Drowned in Sound's Top 50 Albums of 2009

The surprise appearance of The Horrors' new single, 'Sea Within a Sea', has come as quite a shock to the vast majority who dismissed the band during their initial hype-fuelled rise. Where screaming excess and over the top clobber once held sway, the single’s video reveals a group of sombre aesthetes brooding over their instruments as they coolly erect an epic, eight minute wall of sound that slaps a motorik pulse onto the early 4AD catalogue, before slowly immersing it into a bubbling pool of kosmiche noise.

O how you vex me, Dayve Hawke. You vex me because I know you are just one person, yet two of your three alter egos have names in the plural. When talking about you I know I should be all "Memory Tapes is..." but see, that upsets my pedantic semantic circuits so much that if I didn't like you as much as I do I wouldn't like you very much at all.

Hip-hop has been undergoing something of an image shift over the past few years. Kanye West might be to blame, his verbiose and hopeful rhyming sitting quite comfortably with his 808 loving MOR listeners. Or maybe it’s the inimitable Jay-Z, lazy and limp in his old age (the excellent Black Album excepted), supporting Coldplay of all people.

The practical, prosaic, documentarian's way to open a review of the new Sunset Rubdown album would be to note that it’s largely recorded live, and eschews the multiple overdubs of its predecessors, Shut Up, I Am Dreaming and Random Spirit Lover, all the better to reflect the stamping-flailing, wuh-huh-hooing bacchanal of the live-shows (and damn is there a lot of wuh-huh-hooing, when it comes to Sunset Rubdown.)

As unconventional musical ensembles go, Girls must surely register at the top of the pile when it comes to spontaneous muddled creations that confound any kind of pre-conceived expectations. Much loved by both the New York art-rock fraternity and UK underground indie scenes alike, this San Francisco duo and their assorted helping hands have somehow managed to conjure up an Album that doesn't just hop between genres at random like an overexcited rabbit, but actually creates its own guessing game in the process, enticing the listener into a rabid frenzy of self-doubt. "What will come next?" indeed.

During Shellac’s excellent track ‘The End Of Radio’, about the nature of recording and broadcasting electronically amplified rock music, there’s a line (when performed live at least) that goes something like this: "This microphone converts sound into electricity/which travels down this wire/which travels up a hill/and is broadcast out into space/Into motherfucking space!... Distant alien civilization/can you he ar this snare drum?"