20. Camera Obscura 'My Maudlin Career'
How many great pop-songs does it take to make a great album? How many great albums make a great career? Those're the questions to ask when confronted with the fourth album from Scotland's Camera Obscura, whose self-mocking title doesn't obscure the fact that Traceyanne Campbell's CV of winning tunes is growing heftier by the year. And it's been a great career: a band born as timid Belle & Sebastian acolytes growing into a dynamic outfit wielding Campbell's killer hooks with aplomb. Played with peak confidence and dressed in sumptuous strings, My Maudlin Career marks a band in utter command of their craft; cuts like “French Navy,” “The Sweetest Thing,” and “Honey in the Sun” perhaps the best they've done yet.More »
19. El Perro del Mar 'Love is not Pop'
On her first, self-titled El Perro del Mar album, Swedish chanteuse Sarah Assbring contrasted upbeat ’60s-girl-group-inspired pop-songs with achingly sad lyrics. On her second, 2008’s From the Valley to the Stars, she flipped the script, using minimal, melancholy hymnals to sing about the joy of being alive. Her third EPDM LP, Love Is Not Pop, lands in the middle; not exploring a contrast between music and lyrics, but a state of conflicting emotion. Produced by Rasmuss Hagg of Studio, it's a set of gorgeous, downbeat disco whose hypnotic tunes pirouette through feelings bittersweet. Love is Not Pop is a breakup record in which there’s no handwringing heartbreak or missin’-you clichés, but a sad understanding that all good things must end.More »
18. JJ 'Nº 2'
Is it embarrassing to have an album with a cannabis leaf on the cover in your record collection? Always. But let me introduce the exception to the rule: JJ's Nº 2. The debut album for a mysterious Swedish entity whose members remain, thus far, completely anonymous, Nº 2 (which succeeds a single entitled, yes, Nº 1) isn't reggae-fusion or new-acoustic-surf-dude-ism or anything else McCaughnehey-friendly. Instead, it's 26 minutes of magical pop; a Saint Etienne-inspired mix of Caribbean twee, ineffectual electro, balearic disco, and heartbroken acoustic laments. Though its sounds are largely summery, the record is infused with a heavy, heady dose of melancholy; an awareness of the passing-of-time sown in every seemingly-cheery note.
17. Memory Tapes 'Seek Magic'
Dayve Hawk has been 2009's everywhereman. Issuing a stream of sad, summery, washed-out, lo-fi electro tunes under the names Weird Tapes, Memory Tapes, and Memory Cassette, and remixing Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Yeasayer, and Midnight Juggernauts, the Philadelphian stay-at-home-dad has clogged blogs with more cuts in 12 months than Scott Walker's made in 40 years; this maximum exposure anointing Hawk unofficial king of the chillwave/glo-fi/whatever-we're-calling-it movement. Taking cues from New Order and Boards of Canada, Hawk uses electronic tunes to evoke not a bleak dystopian future, but a glowing, utopian past; summoning the inexorable pull of nostalgia and the tender melancholy of memory with his every weeping synth or submerged drumbeat.
16. Holiday Shores 'Columbus'd the Whim'
Holiday Shores' raggedy, shaggy pop-songs are steeped in the eternal summer, evoking the joys of long nights and lazy days; captured with a lo-fi fuzziness that evokes humidity's mugginess. The band are named after the road —in the panhandle's picture-postcard Destin, Florida— on which effortlessly-talented, 21-year-old songwriter Nathan Pemberton grew up. Columbus'd the Whim, Holiday Shores' rather ridiculously-named debut record, comes loaded with persistent pop hooks; but, as much as Pemberton has an ear for a tune, he also has an ear for production. Like some at-home Phil Spector, Pemberton dowses Pavement-ish off-kilter guitar klang, yelped vocals, and torrents of fuzzed-out organ in enough reverb to build wonky walls of summery sound.
15. Sleeping States 'In the Gardens of the North'
Sleeping States' 2007 debut, There the Open Spaces, portrayed Markland Starkie (real name, true story) as lo-fi oddball, authoring a succession of hand-made, home-recorded musical miniatures; tiny sketches bathed in equal parts tape-hiss and intimacy. Two years on, and Starkie's finally ventured out of his room. The aptly-titled In the Gardens of the North was recorded in the English woodlands, and comes replete with crows cawing, wind blowing, streams flowing. As the echoes of nature sound out, songs like “Showers in Summer” find Starkie —multi-tracking his tender, yearning voice into one-man-choirs ripe with gracious harmony— using the natural world to convey heightened emotional states. It amounts to a staggeringly beautiful LP.
14. Why? 'Eskimo Snow'
Yoni Wolf is the master of the overshare. Across five Why? LPs, he's flowed from backpacker-rap to goofy indie-pop to, now, piano-balladeering, but his voice —a half-sung/half-spoken/wholly-Jewish patter of neurotic observation and uncomfortable confession— has remained a constant. So, Eskimo Snow may find Wolf tinkling melancholy ivories, but he's still yapping about suicide, mortality, masturbation, indiscretions. On the “My Way”-esque “Into the Shadows of My Embrace,” Wolf makes like a memoirist sitting down to spill secrets in some sordid tell-all, throwing caution to the wind. “I know saying all this in public should make me feel funny,” he carols, “but you've gotta yell something that you'd never tell nobody!”More »
13. Cryptacize 'Mythomania'
In an over-saturated era that finds an ever-growing number of records drowned in an ever-rising tide of hype, it's amazing there's still discs, like Mythomania, that remain criminally ignored. Born as a love-in between Nedelle Torrisi (a sentimental songsmith of sweet voice and savage humor) and Chris Cohen (onetime discordant Deerhoof guitarist, sometime leader of wonky-pop project The Curtains), Cryptacize are an indie-pop band who radically redefine what 'indie-pop' could possibly mean. Made on miniature guitars and drumkits with heaping helpings of autoharp and random dabs of found sound, they wield such unconventional instrumentation with melodic intent; writing glorious, summery melodies that come together in odd, splintering parts.More »
12. Micachu 'Jewellery'
21-year-old London lass Mica Levy ain't your conveyor-belt pop-star. As Micachu, Levy slaps together an indefinable mish-mash of musical futurism in two-minute pop-song form. Having honed her chops via avant-gardist live performances in which she uses glass bottles, vacuum-cleaners, CD racks, and home-made electronic apparatuses as instruments, Jewellery introduces Levy as an insistently curious, utterly idiosyncratic talent. Taking influence from grime's thickly-accented lyricism, riot-grrrl's balls-out demeanour, early death-metal's frantic fury, Harry Partch's microtonal experimentation, Herbert's sampler-science, and, even, the sonorities of Polynesian folk-music, Levy has authored a distinctive, previously-unheard sound all her own.More »
