Top 33 of the Year.....The Top Ten!

Ooooh, getting close! What's at numbers 4 and 3?

4. Spoon - Transference.

Seven albums in, and Britt Daniel's band continue to weave their angular magic.

Coming after the pop majesty of Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga, there's an unsettling quality about Transference, with the band taking their studio trickery to new heights. Demo-sounding snippets suddenly surge into full blown productions, vocals suddenly drop out of the mix, there's stereo separations, but above all there's some cracking tunes.

There's the familiar groove of 'Trouble Come Running' and 'Before Destruction', the skeletal funk of 'Who Makes Your Money?' and the frenetic 'Got Nuffin'. The record also contains what's possibly Spoon's most lovely-sounding song, the gorgeous 'Out Go The Lights'.

At the centre of it all, however, is the seething, piano-abusing 'Written In Reverse'. Rarely has Daniel sounded so angry and urgent, bitterly spitting out lines about an unrequited love:



The sound of a band who just enjoy letting their hair down.

3. Deerhunter - Halcyon Digest.

Simply a wonderful album about childhood nostalgia and the joy of discovering new music.

Bradford Cox continues to have a knack of being incredibly prolific as the helmsman of Deerhunter while also producing music as Atlas Sound, and Halcyon Digest is an amalgamation of the direct pop of the former and the bedroom electronica of the latter.

Incredibly, on a record full of Cox's brilliant songwriting the highlight is actually guitarist Lockett Pundt's 'Desire Lines'. Having said that, there are so many moments of joy that it's hard to focus in on just one. So here's 'Helicopter' as well:



Can you really argue with the brilliance of an album that reminds of the thrill and excitement of discovering new music? Answer: No.