With the years albums documented with some difficulty and consternation, there’s a lot of very good records from this year whose albums were relegated by my fickle editorial to ‘merely good.’ That, or released on EPs that weren’t by Mogwai.

Unlike the albums that I ranked, these are arranged in a somewhat genre and mood themed playlist. The set is available as a handy Spotify playlist.

1. Miles Kane - ‘Come Closer’. Discovered via Last.FM’s ever surprisingly excellent album recommendations, I was unwittingly a fan of Miles Kane for his previous work as one half of Last Shadow Puppets. Rather like that record, ‘Colour of the Trap’ is full of Scott Walker revivalism, and is rather good.
2. British Sea Power - ‘Luna’. ‘Valhalla Dancehall’ was a bit disappointing in the end. There are some excellent pieces, and BSPs live show was great back in the spring, but as a record it was too long and seemed to drift off in the middle. Enjoy ‘Luna’, though. It’s especially worth it for the wry ‘put the fucking kettle on’ lyrics.
3. Los Campesinos! - ‘Hello Sadness’. Los Camp grew up in the past few years, with (inevitable) line-up changes and increasing maturity in their music. Listening to ‘Hello Sadness’—their fourth (yes, fine, third) album—makes me wonder if I would have gotten into them given this album rather than the jovial facade of their first and second releases. It is still good, just a bit buried. Looking forward to the tour in February.
4. Tune-Yards - ‘Powa’. Always struggled a bit with Tune-Yards first record, but WHOKILL is flipping magnificent, and I was very lucky to see her perform live in San Francisco. Witnessing the frankly incredible vocal agility of Merrill Garbus, and the way in which she almost individual puts together the beats and instruments of every song with creative use of loop pedals and mics is pretty astounding.
5. Youth Lagoon - ‘17’. ‘The Year of Hibernation’ was one of my albums of the year, and ‘17’ is a fine representation of it, capturing the sparse, dreamy vocal and building into a bigger, guitar layered conclusion.
6. Mogwai - ‘Hound of Winter’. The ‘Earth Division’ EP was so good I declared it album of the year, and ‘Hound of Winter’ is I think the single best Mogwai-song-with-vocals ever recorded. Like everything on ‘Earth Division’ it’s the string arrangement that elevates it into indescribable territory.
7. The National - ‘Exile Vilify’. In a hidden chamber filled with cryptic graffiti, early in the video game ‘Portal 2’, is a radio. Crawl up close, and from it you will hear The National’s wonderful ‘Exile Vilify’. If you’re noticing a theme of dramatic, indulgent string arrangements in my musical tastes this year, then you’re paying attention. Well done.
8. Radiohead - ‘Codex’. Radiohead had a busy year. ‘The King of Limbs’ as an individual album probably won’t be stand out as boldly as those before it, but still it has its unique stylings. ‘The King of Limbs’ as a year-long project though, is quite impressive: The initial album, quickly followed by a 12” AA (Supercollider/The Butcher), a live recording of the whole record (plus another new song, ‘The Daily Mail’), and then the summer months were taken up with 7 12” remix releases (of variable interestingness.) There are a few items from Radiohead’s output on this playlist, but as someone who did really enjoy TKOL album, ‘Codex’ was a beautiful centerpiece.
9. Battles - ‘Africastle’. Got to see Battles play the entirety of ‘Gloss Drop’ live just prior to the release, with no old material whatsoever. Thankfully ‘Atlas’ was back in the set (along with super-creepy new children’s choir vocals) by the summer festivals, but I am full of respect for a band who lose their singer and then step up in full support of the new material. I will say again that over the course of the album, keyboards that sound like a disturbed Ice Cream truck in every song grate on me somewhat, but in controlled doses, they’ve done good work.
10. Slow Club - ‘If We’re Still Alive’. Possible contender for grower-of-the-year is Slow Club’s sophomore ‘Paradise’. On first listen, after the jubilance of their debut ‘Yeah, So’ I wasn’t just disappointed, but I didn’t really like it. There’s something about the very beginning of ‘Two Cousins’ that totally throws me off every time (the song progresses into something great, mind you.) Anyway, I’m now at the point where although ‘Yeah, So’ has some all-time-classic hits on it, Paradise is probably a consistently better record. Apart from ‘You, Earth, or Ash’, which unfortunately always makes me think of how earthshakingly powerful its predecessor ‘Sorry About The Doom’ was.
11. Florence + The Machine - ‘What the Water Gave Me’. If Slow Club managed the ‘this is shit, no, wait, no it isn’t at all!’ follow-up album, Florence has achieved the corresponding ‘this is shit, oh, yes, it really is a bit’ follow-up album. I appreciate I come to this opinion from the ultra-hip direction of I saw her when she was unsigned and ‘The Machine’ was one guy with an acoustic guitar and no-one had given her a budget to put a fucking harp in every single song yet, but, well, that. ‘What The Water Gave Me’ is really very good, and is therefore a huge cock-tease for an inexplicably long, 15 song album, wherein every track is so squeaky clean and full of huge echoing drums that it all just disappears into a nondescript pop malaise. I find this tragic, given how fantastic her voice can be. Astronomical success will disagree, whilst I shall treasure those early, bluesy, acoustic 7”s from the first record, and we’ll all go our separate ways. But really, fuck harps.
12. Typhoon - ‘Claws Pt. 1’. From a happier place in my heart, Portland 10-to-13-piece Typhoon followed up 2010’s really excellent ‘Hunger and Thirst’ with the ‘A New Kind of House’ EP. It’d probably have put it in my albums of 2011 list but for dragging the entire concept of albums of the year into further disrepute. What I especially love is the way in which the EP reworks lyrics and themes from the album into new songs. ‘Claws Pt. 1’ has a corresponding Part 2 on the album, but ‘The Honest Truth’ also reuses old lyrics to great effect. As much as anything, it’s a really great use of the EP format.
13. Low - ‘Especially Me’. Weirdly, my enjoyment of Low had previously been focused exclusively around ‘Trust’ and ‘The Great Destroyer’ (two outstanding records, no doubt) and buying ‘C’mon’ was a result of coincidental record store browsing and their release date. It’s very good, naturally, but ‘Especially Me’ falls into that category of Low song that I like the most, the stripped back breakdown. It’s a ‘Points of Disgust’, or ‘Death of a Salesman’. And it’s very good.
14. PJ Harvey - ‘In The Dark Places’. All for the conclusion with its rousing, spine-tingling refrain.
15. Radiohead - ‘The Daily Mail’. More Radiohead, then. From their live recording of TKOL came ‘The Daily Mail’, which later got a digital release via their online store. Where a lot of the TKOL release is underpinned by the ever-evolving post-everything Radiohead sound, ‘The Daily Mail’ (which is an older song revisited) comes from time of ‘Pyramid Song’ and ‘You and Whose Army?’: Bare, piano-led beginnings, big crescendo finish. Brilliant.
16. The Horrors - ‘Changing The Rain’. The Horrors went from being the most stereotypically scene band in the NME to incredible, post-Joy Division revivalists with their second record, and the third—‘Skying’—continues in that mould (their live set currently consists of alternating between ‘Primary Colours’ and ‘Skying’ tracks.) Where lead-single ‘Still Life’ takes the whole Tears for Fears/Simple Minds thing quite far, ‘Changing The Rain’ is less blatant and has a rather more wonderful synth.
17. Esben And The Witch - ‘Marching Song’. Sinister atmospherics, swirling guitar pedal noise, distant moans, poetic vocal delivery, and the slightly distracting realization that ‘Violet Cries’ has two consecutive opening tracks, rather than a more traditional ‘first track, second track’ approach. Dead good.
18. The Go! Team - ‘Rolling Blackouts’. On the file of ‘albums I really disliked’ sits The Go Team’s ‘Rolling Blackouts’. Somehow just didn’t work for me. Apart from this—the title track—which is a stomping gem of indie-pop pixie dust that channels Le Tigre in a way that makes more sense when you note that I only bought that album this year as well.
19. Grouplove - ‘Love Will Save Your Soul’. I made a day-late frantic edit to the albums-of-the-year post to add Grouplove’s ‘Never Trust A Happy Song.’ I forget why I was on the fence about it. Maybe it seemed too innocent up next to all those moody string arrangements. Maybe that’s why it was so important to edit it back in. More indie-pop gold-dust, an album of optimism and overjoy at life. And a live presence of equal exuberance. ‘Love Will Save Your Soul’ probably has one-too-many guitar solos, but it still presses all the right buttons.
20. Radiohead - ‘Bloom (Jamie xx Rework, Part 3)’. The third Radiohead project of the year was a summer-long remix series, causing me to spend somewhat too much money on 12” remix releases. The TKOLRMX project (7 12” singles, and then a compilation of those 7) was quite fun, albeit a bit of a mixed bag in terms of longevity of the remixes themselves. TKOLRMX7 was quite strange, opening with a remix by everyone’s favourite new producer Jamie xx that lasted a mere 2’27, and seemed… incomplete. A few weeks later, once the compilation album was pressed, TKOLRMX8 was announced as a set of remixes that arrived too late, and lo, here’s a proper 7-minute version. All a bit odd, but thankfully it got released, rather than discarded, because it’s really very, very good.
21. Gil Scott-Heron & Jamie xx - ‘NY Is Killing Me’. On the subject of Jamie xx, his main contribution to the year was a release of ‘We’re New Here’, an ambitious and worthy effort to remix the entirety of Gil Scott-Heron’s recent (and, it transpired, final) record. This incredible transformation of New York is Killing Me emerged at the end of 2010, I think, but since the album dropped in 2011 I’m going to sneak it in, especially since in the album context the preceding ‘Piano Player’ introduction is absolutely perfect. It’s a bigger tune than anything else on ‘We’re New Here’. It’s the peak of the record (which is not to take anything away from the rest of it, it’s really a great achievement.) Also, in the days after Gil Scott-Heron’s death, this had me inspired to go back and listen to the original ‘I’m New Here’ with different ears, and found almost a whole different record.
22. Emmy the Great - ‘Trellick Tower’. I’ve seen a bit of criticism for Emmy the Great’s second album along the lines of it not being as quirky or unique as her first. Perhaps that’s fair: It’s musically a bit more conventional, there are no lyrics about S Club 7, or unexpected interjections of Leonard Cohen’s ‘Hallelujah’. On the other hand, the (perhaps excessively) well documented theme of losing a fiancé to God gives it a coherence and authenticity, and lyrically opening song ‘Dinosaur Sex’ manages the most wonderful, inspiring couplet about dock yard cranes you’ll ever hear. ‘Trellick Tower’ is the absolutely concentration of the lost-love theme. It’s stark, brutal. It succeeds in invoking an emotional sympathy in a way that honestly, not a lot of songs do any more.
23. Mogwai - ‘Music for a Forgotten Future (The Singing Mountain)’. Written about substantially in the albums post, ‘Music for a Forgotten Future’ is a soundtrack found on the bonus disc for Mogwai’s 2011 long-player ‘Hardcore Will Never Die, but You Will’. I rank it as one of the finest instrumental compositions I’ve ever heard.

Plausibly, the music I listen to in 2012 will be consumed more coherently. But I doubt it.