kagablog

1. Fleet Foxes – Fleet Foxes (Sub Pop) / Sun Giant EP (Sub Pop)

- though the Beach Boys and CSN&Y have provided many listeners with convenient reference points for this young folk-into-rock-and-back-again Seattle band (as they always do when a new outfit leans heavily on the vocal harmony, and Fleet Foxes’ is as glorious and reverberant as any you’ll have heard), it’s the introspective sense and texture of later Beach Boys songs like Surf’s Up, and maybe a suggestion of that elusive first David Crosby solo album, that really provide the touchstones – there’s ethereal magic, too, and a widescreen rural vastness and majesty about songs like the gorgeous White Winter Hymnal and Tiger Mountain Peasant Song (and, in fact, the whole album) that precisely demonstrates one advantage a young band with decent ideas will have over its influences – all possible strands and brands of rock may, on the face of it, already have been invented, but they certainly haven’t been used up, and there’s a synthesis of all that classicism now available to those with imagination that may not have been in years gone by - the “Sun Giant” EP that immediately preceded the group’s full length debut is mentioned because it’s hardly any less impressive, and because a new version of the album now includes its tracks

2. Portishead – Third (Island)

- Portishead overcame the difficult third album syndrome by simply not making one for eleven years – yet, when your debut becomes as sonically pervasive as Portishead’s did, and your singer is consequently as identifiable as Beth Gibbons is, the recognition factor can’t be helped, even after such a long break, and even if your album is as calculated an attempt to move on as “Third” clearly is – of course, instant recognition is not necessarily a good thing, but Portishead make it work for them while apparently deliberately eschewing any and everything, besides their musical imagination, that will have had their fans longing for their return – that way they hang on to their crucial strengths, completely avoid any sense of basking in outdated glory and produce a record that sounds like it might have done had they progressed naturally through a series of intervening albums to this point – so “Third” is almost surely an intrinsically better album than “Dummy” or its unfairly underrated successor (it’s certainly musically more widely ranging), and that makes it better than just about anything else around as well

3. Bon Iver – For Emma, Forever Ago (Jagjaguwar)

- following the break-up of his band and his relationship with his girlfriend, Justin Vernon took up residence all alone in a remote cabin in the Wisconsin woods where he remained sequestered for three or four months, writing, recording and, so the story goes, hunting his own food - and that’s exactly how “For Emma” sounds … stark, desolate, solitary (the occasional assistance that later added external instrumental colour is itself almost spectral), breathtakingly beautiful and timelessly in tune with the concept of its title

4. Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds – Dig!!! Lazarus, Dig!!! (Mute)

- whether leading his Grinderman project through a maelstrom of about the most red-blooded, raucous rock ‘n’ roll even he has tried since the halcyon days of the Birthday Party, composing with conviction and an impressive sense of style for the Western movies, or fronting the long serving and perhaps long suffering Bad Seeds (it seems the album may be the last original member, Mick Harvey’s, swansong) through his more formal releases, Nick Cave is in a rich vein of form; so much so that, were I to give the matter proper thought, I might even conclude that my gut reaction is correct and that the new and erratically punctuated album (even its artwork sports three different arrangements of the title) is my favourite since “The Boatman’s Call”, and the most gleefully irreverent since “Murder Ballads” – from the lurching title track all the way to the insistently pessimistic closing title, More News From Nowhere (with special mention going to We Call Upon The Author, in which Cave seems to combine literary criticism with a full-throated castigation of the Creator and which, like the previous albums by Okkervil River and the Hold Steady, references poet John Berryman), it’s nothing but the good stuff

5. Bill Frisell – History, Mystery (Nonesuch)

- I’ve never met a Bill Frisell album I didn’t like, but this part live, part instrumental radio ballad double disc, constructed as a kind of 30-part suite where five or six shorter pieces act as repeated and developing themes and motifs holding the work in place, and strongly reminiscent of the superb “This Land” and “Quartet”, is surely among the best by arguably the jazz world’s most sonically distinctive guitarist in an octet of tried, trusted and almost miraculously sympathetic musical compadres, including two horns and three strings – it feels, without standing back or keeping still to do so, like a long view career stock take by an artist who continues effortlessly to push, shift and blur musical boundaries everywhere he goes

6. Deerhunter – Microcastle/Weird Era Cont. (Kranky/4AD)

- with their third and, I suppose, their fourth albums (since the fact that the two impressively evenly high quality parts of this double disc have different names and at least superficially if not fundamentally a different feel - and were recorded several months apart - suggests that the band might have made each to stand up on its own) the wide variety of indie rock influences informing the sound of Atlanta’s experimental noise-rockers/avant poppers (the point is to give you some clue of the sonic territory you’re in – the band refers to itself as ambient punk) has coalesced into a whole where you can still spot the touchstones that give the albums their internal variety, but will nevertheless be seduced and eventually captured by Deerhunter’s originality

7. Toumani Diabaté – The Mande Variations (World Circuit) / Rajery, Ballaké Sissoko & Driss El Maloumi – 3MA (Contré-Jour)

- the Diabaté is absolutely solo, a breathtaking kora recital almost classical in nature, on which the virtuoso star of such more obviously crowd pleasing endeavours as Songhai, the phenomenal Symmetric Orchestra and the Ali Farka Touré alliance, so steeped in not only the music of his chosen instrument but its musicality as well, draws you in, reassures you with his touch and tone, and then slays you with his brilliance – the title of the “3MA” collaboration refers to the native countries of the protagonists … Madagascar, Mali and Morocco (in French), and these masters, respectively, of the rippling valiha, the shimmering kora and the sturdily exotic oud, each so musically fundamental to its homeland, encourage, cajole and intuitively support each other while creating a cross-cultural product of elegance, charm and sometimes dazzling beauty

8. Alejandro Escovedo – Real Animal (Back Porch/Manhattan)

- in the hands of veteran producer Tony Visconti and the songwriting and guitaring company of fellow unsung hero Chuck Prophet, Escovedo, who more or less epitomises Texan music for me, has finally made a record whose sound and feel transcend his home state, though without in any way diluting his string-driven, roots-based strengths – there’s a noticeable increase in punch and drive at rocking tempos, while the improved clarity of those gorgeously melancholic ballads makes them even more heartrendingly poignant, the songs harking back to early days as a glam rock loving punk and cowpunk and even recalling a California upbringing passing himself off as a Hawaiian surfer when his Mexican heritage might have ostracised him - there are only two possibilities with Escovedo, either you love him or else you’ve never heard him

9. Blitzen Trapper – Furr (Sub Pop)

- Blitzen Trapper sounds like one of those mix tapes I (and, no doubt, you) used to make for friends (you know, the ones the industry used to claim were killing music, despite the fact that your friends often then went out and bought albums they otherwise would never have heard); where the young Oregon band’s acclaimed previous release “Wild Mountain Nation” occasionally ranged too widely for its own good, there’s nothing about this absolutely unpretentious record I don’t like as it traverses a stylistic scope where acoustically picked folk and pedal steel swooning country rock rubs shoulders with and is sometimes sparked by riffing, jamming classic rock, soaring ‘60s influenced power pop, indie squonk and even electronic noise – it might be my year’s least expected favourite

10. Dave Douglas & Keystone – Moonshine (Leaf)

- “Keystone”, the 2005 album that gave this band its name (only the keyboards have changed, with Fender Rhodes lending more of an electro-jazz shiver to the sound), was designed to accompany a silent movie, and it worked wonderfully, as the Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle DVD that accompanied the album demonstrated – this time the sense and even the sensibilities are similar (Buster Keaton’s photo is a focal point of the artwork and the band is pictured accompanying the Arbuckle movie), but the music is more flexible, inspired by silent film rather than providing it with a soundtrack, reflecting, in the words of the brilliant trumpeter/leader, “the atmosphere of those innocent/zany black and white images, refracted through 21st century jazz sensibility, interpreted by an eclectic collection of gifted musicians” – exactly!

11. The Hold Steady – Stay Positive (Vagrant)

- if the constant comparisons with Springsteen and Thin Lizzy haven’t yet persuaded you to at least try the Hold Steady, maybe the guest appearances on this, their fourth album, by members of Dinosaur Jr (J Mascis, of all people, on banjo), the Drive-By Truckers and Guided By Voices will do so, suggesting, as they do, serious indie cred to go with all that rock classicism and lyrical Catholicism – “Stay Positive” sounds more closely produced than its predecessors, and that has caused some anxiety in certain critical circles – to these ears, though, all it does is move the band up a level – they were clearly headed this way, so be thankful they got here with integrity intact and without artistic or intellectual sacrifice

12. Rokia Traoré – Tchamantché (Nonesuch)

- one of the constants of just about any musical year is the amount of great music generated by the remarkable Mali, whether from within the country or via expatriates like the increasingly adventurous Rokia Traoré – “Tchamantché” is all the more welcome given the fact that it seemed at one point as if the so-called sophistication Western influence and her multi-cultural background was lending her music might cause a drop off in the arguably more critical (depending what you’re aiming for, I suppose) elements of excitement and soul; this has the lot, from the muscular drive of the traditional n’goni and use of the classical harp rather than its cousin the kora to the rolling guitar of the northern deserts and even Gershwin (with n’goni accompaniment) - Traoré’s quite bewitching vocals, intimate and personal as usual rather than powerful and declamatory like so many of her countrywomen, set the seal on a fabulous performance

13. Dub Colossus – A Town Called Addis (Real World)

- the idea of marrying Ethiopian singing and playing to Jamaica’s reggae rhythms and overlaying the result with dub production methods might seem obvious given the way Rastafarianism has connected the two countries, yet the trick has been tried so seldom (if ever) that this album came as one of the year’s nicest surprises – Dub Colossus (Nick Page of Transglobal Underground, an important champion of cross-cultural collaboration) finds the fit in such a way that this remains a dub album with Ethiopian music rather than the other way round, somewhere between, say, Bill Laswell and Adrian Sherwood, both operating near the peak of their form

14. Okkervil River – The Stand Ins (Jagjaguwar) / Shearwater – Rook (Matador)

- it seems that Okkervil River’s fabulous 2007 album, “The Stage Names”, was initially intended to be a double, and that this may have been the other disc, at least conceptually – well, that’s as may be, but, while this clearly sounds like Okkervil River, it feels essentially different from its predecessor … quieter, perhaps, even though there’s still rock, and volume, to be had, and more downbeat (the album ends, like its forerunner, with a tribute to a tragic artist - then poet John Berryman, now singer Jobriath, but this time without the familiar Sloop John B chorus to lift the spirits - and a suggestion that Sheff might be headed into Scott Walker territory) – it took longer to get into as well, but Will Sheff is such a fine songwriter, and the band such an intuitively great vehicle for his songs, that, as soon as I had stopped making those comparisons, “The Stand Ins” soon revealed itself to be a more than worthy addition to, and broadening of, what is turning out to be a seriously impressive catalogue – and so, on the evidence of their two latest albums, is Shearwater’s, where Okkervil River’s Jonathan Meiburg (Sheff was also once a member) gets to exercise his own substantial songwriting ability as the angel-voiced leader of a band less earthy, perhaps, and more arty, and more precious, but no less precocious, than the Okkervils – it seems that, with both bands starting to make a few commercial waves, he’s chosen Shearwater, where the bleaker, more wintry sound is a perfect fit for his soaring vocals and ravishing songs

15. Dave Holland Sextet – Pass It On (Dare2)

- the magisterial bass player’s ability (yes, bass players like this are always magisterial) to keep putting together ensembles that never dip below magnificent, and then to write material worthy of them, continues to inspire – this time Holland and long serving trombonist Robin Eubanks, who wrote the opening Sum Of All Parts, which perfectly describes the group and its synergistic chemistry, are joined by Russian trumpeter Alex Sipiagin and such stars of the modern mainstream as altoist Antonio Hart, pianist Mulgrew Miller and drummer Eric Harland, the latter two new to Holland recordings though Miller and Hart are well acquainted with each other – as ever, there was hardly anything obviously more impressive in the jazz year

16. Umalali - The Garifuna Women’s Project (Cumbancha/Stonetree)

- Garifuna is an Afro-Caribbean culture, descended from slaves and marginalised for centuries, whose music suddenly came to international notice in 2007 on the heels of Belizean Andy Palacio’s wonderful “Watina” album - Umalali, which means voice, is a collective of Garifuna women singers and their album, produced, like “Watina”, by Palacio compatriot Ivan Duran, makes a terrific successor to that record (sadly Palacio himself died early last year) – it seems that women are the principal bearers of Garifuna culture, so the album is more traditional sounding than “Watina” (though it does include contemporary songs too), with some of the singers, who come from Honduras and Guatemala as well as Belize, strongly reminiscent in style and timbre of their West African ancestors, while the musical backing, which pretty much covers the Caribbean waterfront, brings the sound right up to date

17. Bellowhead – Matachin (Navigator) / Spiers & Boden – Vagabond (Navigator)

- if the second full length release by the remarkable folk big band is not as startling as the first (it could not realistically have been), it’s hardly less worthy of your love and attention - Jon Boden’s wonderful rendition of Fakenham Fair, learned from his hero, the vocally singular Peter Bellamy whose setting of Kipling’s Cholera Camp is here as well, sets the perfect mood for a set that roves imaginatively, eccentrically and sometimes inspirationally across an English folk music landscape that accommodates stirring balladry and bloody murder as naturally as raucous sea shanties and The Flight Of The Folk Mutants – the fiddle and intrinsically English guitar playing Boden’s other project, aside from a burgeoning solo career, is the duo he forms with Bellowhead’s outstanding squeeze box man, John Spiers, and their “Vagabond”, an outlet for a somewhat more conventional, if no less exciting, approach to traditional English music, could hardly have been bettered – it’s all a question of taste, but acquiring both will dramatically improve your world

18. Issa Bagayogo – Mali Koura (Six Degrees)

- known in his native Mali as Techno Issa because of the way he, mostly seamlessly, incorporates electronic sound and rhythm into his traditional, kora-centric West Afropop, Bagayogo has moved up a gear for this album, subtly incorporating horns and slightly more overt jazz influences into the always reliable marriage of ancient and modern elements that sets him apart from most of his colleagues – it’s a difficult balance to achieve, but he achieves it more often than not

19. Robert Forster – The Evangelist (Yep Roc)

- it’s inevitable, of course, that the memory of Forster’s tragically departed fellow Go-Between Grant McLennan will pervade this album (three of the songs are McLennan co-writes) and, trusting Forster’s ability and taste as I have for about 25 years, that would have been fine on its own – yet he manages, against all odds, and without avoiding either that memory or the pain that must have been present throughout, to fashion something that is neither just a wistful, wishful Go- Betweens epilogue (though there are, inescapably, elements of that) nor a maudlin tribute, but probably the best Robert Forster album to date - I’m even tempted to suggest that it might be the best solo offering to emanate from either of the brilliant Brisbanites but my love for McLennan’s “Horsebreaker Star” keeps getting in the way

20. Marcin Wasilewski Trio – January (ECM)

- though this is only the second album released under its name, the trio has been together since they were teenagers making music for film projects, and, as three quarters of the outstanding Polish trumpeter Tomasz Stanko’s band, is now widely considered one of the finest groups in jazz; and “January” is likely to remain a piano trio staple of a label whose love for and care of the form is impressive - Wasilewski’s The Young And The Cinema and Ennio Morricone’s lovely Cinema Paradiso reference their roots, and they pay homage by revisiting Stanko’s Balladyna – Prince may be a less obvious source, but their Diamonds And Pearls is gorgeous, and no less confidently essayed than the album’s Gary Peacock and Carla Bley pieces or the five outstanding originals

21. Drive-By Truckers – Brighter Than Creation’s Dark (New West)

- despite the loss to his own career of Jason Isbell, one of their outstanding trio of singer/songwriter/guitarists, the Deep South’s finest have produced arguably their best album since the wonderful “Decoration Day”, on which Isbell had in fact debuted – his place as singer/songwriter goes to his ex-wife, the group’s bass player Shonna Tucker, and as guitarist to John Neff, whose guest steel had previously contributed importantly anyway, and both rise impressively to the task – this is clearly, in general approach, still the intelligently Southern rocking Truckers we have grown to know and love so well, but these moves do create a little more welcome variety, especially given the band’s penchant for making long albums – most significant, though, are the huge songwriting strides made by Mike Cooley, whose nine songs (out of nineteen) make him easily the record’s individual star

22. Randy Newman – Harps And Angels (Nonesuch)

- this may be the first Randy Newman album of new songs in nearly a decade, but he’s just as clear eyed, sharp tongued and acid penned as he ever was, and he hits the target with the same pinpoint accuracy (see, just by way of example, A Few Words In Defense Of Our Country) – sardonic, fiercely intelligent and often devastatingly funny, it’s closer to vintage Newman than we have a right to expect from a 65 year old who mainly writes for film these days, even one with his songwriting track record

23. Calexico – Carried To Dust (Quarterstick/City Slang)

- returning, but without labouring it, to the wide-land, desert-steeped mariachi-accented folk-rock that got them to a point when I thought, just for a moment, that they might be the best band in the world (my cellphone ringtone is the intro from Across The Wire, so you know I care), Calexico, with important Spanish contributions from members of once roots fashionable Spaniards Amparanoia, especially on the lovely tribute to Pinochet murdered Chilean activist poet and singer Victor Jara, has delivered what looks like a keeper – other, less obvious contributors include members, just to establish the album’s sonic territory, of Tortoise and Iron & Wine, Willie Nelson’s harmonica player and Greg Brown’s guitarist Bo and daughter Pieta

24. Trygve Seim & Frode Haltli – Yeraz (ECM) / Dans Les Arbres – Dans Les Arbres (ECM)

- Dans Les Arbres is a Norwegian improv ensemble featuring Christian Wallumrød on piano and the French clarinet/harmonica of Xavier Charles, with guitarist Ivar Grydeland’s banjo contributing unusual tonal colour and a sruti box providing the drone - the album closely interrogates the sonic possibilities offered by the unconventional lineup, arriving at conclusions and suggesting new areas for exploration that might bewilder at first but that will continue to surprise and delight throughout further listens with just a little patience and an open musical mind – Seim and Haltli are Norwegian, too, the former arguably the heir to Jan Garbarek’s glacial saxophonic throne, the latter a visionary accordionist - using the space around the notes as much as the instruments’ natural sonic, if not necessarily cultural, synergy, they deliver a beautiful, partially composed, partially improvised set incorporating Armenian folk song, pieces by Armenian mystic G. I. Gurdjieff, Seim’s search for the tones and spirit of the Armenian duduk, Bob Marley’s by now nearly sacred Redemption Song and several outstanding originals

25. TV On The Radio – Dear Science (DGC/Interscope)

- it shows how out of touch I am with the commercial reality of the record business – there I was convinced that this must be a number one album, given the fuss made over what was, in what I considered broadly mainstream rock terms, its extraordinary predecessor, and the fact that TV On The Radio was now under the wing of a major label, but I see “Dear Science”, with its general advance on “Return To Cookie Mountain”, its fabulous array of pop, rock and funk tropes and its fierce musical intelligence, didn’t even make the US Top Ten (the predecessor only reached No 41) – more fool them, I say; personally, I’m glad to remain out of touch

26. Crooked Still – Still Crooked (Signature Sounds)

- if self-styled alternative bluegrass group Crooked Still has a fault, it may be a tendency towards scholarly earnestness, causing its absolutely gorgeous exercises in what might be termed old-timey chamber music (well, what would you call a cello driven banjo and fiddle band with vocals this exquisite?) to spill over into preciousness – the thing, though, is that it’s so good when it works (and it works more often than not) that you need the occasional misstep, which is never less than pretty anyway, to balance the books – and I don’t think that this impression is caused by the fact that Greg Liszt, whom they share with Springsteen’s Seeger Sessions band, is a doctor of molecular biology - he’s not the first doctoral banjoist, either, all those jokes notwithstanding … Pete Wernick of Hot Rize has a doctorate in sociology

27. Emmylou Harris – All I Intended To Be (Nonesuch)

- having just turned sixty and five years on from her last excursion into Daniel Lanois influenced sonic territory Emmylou looks back in order to look ahead, with former husband Brian Ahern returning to produce a work of considerable elegance and grace that will re-attract the “Blue Kentucky Girl” crowd without losing those who prefer “Red Dirt Girl” – a number of trusted musical friends come along for the ride and, as usual, she totally inhabits the songs, by one time Johnny Cash stepson-in-law Jack Routh, craggy Texan Billy Joe Shaver, Patty Griffin, former trucker Mark Germino, even Tracy Chapman, but mainly her three originals and two co-writes with the McGarrigle sisters, with the folky How She Could Sing The Wildwood Flower and the heartbreaking Not Enough especially poignant

28. Samamidon – All Is Well (Bedroom Community) / Lissa Schneckenburger – Song (Footprint) / Cath & Phil Tyler – Dumb Supper (No Fi)

– American traditional music is alive and well, and still played, at least on this evidence, without fuss or flamboyance, or any sense of historical chic, and in such a way that all resistance is rendered quite hopeless – to set the record straight, Samamidon is a duo of which Sam Amidon is a member, and they play quiet and often lovely versions of the kind of thing that can be found in its more rugged form on the Harry Smith collection, but, crucially, without losing that essential mystery that so characterises traditional music; the husband and wife Tylers, she an American singer out of the splendid Cordelia’s Dad, he a fine guitarist from Newcastle in the English style, are a little more raw and earthy, especially on those wonderfully spooky harmonies; but the jewel in this particular crown is fiddle playing New England singer Schneckenburger, who sings and plays with such natural ease and fluency you’d almost think the songs were somehow handed down directly to her

29. Eliza Carthy – Dreams Of Breathing Underwater (Topic)

- undoubtedly the star of a new generation of British traditional folk music revivalists (how could she not be with the parents she has, you ask – well, in truth her talent stands up way beyond and apart from a musically steeped upbringing and a famous name), Carthy reveals, on her second album of original songs (far better in every way than on 2000’s somewhat disappointing major label “Angels & Cigarettes”), that she has songwriting skills to burn, too, as she acknowledges and then demonstrates, much more clearly, in material and arrangement, the way the music of that upbringing can be given a contemporary focus

30. Etran Finatawa – Desert Crossroads (Riverboat) / Terakaft – Akh Issudar (IRL)

- the concept of desert blues is now almost a marketing brand, thanks to the adoption by the hip and trendy of the Tuareg group Tinariwen, who have managed to remain musically wonderful despite it all, but whose 2008 output was confined to a live DVD – so, into the breach, with considerable class and without a hint of hype, stepped Etran Finatawa, from Niger rather than Mali, only partly Tuareg, and, when not essaying that by now archetypal call and response of mesmerising rolling guitar and eerie vocal chant, musically quite a bit harsher and vocally more shrill, and Terakaft, who sound (unsurprising, given the presence of two former Tinariwens in their ranks) exactly like I hope Tinariwen are going to once the mainstream media loses interest and moves on to the next big cross-cultural thing

31. Jim Moray – Low Culture (NIAG)

- not everybody was convinced that Jim Moray was going to save English traditional music for the younger generation when his “Sweet England” debut was released to almost unnaturally enthusiastic acclaim in 2003 – it was the somewhat twee boy band vocals rather than the only marginally daring arrangements from an obviously vastly talented performer that caused me pause; that and the fact that English traditional music didn’t seem to need saving, so impressive was the list of young pretenders standing in line for their opportunity – that list has continued to grow, but so, happily, has Moray, to a point where the songs (including a frankly fantastic version of XTC’s All You Pretty Girls) are now easily the most important thing, though the arrangements (which include rapper Bubbz on one of the big murder ballads) continue to show encouraging imagination, while preserving a traditional heart

32. Otis Taylor - Recapturing The Banjo (Telarc) / Carolina Chocolate Drops – Heritage (Dixiefrog)

- despite its determinedly white country music connotations, the banjo was originally a black instrument, with antecedents, most believe, in West Africa, and Taylor, an unconventional but uncompromising bluesman, sets out, with several of his contemporary blues peers, like Corey Harris, Alvin Youngblood Hart and Keb’ Mo’, a few other instruments, a variety of styles that run from classic New Orleans jazz via jug band and old timey to electric rock, fierce determination and a considerable degree of flair, to recapture it – songs include the typically Taylorite Ran So Hard The Sun Went Down and Ten Million Slaves, and the whole affair is a resounding success – the Carolina Chocolate Drops, a trio for whom the phrase young, gifted and black might have been coined, go one further – they attempt, with banjo, fiddle, resophonic guitar (and jug), and enthusiasm to match their considerable skill, to recreate the entire black Appalachian string band tradition, and I’ll be damned if they don’t just about pull it off

33. Wolf Parade - At Mount Zoomer (Sub Pop)

- there can be little doubt that this Montreal outfit benefitted, both sonically and socially, from their association with Modest Mouse and, especially, the Arcade Fire but, fortunately, their outstanding debut (and their Handsome Furs side project) demonstrated real pop magic to go with a strong indie rock ethic and, impressively in the light of the difficulties that must inevitably have accompanied being regarded as the year before’s Arcade Fire (who have themselves come to be considered by many as last year’s Arcade Fire), the patience they have exercised in releasing a follow up has seen them emerge stronger and more musically mature, but without sacrificing any of whatever it was that was so attractive in the first place – older and wiser, therefore, but better, too

34. Warsaw Village Band – Infinity (Jaro)

- robust, strident and thrilling, with plenty of rugged beauty as well, Poland’s fiddle and cello centred roots music finest overcome a bad electronic experience in a triumphant nearly all-acoustic return to the folk songs and dances they know and do best – as usual with this crowd, the totality is way more than the sum of those seemingly quite prosaic parts

35. Earth – The Bees Made Honey In The Lion’s Skull (Southern Lord)

- the veteran drone rockers, with Dylan Carlson still in charge on guitars (and amplifiers – he’s credited, with good reason, as playing both), have co-opted Bill Frisell for extra atmospheric dimension on this often majestic display of exactly how imposing, and musically satisfying, only a few notes, played loudly, slowly and very deliberately, but with sufficient command and sufficiently imaginative placement, can be – all instrumental, the album inevitably has cinematic sweep and imagistic power in spades (think apocalyptic Spaghetti Western shot somewhere west of Armageddon), but there’s something else there, too, almost a delicacy of conception, that is very seldom achieved

36. Evangelista – Hello, Voyager (Constellation) / Thee Silver Mt Zion Memorial Orchestra & Tra-La-La Band – 13 Blues For Thirteen Moons (Constellation)

- I found singer Carla Bozulich’s vocal approach in the Geraldine Fibbers too studied and stylised for comfort, but now she’s on a Canadian outrock label (the only American there, it seems) with a bunch of musicians (several from chamber and majestic post-rock favourites, the interrelated God Speed! You Black Emperor and the various variations on A Silver Mt Zion) perfectly suited to the kind of near pretentious avant-garde drama that her latest project, Evangelista, reaches for in a challenging conglomeration of blues riffs, free verse, cathartic rant and symphonic rock that is sometimes hard going, but eventually well worth the effort – there is little as exhilarating as Thee Silver Mt Zion themselves in full flight, and “13 Blues …” lives up to expectations over four long, long tracks on which the Tra-La-La side of the group features more heavily than has sometimes been the case, and if their vocals contain a little too much desperation for your liking, their integration into the customarily vast, string driven, sonic swathes proves that every rock listener needs a little extravagance, and even bombast, in his listening life

37. Vampire Weekend – Vampire Weekend (XL) / Dengue Fever – Venus On Earth (Real World) / Firewater – The Golden Hour (Bloodshot) / DeVotchKa – A Mad And Faithful Telling (Anti-)

- those paying careful attention to “True Blood” on Tuesday nights will know that, in addition, predictably, to Tuvan throat singing (Huun-Huur-Tu to be precise), Vampire Bill listens to Dengue Fever, a band of LA rockers whose charming psychedelicism runs to ‘60s Cambodian pop (which itself incorporated sundry shades of kitsch) but the ace up whose sleeve is the genuine Cambodian singer up front, singing in genuine Khmer; it’s among the most successful of several recent worthy alliances of American rock and foreign music, right up there with that of Vampire Weekend, in fact, whose most engaging feature might be the entirely acceptable Southern African guitar riffs that punctuate and drive an especially sharp and energetic set of Amerindie pop songs – you wouldn’t have thought that a song called Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa could possibly work, but it does, and it’s by no means the only one … and the guitar’s no cheap shtick, either - I can’t say for sure that Bill listens to Weekend, but he seems to have his musical taste on the right way round, so he probably does, and to Firewater, too, whose Tod A seems to be contending strongly for the title of chief global rock politico so sadly vacated by Joe Strummer, and to DeVotchKa – the latter two focus less closely on a particular geographical area or cultural style (though there’s quite a lot of Eastern Europe generally about DeVotchKa) but manage no less convincingly to incorporate often wildly divergent musical forms into a highly appetising stew

38. Malcolm Holcombe – Gamblin’ House (Echo Mountain) / James McMurtry – Just Us Kids (Lightning Rod)

– here are a couple of superior songwriters who may have passed you by – the albums (like most, if not all of their others) are by no means perfect, but the quality of the best songs is uncommonly fine - I had overlooked Holcombe, a North Carolinan in the broad tradition of Townes Van Zandt and Guy Clark, until this past year, but then set out to get hold of everything by him that I could, so much did his strange, bleak and occasionally even bitter, but always ultimately humanistic, writing affect me – when I saw McMurtry live a few years ago I thought him too cool by half, a Texan cross between Lou Reed and the electric Neil Young, but the songs were mainly good to terrific, and his strong narrative gift demonstrated that he’d clearly gained more from his famous novelist father than just the money required to pursue this career without undue hardship – for an example of how powerful he can be, listen to the intro of God Bless America; when he sings, with menace and barely concealed contempt, “yonder comin’, mercy me, three wise men in an SUV”, you just know that this time it ain’t the cavalry

39. Amadou & Mariam – Welcome To Mali (Because/Nonesuch)

- the blind Malian couple’s version of West African soul is more or less guaranteed to improve your listening life, whatever they do, though the widespread success of the Manu Chao produced Dimanche à Bamako might have created both commercial and sonic expectations that will prove hard to shake, partly because it may have been as much a Manu Chao record as their own – this one also has a big name producer, Damon Albarn, a bona fide pop star with serious roots music credentials, and he brings that particular combination of musical sensibilities to the party, but without stamping a specific sound on the proceedings – the results are fabulous, as long as you accept that Amadou & Mariam are now a global pop act, rather than a specifically African one

40. Kries – Kocijani (Kopito)

- in my experience the line between getting it exactly right (thereby creating something fresh and unusual) and somehow missing the point altogether is often a very fine one, especially as far as foreigners dabbling in rock (which is still, despite what you’ve read here over the years, an essentially Anglo-American form) are concerned – it’s a bit like subtitling a foreign film, in fact … try too hard to be American and you end up with outdated ‘60s slang all over the screen – Kries is a rock band from Croatia, well folk-rock, I guess, in the true sense, since they actually do incorporate large slabs of Croatian traditional music into their slightly (and slightly, but attractively, outdated) psychedelic mix – so, in case you were wondering, Balkan pipes and flutes and the Dalmatian knee fiddle sit very comfortably alongside wah-wah guitar after all; Mojmir Novaković, who sounds more like a tennis player than a rock star, sings arguably my favourite song of the year (the anguished landmine protest Oj Livado), in the voice of an ancient mountain man who gargles every morning with goat’s blood; and Kries hit that line dead on nearly every time

41. American Music Club – The Golden Age (Cooking Vinyl)

- there was a time when American Music Club was one of my favourite bands, maybe ever, and Mark Eitzel a favourite songwriter; indeed, AMC’s sixth album, “Mercury”, was my Album of its Year – but that was 1993, the group split, to my great distress, after just one more record, and Eitzel’s solo career proved only sporadically engaging – so the weight of expectation around my house for the 2004 reunion was pretty severe – but “Love Songs For Patriots” quite comfortably passed muster, even though I missed steel player Bruce Kaphan’s atmospherics, so fundamental I thought to the sound I had loved (they were replaced by keyboards – never a good thing) – four years later only Eitzel and guitarist Vudi are left from that, or any other, version of the band, and Vudi has turned and toned down significantly, so “The Golden Age” is back to well pre-“Mercury” sparseness, when Eitzel, his songs and a mood had to carry the day – suffice it to say that I found it hard to stop playing the album

42. Kasai Allstars – In the 7th Moon, The Chief Turned Into A Swimming Fish And Ate The Head Of His Enemy By Magic (Crammed Discs)

- this is the third, from an aggregation of 25 musicians, singers and even dancers out of five different bands representing different Congolese ethnic cultures, in the already splendid series of recordings of so-called Congotronics, in which the wild, urgent and irresistible street music of Kinshasa, whose initial media shtick was the fact that it managed to be (they said) both primitive and electronic, became an (independent) music biz buzz - if you thought, when it started, that this might turn out to be a colourful one trick pony, think again – it’s no longer the epitome of exotic punk fashion, perhaps, but the music will run and run

43. Lambchop – OH (Ohio) (Merge/City Slang)

- Lambchop, the quietest big band in the world, are down to a spare, and even surreptitious, eight members and a couple of guests (no steel or strings this time, so the country-soul gives way to a brooding grown up pop style that could still be nobody but Lambchop) for an album that shows the taciturn and serially obtuse Kurt Wagner (Sharing A Gibson With Martin Luther King Jr and National Talk Like A Pirate Day are both inestimably wonderful songs, but what the hell do they mean?) again making fantastic use of vocal and melodic limitations to which he simply refuses to admit

44. Jim Neversink – Shakey Is Good (Self released) / Ella Joyce Buckley – For Astraea (.\/#/.)

- I don’t know if this can be right (it certainly shouldn’t be), but it seems to me that the most interesting South African music invariably comes off CDs that are pressed personally, privately or at least seriously independently, and in ludicrously limited runs; in fact I don’t know if Neversink’s second album was ever “formally” released, and you can’t even say the name of Buckley’s record company (run by experimental guitarist and Buckfever Undergrounder Righard Kapp) out loud – but Neversink the man, who occupies a slightly more singular version of South Africa than the rest of us, grows in songwriting stature all the time while Neversink the band (now changed in time for an upcoming third produced by ex-Television guitarist Richard Lloyd) tucks in quirkily, but rockingly, behind him all the way to the heartbreaking Palace – Buckley’s record is quietly gorgeous … starker (mainly just her and her piano, guitar, Alpine zither, mandolin, synths, percussion et al, but not all at once), friendlier (because it sounds more like other people you’ve heard before and liked a lot), yet somehow a little unsettling, too (because, despite the tunefulness and peacefulness there’s an edge that sets it apart – a bit like “My Mother’s Children” by Mary Hampton that nearly made this list, and would have if I’d decided to twin Buckley with it rather than with Neversink)

45. Eli “Paperboy” Reed & the True Loves – Roll With You (Q Division)

- Reed, a young white guy from Boston, actually sounds less like a black Southern soulman from the ‘60s than several of them, with parts of this record calling to mind Otis Redding, Bobby Womack, Sam Cooke, the Bobby Bland squall and the James Carr scream - it’s possible that Reed will turn out to have been just an exceptional mimic with a voice from God but, for the moment, “Roll With You” takes its place alongside the best that white soul has had to offer, and competes favourably with the more melanin enriched version, too

46. Ross Ainslie & Jarlath Henderson – Partners In Crime (Vertical)

- I’m fully aware of the overuse, by myself and others, of the word “blistering” to describe instrumental facility at high tempos, combined with a fire in the performance belly that raises the temperature along with the tempo – Ainslie and Henderson are two of the hottest young pipers (and whistlers) in the business, the former on the Scottish Border pipes, the latter on Ireland’s wilder uillean variety - not everything here is taken at warp speed, of course, and the proper amount of sensitivity is displayed when required – they both demonstrate a fine compositional sense, too, for players so young - but when they do hit the afterburners on those big old traditional reels, they really are nothing short of blistering

47. Seasick Steve – I Started Out With Nothin And I Still Got Most Of It Left (Warner Bros.) / Watermelon Slim & the Workers – No Paid Holidays (NorthernBlues)

- with the exception of a lone LP by the latter that nobody heard, bluesmen Seasick Steve Wold and Bill “Watermelon Slim” Homans started recording late in life, Steve after decades spent, he says (and seems to have the scars to prove it) as a vagrant, a hobo and a bum, which he claims are all different – for his third release he’s snared a major label, yet his rough, raucous, almost primitively driving take on the juke joint blues and his sparsely picked acoustic story telling remain intact despite slightly cleaned up sound, some female backing vocals and guests who include Nick Cave’s Grinderman and even KT Turnstall – Slim, a university graduated truck driving MENSA member who took up music full time after a heart attack, is on his third album for a much smaller label and it’s the same powerful, no frills stuff as before, packed with terrific slide and harmonica playing, fine songs, and the voice of raw and ragged experience

48. Thalia Zedek Band – Liars And Prayers (Thrill Jockey)

- the former Come singer leads her first band since that outfit’s demise through an outstanding set whose intensity matches, without flagging or faltering, her typically raspy vocal and the slow burning bond created between her guitar and bandmate David Michael Curry’s viola (he has contributed critically to the sound of the Willard Grant Conspiracy over the years, too) – so it’s not that different from a slightly less corrosive, but perhaps more consistent Come or, in fact, from Willard Grant with added laceration

49. Department Of Eagles – In Ear Park (4AD)

- is it just me, or are you also finding it progressively harder to follow exactly who’s in which band these days, which bands are just side projects of other bands (and which band is the side project and which the core outfit), and which apparent band names are actually attached to solo acts with a revolving set of mates? – it seems, for example, that three out of these five Eagles are also in Grizzly Bear, which itself might offer tempting clues (gentle but imaginative experimentation, clever use of samples, strong pop sensibilities and a commitment to good songwriting leading to an organically rich end product) – their love of and respect for the likes of Paul McCartney and Van Dyke Parks are palpable and if Macca stuck songs as good as Herringbone on his albums these days I might buy them as surely as I’ll be buying the next Department of Eagles effort

50. Boris – Smile (Southern Lord)

- I didn’t know this, being a relatively new convert to Japrock, till I looked it up, but Smile is apparently Boris’s 18th album, and the first one featuring vocals as more than just an occasional afterthought – what I do know is that, on the evidence of the four or five deafening Boris albums that I have heard, the hearing of this cobweb clearing Japanese trio must be in grave danger if it’s not already shot, so the idea of interspersing their personal variety of sludge rock in extremis with really quite pretty song material might have originated with the personal audiologist that they no doubt have doubling as one of their roadies - you know the expressions louder than bombs and louder than God? – well, Boris are even louder than that – once again their likeminded guitarist mate from Ghost, Michio Kurihara, is on board, with his considerable sonic imagination running free, and the results are really quite remarkable, provided you accept that the occasional ear bleed is good for the soul

1. Mavis Staples – We’ll Never Turn Back (Anti-)

- a dozen traditional and might as well be traditional songs about equality, civil rights and the blessings of the Lord might seem an unusual choice for album of the year, but this collection of freedom songs, sung with unfailing authority and conviction by one of the great soul and gospel voices of our time, who happened also to have been around and involved when activist singing was at its ‘60s peak, and produced with impressive simplicity and focus by Ry Cooder, ended up winning hands down as it just kept getting stronger and more emotionally involving as its rivals struggled to keep up

2. Robert Wyatt – Comicopera (Domino)

- the combined age of the two artists at the top of this list is around 130, not bad for someone who prides himself on continually seeking out the new and the challenging and never, in the words of the civil rights anthem that gave its name to my No 1, turning back (well, not that often, anyway), but if you think that nostalgia might have played too great a part in the choices you clearly haven’t heard the music – there is, in fact, as so often, a touch of an unspecified, indeterminate past about the sound of Wyatt as he deals expertly and enticingly in gentle persuasion, quietly mordant wit and engaging wistfulness, and dispenses, often with considerable political irony, a general air of calm as he dabbles in his usual array of folk, jazz and amiably avant-artpop and rock forms, yet he always sounds slightly ahead of whatever else is going on – Wyatt’s strength is that he’s not only a dabbler but perhaps even, in cricketing terms, a dibbly-dobbler, too, that quintessential English medium pacer who seems innocuous enough but is damn nearly impossible to get away, and who invariably ends up snaring his prey – “Comicopera”, a significant part of which finds Wyatt reflecting on war, seems likely to stand out for some time even in his singular body of work

3. Bassekou Kouyate & Ngoni ba – Segu Blue (Out/Here) / Justin Adams & Juldeh Camara – Soul Science (Wayward)

- essentially, I suppose, banjo and fiddle music from West Africa, Kouyate’s Malian ngoni and Camara’s Gambian ritti being, respectively, fundamentally and without getting too musicologically anal, ancestors of those favourite folk instruments, and every bit as thrilling as any created in the Appalachians or anywhere else (and arguably more elegant than most) – Kouyate’s group is a ngoni quartet with guest vocals from several highly evocative West Africans, including the celebrated Kassy Made Diabate and Malian bluesman Lobi Traore, while Camara’s collaborator is the long serving guitarist in Robert Plant’s band and the producer of the first album by Tinariwen, for whom see (not much) further down this list – despite the sometimes fanciful notions that surround the pre-slavery West African origins of the blues, it’s hard not to hear them here; where “Segu Blue” might be redolent of the Mississippi Delta, though, “Soul Science” seems to align itself with that state’s hill country’s hambone and drone

4. Joe Henry – Civilians (Anti-)

- the legend “produced by Joe Henry” is a surefire indicator of quality in a record, so it’s appropriate that the best of these last year turned out to be his own tenth, and surely finest, album - if I had any influence at all, his Our Song would win Grammy Song of the Year by several lengths – it’s an astonishing meditation on growing old, the fleeting nature of even the most substantial fame (American sports names don’t come very much bigger than Willie Mays), America’s own, suddenly less certain place in the world, the gap between what we want and what we’ll settle for, and buying garage door springs, that moves almost imperceptibly from an assertion of the protagonist’s individual rights to his submission to God’s will – a friend who understands these things better than most says Wave, the very next song on the album, is in fact the year’s best - to single out these two, though, is to overlook at least half a dozen more whose clarity of thought and individuality of expression might just take your breath away

5. Okkervil River – The Stage Names (Jagjaguwar)

- there’s about a minute on this album, as A Girl In Port plays out to pedal steel swooning over boozy horns and Nashville piano, that may be the most gorgeous I heard all year – the song itself is an absolute drop-dead beauty, but what’s most striking about the Austin band’s fourth album in a steadily more impressive Jagjaguwar catalogue that must, surely, eventually result in some small measure of world domination, is that the others around it, from the rocking opener with the enigmatic title via the smart-arse references to songs with numbers in their title (the point of Plus Ones is made by adding one to titles by Paul Simon, ? & the Mysterians, Nena, the Zombies, R.E.M., the Byrds, David Bowie, the Crests and the Commodores - nine miles high, 100th red balloon, 97th tear … geddit?) to a reflection on the suicide of poet John Berryman that culminates in Sloop John B, the Caribbean folk song that became a Beach Boys hit, all stand up for themselves – and the solo demo versions of those songs on the extra disc of the limited edition stand up, as a quite different album, to the official full band versions

6. Tinariwen – Aman Iman (Independiente)

- somebody, turning up late and looking for a hook, called Tinariwen the Touareg Rolling Stones, and the description appears to have stuck, in some quarters at least, but, if that conjures up an image of ancient if once bluesworthy poseurs falling off camels rather than out of palm trees, nothing could be further from the truth – there’s a spirit and an (albeit dark and brooding) elemental energy about these fierce looking former freedom fighters’ trademark desert blues that grabbed hold of my sub-Saharan heart the first time I heard it, and simply won’t let go – the trick is for the music to transcend the back story, and Tinariwen’s has done that, without a single missed step that I can recall, throughout three albums

7. Frode Haltli – Passing Images (ECM) / Sinikka Langeland – Starflowers (ECM)

- a couple of extraordinary and spellbinding Norwegian musicians taking chances with their folk tradition (and, at the same time, taking their folk tradition to places it can hardly have imagined possible) – Langeland merges her Finnish table harp, the kantele, and her stunning folk voice with a group of jazz musicians including the outstanding saxophonist Trygve Seim on a series of songs by woodcutter poet Hans Børli; accordionist Haltli adds trumpet, viola and voice where the natural sounds of breath blown, air pumped and horsehair scraped become as riveting and engaging as the non-vocal sounds that sometimes emanate from Maja Ratkje’s throat, lips and tongue, yet these are as beautiful in their own way as the slow, still, folk-inflected tunes that gradually unfurl out of and fold back into Haltli’s remarkable musical imagination

8. Martin Simpson – Prodigal Son (Topic)

- this may be the album, in a long and impressive career, that best represents Simpson’s range – the traditional English folk songs are there, as ever, his radically improved singing no longer playing second fiddle to his remarkable acoustic guitar playing, and so are the American roots influences in which he immersed himself even more completely in his years living in the USA (including a more mature and better considered cover of Randy Newman’s Louisiana 1927 than the one on Simpson’s debut, slightly altered to accommodate Katrina), and, of course, the delicate instrumentals, but, perhaps most of all, there’s also a brutally honest, beautifully paced original song about his father, who was never any good with money, yet taught his son a range of small skills he uses every day

9. The Arcade Fire – Neon Bible (Merge)

- the question, of course, was how these sudden yet persistently appealing Canadian indie rock darlings were going to top that amazing debut - they didn’t, quite, as it turned out, but the fact that they got this close is pretty remarkable in itself – Funeral’s sheer unexpectedness is what dazzled everybody, and probably continues to do so – the darker, perhaps more deliberate Neon Bible is not as explicitly ravishing, but it’s still beyond what most bands achieved in 2007

10. Sam Baker – Pretty World (BlueLimeStone)

- Baker, in an apparently endless line of brilliant Texan songwriters, had to re-learn the guitar following injuries sustained in a bomb blast twenty odd years ago, when the guy sitting next to him in a Peruvian railway carriage was killed, and he sings in a halting, slightly stilted fashion as a result of his consequent severe hearing loss, but his songs, packed with small but crucial insights and which might, of course, not otherwise have been written the way they were, don’t need the support of that amazing story to reveal themselves as among the pithiest and most poignant I’ve heard for ages

11. Andy Palacio & the Garifuna Collective – Wátina (Cumbancha)

- Andy Palacio, who died suddenly in January this year, lived just long enough to see the effect of his Garifuna Collective’s highly attractive and widely well-regarded debut album on publicising not only his native culture to the world at large, but the very existence at all of his people, a Caribbean race partially descended from shipwrecked West African slaves and living in the Central American country of Belize – on “Wátina”, Palacio, already a veteran of several albums, concentrated deliberately, in the company of other leading Garifuna musicians, on his own traditional music and language, and the results, which reflect both their West African and Caribbean influences in a way that adds to both, were among the year’s most agreeable unanticipated pleasures

12. Mary Gauthier – Between Daylight And Dark (Lost Highway) / Lucinda Williams – West (Lost Highway)

- ten years ago Lucinda Williams finally made, in “Car Wheels On A Gravel Road”, the album that her supporters had hoped she might have in her, and her life was changed forever, along with the attitude of quite a large audience towards Southern songwriting women, but she seemed to lose her artistic way a little as mainstream acceptance grew – “West”, reflecting her geographical move in that direction (it might have been equally appropriate to have twinned it with Steve Earle’s Nashville to New York offering) is a wonderful return to form under a Hal Willner production hand that allows emotional rawness to infiltrate the sound again, and gets exactly the right amount out of a band in which guitarist Bill Frisell and Tin Hat Trio keyboard man Rob Burger are just perfect – Gauthier, also Louisiana born and Southern raised and sounding not unlike Williams, might have been at about the same place in her career before “Between Daylight And Dark” and, while it doesn’t seem to have attracted quite the public attention that “Car Wheels” did, it strikes me that the Joe Henry produced album, with significant musical contributions by a couple of Frisellian associates Greg Leisz and David Piltch and superb songwriting by Gauthier who shines her lyrical torch both outwards and inwards with penetrating observation and unflinching honesty, ought, in a fairer world, to have a similar effect on her profile

13. Levon Helm – Dirt Farmer (Vanguard)

- that Helm still sings like he does, after throat cancer, 28 radiation treatments and, he says, plenty of prayer, seems like a miracle – he’s 67 years old now, so it’s not quite the majesty of the Band anymore but, with added experience, resonance and even deeper immersion into the old time folk and blues traditions that inform the hard core of this acoustic album produced by Dylan bandsman Larry Campbell and featuring Levon’s daughter Amy, it’s much more than the next best thing

14. The Imagined Village – The Imagined Village (Real World)

- an ambitious project in which Simon Emmerson, best known for his cross-cultural work with the Afro-Celt Sound System, revisits old English folk song with an intriguing mix of the English and inter-generational traditional (Martin & Eliza Carthy, the vocal Young Coppers, the instrumental Gloworms), the English but not so traditional (Paul Weller, Billy Bragg, poet Benjamin Zephaniah who totally re-imagines the story of Tam Lyn), the English and somewhere in between (Chris Wood, Tunng, Sheila Chandra) and his own (and the Trans-Global Underground’s) electro-acoustic and wonderfully eclectic inspiration

15. Carlo Mombelli & the Prisoners Of Strange (Instinct Africaine) / Dan Wilson/Mark Huggett Project – Max Roach Park (Musketeer)

- there’s an indication in the dates at the back of Mombelli’s CD digipak of just how difficult it is to get unusual South African music into the public eye (or ear): the recording took place early in 2005, yet it was only released in 2007 – then, to get hold of a copy, I eventually approached the artist and label owner directly, record stores and Internet sites having proved a waste of time – despite this, it’s been nominated for a South African Music Award in one of the few categories that can be taken seriously by anyone not part of the mainstream industry and media’s fifty million Elvis fans can’t be wrong approach (they can, of course, if you play them nothing but Elvis) - experimental bass playing composer Carlo Mombelli’s exceptional group features trumpeter Marcus Wyatt, tenorist Sydney Mnisi and drummer Lloyd Martin, with Jessica Bailey’s cello and Siya Makuzeni’s extraordinary, largely wordless vocals contributing sonic, harmonic and textural elements that make it highly unusual, if not unique, in a South African context - arresting, challenging, exquisitely off-kilter and sometimes even oddly funky, the group’s spontaneous freestyle chamber music (Mombelli’s description) is everything the musically adventurous would like to see more of around these parts – the Wilson/Huggett group is here again (their album featured in last year’s list) because they now have a proper release, and a thoroughly deserved SAMA nomination to go with it

16. Burial – Untrue (Hyperdub)

- lo-fi, claustrophobic, alienating, spectral (the telling song title is Ghost Hardware) and entirely dissimilar to anything else here, “Untrue” is the second album by anonymous electronic dubstep producer Burial, who claims that only about five people know who he is – there are no lustrous melodies, no irresistible dance beats, no overtly flash technology and the rare vocals are murky and cryptic – so it’s just one man’s imagination and a labyrinthine set of moods and surreptitious grooves that creep into your subconscious and gnaw away at your soul

17. Band Of Horses – Cease To Begin (Sub Pop)

- the Band Of Horses debut crept into my 2006 Top 20 without my even really noticing it, and I’ll be damned if their second hasn’t done precisely the same thing, and that’s despite having lost half of the original duo (though they have gained extra members) with so little damage to what it was that attracted me in the first place that I wondered for a moment what it was exactly that Mat Brooke did – Ben Bridwell’s high, airy tenor still soaks up and into those aching melodies and I think the songs may be better this time - to name arguably your best after a professional basketball player is one thing, to name it after one called Detlef Schrempf and make it work may be a sign of something approaching genius

18. Patty Griffin – Children Running Through (ATO)

- the most surprising entry among the half a dozen women in my twenty or so favourite albums of 2007 may have been Patty Griffin’s – six years ago in Austin I was happy enough to have caught her brief backing vocals at an Emmylou Harris gig, and didn’t bother to see her own show – I liked a few of her songs well enough, but I never got the impression that I’d be consistently engaged, and her albums bolstered that impression … until now – her command here of a variety of styles, from the folk and country that had always been her most conspicuous metier, to rockabilly, jazzy pop, soul and gospel, took me by surprise, as did the increase in breadth and depth of her songwriting, and every time I listened again to make sure, well, the album sounded even better – the standouts are probably the heartbreaking Trapeze, on which Emmylou repays the vocal favour, and the Martin Luther King tribute, Up To The Mountain, which she takes back from Solomon Burke, who did such a great job with it the previous year

19. Explosions In The Sky – All Of A Sudden I Miss Everyone (Temporary Residence Ltd)

- I go to London every year and, while I’m there, I catch a lot of tubes - by some distance, the iPod music that goes best with these trips falls into that largely instrumental if generally rather imprecisely classified category known as post-rock - the reason is probably the sense of space it creates – Canadians God Speed You Black Emperor (with an exclamation mark that seems to move from one album to the next), Thee Silver Mt Zion and their various offshoots and annexures are natural travel companions, but there are several others that do the job as well, and Explosions In The Sky from Austin, Tx are among the best without sounding much like the Canadians at all – carefully layering guitars into alternating currents of tremendous sonic power and melodic rapture, their approach has been criticised for being formulaic and even predictable, but the best post-rock works, I think, like a kind of dramatic, obvious minimalism, on the ability to build the sort of tension and make the engaging, if incremental, musical shifts that this band does

20. Bettye LaVette – The Scene Of The Crime (Anti-)

- LaVette was overlooked for much of what might be considered her prime by all but the most committed soul fans, a story told in supremely funky style on Before The Money Came – but, when it comes to soul singers, one’s prime apparently is as one’s prime does and, now in her sixties and a couple of albums into a new and what will hopefully prove to be properly appreciated lease of recording life, she sounds in fantastic shape – recorded at the storied Fame studios in Muscle Shoals and co-produced by Patterson Hood of the Drive-By Truckers, who provide the tough, beautifully unkempt backing with guest appearances from Hood’s bassist father David and his height of Fame keyboard crony Spooner Oldham, LaVette takes on songs by Eddie Hinton, John Hiatt and even Willie Nelson and Elton John, inhabits them completely, and truly makes them her own

21. The Shins – Wincing The Night Away (Sub Pop)

- the “Shins will change your life” hype was impossible to live up to, and this third album seemed deliberately to avoid trying to match the “Garden State” fuelled frenzy – yet it entered the US charts at an improbable No 2, and so the Shins became, formally, the great white hope of indie rock – but guitars chime and voices soar in subtler shades of pop dazzle as the more measured performance suggested it might actually take longer to reveal itself and, consequently, longer to fade, which is precisely how it has turned out … in my life, anyway – it never did make No 1, and the glorious single, Phantom Limb, only reached No 87, suggesting that I was right not only about the band but the audience as well

22. Orchestra Baobab – Made In Dakar (World Circuit) / Youssou N’Dour – Rokku Mi Rokka (Nonesuch)

- the fact that these two albums, both recorded in N’Dour’s Senegalese studio, deliver precisely what we’ve come to expect (which is, let’s face it, the very acme of Afropop) should surely be the cause of great celebration, even if we can shut our eyes and imagine how they’re going to sound (with maybe only Neneh Cherry’s rap on Youssou’s Wake Up (It’s Africa Calling) an exception, though we ought to have guessed what a title like that would generate) – so the veteran Orchestra sound like they’ve sounded for decades, comfortable and comforting with biting guitar and mellifluous sax peppering those wonderfully languid vocals and Afro-Cuban rhythms with just enough spice on a set of new songs and new recordings of old, but mainly not previously Baobabed songs – Youssou guests, too – his own record, on the other hand, is a gleaming, modern thing with few surprises (well, perhaps the New Orleans second line rhythm on Sportif , and a telling appearance by West African music’s man of my year, Bassekou Kouyate) but class to burn

23. Iron & Wine – The Shepherd’s Dog (Sub Pop)

- on Sam Beam’s third proper album, discounting the Calexico collaboration, the somewhat muted tones used to paint the general atmosphere of the first two explode into a comparative riot of production colour, with banjos, slide and steel guitars, funky electric piano, traces of dub and even a hint of Africa jostling for space – there have been clues, some on that Calexico effort, that he might be headed in this kind of direction, but the sonic and stylistic richness of “The Shepherd’s Dog” still surprises – the vocals remain hushed and vaguely conspiratorial, the overall mood melancholy, but there’s so much more to hear!

24. Aman Aman - Musica I Cants Sefardis d’Orient I Occident (Galileo)

- an offshoot of L’Ham de Foc, who featured strongly on this list a couple of years ago, Aman Aman plays exactly what the title tells us … music and songs of the Sephardic Jews of East and West, but that rather prosaic title doesn’t convey even a fraction of the strength and beauty and even excitement, or the sense of exotic time and place, that permeate this album, on which Mara Aranda, a gorgeous singer, and her mainly Spanish musician friends visit Greece, Bulgaria, Turkey and elsewhere in search of their originally Iberian Jewish muse

25. Richard Thompson – Sweet Warrior (Proper) / Linda Thompson – Versatile Heart (Decca)

- more than 25 years on from their musical and marital separation, the legacy of the Richard and Linda Thompson partnership still resonates to such a degree that bracketing their individual efforts still seems entirely natural – overall, Linda’s may be even better than her “Fashionably Late” comeback, though the lump in the throat factor has dissipated and though “Versatile Heart” may not have the one or two showstoppers of its predecessor – but the title track’s clever rhyming and boozy horns, the traditional Katie Cruel with its bouncy left-handed Irish guitar and the fabulously nostalgic Whisky, Bob Copper And Me shouldn’t be missed, and she stills sings like a bruised and slightly shop-soiled angel – Richard, on the other hand, just keeps the quality coming, rocking harder this time than most recently, writing a great war in Iraq song, assimilating the tradition as naturally as ever without ever compromising his rock ‘n’ roll heart and, in Take Care The Road You Choose, devising yet another of those devastating rolling ballads he seems to have the copyright on – a prolific family year also disgorged a raggedly powerful Richard & Linda 1975 concert, and son Teddy released “Upfront And Down Low”, an excellent album of classic country covers

26. Ry Cooder – My Name Is Buddy (Nonesuch)

- after two decades of film soundtracks and cross cultural co-operations, Cooder has revived his own catalogue and follows the brilliant “Chavez Ravine” with this, an allegorical tale of a red cat, by colour and political persuasion, and his buddies as they travel through Depression era America – the music is a return to the era’s folk and blues roots that Cooder so expertly engaged on his earliest albums, and there’s Tex-Mex and R&B as well - a supporting cast that includes long time cohorts Bobby King, Terry Evans, Flaco Jimenez and Jim Keltner, as well as pianist Van Dyke Parks, piper Paddy Moloney, folk icon Pete Seeger and his old time music genius half-brother Mike, speaks for both the scope and the quality of music where Three Chords And The Truth describes a songwriting intent and an approach to living you might have thought had died out

27. Grinderman – Grinderman (Mute)

- if you’ve been paying attention you’ll have noticed that, even though Nick Cave has matured over the past couple of decades into one of rock’s great measured songwriters, he has never completely left the love of noisy post-bluespunk that the Birthday Party so comprehensively espoused when he first exploded into view, and the fact that Grinderman, an essentially, though not invariably, gutwrenchingly rowdy quartet featuring three of the Bad Seeds, growls and snarls its way through what was surely the raucous and gloriously ribald, yet still lyrically smart, rock album of the year should not have been a total surprise – whether this is the early beginning of a Cave policy of railing against the dying of his light in the year of his 50th birthday remains to be seen, but it’ll be no bad thing if it is

28. Robert Plant & Alison Krauss – Raising Sand (Rounder)

- two things struck me immediately about this record – firstly, the collaboration seemed entirely unlikely even if Plant had sung with Sandy Denny in halcyon Led Zeppelin days, that band had often messed with folk (but hardly ever, if at all, country) forms, and Plant’s post Zep career has been much more musically inclusive - secondly, despite my admiration for both Plant and the queen of bluegrass I’d never been especially attracted to them, yet I loved this album – that may have had (and may still have) something to do with a typically T Bone Burnett production and a wonderful song choice that takes in Townes Van Zandt, Allen Toussaint (as Naomi Neville), the Everly Brothers and Gene Clark (twice), as well as a reference to Sister Rosetta Tharpe in a song by Burnett’s wife Sam Phillips, but mostly I’m pretty sure it’s because they sing so damn well together

29. The National – Boxer (Beggars Banquet)

- I read somewhere that the National reminded some critics of both Joy Division and Bruce Springsteen, connections I wouldn’t have made myself but, having been alerted to them, can see why others might – darkly sturdy urban wasteland songwriting, isolated and melancholic urban wasteland sound … yep, there certainly are tangential similarities, though the National doesn’t actually sound anything like either of those acts – however, “Boxer” does sound a whole lot like its predecessor, “Alligator” … the brooding atmosphere is repeated, along with an overall feel of poetic dread, and I like it just as much – in fact, my response to “Boxer” turns out to be so similar that, on checking, I find that “Alligator” made No 28 on the 2005 version of this list

30. Erdem Helvacioglu – Altered Realities (New Albion) / David Torn – Prezens (ECM)

- maybe the most starkly beautiful album on this list, the Turkish composer’s “Altered Realities” are seven long and exquisitely textured acoustic guitar contemplations overlayed with real time electronics that support, stretch, distort, transfigure and transform the basic notes (despite what you would imagine to be the aural evidence, there was no mixing, editing, overdubbing or post-processing), or, where necessary, leave them alone, which means that all the music can be recreated, live, by a single musician – what is most impressive is that what sounds on the page like an exercise in electronic cleverness translates on record as music beyond your imagination – Torn’s explorations of the possibilities of the guitar relate mainly, though not exclusively, to the electric version, in the company of a fantastic improvisational band drawn from altoist Tim Berne’s Science Fiction group and, while what they do might seem a bit like science fiction to those of a more conservative six string bent, the array of sounds, ideas and, above all, musical, as opposed to merely sonic, invention, where the Delta blues, brutally visceral über-rock and inspired electronic manipulation all fit naturally together, it all fits naturally, if challengingly, together

31. Syd Kitchen – Across (No Budget)

- it seems ironic that, at just about the time that Kitchen’s quirky, highly individual but equally highly skilled songwriting appears to be finding a wider audience (a mainstream TV commercial; the much sought after McCabe’s gig in Santa Monica, California; a possible US-made film documentary; the appropriation by a large corporation of his Africa’s Not For Sissies slogan, needless to say without credit or commercial advantage to him, for a T-shirt), arguably his best album ever consists of four long solo acoustic guitar instrumentals named after the four elements, Earth, Air, Fire and Water – each displays exactly the right combination of artistic drift and internal development, referencing, without fuss or fanfare, the numerous musical influences in his life, and together forming a fifth element, (the title of his compilation album notwithstanding) the quintessential Kitchen

32. Ghost – In Stormy Nights (Drag City) / Boris (with Michio Kurihara) – Rainbow (Drag City)

- I have decided, on buying Julian Cope’s book, “Japrocksampler” (a belated successor to his “Krautrocksampler” that I read twice), to spend more time than I have heretofore done investigating the outer limits of Japanese rock (indeed, my exposure to the subject has been such that Japanese rock seems to consist entirely of outer limits, which is just fine with me) – Ghost and Boris (with Ghost’s voice of God guitar player Kurihara) are contemporary bands, not dealt with by Cope – yet the psychedelic spirit so favoured by Saint Julian never leaves them, whether it’s whimsical and folky, like much of Ghost, or darkly menacing, like much of Boris, or ear splitting, brain frying, stomach pummeling experimental noise freak out, like the rest of both - and it’s all fabulous

33. Panda Bear – Person Pitch (Paw Tracks)

- notwithstanding how much you thought you heard this connection before, what is most striking about “Person Pitch”, the Animal Collective’s Noah Lennox’s second album under his Panda Bear moniker, is just how much it sounds like what Brian Wilson did, does and, given that the stylistically quite wide-ranging and thoroughly contemporary production infused with an indie rock sensibility simply means that it sounds like a stylistically quite wide-ranging and thoroughly contemporary Brian Wilson infused with an indie rock sensibility, might yet do – it’s all marvellous, though, especially the vast Bros, which seems to incorporate everything Lennox does best into one 12 minute epic

34. Battles – Mirrored (Warp)

- a quartet out of Don Caballero and Helmet, amongst others, Battles has managed (absolutely and outrightly in some opinions, nearly in mine, which may be coloured by the damage done to my musical psyche by having lived through the grandiloquent schemes and creations of its antecedents), with its first release, to make progrock acceptable – this is some achievement, and the fact that this complex instrumental (with a few vocal sounds for leavening) collection of technological and intellectual trickery does work must be down to the band’s approach (do you call the kind of aggregation that would make his kind of music a band, I wonder), which, though undoubtedly serious, is never pompous and allows all sorts of humorous and even comic book asides into the process

35. Paul Motian / Bill Frisell / Joe Lovano – Time And Time Again (ECM) / Floratone – Floratone (Blue Note)

- this Motian trio is about as sure a guarantee of musical excellence, and even occasional genius, as it’s possible to find in any style, and the fact that they can do this stuff with their eyes closed (a figure of speech, you understand, as many musicians quite literally do what they do with their eyes closed) doesn’t mean either that it’s not worth doing or that they do it any less brilliantly, if arguably a little more abstractly and impressionistically this time – Floratone, a project that focuses musically and titularly on the South (mainly the post-Katrina South), includes drummer Matt Chamberlain as Frisell’s equal partner and features the Frisellian guitar tone, texture and compositional sense in spades, but the fact that both are listed as providing “loops”, and two non-instrumental producers receive equal band credit, says everything about the importance of the overall sound in relation to the actual notes being played

36. Beirut – The Flying Club Cup (Ba Da Bing!)

- Beirut’s 2006 “Gulag Orkestar” had to be a one-off … surely – a 19/20 year old American incorporating authentic-sounding Eastern European folk forms into an indie rock mosaic that spread from the Smiths to the Magnetic Fields and Neutral Milk Hotel … how on earth was he going to repeat that without simply repeating it? – well, he has, by doing much the same thing, only better and with increased maturity, and there are times that I believe I actually prefer this one – I can’t wait to see what he does next, though I’m secretly hoping it’ll be more of the same

37. Chris Letcher – Frieze (2 Feet/Sheer Sound) / David Kilgour – The Far Now (Merge)

- I read a piece written by London-based South African Chris Letcher (also the name of his band, by the way) some years ago about attending a Pavement gig and loving them to distraction – I always thought his work with Urban Creep and his duo with Matthew van der Want, which many South Africans knew, wouldn’t have prepared you for that, though his contribution to the first Lilo offering, which nobody anywhere even heard, may well have – on Frieze, his solo debut and by miles the finest locally related songwriting release of the year, all of that comes together in an intelligent, beautifully crafted, unpretentiously classy, yet slightly quirky rock/pop package on which Special Agents, a clear favourite from the past, is improved without showing up the songwriting quality around it – David Kilgour’s only connection is that he, too, comes from a country better known for rugby players than songwriters, in his case New Zealand – Kilgour is a veteran whose worth has even been formally recognised by his government by way of the Order Of Merit, his contributions to the Clean critical to the birth and development of what became acclaimed in indie rock circles home and away as the Dunedin Sound – but his solo career, too, has been a model of drop in anywhere you like and you won’t be disappointed consistency and understated melodic flair, and “The Far Now” is no exception

38. Rachel Unthank & The Winterset – The Bairns (Rabble Rouser/EMI) / June Tabor – Apples (Topic)

- just in case there’s been any doubt, the sublime Tabor proves, in her sixtieth year, that she is almost certainly the finest interpreter of the English folk tradition and contemporarily written neo-tradition, at least among the women, but maybe overall – as ever, this assessment goes way beyond her magnificent voice to include her choice of material, the real drama with which she invests it, and the way she gels with her restrained but marvellously sympathetic musicians and they with her – Rachel and Becky Unthank are young (their combined age is quite a bit short of Tabor’s) singing sisters plainly and proudly from the Newcastle region who seem already to have inherited a little of Tabor’s willingness for gentle boundary stretching – despite Rachel’s headline billing, the piano centred Winterset is a real collective (with four female voices exquisitely if slightly unusually arranged) prepared to take chances both within (I Wish) and outside (Robert Wyatt’s magnificent Sea Song) the tradition, and it all works

39. Radiohead – In Rainbows (Self released)

- it would be a pity if “In Rainbows” was only remembered as the album that caused a sea change in the way records are marketed (of course, whether or not it does remains to be seen, as an artist probably needs to have achieved a certain level of success to take on the industry juggernaut in the “pay what you think it’s worth” way that Radiohead did), because that might confuse future audiences into overlooking the fact that this is a very good record, perhaps even the band’s best for a decade - I’d have paid full price if I’d had to

40. John Surman – The Spaces In Between (ECM)

- this is the second of Surman’s projects for ECM in which the master of both the baritone sax’s rich sonority and the soprano’s sinuous mystery carefully intersects formal composition and well-directed improvisation, so that it’s often unclear where the one ends and the other begins – Surman, featured here with double bass and string quartet, adopts a lyrical, English compositional feel, yet finds space for both Middle Eastern influence and a revisiting of his own great ‘70s jazz-rock composition, Where Fortune Smiles

41. The Hold Steady – Boys And Girls In America (Vagrant)

- successfully walking the line between sincerity and contrivance is one of rock ‘n’ roll’s neatest tricks, but one of the hardest to pull off – Thin Lizzy and early Bruce Springsteen are such obvious touchstones for this Brooklyn outfit, with their big city rock sound, their coolly offhand rock gestures and their big, urban mythmaking rock lines, that my first impression was that they better have something to go with that to avoid becoming just a nostalgia act before their time, and it seems they do – they have such an obvious feel for the classic rock history they equally obviously love and respect it’s easy to condone the fact that Phil Lynott’s ghost seems at one point actually to have joined the band

42. Magik Markers – Boss (Ecstatic Peace) / Thurston Moore – Trees Outside The Academy (Ecstatic Peace)

- while it was certainly the Sonic Youth connection that caused me to investigate the Magik Markers in the first place, I don’t think it was the fact that Lee Ranaldo produced this release on Thurston Moore’s label that caused me to make an immediate association between Elisa Ambrogio’s melodically deadpan, slightly bored vocal style and that of Kim Gordon, or between the way the group shifts seamlessly, and in the same piece, between proper songs and sonic experimentation and a younger, more fervent version of the great New Yorkers – the title of Moore’s own album seems to represent the music within particularly well, with relatively plain speaking, elegantly textured acoustic guitar driven and violin decorated songwriting growing organically from the more intellectually rigorous explorations in sound and clamour that still populate the edges (and, in the hands of Dinosaur Jr’s J Mascis, some of the centre) of this record

43. Fanfare Ciocarlia – Kings And Queens (Asphalt Tango) / Taraf de Haïdouks – Maskarada (Crammed Discs)

- these genuine bands of gypsies (probably the two bands of Romanian gypsies, in fact) spread their stylistically significantly diverse if geographically related wings to outstanding effect here, and I’m not just talking about the fantastic Fanfare Ciocarlia’s lunatic brass band version of classic rock classic Born To Be Wild that you may have heard in “Borat” – they round up a glittering array of mainly singing but also playing Roma guests from the wider Balkan diaspora (including the astounding Esma Redzepova) for this programme, and then, instead of sitting back and watching what happens, match them stride for melodramatic stride all the way to the finish line – the band of brigands, on the other hand, usually all wild, scratchy fiddles and ancient croaking vocals, tackle a mainly Balkan and generally balkanistically styled classical set (Khatchaturian, de Falla, Albeniz – you know, the real McCoy) with a flair, a flavour and a musicality that not only would have made Bartók proud, but seems not a whit out of place next to the half dozen traditionals or near traditionals that complete the show

44. Tony Cox – Blue Anthem (Instinct Africaine/Sheer Sound)

- Cox’s special skill (setting up tight, intricate, often blindingly dexterous acoustic guitar patterns based on roots music forms) seemed different enough from now demised Cape Town improvisational trio Benguela’s (the slow, patient, development of electric soundscapes out of the bare bones of a groove and a few melodic threads) to make their collaboration intriguing rather than obvious – each must have had to make accommodations, but it works, and sometimes wonderfully, though best when it’s less clearly structured and more interactive

45. The New Pornographers – Challengers (Matador)

- “Challengers” may not deliver quite the immediate power pop rush of its forerunners, at least after the Brian Wilson-ish opener and its vaguely Beatlesque-via-a-more-indie-sussed-Jeff-Lynne successor, yet all of the band’s strengths (the greatest of which is AC Newman’s songwriting gift, whose melodic sense soars so naturally yet so often takes such unexpected turns) are on show again with a few additions (there’s a distinct flavour of early Roxy Music about All The Things That Go To Make Heaven And Earth, for example), maybe just not as obviously – and it can never be a bad thing to have Neko Case as an occasional vocal foil

46. Wilco – Sky Blue Sky (Nonesuch)

- whether “Sky Blue Sky” is (as some commentators believe) a return to the rootsy alternative country of “Being There”, or is not (which is what I think – I was going to suggest it’s anything but, but I can see at least some of their point), it’s definitely a departure from the “Yankee Hotel Foxtrot”/ “A Ghost Is Born” band that I thought for a moment might be the best in the world – it looks back, and perhaps over its shoulder, at ‘70s singer-songwriter antecedents (and the Beatles, particularly on Hate It Here) and, consequently (again notwithstanding what some of those same commentators believe), sounds more like a Jeff Tweedy (as opposed to a Wilco) album than any of the others – it’s more musically conventional, too, and more comfortable as a result, which may be why, despite its fine songs and obvious general excellence, I still, after many rewarding plays, can’t place it higher than this

47. Steve Earle – Washington Square Serenade (New West)

- Earle recently left Nashville to live in New York City (Tennessee Blues tells a story of leaving that Guitar Town told of arriving twenty odd years earlier – according to the latter everybody told him he wouldn’t get far with 37 dollars and a Jap guitar) and this album focuses, without entirely foregoing songs of the South (Oxycontin Blues) or politics (Red Is The Colour … red, ironically, being the colour allocated to traditionally Republican states, Steve’s Hammer (For Pete) … Seeger, in case you wondered), on his new home (City Of Immigrants) and his new life (Days Aren’t Long Enough) and his new wife (Alison Moorer sings gorgeous back-up) – the sound is a bit newer, too, and the production, by the Dust Brothers’ John King, a bit sharper, though, this being Earle, mandolin and banjo are never far away – it’s the sound of a contented man, for the time being anyway

48. LCD Soundsystem – Sound Of Silver (DFA)

- whether the game you play while listening to LCD Soundsystem’s second album turns out to be Spot The Influence or Spot The Homage (there is a difference, and learning it will keep the fun going for hours after the game is up – others have spotted David Bowie, by the way, along with Joy Division, Kraftwerk and any number of dance producers that operate beyond the crushingly obvious, but there are others, whether deliberate or not), James Murphy’s pretty well seamless co-operation between rock and dance styles displays plenty of originality, too, as well as highly developed songwriting chops

49. Alasdair Roberts – The Amber Gatherers (Drag City) / Chris Wood – Trespasser (RUF)

- with its strong melodies, slightly stylised lyrics and titles like Riddle Me This, The Cruel War and The Calfless Cow, “The Amber Gatherers” sounds very much like an album of traditional songs, like its fine predecessor, “No Earthly Man” - the revelation in the sleeve notes that all songs are by Alasdair Roberts (copyright control) came as a genuine surprise, a testament to how well Roberts, in some ways a vocally more lithe and marginally less fragile Scottish Will Oldham (the producer of “No Earthly Man”), quietly goes about his business – there’s even a point where I’m reminded, obliquely enough to be intrigued, of a young, less bluesy Bert Jansch – I guess Chris Wood might occupy the point where, lyrically, a gentler Billy Bragg meets, musically, a less earthy Nic Jones or Martin Carthy – the songs, again steeped in the tradition and immersed in various contemporary considerations of Englishness, are, except two, Wood originals, with the epic Hugh Lupton co-write, England In Ribbons, nothing short of monumental

50. Dàimh – Crossing Point (Greentrax) / LAU – Lightweights And Gentlemen (Reveal)

- my longstanding passion for rootsy Celtic traditional music was well catered for during the year and, after much soul searching, these two bands seemed the best way to show you that real Celtic music has nothing to do with waterfalls and mist, or even Enya for that matter – Dàimh is a six piece from Ireland, Scotland, Cape Breton Island in Nova Scotia and the Irish/American music scene that covers all of those bases; LAU is a Scottish trio comprising three of that tradition’s finest young musicians and, in Kris Drever, whose wonderful “Black Water” was an overlooked wonder of the previous year, an outstanding young singer – LAU push the boundaries a little with their use of unusual rhythms and ability to drift off into other cultures, while Dàimh play and sing the good traditional stuff with a fire and distinction you may not have encountered since the glory days of the Bothy Band – it’s simple, really, you’ll have to get them both

1. Chris McGregor’s Brotherhood Of Breath – Chris McGregor’s Brotherhood Of Breath (Fledg’ling) / Brotherhood (Fledg’ling)

- these reissues of the mighty Brotherhood’s first two early ‘70s albums actually came out in very late 2006, so I wondered, briefly, whether to hide their presence further down the list, but, since they include (make that since they’re saturated with) some of the very best South African music ever made, since they were surely among the greatest big bands ever assembled, since they offer perhaps the most conclusive proof of the galvanising effect the exiled South Africans had on the UK free jazz scene, since Rolling Stone magazine once chose the Clash’s 1979 “London Calling” as its Album of the ‘80s, and since I doubt whether any albums, new or reissued, gave me greater or more lasting pleasure last year, I wondered only very briefly

2. Various - The Very Best Of Ethiopiques (Manteca) / Various – Authenticité: The Syliphone Years (Stern’s Africa)

- the favourable political climates that fuelled the remarkable musical abundance in Ethiopia and Guinea captured on these two double albums overlapped to a significant degree - Ethiopia’s, captured here in 28 totally captivating and astonishingly varied tracks drawn from the marvellous “Ethiopiques” CD series, lasted from the early ‘60s to the mid ‘70s, a joyous interregnum between two separate periods of political repression and consequent artistic recession, with the majority of these songs drawn from a recording explosion that occurred between 1969 and 1975 or shortly thereafter – the sound of Guinea’s, full of exuberance and hope, and coinciding with a policy of authenticité following the country’s independence from France, was primarily captured on the Syliphone label between 1965 and 1980 – if only a few artists on show here made any impression on the outside world, the overall quality is close to miraculous

3. Various - People Take Warning! Murder Ballads And Disaster Songs, 1913-1938 (Tompkins Square)

- superbly packaged three disc set of songs about flood, fire and famine, train, plane and bus wrecks, family slaughters, crimes of passion and the sinking of the Titanic that includes the original recorded version of the Kingston Trio’s 1958 hit tale of the 1868 murder of Laura Foster by Tom Dula in the North Carolina backwoods by the grand nephew of the sheriff (mentioned in the song) who brought him in – mainly old time folk and country and blues, of course, but there’s a traditional prayer for the Titanic dead, sung by a Jewish cantor, that has finally wiped all trace of that Celine Dion abomination from my memory - I can’t resist this sort of thing, and neither should you

4. Charles Mingus Sextet with Eric Dolphy – Cornell 1964 (Blue Note)

- a recently discovered double disc recording of an all but completely forgotten concert by this amazing outfit turns out to be as good as, if not better than several of the great bandleader’s most celebrated live recordings, with more than a phenomenal hour devoted to just Fables Of Faubus and Meditations and enough brilliance elsewhere to almost justify this placing even without that hour

5. Jim Ford – The Sounds Of Our Time (Bear Family)

- this obscure white country/soul singer’s only album (“Harlan County” from 1969), fleshed out here with singles and unreleased material, proves that, besides being a writer good enough to have attracted the attention of Aretha Franklin, Bobby Womack, Nick Lowe and the Temptations, and a personality funky enough to have been one of Sly Stone’s best friends, he was also an artist in the Dan Penn/Eddie Hinton class who might have been more famous had he been more interested, and enjoyed just a little luck

6. Nico – The Frozen Borderline 1968-1970 (Elektra/Reprise/Rhino)

- the Velvet Underground ice princess’s second and third albums, both produced by former bandmate John Cale, the only other musician on show and a perfect artistic foil who said of their non-commerciality, “You can’t sell suicide”, are stark, austere, desolate and intense, their carefully wrought atmosphere utterly uncompromising - yet there is heart here, of a sort, and even soul, as well as an appreciable amount of bitter beauty

7. Arthur Alexander – Lonely Just Like Me: The Final Chapter (HackTone)

- Alexander had a voice that was once described as the sound of heartbreak, and was the only songwriter to have had his songs recorded by the Beatles, the Rolling Stones and Bob Dylan – by definition, therefore, he should have been a big star, but sometimes life just doesn’t turn out that way – this is an expanded edition of his last album, sweetly melancholy, vastly tuneful, packed to the gills with real soul, and recorded after a two decade long absence from the business during which he beat addiction, drove a bus and found the Lord - it will break your heart, and so will the fact that he died just a few days after its release

8. Michael Rother – Flammende Herzen / Sterntaler / Katzenmusik / Fernwarme (Water) // Harmonia – Live 1974 (Water)

- long overdue CD reissues of the first four solo albums by Krautrock guitar genius Rother, formerly of Neu!, as well as a surprise first time live release by the Harmonia trio he formed with Cluster – where Harmonia’s approach is ascetic and artistically rigorous (more so than on their studio releases), qualities much prized by many of their Krautrock colleagues, Rother’s immediately subsequent playing, on perhaps the greatest guitar albums you’ve never heard, is languid, liquid and hugely melodious, and, especially on “Sterntaler”, it soars ecstatically

9. Moby Grape – Moby Grape / Wow / Grape Jam / Moby Grape ’69 / Truly Fine Citizen (Sundazed)

- in a year that saw excellent and highly recommended reissues of classic albums by Fairport Convention, Sonic Youth, Young Marble Giants, Pink Floyd, David Crosby, Joy Division and the Watersons among others, this fantastic set seemed the most desirable, covering the first incarnation of potentially the least era (or area) bound of the all of the San Francisco Summer of Love bands, each of the albums fleshed out with worthwhile extras and an attractive booklet – the first and third are the places to start, the debut cementing its reputation as one of rock’s greatest, while “‘69” will surprise some with its unsentimental and often gorgeous way with early country-rock – but you’ll want the others as well

10. Various – I’m Not There

- an “original soundtrack” album many of whose songs don’t feature in Todd Haynes’s film “inspired by the music and many lives of Bob Dylan” at all – in fact, Bob’s only on one, but it is the title track, the enigmatic Basement Tape song that was arguably the greatest still in his unreleased catalogue – the rest are covers of Dylan songs by a bewildering array of acts, some of whom (Willie Nelson, Roger McGuinn, Los Lobos, Mark Lanegan) might have been born to sing their choices, while others (Cat Power, Tom Verlaine, Sufjan Stevens) mould the material to their own musical personalities – much of the backing is provided by two fine bands built around Sonic Youth and Calexico respectively, while Joe Henry’s production skills are amply utilised, too

11. Various – The Cosimo Matassa Story (Proper)

- cataloguing, across four CDs and 120 tracks, recording engineer Matassa’s remarkable career as the Crescent City’s record man of choice in those days, this is nothing less than a masterclass in New Orleans R&B and rock ‘n’ roll between 1951 and 1956 – Fats Domino and Little Richard are the big names, of course, but there’s plenty of Lloyd Price, Smiley Lewis, Bobby Charles and even early Art Neville and dozens of others, of differing degrees of fame or obscurity, influence or interest, with every one of them worth at least the space allocated to him (or her – Shirley Goodman’s unusual place in all this is emphasised by her almost exclusively male company)

12. Magnolia Electric Co – Sojourner (Secretly Canadian)

- four short albums of new, old and sometimes re-recorded songs, a similarly short DVD of life on the Canadian road and several other artefacts in a sturdy wooden box constitute the kind of package that fans of independent US rock should find irresistible, especially, if almost incidentally, because Jason Molina and latterly this band supply consistently fine music album after album and throughout this set

ALPHABETICAL RECOMMENDATIONS (the next 25 have asterisks)

Leonard Cohen – Songs Of Leonard Cohen / Songs From A Room / Songs Of Love
And Hate (Columbia/Legacy)
*David Crosby – If I Could Only Remember My Name …. (Atlantic/Rhino)
*Karen Dalton – Cotton Eyed Joe (Megaphone)
*Betty Davis – Betty Davis / They Say I’m Different (Light In The Attic)
*Jack DeJohnette & Bill Frisell – The Elephant Sleeps But Still Remembers (GBP)
*Sandy Denny – Live At The BBC (Universal)
*Dave Douglas – Live At The Jazz Standard (Greenleaf/Koch)
*Gordon Duncan – Just For Gordon (Greentrax)
Bob Dylan – Dylan (Columbia)
Joe Ely – Silver City (Rack ‘Em)
*Fairport Convention – Liege And Lief: Deluxe Edition (Island)
*Aretha Franklin – Rare And Unreleased Recordings From The Golden Reign Of
The Queen Of Soul (Rhino/Atlantic)
Robbie Fulks – Revenge (Yep Roc)
Green On Red – BBC Sessions (Maida Vale)
*Hallelujah Chicken Run Band – Take One 1974-79 (Analog Africa)
*Emmylou Harris – Songbird: Rare Tracks And Forgotten Gems (Rhino)
Dale Hawkins – “LA., Memphis & Tyler, Texas” (Rev-Ola)
*Andrew Hill – Compulsion (Blue Note)
*Robyn Hitchcock – I Wanna Go Backwards (Yep Roc)

*Keith Jarrett / Gary Peacock / Jack DeJohnette – My Foolish Heart: Live At
Montreux (ECM)
“Peerie” Willie Johnson – Willie’s World (Greentrax)
*Joy Division – Unknown Pleasures / Closer / Still (Collector’s Editions) (London)
Bill Knight – Kaapse Mengsel (Self released)
Konono No 1 – Live At Couleur Café (Crammed Discs)
Mahavishnu Orchestra – Original Album Classics (Columbia/Legacy)
*Makgona Tsohle Band – Mathaka Vols 1&2 (Gallo)
John McLaughlin – Original Album Classics (Columbia/Legacy)
Pat Metheny – Secret Story (Nonesuch)
*Mono – Gone: A Collection Of EPs 2000-2007 (Temporary Residence Ltd)
John Moriri – Various reissues (Gallo)
*Gwigwi Mrwebi – Mbaqanga Songs (Honest Jon’s)
*Gram Parsons – Archives Vol 1: With The Flying Burrito Brothers Live At The
Avalon Ballroom 1969 (Amoeba)
*Pink Floyd – The Piper At The Gates Of Dawn (EMI)
Steve Riley & the Mamou Playboys – Jazzfest Live 2007 (Munckmusic)
Jason Ringenberg – Best Tracks And Side Tracks 1979-2007 (Yep Roc)
Tom Russell – Wounded Heart Of America (Hightone)
*Sonic Youth – Daydream Nation: Deluxe Edition (Geffen)
*Bruce Springsteen with the Sessions Band – Live In Dublin (Columbia)
Ralph Stanley – Mountain Preacher’s Child (Rebel)
Jem Targal – Luckey Guy (Obscure Oxide)
Chip Taylor & Carrie Rodriguez – Live From The Ruhr Triennale (Train Wreck)
Richard & Linda Thompson – In Concert, November 1975 (Island)
Various – BBC Radio 3 Awards For World Music ’07 (Manteca)
Various – Cape Jazz 3: Goema (Mountain)
Various – Classic Old-Time Fiddle (Smithsonian Folkways)
Various – Goin’ Home: A Tribute To Fats Domino (Vanguard)
Various – Jazzfest Live: The 2007 Compilation Album (Munckmusic)
Various – The Rough Guide To North African Café (World Music Network)
Various – Sound Of The World 2007 (Warner)
Various – Summer Records Anthology 1974-1988 (Light In The Attic)
M. Ward – Duet For Guitars #2 (Merge)
Muddy Waters, Johnny Winter & James Cotton – Breakin’ It Up, Breakin’ It Down
(Epic/Legacy)
*The Watersons – Frost And Fire / Sound Sound Your Instruments Of Joy (Topic)
Andre Williams – Movin’ On With Andre Williams: Greasy & Explicit Soul Movers
1956-1970 (Vampisoul)
Wreckless Eric – Big Smash (Stiff)
*Neil Young – Live At Massey Hall 1971 (Reprise)
*Young Marble Giants – Colossal Youth & Collected Works (Domino)
Warren Zevon – Preludes: Rare And Unreleased Recordings (New West)
Warren Zevon – Stand In The Fire (Asylum/Rhino)

1. Ali Farka Touré – Savane (World Circuit)

- the last album recorded by the great Malian before his death may also be, without any exaggeration on account of sentimentality, his best …Touré himself thought so, and with Touré you knew there was no hype involved – though there might not have been hellhounds on the trail of this King of the Desert Blues Singers, a mood of otherworldliness, with several songs influenced by African spiritual beliefs, is enhanced by a production that ranges from stark and even desolate to a driving, droning African Wall of Sound whose blues seems closer to Chicago than the Clarksdale crossroads - but essentially “Savane” is the sound of Touré’s heartland, marginally modernised, maybe, but ultimately totally timeless

2. Bob Dylan – Modern Times (Columbia)

- surely the album event of the year, sealed by its debut week US chart topping feat, and the third successive incontrovertible pearl in an apparently never ending late career revival – self-produced, with a direct, immediate and uncomplicated sound that suits its old fashioned pre-rock pop songs as snugly as the rock ‘n’ roll, country and especially blues infested portions of the record, it incorporates, without acknowledgement or apology, the thoughts, words, tunes and ideas of a string of influences, from Civil War poet Henry Timrod to bluesmen Sleepy John Estes and Muddy Waters, yet either to accuse Dylan of plagiarism or to glibly cite the folk process, as if he has steeped himself in American culture for so long that lines like “Blues this mornin’ fallin’ down like hail” or “Meet me at the bottom, don’t lag behind, bring me my boots and shoes” somehow sneak into his songs by accident is to fail to see the brilliance of his reworking of Rollin’ And Tumblin’, tried and trusted slide riff and all, so as to accommodate a verse like “The night’s filled with shadows, the years are filled with early doom / I’ve been conjuring up all these long dead souls from their crumblin’ tombs”

3. Scott Walker – The Drift (4AD)

- built from what Walker has termed “blocks of sound” that have little obvious connection to anything else on this list, or to almost anything released under the laughably inadequate banner of “popular music” since the previous Scott Walker album eleven years previously, “The Drift” seems to be more a series of nightmares (with Elvis, his still born twin and the 9/11 towers central to arguably the most memorable of them), in sound settings that are invariably unsettling and occasionally even scary, than even the art songs that some call what Walker does - unforgettable, even if you won’t be whistling its tunes any time soon

4. Bellowhead - Burlesque (Westpark)

- sparked by the kind of supportively imaginative production a band this size needs to really strut its stuff, a) without overwhelming the material and b) while maintaining a necessary balance between eccentricity and restraint, the first full length album by this eleven piece group of quintessentially English musicians playing what are fundamentally traditional folk songs and dances with horns finds that precise spot that stirs the spirit and soothes the soul with an accuracy that sometimes beggars belief

5. Joanna Newsom – Ys (Drag City)

- the easy answer to the question of what you do for an encore when you’re a fey-voiced classical harp player whose debut was as striking and one-of-a-kind as “The Milk-Eyed Mender” is “the same again, only more so” – the trick, of course, lies in the execution and Newsom executes the trick with more assurance and more dazzling brilliance than even her most fervent supporters could have predicted – the album’s five complex, if not necessarily complicated, songs are spun out to epic length but, adorned as they are with typically quirkily gorgeous Van Dyke Parks string arrangements, keep you riveted over and over again – it’s precious, naturally, and arguably pretentious, too, but it’s fabulous all the same

6. Tim Van Eyken – Stiffs Lovers Holymen Thieves (Topic)

- known primarily as the brilliant squeeze box player in Waterson: Carthy, the former BBC Young Folk Award winner easily surpasses, with a band that features Nancy Kerr, Waterson son and nephew Oliver Knight who produces beautifully as well, and Pete Flood of the impressive Bellowhead, even the considerable levels of anticipation that surrounded the release of this first major album under his own name, invigorating, for example, even the hoary John Barleycorn beyond reasonable expectation – in case you’re wondering, van Eyken, who sings as well as he plays, is as English as the next person, though his ancestors were Belgian

7. Toumani Diabaté’s Symmetric Orchestra – Boulevard De l’Independence (World Circuit)

- they say that the hottest gig in West Africa is Friday night at the Hogon outside Bamako when Toumani Diabaté’s in town, and if it sounds anything like this they’re probably right – the star’s rippling, shimmering kora mixes subtlety with sweat in the company of two different horn sections, one with Pee Wee Ellis in the driving seat, and no less than six lead vocalists including the elastic voiced Kasse Mady Diabaté, not to mention stylistic input from several West African countries - yet there’s a real sense of unity as tradition meets modern West African pop and ngoni, balafon and djembe hustle and shuffle next to horns, electronic keyboards and even strings while the exquisite kora, somehow part of both worlds, flits in and out, bringing a kind of seamless logic to the proceedings

8. Bonnie “Prince” Billy – The Letting Go (Domino)

- you’d have thought that working in such a stark landscape with such a sparsely stocked sonic palette would have limited Will Oldham’s ability to keep making records you’d want to keep going back to, but the fact that those relatively few colours in his paint box are divided into an almost infinite number of shades, added to a combination of vast songwriting talent and single-minded integrity, means that you can drop in almost anywhere on his canon and be transfixed – this one, somewhat more fleshed out than “Master And Everyone”, but much quieter than the “Superwolf” project, with Dawn McCarthy’s vocals making much of it an album of duets, might, nevertheless, be Billy’s best since “I See A Darkness”

9. Yo La Tengo – I Am Not Afraid Of You And I Will Beat Your Ass (Matador)

- bookended by a couple of long and impressively intense guitar blowouts that never quite overpower the songs they’re designed to support if not serve, the Hoboken trio fills the intervening 54 minutes or so (it’s a long album, but not so you’d notice) by demonstrating its love for rock and pop generally, from raucous garage to Memphis soul, via jangling Byrds, wistful John Cale, ambient sonic washes and the lovely I Feel Like Going Home, but always remaining intrinsically Yo La Tengo – after the slight hiccup that was “Summer Sun”, once again (or should that be still?) one of the world’s great bands

10. Tartit – Abacabok (Crammed Discs) / Etran Finatawa – Introducing Etran Finatawa (Introducing/Riverboat)

- desert blues is fast becoming the kind of marketing term that we’re going to have to start spelling with capital letters and, when we do, these two outfits may find a place in a sun less relentless than their native Saharan one – Tartit, from northern Mali, are Touaregs, but unlike the better known Tinariwen, and less evocatively perhaps, were not formed in a Libyan refugee camp and may not carry the marks of soldiers’ bullets on their bodies – nevertheless their brand of rolling, droning, chanting desert music is ultimately as mesmerising as any, if occasionally more traditional and therefore slightly more taxing to the untrained ear – perseverance will be rewarded, though – Etran Finatawa, from neighbouring Niger, fall more comfortably and conventionally into the electric Tinariwen stable, without giving an inch in terms of sonic intrigue or musical satisfaction

11. Tomasz Stanko Quartet - Lontano (ECM)

- in an important developmental departure from their previous ECM outings, the Stanko band’s material is largely freely improvised rather than composed, with space and silence as important as the notes that the Polish trumpeter’s intuitively responsive and often brilliantly imaginative outfit, surely now on a very short list of the most exceptional groups currently playing jazz anywhere in the world, actually plays - the pensive title track is divided into three and separated out across the length of the record, centering it with a kind of stylistic and impressionistic melodic motif that keeps you focused

12. The Knife – Silent Shout (Rabid/Brille)

- with the exception of Suicide and very few others, voice and synth duos have generally received brutally short shrift from me, but you can add Swedish brother and sister duo the Knife to those exceptions on the strength of this, their third album, whose combination of dark, ominous dread, complemented perhaps by the accented vocals, and hooks and tunes that reel you in and render you helpless set a mood that I’ve found irresistible since I first heard it

13. Comets On Fire – Avatar (Sub Pop) / Howlin Rain – Howlin Rain (Birdman)

- the line between Comets On Fire and an augmented technoflash power trio straddling heavy metal and progrock with added doses of psychedelia that would place it somewhere in the ‘70s just before punk came to the rescue is sometimes a fine one, but it’s one that the Santa Cruz group generally negotiates with aplomb, and I find myself drawn to them despite their stylistic approach, because of the sheer thrill of the racket they make – if “Avatar” seems less physically imposing than its predecessor, “Blue Cathedral”, and if Lucifer’s Memory is pretty darn close to power balladry for total comfort, it’s still an extremely impressive album – Howlin Rain is Comets singer/guitarist Ethan Miller’s side project, and fun in a semi-classic rock in which you’ll spot elements of the Who alongside Creedence and the Allmans and maybe even the tunes of Sweet Home Alabama and, believe it or not, Country Roads before they’re subsumed by something entirely different side project kind of way

14. Trio Beyond – Saudades (ECM) // Bill Frisell/Ron Carter/Paul Motian – Bill Frisell/Ron Carter/Paul Motian (Nonesuch)

- two remarkable trios, each with a guitarist as the obvious focal point (though Trio Beyond was in fact formed by drummer Jack DeJohnette to pay tribute to his predecessor in Miles Davis’s band, the immense Tony Williams), but sounding quite different from each other – Trio Beyond pays unashamed homage to the electric jazz into rock and back of Williams’s Lifetime in a 2004 concert performance where the spirit and attack, as well as the excitement, of that band is evident as John Scofield plays with zest and fire, Larry Goldings gets impressively close to the explosive Larry Young on organ, and DeJohnette is simply magnificent – yet it’s hard to imagine a more formidable guitar trio than one comprised of Frisell, Carter, who played with Williams in Miles’s great ‘60s Quintet, and Motian, and this is a well balanced album that mixes in two Frisell pieces with one each from the others, a standard, a couple of compositions by Monk, for whom Frisell has always shown a special affinity, and a couple of typical forays into impressionistic country in a way that remains as essentially Frisellian as everything the guitarist does, without being in any way stylised

15. The Decemberists – The Crane Wife (Rough Trade)

- in the USA the Decemberists are no longer on an independent label (they’re on Capitol there), which worried me and led to my not buying this album for several months, but sense, and confidence borne of the quality of their three previous records, eventually prevailed, and I’m glad it did – the band will never again be able to surprise me like they once did, but they surely haven’t yet given in entirely to the dictates of their corporate bosses, even if the overall sound seems a bit bigger than before – the songs are still super literate, and deal with subject matter that few others attempt, and the fact that 2006 produced a hit album named after a song based on a Japanese folk tale might still turn out to be a good thing

16. Espers – Espers II (Wichita) / Brightblack Morning Light – Brightblack Morning Light (Matador)

- a couple of bands that have been conveniently tossed in with the freak folk crowd, Philadelphia’s Espers because their influences are so obviously Pentangling ‘60s and ‘70s British folk and they have song titles like Dead Queen, Mansfield And Cyclops and Dead King; California’s Brightblack Morning Light because they’re hippies who live in a tent or a cabin and have song titles like Star Blanket River Child and Black Feather Wishes Rise – yet there’s real steel and even loud, if measured guitar noise in the former, and Palace Brothers, Slint and Rachel’s connections with the latter, so don’t be fooled; but be warned … both have flute

17. Akli D – Ma Yela (Because)

- the hand of ace World Music producer Manu Chao, who spotted the outspoken and exiled Algerian Berber musician Akli D playing in a café in Paris and joined in, is evident, but not overwhelming, on this irresistible record where reggae and various North African and southern European styles interact on a moving prayer for peace and songs about a variety of topics that include Chechen orphans, the plight of illegal immigrants, and the recognition of Akli’s Kabyle people

18. Cat Power – The Greatest (Matador/Just)

- those who said that this would be the Cat Power record that would appeal to a whole new audience but might puzzle her traditional fan base were right, it seems – pretty much eschewing the angst-ridden indie songwriter stance that had eventually at least got her previous album onto the charts at all, she went to Memphis a la Dusty Springfield in the ‘60s and made a thoroughly convincing white soul album with a gang of local soul music session veterans, even if nothing else quite matches the magnificent title track that kicks off the album, and found herself in the US albums Top 40 – not quite “Dusty In Memphis”, perhaps, and maybe not quite Cat Power, either, but very tasty all the same

19. Beirut – Gulag Orkestar (4AD) / A Hawk And A Hacksaw – The Way The Wind Blows (Leaf)

- Beirut, whose inspired and inspirational blend of Balkan gypsy music and Neutral Milk Hotel styled indie pop with an occasional twist of Morrissey on vocals characterised one of the year’s most unexpected debuts, is really Brooklyn via Albuquerque teenager (or just past teenager) Zach Condon who gathered around himself a crew that included accordion playing drummer Jeremy Barnes (himself once of Neutral Milk Hotel) and violinist Heather Trost, who together constitute A Hawk And A Hacksaw – the more instrumentally orientated AHAAH’s own Balkan brass band includes the real thing by way of members of Romania’s blistering Fanfare Ciocarla, yet “The Way The Wind Blows” makes the collaboration sound as natural as a young boy from Brooklyn via Albuquerque singing songs entitled Rhineland, Mount Wroclai and Bratislava - if this is a new pop music direction, count me in

21. Band Of Horses – Everything All The Time (Sub Pop)

- this album, the first by the slightly augmented Seattle duo, might have been my Grower of the Year – strongly reminiscent in and of parts of Neil Young via a mainly quieter My Morning Jacket, it has gathered momentum over the months as the effect of those influences has faded to be replaced by a slow recognition that it ought to be judged, and judged a success, entirely on its own merits – its atmosphere of slow, deliberate, almost anthemic melancholy persists, though, even through songs that aren’t slow, deliberate or melancholy

22. Bruce Springsteen – The Seeger Sessions (Columbia)

- how well Springsteen does these classic American songs associated with folk icon Pete Seeger, many so done to death they’ve grown hair and then lost it again, but most of which Springsteen, brought up as a rocker with a thing for the working man but now steadily reinventing himself as Woody Guthrie, had to learn from scratch, may come as a surprise – yet he invests them with such fervour you can’t help being swept up in the excitement as he leads a large and rambunctious band including fiddle, banjo, accordion and horns on a selection of gospel shouters, civil rights anthems, Civil and anti-War folk songs and Dustbowl ballads

23. The Black Angels – Passover (Light In The Attic)

- the Black Angels’ (named after the Velvet Underground’s The Black Angel’s Death Song, which is the first clue) home is in Austin, Tx, which is also where legendary psychedelic garage punk acid casualty Roky Erickson lives (the second clue), and they don’t disappoint on either swirling, churning, droning count – if not the out and out rock band debut of the year, then pretty close

24. Elvis Costello & Allen Toussaint – River In Reverse (Verve Forecast)

- a New Orleans tragedy and an obvious love for the music of the Crescent City provided the inspiration Costello needed to make his best record in quite a while – it probably shouldn’t have come as a surprise after all these years and all those musical paths, but he turned out to be a genuinely soulful interpreter of the kind of music collaborator Toussaint has spent a lifetime producing as a matter of course

25. Neko Case – Fox Confessor Brings The Flood (Anti-) / Carrie Rodriguez – Seven Angels On A Bicycle (Train Wreck/Back Porch)

- when “Fox Confessor” first came out, a friend suggested it was Case’s Grammy shot – I knew what he meant, though the presence on an album of musicians from Calexico, the Sadies, Giant Sand and the Band was always more likely to get her a place on this list than at the awards ceremony – but it is easily her most polished outing to date, erring on the side of slick at times, yet the songs, and the singing, and the playing, are so damn good I can’t help loving it – the Rodriguez is the Austin fiddle playing songwriter’s solo debut after a series of duets with Chip Taylor (yeah, Jon Voight’s brother, who wrote Wild Thing and Angel Of The Morning and most of the songs here) and I immediately thought it sounded like the album I’d been hoping for from Lucinda Williams for some time – I especially loved the interplay with Bill Frisell and Greg Leisz … now Frisell is on the new Lucinda, her best for ages, which just goes to show

26. Califone – Roots And Crowns (Thrill Jockey)

- I suppose you could call Califone’s experimental endeavours folktronic (in fact, I’d be surprised if others haven’t) on account of their obvious predilection for acoustic, and especially picked acoustic guitar sound which they overlay with all manner of electronic effects and other sonic bits and pieces you wouldn’t expect to hear on records this steeped in blues-traced folk, but that only tells part of the story – there’s out of synch rock here, too, and even something approaching, if you use your imagination, funk – the point is that Califone never stop using theirs

27. Mari Boine – Idjagiedas: In The Hand Of The Night (Universal) / Värttinä - Miero (Real World)

- two albums that represent something close to the pinnacle of Scandinavian folk-rock – as usual, the fiery, commanding Boine incorporates strong elements of her northern Norwegian Sami heritage with exquisitely intricate, but never fussy, arrangements, featuring African and Brazilian instruments and a vacuum cleaner, that let the rest of the world onto the ice floe, but not so as to detract from the power of her songs – the Finnish group, full of strident vocal harmony, odd rhythms and a generally mysterious sound, now with at least their third major label without ever having achieved the anticipated world domination, remain, all the same, one of the World Music world’s most impressive outfits

28. Lambchop – Damaged (Merge/City Slang)

- the Nashville country/soul ensemble’s ninth proper album could be the quietest big band affair you’ll ever hear as, swelled to eighteen (musicians, if not all members), though they seldom, if ever, all play at once, they seem to be settling back and taking stock – Kurt Wagner’s hardbitten vocal combination of intimate and off-hand sounds even more weary than usual (sometimes, as on the cynical, autobiographical The Decline Of Country And Western Civilization he sounds exactly like Georgia into Texas songwriter Eric Taylor), and the tone of arguably the most accessible Lambchop record for a while may be summed up in the lines “Here’s a little story ‘bout regret / Doesn’t have an ending, it’s not finished yet”

29. Mission Of Burma – The Obliterati (Matador)

- the question of whether Mission Of Burma could really be one of the greatest bands ever on the strength on just one album (1982’s blistering “Vs.”) has surely been conclusively answered by the quality and intensity of the two records they’ve made since re-forming, guitarist Roger Miller overcoming his tinnitus by wearing rifle range headphones – “The Obliterati” sounds even better than its predecessor, “Onoffon”, and the possibility of topping that debut is still real

30. M. Ward – Post-War (4AD)

- again I find myself loving an M. Ward album without fully understanding why – often apparently on the verge of falling apart completely, in a way that seems contrived yet that I can never hold against him, his records fly by without really signposting any songs for future reference – I suppose this means they’re all good, which is what I generally find when I go back to them – for converts, this record is slightly more produced than you might expect; for neophytes, become a convert

30. Scritti Politti – White Bread Black Beer (Rough Trade)

- Green Gartside’s (for Scritti Politti seems now to consist of him, his wife and, just occasionally, the family dog) first album for seven years is further evidence that, when he puts his mind to it, there are few to touch the jolly Welsh giant for rare and precious intelligent adult pop – there are moments here that are quite stunning

31. Calexico – Garden Ruin (Quarterstick/City Slang)

- after Cruel’s typically orchestrated representation of the USA’s south-western desert and the gentle country waltz of Yours And Mine, on which Convertino’s drums seem, as they so often do, to break into a knowing grin, the band eases into a less stylised, more conventional selection of songs (no instrumentals this time) – I struggled a bit with the album’s flabby midsection for a while, but eventually came round, and the dense, intense closer All Systems Red is just fantastic

32. Midlake – The Trials Of Van Occupanther (Bella Union)

- The Denton Texans (same town as Slobberbone, Lift To Experience and others, including, but whisper it, Norah Jones) depart radically from their debut’s psychedelic pop and make themselves over as one of the most tuneful harmony outfits you never heard on the American West Coast in the early ‘70s, but with greater self-knowledge, hopefully, and better songs, definitely

33. Afrissippi – Fulani Journey (Knockdown South)

- springing, according to the band’s web site, from “the hill country boogie and cotton patch trance blues tradition”, Afrissippi is precisely that, a Senegalese musician transplanted in Mississippi combining with members of the Taylor Grocery Band and others to play African blues that is both African and the blues – John Sinclair, former White Panther leader, MC5 cohort and subject of a John Lennon benefit concert, recites the tale on one track

34. Waterson: Carthy – Holy Heathens And The Old Green Man (Topic) / Martin Carthy & Dave Swarbrick – Straws In The Wind (Topic)

- seeing Martin Carthy play live this year, what struck me, besides his obvious brilliance as an interpreter of traditional English folk song, and his astonishing ability to make it come alive while never treating it with anything less than respect, was the immense dignity of both the man and the music – these two albums involve his principal musical associations, and to have them both in one year constitutes riches almost beyond compare – the seriously emphysemic Swarb may find breathing a chore these days, but his illness hasn’t obviously affected his playing, and if the fiddle and guitar duets are less fiery than before, that’s more likely a factor of the wisdom and experience which has lent additional helpings of grace and elegance to the proceedings – the family album concentrates on songs about Christmas and the turning of the year, but if that makes it a little more esoteric, it also gives it a sense of majesty that its very few rivals lack … honorary Waterson Tim Van Eyken’s On Christmas Day It Happened So is an outright gem

35. Matmos – The Rose Has Teeth In The Mouth Of The Beast (Matador) / Kieran Hebden & Steve Reid – The Exchange Session Vols 1 & 2 (Domino)

- the San Francisco experimental duo pay tribute, through a series of audio portraits, to ten gay or lesbian people they admire, from the philosopher Wittgenstein and novelist Patricia Highsmith, via disco DJ Larry Levan, punk rocker Darby Crash and brilliant British maverick producer Joe Meek, to King Ludwig II of Bavaria, whose sister’s life was “clouded by the unshakable conviction that she had once swallowed a grand piano made of glass” - the portraits are astonishingly detailed, and explained in astonishing detail on the ‘Net at http://brainwashed.com/matmos/discog/ole677.html, but, better than that, the album, whether intercutting Tornados style surf guitar with Kronos Quartet ina John Zorn stylee, or making music from a cow’s reproductive organs, is a blast, and not only intellectually – the other duo, electronics soundshaper Hebden, who DJs as Four Tet, and avant-garde jazz drummer Reid, spread six long explorations over two albums where the critical title is Electricity And Drum Will Change Your Mind - give them time and they might just do that

36. Drive-By Truckers – A Blessing And A Curse (New West)

- I was slightly disappointed at first – this seemed too polished and was less focused on what I thought the much loved Alabama outfit knew best, the dualism of “The Dirty South” … and there was one track, Aftermath USA, that sounded too much of a dead ringer for the Faces for (Southern) comfort – but time and patience have been rewarded and, if what you’re after’s a collection of good songs played by a great band, rather than the basis of a sociological investigation into why the sounds and manners of the South are so great when their people and politics are so poor, this may just do the trick

37. Simon Joyner & The Fallen Men – Skeleton Blues (Jagjaguwar)

- Joyner, an Omaha songwriter with a Dylanesque touch was, for a while, my who the hell is this guy discovery of the year – he had apparently released eight previous albums since 1993 on eight different labels, only one of which I’d ever heard of (the label, not the album), but “Skeleton Blues” urges me, every time I hear it and am enthralled, not only by the rolling, tumbling wordiness, but by the spooky interplay among the band, to go back and find out more

38. Nikhil Singh – Pressed Up Black (one minute trolley dash) / Simon van Gend – Pocketsongs (Self released)

- two vastly talented Cape Town songwriters who may have slipped under your radar thanks to the local industry’s insistence on moving everything just a tad further to the right than might be the case elsewhere, so that what might usually be crushingly obvious mainstream rock becomes “alternative”, industry friendly “alternative” becomes “independent”, and truly independent falls off the map altogether – Singh’s Wild Eyes were invited to the celebrated South By Southwest Festival in Austin, Tx, but visa problems hijacked them and the group has now split up – the less angular but still quietly provocative “Pressed Up Black”, which preceded all of that, seems a considerable songwriting step forward anyway and comes with an intriguing Dirk Hugo production that employs the right mix of focused non-intervention and sonic adventure – “Pocketsongs”, a simple satchel of splendidly idiosyncratic acoustic folk-rocking songs with just bass and drums for company, is still, as far as I know, looking for a home

99. Watermelon Slim & The Workers – Watermelon Slim & The Workers (Northernblues)

- “I’m too broke to pay attention”, announces Slim, a truck driver sporting several university degrees and a Mensa membership card, as he embarks on one of the most convincingly hard-worn straight blues records to come my way in a long time, where neither blueswailing harmonica nor rugged slide detract from the essence of the piece, which is Slim’s leathery voice, and the inescapable impression that he might have been too broke to get his teeth fixed, too

40. The Flaming Lips – At War With The Mystics (Warner Bros)

- it would have taken something quite extraordinary to have matched this album’s towering predecessors, “The Soft Bulletin” and “Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots”, certainly two of the finest by anybody in the last ten years or even, depending on the length of the list, ever – “At War With The Mystics”, whose title refers to the US in Iraq, is not quite that, but still has several fine and sonically powerful moments, most of which occur, oddly, in the second half

41. Danielson – Ships (Secretly Canadian)

- well, what’s a poor boy to do when his major influences are listed as Jesus and Syd Barrett except combine the best of ‘em into a career making music that might be termed indie-gospel (an early cassette was titled “God Made Guitar, Women Make Us Play Them”) – among the cast of, if not quite thousands, then at least a couple of dozen assembled for “Ships” by Daniel Smith, a kind of musical visionary with a pronounced squint, are acolytes Deerhoof and Sufjan Stevens – “Ships”, where squeaky voices and nursery chants stand toe to toe with crunchy guitars and visceral power chords, is his magnum opus so far - it’s weird for sure, and often terminally so, but it’s unbelievably compelling, too

42. Jenny Lewis & The Watson Twins – Rabbit Fur Coat (Rough Trade)

- the fine singer from LA indie rockers Rilo Kiley’s debut, to pare it right down to essentials, is a white soul record with bluegrass backing vocals on which an original gospel song called Born Secular sits (and fits) alongside a jangling Traveling Wilburys cover … still with me? – what’s it like? – very good, actually

43. Kelly Joe Phelps – Tunesmith Retrofit (Rounder) / Desert Slide – Desert Slide (Sense World Music)

- a warm, beautifully self-contained album by the fingerstyle ace, stripped down to solo acoustic guitar or banjo much of the time – his songs are the epitome of folk simplicity but remain as engagingly quirky as ever, and his singing and playing are quite sublime – there is no connection whatsoever to Desert Slide except for the fact that all of the slide guitar that Phelps no longer plays seems to be on the latter record, which features microtonal genius and Ry Cooder buddy Vishwa Mohan Bhatt and a group of fellow Rajasthani musicians and singers on six long and mesmeric pieces from India’s Thar Desert region

44. Seth Lakeman – Freedom Fields (Relentless)

- The White Hare caused a stir among the folk police when it was nominated for a Best Traditional Song award - it’s not traditional but a Lakeman original based, like others here, on the myths and folklore of the Dartmoor area that he calls home – so Bob Dylan cops flak for claiming to have written songs that have a traditional heart, and Seth Lakeman gets the same for claiming songs he wrote are traditional, based on their traditional heart … you just can’t win – these are damn good songs though, and the previously slightly disappointing Lakeman has at last delivered CD support for the esteem in which he’s held in Britfolk circles

45. Terje Rypdal / Vossabrygg (ECM) // Dan Wilson/Mark Huggett Project – Max Roach Park (Jazz Direct)

- the Norwegian guitarist’s instinctive understanding of the connection between jazz imagination, rock sonorities and contemporary classical composition turns its attention to “Bitches Brew”, even quoting directly from the Miles Davis masterpiece, but demonstrating that further investigation is both necessary and possible – the Wilson/Huggett group is a collaboration between a Durban-based bass player and sonic architect, an English drummer, a Norwegian trumpeter living in Alaska and others, and the result is as wide ranging as that suggests, though musical grid references that include electric Miles again, Bill Laswell, South African and Native American chanting and European jazz fusions never detract from the record’s own impressive compositional essence

46. Gnarls Barkley – St. Elsewhere (Downtown)

- in which my favourite pop video of the year turns into a full length album almost equally as entertaining, in a stylistic continuum that encompasses Sly and George Clinton, as DJ Danger Mouse commands the mixing desk with nearly as much flair and panache as he displayed on his “Grey Album”, where he had expertly interbred, to the dismay of the formal music business (focusing, as usual, on the business and ignoring the music) the Beatles’ “White Album” and Jay-Z’s “Black Album”, and Cee-Lo Green proves to be a very fine singer of soul music

47. Moses Taiwa Molelekwa – Darkness Pass (M.E.L.T. 2000)

- “Darkness Pass” is a gorgeous, two disc solo piano reflection and tone poem for the soul by the tragic Molelekwa, finally released five years after his death, that demonstrates an introspective side that is not always obvious in South African jazzmen required to appease an audience raised on Afro-fuzak

48. TV On The Radio – Return To Cookie Mountain (4AD)

- kicking off with psychedelic hip hop in everything but name and making its way through Bowie balladry (with David himself singing), reconstituted classic urban pop (as opposed to the industry-defined Urban pop) and several other rock ‘n’ roll styles on the road to even more psychedelia for the surging, spinning outro, “Return To Cookie Mountain” has a greater range and more ideas than most of its compadres on this list, and was one of the year’s most immediately likeable records – the trick is going to be to keep it up till next year

49. Sonic Youth – Rather Ripped (Geffen)

- some have called this the group’s best since “Dirty” and “Goo”, but I don’t know about that … all their rock albums since then, with the exception of “A Thousand Leaves”, seem to have been more or less of a piece, with some better, and even much better, than others, but none really standing out – what it definitely is is in the same general musical vicinity as “Murray Street” and “Sonic Nurse”, which means it’s certainly worth hearing, and getting if you’re a fan, but I’m still waiting patiently, though without much hope, for the next “Daydream Nation”

50. The Raconteurs – Broken Boy Soldiers (XL) / Jack-O & The Tennessee Tearjerkers – The Flipside Kid (Sympathy For The Record Industry)

- the record industry’s drift towards Detroit in the wake of the White Stripes meant that stylistically, or at least spiritually, similar bands from Memphis, arguably the city’s main late ‘90s rival for garage rock raunch (though the essential differences between the cities’ musical output remain as clear to those listening carefully as those between John Lee Hooker and Howlin’ Wolf, or Motown and Stax), like those connected to the Oblivians, are still singing the broke and hungry blues as credibility oozes from the grooves, while Jack White is afforded the luxury of a competent, if unmemorable, ‘60s pop influenced collaboration with the less well-known Brendan Benson that avoids almost all association with his main band, and sounds like it might have been more fun to make than to listen to