kagablog

2. 13th Floor Elevators – Sign Of The 3 Eyed Men (International Artists/Charly Acquisitions)

- What was I to do? I already owned all three studio albums by the great Texan group led by one of rock’s most psychotically drug-damaged cult heroes; the first two, “The Psychedelic Sounds Of The 13th Floor Elevators” (this was allegedly the first band to call its music psychedelic) and “Easter Everywhere”, had discovered the exact location of the blessed intersection between psychedelic rock and garage punk and I own vinyl, standard CD and expanded CD copies of them, but now they were releasing stereo and mono versions of each along with the third, a pile of much better live stuff than the horrible fake live record I also have, a string of unreleased recordings, a hard covered book and sundry memorabilia in an individually numbered, limited edition, ten CD box set which I could have for 75 pounds, plus postage and insurance – I bought it, of course … that’s what rock ‘n’ roll obsessives do, and I listened all the way through it, and I listened all the way through it again, and now I can’t imagine how I ever coped without it

3. Various – Three Score And Ten: A Voice To The People (Topic)

- Topic Records, the oldest independent record label in Britain, and perhaps the world, was established in 1939 by the Workers’ Music Association, an educational offshoot of the British Marxist Party, to release “gramophone records of historical and social interest” but, if the label has retained a generally left wing political slant over the years, its releases quite soon forewent their more stentorian soap box approach in favour of providing a broader voice to the people, and this superbly packaged seven CD, 144 track box set traces, in a manner neither linear nor chronological, but still entirely logical, the truly incalculable contribution the label’s releases have made to British folk music in general, from field recordings of the great traditional singers and musicians of previous generations through much of the best of the UK folk revival of the ‘60s and ‘70s to the vanguard, or very close, of the music’s subsequent development, as the tradition has continued to be shaped and updated – three score and ten was once considered your lot in life, but, with any luck, Topic is just warming up

4. Various – Where The Action Is! Los Angeles Nuggets 1965-1968 (Rhino)

- this four disc set follows in the footsteps of Rhino’s compilation of San Francisco nuggets from much the same period, but in LA nobody was suggesting that you wear some flowers in your hair, at least not on this collection, where much of the action is edgier, spikier and as easily accommodating of hustlers like Kim Fowley as hippies like the Peanut Butter Conspiracy; filled with big names sounding unfamiliar, from the “Pre-Flyte” Byrds to Tim Buckley’s ill-considered shot at a pop song, as if something as mundane as a hit parade could ever have contained his amazing voice, the Turtles, Spirit, Love, the Monkees, the Seeds and Captain Beefheart, the young and formative genius of Van Dyke Parks and Randy Newman, and future cult favourites the West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band, the Rising Sons with Ry Cooder, and Kaleidoscope with his collaborator David Lindley, the spread of brilliance in one city at one time is astonishing; if there’s a slightly different focus here on names you know rather than the customary garage obscurities for which the Nuggets brand is more famous (though the set has its share of those, too, from the Everpresent Fullness to the W.C. Fields Memorial Electric String Band, to go with actor Peter Fonda singing a little-known Gram Parsons song with Hugh Masekela on trumpet), Where The Action Is! stays true to the Nuggets principle of being anything but a nostalgic collection of hits and favourites, and rather a manifestation of the possibilities of pop when its world was new and thrilling

5. Franco & le TPOK Jazz – Francophonic Vol 2: A Retrospective 1980-1989 (Sterns Africa)

- picking up where last year’s first volume left off, this equally excellent double disc selection takes the story of the great and almost unbelievably prolific Congolese bandleader to his 1989 death that provoked four days of official national mourning in what was then known as Zaire; by then Franco’s status had been confirmed by his formal proclamation as a Grand Master of Zairean music, and even though the country’s dictatorial president continued to scrutinise the lyrics of TPOK’s releases for hidden political messages, and despite the fact that Franco had previously been imprisoned under his rule, he was a big fan, so, while the bandleader spent a fair amount of the decade out of his home country, he often returned to record; as had become the custom, the songs’ lengths increased radically, to such a degree that Volume 2 is the same duration as Volume 1 with less than half the tracks, but, if that might occasionally lead to laziness and repetition if the group wasn’t absolutely on song, the time it allowed for building tension and stretching out generated massive excitement when it was, and the complier has ensured that, on this collection at least, it always was

6. Orchestre Poly-Rythmo de Cotonou – The Voudon Effect: Funk & Sato From Benin’s Obscure Labels 1972-1975 (Analog Africa) / Volume Two: Echos Hypnotiques 1969-1979 (Analog Africa) // Various – Legends Of Benin (Analog Africa)

- the quality of the Analog Africa label’s previous collection of Beninese music from the ‘70s, the splendidly titled “African Scream Contest”, amazed nearly everybody who heard it, for the simple reason that Beninese music (and perhaps even the very existence of the country that appeared on maps as Dahomey while a good deal of the music on these sets was being recorded) was more or less completely unknown in the wider world until Angelique Kidjo became an international star, but the levels of energy, funk and sheer excitement on display, and the calibre of the almost totally obscure music and musicians caused the dropping of quite a few jaws that had thought they knew it all – one of the bands on that set was the mighty Orchestre Poly-Rythmo de Cotonou, a hugely productive and often outstanding outfit hardly heard of outside of its homeland; the label’s owner collected about 500 tracks by the group and these two fabulous compilations of African funk and voodoo (Benin is the birthplace of voudon, or voodoo) injected with bursts of the soul, jazz and rock of the period’s international influence are drawn from those; the band is still playing and recently undertook an African Soul Rebels tour of Europe in the company of Oumou Sangare and the Kalahari Surfers; meanwhile, “Legends of Benin” compiles enough of four other similarly thrilling acts from the earlier period to suggest that Analog Africa’s Beninese catalogue is just picking up steam

7. Neil Young – Archives Vol. 1 (1963-1972) (Reprise)

- a career spanning Neil Young multi-disc set was in the pipeline for so long its status had been downgraded from a promise, to a rumour, and then to an in-joke among fans, yet here, at last, is the first instalment, the CD version of the set (there are also much costlier DVD and BluRay editions, as well as various individual website possibilities) running to eight discs, chronologically arranged by recording date of the tracks, yet covering Young’s career to the end of his fourth solo album only; two of the live discs have previously been released in full, which leaves six you won’t have, including one that features the young Neil as a Hank B Marvin acolyte, unreleased early solo stuff and some key Buffalo Springfield songs, and the excellent Live At The Riverboat album – there are around four dozen previously unreleased tracks and mixes in total and, even if you already have all the released stuff, it definitely didn’t sound as good as this, digital technology having finally produced something Old Neil can like nearly as much as old vinyl, the only slight irritation caused by the fact that none of the studio albums featured is quite complete even though there’s enough free disc space for them to have been; they say that if you want something done properly you should do it yourself and Young’s involvement in this project every step of a long, long road, without sacrificing much perspective or critical distance at all, proves that more or less conclusively, if slightly extravagantly

8. Chris Wood – Albion: An Anthology (Navigator)

- Wood might be the brightest among the new wave of traditional and traditionally influenced English folk singers, his strong voice, outstanding instrumental skills on guitar and fiddle, and highly developed and penetrative songwriting on a variety of subjects concerning the concept of contemporary Englishness making him the kind of triple threat that often ends up winning Most Valuable Player awards, the logical link, perhaps, between Nic Jones and Billy Bragg; “Albion” is a carefully and intelligently compiled double disc that covers not only his outstanding solo work, but also his presence in slightly and much larger ensembles with the likes of Andy Cutting, Roger Wilson, Martin Carthy and the Imagined Village gang, and doesn’t always make the obvious choices

9. Various – Stroke: Songs For Chris Knox (Amaj/Merge)

- when New Zealand punk and lo tech pop iconoclast Chris Knox, a crucial early catalyst in the Flying Nun label (whose ethic of homegrown self-reliance would influence and inspire an impressive roster of American rock independence), suffered a debilitating stroke last year, friends and fans flocked to record this tribute in order to raise money for a remarkably affecting songwriter who, despite the barbs that seem to attach themselves naturally to his creations, has never forgotten the importance of melody; among the mainly New Zealand and US roll call are Jeff Mangum, who had more or less disappeared from music since Neutral Milk Hotel released one of the finest albums of the ‘90s, Merge label owner and Superchunk honcho Mac McCaughan in his Portastatic guise, Lambchop, Yo La Tengo, members of the Magnetic Fields, Dinosaur Jr, the Mountain Goats, Olivia Tremor Control and the New Pornographers, Bonnie “Prince” Billy, who serves up a poignant My Only Friend, and Bill Callahan, whose Lapse is just plain gorgeous, plus a gang of old Flying Nun mates from the Clean, the Chills, a string-enhanced Verlaines, Sneaky Feelings, the Bats, the Able Tasmans and Straitjacket Fits, fellow Tall Dwarf Alec Bathgate and several from later generations, among whom SJD’s Sean Donnelly stands out, as do early Clean member Peter Gutteridge and the ever reliable Don McGlashan, but the real stars are the songs themselves and, therefore, their writer

10. Eddie Hinton – Very Extremely Dangerous (Shout!)

- Sam Phillips’s mid ‘50s statement that if he could find a white man who could sing like a black man he could start making serious money is one of the most quoted, and quite likely one of the most misunderstood, in rock ‘n’ roll; he found Elvis, of course, but Elvis wasn’t a white man who sang like a black man … he was a white man who sang predominantly black music like a white man – Eddie Hinton, on the other hand, was a white man who sang just like a black man, naturally, without forcing or faking it, but his timing was wrong, and his reward, contrary to the Phillips prediction, was to make almost no money out of his singing at all; the prospect that anyone (with the possible exception of Al Green, who in fact turned out a relatively ordinary effort that year) would make a great soul album in 1978 was remote; the idea that a white singer would do so was laughable; yet that’s precisely what Hinton did – the ace guitarist on other people’s records, now caught in a downward spiral fuelled by drugs and alcohol, recorded this, his own debut, with the help of the Muscle Shoals session crew and a string of fine songs written, with the exception of Otis Redding’s Shout Bamalama, by Hinton himself, sometimes in the company of other white soulboys, and turned in a record that stands comparison with the very best soul music has ever had to offer; his wracked and worn out vocals, modelled, he said, on a combination of Otis, Joe Tex and Bobby Womack, but utterly convincing themselves, were a revelation as he tore up the faster tempos, settled comfortably and funkily into the mid tempos, and then, quite simply, broke our hearts in three quarter time on the slow songs – it’s been unavailable on CD for too long … a 2009 reissue rectified that

11. The Monks – Black Monk Time (Light In The Attic) / The Early Years 1964-1965 (Light In The Attic)

- if the term garage rock was coined to denote the fact that its practitioners, and especially its ‘60s American practitioners, literally learned their licks in suburban garages, it is almost universally applied only to those whose results turned out rough, rowdy and raucous … and the rougher, rowdier and more raucous they were, the more authentically garage they are considered, yet the tonsured, black robed Monks, one of the bands that might best epitomise the garage rock ethic learned, or at least honed, its licks not in a garage at all, but in the US military in Germany; they played their crudely fashioned combination of elemental rock ‘n’ roll and brash R&B with terrifying ferocity and intent, the beat, driven by primitive drums and a fuzz bass that considerably thickened the rhythmic sludge, simplified down to absolute fundamentals, the rhythm guitar parts played on an elementarily electrified six string banjo that added uniquely to the general clamour, the unruly lead guitar flailing away over the top while the organ vacillated and oscillated between proto-prog embellishment and the stabbing bleat that punctuated much of the period’s most primal pop; the songs were nasty, brutish and short, rhyming “complication” with “constipation” and railing against the masters of war with impressive directness – perhaps because of its uncompromising approach, “Black Monk Time” was not released in the US at the time, and sold no more than a few thousand copies in Europe, yet it has developed a significant cult following and this reissue, expanded by a couple of later singles, delivers a truly manic pop thrill – a companion collection, “The Early Years 1964-1965” is similar, only rougher

12. Drive-By Truckers – The Fine Print: A Collection Of Oddities & Rarities 2003-2009 (New West)

- the Drive-By Truckers, arguably the greatest rock band in the American South and almost certainly the finest exponents of contemporary American Southern rock (not quite the same thing), are nothing if not prolific; from 2003 to 2009 they released four outstanding studio albums featuring a total of 59 tracks and a live album to go with two live DVDs; they also backed Bettye LaVette and Booker T. Jones on their own excellent albums, Patterson Hood released two albums under his own name and Jason Isbell, who quit the band in 2007, another two under his – yet, despite all this, they still had sufficient worthwhile material left over for this collection of antiques, curios, cover versions (Dylan, Zevon and Petty) and outtakes that most bands could never have afforded to leave off their records; it helped, no doubt, to have had access to three such fine songwriters as Hood, Mike Cooley and Isbell in one place at one time

13. Keletigui et ses Tambourinis – The Syliphone Years (Sterns Africa) // Various – Ghana Special: Modern
Highlife, Afro Sounds & Ghanaian Blues 1968-81 (Soundway) // Various – Tumbélé!: Biguine, Afro
& Latin Sounds From The French Caribbean, 1963-74 (Soundway)

- one thing you can say about the marvellous Soundway compilations of African and African orientated music of the ‘60s and ‘70s is that the album titles leave you in no doubt what to expect; so, the splendid Ghana set follows its outstanding predecessor that trained a similar focus on Nigeria, though some of the music on show is surprisingly different if some is almost interchangeable (due to similar western influences on the West African popular music of the time), while “Tumbélé!”comprehensively answers any questions you might have had about the music of French Caribbean islands like Guadaloupe and Martinique while reggae, calypso and the incipient soca were taking over the English speaking part of the region … though one of the answers you may not have expected was the pervasive influence of Congolese group Le Ry-Co Jazz who spent four years in these islands; Keletigui Traoré and his Tambourines, government sponsored and so highly influential, but wonderful all the same, were at the forefront of the newly independent Guinea’s cultural revolution, which applied a policy of authenticité; these recordings for the country’s official Syliphone label cover the period 1968 to 1976

14. North Mississippi Allstars – Do It Like We Used To Do: Live ’96-’08 (Songs Of The South)

- Jim Dickinson, a truly great Memphis music man who had seemed pretty well indestructible, died during the year, leaving a gap that might never be filled, but Jim had two sons, guitarist Luther and drummer Cody, and they have a band, the North Mississippi Allstars, considered a blues rock outfit by some, and part of the jam band scene by others, with all of the boogie-down self indulgence that often calls to mind; while not entirely inaccurate, this characterisation misses the point by a distance (for example, Luther’s brilliant slide playing sits somewhere between a scrawny white Mississippi Fred McDowell and the reincarnation of Duane Allman); dad taught them great taste, and passed on a good deal of his soul as well, so, on a good day, and there are plenty of those, the Allstars sound like about the most exciting band there is, especially live; as this double CD plus documentary DVD retrospective of terrific live performances across a dozen year career demonstrates, the groove and drone of the North Mississippi Hill Country is essentially different from that of the more culturally pervasive Delta, and the blues this band plays, and the blazing rock that is shaped by that blues and by a range of influences from the ancient proto-Bo Diddley beat of the rural fife and drum ensembles all the way to hip-hop, goes way beyond the usual twelve bars and a solo and casts a spell that lets you feel the juke joint jumping, hear the chain gang chanting, and be musically saved by the rapture of a country congregation; if you listen hard enough, you can know the sound of the land itself

15. Van Morrison – Astral Weeks Live At The Hollywood Bowl (Listen To The Lion)

- deeply and dependably curmudgeonly for decades, Morrison wasn’t the obvious candidate to revisit a classic album, even one as abiding as “Astral Weeks”, song for song, in live concert; yet here it is, and, despite its virtually unrepeated, maybe even unrepeatable, brilliance, it’s great to hear Van wrap that fantastic voice around a set of songs this good again, the four extra decades of experience adding a depth of reflection that the 23 year old genius who first recorded this stuff could never have had; familiar as it all may be, there’s no sense of the current band slavishly playing someone else’s parts, as the original’s sense of folkish looseness and jazzy live spontaneity is recaptured and maintained, and, while there’s a bit of stretching out for the audience, there’s still no extra fat to speak of – The Way Young Lovers Do, always an odd song out for me, swings more deftly and more naturally than before, while an altered song sequence means that the wonderfully, almost casually intense blues, Slim Slow Slider, now seems less of an afterthought, and all roads finally lead, with impeccable logic, via the excellent lesser songs and the merely great Cyprus Avenue and Astral Weeks itself, to the magnificent Madame George

1. Bassekou Kouyate & Ngoni ba – I Speak Fula (Out/Here)

- perhaps the perfect demonstration, if any were still required, of the fact that you don’t need electricity to create electricity, this overwhelmingly acoustic second album by allegedly the first man to play the humble Malian ngoni standing up in concert, thereby turning it into a featured as well as a textural instrument, and his seven piece band, the first ngoni group, consisting of four different versions of the banjo-like implement, traditional percussion and the gorgeous vocals of Amy Sacko, harnesses all the excitement caused by the group’s debut “Segu Blue” and lifts it several notches; unlike in most contemporary West African music reaching the rest of the world, there’s no drum kit on this fantastic album, and neither horns nor hype, and, without in any way deprecating some of the most exciting music on the planet, it’s all the more naturally exhilarating because of it – judiciously selected guests (kora wizard Toumani and master vocalist Kasse Mady Diabaté, sandpaper voiced Zoumana Tereta and Vieux Farka Toure on his father’s electric guitar, which makes its statement on two songs precisely because of the overall acousticity of the proceedings) provide the cream, but it’s those ngonis that focus the ears and capture the heart

2. The Low Anthem – Oh My God, Charlie Darwin (Bella Union)

- I don’t often make a really bad musical mistake, but I did last year … I had the opportunity of seeing the Low Anthem live and passed it up; I probably won’t do that again – several months and dozens of listens later the diaphanous beauty of this album’s Charlie Darwin opener still makes me gasp, and, by the time that To Ohio and the mysterious Ticket Taker have passed I’m often still metaphorically holding my breath at the understated loveliness of it all – few, if any, albums could sustain that kind of start, and the group wisely breaks the mood by belting out a couple of righteous punk folk rants (one a Tom Waits rewrite of a Jack Kerouac song) before the hymnlike vocal harmony of Cage The Songbird stops me in my tracks once again and To The Ghosts Who Write History Books usually forces me to hit the repeat button – this might not be the most consistent album I heard from 2009, but for many of those several months I mentioned about two-thirds of it was my favourite listening

3. Tinariwen – Imidiwan: Companions (Independiente)

- the fourth album by the Malian Touaregs, and the first not at least co-produced by Justin Adams, who appears elsewhere in this list as an artist and who seemed, on the strength of their previous album, swayed perhaps by their new found status as irresistibly foreign rebel rockers, to be nudging them gently in a more internationally western direction even if their sound, while not quite unique, is so idiosyncratic that the slight shift of focus never detracted from the music’s commanding cultural core; here, though, they headed home to Tessalit in the southern Sahara with a new producer, returning to a rougher and more natural sound, the trademark hauntingly droning guitars and hypnotically chanting vocals once again apparently unaffected by any outside influence other than the electricity that courses through their music, seemingly generated by some impossibly ancient power source – the change is subtle, but important … a statement, hopefully for all time, that the music is too precious to be treated on any but its own terms

4. Bill Callahan – Sometimes I Wish We Were An Eagle (Drag City) // Mark Eitzel – Klamath (Decor)

- two of the darker, more acute songwriter poets of the best that independent rock has offered over the past twenty years (more in Eitzel’s case), Callahan as Smog, as though he was part of a band, Eitzel as leader of the American Music Club, which was one and is again, made superb records in 2009 by moving in what appeared to be opposite directions in relation to their best known recording identities; Callahan’s effort, though still quintessentially his work (as if that terse baritone delivery of those piercing lyrical lines could ever be anybody else’s) is more carefully crafted musically, and more lavishly produced, with strings and horns filling what were previously spaces and often even silences … he used to be darker, he tells us, then he got lighter, but now he’s got darker again, and that’s about the way it is; Eitzel’s, on the other hand, written in the solitude of northern California’s Klamath River area and apparently not, for some reason, destined to be released in the US, sounds less like his solo work, though that has, it must be said, shifted around, if not all over, then quite widely across, the stylistic shop, and more like American Music Club before the split – Callahan says he went in search of ordinary things, and Eitzel might have done the same but, if they did, they both made some pretty extraordinary music in the process

5. Broadcast & The Focus Group – Broadcast And The Focus Group Investigate Witch Cults Of The Radio Age (Warp)

- it seems that Broadcast’s musical collaboration with album cover designer Julian House of the Focus Group is not the English electronic collagist duo’s official fourth album at all, but an EP that just grew and grew as the ideas rolled in, and thanks heavens it did; the result is a wonderfully strange, unsettlingly spooky programme of psychedelic pop, old fashioned electronics and library music sound effects that has the effect, foreshadowed in its title, of listening to some spectral radio station from an imaginary time, as if, to mention some of Broadcast’s stated influences, 17th century witches had heard ‘60s avant-gardists the United States of America just before composing music for a film about their practices – the Focus Group calls what it does hauntology, which sounds about right

6. Oumou Sangare – Seya (World Circuit)

- though three albums in nearly twenty years, if you exclude a mainly retrospective compilation, might not seem like much of a CV, especially when some consider you, not entirely hyperbolically, the finest living African singer, their riches command such regular space in my impossibly crowded listening life that she always seems to have a record out; “Seya” is the majestic Sangare’s first for thirteen years, and will certainly be a listening staple until she graces us with a successor, however long that takes – where just four players and two singers accompanied the young Sangare on her “Moussolou” debut, roughly fifty musical participants are employed here in carefully considered combinations, including such heavyweights as guitarist Djelimady Tounkara, n’goni star Bassekou Kouyate, Nigerian drummer Tony Allen and hornmen Fred Wesley and Afro-funk man-without-whom Pee Wee Ellis, yet the roles of each are so well defined and their talents so thoughtfully deployed that there’s never any sense of extravagance or clutter; if a traditional hunter’s song for her late father and an admonition against the practice of forced underage marriage still conducted in Mali represent the twin poles of her stylistic range, the highlight might be a buzzing, swaying praise song whose decidedly non-traditional stabbing horns and Arabic influenced strings highlight rather than diminish the music’s ancient roots and the singer’s obvious respect for them

7. Anouar Brahem – The Astounding Eyes Of Rita (ECM)

- Brahem, matchless master of the Tunisian oud and among the world’s finest performers on any instrument, has brought together a group of quite exceptional empathy for this stunningly lovely album, even by the standards of ECM; the eight pieces pay tribute to Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish, whose Rita And The Rifle appears to have been its principal inspiration, as the rich, dark countermelodies of German bass clarinetist Klaus Gesing both support and instinctively respond to Brahem’s own boundless melodic mystery, and Swedish bassist Björn Meyer and Lebanese percussionist Khaled Yassine keep the music grounded while supplying extra colour – it’s not really World Music, despite the multi-national line-up of both instruments and instrumentalists, and it’s not really jazz, despite its spontaneous and improvisatory quality; in fact, everything is so perfectly placed it seems to have created a category of its own

8. Grizzly Bear – Veckatimest (Warp)

- sonically complex without being musically complicated, gently experimental without losing sight of the value of plain speaking, populist without trying too hard to be popular, impressively intelligent without being intellectually selfish, vocally lush and instrumentally generous without sounding grandiose, “Veckatimest”, named after a tiny uninhabited island off Massachusetts, is the kind of album that richly repays the demands of close inspection but rewards the casual listener too, a point demonstrated, perhaps, by its simultaneous critical embrace and its Top Ten showing on the US charts – gorgeous is an overused word, maybe even in this list, but this is, without a doubt, a gorgeous record

9. Alasdair Roberts – Spoils (Drag City) / The Wyrd Meme EP (Drag City) // Jackie Oates – Hyperboreans (Unearthed/One Little Indian)

- Scottish songwriter Roberts’s fourth album under his own name draws together many of the threads and most of the potential of its predecessors and finally fulfils the promise at which they hinted without ever really consistently delivering – as ever, he hovers on the edge of pretentiousness, his slightly mannered vocals articulating wordy and largely impenetrable songs of unearthly magic and natural wonder in a pitch and accent that calls to mind a sturdier, more accurate Incredible String Band, but this time he never overbalances as he closes the distance between the early Will Oldham’s Appalachian idiosyncrasies, occasional glimpses of a more fragile version of Van Morrison’s Celtic soul and the traditional folk song that provides him with so much of his structure and melodic sense, and offers song titles like The Yarn Unraveller (from the four track “Wyrd Meme” EP that serves as a stylistically similar and equally essential coda to the album), strange and strangely poetic lyrical insights and outbursts, and a song about a man looking for his legs “through Christendom and Araby and all through higher heathenry” –

singer and string player Jackie Oates seems to be following her brother Jim Moray (who produces and plays on an absolutely lovely, mainly traditional third album that also features a version of Icelandic pop group the Sugarcubes’ Birthday) into the upper ranks of young English folk singers and might have found her own place a little further down this list but for the fact that she named the record after an Alasdair Roberts song, got him to sing and play on it, and seems to have picked up some of his musical personality in the process

10. Richmond Fontaine – We Used To Think The Freeway Sounded Like A River (Decor/El Cortez)

- the fact that that Willy Vlautin has written a couple of well-received novels to go with his band’s recorded output that has largely been better received outside of his native United States has more or less condemned him to permanent classification as a literate songwriter whose richly perceptive songs, which often concern, and incisively, astutely and sympathetically chronicle, life among the downtrodden, downhearted and otherwise marginalised, are usually described as being as much short stories with a tune as anything else; but there are worse fates than that, even for a songwriter in an occasionally, but by no means exclusively alternative country band whose eighth studio album is good enough to maintain, without obvious effort, a five-year winning streak that now includes at least four outstanding records

11. Justin Adams & Juldeh Camara – Tell No Lies (Real World)

- if the desert has many songs, then Sahara, which kicks off this second, and arguably even better, release by the magical match-up of the Gambian Camara’s eerily wailing, primitively raw one-string ritti fiddle with the British Adams’s restless world blues guitar investigations, is surely one of the most striking, achieving a propulsion and a density of sound that is almost overpowering; that the rest of the album doesn’t just roll over and surrender to the onslaught, but more than holds its own, via the thunderous Bo Diddley beat and chiming Buddy Holly midsection of No Passport No Visa, the Muddy Waters wellspring blues of Fulani Coochie Man, Nangu Sobeh’s happy combination of pluckily plunking kologo and blazing slide guitar, and Banjul Girl’s exhilarating pop potency makes it very special indeed

12. White Denim – Fits (Full Time Hobby)

- I may have mentioned this before, but it remains as valid as ever … getting your angles right is not only the mark of good goalkeeping, it’s absolutely critical for bands whose approach to rawboned rock is as multi-dimensional and multi-directional as White Denim’s – punk-prog is probably too disparate a hyphenate to be meaningful, but I’m not sure that anything else would adequately describe the geometrically perfect combination of attitude, enthusiasm, power, spike, invention, roots, technical efficiency and sheer hell for leather rock ‘n’ roll this Texas trio cooked up in a trailer just outside of Austin and unleashed on an only partially suspecting world – some consider them spiritual heirs to the great Minutemen, though even that touchstone is by no means exact; but it’s the Rock ‘n’ Roll … Phew! Album of the Year by a margin

13. Joe Lovano & Us Five – Folk Art (Blue Note)

- celebrating the 70th anniversary of the Blue Note label, for which he has recorded 22 albums, Lovano, perhaps the most highly regarded tenorist in the contemporary jazz mainstream, and a player who may even go down in retrospect (considerations of jazz importance being the way they are) as one of the greats, spreads his instrumental wings, playing straight alto on an Ornette Coleman tribute, alto clarinet, the Hungarian taragato which enhances the spare and evocative Drum Song’s folkish feel, and the double soprano aulochrome, whose simultaneous harmonies on another tribute, this time to Cameroonian giant Manu Dibango, call to mind the still inimitable Rahsaan Roland Kirk; the outstanding if relatively inexperienced band often hives off into trios and even duos for more personal interplay as Lovano’s customary double whammy of balladry and bop provides much of the stylistic focus as he swops easily between fiery improvisation and melodies that pass the old grey whistle test; his ongoing willingness to broaden his horizons, and the album’s understated, but unmistakable interest in the music’s African roots, are what give it its particularly striking character

14. The xx – xx (XL)

- hardly out of the high school that mysterious dubstep artist Burial had also attended (the link is more sonically and emotionally appropriate than any with Four Tet, who had been to the same school), this dark, understated, uncomplicated, melodically straightforward but dreamily, sensuously effective debut in fact makes quite a few of the connections with Young Marble Giants’ notably unadorned, quietly influential 1980 album “Colossal Youth” that are being claimed for it (listening to the two in succession certainly establishes a consistency of mood, if not specific style), except that its unassuming R&B and pop references (and this century’s easier access to the good stuff) have allowed it to reach a deservedly broader audience of both punters and pundits – quite probably the debut of the year

15. The Flaming Lips – Embryonic (Warner Bros)

- too long, and lacking the kind of coherence that would have ensured a place in a shorter version for the several outright gems that populate its 18 tracks, this is, nevertheless, in spirit at least, the very model of a Flaming Lips album, from the throat clearing that introduces If’s frail falsetto to the affectingly low key reintroduction of the guitar solo into their work by way of one on Powerless that appears, half way through, to forget why it’s there; if “At War With The Mystics” made you wish for a return to the bracing racket that characterised the pre-“Soft Bulletin” band and its self-styled punk rockers on acid approach, this combination of gloriously weird symphonic pop and melodic sense in the midst of musical chaos, fed through references to krautrock, psychedelia, noise and a commotion that no doubt passes, in the strange world of the Flaming Lips, for something approaching funk, reminds us that these are indeed fearless freaks

20. The Unthanks – Here’s The Tender Coming (Rabble Rouser / EMI)

- both of them now recognised in a more democratically accurate group name, strikingly distinctive Northumbrian chamber folk sisters Rachel and Becky Unthank have built solidly and carefully on the unexpected success of their Rachel Unthank & the Winterset incarnation without losing any of that wonderfully fresh quirkiness or the bleak, unexpected beauty of “The Bairns”, yet this gorgeous collection of unusual song choices (the testimony of a 17 year old girl to the 1842 Royal Commission on Children’s Employment, for example), and unusual versions of more usual song choices (a slow, stark Annachie Gordon keeps the Nic Jones flag flying, Flowers Of The Town as opposed to Flowers Of The Forest, and the Geordie standard title track) is still a clear and confident step forward

21. Jon Hassell – Last Night The Moon Came Dropping Its Clothes In The Street (ECM)

- this album and its label are such a perfect fit that it’s at least mildly astonishing that it’s been nearly a quarter of a century since trumpeter Hassell last recorded as a leader for ECM – once described by frequent collaborator Brian Eno as “an inventor of new forms of music”, the 72 year old originator of what he termed Fourth World and explained as “a unified primitive/futuristic sound combining features of world ethnic styles with advanced electronic techniques” has assembled a team comprising explorers from Scandinavian, Algerian and Anglo-American experimental music to create a musical representation of the 13th century Sufi poem from which the album’s beautifully evocative title is lifted that sifts, drifts and shape shifts into a montage of sounds, motifs, melodic fragments and atmospheric devices drawn from a number of live and studio recordings that is as much a spellbinding cinematic mood as a mesmerising musical composition

22. Martin Simpson – True Stories (Topic) / Jon Boden – Songs From The Floodplain (Navigator)

- I’ve loved Martin Simpson’s effortlessly brilliant fingerstyle guitar playing for so long that I had always been prepared to overlook his just about serviceable singing of traditional and other people’s material in the light of the quality of its accompaniment, so his recent emergence as a singer of emotional resonance, a songwriter of high calibre if not yet much volume, and as one of the UK folk scene’s major figures has rather crept up on me – ‘True Stories’, with an exceptional, if temporary, band, maintains the standard and variety of 2007’s outstanding ‘Prodigal Son’ and contains surely the only song ever recorded to namecheck streets in both New Orleans and Scunthorpe – Jon Boden, the principal of whose several musical jobs is leading Bellowhead, played impressive enough fiddle in that Simpson band, but ‘Songs From The Floodplain’ is surely the mother lode as far as individual folk musical multitasking is concerned as he sings and plays every note (on around a dozen instruments) on what is nothing less than a folk concept album telling a compelling if at times lyrically oblique story of a community beset by some unnamed apocalyptic event; he does so with such skill that every song is capable of standing alone and the project never seems pretentious or overbearing

23. Sam Baker – Cotton (Music Road) / Malcolm Holcombe – For The Mission Baby (Echo Mountain)

- Texan songwriter Baker’s album booklet bears the legend, “Talk about forgiveness”, and that’s what he does on this, the third in the trilogy of albums, dealing, in turn, with mercy, gratitude and, now, forgiveness, that he decided to make after years spent recovering from the physical scarring and mental trauma of having been the victim of a political bomb attack (in Peru in 1986) – conceptually complex, lyrically spare and emotionally direct, haltingly sung, its underlying grit leavened with moments of unexpected prettiness, ‘Cotton’ completes one of the singular songwriting experiences of my decade – Holcombe, from North Carolina, with his voice full of spit and gravel, his guitar ringing out under a powerful, bluesy right hand, and his ongoing battle with life’s darkness more or less under control, was another; this is a worthy addition to his catalogue, perhaps not quite the best of what would appear to be seven albums and an EP, but certainly doing the business of making you want to hear more

24. Wilco – Wilco (the album) (Nonesuch)

- it’s a cruel irony that this, the group’s seventh studio album, released just about a month after the death of Jay Bennett who was Jeff Tweedy’s most reliable collaborator in its earlier incarnations, is the first to feature the same group line-up as its predecessor – that stability seems to have led to a consolidation of the various stylistic routes and branches the band has investigated along the way, from the muscular roots rock of ‘Being There’, via the lush pop of ‘Summerteeth’ and the electronic noise and krautrock experimentation of ‘Yankee Hotel Foxtrot’ and ‘A Ghost Is Born’, still, to my mind, the band’s artistic peak, to the crafted songwriting of ‘Sky Blue Sky’ – even the alt.country of its ‘A.M.’ debut, so vehemently disowned by Tweedy, returns in fleeting spirit, if not in direct form – it’s hard to doubt, in fact, that, if this was all the Wilco you’d ever heard, you would immediately accept the promise of the title song that, “Wilco will love you baby”, or that you would love Wilco in return

25. Bob Dylan – Together Through Life (Columbia)

- despite the weight of expectation attached to a new Bob Dylan record, they keep delivering and, if the simple and direct ‘Together Through Life’, a lyrical collaboration with Grateful Dead wordsmith Robert Hunter with a salute to Mississippi writer Larry Brown in the cover art, is no career masterpiece (which isn’t a problem if you accept that, having already invented rock music once, he’s unlikely to do so again as he approaches 70), its confident stroll, by lyrical turns pessimistic and playful, cantankerous and even comical, but never less than completely commanding, through the early rock ‘n’ roll, blues and general Southern music territory so redolent of his radio show, as he references Otis Rush, nods to John Lee Hooker, credits Willie Dixon, heads to Louisiana in the slipstream of David Hidalgo’s ubiquitous accordion, but gets sidetracked along the way by a broadly Tex-Mex feel no doubt fuelled by memories of his old mate Doug Sahm, shows he’s having a whale of a time

26. Levon Helm – Electric Dirt (Vanguard)
- miraculous though the vocal recovery from throat cancer of the Band’s most majestic voice may have been on 2007’s ‘Dirt Farmer’, the more hopelessly romantic might still have wished his mainly acoustic, largely folk and country delve into the musical psyche of the American South had sounded more like that great group – if so, ‘Electric Dirt’ may just about have granted them that wish as Helm’s own Growin’ Trade, and covers of the Grateful Dead’s Tennessee Jed and Randy Newman’s sly Huey P. Long portrait, Kingfish, sound arguably closer to the original Band than some of its later version’s output did; there’s blues again, too, via Muddy Waters, bluegrass through the Stanley Brothers, gospel soul from the Staple Singers’ songbook, ancient sounding fiddle and voice balladry and a couple of rousing Allen Toussaint horn arrangements, and that voice is holding on … magnificently

27. The Felice Brothers – Yonder is The Clock (Team Love) / The Duke & The King – Nothing Gold Can Stay (Loose)

- it’s taken me the best part of three albums to properly warm to the Felice Brothers; I always thought they tried too hard to grab the torch passed by Basement Tape Bob and his mates without actually getting as close as their supporters claimed, but ‘Yonder Is The Clock’ seems to be a quantum leap towards a more individual way of keeping those influences from the Invisible Republic intact while demonstrating the clear advantages involved in avoiding sounding like every Bob, Greil and Harry and being your own Band instead – there’s a triple whammy towards the album’s end that will convince doubters … the mysterious, mytho-historical Boy From Lawrence County, which might be about hunting the James Gang for bounty; a rambunctious, if ramshackle, retooling of Elder Curry’s 1930 admonition to his congregation to turn away from its shame if it hoped to avoid the Memphis Flu epidemic; and a ravishing, deeply resonant imagining of a time long gone from Cooperstown where, according to legend, baseball was first played – if Cooperstown was a strong candidate for Song of the Year, it was run close by the profoundly moving One More American Song by The Duke & The King, a duo featuring brother Simon Felice, who was on ‘Yonder Is The Clock’ but quit soon afterwards (by the way, the first album title and second band name both come from Mark Twain); the remainder of the record, which hews closer to 1970’s acoustic California than 1920’s Smithville, or even 1960’s Woodstock, does well to keep in touch

28. Dinosaur Jr – Farm (Jagjaguwar)

- if, as I suspect, there is a secret melodic guitar wellspring the location of which was once known only to Neil Young and from whose waters he draws freely nearly every time he picks up Old Black, then J Mascis of Dinosaur Jr, whose musical template feeds off punk and metal rather than folk and country rock, is among the few to whom Young has lent the GPS; those huge ringing swathes of guitar, at volumes that had to be heard to believed, enriched and invigorated ‘80s and ‘90s independent rock to a degree that only really became clear when the band had a huge fight and split for ten years – ‘Farm’, the second album in what must be one of the least expected rock reunions of them all, not only maintains the magnificent roar of its predecessor, ‘Beyond’, it recaptures the glory of the classic catalogue in a way that reunions almost never do

29. Joe Henry – Blood From Stars (Anti-)

- I suppose, if you had to describe Joe Henry’s 21st century output to someone who’d hadn’t heard it (and you’d want everyone, even those who only remember him as a county rocker backed by the Jayhawks, to hear his last four albums at least), you might say that he’s a bit like Tom Waits without the banging and crashing, the throat shredding and the wild surrealism, and with Harold Arlen a more likely influence than Harry Partch … so, not that much like Tom Waits, in fact – you’d also refer to his wonderful production skills, perhaps in the same breath as T Bone Burnett, although Henry’s approach seems more stylistically inclusive; but they all occupy the same broad territory, one that’s neither pop nor rock, blues nor jazz, and, in Burnett’s case, neither folk nor country either – you might call it adult contemporary at a push, except that that nearly always signifies a lack of imagination, and imagination is something Henry has in abundance – that said, ‘Blood From Stars’, which already fits easily into a recent canon that continues to grow more impressive with each listen, sounds like Henry’s jazziest record, without ever being a jazz record, despite the prelude by jazz pianist Jason Moran that opens it and the fact that some of its best songs are written in that noir-ish romantic style that the main jazz cats use as standards – but, as ever when you try to pin Henry down, others aren’t … Stars, for instance, is a rock song with a reggae inclination and a pure jazz soprano sax solo by his son Levon, Madonna’s nephew, who shines in the customarily impeccable backing band

30. Arbouretum – Song Of The Pearl (Thrill Jockey) / Pontiak – Maker (Thrill Jockey)

- when it comes to drugged out music, whether genuine or simulated, I’m seldom that convinced by stoner rock as a type, as opposed, I guess, to the psychedelic variety, even though a well appointed guitar blow-out featuring noise, understated melody, overdriven drone and texture that stays clear of metal sits particularly well with me – the line is often hard to find, and even harder to define, but these two bands, labelmates who have toured together and even shared an EP a good part of which consisted of John Cale covers (though I hear little of Cale on these albums or, for that matter, their predecessors – then again, I hear little of Bob Dylan here either, yet Arbouretum’s slow, feedback enriched cover of his Tomorrow Is A Long Time is mighty fine) gave me one of the year’s more satisfying back to back guitar experiences; Arbouretum leans towards a kind of loud, gothic Americana possibly associated with their previous Palace Brother connections, while the Pontiak brothers’ harsher, more exploratory method belies their own rural origins

31. Sonic Youth – The Eternal (Matador)

- a change of record label and a new bass player (Mark Ibold from Pavement, although Kim Gordon is still well and truly on board) seem to have galvanised a truly great band that I had become concerned, over the last few admittedly hugely listenable if not exactly bracing records, might be giving up their edge in return for a relatively comfortable middle age – but ‘The Eternal’, which sounds to me like their best album since at least ‘A Thousand Leaves’, actually embraces musical menace in a fashion that hasn’t been obvious since at least ‘Dirty’ and maybe even earlier – the irony of all this is that it’s finally, after all those wonderful records and almost two decades in the bosom of a major label, given them a Top 20 chart placing, which goes to show you never can tell

32. Vic Chesnutt – At The Cut (Constellation)

- a bit like Joy Division’s ‘Closer’, or those Nick Drake albums, it’s going to be hard from now on to separate the song Flirted With You All My Life, which refers, no doubt, to the terrible motor accident that confined Chesnutt to a wheelchair from his late teens, but miraculously left him alive, as well as to his previous attempts at suicide, or the lyric on It Is What it Is about hedging his bets “against the looming blackness”, from his death by his own hand on Christmas Day – but Chesnutt had often been a raw and even brutal songwriter, choosing subjects that others shied away from, and then making them normal, and, although ‘At The Cut’ is a dark record, it’s certainly not unremittingly bleak; its closing lines tell how his grandmother called him “the light of my life and the beat of my heart”, and Chesnutt’s signing to Canadian label Constellation, which put him in the studio with members of post-rock chamber groups God Speed! You Black Emperor and Thee Silver Mt Zion, lent this and the earlier ‘North Star Deserter’ a relative, if often wintry, sonic affluence that balanced and boosted all those crawling tempos, stark arrangements and melodic minimalism

33. The Very Best – Warm Heart Of Africa (Moshi Moshi/V2) / Extra Golden – Thank You Very Quickly (Thrill Jockey) / BLK JKS – After Robots (Secretly Canadian/Just Music)

- any of these three albums could have claimed a spot here on its own as cultures meet, greet and play in a way that won’t make you want to puke from the earnestness of it all – as the Very Best, a Malawian singer and a European production collaborative calling itself Radioclit reimagine upbeat pop by way of inventively simple electronics and the Southern African voice via a totally irresistible combination of jive styles that take in kwaito, cheap keyboard gospel and even that nursery rhyme chanting that so much contemporary pop seems to do (maybe because it’s all most of the singers can manage to lip synch while conducting the aerobics class among all the explosions and effects that constitutes the average pop concert) that’s not so bad when you don’t understand the words; what Vusi Mahlasela might have done, perhaps, with youth on his side and a sense of humour in his camp – East African Benga meets indie and even progressive guitar rock in Extra Golden, a Kenyan/American alliance where the individual components still live in their own countries, yet this, their third album, is a significant advance on the second where you’d have thought that what they do is what they do; that wonderfully fluid dual guitar thing that bands to the fairly immediate north of us achieve with their eyes closed takes on an entirely new dimension as a more expansive Extra Golden sounds, at times, like the original Allman Brothers Band on safari – like it or not, black guys playing rock still make people talk, and black South Africans playing rock make them talk louder, all of which means you might have seen BLK JKS coming before you actually heard them – I think I preferred them before they were Africa’s TV On The Radio, though that might just be a reaction to the hype and a desire to protect critical exclusivity; BLK JKS certainly aren’t toeing any easy industry line as they create a holy row around an ever shifting rhythmic bed that finds space for reggae, dub, ska and kwaito among the rock, rather than the other way round, but there’s a tendency for the blare and bluster to get a bit prog and flabby on occasion, and that needs to be watched; it’s an impressive debut for sure, though

34. Righard Kapp – Strung Like A Compound Eye (Jaunted Haunts Press) / Ramon Galvan – Outer Umbolia (Jaunted Haunts Press)

- one of the few givens in any South African music year, other than the fact that, by and large, it’s likely to disappoint most people listening outside a fairly narrow box (it’s a lack of opportunity to hear what’s worth hearing, unless you know someone who knows where to find it on the Net, and who to find, that causes this, rather than an absence of anything worth hearing), is that pretty much anything Cape Town experimental guitarist Righard Kapp releases, on whichever is the latest of his impossibly obscure imprints and no matter how limited the edition, will be worth getting, and getting into; 2009 was no exception – Kapp’s own ‘Strung Like A Compound Eye’ makes a terrific fist of what are broadly the three strings to his musical bow, namely the fine acoustic guitar instrumentalist, the ever inquisitive sonic investigator and the affecting songwriter, none of which ever quite ends up where you expect it to – Ramon Galvan is a likeminded soul who used to be in the excellent Blackmilk; his refusal to be pinned down stylistically, his unwillingness to treat his wonderful voice as a conventional rock instrument and his lively musical imagination have led to a kind of quietly compelling, meticulously wrought, unexpectedly addictive folk/jazz/chamberpop artsong hybrid that keeps serving up surprises

35. Alela Diane – To Be Still (Names/Rough Trade)

- much has been made, as it inevitably would be, of Alela Diane’s shared hometown and childhood friendship with Joanna Newsom but, if that has attracted her an audience, it has also tended to misconceive her into the so-called freak- or nu-folk scene whereas ‘To Be Still’ in fact places her much closer to more traditional, and older, areas of folk-rock where the touchstones are as much the pedal steel of the guy in her father’s Grateful Dead cover band (who apparently taught the instrument to Jerry Garcia himself), her father’s own vocal and instrumental presence, the fiddle of her childhood teacher, the vocal assistance of cultish folk veteran Michael Hurley and the guitar of Kate Wolf/Dave Alvin collaborator Nina Gerber (she’s part of Alvin’s Guilty Women, whose own 2009 album damn nearly made this list) – it’s the sense of community, rather than the specific musical style, that may make this strikingly lovely record part of any contemporary movement, but its embrace of tried and trusted folk styles ought to attract other generations too

36. Reigning Sound – Love And Curses (In The Red)

- the history of Memphis music is full of mavericks and garage rockers Greg Cartwright and Jack Yarber, marginally better known, perhaps, as the Oblivians, but to be found all over the local garage scene in fact, are among the more recent to have helped shape the sound of what has amounted over the years to one of the world’s most consistently stimulating sonic cities –– Reigning Sound is Cartwright’s band and, on its fifth studio album, he rolls back some of the guitar of the previous ‘Too Much Guitar’, re-infects the rock ‘n’ roll raunch with a healthy dose of the organ driven soul music he loves so dearly and exercises a perfectly natural attraction towards early ‘60s girl group pop that had him produce and lend his group’s accompaniment to the recent fine solo album by former Shangri-La Mary Weiss – the songs, which take no prisoners, suffer no fools and brook no argument, are short sharp and punchy, like a good sock to the jaw, and hopelessly addictive, just the way rock ‘n’ roll ought to be

37. Magnolia Electric Co – Josephine (Secretly Canadian) / Bonnie “Prince” Billy – Beware (Domino) / Molina & Johnson – Molina & Johnson (Secretly Canadian)

- up until the last moment this was looking like a Will Oldham-free list, such was the overall quality of the 2009 catalogue, and even though ‘Beware’ is a stronger album than some Oldham releases to have featured here previously; but ‘Beware’ is such a thoroughly enjoyable, and tuneful, Prince Billy record, with its swooning pedal steel, its swelling female choruses and its general air of contentment, and so much of this music might not have existed without Oldham in the first place, and the Magnolia Electric Co’s Jason Molina started out as such a vocal dead ringer for Oldham in his early Songs: Ohia days (before first turning into the electric Neil Young and then finding his own voice somewhere between the two) that I couldn’t really keep it off – among the first words you hear on the ineffably melancholic ‘Josephine’, which quickly asserted itself among my favourite Molina recordings, its mood of sweet, melodic pain undoubtedly affected by the death of the group’s bassist but its spirit intact to the end, are “I’m as lonesome as the world’s first ghost”; sung in that lugubrious near falsetto to the band’s familiar loping electric tread, you can’t help giving yourself over to it – if Molina’s quiet and lovely collaboration with Centro-matic/South San Gabriel man Will Johnson’s slightly gruffer if hardly less pensive voice sounds less immediately substantial by comparison, it has nevertheless exerted its own, somewhat different hold over my listening

38. Califone – All My Friends Are Funeral Singers (Dead Oceans) / Castanets – Texas Rose, The Thaw & The Beasts (Asthmatic Kitty)

- it’s more than just alphabetical proximity that connects these albums, though if that was the only way to get them both in, it would be enough; both incorporate the electronic and experimental into more conventional folk, blues and country styles (albeit differently so), but always in such a way that the sonic disparities sound organic and logical, and the often unsettling and provocative results never become weird for the sake of it – Castanets’ Raymond Raposa, as much the group itself as Mark Linkous, for example, was Sparklehorse, or Bill Callahan became Smog, sometimes sounds like a broadminded folk singer with a hobbyist’s enthusiasm for and grasp of the world beyond his acoustic guitar, where Califone’s approach appears more deliberately, though no less imaginatively crafted – typically, though, their Bunuel, ostensibly about the experimental surrealist film maker (the album was written to accompany a feature-length film) sounds about as traditionally Son Volt as the album gets

39. The Dirty Projectors – Bitte Orca (Domino)

- there was an article by Chuck Eddy, a highly entertaining and provocative music critic whom I quite often read despite apparently having little in common with his taste, that called 2009 the Year Of Too Much Consensus in the light of the mass critical genuflection that took place towards bands like Animal Collective, Grizzly Bear and the Dirty Projectors – the first two will appear higher up this list, though not so high up as to give them nosebleeds or ideas above their station, but ‘Bitte Orca’ is basically consummate attention deficit disorder pop, with elements of skewed folk, off kilter R&B and crazily tilting rock bouncing off the studio walls around it, full of disjointed rhythms, fantastically clever vocal interjections, brittle African guitar even, and several varieties of the kitchen sink; it’s brilliantly constructed and you can hit just about any song just about anywhere and be impressed by the sheer pop ingenuity at work, but it never sticks to anything long enough for me to find its heartbeat

40. Allen Toussaint – The Bright Mississippi (Nonesuch)

- the veteran Crescent City R&B pianist, producer, composer and arranger, no less than Mr New Orleans to many, reaches way back to visit, for just about his first time on record, the jazz roots that originally defined his hometown – Joe Henry, who crops up more and more on these lists, produces an all star band worth burning down the mission for through a collection where local masters like Jelly Roll Morton, Sidney Bechet and King Oliver are accorded respect, understanding and just the right amount of swagger and Ellington, Monk, Django and the traditional Just A Closer Walk With Thee sound like they, too, were Big Easy born and raised.

41. Bill Frisell – All Hat (Emarcy) / Disfarmer (Nonesuch)

- the peerless guitarist’s last two albums have been soundtracks featuring his so-called country band, with violin, electric and acoustic steel and double bass the principal accompanists of his timeless twang – ‘All Hat’ was a film that seems, by all accounts, to have been, in the Texan expression, all hat and no cattle itself, so the soundtrack, toughened by additional drums and harmonica, might be considerably more attractive than the movie ever was; Frisell uses the great traditional tune John Hardy as a musical motif, and that alone makes the album worth hearing – ‘Disfarmer’ was commissioned to accompany an exhibition of the rural portraits of Arkansas photographer Mike Disfarmer and Frisell’s trademark contemporary American composition draws, once again, mainly on folk and old time themes and ideas, though there are rockabilly and country favourites tossed in, too – being soundtrack music, this stuff consists mainly of sketches, but what sketches!

42. Tony Allen – Secret Agent (World Circuit) / Baaba Maal – Television (Palm Pictures) / Vieux Farka Touré – Fondo (Six Degrees)

- reasons to love West Africa, and there’ll be more before the list is done, from a year when the region’s output was especially strong – Nigeria’s Tony Allen, for years the rhythmic powerhouse behind Fela Kuti and his Afrobeat inventions, and one of the most naturally funky men alive, has long been considered one of the world’s great drummers, and perhaps Africa’s most influential, and there was little more imposing last year than the juggernaut created by his mighty Afrofunk outfit operating at full power, with chattering guitars and combative keyboards playing off against enterprisingly riffing horn charts and Allen’s relentless drive; there’s wit here, too, and even accordion, and songs sung in a veritable Babel’s worth of languages, but it’s always most impressive when the funkmonster comes out to play – Senegal’s Baaba Maal is not far short of a cross-cultural icon, the owner of one of the half a dozen or so most recognisable voices on the continent; now a genuine Afropop star, Maal spent a fair amount of recording time mining the tradition on his way to this point, and still reverts, from time to time, to his roots, but ‘Television’, elegant and composed, is where he demonstrates, a little less energetically than previously, but with minimal damage to his musical essence, his facility with international pop style, and if that involves a flash of flamenco, or a song or two in English, then so be it – from Mali comes Vieux Farka Touré, whose father was one of the continent’s greatest musicians; there’s much of Ali in Vieux’s singing and playing, of course, but where the father heard the sounds of home in the blues of John Lee Hooker, the son has incorporated the influence of Hooker’s more electric children, along with several other African elements, into his own version of the desert blues

43. Yo La Tengo – Popular Songs (Matador)

- the fact that there’s little new to say about one of independent rock’s most consistent performers is surely a good thing – Yo La Tengo have been improving musical lives for nearly 25 years, easily shifting gears between drifting, slightly edgy pop, punkish melody and full tilt guitar noise (more or less divided here into a first half of nine shortish songs, and a second of three long sonic explorations) without ever threatening to become much more than the critical favourites they’ve been throughout – it seems to be enough for the band, and it ought to be enough for an audience for whom a new Yo La Tengo album is still an almost inevitable source of high quality listening that entices, rather than incites, its engagement; proof, in fact, that reliable doesn’t have to mean safe

44. Sunn O))) – Monoliths And Dimensions (Southern Lord)

- never underestimate the power of a well-considered guest list, even in music’s more extreme areas – subtlety may not be the first word you’d use to describe the music of cowled and comfortless ambient drone specialists Sunn O))), especially in the company of improbably deep throated Hungarian black metal vocalist Attila Csihar, but add a choir or two, strings under the singular and invariably provocative direction of Eyvind Kang, free jazz trombonist Julian Priester, Dylan Carlson of Earth, who were the original Sunn O))) blueprint, and other high grade jazz , noise and avant-garde musicians to the immense rumbling sound and funereal tempos, all without disturbing the material’s essential dark challenge, and the effect is remarkably potent, stimulating, and even subtle

45. Fred Morrison – Outlands (Ridge) / Julie Fowlis – Uam (Shoeshine)

- bagpipe monster Fred Morrison and exquisite Gaelic singer Julie Fowlis, both from Uist in the Outer Hebrides, seem to have been influenced by their respective appearances on the BBC’s wonderful ‘Transatlantic Sessions’ television series, where Celts and Americans join musical hands across the roots music ocean – Fowlis, who previously dallied briefly with wider fame via a Gaelic version of the Beatles’ Blackbird, includes ‘Sessions’ favourite Eddi Reader’s English counterpoint on the well-known Wind And Rain here, and gives a guest spot to Jerry Douglas’s lap steel; the simple joy of hearing her sing, “I have new shoes tonight”, even in Gaelic, in a gorgeous set of local airs, spellbinding chants and irresistible dance tunes, can’t help enchanting even the hardest heart – Morrison has gone further; his magnificent playing on a variety of pipes and whistles never fails to thrill, but the addition of acclaimed American musicians Ron Block (banjo) and Tim O’Brien (guitar, mandolin and fiddle) raises even that excitement level several notches as The Hard Drive proves to be nothing less than raging bagpipe bluegrass while the Kansas City Hornpipe would steal most shows

46. Phoenix – Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix (V2)

- I can never be sure how long perfectly made pop du jour will last for me but, for now, just about every one of these ten small but perfectly French-formed tracks seems to do the trick just about every time – other than that they might have been named after films, I don’t know why those helplessly catchy songs are called Lisztomania or 1901, or what they’re about, nor do I feel the need to find out; it’s good enough that they make me smile and tap my feet – this marks a rare appearance in these lists, by the way, of a Grammy winner, this year’s even more appalling than usual ceremony notwithstanding

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