PAS/CAL: I Was Raised on Matthew, Mark, Luke & Laura

As much as I love a simple, beautiful pop song, I'm a sucker for byzantine, schizophrenic compositions. I'm still scratching my head trying to comprehend just how PAS/CAL manage to accomplish both simultaneously. Their songs, regardless of length, change direction unexpectedly and frequently but seamlessly, never losing that sense of cohesion that tells you you're still listening to the same song. Imagine a sunnier Destroyer, using ELO as a touchstone instead of Bowie. It helps that PAS/CAL are interminably upbeat; their confections aren't weighed down by artiness or a sense that they're doing anything but having fun. This is an enjoyable, nuanced record with lots of twists that still surprise after many listens.

Eat Skull: Sick to Death

The first immediately noticeable feature of Eat Skull's debut is the overwhelming, unrelenting noise. Blistering feedback and static dominate throughout, but tracks like "Ghost List" and "Fade to Smoke" hint that there is a secret coherence lying hidden under the squall. A second pass through the album makes the picture clearer. For all their devotion to no-fi production values, Eat Skull are astonishingly melodic. Traces of surf rock and VU-style balladry belie their apparent abrasiveness. Sick to Death is one of those rare albums that sounds like a different record each time, and each of those records has a cryptic charm.

Firewater: The Golden Hour

Global influences are ubiquitous in indie music these days, and Firewater has helped make it that way. The Golden Hour is a travelogue of sorts, mining the popular musical forms of various regions for backgrounds against which stories of escape and refuge are told. Tod A. wields these cultural devices deftly, meticulously arranging them into gorgeous, gritty songs. The album vividly portrays the sensations of a weary expatriate. The Golden Hour shows that cerebral music needn't be dull or pretentious.

The Chap: Mega Breakfast

I can honestly say that Mega Breakfast is the oddest album of the year so far. The Chap start on a foundation of post-punk and krautrock, two forms which have come back into vogue in a big way, and then depart from that plane at a ninety-degree angle. The strange rhythms, non-musical sounds and often whimsical lyrics on Mega Breakfast stand in stark contrast to the utter humorlessness of other revivalist bands. It would be easy to believe that Sparks have had a large influence on The Chap's songwriting. Novelty alone doesn't make an album great, though, but their ability to craft both danceable and hummable songs do. There isn't a dud on the album. Mega Breakfast is both fun and challenging, making The Chap one of the most promising bands to emerge this year.

Alias: Resurgam

Resurgam finds Alias, the producer behind many of the best records released by the anticon. label, showing off his compositional skills in a wide array of electronic styles. His songs hover between the indie hip-hop for which anticon. is best known, glitch-hop, ambient and IDM. Artists always risk making a scattershot, incoherent record when trying to move in so many directions at once, but Alias deftly avoids this pitfall. Instead, his compositions emphasizes the elements the forms have in common, so the album never loses focus. Resurgam is one of the best records from anticon. in years, possibly in its entire history.

Solange: Sol-Angel and the Hadley St. Dreams

Whereas most soul and R&B records made after 1967 make me want to douse myself in gasoline and light a match, Solange Knowles' new record came as a welcome surprise. A major factor in my unlikely enjoyment of Sol-Angel is its rejection of the faux-soul sound that has dominated the past twenty or so years. Solange instead embraces sounds from the acme of Motown and the girl-group genre it inspired. The album isn't purely a throughback, though, as it also incorporates influences from more recent electronic music. "This Bird" masterfully appropriates a sample from Boards of Canada and "Sandcastle Disco" reminds me of Stereolab at times. Sol-Angel is a remarkable development from a young artist who is just beginning to move out of her more famous sister's shadow.

Glasvegas: Glasvegas

Glasvegas is probably the most aptly named new band to emerge this year. Their eponymous debut inflates maudlin Glaswegian-ness and the post-punk revival sound to arena-sized proportions. The bloom is off the rose for peers like Bloc Party and Interpol, due in no small part to their failure to inject soul and intensity into their music. In contrast, Glasvegas remedy this shortcoming by dispensing with the spartanism of post-punk, favoring sentimentality and Phil Spector-esque production values instead. Almost wholely successful in its gargantuan ambitions, Glasvegas is an impressive opening salvo from a band that's too loud to be contained by any venue smaller than a stadium.

Venetian Snares: Detrimentalist

Admittedly, I have little frame of reference to evaluate Detrimentalist with. I usually find the more spastic and noisy genres of electronic music unbearably abrasive. Even worse, the records that aren't irritating are some of the most boring I've ever heard, i.e., the recent output of Meat Beat Manifesto. Perhaps Venetian Snares affect me differently than their peers because rhythm isn't treated as an end in itself. The time signatures are prominent, of course, but the beats often slow down or pause to make room for a fragment of melody. The tracks on Detrimentalist are distinguishable from one another in terms of tempo, mood and intensity. This alone makes it one of the superior records of drum 'n' bass and related genres, and the fact that almost all are gems puts it over the top for me.

The War on Drugs: Wagonwheel Blues

A few years ago, having taken notice of several then-nascent musical revivals, I predicted the entire previous century would come back into vogue in the first decade of the current one. With new bands under astronomical pressure to stand out, genres would rub against one another and fuse into strange new musical forms. Nothing as dramatic as the scenario I foresaw has occured yet, but there is ample evidence that many of the more interesting bands are drawing inspiration from intersections. Wagonwheel Blues, at times, sounds like a collaboration between Bob Dylan, Brian Eno, The Jesus and Mary Chain and Guided by Voices. Despite a vastly ecclectic range of sources, though, The War on Drugs have integrated their influences into a surprisingly coherent sound. It would not severely tax the imagination to picture this solid, frequently transcendant debut becoming the catalyst for a flood of ambient shoegaze Americana imitators.

Growing: All the Way

All the Way, Growing's second superb release of 2008, is measurably better than its predecessor, Lateral. Whereas Lateral was droning and austere, All the Way is more rhythmic. In a sense, the newest release is the closest thing to a pop record Growing will ever release. Repeating, arpeggiated sequences of notes sculpt something almost resembling a song, as if an extraterrestrial civilization had attempted to reconstruct music from Earth using only parts from Voyagers I and II. As the century unfurls, All the Way will either be a weird but beautifully accessible standout or the template for the pop music that follows.

Dodos: Visiter

There has been such a flood of new bands offering their takes on Americana in the past five or so years that most of them have begun to sound the same. Even the more gifted musicians often fail to create anything distinctive enough to be heard over the din. Visiter, fortunately, does not suffer from this failing. Dodos possess an aptitude for hummable melodies, beating most of their peers on this basis alone. Unlike all the other bands pursuing an indie-folk aesthetic, however, Dodos also lean heavily on precise clockwork rhythms that flaunt their acumen as instrumentalists. Hopefully, unlike the birds from which they took their name, Dodos won't become extinct anytime soon.

The Cool Kids: The Bake Sale

The Cool Kids take a simple approach to rap that hasn't been heard much in the past twenty years. Without the benefit of expensive studio production, they sink or swim on the basis of their beats and lyrics alone. It is a testament to their considerable strengths in these areas that they do much more swimming than sinking. The content and subject matter are simple, too, as The Cool Kids eschew heavy or emotional topics in favor of light fare. This decision pays off handsomely, resulting in a stellar, fun party record.

RZA as Bobby Digital: Digi Snacks

Digi Snacks continues RZA's urban sci-fi meditation on the internal struggle between opposing natures, with Bobby Digital playing the Hyde to his Jekyll. While Bobby holds the reins almost completely, RZA continually hovers in the background, tempering Bobby's single-minded aggression with softness. Similarly, the album's grittiness is balanced against hazy, surreal atmospherics. In one of the album's most surprisingly pleasurable moments, a woman who sounds just like (and very well may be) one of the Cassidy sisters from CocoRosie contributes vocals to the most tender rap song about fucking I've ever heard. On the whole, what could have been a ham-handed, gimmicky album is saved by a remarkable depth.

My Morning Jacket: Evil Urges

With Evil Urges, My Morning Jacket plunges deeper into R&B without losing footing in their well-established proggy Americana mode. It's a somewhat surpising move, but in retrospect it was prophesied by the adventurous genre-bending of Z. When the band gets carried away, like with the over-the-top falsetto of "Highly Suspicious", a solid Southern rocker kicks in just in time to prevent the album from jumping the shark. The schizophrenic tone of the album belies a subtle grace that takes repeated listens to perceive. Evil Urges doesn't approach the triumph of Z, but it still demonstrates a great deal of what makes My Morning Jacket special.

Black Kids: Partie Traumatic

Those who claim that good music must be original either harbor some woeful misconceptions about music or just don't enjoy very much of it. For one thing, all music relies on what has come before to a great degree. For another, innovation in music is usally accidental, arising due to imperfect mimicry, much like mutations in genetic code. And artists that set out to create something completely original usually produce something interesting but unlistenable.

Black Kids' debut full-length, Partie Traumatic, is great precisely because they are skillful imitators. They strip-mine the 80s for vintage sounds and combine them with current pop culture signifiers to make fun party songs. While the seams are mostly visible, Black Kids' surprisingly broad cultural vocabulary make up for obviousness. Reggie Youngblood's frequently dead-on impression of Robert Smith, while almost embarrassingly transparent at times, works well with Black Kids' fluffier fare. Partie Traumatic won't be anywhere near as influential as the material they bite, but it's tremendously successful at what it tries to be: one of the most memorable and fun indie pop records in recent memory.

Portishead: Third

Third cannot exist unless everything we know is wrong. It's an abomination unto the laws of nature. And like all abominations worth their salt, it's astonishingly beautiful. Portishead have created a return to form that's also a radical departure. Paradoxically, Third recreates the mood and the aesthetic of Dummy by discarding its techniques and employing a new toolkit. Third sounds as if it were Portishead's eleventh album snatched from an alternate reality, rather than their third in this one. In another potentially universe-detroying contradiction, Beth Gibbons sounds like a torch singer enfeebled by chemotherapy, but her presence is anything but meek. I've always felt that the best music seems imaginary, though music becomes real once it is imagined. Third seems less real the more I listen to it, so by this criterion (and by many others) it's easily one of this year's best albums.

Robyn: Robyn

It's actually been four years since Robyn, Sweden's former teenage "pop tart", released this astonishing comeback album in Europe. However, it didn't get a U.S. release until this year. Fortunately for Robyn and for the States, it still sounds ahead of its time. She has clearly matured beyond the teen pop stereotype and into the role of auteur. Robyn is constructed on a bedrock of impeccable electro and dance pop, but the whole affair is handled with much greater intelligence than is typical of these genres. Her winking, smirking bravado and semi-coherent appropriations of American slang are a perversely astute deconstruction of the clichés of celebrity. It's no wonder why Robyn has crusty old music snobs scratching their heads and reevaluating preconceptions of musical credibility.

Fleet Foxes: Fleet Foxes

It's quite unusual for a band to release such a sophisticated debut as that of Fleet Foxes. It's even more anomalous to hear an album that's both highly polished and unfailingly excellent. Yet Fleet Foxes have achieved both in one fell swoop. This is largely because they know their myriad strengths well and have crafted an efficient showcase for them. Their songs rely equally on unabashedly buoyant melodies, sunny harmonies and arrangements or guitar, piano, etc., played more than competently. If you haven't heard Fleet Foxes yet - and judging by its U.S. chart peak at #83, you probably haven't - you're missing one of the finest albums of the decade.

The Ruby Suns: Sea Lion

It saddens me that most people's first (and probably only) exposure to The Ruby Suns will be a recent Microsoft commercial that uses about three seconds of "Oh, Mohave". I say that because the venom just beneath the surface of the ad - it implies that if you don't like Vista, the problem is you, not Vista - is antithetical to the spirit of the band. Ryan McPhun skillfully marries Brian Wilson-inspired sunshine pop to the equally good vibrations of the South Pacific. Sea Lion hasn't a single malicious note. The album is a densely layered confection of fuzzy, sunny loveliness. I hope that the songs will be licensed for more commercials, but for companies that use their powers for good instead of evil. Then Sea Lion will get the exposure it deserves without being sullied by malice.

Syclops: I've Got My Eye on You

Syclops isn't the typical act for DFA Records, if there can be such a thing anymore in the wake of the label's more diverse recent signings. The funk and punk trappings ordinarily found in their releases are sparse on Syclops' debut album and there is very little cowbell. Likewise, with few exceptions, the tracks on Eye are much more landscape than foreground. The negative spaces are filled with dreamy synths and squelches. The array of tone colors floating around the middle of the mix provides ample reward for repeated listens.