the music of the year twenty twelve: 25th to 21st

When year-end Best Albums lists start coming round, I always find myself slightly disappointed by their relative consistency. Why do the same batch of albums keep cropping up all over the place? Not that they would be bad choices, necessarily, but music is such a personal thing. We all listen to music for so many different reasons and get so many different things out of it. A list should say at least as much about the person compiling it as about the musical landscape of the year – so why does it seem like everyone was affected by exactly the same very small set of music?

Of course this is partly inevitable. We can’t listen to all the new music out there, so we need gatekeepers to skim the cream of the crop off the pile of thousands and thousands of records released every year. I don’t exonerate myself – I learn about most of the music I listen to from Pitchfork, same as any other pretentious hipster. You have to start somewhere, and certainly a lot of the music on my list is gonna be more or less exactly what you’d expect. I’ll just be happy if I can provide a couple of interesting surprises along the way.

So. With the honourable mentions out of the way, it’s time to start counting down the Top Twenty-Five proper.

twenty-fifth: DIIV – Oshiin

This year, this was the album for blissed-out summer drives to the beach and 4am drives home on suffocatingly hot nights, for heat-haze and the glare of too-bright sunlight, for the sleepy-but-sometimes-alm0st-eerie stillness of Maltese July afternoons. Deceptively simple, hummable tunes and driving rhythms frame intricate guitarwork that slowly reveals hidden textural depths, enough to sink into and lose yourself in.

twenty-fourth: Bat for Lashes – The Haunted Man

No denying it: after the grand beauty of 2009’s Two Suns, absolutely one of the greatest albums of the past few years, what I first heard in The Haunted Man was the sound of mild disappointment. I still don’t think it’s a match for the album that, for now, remains Natasha Khan’s masterpiece, but time and repeated listens have been kind to her latest. I’m not the first to point out that the two albums’ very different but equally striking cover images serve as the perfect metonym for the albums’ divergences. Two Suns is introduced by a kaleidoscopic Technicolor fantasia that references Catholic iconography, alchemical imagery, beloved 80s blockbuster cinema, bad stoner airbrush art and probably countless other details I missed – it’s maximalist, rich, gorgeous and utterly idiosyncratic. On the other hand, the Ryan McGinley-shot image announcing The Haunted Man (incidentally, probably the album cover of the year) is raw, grainy, stark and unadorned. It’s stripped-down and naked, both figuratively and literally, and likewise the album is sparser, less ornate, more direct, more honest. Still, the image is an arrestingly strange one, and ultimately so is this album – it’s a landscape of hauntings and ghostly figures, of voices lurking at the edges of songs. It’s strange, evocative, mysterious, and, yes, utterly idiosyncratic.

twenty-third: James Blackshaw – Love is the Plan, The Plan is Death

Blackshaw’s music feels like listening in to the eternal, interlocking circular harmonies of the celestial sphere, and glimpsing the fundamental order of things. If you think that sounds like hyperbole, you’re probably not familiar with his work. Here, his switch to a six-string guitar lends an earthier, campfire quality to his ethereal compositions, while “And I Have Come Upon This Place By Lost Ways”, his collaboration with Menace Ruine singer Geneviève Beaulieu, is both remarkable and entirely unlike anything Blackshaw has done before, hinting at tantalising new directions.

twenty-second: Grizzly Bear – Shields

Grizzly Bear make cathedrals of sound, imposing edifices that show the hands of perfectionists at work. Every detail reveals patience and painstaking craft. Still, it is not the sounds that make Grizzly Bear so special, but the space they create, a cavernous, lonely, hermetic nave for the band’s flawless harmonies and crashing percussion to reverberate in. Shields is their most towering, meticulous work, and also their most aching.

twenty-first: Passion Pit – Gossamer

Never has music this despairing and world-weary sounded so fun, bright and cheerful. Call it bubblegum pop with the bitter aftertaste of knowing the bubble has burst – nothing this year was as infectious, as great at making you want to dance or as merciless about making you feel bad at wanting to dance to someone’s misery.

To be continued.