My change in jobs and lifestyle also affected the way I have been listening to music. My 20-minute walk to and from work has been replaced with a 20-minute drive, which is proving much less conducive to good listening. Being immersed in an album has given way to podcasts and playlists, so some of the albums listed here have been appreciated in a sometimes random, often backwards, order. As an aside, is anyone knows a way to make Smart iTunes playlists that can order by album most recently added, but keep the songs in the right order, I would be interested in learning it.

So, as ever in no particular order, my pick of this year’s albums…
Last of the Country Gentlemen / Josh T Pearson My big discovery from 2009′s December ATP finally got around to releasing his first solo record. Live he’s an affable, bad-joke-cracking fool between his haunting, haunted songs. On record, you just get the sound of a soul trying to fix itself any which way it can.

Acrobats / Peggy Sue A little old-school PJ Harvey, a little of what I’d have liked from the last Tegan & Sara. Taut, and not a little bitter.

Let England Shake / PJ Harvey While I love ‘Stories From The City…’, for my money this is her best album since ‘To Bring You My Love’. If autoharps, hunting horns, reggae samples and Eddie Cochran were the building blocks of English folk music.

England Keep My Bones / Frank Turner A couple of missteps on this album for me, not least of which is the uncharacteristically clumsy “atheist anthem” ‘Glory Hallelujah’; Frank dispatches religion far more pithily and effectively in throwaway lines elsewhere on this record. But when its good (the first 5 tracks, ‘One Foot Before The Other’) it’s the most assured he’s sounded since ‘Sleep is for the Week’.

Hot Sauce Committee Part 2 / The Beastie Boys Couldn’t not be on here. 2 years delayed, squelchy, distorted, unutterably Beasties.

Blacked Up / Shabazz Palaces Pretty much the hip-hop album I’ve been waiting for for the last five or six years. The swagger of Kanye, but the playfulness of DAISY Age De La. This year’s most-played by quite a margin, according to my iTunes.

Dynamite Steps / Twilight Singers I pretty much just want Greg Dulli to make records that sound like this for the rest of his life. Which is fortunate, I guess.

Cults / Cults The first record I bought this year. It rides the Sleigh Bells coattails a bit, but sounds like it’s having more fun.

Virtue / Emmy the Great The beautifully-enunciated sound of a love gone inexplicably, cruelly pear-shaped.

Honourable mentions should go to Braids (‘Braids’) and Das Racist (‘Relax’), records I have only picked up in the last few weeks and have not had the opportunity to fully explore.

If you have your own recommendations to share with the class, or any wrongheaded rebuttals of my infallible logic, comments will be open for 2 weeks (first time commenters may need their comments moderating, in which case apologies if I don’t get to it in a timely fashion). Happy New Year!

I’ve surprised myself this year with the number of records actually released during 2010 which are on my ‘most played’ list, to the extent where I’ve struggled to get it down to a list of 10. And then I realised that this is my blog and if I want to have more than 10 then I can if I want.

• Brothers / The Black Keys
  I’ve caned this album this year. It’s most-played on my iTunes and it’s barely been out of my car CD player. Less the dirty, cacophonous blues-rock that they’re known for, this has bucketloads of soul
• Broken Bells / Broken Bells
  A very close second in the most-listened-to stakes. Space-age, squelchy pop, and confirmation (if it were needed) of Danger Mouse’s versatility.
• Yesterday You Said Tomorrow / Christian Scott
  The first I knew of New Orleans trumpet prodigy Scott was when I saw a picture of his awesome custom horn ‘Katrina’ when he performed onstage with Thom Yorke (a cover of ‘The Eraser’ appears on this album). He’s got a beautiful, individual tone and the ability to go from a whisper to a roar in an unexpected moment.
• Grinderman 2 / Grinderman
  Another fantastic album of noisy innuendo from Messrs Cave and Ellis. Although, it’s not really innuendo a lot of the time so much as proudly declarative statements of sexual inadequacy.
• I Learned The Hard Way / Sharon Jones & The Dap-Kings
  Their best album yet adds more lush arrangements and instrumentation on top of the tight-as-a-drum Dap-Kings.
• July Flame / Laura Veirs
  This has been a shoo-in for this list since it came out in January and a heavily-pregnant Veirs played Leamington Assembly on a grotty Sunday night. This is her seventh album, and a shopping spree that evening set me up with my folk-pop singer-songwriter listening for the rest of the year. ‘Year Of Meteors’ and ‘Saltbreakers’ also come highly recommended.
• The Archandroid / Janelle Monáe
  Without a doubt, this year’s best bonkers-future-timetravel-conspiracy robotsoulfunkscifihiphop epic. One of those albums with so many out-and-out hits in the first few tracks that it’s easy to get caught up in those and miss the Stevie-Wonderesque beauty in some of the later tracks. Tip: listening to it in the two ‘suites’ as intended, rather than one long record, helps immensely.
• This year had a sound for me. Female vocal harmonies and big guitars. A touch of fifties girl groups, a smidgen of shoegaze, a pinch of surf rock. It started with the Vivian Girls’ self-titled album from last year and continued via The Shop Assistants, Tender Trap, Tamaryn, and yet more Vivian Girls, as if my entire year was being soundtracked by the Pixies ‘UK Surf’ version of ‘Wave Of Mutilation’. Of all of the records that fell into this niche, three quite different ones stand out.
  
  Past Time / Grass Widow Malcs had turned me on to Grass Widow’s last record earlier in the year, so by the time Past Time came out it was already highly anticipated. It’s at the spikier end of the spectrum, the harmonies and instrumentation going together like toffee apples and razorblades.
  Crazy For You / Best Coast plays the surf-pop angle more, all sun-kissed lazing and bittersweet adolescent romance, while
  Teen Dream / Beach House is the grown-up, late-night version; breathless, dreamy and sophisticated. (NB, further investigation suggests this is the album where Beach House found their voice, I was unimpressed with their previous two efforts)
• Hawk / Isobel Campbell & Mark Lanegan
  The inevitable Lanegan entry in the list almost managed to slip past me unnoticed earlier in the year. It’s got a little more variety in it than ‘Sunday at Devil Dirt’, particularly in the rockabilly stomp of the title track and ‘Get Behind Me’. I’m still a little scared that Lanegan is going to eat Isobel Campbell one of these days, mind.
• Aloe Blacc / Good Things
  Stones Throw’s Marvin Gaye releases his ‘What’s Going On?’. ‘I Need A Dollar’ sets the scene for an album of social-conscience soul, the smooth bounce of Blacc’s voice sugaring the pill. It’s got a more modern-sounding production than the Sharon Jones record (as you might expect), but make no mistake, this has more in common with Gaye or Curtis Mayfield than any current RnB nonsense. And there’s a Velvet Underground cover to boot.
• Majesty Shredding / Superchunk
  I bloody love Superchunk, me.
• Pale Silver & Shiny Gold / Sad Day For Puppets
  Essentially a Swedish, girl-fronted Dinosaur Jr, with occasional shoegazey tendencies. Lovely.

Comments will be open for 2 weeks for you to wade in with your recommendations and denunciations.

Album of a year by a country mile for me is:
Travels With Myself And Another / Future Of The Left Only half an hour long, but what a grating, loud, exhilarating, offensive, unapologetic half hour it is.

And the rest, in no particular order:

• Farm / Dinosaur Jr As good a record as they’ve recorded, for my money. It starts with a bang and a huge guitar solo and just never lets up.
• The Slew / Kid Kola & Dynomite D The album of the tour of the soundtrack of the aborted documentary, available to download for free at Kid Koala’s site. Massive, massive drums and bonkers scratching.
• Fight Like Apes and the Mystery of the Golden Medallion / Fight Like Apes McLusky-covering Irish synthpunks. Amazing live, and a debut album awash with nerd-culture references. UPDATE: There’s a live album available to download for free at their website.
• A Balloon Called Moaning / The Joy Formidable Initially, I thought of The Joy Formidable as a kind of less silly Fight Like Apes, but I lost this lazy preconception after seeing them live, where the synths take a back seat to a surprisingly loud shoegazey guitar assault. Their Christmas single is available for free from Music Glue and I also highly recommend their live album ‘First You Have To Get Mad’.
• Fantasies / Metric I seem to have had something of a year for synthey girl-vox albums, and this one completes the set of three quite nicely. Metric’s 4th album sounds like it’s designed to fill stadiums – I wrote earlier in the year that you can hear where the strobe lights and lasers should kick in.
• Born Like This / DOOM First new material from the supervillain since 2005′s collaboration with Dangermouse. He’s on fine form, and I still can’t get over the fact he finishes a rhyme with electroencephalograph.
• A Woman A Man Walked By / PJ Harvey & John Parish Unsettling performances from Polly Harvey make this a record that’s actually quite scary to listen to in places.
• Two Suns / Bat For Lashes This feels like Natasha Khan has started to find her own voice – it’s a lot less Kate Bush / Bjork than ‘Fur & Gold’.
• Moon OST / Clint Mansell Absolutely gorgeous vinyl packaging aside (and it is a thing of beauty), former Poppie and Darren Aronofsky’s go-to soundtrack guy Mansell has produced a soundtrack that’s as compellingly beautiful and intriguing as the film it accompanies. I’m not generally a big soundtrack fan, but this has been one of my most-listened-to records this year.

Honourable mentions:
Poetry Of The Deed / Frank Turner
Man From Another Time / Seasick Steve
Broken / Soulsavers

Recently acquired albums that may have made it onto the list if I’d become a bit more familiar with them:
Glass Rock / Tall Firs Meet Soft Location
Sainthood / Tegan & Sara
Embryonic / The Flaming Lips

And you?

Anyway, for what it’s worth (as usual, in no particular order), the albums I’ve enjoyed most this year:

The Gutter Twins / Saturnalia
Bon Iver / For Emma, Forever Ago
Los Campesinos! / Hold On Now, Youngster…
The Night Marchers / See You In Magic
Portishead / Third
Tegan & Sara / The Con
The Apples / Buzzin’ About
Blood Red Shoes / Box Of Secrets
Cat Power / Jukebox
Johnny Foreigner / Waited Up Til It Was Light

Honourable mention should go to Isobel Campbell & Mark Lanegan’s Sunday At Devil’s Dirt, which I only left off because I didn’t want to put 2 Lanegan projects in the top ten. This year’s offerings from Frank Turner and Get Cape, Wear Cape, Fly would have been contenders if they didn’t both contain one song that makes me scrabble for the skip button.

No hip-hop on there this year, I notice. There were a few albums this year – Guilty Simpson, Lyrics Born, Q-Tip, The Roots – but none that I properly engaged with.

  This year has been unusual for me in that a larger-than-normal percentage of the music that I’ve consumed has been actually released this year. So, in more-or-less chronological order, my favourite albums of the year are:

• Frank Turner / Sleep Is For The Week
• The Hold Steady / Boys & Girls In America
• Battles / Mirrored
• Dinosaur Jr / Beyond
• Go! Team / Proof Of Youth
• Gallows / Orchestra Of Wolves
• Future Of The Left / Curses
• Aesop Rock / None Shall Pass
• Gallon Drunk / The Golden Mile
• Buck 65 / Situation

Honourable mention should go to the Wu-Tang Clan’s ’8 Diagrams’ which I’m really enjoying this week but I’m unsure of its long-term appeal at the moment. I’ve made the mistake of including Wu albums in these lists in the past and then felt a bit stupid a few months later.