Twelve things that floated our boat this year. We'd reiterate "top" but music competitions are as real as Santa. Worst Oz album covers, Top Ten other stuff and a bunch of other random things we can't help but blab on about, coming next:

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12. La Roux
La Roux

Guilty-pleasure in the cheesiest extreme. La Roux's debut took the sieve to the last couple of years of electronic pop music and didn't stop stripping it back until they had the blatant bits that just worked. Quick verses fly into catchy pre-choruses which give way to catchier proper choruses, all over the dickiest sounding synth this side of K-Mart. Elly Jackson's cool croon keeps things focused and tight, and it's impossible to hear just half this record and not have it stuck in your head. There's also hints of the classics deeper into the LP - Duran Duran, Eurythmics, Prince (if this was a Prince album people would be losing their mind). You can hate this and you'll still tap your feet. Fuck you, La Roux.
 
11. St. Helens
Heavy Profession

Just when it seemed like the Melbourne clangy Fender guitar scene's bi-yearly exhuming of the Bad Seeds legacy was once again reaching its impotent nadir, along came St. Helens to wipe the slate clean with some much needed woozy groove. Pulling together an expert band, Jarrod Quarell's drawling tales of wrong-doings and off-kilter worldly proclamations ("when you kill a man he falls into a field / but when you kill a kid, they turn into lights") were perfectly complemented by partner Hannah Brooks' equally disdainful double-tracking vocal. It's this duo-personality that gives the band their teeth, and gives us the perfect things to think about when we're trying to not think the things we think about.



10. Sparklehorse & Danger Mouse
Dark Night Of the Soul

The only thing that would've made this un-buyable album better is A) if it was in shops and not scuppered by the tight-fisted record label that has a finger in Danger Mouse's back pocket, and B) if it was actually sung by Mark Linkous aka Sparklehorse. But since we can't have a new Sparklehorse record this year, this collaboration (which also includes David Lynch on artwork and ghostly vocals) will easily do. After being leaked by the band, it probably didn't get the attention it deserves. But with A-game guest spots by James Mercer (the Shins), Jason Lytle (Grandaddy) and Iggy Pop, as well as the three standouts in Wayne Coyne (Flaming Lips), Julian Casablancas (The Strokes) and Frank Black (who, whilst snarling "plucking all day on my angels harp" sounds the most Black Francis-like since pre-Pixies reunion), Dark Night Of The Soul works like the perfectly deceased album of characters it became.



9. Future of the Left
Travels With Myself And Another

The scathing Welsh trio finally put McLusky six-feet-under with a ball-tearing effort that perfectly balances their violent disgust at the world with a tounge-in-cheek injection of pop fun. (At last!). Not that this is new in Andy Falkous' world, but Travels With Myself And Another is the first time that Future of the Left is the best thing he's done. Bookended by 'Arming Eritrea' and 'Lapsed Catholics', two of the most viciously smart-arsed - but desperate - cuts from anyone this year.



8. Dirty Projectors
Bitte Orca

Props to an album that on immediate listen pushes every bad reaction button to the affected hipster scene coming out of Williamsburg. But that, on repeated listens, over many months, brings you round to the point where you say "I'm sorry Dirty Projectors. You were too far ahead of me. I didn't know I liked you like that. I needed to look past your video unicorns, your Nietzsche referencing, your R&B projections, your shawls, and see you for the sparkling head-warping harmony group you really are. I was a dick. Take me back."



7. The Mess Hall
For The Birds

Sydney duo Jed Kurzel and Cec Condon get brooding on the Mess Hall's expansive third album, and follow up to their AMP award winning The Devil's Elbow. Having appreciated the band's work in the past we've never really felt it - until now. Helmed by producer Burke Reid, For The Birds adds a darkly surreal dimension to the bands guitar ethic. They still groove, churn through flecks of blues and flat out rock when they have to, but when the piano thuds of 'New Ornithology' kick in it suggests some kind of doomy Radiohead via Bad Seeds detour. And 'Silhouettes' may be the most beautiful song we've heard all year. If The Mess Hall is a band you thought you had pegged, you need to retrace your steps through the fog.



6. Kid Sam
Kid Sam

Melbourne via regional NSW cousins Kieran Ryan and Kishore Ryan still seem pretty bewildered by their ascension from poorly attended midweek shows to slots at Meredith and Laneway, J Award nominations and a punishing, steady national touring schedule. For good reason. Their debut album's a slow-burning meditation on relationships in transition, supported by fringes of spindly guitar lines and a drumkit that is actually lined with the kitchen sink. Not exactly a chart-topper. But above all it was refreshing, something that hasn't come out of the blue in Australia for a long time.



5. Handsome Furs
Face Control

Dan Boeckner and partner Alexis Perry mash-up the formers Bruce Springsteen-isms with the latter's 'beats-of-the-recent future' and outdo their debut by a thrilling mile. Not to mention redress the balance between Spencer Krug being seen as the "exotic one" in Wolf Parade and Boeckner as the straigh-tlaced sidekick. Not that their should be such a divide. But those that missed the rushy thrills of Wolf Parade's At Mt.Zoomer will find them all here and then some. Essential for any house dance-party that is also burning a car in the backyard.



4. The xx
xx

To re-print our review: "New UK group The xx are remarkable for what they don't do. They play the spaces (and the shadows) lazily building a sense of tension and (some) release. The result is one of the most beautifully refreshing - and best - records of the year." The young foursome (now threesome) managed to slip past the hype surrounding them to send forth a humble but meticulously produced album that somehow works as well as when you're trying on jeans at midday, as much as you are weeping in the back seat outside the bottle shop at 3am in the morning reading letters on your mobile.



3. Sarah Blasko
As Day Follows Night

Don't be put off by that artwork. Or anything she's done before. Blasko ditches the songwriting partner, decamps to Sweden to record with the guy who made 'Young Folks', and makes not only her best album by an embarrassing margin but recalibrates her entire persona from 'middling pop' to 'artiste extraordinaire'. In the meantime we get the most evocative, bare and classiest account of the dead roots of a relationship since I don't know when. If Blasko was American she'd be winning Grammy's and purchasing townhouses overlooking Central Park for this. As it is she gets to bunched up on stage with Lisa Mitchell and Kate Miller-Heidke in one of the ARIA's most chauvenistic moments.



2. Phoenix
Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix

Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix's is the elusive spectre of your dad - and pretty much every Australian male - secretly believing that if he applied himself he could've played pretty much any sport at international level. Years of armchair overload have lulled him into a false sense of security; he thinks it'd be a cinch. To run around out their, bend the ball like that. Phoenix are those sports stars at the top of their game, making every move, hook and arrangement seem completely effortless. While everyone else is grinding away on subtleties and psychedelia, Phoenix are breezily decided today whether to manufacture the wind in your hair, the spring in your step or the glow in your heart. Easy. If you think there was a record this year that better melded pop, dance, indie and rock - while somehow unearthing a new vantage point on the 'ol "relationship not really working out" angle - you're probably still plucking the label off a stubby in front of Fox Sports.
  


1. Animal Collective
Merriweather Post Pavilion

Yeah just like everyone else. We deliberated about putting this number one, especially after seeing them just this week. Which took a little wind out of the band's aura. But no record in 2009 has been as influential, talked about or referenced, and when we listen to it again we remember why. It doesn't have the best songs, the best arrangements or even the best chance at longevity. But it did the thing that every artist dreams about: create an entirely new language for a new universe, one that both references the bands vast legacy of fringe-dwelling, as well as breaking down a mainstream audience.

It was massive, and yet it's still the most polarising inclusion here. (Everett True would agree, I'm sure). I mean, how do you play Animal Collective to someone? "Listen to this track 'My Girls', it's their poppiest moment! Aside from the water sounds, bird calls, twinkling swirls and near impenetrable 'bottom of the well' vocals." And that's the hit. Nonetheless, eleven months after it's release Merriweather still sounds off the map. The affect is subtle, but this year everything was contextualised post-Merriweather. Like it or not.

Twenty-one other things we can fight about:

Grand Salvo 'Soil Creatures'
Yeah Yeah Yeahs 'It's Blitz'
Aleks and the Ramps 'Midnight Believer'
Lou Barlow 'Goodnight Unknown
Why? 'Eskimo Snow'
The Dead Weather 'Horehound'
The Flaming Lips 'Embyronic'
Whitley 'Go Forth, Find Mammoth'
Bat For Lashes 'Two Suns'
Anti-Pop Consortium 'Fluorescent Black'
Fever Ray 'Fever Ray'
Ned Collette & Wirewalker 'Over The Stones, Under The Stars'
Paul Dempsey 'Everything is True'
The Crayon Fields 'All The Pleasures of the World'
Songs 'Songs'
Seekae 'STFP'
The Antlers 'Hospice'
Mos Def 'The Ecstatic'
Grizzly Bear 'Veckatimest'
Memory Tapes 'Seek Magic'
Blakroc 'Blakroc'
Tucker Bs 'Nightmares in the Key of (((((WOW)))))'