What better way to kick off the new year than a whole month’s worth of songs by this humble blogger’s favourite English troubadour, Mr Darren of Hayman.  This time last year, he was just setting out on a valiant quest: to write, create and record a new track each and every day during January, which you can still review over on the blog.  Accompanied by the talents of friends and artists alike, January Songs is a 31 gun salute to endeavour and to new years resolutions.  He’ll even be performing them all in a series of gigs this month so if you’re lucky enough to be in England, be sure to see it.

I Want That You Are Always Happy is the full debut album of Australian septet, The Middle East.  It follows their sumptuous EP (cleverly titled The Recordings of the Middle East) from last year and follows that up with more downbeat folk that doesn’t sound dissimilar from what the blender would sound like if you threw a Fleet Foxes CD in there with a Low Anthem record and a Jet minidisc.  Just kidding about the Jet (ah, the fate of poor Australian bands) so maybe replace that with some barley.  Yes, that’d go quite nicely.  Much like this album.  Won’t hit the end of year top 25 but it’s a pleasant enough record.

Part of the 2011 winter clearout - albums not reviewed when they came out but still worth sharing before the end of year lists hit.

Original release date: 

Oh Panda Bear, how were you ever supposed to live up to expectations on Tomboy?  The critical success of Person PItch weighed heavily and the seemingly-forever postponed recordings (due in part to the success of Merriweather Post Pavilion and Animal Collective’s touring) that led to the release of this album 4 years later didn’t help.  Tomboy is certainly not a bad record, indeed there are quite engaging tracks in there, but really not enough to keep you returning and certainly nothing nearly as inventive as he’s delivered before.

Part of the 2011 winter clearout - albums not reviewed when they came out but still worth sharing before the end of year lists hit.

Original release date: 11 Apr 2011

When the good people of Summer Camp go to sleep at an angle, this is what you get.  Beautiful, dreamy synth-pop that’s slightly too off-kilter to call pop and slightly to charming to call shoegaze.  The twisted dream state extends beyond the rather ethereal ephemera that is each song but into the content too, covering everything from the complications of time travel to the distorted videotapes of our history.  Blouse is ultimately the captured sound of our collective dystopian retromania disintegrating into something ultimately quite vivid.

I hate Christmas records so much.  But this is a Christmas record with Emmy The Great and Northern Ireland’s Ash’s Tim Wheeler.  I am feeling so conflicted right now.  And that is why I will leave it up to you, dear reader, and your impeccable taste to make the judgement on this one.  I do urge you to at least listen to Christmas Day (I Wish I Was Surfing), an inspired Wheeler take on the Ramones.  Now go buy your turkeys you miserable scrooges.

Imagine the Moldy Peaches on their most introspective days.  The days when the wacked-out, crack-finding urges were gone.  Now imagine a pineapple.  Forget the pineapple.  What you’re left with is Gospel Music.  Anyone who listened to the EP Duettes will know how How To Get To Heaven From Jacksonville, FL is going to sound.  Charming little pop ditties with witty lines such as “I can’t be a man if I don’t have a woman, and I can’t get a woman if I’m not a man” show Owen Holmes poking fun at himself and “You don’t have to be alone (but you can’t be with me)” poking fun at others.

The King Is Dead… Long Live The King!  A fitting companion piece to the Decemberists fine album from all the way back in January.  ’twas so long ago this record almost sounds vintage now.  So old that it’s cool again.  Well okay, it’s actually one of the few records of 2011 that’s stuck all the way through the year so having a little fill-up on that is more than welcome.  Tracks like Row Jimmy and E. Watson (which is not about the Harry Potter starlet but a lawless cane sugar plantation owner called Edgar Watson) would’ve fit perfectly on The King Is Dead were it not for their very selective editing. So long live the Decemberists…

Why, why do they leave? On the day that you needed them the most.

… you may ask.  On Ryan Adams’s first album for 3 years (last year’s III/IV was recorded in 2008 and the metal record he released last year, under the nom de plume Orion, doesn’t really count) he has parted ways with the Cardinals - the backing group he had so effectively recorded with on some of his most appealing work of late.  What’s left after the band has gone is a very stripped-down singer-songwriter, not in the riotous, chaotic mold of his earlier years but in a more sedate, tender incarnation.  And that’s okay, there are some nice moments on here like Dirty Rain and the title track Ashes & Fire, but on the whole it feels a bit tepid.  Perhaps it’s a grower - I’m willing to give him the benefit of the doubt for now…. 

After Radiohead dropped The King Of Limbs into the world at such short notice, there followed a slow trickle of remixes.  Released a couple at a time as singles, these 19 tracks make up a diverse take on that intense beast.  However, depending on your predilection for spaced out electronica, these remixes are a mixed bag.  There are some superb reinterpretations (Jacques Greene’s take on Lotus Flower is one such highlight) but on the whole these versions don’t come anywhere near the originals.  The sense of dynamism and invention is lost in the during the inevitable unpacking of TKOL that any remixer had to attempt.  Maybe it was the complexity of the originals that was daunting to those who dabbled with them or maybe it was just that Radiohead already spent 4 years honing these so that a few weeks by others was simply not enough.  It’s worth listening to once but then just go back to TKOL.

Hey bro, what’s going on? Feeling bummed out by all those hipster bands full of bearded guys in cardigans introspectively whining over their soft-ass acoustic guitar about some girl or industrial water purification or a forest or some shit? Cut it out and plug it in, brojoke. If you miss those sweet days when Weezer could just rock up to some bar and jam out some riffs with the Fonz all night long, you need to listen to Jeff the Brotherhood This album is a real bronus for the global brotherhood.

I just hit the motherload.  Whilst searching for news on the new Shins album (which according to reports looks like it’s due early next year) I stumbled upon The Bluegrass Tribute To The Shins.  With a penchant for feudin’ banjos, my weakness had been exploited and I’ve found a treasure trove of not just takes on Shins songs, but a whole series dedicated to popular classics, reinvented in the bluegrass style.  The Shins ones work particularly well (see So Says I and Saint Simon) but here’s a nice little playlist of the best of the rest too.

Click here for the best of the best of the rest: Best of Pickin’ On (Bluegrass tributes)

Bon Iver’s eponymous second album has obviously been out for a little while now but I hadn’t posted yet because I wasn’t quite sure what to make of it. Now I am. And I think it’s simply this: Bon Iver is an okay record. A lot of hype has surrounded it but to my ears (and these are ears that we’re particularly taken with For Emma, Forever Ago) that is mostly unjustified. You have to give some credit to Justin Vernon for trying something new here but by unstripping away all the elements he’d originally stripped away, the album feels bloated and, in places, bland. It’s lost the gut wrenching songs that laid bare his state of mind and replaced them with complex compositions that don’t always equal the sum of their parts.  For example, if Beth/Rest, the final track on the record, was the first Bon iver track you heard, would you really be pressing on with it’s unashamedly 80s vibe?  That’s not to say there aren’t good parts… Some tracks are quite marvellous, mostly furnished by Vernon’s exquisite voice and it could well turn into a grower.  But for now, it’s just okay.

On his third album, Wolfman (well, Wolf Parade man) Dan Boeckner drops the guitar and strips things down (maybe inspiration for the artwork?!) to just the machine elements.  This puts the keyboards of his wife and band member, Alexei Perry, to the fore and in doing so creates a warmer, dancier album than their previous spaced-out records.  Inspired by travels to Eastern Europe and Asia it is in equal parts inspired and poignant and even takes a card out of James Murphy’s pack on some strong tracks such as What About Us and Serve The People.