It’s that time of year when popular (or in this case singular) demand dictates that a planned, indefinite hiatus may need to be suspended in order to enumerate the coolest, most yulest, recordings of 2011. In no particular order, this is the music that caused my jaw to drop this year.

1. Lanterns on the Lake – Gracious Tide Take Me Home (2011)
Utterly gorgeous offering from Geordieland. Not a sentence I’d ever anticipated writing, but this is a truly wonderful album. folk ambient? Jazz Folk? Never mind the category, just let it wash over you.

2. Olafur Arnalds – Living Room Songs (2011)
Neo classical wonderfulness from Icelandic bedroom genius. Written, recorded and mixed in ten days by all accounts, this album betters his best.

3. Chrysta Bell – This Train (2011)
The return of David Lynch – only slightly reminiscent of the wonderful Julee Cruise, this album’s highlight is the twisted blues of “Real Love” which delivers a timely reminder that rock music is still capable of being down and dirty. The guitars on this track are downright filthy.

4. Anna Calvi – Anna Calvi (2011)
A talent (and a sound) too large to ignore, this album fuses elements of Diamanda Galas with Jazz, Flamenco and Blues. There is still hope while talents like this get record deals.

5. King Creosote & John Hopkin – Diamond Mine (2011)
If I had to choose just one album from this list it would be this, eerie and beautiful by turn, this blend of found voices, electronica and folk is a fully immersive experience that makes me wonder why we bother with dreary technology like 3D TV. One day people will look back and remember when they had imaginations. A power for the hills.

6. PJ Harvey – Let England Shake (2011)
This is simply without peer, a set of songs that sets this wilful and extravagantly talented artist apart from everyone else of her generation. That rare thing, a concept album that works. The messages here are from the heart and that’s the difference.

7. Tom Waits – Bad As Me (2011)
If ever an album could be said to be inebriated it is surely this. A glorious, lurching, ramshackle beast of a talent this stands up with SwordFishTrombones as representing the essence of this singular man. Inevitably, it features Keith Richards.

8. The National – Think You Can Wait (Single – 2011)
No properly new product from the National this year, but this single will do – The Paul Thomas Anderson’s of rock music, another timeless vignette from an act who set such high expectations in 2010 that my worst fear is that they won’t match it. This single suggests that they will.

9. Ryan Adams – Ashes & Fire (2011)
Back on track with a much more focused effort. His concert in Brighton was simply astounding this year and here, this maverick talent settles down for an hour or so. As a balladeer, Ryan Adams is without equal. Ashes & Fire delivers a set of songs that stand up with the best of Heartbreaker and Love Is Hell. High praise.

10. Roy Harper – Songs of Love & Loss (2011)
Speaking of mavericks, Roy Harper is surely the block from which Ryan Adams is a chip. A compilation of varying interest, but the highs here are veritable peaks. Francesca, East of the Sun, Another Day, these are absolutely sublime recordings.

Honourable mentions to other artists constantly on the sound system – reissue of the year The Cramps – Smell of Female, an absolutely dastardly album and for me, the best of the Cramps. Sleazy, deranged and comical by turn. They truly were marvellous days. The Go Betweens – Before Hollywood for one song in particular, the amazing “Cattle & Cane”. The Guillemots – Walk the River, as deliriously over the top as ever, “I Don’t Feel Amazing Now” and “Sometimes I Remember Wrong” are two of the best love-gone-wrong songs ever. Wilco – The Whole Love, you simply can’t go wrong with Jeff Tweedy, like a good whisky, they just get better with age. Finally, David Lynch – Crazy Clown Time, the deranged surf guitar of “Pinky’s Dream” featuring Karen O. Spooky, psychotic and edgy this track has most of what makes rock music so special.

So that’s it from me – have a very merry Christmas and a happy new year!

Thank you everyone for reading, I may still write occasionally about music, and if you’re interested in an idiosyncratic mixture of politics, technology and ‘shit that happens’ then you’re welcome to come on over to Magic and Lies.

Until the next time

Chris

There are times when life seems to shimmer gently, as if seen through a heat haze. Usually this feeling is accompanied by a sense of melancholy and introspection, perhaps centred on the wisdom of taking that last cocktail the previous evening. It is to this record that I would turn, should such a mood overtake me. It is balm for a troubled soul and its ruminations and reflections create a lacuna in the endless chatter of life. Bill Callahan is an artist well worth the effort of getting to know and this sleepy, meandering affair is a breath of fresh air in a world of conditioning.

RIP Gil Scott Heron. An artist who spent the seventies railing against the establishment (“Johannesburg”, “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised”) and addiction (“The Bottle”, “Angel Dust”), who influenced and inspired artists as diverse as Public Enemy and Kanye West, died on Friday night in hospital in New York of complications arising from a disease he caught whilst touring Europe. His fight against “the man” was displaced at some point in the 1980′s by another fight, ironically against addiction, but he left a body of work that continues to inspire. As is so often the case, his death interrupted a rehabilitation of sorts, both artistically with “I’m New Here”, it’s subsequent remix “We’re New Here” and personally. He fought the good fight for the right reasons and if in the end he lost, it does not take away from the fact that he tried.

About as X Factor friendly as Richard Wagner’s comic turn “Die Meistersinger” was funny. Gorgeous. And singular. No other word will do. While music like this proliferates, there is life. This is a band transformed; where the first album showcased a prodigious talent that was frankly irritating in parts, this is where it all comes together. Strongly reminiscent in places of those potentates of whimsy, the Mael brothers, this album snuggles happily into the miniscule gap between pretention and sophistication. Having said which, it is quite certain to languish in the doldrums of drear as the music buying public fawn over Lady Gaga’s latest PR stunt. I hear she too does music, though that may just be a rumour.

After the magnificent trauma that was Hospice it seemed there was nowhere else to go for the Antlers. In defiance of this album’s title however, Antlers have regrouped. Where Hospice was one man’s howling against the injustice and pain of a child’s protracted death from cancer, this album returns Pete Silberman to the heart of a band and we begin to see what these musicians are really capable of. Still mining the rich seam of minor chord melancholy that sets off Silberman’s voice to such good effect, this album delivers a set of songs that recall the best of times as well as the worst. The music ebbs and flows, building layers of atmosphere interspersed with more conventional and dare I say, soulful, song structures reminiscent of the best early work of Prefab Sprout….and yes, that is a good thing, check out Swoon! One of the best albums of the year so far, and it’s been a good year. Love it!

Here’s the video from the last album’s most upbeat track: “Two”

A riot of breathless vocals and properly distorted guitars, a song that sounds like The Shangri Las colliding with the Jesus and Mary Chain has of late dominated the iPod shuffle in my car. It is of course ‘Albatross’ and it represents but one of the peaks to be found on this album. Yes, I know it is shamefully late in the day to be advocating the sound of soaring guitars, but this band are quite exceptional and apparently from Montreal which puts them in the context of God Speed You Black Emperor and of course Arcade Fire. More accessible than GSYBE and more indebted to prog rock than Arcade Fire, this is a great album which makes me wonder quite how I contrived to miss it the first time around.

In which the exuberantly named and extravagantly talented Fyfe Dangerfield tackles the difficult third album. A band for whom the inclusion of the kitchen sink normally heralds just the starting point of an arrangement, gUiLLeMoTs sound positively restrained in the opening fifteen minutes. Thankfully this restraint is soon cast off and by track 6 ‘Inside‘, the bit now more or less firmly between their teeth, we are back on familiarly frantic ground. If I have any criticism, it is that I fear the dead hand of some record company A&R executive has been offered in the name of ‘improving’ the commercial appeal of the record. The songs are as great as ever, but the reference points are more easily identifiable, the giddy rush of the first album and the bold experimentalism of the second are in scant supply. The result is a much more comfortably radio friendly record, but I’d rather the bipolar extremes of the first two records. Nonetheless, this band’s peculiar world is still well worth the price of admission.

Chimera Mansions reverberate to the sound of Graham Nash – “Wild Tales”. Hang on a minute it’s Fleet Foxes…In truth this is a gorgeous album, indeed anyone that can cast a rehabilitating light on the tragi-comic careers of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young gets my vote. The harmonies, artificially abetted or not are wondrous, the songs bear a distinct debt to the aforementioned Graham Nash, the criminally overlooked genius behind the Hollies and founder member of the, ahem, superegos of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, Crosby, Stills & Nash, Crosby & Nash – you get the picture….anyway, in life as in music, only two things matter, massed acoustic guitars and harmony vocals. Both of these are found here in abundance. Lush.

Simply delirious. The Pains of Being Pure At Heart recycle every indie mannerism in the book and come up with an album that sounds like the Primitives colliding with ‘Adore’ era Smashing Pumpkins. A soaring cacophany of frothing choruses and foaming guitars. Simply brilliant and top marks for the name.