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.

It starts strongly, with the Dap-Tone Horns’ instrumental take on Coldplay’s execrable “God Put A Smile…”. The brass arrangements are excellent and it sets up nicely for the following track – Lily Allen’s version of the Kaiser Chiefs’ ‘Oh My God’, which works a lot better than I thought it would. However, it suffers from the problem that plagues the majority of the album – the song itself just isn’t deserving of getting the re-worked treatment.

‘Just’ worked because it’s one of the strongest songs off a pretty classic album which has properly stood the test of time. Kaiser Chiefs, Zutons, Maximo Park could hardly be described as having had the chance to cement themselves in the annals of popular culture as yet, and as a result the versions of these songs seem pretty pointless.

When there is a bona-fide classic in there (as in the case of Stop Me If You’ve Heard This One Before and The Only One I Know), Ronson and his cohorts seem to miss the mark somewhat. Robbie Williams’s take on the Charlatans best-known song is at best redundant, shrouding Robbie’s vocals in reverb to make them virtually indistinguishable from Tim Burgess’s original performance, and lead single ‘Stop Me’ is just…weird (especially with its interpolation of ‘Keep Me Hanging On’ near the end).

An interesting idea for a project that suffers mainly from a poor choice of songs, and the fact that the best track on the album came out months ago as part of a separate project.