Actor - St. Vincent

This one was tough. A month ago, Bat For Lashes would have got the top spot for her gorgeous second album Two Suns. I have been listening to it regularly since it came out in the spring and I was sure it would triumph over all comers in what has been, for me, a supernova year in music. I thought Two Suns was as well-crafted and assured as anything emerging from the Brooklyn pop explosion (your Grizzly Animal Projectors), but ultimately it was Natasha Khan's vocal performances: hushed and yearning in 'Daniel', lonely…

'My Girls' - Animal Collective

Hand on heart, when I first heard it (on Radio 1 of all places) I didn't buy it. Too long, too weird, too sugary. It's as Patrick Stump so memorably sang on 'Dead On Arrival': the songs you grow to like never stick at first.

Too many people have already written more than enough about 'My Girls' for me to add anything very valuable. I just want to mention my favourite part of the song's glorious five and a half minutes. When the first verse gets repeated again, and right before…

Choosing one song to embody a decade should be more difficult than this, surely? I didn't even have to think about it for more than a minute, it was so obvious. Drumroll…

'Idioteque' - Radiohead

The structure of Kid A is built around two perfectly carved black obsidian pillars at the beginning and at the end. The opener, 'Everything In Its Right Place', with its soothing melody and quietly insisting vocal, suggests an appeal for order, calm, simplicity. There are two colours in my head. Black and white. Everything has boundaries. It's defined. And it's in the RIGHT…

Sat 10 Oct – Johnny Foreigner, Tellison, japanese voyeurs

I walked in just as Japanese Voyeurs started tearing up the poo. They delivered punk/metal/hardcore-type goodness, which set the tone of the evening very nicely. Lead singer looked a little dejected, however. Hope she's OK…

A little wait. Sipped Guinness. Spotted members of JoFo wandering up to the bar and back. No drinks backstage? Wanted to wish them luck, but had zero nerve. Waited some more. Sipped Guinness.

Tellison got going. Sound, surprisingly enough, a bit like Johnny Foreigner. The guy on the far left plays keys, sax *and* guitar,…

Seems like the decade roundups are beginning already, so I'm jumping on the bandwagon. Now, you shouldn't expect a considered, bird's eye view of the changes in the pop landscape in what follows. Ten years ago I was eleven, and my pop music literacy extended to a few Will Smith records. It has only been in the last couple of years, with access to Pitchfork and illegal downloading, that I've started to get my head around all the great stuff there is out there. So no, this isn't about me combing through everything released in the past ten years to…

From my blog, thoughts on The Sea Is A Good Place To Think Of The Future.

They are definitely channeling the We Are Beautiful, We Are Doomed skuzzy, post-rock tinged sound, 'Heart Swells/Pacific Daylight Time' in particular. Pitchfork are right to identify that song as the album's centre-piece. In an interview with them, Gareth says it is the band's best song so far.

I don't know about that. But it sure is a standout. The Los Campesinos! staple of well-worded misery scraped over jaunty tunes is inverted. 'Heart Swells' is snail-paced and draped in howling mist, and…

Hard as I try, I can't love all of Tom Waits's songs on his late 1980 Island Records trilogy of albums equally. Of the three, I go with most and pick Rain Dogs as my favourite. But I depart from convention by putting Franks Wild Years over Swordfishtrombones. The latter was a bit too weird for me. None of these albums are perfect, imo. They all have tracks that skirt too far away from the captivating and evocative blues I worship Waits for. So playlist time. I had to kick things off with '16 Shells From A 30.06'…

For me, both Kid A and Amnesiac are half brilliant, half frustrating albums. The songs on each were (I have learned) recorded at the same time. So I thought Radiohead wouldn't mind if I re-sequenced them to make my own perfect record. I should say from the very beginning that I have wielded my scissors according to my own tastes, not any objective standard, so don't come crying to me if you feel that I've desecrated Radiohead's work. Music is, more than most art-forms I think, a subjective experience. I personally wanted something that matched/exceeded Radiohead's most gripping and rewarding…