A caveat first, though: given the incredibly huge amount of music that gets released these days, this is by no means a definitive list. While it is true that we do receive a small amount of promotional review material*, most of the music I’ve covered, here and elsewhere, I’ve paid for myself. So the pool of candidates is on the small side, relative to one of the larger magazines, say. I just don’t have that much in the budget, frankly. So if you don't see your fave rave here, it's either because I didn't have the cash to pick it up, or you have really bad taste.

Also, I’m not really gonna rank them after the top two. You end up comparing apples and battleships and sweaters, y’know, and that’s not really very useful. Everybody else gets honorable mention, and there’s no shame in that.

OK. I had an awful time deciding between these two, precisely because of the aforementioned apple/battleship/sweater effect. One of them is an anvil falling from a clear blue sky, while the other is more like some Rube Goldberg-style mousetrap, all spinning gears and falling bowling balls and candles burning through twine to release balloons and such like that. Both do what they set out to do, and both held up very well indeed to repeated listening.

Coming in at number one, it’s The Woods by Sleater-Kinney. I ended up giving them the nod because it’s such a departure from the received S-K sound, as well as being a roundhouse kick to the head of every hipster proclaiming the death of rock & roll. My original review is here, and aside from my mis-attribution of vocals I think it stands up pretty well.

Number two, but only by a hair’s-breadth, is Lonely People of the World, Unite!, by Devin Davis. (Original review here.) I know I’ve been kinda down on pop rock in my last couple of reviews, but this is a case of someone definitely getting it right. This was a great debut that sorta got lost in the shuffle, I think; it certainly deserves more attention than I’ve seen it receive. I’m not sure how that happened, so I’m doing my part. Do yours.

Honorable mentions include Kinski’s Alpine Static, The Turpentine Brothers’ We Don’t Care About Your Good Time, 50 Foot Wave’s Golden Ocean, and Okkervil River’s Black Sheep Boy, which I never actually reviewed since I was so late picking it up – it’s an expansion on a Tim Hardin song, in which the band work out a backstory for the protagonist of the song “Black Sheep Boy”. It’s much better than I’m making it sound, and I’m sorry to see the band sort of languishing in the Americana ghetto.

So that’s the good stuff. There are other things to consider.

Namely, Hype of the Year. There was some stiff competition this year, as usual. Battling it out for tops of the bottom are the post-punk revival and the freak folk scene. This is an incredibly tough call to make, as both suck really hard. On the one hand, you’ve got a bunch of bands aping the sound of a much more inventive movement; on the other, some of the most pretentious, annoying, flat-out bad music ever.

And then there’s The Rolling Stones. They left their crypt long enough to put out a new album and tour behind it. As is traditional on such occasions, the media consequently fell all over itself in a rush to be the first to proclaim this year’s squeezings “their best since Some Girls”, as if that actually meant something. This is really something of a non-starter, though. The Stones haven’t been even remotely relevant to anything other than their own lives since… um, hold on… well, we’ll be generous and say It’s Only Rock & Roll. So let’s let the old gents catch up on their naps and move on.

Freak folk is the latest iteration of the “emperor’s new clothes” meme. Devendra Banhart comes off as an insufferable prick, Antony Hegerty sounds like nothing so much as (forgive me) a tired old queen, and CocoRosie… well, I already covered them here. It’s boring, pretentious, utterly sexless music. The French have a term which applies so well it would seem to be custom made for just this occasion: “merde”. And yet, these same folks are showing up on countless other “best of” lists as actual “bests of”. I predict that in about another year or two, people are gonna be looking back on this and wondering what the hell they were thinking, just like they did with drum & bass. Remember that? Didn’t think so.

As for the neo-post-punk… I’ve said it before and I’ll more than likely say it again: it’s not enough to imitate the sound of an era. If you can’t match the inventiveness (and if the bands in question did, they’d have their own sound rather than having to bite someone else’s), stay home. Now I know how the folks who were around for the beginnings of rockabilly must have felt when they heard the soulless mewlings of the Stray Cats proclaimed as a worthy succession to the progenitors. Neo-post-punk takes home the trophy, if for no other reason than the fact that even Kelefa Sanneh has heard of it and approves.

Dishonorable mention goes to the last dying gasp of the dregs of rock radio programming, AKA Jack. Santa needs to bring me a satellite radio, and how.

So there it is. I hope it’s of some use to someone, because all it feels like on this end is a rather unsatisfying, desultory wank.

*Hey, if you work for a label or are in a band (or some unholy combination thereof) and want to see your stuff reviewed here, drop me a line at willreview4food at gmail d0t com.