#1: ARCADE FIRE - 'The Suburbs'

All right, so this feature has really come to get the better of me, and I'm in a bit of a hurry, 'cause I'm headed out drinking soon, and southbound tomorrow for the remainder of the year, and it's probably visible from my writing that I haven't really enjoyed doing the last few posts. Not enjoyed it near as much as I have enjoyed the albums themselves, anyway.


Enough about that, here it is, the #1 album released this year, in my humble and subjective opinion. It's quite an obvious choice, you'd say, but it isn't. For as many skinny jeans I've worn, and as many Roskilde Festivals I've attended, I was never completely convinced about Arcade Fire. Well, maybe I was convinced, I knew they were a bloody astonishing band, but actually listening to it much wasn't really my thing.


With The Suburbs, things have changed. The band still employs the same overt melodrama, and for a band that has been always been a bit on the heavy-duty side, a concept album about something as serious as American suburbia might seem a daunting task. But Arcade Fire have lightened their grip on theatricality here. You just need to get a few tunes into it, to get a grasp on what this album is about. Win Butler is through every a register on this epic piece of work. At times, he sounds like an old, scarred man, reflecting on his past, and at times he sounds like exactly the youthful, daydreaming adolescent he must have been himself. That's on 'Ready To Start' for example, which is one of the strongest tracks on the album.


I find it very hard to point out exactly what makes The Suburbs much easier to devour than the band's two previous (genius) albums. I guess the right adjective would be light-footedness. Even some of the more dead serious tracks such as the magnificent 'Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains)' and 'City With No Children' seem to jump along in a pleasant way, while of course not losing their vital pathos. A lot of this is courtesy of the band including more synthesizers into their machine park.


It wouldn't be fair to mention this album without highlighting its lyrical content. I'm still only scraping the surface of it, but I am very intrigued by the entire concept, and by the very elegant way Butler and his gang have come around it. The Suburbs has a strong theme that recurs throughout, but never in a tiresome way, and suburbia itself is such a perpetual subject. Butler's observations are very sharp, and there are numerous impressive lyrical passages scattered about on the album, that it would take up too much room to mention them here.


And there are just so many highlights in general. There is the above mentioned 'Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains', not to mention its lesser cousin, 'Sprawl I (Flatland)', which is the suburbia-theme at its most intimate and climactic. Then there's the frantic 'Empty Room', the chillingly emotional 'We Used To Wait', the grand 'Half Light II (No Celebration)', and the gritty 'Month of May'. There's so much to this album, and it's only just begun to creep up on me, which is why it's the year's number 1...

#2: FOALS - 'Total Life Forever'

Total Life Forever opens up on its toe-tips, with skinny guitars, just as we knew them from Antidotes. It seems to not really know whether to shit to or wind its watch, but from around 0:45, a low drum starts to accompany Yannis Philippakis' vulnerable croon, and after only a minute and a half, the album has already moved from balancing on the edge of sound and silence, to the absolutely merciless bass-line of opener 'Blue Blood'. This tune, even though it takes a few listens to grasp its skew-whiff beauty, is one of the key tracks on Total Life Forever, as it joins together many of the traits of Foals old and new.


Foals old was, as I mentioned above, an abundance of skinny guitars and Philippakis' often slightly nonsensical yelping. It was pretty good, but on this their second full-length album, the Oxford outfit expand in every direction - Total Life Forever is leagues above Antidotes in texture, in depth, in grandeur and in intimacy. Philippakis even sings now!


I am an absolute sucker for albums that evolve along the line in some way or another, and Total Life Forever is a great example of such an album. The opening threesome is pretty accessible, and builds on the sound, sentiment and instrumentalization Foals brought to the table when they emerged a few years ago, and the rhythm section again impresses on the title track, 'Total Life Forever', which just rips in every a muscle to groove with it. But at track five, the soaring 'Spanish Sahara', that's where Foals really elevate their game to the absolute upper echelon of art rock. This song, along with its epic brother 'After Glow', the kind of tune that just cannot be heard too loud, are the true rubies on an album of many diamonds, and they share a pathos that dwarfs almost everything this side of Sigur Rós. The band fuses a lot of electronics with their trademark guitars on the latter part of the record, which enables them to become much more intimate, on tunes such as 'Alabaster' and '2 Trees'. Indeed, the album closes out in a pretty distant, more ethereal corner than it kicked off, but at no point does it loose its footing or become schizo.


This is really, impressively the sound of a band matured, a sound expanded but not by any means hollowed out or compromised. It's also really a slow-burner, and an album that definitely comes through for you only when you have the time and peace to listen to it alone, in your headphones. But the newfound patience and thoughtfulness suits the band well, and with Total Life Forever, Foals have skipped several steps of evolution to create a vivid joyride of a record abundant with striking musical wit.

#3: THE RADIO DEPT. - 'Clinging To A Scheme'

For all the avant-garde music there is around, for all that Animal Collective or Sufjan Stevens or Björk have ever done, it's ever so refreshing when a band once in a while shows up and doesn't need to wear neon-coloured costumes to get attention. As many guts as it takes to push the limits and invent new wheels all the time, in a way, it takes loads more guts to not.


Through the above scope, Clinging To A Scheme is the perfect title for Swedish indie outfit The Radio Dept.'s third full-lengther. It's pretty hard to put your finger on exactly what it is that these guys do so spotlessly. I guess you get a clue when listening to the blissful opener 'Domestic Scene', which picks up pace from its discreet, throbbing bass, and then segues into the album's key track, 'Heaven's On Fire'. Shimmering pianos and heavy percussion drives this intensely life-affirming track forwards. Another highlight is the downbeat, swerving 'Never Follow Suit'.


But, as is often the case, it's pretty hard to talk about particularly strong or weak tracks here. Clinging To A Scheme, perhaps more than any of the other albums on my list, is about a certain mood that envelops all the tunes on this 35 minutes short journey through misty, indie-electro euphony. It's the haziness, the scintillating and self-confident understated wit, and the blissful timbres that can only be conceived in the long days and nights of somewhere northerly. It's how 'The Video Dept.' becomes 'Memory Loss' which becomes 'David'. The sudden rant at the opening of 'Heaven's On Fire' is somewhat juxtaposed to The Radio Dept.'s submerged, but sometimes almost excitatory harmonics. It's like Kings of Convenience and Delorean having a kid together, and in all honesty, that is pretty avant-garde.


This is such a low-key album, but what lacks in apparent great gestures, is richly found in all those little things that make shoegaze matter, right through to the tear-jerking closer, 'You've Stopped Making Sense'. And which album would be a better fit for quote as strong and matter-of-factly as when Johan Duncanson exclaims:

When I look at you,

Heaven's on fire. 

#4: SUFJAN STEVENS - 'The Age of Adz'

If you look up Sufjan Stevens on Wikipedia, you see a picture of an otherwise pretty plain-looking dude with a pair of massive, colored wings on his back. That's how strange he is. It's a bit more than a year ago, that I first heard Stevens' masterpiece, the Illinois-album of 2005, on our campervan stereo heading for the great, red unknown. If you had told me back then, that Stevens would release a new album in late 2010, which would jump in at #4 on my end-of-year list, I would have giggled.


Okay, Stevens has moved massively in my direction on The Age of Adz. First of all, he's experimenting heavily with electronic sounds and blips, and secondly his lyrics are now about his own emotions, rather than historic fables from the Mid-North. But still, this album is an instant winner. Heck, I played a few of the tunes for my dad the other day, and he dug it instantly - that's pretty awesome!


The difference between madness and brilliance is often pretty slim, and Stevens is perfect proof, although one should not be in any doubt that he crystal clearly leans towards the latter. The arrangements on The Age of Adz are often so eargasmic, so textured and masterfully produced that any muso would wet him/herself. I love how some of the tunes, such as 'Age of Adz' itself, start out in one direction, and end in an entirely other direction. Or how about the incomparable, 25-minute closer 'Impossible Soul', which on the surface may consist of several different movements, but, if you dig a bit deeper, is really an extraordinarily schizoid, masterful whole, iced by a a massively inspiring choir of enthusiastic voices.


But what really sends The Age of Adz skywards is Stevens' ability to suddenly become very intimate. As I mentioned before, I'm really a sucker for artists that are able to beautifully describe their emotions and innermost feelings (For Emma, Forever Ago didn't become my benchmark album for nothing), and on tunes like 'I Walked' and the excellent 'Vesuvius', Stevens really gets down to the nitty-gritty. Of course there are lesser tracks around the middle of the album, but when Stevens hits home, he does so with incredible wit, and his remarkable ability to turn almost strikingly kitsch sounds into magnificent and wickedly intricate soundscapes makes The Age of Adz an enthralling experience!


By the way, I've been a bit busier this week than I expected (but in a pretty awesome way, really), and I also managed to be a shmuck and forget the power cord for my computer at my parents', so I'm a bit behind schedule on my countdown, meaning that you're gonna have to wait it out a bit for the top 3 on the list - it's gonna be out between chrissy and new years!

#5: DELPHIC - 'Acolyte'

We all return to change.

We all have time to change.

We swim against the tide,

look back into the past.

We all do anything.

We live in unconditional change.

That's a bloody relevant way to start one of the most unfashionable yet brilliant records of 2010! For Delphic, 2010 has been a year of pretty widespread press ignorance, especially on the wry side of the Atlantic, being far from many end-of-year lists. In this way, Acolyte, the Manchester outfit's debut album, is a key descriptor of the late '00's shift in indie trends, towards the American-dominated sounds of lo-fi, folk and chillwave. British indie, meanwhile, has been stuck in a hell of a rut. Post new-rave and garage-revival, UK indie and alternative acts have been perplexed as to where to head, and as a result, very few British albums of 2009 and 2010 will probably become legendary (forget The xx for a moment, will ya?). Pitchfork rules the world, and the more navel-gazing the music, the better.

So, Delphic hasn't exactly been the critics' choice. Rock with synthesizers just isn't as hot as guys with beards playing acoustic guitars, and perhaps it never really has been the shizzle this century, at least outside of Denmark, where bands like VETO, Spleen United and Turboweekend have been among the most prominent of the country's sudden surge in independent music.

But how can you resist? When 'Clarion Call' kicks off in a massive crescendo at 1:26, how can you not be drumming your fists into thin air? How can you help nodding along to 'This Momentary''s insistent, four-on-the-floor beats and chanting, haunting vocals? How can you ignore the brilliance of the pivotal track, 'Acolyte' itself, which surges like a tsunami again and again, and clusterbombs you with swooning, rapturous synthesizers? Or when the album fades away with 'Remain', a post-crescendoic blissful nirvana?

Wearing its Haç-heritage pretty visibly on its sleeves seems to often override the fact that Acolyte really isn't exactly the floor filler it's often proclaimed to be. I see it more as a listening record, and while being sometimes slightly characterless; it cleverly manages the oft-attempted fusion of rock and electro, avoiding most of the pitfalls. So Pitchfork gave it a 5.0 grade? I bloody hell couldn't care less - this is one of the most menacingly intense and engrossing albums of 2010!

Why not swim against the tide, as the opening stanza states, we live in unconditional change anyway?

#6: BROKEN BELLS - 'Broken Bells'

I guess few doubted that this would be one of the year's most interesting debuts. Put together a producer, who can turn manure into diamonds, and one of the most expressive voices in indie, and you've got a masterful tune like 'The High Road'. Way too many good producers, and musical geniuses in general, spend way too much time creating stuff inaccessible to all but the crookedest minds and the most devout listeners, but as Broken Bells, James Mercer and the mighty Mouse have created an album that is an enjoyable listen through and through.


Alright, 'The High Road' is the absolute highlight, being perhaps one of the most well-written songs released all year, but all over Broken Bells, Mercer's wistful voice and Danger Mouse's divine production and harmonics turn relatively simple music into one of the best records of the year. I find it very refreshing, in a year and in an era where to be off-kilter at times seems more normal than anything else, two of indie's top dawgs create an album, which, speaking of genres, is utterly middle of the road, but is so with such finesse and skill.


It's the arrangement and the layers that lift the record, such as on the schizoid 'Your Head Is On Fire', and the album in its entirety is just such a dynamic, gentle listen. Not in the bland, under-the-radar kind of way, but as 37 minutes of easy euphony. That's what happens when geniuses get together and do their thing. It's got none of the typical debut albums insecure fickle, although its probably also irrelevant to speak of faddy in the case of musicians so battle tested as these two, but I do find it impressive, that their vastly different backgrounds come together so hand-in-glovely. Take the swooning 'Citizen' for example - it sounds like a band that's been around for ages and ages. The album is full of hidden gems, such as the stunning 'Mongrel Heart' and the head-nodding 'October', that I guess ultimately couldn't be the work of anything but one of the most prominent producers on the planet.

#7: JÓNSI - 'Go'

Jón Þór Birgisson must be one of the most interesting musicians that have been around through the aughties. He catapulted to fame with Sigur Rós' pretty inaccessible and abstract music, and now he's on his own, proving that he was indeed the force behind the Icelanders' rise to post-rock stardom. His debut album Go continues in the same direction as Sigur Rós went on their last album, Með suð í eyrum við spilum endalaust, but Jónsi confines his game somewhat. There are no lengthy, escapades such as 'Milano', 'Staralfur' or 'Untitled #8' from some of his previous albums with Sigur Rós, quite the contrary; all of the songs are crafted within the well-worn three-to-five minute template of contemporary music.


As opener 'Go Do' clearly indicates, gone are also the sometimes very melancholic and even dystopian soundscapes of some of Sigur Rós' work, replaced by a much brighter mood. The opener is a pretty simple, sparklingly instantaneous but not all too deep basher, but at track number two, 'Animal Arithmetic', the album takes off with the phenomenal harmonics that dominate throughout, impressively accompanying Jónsi's lung-collapsingly beautiful voice. The gingerly swirling and beautiful ballad 'Tornado' is another highlight, and many of the tunes on the album are in the same mold.


In fact, there are so many uplifting songs on this record, it's hard to know where to end and begin without having to highlight each and every tune, but a key one is 'Boy Lilikoi', with Samuli Kosminen's cascading drums and chirruping flutes. Some might find this album hysterically overjoyous, but who cares, when it's as beautiful as this? Still, 'Kolniður', which is the album's darkest and gravest track, is a pivotal finger in the soil midway through, as are the two closing tracks, both of which are more akin to the sound of the earlier stages of Jónsi's career.


Sure, Go doesn't reach the same dizzying heights, and doesn't have the sheer monolithic pathos and bombast of Sigur Rós at their finest, but this is just as good, and with the hard truth being that the most advanced music is also often the most confined and least accessible, Jónsi sacrifices his eminence in one field, only to prove his equal excellence in another.

#8: YEASAYER - 'Odd Blood'

A few quite left-field bands this year got a big break into the mainstream, and received general critical acclaim. Acts such as Vampire Weekend and Sufjan Stevens got airplay by media they wouldn't have dreamt about a few years ago. All right, VW's mainstream success was perhaps sort of a gimme, but who would have thought Yeasayer was another band to fit into this category? I just read Time Magazine's top 10 list of this year, and impressively, not only Yeasayer but also Sufjan is there, and that's by a publication that hasn't exactly got a track record of being on the forefront of the latest hot's and not's in music.


Odd Blood, Yeasayer's sophomore release, is recognizable, but still in some ways a quantum leap from the much more introvert, oriental-hinged debut All Hour Cymbals from 2007. There's much more beat and zest here, and it's at times indisputably catchy. How many days this fall have I had 'Mondegreen' relentlessly revolving in my head?


It kicks off in usual, enigmatic form with 'The Children', but the pair of 'Ambling Alp' and the larger-than-life 'Madder Red', the latter of which was later accompanied by one of the most interesting music videos this year, clearly mark a turn of events. Then there's "the hit", the instantly hummable 'O.N.E.', which has a thousand times more hit credibility than the standout tunes on All Hour Cymbals such as '2080' and 'No Need To Worry', and the amiable, Donkey Kong-reminiscent 'Rome', which is more zip-tight than the synthetic all-body suit of your generic 21st century jogger.


Yeasayer have often been heralded for being true craftsmen of sound, with their vast and clever employment of timbres and rhythms from a plethora of genres and parts of the world, and this influx of spices is still present on Odd Blood, although slightly less obvious than on its predecessor, and especially some of the more middle-of-the-road tunes, such as 'I Remember', seem to have been a bit boiled over in synthesizers. This is clearly a grasp for the mainstream, but in my opinion, Yeasayer manage to do so while still preserving their decisive, off-kilter appeal.

#9: SØREN HUSS - 'Troen & Ingen'

So, is it a testimony to 2010 being a pretty uninteresting year in Danish music, when my Danish album of the year is a sad rant by the singer of a has-been whine-rock band that was mainly a factor in Danish music before the important indie watershed years of 2004 and '05? It could be. That's if it wasn't for the excellence of this very album.


Søren Huss has always been a sympathetic bloke. Even if Saybia didn't exactly invent the wheel, then for his charisma and his gezellig, beaver-like look that was lumberjacky when Fleet Foxes were still in junior high. Now take this likeable but somewhat soft and sensitive dude, split up his troublesome and increasingly drug-addicted band and have his wife fatally run over by a car, and you've got the recipe for suicide... Or you've got the recipe for one of the most impressive and heartfelt comebacks I've ever seen. And we see so many comebacks these days. Musical antiquities that dust off their boots for one last bash to get some money to pay the rent. Huss does appear quite juxtaposed to those when you listen to his comeback album, his solo debut Troen & Ingen. In fact, you just have to listen to a tune like 'Fra Tanke Til...' once to realize he means this dead seriously.


It's one of the hardest things in the world, to write a credible album about a love lost, without ending up being so pathetic and letting your feelings dominate the music so much, that no-one wants to listen to your harangue anyway. If you take Huss' past musical accomplishments into consideration, it's quite impressive how much he's upped his game here. I mean, it's no For Emma, Forever Ago, but it certainly is far from as dreadfully whiney as this kind of album can be. In fact, it's a pretty masterful balancing on the knife's edge, as he doesn't fall into neither the boring nor the pitiable category, although at points he is within striking distance of both.


Musically and lyrically, Huss draws subtle but clear references to top bananas of Danish lore such as Sebastian and C.V. Jørgensen. There's a bit of a careen toward the middle of the album, but the latter half contains the three absolute highlights of the album; the hopeful 'Jeg Finder Vej', the escapadic 'Et Hav Af Udstrakte Hænder' and the almost tear-jerkingly beautiful closer 'Tak For Dansen', which rounds off a powerful and crucial record.

#10: LCD SOUNDSYSTEM - 'This Is Happening'

I remember when Sound of Silver came in 2007, a sharp critic labeled it as "the encyclopedic sound of an avid record collectors collection", with its multifaceted inspirations from deep and diverse corners of music new and old. If Sound of Silver was that, This Is Happening could be described as fittingly as the sound of a party at a seasoned, witty party maker's house. In lieu of that, This Is Happening probably has more in common with LCD Soundsystem's eponymous debut, than with the above-mentioned 2007 masterpiece (even if he doesn't need Daft Punk to amp the party anymore).


James Murphy was happening in 2010. He was here, there and everywhere, and even if his proclaimed swan song with LCD was perhaps somewhat of a promotional gimmick, This Is Happening does have an urgent feel to its zip-tight, potent soundscape. It lacks a bit of Sound of Silver's appropriate gingerliness and funky immediacy, but there's more muscle to This Is Happening, it's a much more in-your-face album. Above it all, Murphy still croons as the unlikely master of ceremonies, as the graying, chubby trendsetter eminence of dance punk. He's like the bee that isn't supposed to be flying but does so anyway. He's not supposed to be a brat, to be jumping and screaming like an 18-year-old, but here's the skinny: He's a godlike musician.


Murphy's lyrics are sardonic, witty and observant, and he's got this curious knack of making a song work for 8 minutes even if it doesn't evolve much. OK, some of the tunes on This Is Happening are indeed a bit too long, and do not work as well down the stretch as some of the tunes of similar length on Sound of Silver, which is ultimately one of the reasons why This Is Happening sits at #10 rather than at #5. But it is an impressive album, a power demonstration by the man who has ruled NYC since The Strokes wore out their leather-clad cool. Ironically, Murphy couldn't be farther from The Strokes, nor from the plethora of Brooklyn lo-fi rattle that's vying for attention these days.


Musically, the highlights are some of the shorter tunes, such as 'I Can Change', 'One Touch' (ouch, that actually couldn't possibly be construed as a "short tune", clocking in at 7:46, I guess it just feels as such), and tour-de-force 'Pow Pow' which is just strikingly beautiful in its own way, and perhaps the closest one will ever come to a generic LCD Soundsystem song.

The Idioteque's subjective albums of 2010 - notable mentions.

Cheers folks! 2010 is rapidly coming to a close, and end-of-year lists are popping up here, there and everywhere these days. A load of bullshit really, one could say, because music is such subjective matter, and once you've crossed out the obvious shit albums, there's still such an abundance of awesome and interesting music around. Heck, the other day I read the Danish albums of 2010-lists from the nation's two benchmark music publications, Gaffa and Soundvenue, and found that they agreed on none of their respective top four albums.


Anyway, before I kick off my own, subjective (even more subjective than all the others', 'cause its totally dictatorial), list, let me give a shout out to all the albums that won't be on my list, but that have contributed greatly to 2010 in music anyway! 


Primarily, there are the albums that were truly within striking distance of making the top 10, spearheaded by two domestic releases, The Kissaway Trail's Sleep Mountain and Treefight For Sunlight's A Collection of Vibrations For Your Skull. The latter even, surprisingly, but very impressively nonetheless, made it to the very top of Soundvenue's list. Even if it has been a sort of strange, or, dare I say, mediocre, year in Danish music, that's quite a feat for a debut album clocking in at just a snicker above thirty minutes in length. But really, it's hard to see who else could've filled the void (certainly Gaffa went for the boring, conservative consensus-choice in going with Efterklang...).

There are thoroughly decent albums like Vampire Weekend's Contra, Gorillaz' Plastic Beach and Delorean's Subiza. Then there's Deerhunter's Halcyon Digest, which is still a work in progress for me, and Teen Dream by Beach House, which I perhaps should give another try. And then there's the wholly, outlandishly bizarre, Tomorrow, In A Year by The Knife which, in its own right, could be construed as the most interesting album of the year. Not in terms of listening pleasure, but when you look at it from a more expressionist perspective. Just as I predicted, disregarding its almost inhumane nature, it would almost certainly stick up its controversial thumb on some end-of-year list. Drowned in Sound agree with me, and have placed it at #5 on their list.


Also, there are the disappointments. Like High Violet by The National, which everyone but me seem to be raving about, but which honestly doesn't come close to its predecessors if you ask me. Or like Trespassers by Kashmir, who, it becomes more and more apparent, did really peak with The Good Life and Zitilites. Or Klaxons' sophomore effort Surfing The Void, which doesn't really know on which of its not-anymore-so-raving legs to stand upon. Or MGMT's Congratulations, which reminded me how I wasn't really crazy about MGMT in the first place.

And finally there are all the many albums I should have listened to this year, but that I haven't. I hope to get around to some of them before the Roskilde season really sets in. Albums such as Gemini by Wild Nothing, Heartland by Owen Pallett, Hidden by These New Puritans, InnerSpeaker by Tame Impala, Swim by Caribou, or Les chemins de verre by Karkwa, who beat out both Caribou and Arcade Fire for the Polaris Prize. And Sleep Party People's eponymous debut, and Agnes Obel's Philharmonics. And how about Crystal Castles?


It's been a year of lo-fi, chillwave, noise, slack, wonky, witch-house and dubstep gone popstep gone gone-and-done. It's also been a year blessed with the ten albums that are gonna run across this page the next ten days. Roll on 2011!

Highly infectuous!

I've been indulging a couple of very high quality albums over the past week, that I thought I'd share with you. First of all, it's Yeasayer, whose debut album All Hour Cymbals is really catching up to me. It's much less beat-oriented, and there are more oriental harmonics than on follow-up Odd Blood, but it's really an intriguing record - at times very Sgt. Peppery. I love 'Wait For The Summer' and '2080', which is also around in an extraordinary Take Away version here!


Also very intriguing is Sufjan Stevens' new album, The Age of Adz. I haven't been all that much into Sufjan before, but this is a masterful record. He's much more emotional, and slightly more restrained in genre and sound, although he does still leap and jump around like a madman, often sending songs in vastly different directions through their course. Highlights are the grandiose 'The Age of Adz', the beautiful 'Vesuvius' and the crazily impressive closer, 'Impossible Soul'.


Everyone is expecting Kanye West to be atop Pitchforks albums-of-the-year list with his supposedly tremendous new album, My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy. I'm not much into hip hop, but this tune which samples Bon Iver's 'Woods' is bloody awesome, check it out! It's called 'Lost in The World'.


Beginning this Tuesday, I'm gonna present my own albums-of-the year list, so stay tuned lads!

Meet me by the vending machine.

I've been humming and singing this song constantly the past week or so, and I think it's best served justice by simply posting its astonishing lyrics.


'Julie', by Jens Lekman.

Oh Julie, meet me by the vending machine.
Oh Julie, I'm gonna buy you a wedding ring. 

Eating French fries by the dock of the bay.
Lots of ketchup and mayonnaise.
You said this town's too big for our hearts.
You can't tell where it ends or starts. 

Oh Julie, the future could be so bright.
Oh Julie, the ticket inspector's out of sight. 

What will you do when you graduate?
If you stay here you will suffocate.
And all your friends are moving to London.
While the cherry trees are still in blossom. 

Oh Julie.
Oh hold me, hold me for the sweet hereafter. 

The end with you can be very fatal.
Somehow we forget to pray for the angels.
Then the angels make sure that our hearts are devoured.
Make us jump from the Eiffel Tower. 

Oh Julie, you know that I ain't for hire.
But you can have me.
You can trade me for your cigarette lighter. 

Take a step from the humdrum.
Step out of the museum.
They said we had hit the bottom.
But the cherry trees are still in blossom. 

Julie, you know that I ain't for hire
but you can have me, you can trade me for your cigarette lighter
Oh Julie

What a hearty... 

Foals: Sacrificing finesse.

So, I went to see Foals this Friday at Vega, which I highly anticipated, since their sophomore album Total Life Forever is one of my fave releases of 2010. It's beautiful in its creative finesse; sharp guitar licks, interesting sounds and impressive sonic booms. It seemed Foals chose to bring only the latter to Copenhagen this weekend.


Sorry for being a killjoy, because it was in fact a really enjoyable and generally well-played concert. I guess it's just because I had expected something else. I had expected to enjoy and fully devour the comely guitar patterns of '2 Trees', the ease and airiness of 'Olympic Airways', the furious tightness and wit of 'After Glow', and enjoy five extraordinarily creative and skilled musicians. It seemed however that Foals' agenda was for everyone to jump around like crazy. At all possible times, the band's signature strong endings, outros and bridges were sacrificed for menacing and scrappy amok. The tight and vital rhythm section was much too loud, and often completely overpowered the little finesses from the guitarists that make both Foals' albums such enjoyable listens. Drummer Jack Bevan is normally credited with carrying a heavy load of Foals' euphony, which is completely true, just listen to tunes like 'Two Steps, Twice' or the aforementioned 'After Glow', but it seemed like he much too often resorted to simplifying his game, and applying steadfast disco-oohntz beats whenever possible, such as the outro of 'Red Socks Pugie', which normally is of a much dozier nature. Or the end of inevitable highlight 'Spanish Sahara', where the post-climactic blissfulness was sacrificed for yet more of the same unimaginative beats.


Of course, it was still good, and the music is often lovely, but I do think Foals sacrificed a big load of finesse and euphony for having the first four-five rows of audience jumping around like karrazzee. Sometimes it seemed that the prevailing mantra for the band was "as loud as possible", which seems quite unimaginative for a band of unquestionable musical skill. It was good, and it was a party, but it could have been so much more interesting.

These 10 albums are gonna fare well on end-of-year lists.

Time for the end-of-year razzmatazz, where everyone's trying to sum up everything from the past year, the most prolific being the album-of-the-year lists, that are gonna spring from every a music media soon. I'm not gonna do one myself, as I don't have near wide enough a span on different genres to be able to make sense. I decided it would be fun however, to try and guess which albums are gonna be recurring fixtures high on these lists. So I did a bit of researching and analysis, and these are ten albums you're definitely gonna see a lot of the next month!

The ArchAndroid by Janelle Monáe.
Monáe's debut project, The ArchAndroid has been one of the highest scoring albums on Metacritic this year, and she's gonna be a pretty surefire fixture in most of the lists. She widens the musical spectrum slightly in terms of genres, hear cinematically oriented approach is something new, and she scores highly on a variety of different media on both sides of the pond.

My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy by Kanye West.
It's gonna be quite a feat to get a 10.0 mark in Pitchfork, and not appear right atop the benchmark magazine's end-of-year list, and near the top of loads others. Even if Kanye's new album is so great it transcends genre-preferences, some of the holier indie-media are bound to keep him off their lists, but he sure is gonna be on a lot of them. Justin Vernon (Bon Iver) and Kanye might be a curious match, but fact is they do hang out quite a lot together, and they probably smoke a lot of really high class grass. And they collaborated on this tune, which is mindblowing!

The Suburbs by Arcade Fire.
Alright, finally into my own territory here. The Suburbs is nothing less impressive than a third sublime album coming off two equally extraordinary ones. It really has legs, and I think it's only just starting to grow a lot of people (myself included). Arcade Fire are reviewers' darlings like few others, but the hype surrounding The Suburbs is well deserved, and it's gonna be near the very top of many, many lists.

Halcyon Digest by Deerhunter.
Deerhunter has a sound that usually doesn't fare well in British media, but when they get a Metacritic score of 80 from reviewers such as NME, The Guardian, Q and Drowned In Sound, you know they've got something going for them. On Pitchfork this is a surefire top 10 record.

Swim by Caribou.
Dan Snaith of Caribou has been here, there and everywhere this year, doing a lot of remixes, and of course releasing his followup to Polaris Prize-winning Andorra of 2008, and although Pantha du Prince, Crystal Castles and Delorean have made waves as well, Swim is probably gonna be deemed top of the crop on the independent, electronic scene this year by many.

The Age of Adz by Sufjan Stevens.
Sufjan Stevens sure is a wacko, but he's a pretty damn safe bet for a critic's choice in alternative music. The moniker 'Pitchfork music' is pretty fitting for Stevens' quirky but very talented antics. The NME hasn't even reviewed this, and it's definitely gonna fare much higher on American lists than on British ones.

Plastic Beach by Gorillaz.
Unless you want to be alternative and undergroundly just for the sake of it, Plastic Beach is pretty damn hard to avoid. In the year when Albarn and co. all but discarded their cartoony aliases completely, they also released their musically most interesting album to date, spanning genres far and wide. Amidst the identity crisis of British indie, Gorillaz are the sole UK act on this list.

Teen Dream by Beach House.
Bridging the gap between the indie-folk wave of 2008 and '09 and the chillwave-lo-fi craze of 2010 is Beach House, who are neither from Seattle nor from California, but from the East Coast. Less self-aware than Californian-turned-Brooklyner trends and trendsetters, Teen Dream became one of the unifying indie records of 2010.

Clinging To A Scheme by The Radio Dept..
Quietly clinging, perhaps not to a scheme, but to their own little department of hazily electro-indulged indie-pop, The Radio Dept. will be a welcome addition and counterpoint to the many big movements of some of the other artists, with whom they're presumably gonna share space on the end-of-year lists. One of my personal favorite albums of this year, I think its unambitious but melodic demeanor appeals to many a critic and listener alike.

Sir Lucious Left Foot: The Son of Chico Dusty by Big Boi.
Alright, so I don't know a thing about this album, but this is the debut album by Big Boi, who came within striking distance to numerous album-of-the-decade recognitions with Outkast a year ago, and reviews for this album have been strong across the board.


Other albums I considered and researched on were:
Before Today by Ariel Pink's Haunted Graffiti.
This Is Happening by LCD Soundsystem.
Treats by Sleigh Bells.
High Violet by The National.
Black Noise by Pantha du Prince.
Lisbon by The Walkmen.
The Wild Hunt by The Tallest Man On Earth.
Total Life Forever by Foals.
Crazy For You by Best Coast.
Body Talk by Robyn.
Dark Night of the Soul by Danger Mouse & Sparklehorse.
Acolyte by Delphic.
Gorilla Manor by Local Natives.
Crystal Castles by Crystal Castles.
Heartland by Owen Pallett.
Love Remains by How To Dress Well.
Subiza by Delorean.
InnerSpeaker by Tame Impala.

"Our best gig ever!", three years on.

"Our best gig ever!" That's what Klaxons exclaimed towards the end of their legendary show at Roskilde 2007. A show bathed in glow-sticks and neon face-paint on youthful, sweaty, muddy, lusty bodies and young British musicians jumping off stage.


Quite a bit, it turned out, has changed since then. Saturday, when Klaxons went on at Amager Bio, there was no face-paint, no glow-sticks, and mostly men in their early twenties - guys who were there three years ago too, young and insane. Klaxons looked themselves. The femininely built James Righton is still clearly on the top five of men one would want to look like. He's one of the few guys who can hit the stage in a simple grey tee and a pair of jeans, and still have the attention of the entire female crowd. Jamie Reynolds is still his old, ungraceful self with his weird stance and his general ugliness, and Taylor-Davies is still the shy guitarist with his unruly shy guitarist-hairdo.


But still, something has happened. There was no crowd-surfing here (the meager crowd probably couldn't have withstood it anyway), and only a fraction of the insane energy of a few years ago. The sound however was sublime, and there's knack to a lot of the band's tunes that just makes it impossible to stand still. Amager Bio was only half-filled, but unless you looked backwards at the empty space, you wouldn't have noticed - the ones who were there clearly made it their business to rave on.


It does however seem as though this is a band inevitably on the decline. It was very clearly the Myths of the Near Future-tunes, of which we got a full seven, which excited the crowd the most, and it's not that Surfing The Void hasn't had sufficient time to sink in. Down the stretch, it just seems to be less elating than the old stuff.


It was however a good concert, and a well-crafted setlist, concluding with 'It's Not Over Yet', 'Surfing The Void' and 'Atlantis To Interzone' to send the aging ravers into the night.

Albums growing (like trees in suburbs).

I've got these three albums that have been growing a lot on me these days. I also (finally!!) got Halcyon Digest late last week, but the jury is still out on that one. It seems to be a quality album, but I'm not so sure how much I personally like it. It's the kind of album that needs quite a few listens. Anyway, the three albums on pace right now are:


The Suburbs, by Arcade Fire
This has been a classic slow mover, but I've now come to realize truly what a tremendous album this is. Truth be truth, there aren't really any that bad tunes here, anyhow not any irrelevant tunes. That's pretty impressive for an album that clocks in at an hour's length. Even tunes like 'Half Light II (No Celebration)' and 'Wasted Hours' are coming to me now, and the album impressively climaxes again and again, most prolifically with the haunting 'We Used To Wait' and the brilliant Sprawl-duology on the albums back part. I hope these guys will hit Roskilde next summer!


Troen & Ingen, by Søren Huss
I've been through this album five times now, and every time it hits me a little bit more, just how sharp it is. Huss balances masterfully on the edge of being sentimental without being whiny, but still being very evident and perceptible about the emotional landscape that has driven this record. It's a very pleasant and deep listen every time (still).


A Collection of Vibrations for Your Skull by Treefight For Sunlight
Back when this album came out, I doubted its longevity, so I think it's only fitting to take up this issue again. I've had the album for a month and a half, and my iTunes shows I've been through its (short) entirety 12 times. And honestly, I actually like it better now than I did after the first few listens. These guys seem to have legs, and the album is due for an international release next year, which is pretty cool!