Cathal Coughlan, "Rancho Tetrahedron" (Kitchenware)

Late of Microdisney and Fatima Mansions, Cathal Coughlan has for a decade now followed a singularily fascinating path as a singer/songwriter. Aided by musicians like Audrey Riley and James Woodrow who arrive from a New Music background, including the band Icebreaker and Merce Cunningham's ensemble, Coughlan's songs are intricate and yet muscular, subtle and yet savagely, satirically funny.

Cosa Brava, "Ragged Atlas" (Intakt Records)

Guitarist Fred Frith first honed his instrumental skills with the archetypically 1970s English group Henry Cow. His new band contains accordionist and cellist Zeena Parkins, violinist Carla Kihlstedt, drummer Matthias Bossi and Norman Conquest on "sound manipulation". Their debut album is a gripping affair, weaving the varied backgrounds of all members into a tight mesh of devilish rhythms and intriguing melodies.

The Climbers, "The Good Ship" (Willkommen Records)

Post-Arcade Fire, violins, celli and outré brass and woodwind instruments next to the usual guitars and drums are no longer a rarity on our stages. Britain, in particular, has recently spawned a great many beguiling mini-orchestras for audiences with trendy haircuts. The Climbers are one such: lovely autumnal melodies to read Rilke to, embedded in richly layered arrangements that never get too cerebral, soppy or even kitschy.

Dr. Will, "Speak of the Devil" (ZYX Music)

The most interesting Reggae in recent years has come out of Berlin, so why should we be surprised that the best "New Orleans"-album of recent years hails from Munich? Dr. Will takes the formula - massive Dr. John-type voice, rumbling Voodoo-Grooves etc -, mixes in a hint of Waits, Doug Sahm, Ry Cooder and Stones, and yet remains utterly his own man.

Otis Taylor, "Clovis People Vol. 3" (Telarc)

The list of instruments used in "Rain So Hard", the first track of this astonishing set of 21st century Blues, may give an idea of just how singular an artist the 61 year old Otis Taylor is: his own guitar and voice (he also plays mandolin and banjo) plus bass and drums are joined by theremin, cornet, cello and pedal steel. Ranging from sparse acoustic gentleness to fierce and exquisitely controlled aggression, this is a gripping album.

Villagers, "Becoming a Jackal" (Domino)

"Villagers" isn't really a band. It's the nom-de-plume of Dubliner Conor J. O'Brien, previously of The Immediate, a psychedelic sort of Post-New Wave band with a sixties tinge, beloved, of course, by Hot Press and unknown anywhere else. After the failure of that group, O'Brien settled down with his collection of superior poetry books playing guitar for touring singers whilst quietly developing his own song writing skills. Three years later comes "Becoming a Jackal", his gorgeous debut album. Much of it, O'Brien has played and recorded himself. Occasionally, friends help out with strings, woodwind, drums and the like. The songs meander without hurry through a set of melodies that in the beginning keep their secrets close to their chest but nevertheless exude a rare hypnotic power.

Laura Veirs, "July Flame" (Bella Union)

Another endlessly fascinating album by one of my favourite American singer songwriters. She has a unique way of underpinning strong and unpredictable vocal melodies with an intricate mesh of instrumental patterns supplied by acoustic guitars as well as viola, drums, sax and strings.

The Features, "Some Kind of Salvation" (429 Records)

Another album that has reached me late. The Features hail from Sparta, Tennessee, and have been going for well over 15 years, apparently. This is only their second album, however, and it is the first to be chosen by The Kings of Leon to be released on their own new label. The Features are cut from a similar cloth as Spoon and myriad other non-mainstream, American rock bands. Their main advantage is great, simple songs, a lot of drive, plus a fantastic singer.

Erland & The Carnival, "E & TC" (Full Time Hobby)

Erland Cooper is a young Orcadian Folk singer, the Carnival consists of guitarist Simon Tong (Ex-Verve, Gorillaz, The Good The Bad & The Queen) and drummer/engineer David Nock. What makes their acid-frazzled brand of Folkrock so alluring is a hefty infusion of Motown-ish oomph and 60s psychedelic poppiness, and yet they do not sound "retro" in any way.

These New Puritans, "Hidden" (Domino)

A remarkably original and powerful fusion of woodwind, strings, Japanese Kodo drums, as well as loops and beats. For once, the "classical" instruments aren't just daubed over conventional rock tracks, but they are integral to the arrangements and the dynamics. I'm very much looking forward to seeing this lot at the M4Music Festival in Zurich at the end of the month.

Hindi Zahra, "Handmade" (EMI)

Hindi Zahra is a Paris-based Moroccon singer, and this is her debut album. Her music is a subtle and entirely clichée-free blend of chanson (with a few anglo-saxon influences, no doubt) that occasionally betray a hint of North African melody, Flamenco rhythm or even a light bossa nova touch (there is not the slightest hint of Buddha Café or Astrud Gilberto, though - both of which get on my nerves something rotten).

Owen Pallett, "Heartland" (Domino)

Pallett, a classically trained composer from Toronto, has written arrangements for Hidden Cameras, Last Shadow Puppets and many others. Free from any outside constraints, he serves up a concept album about his own relationships inspired by Roland Barthes's "A Lover's Discourse". The music is a deeply peculiar and yet powerful and edgy fusion of beats, singer/songwriter craft, woodwind, brass and gay aesthetics.

The Leisure Society, "The Sleeper" (Full Time Hobby)

An album that's been out for a while but I've only discovered it now. The core of the band consists of song writer Nick Hemmings and producer/multi-instrumentalist Christian Hardy. Around them they have assembled a vast cast of violins, cellos, clarinettes and the like. The results are finely crafted autumnal chamber-pop-songs full of detail, verve and charme.

Jace Everett. "Red Revelations" (Weston Boys/Wrasse)

Easily the most incendiary start to an album of the year. First, a few guitar scrapings, then, after the 1-2-3-4 of the drum sticks, a descending three-note guitar riff,a few gravelly "a-oohs" from a voice born in a midnight bar, and the whole thing propelled along by a dirty one-note piano motif. Everett is new to me, a Nashville song writer, this is his third album. Produced in part by Chuck Prophet, it is a potent brew of dirty Country and Rockabilly - the sound, furthermore, is ncredibly beefy without ever straying into Springsteen-territory. Superb.

Madness, "The Liberty of Norton Folgate" (Lucky Seven)

It's taken a few months to take in the full brilliance of this gorgeous album - next to "New Boots and Panties" and "Muswell Hillbillies" without a doubt one of the greatest London albums ever. The modern Madness sound features a little less Ska and a lot more Music Hall, Reggae and subtly underplayed circus melancholia. The ten-minute title track right at the end is worth the admission price alone.

Nisennenmondai, "Destination Tokyo" (Small Town Supersound)

Three women from Tokyo, five pieces of flabbergastingly tight and intense instrumental patterns not unlike a high-speed Michael Nyman. Just guitar, bass and drums, it says on the sleeve. However they do it, half the time it sounds as if there were also a couple of demented cellos and violins in there. Fiercly narcotic.

Trembling Bells, "Carbeth" (Honest Jons)

You can sense the free improvisational past of drummer and principal song writer Alex Neilson in vocal and instrumental lines that weave in and out of each other like the mists over a moor - or over an urban canal with a corpse or two floating in it. With instruments like harmonium, viola and trombone, we can hear echoes of the Incredible String Band, but also of Alistair Roberts (see below). The lyrics are undeniably contempoary, and singer Lavinia Blackwall is entirely her own woman and holds together this alluring and eerie album beautifully.

St Vincent, "Actor" (4AD)

Multi-instrumentalist Annie Clarke has worked with Sufjan Stevens, and her own music is every bit as convincingly odd. Hard to describe what she does - whatever, she does it well. A particular forte are peculiar arrangements involving a variety of real instruments as well as electonica. And she doesn't shy away from noise and dissonance.

Miles Benjamin Anthony Robinson (Transgressive)

The Booklyn-based singing songwriter's album has been out in the States for a year, but it's only just been released in the UK. It contains a captivating mix of ramshackle band arrangements and strong voice.

Tom Brosseau, "Posthumous Success" (Fat Cat)

North Dakotan Brosseau has an eerily boyish voice and a very superior guitar technique. His witty lyrics often tell stories with a strong, Gothically tragi-comic undertow. Live, his solo appearances have a hypnotic quality that would be difficult to recreate on record. Thus, a number of guests add psalter, Jew's harp, guitars, drums and even feedback to this fine album.

Mexican Institute of Sound, "Soy Sauce" (Cooking Vinyl)

By day, Camilo Lara is the director of EMI Mexico. By night he immerses himself in a vast record collection and turns into the Mexican Institute of Sound. He builds riotously joyous and often very funny dance floor collages from beats and samples from all local music traditions. Guest singers Maria Paula, Paty Cantu und Pat C. as well as a real-life Mariachi combo add spice.

Alasdair Roberts "Spoils" (Drag City)


Scot Alasdair Roberts has for a while now been the most interesting and original of the new generation of songwriters working within the framework of the traditional British Folk song. This is his fifth solo album, and it is his best. A superb guitar stylist, Roberts is also a mesmerising teller of dark stories that are utterly modern and all the more poignant for their timeless settings.

Metric, "Fantasies" (Metric Productions)

The fourth, self-produced album of Canadian singer Emily Haines's post-post-New Wave-Pop-quartet is a glorious assemblage of deadly hooks, shiny and yet beefy production, and lyrics with unusal depth. Haines manages to sound both glacial and vulcanic in her delivery of killer songs like "Help I'm Alive", "Stadium Love", and - best of all - "Sick Muse".

Art Brut, "Art Brut vs. Satan" (Cooking Vinyl)

On their debut album, Eddie Argos's shouty vocals simply got on my nerves. On their second album, I thought the music was as boring as everything else. Clearly, I thought, a band whose gimmick had run its course. Now this, their third - a complete turn-around. The music - produced by Frank Black - is an urgent rock noise reminiscent of the kind of music Black himself comes up with when he's in loud mode. The main attraction, however, is Argos's lyrics. They are as funny as they are poignant through-out, full of verve, originality and warmth. The title track, Art Brut vs. Satan, argues the point that the listening public is satan because it consistently buys the wrong records, ie. not those of Art Brut. Elswhere, Eddie Argos is expressing astonishment that he hasn't discovered the pleasures of "The Replacements" before, especially as some of their members were almost as old as his parents. Elsewhere still, Argos is wondering aloud why so many bands were trying to sound like U2: "It's not so cool", he reckons.

Alela Diane, "To Be Still" (Fargo)

Her debut album took four years to flutter into the consciousness of a public beyond the cafés of hinterland California with its post-Vashti Bunyanesque songs of quietly bucolic travails. The follow-up comes with a much "bigger" production - "big" being very much a relative term. It's all the better for it. Mandolins, banjos, fiddles and even drums are applied with a touch that is both sure and sensitive. The arrangements throw a new light on Alela Diane's clear and still-water-deep voice, making it appear much more three-dimensional than on the previous album.

The Incredible String Band, "Tricks of the Senses" (Hux)

I´ve just bought the ISB´s new double CD of material from the vaults, "Tricks of the Senses" (Hex Records). 16 tracks, some previously unreleased, others alternative versions of some of their greatest songs ("Maya", "The Iron Stone"). It´s all lovingly done, recordings splendidly cleaned up (whilst still retaining some period crackle), lengthy accompanying essays, notes about the origin of the recordings etc. I must say, impressions on first hearing are mixed. Some of it is lovely, but I haven´t yet heard anything that achieves the intense sense of otherworldliness and transport of their best albums. Which in my book are "5000 Spirits", "Hangman´s Beautiful Daughter", "Wee Tam & Big Huge" and "Liquid Acrobat as Regards the Air". Still - very nice to have.

Robyn Hitchcock & The Venus 3, "Goodnight Oslo" (Proper)

The first great record of the new year has arrived - "Goodnight Oslo" by Robyn Hitchcock & The Venus 3. A splendid selection of witty and yet emotionally subtle songs with memorable melodies and lyrics, complete with Terry Edwards and his trumpets and saxs, plus cello, violin, oud, santoor. Peter Buck, Scott McCaughey and Bill Rieflin are somewhere in the mix, too, but this isn't about names or connections, it's about the songs. I can't help wondering, though, what Robyn Hitchcock might sound like alongside Go Between Robert Forster.

As can be gleaned from my news page, I´ve been to San Francisco. This means I´ve also been to the Amoeba Record Store at the far end of Haight Street. It will be impossible for anyone who´s never visited one of the three Amoebas in SF, LA or Berkeley to comprehend the sheer vast wonderfulness of this establishment. Naturally I bought a few CDs. This is what I bought:

- Link Wray, "Link Wray" (Polydor)

An astonishing album that nobody bought when it came out in 1971, a firey hotpot of Link Wray-Folk-Blues and Link Wray-Gospel, all performed with fierce devotion to the task at hand. Billy Hodges is on piano, Bobby Howard on Mandolin and piano, Doug Wray and Steve Verroca play the drums, and all sing. I have this on vinyl and barely dare putting it on for fear of damaging the sleeve with its cut-out profile of Link (?) dressed up as a red indian. Thus, I´m very pleased to have found it on vinyl, a "limited edition", no less, again on Polydor, complete with cut-out, but this time on hard cardboard.


- The Mendoza Line, "30 Year Low" (Glurp Records)

This mini-album (packaged with a bonus CD crammed full with cover versions and alternative live recordings) was released last year in the States and never made it to the UK. It is the swangsong of the glorious Mendozas from Brooklyn who have for so long been favourites of mine with their literary take on Indie-Country-Rock. Alas, I realised only on the flight back that singer Shannon McArdle´s first solo album has already been released in the US.


- Liam Finn, "I´ll Be Lightning" (Yep Rock Records)

Neil Finn´s son - I´ve heard good things about this album. Now seemed as good a time as any to buy it.


- Mighty Baby, "A Jug of Love" (Sunbeam)

I´ve been looking for this re-release for a while. Mighty Baby were a classic hippie band in the London style. Emerging from a mod band called The Action, they released their debut album in 1969, and followed it two years later with this, their last. I have the debut on vinyl and it is one of my favourite rock albums of that time, a heady blend of subtlety and hypotic rock dynamics. Their second is folkier, but the arrangements are still suprisingly complex. After this, the band fell apart, mostly due to the fact that the majority of the members had converted to Sufism, whilst Alan King hadn´t. The liner notes tell of a tour of Holland where half the band could hardly play so weak were they from their Ramadan exertions.


- Black Mountain, "In The Future" (Jagjaguwar)

A recommendation from Noel Gallagher, and everything he´s recommended to me over the past few years has been good. Intense, narcotic rock, it seems at first glance. Intriguing, that´s for sure.


- The Hidden Cameras, "The Arms of his "Ill"" (Absolutely Kosher Records)

The mad Joel Gibbs. Contains much sparser alternative versions of most of the songs contained on the Rough Trade album "Mississauga Goddam", released in the same year, 2004.

I took Johnny Flynn's album to Switzerland a few months ago to play on the radio show I do every time I'm there ("Sounds" on DRS3) and left my copy there to be played by their regular DJs. It's taken me until now to find a copy for myself. And the album is every bit as good as I remembered. Subtle folky stuff with celli and mandolins, a little reminiscent of James Yorkston, but a lot more upbeat. Plus, there is a song called "Wayne Rooney"!


Johnny Flynn, "A Larum" (Vertigo/Universal)

On the cover this, his first proper album (there was mini album taster last year) Eugene McGuinnes looks a bit like a very young John Lennon stuck - inexplicably - in a fencing outfit. The image has absolutely nothing to do with the fine contents of this CD. Song titles like "Rings Around Rosa", "Fonz" or "Moscow State Circus" give a hint that McGuinness is a singer songwriter with a neat turn of phrase as well as an ability to avoid lyrical and musical clichées. Double-edged jollity and wit is more his style than introspective melancholia. Ace. Domino Records truly is our contemporary version of Island Records in the 70s and Rough Trade in the 80s - a company whose every release is at least worth investigating.

Eugene McGuinness, "Eugene McGuinness" (Domino)


Juana Molina was born in Argentina, moved to Paris when she was 12 to get away from the government, returned to Buenos Aires six years later, became a tv comedy star, fled from fame to Los Angeles and became a musician. Her fifth album "Un Dia", is louder, "bassier" and "groovier" than the subtle predecessors and not at all less gorgeous for it. Molina truly has an indiosyncratic and subtle take on electronica and song-writing. The music this time sometimes has a minimalistic, repetitive groove, but the vocal melodies remain as intricate and "Argentinian" as ever.

Juana Molina, "Un Dia" (Domino)


Leila Arab was the keyboard player in Björk's live band before she turned her attention to the pleasures of the computer and the mixing desk. After a lengthy gap, this is her third album. Despite the vocal presence of Tricky's ex-partner Martina Topley-Bird the outcome is anything but trip-hop. The rhythm tracks are a complex tapestry of noise, beats and sampled instruments. Sometimes there is a hint of Central European circus, folk or chamber music, sometimes the noise borders on the industrial. Another guest singer on this gripping album is Ex-Special and -Fun Boy ThreeTerry Hall.

Leila Arab, "Blood Looms and Blooms" (Warp)

Dennis Wilson, "Pacific Ocean Blue" (Sony/BMG); the only solo album of the late Beach Boys' drummer resurrected, together with the never released "Bambu" and other tracks. A raw and dramatic album full of vast arrangements - many instruments played by Dennis himself - that could serve as a definition for a new genre, "California Soul".

Flat Mountain Girls, "Idle Talk & Wicked Deeds" (

No Depression calls it "postmodern traditionalism" - whatever, the Flat Mountain Girls are an old-tyme string quartet from Portland, Oregon whose music is a sparkling fresh melange of the Carter Family song book and a heap of traditionals, all done with real swing. This is their third album. The second, "Honey Take Your Whiskers Off", is just as good. The first I have not yet heard.


STRANGE CHANGED-MY-MIND-MOMENT OF THE MOMENT:

Bought the Micachu album "Jewellery" a few weeks ago and thought it was absolutely ace. Well, there was one song, "Golden Phone", that was so good I played it again and again until I was convinced this was the sound of the future and beyond. Since then I've tried to listen to the whole album on a few occasions, and I've failed miserably. Ten minutes maximum of the constant clank of home-made instruments and lo-fi vocals, and I'm truly annoyed. Another album that went from great admiration at first to complete "can't listen to it" in a very short space of time: Animal Collective's "Merriweather Post Pavillion" - I now find it shrill and claustrophobic and showily cerebral.


The best of 2009

Robyn Hitchcock & The Venus 3, "Goodnight Oslo" (Proper)
Alela Diane, "To Be Still" (Fargo)
Art Brut, "Art Brut vs. Satan" (Cooking Vinyl)
Micachu & The Shapes, "Jewellery" (Rough Trade)
King Creosote, "Flicking the Vs" (Domino)
Grizzly Bear, "Veckatimest" (Warp)
Metric, "Fantasies" (Metric Productions)
St. Vincent "Actor" (4AD)
Madness, "The Liberty of Norton Folgate" (Lucky Seven)
Jace Everett, "Red Revelations" (Weston Boys/Wrasse)
The Leisure Society, "The Sleeper" (Full Time Hobby)


The best of 2008

Nick Cave, "Dig. Lazarus, Dig!!!"
The Raconteurs, "Consolers of the Lonely"
Leila, "Blood Looms and Blooms"
Robert Forster, "The Evangelist"
Elbow, "The Seldom Seen Kid"
Juana Molina, "Un Dia"
Santogold, "Santogold"
MGMT, "Oracular Spectacular"
Fotheringay, "Fotheringay 2"
Bowerbirds, "Hymns for a Dark Horse"
Kings of Leon, "Only By The Night"
Eugene McGuiness, "Eugene McGuinness"
Johnny Flynn, "A Larum"