Cast your minds back to the beginning of 2012.  Who was your favourite act named after a keyboard shortcut?  You can’t remember can you?  I bet you can now, in these late, cold days as 2013 appears on the horizon.  That’s because Alt-J (or ∆ as their instructions suggest) have had a stellar year, coming off the back of a debut EP late last year, signing to Infectious Records and putting out An Awesome Wave which eventually scooped the Mercury Prize against serious competition.  The album itself is an exercise in sparseness as they emptily search for space and for meaning in that space and it is perhaps best summed up for me in Tesselate, a slow rhythmic groover that imagines what would happen if Prince and James Blake had an unholy union produced by Steve Mason.  ∆ are certainly not to everyone’s tastes but I, for one, have kept coming back to this album throughout the year.

Upon hearing Summer Holiday, the first track Wild Nothing released a few years ago on a double A-side that preceded his debut album, there was an immediacy to the experience.  It wasn’t just that the sound was familiar but that the essence of the song grabbed you in and made itself at home.  Nocturne is Jack Tatum’s second full-length and follow up proper to that debut, Gemini, and it continues where the last one left off, although, in terms of production values, it has even stepped up a notch.  However, it seems to have just done that - picked up where the last one left off but lacking any tracks that have those hooks and instant charm (with the possible exception of Paradise).  To that effect, it feels like a solid but not spectacular record, one that is a product of constant touring and pressure for new material and not making the time to step back and evaluate what’s next.  With a musician as talented as Tatum (this is a band that successfully emerged from the chillwave tsunami of 2010 with head above water after all) you’d love to see him taking a few more risks and pushing himself, instead of just churning out those glorious Marr-ian guitar lines and delicate songs.  It’s a good album that’s definitely worth some listens, but it makes you yearn for more.

Jens is back but this time with a broken heart.  I Know What Love Isn’t is a (weakly disguised) breakup album.  Which maybe explains why it took five years to arrive.  Most of the songs on here are more sedate than the bombastic pop you get on previous work as it focuses on the forlorn.  In places it seems to miss the wryness and charm which is synonymous with Jens Lekman and focuses too much on the sentimental. At one point it even feels like it might’ve got too downright schmaltzy, when he sings “Let’s get married…” and a woman’s laughter is heard.  But then he rips it back onto form by completing his sentence “…but only for the citizenship”.  So he’s stil the same old Jens at heart - maybe he just needs some time and maybe so does this album.

Diiv is a side project by Zachary Cole Smith from Beach Fossils and manages to escape the realm of its true bedroom production to transport you to a place with no boundaries.  Oshin, released a few months ago, has an interesting tone to it - the emphasis on creating all-encompassing, overwhelming tracks is unmistakable.  It’s not quite a wall of sound, nor is it a sea of sound.  It’s more like a lagoon of sound, all washing over you as you blissfully try to interpret what’s going on.  It could easily be an instrumental album, so important is this impressionism to its essence whilst the vocals pale into the mix, and gives a nod to great sides to Smith’s creativity and hopefully more good things to come from Diiv in the future.

Opossom is the latest incarnation of Kody Nielson’s (once of NZ’s The Mint Chicks) imagination.  At heart it’s a psychedelic rock record that mixes the dark, spiritual musings of a Roky Erickson with the surf-rock lightness of The Drums - a horrifying combination conceptually but one that quite engages in reality.  The cool thing about Electric Hawaii is that it seemingly could’ve come from any age.  It’s not obviously a record from an era, something that is both a strength and a weakness but one that ultimately goes on to define it.  

Caught Me Thinkin’, one of the standout tracks on Bahamas second album, catches you with it’s tropical guitars and funky rhythm but if it’s the first track you hear, it’s quite a misleading entry into Barchords.  The rest of it is not nearly as sun-kissed with doleful folksy charm on everything else from the slow and touching Montreal to the not-a-cover-version, I Got You Babe.  But even though it’s out of the sun, it’s still a warm, blissful record.

Mighty Love, the first track on Homebuilding, builds and builds, slowly arriving in your aural range at just the right speed and time.  The way it develops the mix of ethereal voices and metronomic percussion is very reminiscent of Comfy In Nautica, the lead track on Panda Bear’s classic (can you say classic after only five years?) album, Person Pitch.  In many ways Homebuilding is quite similar to that record - a sideproject for Graham Hill, whose day job takes him drumming around for Papercuts and Beach House (who he borrows a few tricks from here and there), it’s a creative blend of Wilson-inspired harmonies and sampling.  Lyrically, Homebuilding explores exactly what it claims to - growing up and building a home and environment for his family - something that’s equally reflected in the style of the record, which hopefully provides a foundation for him to take Roman Ruins to a wider audience.

Here’s something I dug up from the musical crypt of 2011: Tan Vampires’ debut album For Physical Fitness, a deliciously melodic escape.  It’s somewhat reminiscent of the Pepper Rabbit album from last summer, mostly due to the pastel shades adorning its cover art but also the liveliness that is overflowing once you peel that away.  Tan Vampires don’t necessarily have the same epicness or psychedelia to their palette but they do know how to shape and build a good song and there’s plenty of those on here.

Maybe it’s a conscious effort that the aesthetic for Hot Chip’s latest album, In Our Heads, bears more than a passing resemblance to their breakthrough, The Warning, at least in terms of artwork.  However, the songs themselves continue the trend since then which has seen the band move to a more purified pop sound and thus moving them later in the night, from exuberant dancefloor to emotional last dance territory. After a few spins, that seems to mean a less exciting album with less ingenuity and only a couple of stand-out tracks (in Don’t Deny My Heart and Flutes).  But then again, that’s exactly what I thought after One Life Stand two years ago and that, like most of their albums, turned out to be a grower.

Really digging the new Porcelain Raft record.  It’s hazy, ethereal sound could’ve made it class of summer 2010 but it seems to work just perfectly in a 2012 just beginning to figure itself out….  Here’s one of the best cuts from that record.  They’re touring too.