weeping at their cubicles while they listened on headphones to her arias. Normally hardened, crusty critics composed panegyrics, writing with uncharacteristic awe of her ability to stop time with her voice: a cliché that loses it force when wantonly applied, but one that nonetheless holds true for the unadorned, elemental purity of her singing. Simply put, she made you feel it — whatever heartbreak, longing, despair, wonder, joy or delirium might be lurking in the music, she summoned it onstage, in real time, often to overwhelming results. She herself would sometimes leave the stage in tears.
  
  This recording is drawn from two different live performances; one from 1992, when she was still just Lorraine Hunt (she married composer Peter Lieberson in 1999). Conductor Craig Smith, who this release also commemorates, takes the Bach cantata "Kommt, ihr angefochtnen Sünder" at such a leisurely pace that it might produce gripes, and they would be justified if it didn't give Lorraine even more time to draw unearthly beauty from it. Think of it as an analogue to the exquisitely endless final movement of Mahler's Ninth, or those late Leonard Bernstein recordings when he deliberately slowed down all his signature works, as if to get one last good look at them before dying: this much time in the hands of a master is a never a bad thing. Another Bach cantata drawn from this performance concludes the disc, and her voice, which only truly revealed all its wondrous colors after she made the switch to mezzo-soprano from soprano, glows with dark, amber hues. In between, there are 13 Handel arias, works that move forward "like a godly machine, crushing all ugliness and plainness in its path," as Alex Ross once memorably put it. All this exalted language points to one, single truth — though many have tried, even some of the world's most gifted writers find themselves at a loss to describe her voice, and that is because there are things that transcend words. Before such things, music critics are helpless: all we can say for certain that you should allow yourself to hear this voice.

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#65 A fun and funky jazz album. And we didn't even cringe when we wrote that.

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  Dance Like There's No Tomorrow by John Ellis Pick

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  The past associations of saxophonist John Ellis resonate on Dance Like There's No Tomorrow, which is imbued with the skewed humor and raucous energy of Charlie Hunter and the impeccable musicianship and Crescent City leanings of Ellis Marsalis. But Ellis himself deserves enormous credit for assembling the strikingly original instrumentation of Double Wide — from the oom-pah rumble-splat of Matt Perrine's sousaphone to the ballpark whirly of Gary Versace's organ — and then writing tunes with such evocative but apt titles as "Three-Legged Tango in Jackson Square" and "Zydeco Clowns on the Lam." Right from the opening strains of "All Up in the Aisles," with funky tambourine joining the Perrine's low notes and Versace's melodic glaze, you don't know whether you're at a sporting event, street fair or hip funeral, but smiles are nonetheless the only proper response. Likewise, "Three-Legged Tango" feels like a silent-movie soundtrack for Three's Company's John Ritter, and "Clowns," with Versace moving to accordion, is hell on wheels — probably unicycles.
  
  The prevailing hijinks make the trio of slower, more balladic tunes – "I Miss You Molly," "Tattooed Teen Waltzes with Grandma" and "Prom Song" — akin to anti-comic relief. Versace steals the emotional show on a tribute to the feisty late newspaper columnist Molly Ivins "I Miss You Molly," while Ellis offers up the perfect horn phrases to capture the awkward sweetness of "Tattooed Teen Waltzes with Grandma." The other change-of-pace tune, "Prom Song," is a pretty number, plain and simple.
  
  Finally, a special salute must go to the rhythm section. Ellis's use of Perrine as the de facto bassist goes beyond the New Orleans brass band tradition, and becomes more reminiscent of the way Henry Threadgill deployed the tubas in Very Very Circus. And Jason Marsalis (brother of Wynton, son of patriarch Ellis) not only delivers his patented march-time snare rolls, but simultaneously hastens and organizes the group gambols in masterful fashion, capped by a great, tom-tom-oriented solo on the closing title track.

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#64 It's all gloom and doom, but we like it

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  How Shadows Chase the Balance by Boduf Songs Pick

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  It's a reference that will matter to maybe twenty people, but all twenty of them will be thrilled by it: Boduf Songs' gorgeous How Shadows Chase the Balance is an extension of Calla's Scavengers, a minor but essential folk-based album that casts long glances at rock and electronic music, ultimately settling for a gloomy tone conveying heartache and little more. Why would anyone want to listen to such a thing? We all suffer heartache, too, and with his muffled, languid dourness, Boduf Songs' Mat Sweet channels our pains and fears, and strums a nice, thick-sounding guitar all the while. Shadows Chase consistently nails those notes without ever seeming to try. Definitely one of the best indie records of 2008.

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#63 Out-there sounds from deep within Asia

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  Mother Earth! Father Sky! by Huun-Huur-Tu Pick

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  All of the reasons why I am grossly unqualified to properly assess the quality of Huun-Huur-Tu's Mother Earth! Father Sky! are the very reasons why it's important that I'm the one recommending it. Chiefly: you don't need a working knowledge — or any knowledge — of the Tuvan musical tradition (Tuva is the former Soviet land from which HHT hail) to get a lot out of this record. It's weird — very weird. The melodies are often eroded, disparate shards and outcroppings, like a prehistoric cavern. There are times — like the incredible opening "Mezhegey" — that listening to the album feels like falling down a well. It can be that disorienting. But at the same time, you get something comparatively conventional like "Daglarym," the work of Sainkho Namtcylak, who, based on her incredible contributions here, I am willing to peg as the Tuvan Carole King. The two women's ballads are not all that far apart. Really! At times it drifts a bit more towards New Age than I am normally comfortable with, but within this context, it's immaterial. Mother Earth! Father Sky! is an album of immersion and staggering beauty.

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#62 Pop songs as delicate as a goodnight kiss

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  Some Racing, Some Stopping by Headlights Pick

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  Here’s how it opens: with a steady humming organ, a twinkle of guitars and — shooting upward from the darkness — a soaring, pleading vocal. It's dramatic and it's perfect, the kind of introit bigger bands break their backs trying to create. The second record from Illinois trio Headlights is full of casual beauty, moments of pop elegance that arrive with natural grace rather than with blunt force and blaring fanfare.
  
  Some Racing was recorded in a farmhouse outside Champaign, IL, and the songs it contains are, appropriately, airy and utterly cloudless. Vocalists Tristan Wraight and Erin Fein sing like they're sharing secrets: their voices are low and cottony, gliding gently over lacy guitars and blinking vibraphone. Even when the tempo escalates — "April 2" is shoved along by a walloping backbeat — the voices remain subdued.
  
  The songs themselves are shimmering marvels; they don't hurtle so much as hydroplane, speeding forward a few inches above the ground. Fein's voice is light and cherry-flavored, and she drizzles it slowly across the length of each composition. Some Racing is the perfect tonic for fans of the small statement, a record for people who wished the world was full of more groups like The Field Mice. It's music that's meek but gorgeous, the quiet girl in the corner with the red lips and the pale skin who's smiling and whispering over and over: "Hey. C'mere for a second."

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#61 Because sometimes hipsters get it right

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  Crystal Castles by Crystal Castles Pick

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  Toronto-based Crystal Castles have been saddled with a slew of 21st century microgenre tags (see: nu-rave, chiptune), none of which properly capture the brilliantly damaged pop of their debut self-titled full length. Setting the basic sonic table with 8-bit synths and pounding drum machine, producer and multi-instrumentalist Ethan Kath glitches, tweaks and bumps the tracks into twitchy dance anthems. Singer Alice Glass lets loose; shrieks dip into monotone hums even as the vocals get cut up, modulated, doubled and generally fucked with. Truly ADD-addled, the buzzy tunes on Crystal Castles refuse to sit still: this is how 0s and 1s bump n' grind.

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#60 There is still no more singular voice playing Bach today

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  The Berlin Concert by Simone Dinnerstein Pick

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  When Simone Dinnerstein's career launched unexpectedly into the stratosphere two years ago, it's safe to say that no one was more taken aback than Dinnerstein herself. She was, after all, a 35-year-old piano teacher and mother living in Park Slope, Brooklyn at the time her self-financed debut CD came out, a take on Bach's Goldberg Variations so deeply personal that listening to it sometimes felt like eavesdropping. And while 35 is still young by "Park Slope mom" standards, by the skewed metric of solo piano careers, it puts you roughly in league with Methuselah.
  
  Nonetheless, Dinnerstein's Variations hit some mysterious nerve cluster, gathering momentum with a force that would confound Malcolm Gladwell. After being picked up by the Telarc label, the album went on to outsell The White Stripes on Amazon.com, garnering Dinnerstein a hailstorm of solo recital dates and orchestra bookings, a segment on NPR's "Morning Edition," and a big feature in The New York Times.
  
  For a minute, in fact, it seemed like the runaway train of Dinnerstein's Goldberg Variations was threatening to derail her preternatural composure. Happily, with her follow-up disc, it seems as though Dinnerstein has ultimately refused to allow her sudden ascent to disturb the unearthly poise that made her Variations so beguiling.
  
  This live album is taken from a recital Dinnerstein gave last November in Berlin, and while it isn't exactly a departure from her beloved Bach — the concert opens with his French Suite No. 5 — it represents at least an elaboration on her well-traveled territory. Besides the suite, Dinnerstein offers American composer (and Juilliard professor) Philip Lasser's 2002 work Twelve Variations on Chorale by J.S. Bach, as well as Beethoven's Piano Sonata No. 32. The sonata, a technically fearsome beast, is an idiosyncratic, even slightly rambling work, with an odd, ersatz-swing second movement. Dinnerstein doesn't sound entirely at home in it; it could have been an off night, or it could be that Dinnerstein is just less comfortable with Beethoven's stormy unpredictability as she is with the equanimity of Bach.
  
  Lasser's Twelve Variations, meanwhile, taps into the deep well of spirituality in Bach's music, and Dinnerstein handles the work with the same thoughtful, lingering touch she brings to the master. There is, in fact, an almost spiritual discipline at work in all her interpretations: each phrase is carefully enunciated, with utter clarity, yet she is still capable of making the air dance with the lightness of her tone. Over and over again, Dinnerstein displays the uncanny ability to make technically flawless playing feel conversational, and on the Bach and the Lasser, she conjures a pensive stillness that I would love to hear her apply to, say, Erik Satie's Gymnopedies. With the Berlin Concert, Dinnerstein again proves there is no more singular voice playing Bach today; one can only eagerly await hearing what she does with the rest of the canon.

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#59 Swedes go remix crazy

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  Yearbook 2 by Studio Pick

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  Swedish duo Studio follow up their Yearbook 1 album in typically understated, low-concept fashion — with another album of remixes. The standard is uniformly high — they enhance, rather than obscure the subjects of their mix-ology with a cleverly paradoxical mixture of Balearic golden sunset warmth and synthetic Techno sheen. Many of the remixees are fellow Swedes, such as Love Is All, to whose winsome “Turn The Radio Off” they add both pop glitter and sleek sophistication.
  
  When dealing with indie-pop, they inject vital flavor and color to a genre that has suffered progressive anemia these past few years — though in the case of Rubies, whose shuffling, lilting “Room Without a Key” they version, a metamorphosis is hardly required. For deep Techno denizen Brennan Green, they pay tribute with a mix of woodpecker sequencers and paradisal slide guitars. However, the real catch here, and probably the album highlight, is their take on Kylie's “2 Hearts,” which has won the ardent admiration of Ms. Minogue herself. It's a fireworks display of Flamenco curlicues, tangential, rotorblading sequencers and Balearic beats, in which Kylie's cut-up and discorporated vocals luxuriate.

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#58 A new soulful hip-hop classic

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  Johnson & Jonson by Johnson & Jonson Pick

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  As Johnson & Jonson, Long Beach rapper Blu and producer Mainframe have made an album that will warm the hearts of old Native Tongues fans and early Rawkus heads alike: music whose generous samples include bits ranging from Hugh Masakela ("Long Time Gone") to John Lennon ("Hold on John" utilizes the Plastic Ono Band cut of the same name) and whose beats amble more than they push. Though we count ourselves among Blu and Mainframe's biggest fans, by no means was Johnson & Jonson's success assured: Blu is the kind of dude who could not be more nonchalant about his obvious rhyming skills, and Mainframe — despite working on some posthumous J Dilla releases — has yet to make a signature work. Until now, anyway.
  
  Mainframe's aesthetic works perfectly for Blu's stories — often funny, always rooted in the everyday. Take "Mama Always Told Me," whose sharp organ whirls and '70s-game-show horn fanfares are like TV in the background, while Blu boasts in his living room: "We made a classic cause our shit pumps/ Changed the game in six months/ Gave them what these kids want." "Go for the Gusto Room" is a funky visit to the local casino that sounds like it was inspired by Hunter S. Thompson, with Blu providing inspired shit-talk monologues at the beginning and end. And like a good indie artist, he has harsh words for "handing out royalties as big as your advance/ Labels can't stand it" on "Bout It Bout It." The refrain is simple, and speaks for far more than just its hook: "I know you're 'bout it, but it's how you go 'bout it."

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#57 Their last indie stop before Wilco-level fame?

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  The Stand Ins by Okkervil River Pick

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  Billed as a sequel to last year's The Stage Names, the sixth record from Okkervil River, isn't so much a continuation as it is a further rumination on similar themes. Like its predecessor, The Stand-Ins is concerned with the travails of "some mid-level band," but where the protagonists in The Stage Names seemed to stumble dumbly and naively through their misfortunes ("A Girl in Port," in particular, bore the sting of regret), here the characters are harder and crueler and more calculated.
  
  The villains enter early: "Singer Songwriter" is a dead-on evisceration of the kind of privileged folkie that affects penniless bohemianism for the sake of image. Will Sheff's lyrics, which in the past had a tendency to sacrifice clarity for poetry, are agonizingly precise here: "I heard cuts by the Kinks on your speakers," he sneers, "I saw Poe and Artaud on your shelves/ While The Last Laugh's first scene/ On your flat-panel screen/ Lit Chanel that you wrapped 'round yourself." It's blistering and brutal, a 21st-century take on "Positively 4th Street." That the music is a spot-on evocation of Bringin' It All Back Home doesn't hurt. In fact, The Stand-Ins is best when it's buoyant: "Calling and Not Calling My Ex," which this writer would like to argue is about Chan Marshall (um, evidence to come) rolls along on a broad, brash folk strum as Sheff sighs, "She was once mine/ That smile that shines from the glossy magazine/ That's stuck inside the Sunday Times." "Pop Lie" is a hurricane, too, all bash and clatter and chugging Kinks riffs that take to task "the liar who lied in his pop song."
  
  If that last lyric sounds a bit unreasonable, that's one of The Stand-Ins only drawbacks. Sheff has a tendency to treat his artistic miscreants with a kind of acrid contempt, and periodically his declamations of musicians who dare to conduct themselves with anything other than total integrity can be a bit wearying. But if Sheff demands a lot of his creations, it's likely because he demands a lot of himself. On "Lost Coastlines" he howls "Every night finds us rocking and rolling on waves wild and white/ Where we have lost our way/ But no one will say it outright." Maybe that topic is fodder for Part III?

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#56 Cooler than thou

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  Midnight Boom by The Kills Pick

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  Like most contemporary duos, the Kills are both constrained and liberated by their format: They need to draw their energy from within a small unit, but also channel it out into something bigger than the sum of their limited parts. Some duos choose to evolve by super-sizing with guests, but on their third full-length, Alison “VV” Mosshart and Jamie “Hotel” Hince have chosen to make minimal adjustments that resonate maximally. The most stunning of them is that the Kills have discovered their inner groove. (No wonder Spank Rock’s XXXChange helps out on production on a few tracks.) It still sounds like there’s only two of them — they haven’t suddenly gone orch-pop or anything — but many of the tracks have a great pulse that’s all the more sexy for not being in-your-face (just check out “Cheap and Cheerful,” “Last Day of Magic,” “Hook and Line” or “Alphabet Pony”). And almost of all them throw in a simple, deadly break: well-placed handclaps or a sudden acceleration that hurtles them to the finish line. “Hook and Line,” for instance, is a lesson in how to wring out maximum effect out of a relatively simple tune; it brings to mind the ruthless efficiency of PJ Harvey’s debut, paired with the brooding sexiness of early Yeah Yeah Yeahs. Brilliantly rejuvenating themselves, the Kills demonstrate how much you can do with very little.

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#55 Slept-on bedroom pop gems

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  Constant Hitmaker by Kurt Vile Pick

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  Kurt Vile's Constant Hitmaker has all the telltale signs of a bedroom-pop album: super-fake, tinny percussion, amateurish production technique and whispery, "don't wake up the roommates" vocals. Lo-fi, do-it-yourself indie rock has been around for years, but the advent of hyper-simple recording software has made it so someone like Vile, who's twiddling with a four-track or Garageband, can only stand out one way: with great songs. Luckily, Hitmaker has ones like "Breathin' Out" — three minutes of rinky-dink drum machine, grain-silo reverb and an undeniable, see-sawing, mega-catchy melody. It's a joyous, buoyant guitar-pop song, played with charm and quirkily produced. There are wacky levels of delay on the guitar, like Vile was going for Roy Orbison but went too far and broke the knob off entirely.
  
  Hitmaker is full of simple gems like "Breathin' Out." Relying mostly on guitar, vocals and drum machine (primitive-Casio keyboards are sometimes used for added effect), Vile's best songs play like underwater versions of classic rock staples. "Freeway" is just a few chords, an excited, chirpy vocal melody and a looped, loping drum-bounce. The back half of the album lingers in at-home, D.I.Y. sound experiments and a couple of slower, muddy folk songs. The collage of sounds is certainly affecting — the bubbling ambience and ethereal twinkling creates a unique, eerie world — but Vile can't help including the sprightly, almost-cute "Deep Sea" into the album's final third. As firmly as he's planted one foot in the world of the knob twiddler, Vile has impressively established himself as something more: a great songwriter.

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#54 Dubstep goes Detroit

#53 From eMusic Selects: goofy, heartbreaking folk

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  Ghost Glacier EP by Breathe Owl Breathe Pick

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  Breathe Owl Breathe sing of folklore and homespun miracles, oral histories left to thaw in the earth's crust until pre-history's giant ice cubes rolled their wet bulk down the North Pole and into Canada, finally settling into extinction in what we now call the Great Lakes. It's from the shores of these bodies that Breathe Owl Breathe come (Ann Arbor, Michigan, to be precise), and it's in the shadows of those hollowed troughs that these eight songs rest. These are songs about being left behind, songs about being dead, songs without geography, songs worth repeating.
  
  The music is very economical — guitar, cello, drums, piano, other organic sounds — and the vocals float between folk and country, a very earnest mood. It sounds a lot like Smog — singer Micah Middaugh and Bill Callahan have similar voice boxes — and at other times early Lucinda Williams, Victoria Williams and, in the case of "Your Cape," even Loretta Lynn. There's a distinctly — and very specifically — American folk tradition at work here, and I don't get the feeling that Breathe Owl Breathe at all mind their limited scope.
  
  The kinda stuff that drew Alan Lomax and Harry Smith deep into Appalachia and the American South forms the foundation of Breathe Owl Breathe's spare, rustic sound. When singer Micah Middaugh belts, "I've got a toboggan," in the last cut, it could easily pass for a boast, a cataloguing of lower-class luxury the way bluesmen might sing of women and whiskey. Mostly Middaugh and his Colombian co-vocalist/cellist Andréa Moreno-Beals sing about ghosts and winter (it is a descriptive album title), sometimes literally ("Playing Dead," "Toboggan," "Sabertooth Tiger") and sometimes in the context of a relationship ("Your Cape," "Sylvia Plath").
  
  The marriage of their music and lyrics is the sort of chance meeting that becomes a 60th anniversary in a blink. Middaugh, Moreno-Beals and drummer Trevor Hobbs are easy and fluid with one another, enabling their songs to (deceptively) feel more like happy accidents than serious, premeditated songwriting. That's where their charm lies. And that's why we chose them for eMusic Selects. Whether or not you're listening hardly matters: this music has always existed, and always will.

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#52 Paul McCartney is making incredible records in 2008. Who knew?

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  Electric Arguments by The Fireman Pick

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  Here are the two things you need to know about the Fireman and Electric Arguments: 1) It is a Paul McCartney project and 2) It's so good we can't understand why he even bothered to release the dull-to-average Memory Almost Full a couple years ago. In fact, here's how much we love this record: its closest relative is Ram, aka Macca's best solo record ever (McCartney is a very close second; note that we're not counting Wings stuff), in that it's highly ambitious, very scattered and all the better for both. We're not about to proclaim this McCartney's "Best Moment in Decades!" or any other Goddess in the Doorway-type b.s., but we will offer that we can't imagine any Paulettes being disappointed by this record.
  
  The Fireman is not a solo McCartney project; his collaborator for the past 14 years (there have been three Fireman albums) has been Killing Joke bassist Youth. The previous Fireman albums — both completely instrumental — felt like Youth was the one steering the truck: their immersion in ambient techno and other electronics drew a clear lineage from Killing Joke's industrial edges, and displayed little McCartneyism. On Electric Arguments, all of that changes. Certainly it's more experimental than we expect from Paul (the droney, "Tomorrow Never Knows"-ish "Lovers in a Dream," to name one), but the core of Electric Arguments draws from his impeccable melodic sense.
  
  It's from there that we get "Dance 'Til We're High," which could have been Echo and the Bunnymen's biggest hit. It's a miraculous song: beginning with girl-group snare and tom cracks, shifting into verses guided by a tight, lower-register melody, opening up wider with an incredible pre-chorus as Macca's tenor cracks through and then erupts — yes, erupts — into a chorus that knows nothing of limits or ceilings or stratospheres. It just goes up and up and up. It will stun you it's so good. This is no hyperbole.
  
  Just as "Dance 'Til We're High" knocks us down with its beauty, "Nothing Too Much Just Out of Sight" does the same with its power and aggression. It feels like a midpoint between "Helter Skelter" and John Lennon's scathing (and McCartney-directed) "How Do You Sleep?," a big, buzzy, chunky thing that doesn't move, it churns, drilling itself deeper and deeper into place.
  
  "Nothing Too Much" is definitely an outlier on the album; the rest sits between the fierce urgency of that track and the songwriting virtuosity exhibited in "Dance 'Til We're High." Not every song is amazing, but all are great. And, most importantly, not a one dips into that maudlin ditch Paul's lodged himself into in recent years. We have no complaints about Electric Arguments, and neither will you.

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#51 Raw, hyper-literate and triumphant indie rock

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  The Airing of Grievances by Titus Andronicus Pick

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  In a rock world clogged with whiners, Patrick Stickles is a blurter. The Titus Andronicus frontman shreds his vocal chords with enough foolish disregard to strike fear into the heart of any decent laryngologist, and his snotty passion suggests how Conor Oberst might sound if he wasn't always partly angling for you to spend the night with him. Stickles poses callow, often funny questions about God, parents, love and mortality as a grand phalanx of four (or more) guitars chases him through some fairly epic compositions, sprawling enough to allow room for musical digressions like a fancy hammer-on mid-section and a harmonica-wheezing intro that totally rips off Springsteen's "The Promised Land."
  
  Any band that follows "No Future Part One" with "No Future Part Two: The Days After No Future" knows how to play punk nihilism for laughs, but Titus Andronicus aren't just being cute — they're girding themselves for the long slog ahead into adulthood. And fittingly "Titus Andronicus" encapsulates their worst fears. Prior to a singalong chorus of "Your life is over," they list off the creature comforts you're denied once your life ends: no more cigarettes, sex, drunkenness, and — what? "No more indie rock!"? Jeez, these guys aren't kidding around.

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#50 Harrowing hardcore from Philadelphia

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  Heavier Than Heaven, Lonelier Than God by Blacklisted Pick

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  The character on the cover of the second full-length record from Philadelphia hardcore band Blacklisted is perched on the edge of a pier, arms stretched, about to take that long final plunge into the black. That single image reflects the whole of Heavier’s pummel and scrape, the kind of blind despair that leads first to panic and then to bitter self-destruction. "I feel hopeless when I just wish I could feel a little less," hollers vocalist George Hirsch just seconds into the record, and his hoarse edict functions as a statement of purpose. As the record progresses, he damns friends, family, Jesus and, above all, himself, each damnation delivered in the same searing, strangled howl. What saves Heavier from being a long sob in the mosh pit is its force and — above all — its brevity. Songs are in and out in 70 seconds, feeling more like sharp, sudden gut-punches than full-blown bloody brawls. "I Am Weighing Me Down" could be ramped-up In Utero-era Nirvana, grim riffs grinding like blown gears in an old combine. The whole back half — from "Matrimony" to "Wish" — goes off like a fistful of firecrackers in an old coffee can, one long blast of epileptic white noise. "Just want to love myself! Just want to love myself!" Hirsch screams over tommy-gunning guitars. He’ll never get there, of course — he’ll just stay paused and poised on the pier forever.

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#49 A young British folk icon finally finds her niche

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  Dreams Of Breathing Underwater by Eliza Carthy Pick

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  It’s been eight years since this young British folk icon dipped her toes into singer-songwriterdom with the very mixed bag Angels & Cigarettes. But, my, how she’s grown in the meantime. After far more experience in the traditional music scene, Carthy returns with real maturity to her writing and singing — and a much clearer sense of how to present it. She is, and always will be, a folkie, and her music is at its best when she uses and (especially) subverts folk — as she does in “Lavenders,” which takes a hoary folk theme and reinvents it with lush atmospheres, Middle Eastern violin and unearthly harmonies.
  
  She takes a similar approach in “Rows of Angels,” where subtle beats add emphasis to a strong, downbeat melody. In fact, it’s when she tries to break out of the folkie mold that she’s least successful. Compare indie-style opener “Follow the Dollar,” with its yawning ennui and distorted guitars, to “Hug You Like a Mountain,” which has a breathy, pastoral warmth. When folk is her springboard, Carthy can be terrific — “Mr. Magnifico” blends speech and song and comes across like an Irvine Welsh story told in the dark corner of a future folk club. It’s not a perfect album, but Carthy has found her niche, and she’s starting to explore it.

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#48 Fela’s 26-year-old son serves up some classic Afrobeat

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  Seun Kuti & Fela's Egypt 80 by Seun Kuti & Fela's Egypt 80 Pick

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  A family legacy can be a real bitch. A lot of folks try to ignore or hide from it; others embrace it with the half-heartedness of the heir apparent who really just wants to be left alone. A lot of musicians’ children tend toward the latter, but not Seun Kuti. The youngest son of Afrobeat founder and Nigerian pop legend Fela Kuti, Seun began playing alongside his father’s band, the Egypt 80, when he was nine, and began leading them following Fela’s death in 1997, when Seun was 15.
  
  While his half-brother Femi has found success with a lighter, updated take on Fela’s sound, Seun messes very little with the Afrobeat formula. The focus is on bare-knuckle-tense guitar lines from rhythm man Alade Oluwagbemiga and lead player David Obavendo, commanding horn lines alternating with hot, sweet saxophone breaks and mostly English-language lyrics that question society and government in no uncertain terms: Seun’s “Don’t Give That Shit to Me” and “Many Things” — “All this shitty-shit shooting/ All this shitty-shit killing” — are both clearly indebted to dad’s 1975 classic “Expensive Shit.” But Seun’s onto something of his own, too. “Think Africa” is dense, swirling near-disco that sounds cognizant of the clubbier styles Femi mines without surrendering its basic Afrobeat base, and while Seun’s voice is reedier than Pop’s, it’s got the sort of sit-up-and-pay-attention authority that’s rare whether a pedigree is involved or not. Seun is only 26; this superb debut hints that things could get even better from here.

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#47 '80s Boston hip-hop legends re-emerge from obscurity

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  Reel Chemistry - The Anthology by Top Choice Clique Pick

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  In a town that claims bizarre rap handles like Orangeman and Rusty the Toe Jammer, Top Choice Clique were the pride of Boston hip-hop in the late '80s. Just being a multiracial rap group with street credibility was an accomplishment in itself. Yet Top Choice steadily slipped into obscurity until a box of warped 12-inch singles was discovered by the rapper Esoteric, who carefully placed the vinyl in an oven and baked it into playable condition (375 degrees, 4 minutes). Collectors and bootleggers rejoiced. Liberated from the James Brown cycle of beats, that sample happy 12-inch — "Peace of Mind"/"You Can't Deal" — was proof that the group knew its equipment.
  
  Reel Chemistry — The Anthology traces shelved material from 1987 to 1995, including freestyles and alternate takes. An Italian-American in acid-washed baggies, red beanie and a UNLV sweatshirt, Jawn P brags about turning rappers into bacon bits — with "certainness," even — though his biggest feat was off-record, when he stood up to the Almighty RSO's Ray Benzino, perhaps Boston's most notorious thug, after Benzino had tried to turn an audience against the group. Along with MC Force, P obsesses with the voices in his head ("Troubled Kid") as much as outside influences, anywhere from Hieroglyphics ("The Highlander") to a drowsy Bomb Squad production ("Alright"). This is another important step in reclaiming Boston's hip-hop reputation from Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch.

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#46 Driving, Teenage Fanclub-style power pop with hooks to hold onto

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  Army Navy by Army Navy Pick

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  From the first driving drum beat straight through to the last song's final notes, the debut from California's Army Navy shines. Resembling an updated Teenage Fanclub or a hyperactive Death Cab for Cutie, the group's catchy melodies inspire singing along before the words can even be learned. The album packs a mighty punch — every song's a perfect single. "Dark As Days" showcases sparkling guitars and dreamy harmonies, while "Unresponsive Ears" employs a glockenspiel to punctuate the steady rhythm guitar. The drumming, courtesy of Attractions drummer Steve Thomas, is critical, lending a kind of frenetic energy to songs like "Snakes of Hawaii." The band does slow it down, ever so slightly, for a few songs: "Ignite," "Golden Pony" and "In the Lime" highlight Army Navy's knack for beautiful harmonies. The final track, a fun and rocking version of Maxine Nightingale's 1976 hit "Get Right Back (Where We Started From)" emphasizes the original's juicy hook and call-and-response harmonies. Army Navy is music with hooks to hold on to, with layers and surprises that continue to charm with repeated listens.

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#45 Harvesting that '80s Mellencamp sound

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  Heart of Stone by Chris Knight Pick

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  Kentucky songster Chris Knight's fifth album takes a few listens to get into — song tempos almost invariably feel sluggish, and the singing congested, like he's got sinus troubles. But the initial frustration is worth it. What first connects is the mid '80s Mellencamp muscle of tracks like "Hell Ain't Half Full" and "Another Dollar" and the overcast Link Wray guitar twang running through "Almost There." Then melodies start ringing a bell: remnants of Don Henley's "The End of the Innocence," Jim Croce's "One Less Set of Footsteps," Gordon Lightfoot's "Sundown," Johnny Cash's "Wanted Man." Eventually, finally, the writing starts kicking in. And it's both funny and poignant.
  
  In two songs Knight worries about becoming his dad; in two more, he worries about money. Opener "Home Sick Gipsy" turns out to be a tough Southern-rock road boogie (production from old Georgia Satellite Dan Baird can be a good thing); the waltz-unto-reel "Danville," which at first seems a sub-par rewrite of R.E.M.'s "Don't Go Back to Rockville," turns out to be about domestic violence. There are drug fixes in abandoned hotels, hard times in the cold mines, and lots of cars, on crooked roads and in junkyards. Chris used to run from the past, he tells us in the closing "Go On Home", but now he runs from the future. "Stupid's in the water these days," he says. Stop the world and let him off.

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#44 A four-year traversal of the Beethoven sonatas is completed

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  Beethoven: Piano Sonatas, Vol.4 by Paul Lewis Pick

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  This three-disc set is the latest volume of English pianist Paul Lewis's traversal of Beethoven's 32 piano sonatas, the fourth in a series launched in 2005. Lewis's playing, especially in the early sonatas, stands out for his mellow, silky tone and his mercurial way with the music's many sudden contrasts, which he points up without exaggeration or arbitrariness. These two characteristics work beautifully in tandem; your ear is seduced before it's startled, and his readings of the Op. 10 sonatas are full of elegant, Haydnesque shocks. Lewis's tone makes the lyrical, fresh-air opening movement of Beethoven's "Pastoral" Sonata as lovely as can be, and the two "easy" Op. 49 sonatas aren't taken for granted, but given charm and significance. In his last three sonatas, a sort of valedictory trilogy, Beethoven turned twice to the theme-and-variations form. If in Op. 109 Lewis's slow variations are a bit up-tempo for my taste, that's only because I never want them to end. In the variations in Op. 111, Beethoven subdivides a slow, steady beat into smaller and smaller divisions over the course of 18 minutes; as the music finally dissolves into celestial trills and murmurings, the microscope becomes a telescope gazing out at other worlds. Lewis's playing of this enormously difficult movement arrestingly captures this inward/outward sense, appropriately capping his four-year musical journey.

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#43 A supremely satisfying indie-rap throwback from a dazzlingly gifted MC

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  The Preface by Elzhi Pick

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  The first sound you hear on Elzhi's The Preface is a sample of a preacher's voice lamenting, "I don't know what this world is coming to!" followed by Elzhi (government name: Jason Powers) grumbling to his friends about the "bullshit on the radio" over an artfully faded, tape loop-soul beat courtesy of Detroit producer Black Milk that summons the ghost of Jay Dee. In other words, short of watermarking the album with a voice intoning "this is an indie-rap album" at odd intervals, there isn't much more Elzhi could do to clarify his intentions. The moral and creative bankruptcy of "current" hip-hop and the world's pervasive wickedness, after all, are independent hip-hop's two most shopworn laments, and at this point they tend to produce more eye rolls than head nods.
  
  Luckily, Elzhi at least has the credentials to back up his griping: he was a member of Slum Village, the late-'90s Detroit trio that once counted the mighty J Dilla in its ranks. On The Preface, Elzhi has recruited Black Milk to serve as his surrogate Dilla, in much the same way Ghostface gathered together enough Wu disciples to recreate a semblance of the Abbott's sound on last year's The Big Doe Rehab. Black Milk's beats have the same slightly surreal, half-remembered quality as Dilla's: the soulful voices he samples often dip and wobble uncertainly in pitch, eloquently suggesting the warp and weft of vinyl as well as the distortions of memory.
  
  As a rapper, Elzhi doesn't so much "ride" these quietly gorgeous productions as smother them, filling up every inch of available space with neatly turned internal rhyme, tricks of meter, and, above all, extravagant wordplay. He has passion to burn, but Elzhi is mostly a man in love with his own pen, and he spends most of The Preface showing off all the nifty different ways he can flourish it. Listen, on "Guessing Game," to how caught up he gets just laying out the song's concept: "Yo, I'mma take a double, take a double syllable/ And split it down the middle so it's no longer even/ The first half stay, the last half leavin'/ So now the end of the line sound deceiving/ So try to figure out the word to match before it change the meaning." He then goes onto to demonstrate, running effortlessly through a routine that, with different source material, could almost pass for an old vaudeville bit: "Check — this girl was peckin my neck/ She knew this one-minute man who used to bust in one sec--/retary"; "Now we can really begin/ Long as these beats keep these treats fallin out of my pen--/ñata"; "Lost for words, that's why she hop up all on my dick--/tionary" (this last one makes it clear that nothing really gets Elzhi off except vocab).
  
  There's more where this comes from. "Color" follows nearly the exact same structure as "Guessing Game": Elzhi gives us the premise ("Ok kids, today we learn the color scheme") and then elaborates on it to the point of giddiness, or exhaustion: "Got them boys in blue with blackjacks, lockin the new youth/ They sell purple through Blackberries with the Bluetooth/ I saw this gold-digger redbone I knew posin in Black Tail..." you get the picture. Even when he's spitting pure swagger, it still feels like it should come with footnotes: "I end careers, years, peers, ears, fears with spears/ They say I'm gifted/ You lifted like the beers in Cheers." There are emotional songs here too, about women, relationships and whatnot, but they feel slightly perfunctory; Elzhi doesn't open up to humans nearly as eloquently as he does to his notebook, and this album is best taken as a supremely satisfying near-wallow in the pure pyrotechnics of a dazzlingly gifted MC.

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#42 Ambient that's noisy as #%$@

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  Street Horrrsing by F*** Buttons Pick

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  F*** Buttons — aka Andrew Hung and Benjamin John Power, two experimental noiseniks from Bristol, England — might be a relatively unknown quantity right now, but they have connections in all the right places. Their debut album Street Horrrsing enlists the help of Mogwai’s John Cummings (as producer) and Shellac’s Bob Weston (for mastering) at Part Chimp vocalist Tim Cedar’s studio. While radio DJs have had a hard time working out ways to introduce the obstinately-named duo, they’ve been quietly building support at low-key British festivals and at All Tomorrows Parties, whose label arm brings us this.
  
  It’s a beautiful experiment, at once aggressive and encompassing, confrontational yet strangely familiar. It sees tribal rhythms and rigid patterns share space with meandering digressions. Think the drone of Sunn O))) with the folktronic playfulness of Four Tet, or the Locust on a lazy Sunday afternoon dreaming skywards. Animalistic sounds and demonic howling make an appearance midway through first track “Sweet Love for Planet Earth” and reappear over the course of the album. At first they’re unwelcome, but as the waves of feedback shift your perspective over repeat listens like longshore drift, they become as integral as more conventional vocals. Like the questionable urban sport the album’s title refers to, this flies in the face of normalcy, but somehow it pulls it off.

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#41 Cross-genre playfulness and rigorous formalism from a master bassist

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  Gently Disturbed by Avishai Cohen Pick

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  Cohen's command of this trio from the bass chair is rigorously matter-of-fact, less a star turn than a force of nature, made even more pervasive by his being the sole composer on seven of the eleven tunes and co-writing two others. The songs he writes are similar to the ensemble interplay he fosters — clean but dense, with no muss, but a fair amount of fuss. Some of it comes in dynamic gusts, such as the taut, percussive eruptions (by both bass and drums) on "Chutzpan" and "Eleven Wives." Some of it comes from a plangent yet elusive pulse, as with the not-quite-rondo tail-chasing structure and 9/4 time signature of "Pinzin Kinzin," a toe-tapper that will either dislocate your ankle or put sweat on your brow trying to keep tabs on the groove. The title track opens with a vamp that begins to quote "It Don't Mean a Thing (If It Ain't Got That Swing)" before swerving into faux-spooky territory, like a Tim Burton film. The closer, "Structure In Motion," is as chirpy and serene as a Christmas carol. There's even room for an Israeli folk song ("Lo Baiom Velo Balyla").
  
  The trio's longtime pianist Sam Barsh has moved on to his own discs, replaced by 21-year-old prodigy Shai Maestro, who plays with a bit less fire and more refinement. But drummer Mark Guiliana kindles fireworks all over the place — he's practically Billy Cobham on "Eleven Wives" — and puts a rockish tinge on the cross-genre playfulness that, mixed with chamber-style formalism, inevitably draws comparison to the Bad Plus and EST. Inevitably, however, the focus returns to Cohen, who continually creates expansive, intellectual music without sacrificing his precise, almost pointillistic, pizzicato style.

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#40 A 23-year-old jazz bass prodigy whose stardom seems likely -- if not inevitable

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  Esperanza by Esperanza Spalding Pick

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  Esperanza documents a 23-year-old prodigy near the onset of her career, wielding her ambition and effervescence to put the development of her myriad talents on fast-forward. It's a shrewd showcase, giving full measure to the jazz bass chops that have made Spaulding the second-youngest faculty member (behind her friend Pat Metheny) ever to teach at Berklee. Also on display are Spalding's lithe, airy vocals (sung in English, Portuguese and Spanish), and her compelling knack for songwriting and arranging.
  
  As a singer, the Spalding gravitates toward the breathy-but-rich female vocal tradition of Brazil, from Elis Regina to Ceu, with Astrid Gilberto as the touchstone for common reference. Thus, Milton Nascimento’s lush “Ponta De Areia” (one of only three cover songs among the dozen tracks) is an ideal opener; the rapid-fire “I Know You Know” is cute, catchy, clever and somehow not cloying; and the ballad “Fall In,” with just piano as accompaniment, relies on a beautiful blend of melody and narrative to cover for its limited tonal range.
  
  On the next two numbers, Spalding the jazz bassist steps forcefully to the fore, her playing creating a dazzling, scat-pluck duality with her vocals. Spauling's penetrating tone — rounded, scampering notes, like Charles Mingus although obviously not as advanced — acts as a catalyst for her highly-regarded horn players (trumpeter Ambrose Akinmusire and saxophonist Donald Harrison). And her sexy, elegant put-downs of would-be and past lovers on “She Got to You” and “Precious” are kinetic jazz-pop and, with any justice, full-fledged radio hits. Throw in her funky good looks, and stardom seems likely — if not inevitable.

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#39 Accessible and scorching

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  Do You Like Rock Music by British Sea Power

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  Don’t let the title mislead you. British Sea Power aren’t selling any kind of retro-rock revival on their third album. Instead, they’ve maintained the momentum of their first two outings by allowing their socio-politically aware lyrics and distorted, over-driven rock to evolve towards accessibility without abandoning the scorching vitality that marked them as England’s most stimulating new prospect.
  
  A couple of tracks here, "Atom" and "Down On the Ground," were previewed on last year’s exhilarating live EP Krankenhaus?, but the studio versions realise their potential much more convincingly. Ultimately, for the band too, the realisation of potential is the major achievement of Do You Like Rock Music?
  
  Having fabricated a fabulously fast-and-furious debut with 2003’s visceral Decline Of British Sea Power and pushing their catchy melodies and weird lyrics nearer the front on the follow-up, Open Season, British Sea Power has now gone whole hog, shamelessly revealing themselves as big, intelligent tunesmiths while remaining unafraid to hit the cacophony button whenever necessary to propel any given song from bloody marvellous to mind-bogglingly stupefying.
  
  In the space of just two minutes, the understated opener, "All in It," moves from a mesmeric bass-drum thump to a trance-like chant to a hugely majestic Nordic choral stomp shot through with blasts of white noise before winding down with singer Scott Wilkinson quietly repeating the song’s only two lines: "We’re all in it, and we close our eyes." And, of course, we are, aren’t we? This simple little dirge is saying that this TVOD life, this gesture-politics world, is our fault — but we do next to nothing to make it better.
  
  And that is why British Sea Power have the edge on most of their UK contemporaries: they give a damn, and they’re engaged with every aspect of modern life. Who but British Sea Power would fashion huge rocking pop hooks around such topics as light pollution in "Lights Out for Darker Skies," and economic migration in "Waving Flags"? And who, else could pull off the nerve-shredding wrecking-ball rush of "Atom" and immediately follow it with the tender, slo-mo plaint of "No Need to Cry"? Don’t bother even attempting to answer.
  
  "Open the Door" and the aforementioned "Atom" represent both ends of the band’s sonic spectrum. The former starts out like a wistful rock-lite rumination on life and death, climaxes briefly with a stunningly brief but cataclysmic guitar solo, then ends as it started. The latter batters along relentlessly before imploding into an atonal heap of sirens, feedback, mumblings and clattering cymbals.
  
  The comparison that gets trotted out most often is with Arcade Fire and, while both bands offer an organic, “live” rock sound (built mainly on splashy drums and relatively unprocessed guitar tones) that’s about where the comparison stops. What I hear is more like the crazed abandon of Spiritualized leavened with the intelligence of Bright Eyes.

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#38 Central Asian music gets an exotic and loving reworking

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  Silent City by Kayhan Kalhor Pick

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  You can justifiably call this cross-cultural effort a spinoff of Yo Yo Ma’s Silk Road Project. The string quartet with the quixotic name Brooklyn Rider consists of musicians who first met each other, and Persian fiddler Kayhan Kalhor, while working in Ma’s globetrotting world/chamber music ensemble. Kalhor is a master of the kamancheh, the spike fiddle of Persian classical music, and has become a primary composer for the Silk Road albums. On “Silent City” he and his Brooklyn-based colleagues draw freely on their shared loves of traditional Central Asian music and improvisation — which sounds like a recipe for a mushy, politically correct album of Classical Lite. Instead, the album sounds like the next step in an evolution that comes from the tradition of Béla Bartók, who tramped around the Hungarian and Romanian countryside in the early 20th century, recording folk songs and dances and incorporating them into his own string pieces.
  
  In addition to the bowed Western and Persian strings, “Silent City” also features bass and percussion, and the combination is used to good effect on the opening cut, “Ascending Bird,” an exotic yet accessible work that wouldn’t disappoint fans of Led Zeppelin’s “Kashmir.” Each of the four tracks offers something slightly different, from the haunted introspection of the title track, to the plucked sounds of the Iranian setar (a lute that is the ancestor of India’s sitar) on “Parvaz,” to the gradually building, almost trance-like ecstasy of the epic “Beloved, do not let me be discouraged.” It’s not Persian classical music, and you could reasonably ask if it’s Western classical music either — but part of Brooklyn Rider’s mission seems to be to suggest that we redefine what “Western classical music” means in the 21st century.

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#37 Simply an exceptional power-pop album

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  I'll Be Lightning by Liam Finn Pick

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  Does it run in the family? Liam Finn, son of Crowded House's Neil Finn, crafts songs rife with heart and hooks. Unlike dad, though, Liam isn't afraid of a little noise. Opener "Better to Be" is anchored in a spurting organ line, "Lead Balloon" moves quickly from spry pop strum to complete-and-total-chaos and the guitars in the driving rocker "This Place is Killing Me" are muddy and messed-up. This willingness to scrape and scuff gives Call Me Lightning a surprising surge of urgency. Finn's voice may have the same nervous whisper as Elliott Smith's, but the clattering around him keeps things suitably screwy. It's a refreshing dynamic, a kind of rough vs. sweet back-and-forth that makes Call Me Lightning one of the year's most charming surprises.

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#36 A former Trey Anastasio sideman gives the drummer some

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  Invisible Baby by Marco Benevento Pick

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  Though it’s more tightly focused and accessible than the glorious sprawl of Benevento’s 3-disc, Live at Tonic outing last year, Invisible Baby remains a daring, genre-bending trio record, one that showcases more of the acoustic piano chops Benevento gleaned from Joanne Brackeen and Brad Mehldau. The opener “Bus Ride” features some of the anthemic, vamp-oriented virtuosity one might expect from a former sideman of Phish’s Trey Anastasio. It leads into a gentler redux of “Record Book” from Live at Tonic, connoting innocence — like a soundtrack to a birth or a sunrise — with its simultaneous sense of peace and rustling.
  
  One of the best things about Benevento, honed from his long association with Joe Russo, is his synergistic sharing of the spotlight with drummers. You hear it on “Atari,” when Benevento leads with a jittery riff that sounds like Liberace at the harpsichord and drummer Matt Chamberlain immediately catches the frenetic campy spirit and carries the tune the rest of the way. And check out drummer Andrew Barr’s ingenious rhythmic shadings on “Ruby,” a mélange of Benevento’s first dream about his daughter and the actual experience of her falling asleep in his arms (it turned up on Tonic as “The Arrival of Greatness”). Some of the more lightweight material ranges from inspired giddiness (“The Real Morning Party,” like a goofy video game gone a-clatter) to perverse (“If You Keep Asking Me” features a riff that is meant to be annoying, and succeeds). The finale, “Are You the Favorite Person of Anybody?” bookends well with “Bus Ride,” with its swelling (mellotron fueled) climaxes and stylish interplay.

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#35 Strums, whispers and whiskers: think Bon Iver

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  House With No Home by Horse Feathers Pick

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  Scrappy, acoustic indie-folk has enjoyed a certain renaissance in the last half-decade, with strums-and-whispers replacing prickly, post-punk guitar as the underground's favorite new guise. Portland's Horse Feathers (fronted by the vocalist and songwriter Justin Ringle) has existed in various forms since 2004, but the band's low-lit, violin-addled folk songs (think Bon Iver, Bowerbirds) have been mostly overlooked — which is tragic, considering the extent to which Horse Feathers' rich, dulcet tracks deserve a spot in the beard-and-plaid-shirt scrum.
  
  House with No Home is Horse Feathers' second full-length, and it's first on a major indie. Many will likely recognize the band's name as the title of the fourth Marx Brothers film (an oddly prescient football comedy that pits creationists vs. Darwinists), but Horse Feathers aren't a particularly goofy outfit: instead, Ringle and his bandmates play autumnal folk that's earnest and gentle (but, miraculously, never boring or contrived). "Working Poor" is the album's standout track, a shimmering, expertly harmonized ode to youthful fickleness. On nearly every song, Ringle's vocals run and ooze, eventually fading into a scratchy hum, which is augmented by his bandmates' banjo, guitar, cello, celeste, saw and light percussion; House with No Home has the soft, woozy feel of a northwestern sunset, an excessively calming, perspective-straightening exercise in perfect quietude.

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#34 eMusic Selectees get their Velvet Underground on

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  Alight of Night by Crystal Stilts Pick

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  A mere ten years or so after its invention, rock & roll was bored of itself. The Velvet Underground sighed through rock's paces like childhood chores, their sensibilities too refined for robust exclamations of joy, pleasure or excitement. They approached the music with the same basic tools as the garage rock bands of the day (the Seeds, the Action, the Creation — potent names all), but that teenage exuberance that remains unwearied on oldies radio today was as alien to them as they were to the rest of the world.
  
  Boredom can either be laconic or vengeful — it has equally inspired sloth and violence, seemingly contrary notions that are closer than you'd think. Like the Velvet Underground, the Crystal Stilts wallow between the two — siding with sloth if forced to choose, but uncommitted in the end. There's an exhaustion in their songs that feels more appropriate by the listen; this music simply wouldn't work if it mustered a single yelp or squeal from band member or crowd. And the Stilts are obviously committed to the mood: "Crippled Croon," the comparatively exuberant pop hit from this spring's eMusic-exclusive Selects EP was one of the only tunes to not make their full-length debut. (It's an omission I still find curious and misguided, but at least there's a philosophical bent behind it.)
  
  The very good Alight of Night doesn't need cheap thrills to impress. Thrills there certainly are ("Bright Night," "Crystal Stilts" and "Prismatic Room" all have an upward tilt, and each is excellent), but the majority of Alight builds off of the Crystal Stilts EP, a thoroughly introspective and determinedly serious collection that clearly did not give a fuck about whether you choose to listen to it or not. It's almost confrontational in its unwillingness to open up: "If you don't get this you weren't supposed to anyway," it seems to say.
  
  But the dirty truth is that, if anything, the joke is on the Stilts, who despite themselves write great pop songs with even better arrangements. They have an uncanny knack for organ parts, and even when the pipes exit, singer Brad Hargett's voice itself has "organ"-ic qualities: no edges, all rounded corners, no beginnings or ends. And even at their least inspired, JB Townsend's chug-a-chug guitar is all reluctant kinetic energy, impossible to ignore. There's still plenty to learn, for sure — "Departure," for instance, is an unneeded re-recording of the Selects EP's awesome "Converging in the Quiet" — but Alight of Night is a big step forward, whether they like it or not.

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#33 The ultimate tortured Romantic's grandest and most grandiose symphony

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  Mahler: Symphony No. 3 by Valery Gergiev Pick

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  Really big, huge, and absurdly enormous: thus goes the progression of Mahler's symphonies, in scale, scope, ensemble size and ambition — by the time he got to his Eighth, the "Symphony Of A Thousand," there was nowhere else to go, so in his Ninth he bid farewell to Earth, in one of the most exquisitely drawn-out, beatific denouements ever written (Mahler departing the mortal coil is a little like a Liza Minelli farewell tour: both take the same amount of time to say goodbye that most people take to introduce themselves, tell their story, leave, encore, and leave again). Mahler, more than any composer before him, wanted to fit the world into his symphonies, and he kept upping the ante on himself and his audience, all the while taking great pains not to lose anyone. Like all of history's most maniacally ambitious pop musicians, he was constantly torn between his musical aspirations and his hunger for wider recognition and fame. It is to Mahler that generations of self-described "misunderstood" composers attribute the quote "My time will come" when their more difficult works fall on indifferent ears, but this quote misremembers just how greedily Mahler latched onto to a single positive notice, or how he obsessively catalogued all music world's slights against him.
  
  His Third Symphony is his longest and in many ways his most grandiose — the opening movement is a half an hour's-worth of being pummeled by lightning bolts from Zeus, of thundering trumpets, martial drums and roiling strings churning like an angry sea. Like most Mahler, it is both thrilling and exhausting, and in this reading, positively ravishing. Valery Gergiev coaxes a ripely sensuous, darkly glowing sound from the orchestra, which feels completely caught up in the movement's tense, coiled brooding. The double basses toss off sharply etched, rapid-fire figures, and the random drum beats resound like the hammering "blows of fate" that Mahler would later use in his emotionally shattering Sixth Symphony. Mahler symphonies are often gauntlets for horn players, with incredibly taxing parts that offer potential for heroism of the highest order, and the horns here are like a glittering phalanx, never fudging or missing the chance to finesse a single note.
  
  The second and third movements, which play out like the long sigh of relief following a violent storm, breathe with ease and contentment. The strings stretch out the "Some Enchanted Evening"-esque melody of the second movement like taffy, milking it for all of its schmaltzy glory, while the flute curlicues and burnished woodwinds of the third movement show again just how skilled Mahler was at pastoral tone-painting. I'm a sucker for abyssal depths, and this was therefore the first Mahler symphony that truly hooked me: there was an astonishing amount of beautiful music here, too much to take in — listening to the whole piece felt like drinking from a fire hose. There are tons of Mahler recordings out there — eMusic also offers Michael Tilson Thomas's excellent cycle with the San Francisco Symphony — but the LSO's is uniquely warm, vibrant, and expansive, probably a result of the special charge you only get from a live recording.

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#32 Better than Psychocandy

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  Lust Lust Lust by The Raveonettes Pick

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  Exactly why the Scandinavians have rocketed past the Brits in recent years as purveyors of supercharged, edgy rock isn’t exactly clear. In-depth analysis tends to get bogged down right at the off, when whoever first mentions Abba gets clobbered by a comment about long cold winter nights and high suicide rates. I tend to settle for the pragmatic observation that bands like the Wannadies, Motorpsycho and Grass Show know how to rock in weird ways but aren’t ashamed of showing their love for the music’s rich historical tapestry.
  
  The result, and it’s there in spades in Lust Lust Lust (L3 in aficionargot), is music that instantly engages the feet and fingertips, but then, as it seeps in with repeated plays, reveals hidden depths, subtle layers and quirky textures.
  
  This is the Danish duo’s fourth album (if you count 2002’s eight-song debut, Whip It On, as an album). It’s also, after five years with Sony, the band’s first indie-label offering — a move occasioned, say the band, by a desire to exercise more control over their music.
  
  There’s no denying that Lust Lust Lust is a gutsier outing than its 2005 predecessor, Pretty in Black. With mainman Sune Wagner now in charge of production as well as songwriting, they’ve restored the swirling, frenzied miasma of repressed rage and sexuality that made their exhilarating debut so vital. Five years, however, have come and gone since then, so Lust Lust Lust also benefits from Wagner’s increasing skill as an arranger and Sharin Foo’s enhanced confidence as a vocalist.
  
  The twelve tracks here are said to have been selected from 100 demos Wagner came up with in the past two years and, if the other 88 are even in the same ballpark, he can now take a break from songwriting for another eight albums.
  
  The band sets out its stall from the opening track whose title, "Aly Walk With Me," is an undisguised reference to David Lynch’s Twin Peaks movie, Fire Walk With Me. As soon as its opening vibraslap hit melts into a filthy sludged-up bassline (underpinned by a rattly line of distortion that any self-respecting engineer would eradicate), you know you’re off on a wrong turn, headed for a backwoods shack with blood-rusted chainsaws propped against the rocking chairs on the porch. Indoors, an inbred family waits to welcome you for dinner. Their dinner.
  
  As in any classic horror movie, once you’re into Lust Lust Lust, there’s no turning back. Logic tells you not to open that locked door down the hall, not to go down those creaky stairs, not to prise up the lid of that man-sized box on the table, but how can you not? Just when you expect the monster to jump out, the Raveonettes hit you instead with the cute Tommy James and the Shondells bassline of "Hallucinations," combining the pop smarts of "I Think We’re Alone Now" with the acid-fried pyrotechnics of "Crimson and Clover" before lurching into a nastily overdriven guitar jangle. The track is nailed shut by a percussive thwack, reminiscent of a crowbar attempting to pound an oil-drum full of bolts down to the size of a sardine tin.
  
  All of this, of course, is just the top layer — the sonics. It’s when the lyrics start to register that the album assumes its darkest aspect. Is Foo really singing, “In this dream I call life I get so lonesome with you,” in the sweet-sounding "Hallucination"? Yes, she is, and the lyrics become progressively more despondent until she delivers the closing track's poignant couplet: “The first love you can’t escape, the second love feels like rape.”
  
  One obvious point of comparison is the Jesus and Mary Chain’s classic Psychocandy but, for me, this is the better-constructed album of the two. Wagner’s huge slabs of furnace-hot guitar distortion, for example, are always placed for maximum impact, while Foo’s erotically wacked-out under-emoting vocals float free over riffs that evoke everything from Phil Spector in "Black Satin" to Eddie Cochran in the zip-along "Blitzed." (To hear Foo at her dreamiest, check her achingly forlorn multi-tracked vocal harmony on "Sad Transmission"). The poptastic "You Want the Candy" is particularly intriguing, being an obvious answer-song to "I Want Candy," a '60s smash for the Strangeloves, written by the Raveonettes’ former producer Richard Gottehrer. Are they trying to say they still harbour a sneaking affection for him?
  
  Despite the lack of live drums and bass (they’re both computer-generated) Lust Lust Lust feels remarkably alive, with only the awkward drum-pattern of the closing "The Beat Dies" taking a while to settle in comfortably. In the fullness of time, this album may well be remembered as their first truly great moment, the point where the Raveonettes and their myriad influences merged seamlessly into a perfect unity.

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#31 A '50s-sounding EP that knocks our bobby socks off

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  Ground Trouble Jaw by Richard Swift Pick

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  We've been waiting years for Richard Swift to break out. Even though his recordings have largely left me cold, his persistence, ambition and talent, clear even through my cynical lens, lead me to believe that he could not fail. And well, he hasn't failed exactly, but Swift hasn't exactly caught on either. In another life, Swift made pretty much only Christian music (he spent time with the Promise Keepers, Starflyer 59 and recording as Dicky Ochoa), but the recordings under his own name have been mainstream indie singer-songwriter, not all that far from Sufjan and the like, with a prepared audience that hasn't managed to uncover him. Yet.
  
  Ground Trouble Jaw is different. Very different. Out of nowhere, Swift is now Bobby Darin doing a Freak Out-era Frank Zappa impression (or vice versa), an odd and earnest midpoint between straight girl-group balladry and '70s blue-eyed soul. Thing of it is, Swift is so skilled as a songwriter and listener that none of it sounds like camp: "Would You?" and "Lady Luck," the first two songs here, are knock-you-off-your-feet good. Tender and beautiful, they're the kind of love songs that have always existed somewhere, in someone's heart. It took a man like Richard Swift to finally extricate them from the ether, liberate them for us to finally get here.
  
  Of the two, we'll go with "Would You?" as our favorite — love the quick guitar strums and his voice, just aching and breaking for love — but "Lady Luck" is close behind. They're two of the best songs I can remember coming across in all of 2008 — and the fact that they sound like they're from 1958 is all the better. They are incredible and they are immediate, and in their combined seven minutes, all that we love about music comes out.

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#30 An unsigned Brooklyn duo stuns us

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  Nests by She Keeps Bees Pick

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  Jess Larrabee, the female half of She Keeps Bees, is a fighter. She's bare-knuckled — nicked and scraped and scarred, and all the wiser for it. But wisdom has not calmed her, has not quelled the explosive energy that makes her lash out before she remembers to pull back, play it safe, keep it close, not make any sudden movements. She is more aware of her faults than we could ever be. You can never hurt her more than she can hurt herself. Sticks and stones might break my bones but my words will always hurt me.
  
  That's the sorrow, the pregnant potential for emotional violence, that dots Nests, an absolutely astonishing album from Larrabee and drummer Andy LaPlante. Even the band name — a seemingly senseless, "well, it sounds nice" kinda name — speaks to this weird dynamic: whenever I read the name I picture an old, half-crazed Southern woman storing a beehive in an old hat box, her left hand calmly battling the vibrating lid to keep it closed, her right laconically dragging on a cigarette.
  
  All of this sounds silly and a bit overwrought, but if you spend any amount of time with Nests, I have to think you'll come to similar conclusions. The music is so uncomfortably naked and raw that it begs cheap psychoanalysis — you feel like you know Jess, much the same way that those early, fragile Cat Power records offered what felt like a window into what it was to be Chan Marshall. And yeah, that namecheck was intentional, as She Keeps Bees and Cat Power definitely share some traits in mood and means to achieve that mood, but to pin Bees as some Jeannie Come Lately would 1000% miss the point. The emotions and motivations that drive Nests aren't mimicry, nor can they themselves be mimicked. This is the work of Jess Larrabee and Andy LaPlante. Period.
  
  The album opens a capella: "Don't follow me honey/ Not the road you want to be on." Then hand claps, a slight blues beat, Larrabee's voice moving hard into the red, reaching deep for a little yelp. Little bits latch on over its two minutes, following along on the unexpected rhythm shift, the melody getting bluesier, harder every second, and then it ushers us into "Wear Red," and holy shit she isn't fooling around. It's meaty, defiant, a big dick-swinging kind of song. You know, the White Stripes if they had heart.
  
  In terms of other places to start, it's hard to say, because swear to God every song is great. But definitely "Gimmie" — a She Keeps Bees thesis statement if there ever was one — and "My Last Nerve," another efficient distillation of what we love about this band and this woman. "I'm your punisher/ I'm your punisher/ I've got some nerve/ I've got some nerve/ Yeah, I've got some nerve," but not bragging — challenging, eye-to-eye. And, after about 50 listens, I don't think she's singing at one enemy, ex, lover or betrayer. No, I'm fairly certain that she's singing at all of those at once: herself.

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#29 One of the best pure indie-rock albums we've heard in years

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  Hometowns by The Rural Alberta Advantage Pick

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  Nils Edenloff, the lead singer for the Rural Alberta Advantage, possesses a complete and utter inability to sing with any measure of distance or cynicism. With his nasal, earnest voice, Nils pleads, pledges, confesses, praises and laments. Give him a slice of history like the 1903 disaster in the Canadian mining town of Frank, Alberta that buried an entire town alive beneath a rockslide, bodies still dug from its ruins decades later, and what does he sing? "Under the rubble/ The mountain that tumbled/ I'll hold you forever/ I'll hold you forever," on "Frank, AB." There's an urgency to Nils and Amy Cole and Paul Banwatt, his bandmates. Absorb, experience, write an amazing song about it, repeat.
  
  Hometowns, the RAA's spectacular, doe-eyed debut, isn't the stuff of teenage love, sappy love letters or rapid infatuation. The band sees love in its soup, for sure, but it's the very best kind: earnest and sincere, and honest in its limitations. Take the gorgeous "In the Summertime" and its heart-skipping refrain: "And once in a while/ I know our hearts beat out of time/ And once in a while/ I know they'll fall back in line," all of it delivered in a soft, stoned coo that summons aorta butterflies and eye grins.
  
  One of the first things that will undoubtedly jump out after you download Hometowns is how Neutral Milk Hotel it is. And it's true. Jeff Mangum has obviously impacted this album; he and Nils have similar vocal tones ("non-singer singers" was how Nils described it in our interview) and a similar urgency. Mangum always sounds on the verge of death, each word potentially his last. The RAA doesn't go that far, but the spirit is there. Maybe every sixth word is a "Rosebud" rather than each and every one, but when you hear it, you know it.
  
  The biggest difference between the RAA and NMH comes in the rhythm section. The Arcade Fire, by piling rhythms in endless layers, have helped steer indie into grandiosity — which was it's Achilles Heel in the '90s — and the RAA have taken those lessons to heart. For one, the lineup of the band is essentially Nils singing and playing guitar and Amy and Paul playing percussion. (Amy and Paul contribute more than that — Amy sings quite a bit, for instance — but that's their primary role.) This leads to songs like "Rush Apart" and "Four Night Rider" and "The Deathbridge in Lethbridge" being extremely percussive, explosive even.
  
  In what is probably the least objective close I can imagine, Amy said something really striking to me in our phone interview last week, something that speaks eloquently to why we love this band, and why we chose them for eMusic Selects. Here's Amy: "I remember talking to Nils after we finally got the record and I listened to it all the way through the first time. And I remember talking to [Nils] and saying, 'You know my favorite part about the record is that I believe you. I believe in what you're saying. I totally buy it.' " Simply put, we buy it, too.

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#28 Sneering indie from three London teenagers

#27 Beguiling dream-pop from Deerhunter’s Bradford Cox

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  Let the Blind Lead Those Who Can See But Cannot Feel by Atlas Sound Pick

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  Atlas Sound might have been presented to the world as the solo "side project" of Deerhunter frontman Bradford Cox, but it stands some chance of eclipsing that band, at least among a different class of listeners: sleepier ones, with more free time. This endlessly pretty debut feels like an amalgam of every strain of stoned, dreamy, indie-approved music since the 1960s, whether made on guitars or computers — everything from the druggy languor of the Velvet Underground to the woozy, hypnotic loops and tickly high-hats of the Field, with a very heavy dose of shoegazing and dream-pop tricks from the blissed-out 1990s. Sighing vocals, draggy tempos, washes of reverb; this is stuff you listen to with eyes closed, whether you're filing it next to Pygmalion or Panda Bear.
  
  But it's not exactly what you'd expect from that, mostly because Cox still provides the same messiness and blurting self-exposure that's all over his public persona. These tales of unrequited love have barbs of discomfort in them, and their sound isn't a pristine, precise kind of dreaminess — they feel a little degraded, like they're coming out of a basement with a fine layer of grit covering the equipment. When Cox is building from classic pop structures, like on "River Card," that grit helps him hit peaks; when he's just slinking through his own fascinating loops, like on "Cold as Ice," it makes for gorgeous plateaus; and when he's zoning out into ambience and drones, like on "Ready Set Glow," it creates the kind of valleys you can laze around in for a while before you've found everything there is to find.
  
  What's remarkable, for a project put together during breaks from a very busy rock band, is that it really never bores: most every guitar swell and synth pad has something to it, and moves along before you can figure out quite what that something is.

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#26 Second batch of hazy indie lulls from the Baltimore duo

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  Devotion by Beach House Pick

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  It’s easy to hear the Baltimore duo Beach House as victims of prettiness. Their songs — mid-tempo puffs of teary indie-pop flecked with old soul and country — wouldn’t dare intrude on a mellow mood to make a statement. At their most agitated, Beach House glides or rolls. Most of the time, they tackle their songs with the inertia of a bookshelf.
  
  Paradoxically, though, Devotion — like 2006’s Beach House — is an album that finds impact in discretion. Instead of striking, it seeps and sneaks. Certain moments come to stand out — “Gila,” “Astronaut,” “D.A.R.L.I.N.G.” — albeit in the most noncommittal way possible. Their dedication to their own sense of calm is unwavering. And though Devotion’s organ-heavy arrangements and Victoria Legrand’s somnambulistic torch singer pose feel more sanguine than on their debut, the music is still characterized by an intoxicating lack of command. Listeners aren’t guided or carried, but set adrift from the opening notes and rarely bothered after.
  
  Like any cultish band, Beach House can be a tough sell to the impatient. They’re unnervingly consistent. But for listeners who can appreciate a low pulse, Devotion offers crucial variations on a theme of melancholia: instances where a chill brings comfort; when a gray streak painted across the sky makes the world feel insular and cozy; and when not being able to give a precise name to the soft little sadness wafting in and out of your day is precisely what enables you to appreciate its passing beauty.

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#25 Indie your mother could love

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  Vampire Weekend by Vampire Weekend Pick

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  This quartet of recent Columbia University alumni pick up as much press for their boat shoes and for being social-networking hype-cycle poster children as for their lyrics about French architecture and serial commas and commuting from New England. But their biggest selling point is their incorporation of African and Caribbean guitar and drum lilts into baroque indie pop-rock — alternately lifted by roller-rink keyboards and chamber-group string cheese.
  
  Not the easiest pursuit to pull off: “This feels so unnatural/ Peter Gabriel, too” goes one line in the instructively titled “Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa.” But sifting the global appropriations through ‘80s British pop helps. “A-Punk” follows ska hooks from the English Beat’s “Best Friend” with polite gang shouts; “The Kids Don’t Stand a Chance” walks on the moon like the early Police; “One (Blake’s Got a New Face)” mashes “Another One Bites the Dust,” New Order and the electric slide into a rhythmic call-and-response. And Ezra Koenig’s drama-club diction can be endearing, especially when the melody’s as sweet as in “Walcott,” about escaping Cape Cod. Not shy about rhyming “campus” with “romances,” Vampire Weekend almost convince you they’re the only living college boys in New York. Paul Simon would be proud: So long Frank Lloyd Wright, hello Mansard roofs.

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#24 The kind of amazing, punkish record that Supergrass used to make

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  Little Death by Pete And The Pirates Pick

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  Small towns have a healthy place in musical history. Reading, though, makes something of an odd entry. Famous for its annual rock festival, it’s nonethless lacking in famous musical sons. There’s Mike Oldfield, Antony from Blue and, well, the Cooper Temple Clause.
  
  So what chance does Reading five-piece Pete & The Pirates have? When you’re young, male and pedalling offbeat upbeat pop tunes, there’s always a chance. Clocking in at a brisk 35 minutes, with a hint of early Blur swagger about the proceedings, Little Death is all about picking up girls, staying up all night and legging it in the morning. Sure, there will be knowing glances at the line “Get out of bed, it’s the wrong one,” from single “Knots” — but, then again, it’s all about bed here (and how bewildering life is once you’re up).
  
  What Pete & the Pirates do well is pack real pop punch. Some cars can’t accelerate as fast as “Dry Your Wings,” which builds to a discordant, swollen jangle in under three minutes. No worries: they also do gentle thrum with aplomb — “Humming” and “Moving” show they have more in the tank than just gas. Ultimately, this is an impressive debut of charming backwater sonnets that tread a similar path to Stereophonics’ fine debut Word Gets Around — a record they never managed to better.
  
  With Little Death, Reading expects. No pressure, boys.

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#23 Essential stuff for Beethoven fanatics and classical newcomers alike

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  BEETHOVEN, van L.: Symphonies Nos. 2 and 7 (Minnesota Orchestra, Vanska) by Osmo Vanska Pick

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  The Minnesota Orchestra indisputably struck gold when they stumbled onto Osmo Vänskä, their music director since 2003. Nearly unknown in America before his appointment, he has since lifted the orchestra from a reliably excellent regional ensemble to one of the most prominent on the national stage. Everyone loves Osmo: critics, audiences, and musicians, and he has easily proven himself to be among the most promising conductors in the world right now. His latest feat has been recording the best and freshest-sounding Beethoven symphony cycle in years, of which this recording is just the latest example. The burden of recorded history on these pieces is crushing: as a conductor, you can hardly lift your baton without inadvertently copying some venerable master's previous interpretation. And yet Vänskä pulls off the seemingly impossible trick of making you forget about the stern hall of ghosts looming just over his shoulder: guys with imposing, carved-in-granite names like Klemperer, Kleiber, Toscanini, Furtwängler. Without seeming the least bit concerned about anyone's interpretations of these monumental works save his own, Vänskä draws fleet, light-footed playing out of the players that never feels hurried, making the first movement Second Symphony sound as bubbly and refreshing as the written music demands. They also nail Beethoven's hairpin dynamic turns, from tip-toeing, church-mouse quiet to storming the heavens in the space of a single breath, with stylishness to spare. It doesn't matter whether you've got a crate full of well-loved Beethoven symphonies on vinyl at home or whether passing curiosity got you to click here to find your first Beethoven download: this is essential stuff either way.

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#22 Rap high art pushes even further into orbit on this tasty remix

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  Madvillainy 2: The Madlib Remix by Madvillain Pick

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  Madvillainy was a landmark album, a consensus piece of rap high art. The 2004 work featured Dadaist emcee MF Doom at his creative peak: his parables about blunted weirdos and treacherous characters were punctuated with raunchy punchlines and left-field imagery, making for a kind of sublime surrealism that hasn't been equaled since. Combined with producer Madlib's chaotic, thickly textured beats, the album was almost impossibly fun — and an oddly cohesive gem.
  
  So, why make Madvillainy 2: The Madlib Remix? Better question: why not? Doom is almost completely AWOL these days, heard from only when he's denying rumors that he's on his deathbed, or when he sends in impostors wearing his gladiator mask to play his shows. And so while Madlib may be more than ready to do a Madvillain follow-up album, Doom hasn't quite gotten his act together. In this light, the remix makes sense — if only to give fans something to chew on in Doom's absence.
  
  Madvillainy 2 is certainly tasty — like the first disc, it's challenging but rewards repeated listens. The songs have been dramatically overhauled; some of the original tracks have been renamed but are otherwise similar ("Curls" is now "Pearls!"), some have been reworked, while some have been dumped entirely. Overall, they tend to be more downtempo — "Borrowed Time" samples chanting monks — and display a willingness to push Madvilliany's already experimental song structures even further (see the noise mash-up "Drainos"). As such, the new album probably isn't a good introduction for listeners unfamiliar with the artists involved, but for those who liked Madvillainy, Madvillainy 2 should suffice until the duo's next project.

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#21 A dance music legend looks back

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  Sessions by Carl Craig Pick

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  To put it plainly: Carl Craig may just be one of the most respected (and relevant) electronic music grandfathers working right now. Craig was part of Detroit techno's second wave, learning the genre's ins-and-outs from legendary producer Derrick May. But unlike those that have fallen by the wayside of the future-centric techno scene, Craig has kept his ear to the pulse of electronic music via his label Planet E and his excellent remixes for artists as varied as English chanteuse Siobhan Donaghy and Luxembourg's (only?) piano prodigy Francesco Tristano. Sessions is essentially a celebratory look back at his career thus far, with a particular focus on his remixing talents, which garnered him a long overdue Grammy nomination in 2008 for his take on the Junior Boys' "Like a Child."
  
  With a reputation as large as Craig's, it's sometimes hard to find a way in. (Especially in the relatively faceless world of electronic music.) The answer lies in the details. Listen to Craig's mix of "Like a Child" for five minutes and you may not realize that he still hasn't dropped a beat (or a bassline for that matter). When he does, the effect is magical. Similarly, his remix of Rhythm & Sound's "Poor People Must Work" builds from murky beginnings into a mammoth techno stomp. ("There is no place to sleep/ there is nothing to eat" may be one of the unlikeliest sing-alongs you're likely to hear on a dancefloor.) Craig is a master tease, taking his skills as a DJ and building miniature epics of tension and release where the addition of a simple kick drum can elicit a scream.
  
  Included on Sessions, amid the brilliant reworks, are a number of Craig's original productions under his own name — and a pseudonym or two. They shouldn't be ignored. Innerzone Orchestra, a jazz group led by Craig that featured (among others) Sun Ra drummer Francisco Mora, is represented by a tune that is often credited with inventing drum 'n' bass, "Bug in the Bassbin." And you can even hear Craig's own voice on the track "Demented (Or Just Crazy)," although I wouldn't recommend judging him by the snarling and grunting. That's just the way his dark alter ego, Tres Demented, seems to like it.
  
  If "Oscillator" by Paperclip People (another alias) was the sound of Craig perfecting Detroit techno, "Rushed" and the previously unreleased "Psychobeat" by 69 (a name used [mostly] in the mid-'90s) are snapshots of an artist at work, trying to break out of the early Detroit techno sound into something else entirely. That something else found its flowering in Craig's More Songs About Food and Revolutionary Art, which is heard here in the form of a live version of "At Les" recorded in 2007. It's techno, but it also encompasses so much more. The same could be said for Craig's career.

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#20 The very first eMusic Selects release still sounds perfect to us

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  03/07 - 09/07 by High Places Pick

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  Mary Pearson and Rob Barber are Brooklyn-based duo High Places and 03/07 — 09/07, as the title suggests, collects the band's work from a six-month period in 2007. Some of it has been released on 7-inches and compilations, some of it is available on eMusic exclusively for the first time. All of it is eMusic Selects. The best description I've heard of the band's tunes? "Every national anthem going off at the same time in a bucket of water." Indeed, High Places ride that careful line between unadulterated anthem and a muddy effects-laden mess, emerging with discombobulating dubby masterpieces.
  
  "Head Spins" bounces along on aquatic steel drums, good vibes and a melody built from samples drained almost completely of their source material. "Sandy Feat" is Beat Happening via King Tubby. Perhaps the most surprising moment is a commission that the group received from Pearson's mother. She asked the duo to write a song for the elementary school at which she teaches. "Jump In" doesn't have a lot of the murkiness that colors much of High Places output thus far. Instead, it nakedly showcases the bells, whistles, woodblocks and doodad's that the group buries underneath. It's a revelatory moment here — Pearson and Barber aren't just noiseniks having fun, they're first-rate pop songwriters.
  
  With their short songs and inclination toward miniaturized releases, it's clear that High Places aren't big on mission statements. You could fairly say that 03/07 — 09/07 reflects what happens when a classically trained bassoonist heads out of the academy (Pearson) and a former hardcore kid gets into the noise scene (Barber). Sure, it's awfully specific and honest, but that's pretty much the charm of High Places. Jump in.

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#19 The perfect soundtrack to watching rain fall on your window

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  Ferndorf by Hauschka Pick

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  New York City's highly regarded Wordless Music series, in its exploration of the middle ground between indie and contemporary classical, has trained the spotlight an emerging new subgenre: call it Wordless Music classical. Many of the composers and musicians the series has featured — Nico Muhly, Caleb Burnhans (of itsnotyouitsme and Alarm Will Sound), and German-born pianist Hauschka — emphasize ambient textures and fleeting, Impressionist sketches in their music, foregoing the rigorous complexity of the academic avant-garde or the anarchic spirit of the contemporary classical underground. Instead, they tap the same vein of wistful, pensive melancholia that has found expression in American indie as long as relatively well-off men and women have found themselves sad for no particular reason. Basically, if you are currently making your indie film about a divorced, emotionally constrained New England professor who yearns to reconnect with his estranged adult daughter, you have just discovered your soundtrack in its entirety.
  
  Hauschka's chosen instrument is the piano, prepared John Cage-style with little screws, bolts, rubber erasers, and such. If you've never heard prepared piano before, this is still probably the best place to start: Cage was the first to tinker inventively with the strings of the piano, finding astounding ways to make the instrument sound like a Chinese zither, a Javanese gamelan ensemble, or like a music box playing on a sunken ship. Hauschka's preparation is much lighter: the piano still sounds recognizably piano-ish, just tinged with hollow, buzzing noises at the edges. Almost every note he plays is steeped in pedal, helping create the warm, hazy glow that envelops the album. Like Muhly, Hauschka is often drawn to odd, toylike sounds — "Rode Null," with its cheerful menagerie of tootling and scraping instruments, inexplicably put me in mind of the gruesomely mismatched action figures in Sid's bedroom in "Toy Story."
  
  Also like Muhly, Hauschka seems mostly unconcerned with theme development, preferring to sustain and explore a single mood. This approach leads to moments of disarming beauty: the opening of "Freibad" traces a long-limbed and sorrowful melody on cello before dissolving into picaresque, while the wandering "Nadelwald" finds Hauschka's playing at its most soulful. Ferndorf is autumn-gust music, full of wispy little half-melodies and evocative flurries of plucked notes, and there really is no better soundtrack to watching rain fall on your window on a Sunday afternoon.

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#18 Subversive, jazzy fun

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  Knee-Deep In The North Sea by Portico Quartet Pick

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  What distinguishes these four young Londoners is their use of "hangs," 21st-century percussion instruments that look like covered broiler pots and sound very similar to steel drums. Struck with mallets, their resonance imparts an ethereality reminiscent of vintage ECM-label material, while their steel-drum tone counters with a tropical flavor.
  
  Saxophonist Jack Wyllie is the only classic frontline soloist, so it helps that he varies the tempo from prancing, tootling soprano ("News From Verona," "Too Many Cooks") to more fervent squawks, as on the title track and in conjuring the storms that burst through the serene atmospherics on "Monsoon: Top to Bottom." The rest of the group likewise maximizes their mood swings, creating a uniquely foreboding ambiance with bass and a rapidly brushed hang (giving it a subtle, keyboard-ish drone) on "Steps in the Wrong Direction," and then creating a more linear, peppy groove on "The Kon-Tiki Expedition" and "Cittagazze." Hang players Nick Mulvey and Duncan Bellamy (the latter doubles on drums) keep the rhythms brisk without pat superficiality or a gimmicky reliance on the novelty of their instrument. Together with Wyllie and bassist Milo Fitzpatrick, they play with a Euro-classical formality and precision that's nicely subverted by their fondness for fun.

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#17 Punk's leading light tilts even further towards pop

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  Matador Singles ‘08 by Jay Reatard Pick

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  Jay Reatard, for the better part of this decade, has shown all the signs of hiding a Big Pop Heart underneath his furious punk façade. After parting ways with his trash-punk group the Reatards, he released a steady stream of increasingly melodic singles, culminating in the breakout full-length Blood Visions — a bright burst that splits itself evenly between loud n' raucous and quick n' bouncy. After the slow build of adulation surrounding Visions, Reatard (real name: Jay Lindsey) has relied even more on the chiming, anthemic guitar-pop he's hinted at over the last few years.
  
  Leading up to the collection of 7"s he recorded for Matador, compiled on Singles '08, Lindsey repeatedly declared his infatuation with likeminded quirky pop songwriters like Devo and the stable from New Zealand's Flying Nun label. It's clear he's absorbed a lot of (the best) tendencies from this motley crew — check the squiggly new-wave keyboard line on "You Mean Nothing to Me," the chug-a-chug acoustic layers on "Painted Shut" and the ragged, almost-droning Clean-esque lead guitar riff on "See/Saw." The first half of Singles is the most consistently inventive and thrilling set of songs Lindsey has ever laid down: perfect, compressed guitar-pop with verses almost as hooky as the choruses. It's hard to imagine the punk/pop synthesis can be mastered any more fluidly.

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#16 A lean, vivid and singular take on a repertory standard

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  Brahms Symphony 1 by Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique, The Monteverdi Choir, John Eliot Gardiner Pick

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  You can tell immediately — immediately — what kind of Brahms interpreter you've got on your hands from how they handle opening bars of any recording of Brahms First. Those pounding drum beats are a Rorschach test, and just like the opening triplet "fate" motif of Beethoven's Fifth — how fast to play the triplets? How long does one hang onto the long held note? — they signal a lot of aesthetic choices, right away. When Marin Alsop recorded the piece with the London Philharmonic Orchestra in 2005, she ramped up the tension as high as it would go, so the insistent pounding was like the bearing down of fate, the tribe of barbarians gathered at your gate. It announced a feverish, tensile Brahms that partook pretty seriously of the sort of meat-and-potatoes Austro-German heaviness that people normally associate with Brahms (this is one of the "three B's" we're talking about, after all). To anyone who had been wondering how Alsop, a noted interpreter of contemporary American music who hadn't distinguished herself much in the traditional repertory, would handle this Romantic-era Mt. Everest, it sent a message: "I am a force to be reckoned with."
  
  John Eliot Gardiner, who has always displayed a knack for, er, marching to his own beat — Exhibit A would be this label, which he set up a few years before every orchestra in the world began to triumphantly announce their own imprints — takes a more restrained route. He is working with a smaller, period orchestra, for starters, and the leaner sound is startlingly refreshing, lacking the caloric bloat of Stokowski-era Brahms. The opening is still serious business: eighteen straight bars of C minor, the root C note held by the droning double basses and literally hammered home by the timpani, while the violins rise steadily against it and trace the mournful melody that will serve as the entire symphony's DNA. This is the sort of moment in the symphonic repertoire for which the adjective "stormy" was invented, and it loses no gravitas in Gardiner's capable hands. In fact, his (relatively) muted handling of the opening serves him well when the long, dark night of C returns a few minutes later, welling up more insistently and with more grief and weight.
  
  Thus goes this entire, superlative rendering of Brahms's long-in-the-making first symphony, which he composed in furtive fits and starts under the stern tutelage of his mentor Robert Schumann. Gardiner proves a peerless architect, with the sort of eagle's-eye view of this work — it's natural peaks and valleys, its pivotal moments of drama — that suggests a lifetime of study. The sound of the recording itself is both bright and burnished, with a pleasing tone that occasionally edges into slight steeliness. Overall, this is the kind of recording one is grateful to have waited for: a thoughtful and singular take on a behemoth of the repertory.

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#15 An indie-rap milestone from an undisputed golden age for the genre

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  The Visualz Anthology by Siah & Yeshua dapoED

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  The New York hip-hop duo Siah and Yeshua DapoED represent a sort of secret handshake amongst heads, and their 1996 EP, The Visualz, has attained near holy-grail status. It had all the ingredients necessary to generate a tiny-yet-fervent cult: it is tantalizingly short yet fully-formed, and long out-of-print. It doesn’t hurt that it came out on Fondle ‘Em Records, which could probably fix the subprime mortgage crisis if “indie cred” were money. (Oh, and did I mention that it was vinyl-only? Also, it was pressed from Rakim’s tears.)
  
  Now, Traffic, in a supreme act of generosity, has expanded and reissued the original EP, including follow-up 12” tracks recorded in 1998 and live radio freestyles. The resulting full-length, dubbed The Visualz Anthology, is almost ludicrously refreshing to a parched rap throat in 2008. Siah and Yeshua DapoED rap small novels in each song, packing more internal rhyme and wordplay into single verses than most rappers manage in whole careers. “The Head Bop” and “The Victim of My Own Imagination” are the upfront dazzlers, pure showcases for giddy virtuosity. “A Day Like Any Other,” however, is the centerpiece and maybe their most enduring achievement: an 11-minute narrative opus that never flags in momentum, packed with finely observed details and compelling right up through its last seconds. An indie-rap milestone from an undisputed golden age for the genre.

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#14 Shapeshifting pop music, beguiling and mysterious

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  Santogold by Santogold Pick

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  Santogold has a storied industry pedigree — she worked in A&R for a major label; helped write and produce an ambitious pop soul album by Res; and sang (as a no-name, no less) on a big collection of covers by Mark Ronson — but the savviest of her many charms is the way she sounds a bit strange, clumsy and even awkward on her solo debut. That’s not a knock against her; it just goes to show how much Santogold changes shape and how little she can be sized up as an obvious heir to M.I.A. Certainly songs like “Creator” pick up on M.I.A.’s beloved stomp-and-toast vocals and polyglot sci-fi world sound, but just as much of Santogold swings at hooky reggae, gothy balladry and even snappy indie-rock.
  
  “L.E.S. Artistes” makes the moody range known from the start, with smeared guitars and vocal moves straight out of mid-tempo Yeah Yeah Yeahs before “You’ll Find a Way” wanders into sharp, sawing reggae of the kind reconfigured by the Clash. That’s just in the span of two songs, and swerves of the sort are standard. Graced by the odder quirks of Santogold’s nasal voice, “Say Aha” suggests M.I.A. fronting a gypsy-rock band like Gogol Bordello. Which, of course, has nothing to do with the affecting Siouxsie & the Banshees-like sulk of “My Superman” or the homey indie-rock crunch of “Lights Out.”
  
  Or does it? The one main drawback of Santogold is how little it communicates a clear sense of identity that might be carried over into a career. But then, it does an awfully good job of making the question of what comes next a fun one to mull.

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#13 One of the year's most anticipated does not disappoint one bit

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  Microcastle by Deerhunter Pick

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  Deerhunter are either one of the toughest ambient bands or one of the most ambient tough bands you will ever come across; the difference hardly matters, because the group is so good at being both. After their gritty breakthrough in 2007 with Cryptograms and the wild charge of Deerhunter's increasingly storied live shows, the initial hush and softness of Microcastle might come as a surprise. In "Agoraphobia," Bradford Cox sings softly over guitars that ring and chime almost like R.E.M. This being Deerhunter, though, that mood proves deceiving; the ring quickly takes on sinister tones and Cox gets to singing, with an eerie stoic desperation, "I had a dream no longer to be free/ I want only to see four walls made of concrete."
  
  There's a lot of fantasizing about freedom and constraint here, both in the lyrics and in the strangely nervy take on shoegaze that Deerhunter have made their métier. "Little Kids" offers a comely melody that builds and builds into a vaporous din, and "Nothing Ever Happened" (one the best songs of this year, by far) launches into a raucous motorik krautrock jam, sending out frayed signals of hooks in glimmers. On the whole, Microcastle proves more of a moaning koan than might have been expected, but the intensity starts to bear out with repeated listens, yielding plenty of opportunities to get haunted

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#12 Art rock that swoops and soars

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  Rook by Shearwater Pick

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  The Eels song “I Like Birds” could’ve been written about Shearwater’s Jonathan Meiburg. This Austin, Texas frontman is a graduate student in ornithology, has named the band he started with Okkervil River’s Will Sheff after a seabird, and has titled Shearwater’s fifth album after a European crow. It’s nearly impossible to think of Shearwater’s intimate, emotional music — in particular, Meiburg’s seemingly airborne tenor — without such words as soaring, swooping or sailing. Both the quartet and its singer seem to be, like the winged life with which they’re clearly obsessed, on the verge of defying gravity.
  
  Meiburg’s no longer an Okkervil River member, and unlike previous Shearwater albums, Rook does without Sheff's contributions. This is as it should be: Meiburg's found himself as Shearwater’s guiding force and focus. His wafting vocal performance here and the fluttering arrangements gliding around it transcend Shearwater’s initial side project status as a repository for Meiburg and Sheff's quiet songs. As the grinding midsection of opening cut "On the Death of the Waters" makes clear, Rook gets quite loud in parts. With its lopsided rhythms, multiple distorted guitars, and enraged Meiburg vocal, "Century Eyes" is unabashed post-punk.
  
  These brief excursions in clanging fury heighten the hushed beauty of Rook’s fragile bulk. The band’s austere presence on muted guitars, keyboards, and percussion is magnified by strings, woodwinds and horns that maximize Meiburg’s poised sense of dynamics and drama as the instrumentation rises and falls in support of his keening cry. In "I Was a Cloud," the seemingly aerial accompaniment hovers as the singer lovingly contemplates a sparrow. This would be ridiculous if it wasn’t done with such disarming, heartfelt care.

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#11 A hazy, opaquely beautiful album of sighs and drones

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  Dragging A Dead Deer Up A Hill by Grouper Pick

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  When musicians rely heavily on reverb, it usually ends up coming off one of two ways: as a mask to hide their own musical shortcomings or a controlled aesthetic choice that changes the ordinary into something spectacular. Dragging a Dead Deer Up a Hill is a remarkable example of the latter. Grouper albums typically come cloaked in a certain amount of transformative ugliness: elegance and production clarity are sacrificed to create a deliberately ethereal voice. With each release under her Grouper moniker, Liz Harris has expanded her range as both a singer/songwriter and a sound artist. With Dragging, conventional approaches — vocal melodies, traditional instrumentation — that were previously and consciously submerged have been allowed to surface.
  
  Which goes a long way to explain why Dragging is the most focused and accessible Grouper outing to date. The major difference is simple: guitar and vocals, while still draped in effects, are clearer and more upfront. Harris’s new, less opaque methods (most successful on "Heavy Water / I'd Rather Be Sleeping") let the perfect amount of light shine through the trees. There is a dark forest of sound here, but not much to be afraid of. These breathy, ghostly incantations over repetitive acoustic strumming provide a secure map of the terrain with mostly coherent lyrics and distinguishable song structures, while the remaining songs veer off course just enough to keep things interesting. The title track is swaddled in delay and detuned electric guitar, and on "Wind and Snow" the composition drifts into an almost complete wash of feedback and soft focus. Start-to-finish, Dragging a Dead Deer manages to dodge any kind of simple classification: Dark folk? Ambient? Experimental? Yes, no and always — in the best possible way.

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#10 A friendly and catchy pop record

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  We Brave Bee Stings and All by Thao Pick

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  Thao Nguyen's We Brave Bee Stings and All is an astonishing mash of herky-jerked D.C. punk and Olympia-style folk. Thao, an Asian woman whose voice sounds like that of a young man, favors an acoustic guitar, a vaguely rootsy take on literate indie-rock in the vein of Smart Went Crazy and other nerdy in a brawny kinda way bands of that ilk. "Beat (Health, Life, and Fire)" is the best song here — and an early fave for song of the year. Over upper-fret hummingbird-strums Nguyen sings, "Beat my chest/ Beat the ones who love me the best/ Oh, how could they be liars/ They assured me health, life and fire" with a slight Bjork lilt, her voice breaking bread with a country twang. The song is ridiculously catchy and propulsive, and it's about as close to a must-download as there can be. Elsewhere, We Brave does not let up. "Swimming Pools" is super-cute and catchy (imagine Kimya Dawson all grown'd up) and "Big Kid Table" is mega-cute and loveable. Don't overlook this one.

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#9 Scots on the rocks

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  The Midnight Organ Fight by Frightened Rabbit Pick

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  With Interpol/National producer Peter Katis behind the boards, the second album from this Glasgow trio comes invested with its share of high drama. But singer Scott Hutchison, who founded the band with his brother, Grant, prefers directness to theatricality. Overwhelming as some of the album’s lyrics can be, he assured in a recent interview that they’re “not at all metaphorical,” including the one where he contemplates throwing himself off a bridge.
  
  Like their Edinburgh countrymen Idlewild, Frightened Rabbit aren’t afraid to let a dynamic build slowly. “My Backwards Walk” simmers for nearly three minutes before the drums kick in, pitting an anxious strummed guitar against an undulating wash of one-finger piano and gently lapping accordion. Occasionally, as on the somber sea shanty “Who’d You Kill Now,” the band harks back to the more shambling and eclectic sounds of their 2006 debut, Sing the Greys, which was essentially a collection of spruced-up demos. But for the most part, Frightened Rabbit are confident in their insecurities, with Scott Hutchison’s quavering voice fighting through the haze, riding the waves and coming home safe.

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#8 An epic collection of failed romances

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  You & Me by The Walkmen Pick

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  The Walkmen can't stop apologizing. Makeup-covered bruises, lipstick on the collar, slivers of broken glass underneath the refrigerator, a glance that elicits an immediate flinch — this is the destruction they have wrought. But never again. Now, apologies and promises. Promises that won't be kept, certainly, and vocalizations of half-hopes, things intended but doomed, and everyone knows it. Everyone, including you & me.
  
  They're trying, though. They're trying real hard. "Last Christmas was black and blue/ but this year is white," they sing. "You know I'd never leave you/ no matter how hard I'd try/ You know I'd never leave you/ that's just how it is," they protest, and you know it's true but it'd be better if it weren't.
  
  Even when things have fallen apart, the last straw left on a stranger's nightstand, there is still the hope of no expectations. "I'm still living/ at the old address/ and I'm waiting on the weather/ and I know at last/ I know that it's true/ it's going to be a good year," and then an organ pierces like an implosion, its gait wobbly, its rhythm untrue. The guitars clang, the drums do this halting pause ("is it really ... you?"), the organ violent in its urgency. "Out of the darkness/ and into the fire," they scream.
  
  There are forty acres and a mule. "We'll move away/ We'll buy us some land/ build us some homes/ and no more will we stray," they plead. There's honesty in their dishonesty. Failing, tactics shift, façades go missing: "Take me tonight as I am/ Leave me the way I was found," just anything. Anything anything anything. I'll read Manhattan Transfer to you by shaded light and we can laugh at those fools, chasing what? What can those suckers hope to find?
  
  Pretend Ralph Kramden awoke with a conscience. "You keep replaying the days/ that brought you to this place." Convincing themselves they feel good about the bad decisions. Pretending they've known all along they weren't mistakes. The tightness in the corners of their mouths slackening a little, wanting it to be true so badly that they physically feel it. "What happened to you/ What happened to you/ What happened to you" they mourn, but for whom do they cry? You, or me?
  
  It ends with escape. "My dream ain't through/ And when I've had enough/ then I'll die in dreams of you." A road, headlights, pledges of better days from the double-yellows, defiance at the past, never forgotten.

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#7 Dug last year's Tinariwen record? You'll like this even more

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  Akh issudar by Terakaft Pick

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  The Touareg blues, as Terakaft calls it — others have dubbed it desert blues, which rolls off the tongue a bit easier — sounds remarkably like American country music. The conscious twang of the electric guitars — and there are lots of guitars, always played clean (no distortion, no reverb) — combined with the stuttered, Arab gait reminds me of a distant cousin to the gorgeous bluegrass ballads that crossed over to become country music. This isn't to say that you could blast this on the PA before a Toby Keith concert, but in terms of Western music, country makes for a far closer corollary than, say, rock & roll.
  
  Akh issudar is, by coffeehouse "world music" standards, an extremely forceful, even aggressive, album. By any other standard, though, the album is introspective and meditative; "Amidine wa dagh nohar timtar" feels like it's submerged in water, its soft, palm-mute rhythm and drifting chords the soft ripples of a languid afternoon in paradise. And "Tenere wer tat zinchegh," the song that first drew me in, has a hyper-confident strut, but in a very contemplative way. If it's possible to be boastful about the soundness of one's mental state, this is it.
  
  Terakaft are led by Kedou ag Ossad, baby brother to Tinariwen's leader Inteyeden, and a onetime member of Tinariwen as well. The differences between the two groups aren't immediately apparent to these Western ears — I'm sure to someone in Algeria, that's like saying the Beatles and Stones were identical — but I can say that "Djer aman," for instance, moves me in a way that even Tinariwen's excellent catalogue cannot. Last year's Aman Iman was an excellent introduction to desert blues; here's some incredible further listening.

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#6 A beautiful, stunning soul record from an unlikely source

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  For Emma, Forever Ago by Bon Iver Pick

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  After splitting with his former band (DeYarmond Edison, who, after relocating to North Carolina, reformed as Megafaun), Justin Vernon holed up in a remote Wisconsin hunting cabin for four frigid months, recording the tracks that would later comprise For Emma, Forever Ago, his haunting debut as Bon Iver. For Emma was self-released by Vernon in 2007 before being picked up by Jagjaguwar in 2008, and while the record may now be an official, bar-coded release, it still feels more like buried treasure, caked with dirt and full of secrets.
  
  Vernon’s high, lonesome yowls are multi-tracked over (mostly) spare acoustic strums; unsurprisingly, Vernon’s guitar feels secondary to his vocals, which are pretty and threatening, primed-to-pierce icicles dangling from a rooftop. Tracks like “Skinny Love” — which, like most of For Emma, sees Vernon lowing about failed relationships — feel distinctly cautionary, with Vernon earnestly admonishing his listeners to be patient, fine, balanced, kind. For Emma is packed with these sorts of tiny lessons and Vernon’s spooky, otherworldly instrumentation only cements the celestial vibe — the cumulative effect is enough to make you momentarily consider camping out in an ice-crusted hut for a long winter, just to see what you can learn about life.

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#5 Indian jazz and classical musicians tackle Miles Davis

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  Miles From India by Various Artists - Four Quarters Records Pick

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  Mixing the music of jazz icon Miles Davis with sounds and instruments from India, as producers Bob Belden and Yusuf Gandhi did on Miles from India, was far from an outrageous proposition. Davis set the precedent himself — not only with his use of Indian players like the tabla virtuoso Badal Roy in sessions issued on albums like Big Fun and Get Up with It, but also with his sinuous modal compositions stretching back to 1959's epochal Kind of Blue and continuing through his electric period of the '70s.
  
  Belden, who masterminded the long series of Davis box sets issued by Sony, knows the trumpeter's back pages better than anyone. Together with Gandhi, he arranged a globe-spanning series of sessions that mixed the cream of India's impressive upstart jazz scene with an unprecedented cadre of Davis sidemen spanning the leader's greatest decades: Kind of Blue drummer Jimmy Cobb; bassist Ron Carter from the second great quintet of the late '60s; electric-era sidemen like Chick Corea, John McLaughlin, Pete Cosey and Michael Henderson; and '80s collaborators including Marcus Miller and Mike Stern.
  
  What makes Miles from India so endlessly compelling is its complete avoidance of easy cultural appropriation. Instead, this is a true meeting of minds and cultures, pointing out connections that were always latent in this much-explored canon. Listen, for example, to trumpeter Wallace Roney's sublime Davis evocations in the opening track, "Spanish Key," and compare the vocalized contours of his lines to the spirited singing of Shankar Mahadevan. A common spirit could hardly be more evident.
  
  In that same track, Indian-American alto saxophonist Rudresh Mahanthappa offers an even more organic integration of two seemingly disparate traditions, while Davis alum Dave Liebman sets aside his saxophones to offer a sublime improvisation on Indian flute. So it goes throughout this endlessly fascinating set. More than simply a new look at Davis's towering achievements, Miles from India provides compelling evidence of jazz's endless capacity for growth and revitalization through an influx of strong personalities, found both on the corner and around the world.

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#4 A must-hear survey of Nigeria at its most rhythmically exuberant

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  Nigeria Special: Modern Highlife, Afro-sounds & Nigerian Blues 1970-76 by Various Artists Pick

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  Some compilations that highlight a particular sound during a particular time follow a straight line. But when that time and place is as relatively under-documented as early ’70s Nigerian pop, such tidiness isn’t so necessary — it’s enough to just crack the door and to keep it open for an enticing while. That’s why Nigeria Special, a brilliant two-hour tour through a musical world that ranged far more widely than even a serious fan of this era and place might have been aware, is such a triumph. Covering the period just after the Biafran War (1967-70) had ended, Nigeria Special concentrates on the region’s late highlife and the post-Fela Kuti fallout of Afrobeat — Kuti was an exemplar of the style, but by no means the sole model of success. If that means the collection’s focus blurs a little, that’s more than made up for the sheer breadth, range and intrigue on display here.
  
  Many of Nigeria Special’s cuts are so juicy it’s impossible to believe they’ve never been made available outside of Nigeria before. The Funkees’ “Akula Owu Onyeara” — originally released in two parts, and edited together here for the first time — works like Fela at his most rhythmically sinuous; the simple keyboard figures could be Morse Code signal for uncut funk, and it has one of the most perfect endings you’ll ever hear. George Akaeze & His Augmented Hits’ “Business Before Pleasure” is delectably light-footed Afrobeat with laconic chants and jazzy horns so friendly they belie the title: this is business as pleasure. The nonstop forward motion of the Semi Colon’s “Nekwaha Semi Colon” is formally disco — the hi-hat/kick-drum pattern points right at it — but it’s so hypnotic it seems rooted in something far older (and more intrinsically Nigerian). The highlife tracks are equally hot: St. Augustine & His Rovers Dance Band’s “Onwu Ama Dike” is made even lovelier by its slightly messy rhythmic feel, not to mention the semi-sweet horn line.
  
  Compiler Miles Cleret claims that there are thousands more such goodies that have just been sitting in Nigeria waiting to be rediscovered. The 26 included here are such a pleasure to listen to that, for anyone who loves them, they could inspire fantasies of booking a flight to Lagos and starting a treasure hunt of one’s own.

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#3 A forgotten folk-rock classic from the era of Dylan, Hendrix and the Beatles

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  Cold Fact by Rodriguez Pick

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  History is a funny thing. While for us in the States the pinnacle of '60s music remains Bob Dylan, the Beatles and Jimi Hendrix, it's not necessarily so elsewhere. A Hispanic Detroit folk-rock singer by the name of Sixtoo (Sees-toe) Rodriguez might be the best example of such mutability. The album Rodriguez cut with guitarist Dennis Coffey (he of "Scorpio" fame), Cold Fact, was received with indifference stateside, yet inexplicably crossed oceans to become a smash hit in Australia and South Africa (even going platinum in the midst of Apartheid). In those countries, Rodriguez verges on legend, a songwriter who contains the sneer and outrage of Dylan, the folk lyricism of Donovan and the rhythmic sensibility of fellow Detroit resident Marvin Gaye (he even has a song called "Inner City Blues"). As Cold Fact makes abundantly clear, while his voice does contain such strands of these icons, Sixtoo stands as his own man. He's gritty and hard-nosed on "Hate Street Dialogue," sly, macho, and slightly possessive on "I Wonder." Opener "Sugar Man" is retroactively considered a dusty-fingered classic of soul/ rock, so that you wonder how history might have been rewritten.

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#2 We are sure of this: Deastro will be a star

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  Keeper's by Deastro Pick

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  The 22-year-old Randolph Chabot is Deastro, a one-man machine synthesizing Death Cab for Cutie, M83, LCD Soundsystem and other future-rock practitioners into a glitzy world overflowing with regret. Keeper's' ten songs are culled from demos and home recordings Chabot pieced together in his parents' basement, a land decidedly far from the dance floors and neon-lit city streets of his music, a place where his bald yearning and incredible talents find no boundaries, a place where he still lives. Like any dreamer, Chabot's imagined world is infinitely better than the one where he resides, "a place where I am free," as he sings in "The Goodman of the House." After learning more and more of his life, I can't help but to think of Chabot as Bastion of The Neverending Story, a young man subtly shifting from spectator to hero in a world of his own creation.
  
  And make no mistake: Keeper's is wholly Chabot's. Certainly M83 has influenced the cut of Chabot's jib, and his voice unmistakably shares qualities with that of Ben Gibbard. But the crisp, sparkling environs of Keeper's come from one young man, and one man alone. Chabot has no other collaborators, and his songs — even with their swooping electronics, enormous guitars and startling self-assurance — ring with a vulnerability that can only come from a belief that no one would ever hear them. Sure, they are about love and longing — universal inspirations — but they are also acutely idiosyncratic, the product of an imagination that has yet to meet an obstacle it can't thwart.
  
  "The Shaded Forests," the album's amazingly pop track (if someone told you this was the new Killers single, you wouldn't blink), is built around the following lyric: "When the wolf lays down to marry the lamb/ He'll lay down his fangs, he'll lay down his plans/ I told you, we're gonna be fine/ I t-t-t-t-told you, we're taking our time" (that last stuttering revealing a bit of Ric Ocasek in our boy), as if he's Hansel telling Gretel to hang in there, we ain't no cake, yet.
  
  Spiraling out from "The Shaded Forests" — and "spiral" is the perfect word for the towering, Autobahn tones of "Michael the Lone Archer of the North Shore" and the spaghetti sci-fi instrumental "Light Powered" — the album's heart rate ebbs, songs like "The Green Harbor" and "The Floating Cradle" emotionally naked and fragile: in the latter, Chabot's self-harmonizing falsetto beckons like a Greek siren. And then there's the cathartic "Leah's Daughter the Giraffe," strings plucking while Chabot gorgeously coos "Oooooh/ The difference is your… eyes."
  
  It bears repeating: Randolph Chabot is only 22-years-old. Music like this doesn't just happen, especially not when only one person is involved. That wunderkind word used at the beginning of this review was carefully weighed, and we stand by it. To return to the fairy tale idea, this could absolutely be one. Except fairy tales end, and for Randolph, this is merely the beginning.

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#1 Because they are destined for greatness

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  The '59 Sound by The Gaslight Anthem Pick

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  With all due respect to Springsteen-loving outfits such as the Hold Steady and Arcade Fire, the Boss already has some local boys who seem to have the apprenticeship locked down tight. The members of New Brunswick, N.J.’s the Gaslight Anthem are young and hungry, earnest to a fault and apparently very eager to impress upon us their warped-cassette copies of Born In The USA: “No surrender, my Bobby Jean,” sings frontman Brian Fallon on the band’s second full-length, economically fitting together his Springsteen references like Tetris blocks. So it’s no surprise that The ’59 Sound is filled with songs about working-class heroes and hard-luck teenagers cruising around in the backseats of cars and washing away sin with cheap whiskey and beer. The shocker is that the Gaslight Anthem has taken these well-worn Jersey-rebel themes and revived them through the sheer power of youth.
  
  Opening with the crackling speaker noise of a needle hitting vinyl, The ’59 Sound echoes all around the ragged-rock corners of a record collection. It particularly tends to linger in mid-period Replacements (circa Tim and Pleased To Meet Me) on “Casanova, Baby!” and the title track, with Fallon nailing the raspy anxiety of Paul Westerberg and small-town malcontents everywhere. Guitarist Alex Levine alternately chugs and chimes, never settling too deep into Social Distortion-style punk riffing or Tom Petty pop jangle, resulting in songs that are more durable than derivative. Even those who would scoff at Fallon cribbing song titles from movies (the single-gal lament “Even Cowgirls Get The Blues,” the ex-girlfriend weeper “Here’s Looking At You, Kid”) have to admit it’s kind of endearing. The Gaslight Anthem is trying too hard in all the right ways.

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