Winning '11: 1 - Patrick Wolf

Patrick Wolf - Lupercalia

The Magic Position was meant to be Patrick Wolf's commercial breakthrough back in 2007. Major label, bright presentation, glittery songs in (clap, clap) the major key. It didn't really happen. He went away and made The Bachelor, a darker, more personal and dense album funded by fans and released on his own label. It was a tremendous album but one that was stylistically all over the pace and took a lot of living with to get. I assumed that that was it as far as his chances of making it to the mainstream, and that a future of similarly difficult albums as a self-releasing cult act was ahead. Hopefully not involving Twitter as a full time job and auctioning off his possessions Amanda Palmer style.

In 2011, though, he was back on a major label again, and released a fifth album which finally saw his music more widely embraced and in the top 40 and on the radio (albeit the previously unlikely Radio 2!). Not only that, but Lupercalia is his best album yet, a cynicism-destroying celebration of love with his talent and ambition as forceful as ever and his strength at maximalist pop finally given free rein over a whole album, inspired by his engagement to fiancé William. He even gets namechecked on the brief electro interval of the same name, which yes, really does end with the line 'William, will you be my conqueror?'. As made clear by that and Patrick's rant last time I saw him about negative responses to the saxophones in "The City", this is not an album which recognises the concept of cheesiness.

Patrick has always had a way with writing grand, sweeping songs which hit with an elemental force but are still believably intimate and personal. Lupercalia drops some of the more ornate detailing for comparably straightforward love songs, but that's all still true and he manages to bring new perspectives to even this oldest of topics. "Bermondsey Street" is the biggest statement on love in the wider rather than personal sense (and its chorus is ridiculously, gloriously big, swelling with feeling and pride). Love is for everyone and anyone, it says, illustrating it with two mirrored proposals, both couples declaring theirs 'the greatest love of the century'. The obviously striking detail is the way its first line 'she kisses him on Bermondsey Street' is swapped out in the second verse for 'he kisses him on Bermondsey Street'. After reading so many suggested wedding vows with that phrase 'You may now kiss the bride', I can't help but see 'she kisses him' as a pointed reversal of the norm too, though. 

"House" brings a great deal of sophistication and thought in to its hymn to the possibilities brought about by the security of a relationship, but Patrick still sings it with a heart-on-sleeve urgency: never has contented domesticity sounded so bloody exciting. Its something repeated in "The Future" which eventually builds to 'The threshold appears and I am carrying you over/Carrying me over!/Into the best days of the rest of our lives' as the track bursts into life, guitars and choirs driving home the all-encompassing joy.

On "Together”, which combines Patrick’s mile-wide romanticism with a deep disco pulse to incredible effect, the message is not “I can’t go on without you” but “I can go on without you, but it would be a bit rubbish, so let’s not, please”. It feels entirely natural but is uncommonly refreshing. It still allows his love to feel monumental, turning the ordinary into the extraordinary and powering the most ecstatic chorus of the year. And oh, the strings! The sweep up and out of the spoken bit! I don’t know how many times I’ve listened to it (last.fm says 32, I'm not sure I trust it), but like Lupercalia as a whole, it still makes me so happy every time.

Winning '11: 2 - Emmy the Great

Emmy the Great - Virtue

I very much see my top two albums as a pair. They came out within a week of each other in June and helped immensely to get me through some of the worst weeks of my year immediately at the same time. They were by the two singers who I've seen more than any others over the last couple of years and the albums are almost mirror images of each other. Both are open hearted intimate and make no secret of their autobiographical elements, but one is celebratory and one mournful, one marking the beginning and one the end of serious, marriage-bound relationships. They even both have a superb second track and single which is superficially about a house but really about the relationship.

Virtue is the end album of the pair and one which I'm very close to in probably unprecedented ways. I've exchanged more words with Emma-Lee Moss than any other musician (not that that's hard). I've seen her play more times than anyone else bar Elbow and Hard-Fi, and over a much shorter period of time than either. I've witnessed the songs on Virtue evolving before they were recorded and in fact, thanks to Pledgemusic, I heard several of them for the first time in my friend's front room, played to an audience of twelve people and a cat. It's maybe not surprising that I feel such a strong personal connection to the songs as a result, but on the other hand it's the strength of her songs which brought me into doing all of that in the first place. "Secret Circus" knocked me out before knowing anything about her apart from the name, which is probably worse than nothing. First Love was my favourite album of 2009.

Virtue shows all the same wit, insight, poetry as that album and is more complete and focused with it, musically as well as lyrically. Still playing indie-folk of a sort closer to Bright Eyes than to Laura Marling, every single song now sounds stripped to the bare essentials to make every moment count in service of the stories she's telling. Not to say that it's all acoustic all the way, but every additional touch is perfectly fitting - the yawning guitar echo in "Dinosaur Sex" that marks the creeping power of the uncertain and unknowable; the gothic choral backing vocals that convey the full horror of "A Woman, a Woman, a Century of Sleep" as her relationship turns suffocating and the very walls around her seem to be closing in.

The overall back story to the album is that it was written in the aftermath of a breakup triggered by Moss' fiancé finding God, and religious and fantastical imagery and considerations haunt the whole album. "Paper Forest (in the Afterglow of Rapture)" casts love as a blessing and the rapture of the title, but one that she's left unsure what to do with. Its words and sense of rueful deflation ring very true in capturing what happens when you spend so long believing something to be true, documenting and analysing and reaffirming it, that you can’t find your way back to actually living in and feeling the moment as it happens. "Creation" plays powerfully with the idea of becoming the author and God of your own story, or of someone else's and the weight of responsibility that results.

The album ends with "Trellick Tower", her saddest and best song yet. It lays everything as bare and as clear as can be, music reduced to a few piano notes which sound afraid to intrude on its grief. Her lover is now cast as a departed saint, as unreachable as the top of the brutalist block of flats from which the song takes its name. She prays in vain to a voice which he hears and she can't, everything around her and eventually herself turned into lifeless relics of something now gone forever, all greeted with a numb acceptance, like she's just setting out the facts but in the only language able do them justice. It's another fairly audacious idea but like all of Virtue it really, really works.

Winning '11: 3 - Einar Stray

Einar Stray - Chiaroscuro

This first album from young Norwegian Einar Stray reminds me at least as much of Sufjan Stevens (when constructing delicate, intricately pretty chamber pop arrangements) and Hope of the States (when exploding them into an angry mess) as it does of Sigur Rós. Yet the feeling of listening to Chiaroscuro reminds me very much, and very specifically, of listening to Ágætis Byrjun for the first time. It has the same effect of almost overwhelming beauty and the same magic feeling that a strange new music and world is being created in which anything is possible (the latter being both the more unusual and what Sigur Rós have lacked since, it all now tending to feel a bit too forced and planned).

The album has three key songs which between them make up the bulk of its time and which it all hangs on, and it's perfectly structured around those peaks. They sit at the start, middle and end of its seven tracks. In between are two pairs of songs which are lighter, but bring their own joy on a smaller scale, and are a welcome breather to ensure that epic fatigue doesn't set in.

The three, then. "Chiaroscuro" deals in vivid wild elemental forces - its few lyrics sketch us in as 'rockets fall to the ground like snow' and Einar urges us to 'Make a red, red, riot/Make a big, bright fire'. We tour through great clouds of violin, a wilderness of whistled wind, molten rivers of feedback, the enthralling journey held together by a few elegantly recurring motifs sung and on piano. "We Were the Core Seeds" at the album's centre starts off with urgent plucked strings and skittering drums but emerges as a gentle and expansive lament for opportunities glimpsed and lost (note that whatever Core Seeds are, it's We Were, not We Are). It is though plainly backed up by a heart of steel that only completely emerges in the words 'They said trust the Bible/Trust the bankers' over crashing cymbals, the last word practically snarled. It's a terrifically startling moment in an album that exists so often in a reality of its own.

At the end, "Teppet Faller" is an instrumental and the album's big concession to the standard post-rock build and release format. But what a build and release! A piano tentatively emerges from the gloom and plays solemn notes, first obscured by the speaking of strange voices and then backed up by strings. It settles into a loop, growing in power, strings squeaking around the edges like a great old rusty machine being reluctantly forced into action again. The sound continues to grow imperceptibly until a bass rumble announces that everything is just about to kick off and then... nothing does. Everything grinds to a halt. There's a terrific unresolved tension. But it starts again, and this time the strings are squealing and the bass is becoming a ferocious roar and BOOOM. The strings go mental, the drums kick in like they've been restrained for the last ten minutes and are free at last. It's a life affirming bit of barely controlled noise that the whole track, probably the whole album, has been working up to and the pay off is worth it.

Winning '11: 4 - Elbow

Elbow - Build a Rocket Boys!

Time flies and Elbow have been my favourite band for more than a decade now. Take the fact that Guy Garvey has the most amazing voice and that their every note is made to sound completely gorgeous as read for this review, really. This marked the first album of theirs which I approached with anxiety though, being as it was their first after achieving massive commercial success off the back of That Song. It turned out that I needn't have been worried that a whole album of deliberately soundtrack ready anthems was going to emerge to capitalise.

First, if anything Build a Rocket Boys! is the most considered and dense Elbow album since their first, the least concerned with immediate thrills and sing along choruses. It starts off with "The Birds", simultaneously big in musical scale and intimate in its emotions, unfolding in languorous stages. It has a hint of Pulp's We Love Life to its organic portrayal of nature and love but has a mix of romance and realism which is pure Elbow. It has an old man looking back at his life, interspersed with the dismissive interjections of those looking after him. 'What are we going to do with you?... looking back is for the birds', backed up by a puffed-up bass stomp. There's a lot more where that comes from album goes on to meditate on different aspects of memories and the past in every song, always one of my favourite of Guy Garvey's topics and one which once again sees him in evocative and impressive form.

The other thing, though, is that the album does have its own one obvious single, and "Open Arms" is unreservedly fantastic in a way that "One Day Like This" never was. An ode to community that it seemed clear, from the first time I heard it live before the album's release, was seemed destined to bring together its own wherever it went, so utterly welcoming and big-hearted it was. It even reaches out into space in the end - 'The moon is out looking for trouble/The moon wants a scrap or a cuddle/The moon is face down in a puddle/And everyone's here'. There remains no one better to go to for totally endearing and warm poetry on the subject of drink and friendship and nostalgia.

Winning '11: 5 - Lykke Li

Lykke Li - Wounded Rhymes

In some ways, the most unexpected album on this list. Lykke Li's first album Youth Novels had its moments, but for the most part I found it too limited, with too many incomplete sketches relying on cuteness and not much else. For Wounded Rhymes she came back transformed - still recognisable and still with the same producer and mostly the same instruments, but powered-up, focused and angry. "Get Some" was the early statement of purpose, all shyness or hesitancy blown away in a storm of sex and thumping drums which remains fantastically fun.

Mixing indie sensibilities with a new widescreen pop classicism, her sound and songs now hit a spot in a way that no one else has quite managed. The "Be My Baby" beat's inevitable appearance comes on "Sadness is a Blessing", the zenith of the album in its masterful control of melancholy. Confident and accomplished, even her voice took on a new deeper force which was barely hinted at previously, one which is as well suited to the scathing blitz of "Rich Kid Blues" as to the bare heartbreak of "Unrequited Love".

Winning '11: 6 - Austra

Austra - Feel It Break

I just have to look at my year end lists over the last decade to see how crucial my year writing for Stylus Magazine in 2006 was to the development of my tastes. Exposed to a community of passionate and inspiring people who knew very different things, and saw things very different ways from me, I tried out stuff which I probably never would have done otherwise and took me at least a little away from the (British, male) indie rock which made up all. And some of the new stuff was awesome. One of the most critical records of that year was the haunted forest electro-pop of The Knife's Silent Shout. Maybe as a result I'm slightly over-inclined to see its influence, but there do seem to be a succession of new acts in the last couple of years who have been inspired by it and Austra are my favourite.

Not to say that Feel it Break is a mere imitator. It uses many similar sounds and tones and has a very similar stark and alien beauty - the deep throb of single "The Beat and the Pulse" is probably closest of all - but Feel it Break doesn't have the same fearful, cold distance or crushing force of sound. There are no mental rave-outs or pitch-shifted voices and Austra are more pop and less electro, have more open spaces. The plain piano backdrop of "The Beast" is the most extreme case, but "Lose It" and "Shoot the Water" both let in a lot more light. At least as far as it's possible to with a chorus of 'I want your blood/I want it in my hair'.

That couplet is an illustration of the way that Austra get much of their intensity and uniqueness from Katie Stelmanis' lyrics and voice. She specialises in an straightforward and unstinting darkness and while there are plenty of inspired moments like the evocative flashed images of "The Choke" ('The lamp. The slip. The floor.'), there's no obliqueness or indirectness. Together with the fact that she's front and centre and very clearly putting across the words to be heard and considered it kind of inevitably ends up with songs which could easily be considered quite silly. By neither steering away from ridiculousness or ever quite letting on that they're aware of it, though, Austra are able to use the reaction of humour and turn it into part of the heightening of emotional reaction. At least, that's how it works for me. "Hate Crime" being called "Hate Crime", having verses of struggling with avoiding sympathy with the darkness, and then in its chorus having Katie sternly intoning, over catchy synthpop, 'who signed the consent forms??' is amazing and somehow even more intense and sinister. The effect is quite similar to what I get from a lot of Editors songs and what I was the only person on the Jukebox to get from The Vaccines' "Post Break Up Sex", though Austra have crafted a set of songs which make making the bargain of accepting pomp as part of the appeal for their length much, much easier.

Winning '11: 7 - Perfume

Perfume - JPN

2011 has been a hell of a year for Japanese writer/producer extraordinaire Yasutaka Nakata. A fine album from his Daft Punkish project Capsule (seriously, watch that video), an EP and another single of uniquely garish and infectious hyper pop from Kyarypamupamyu (watch that one too, though for different reasons). Oh, and providing easily the best and most complete album yet for all conquering trio Perfume, who fall somewhere between those two in sound but do more than that.

I first came across them almost three years ago and it's been rather exciting to see them both getting better and getting a bit of wider attention this year. Manufactured pop in the best sense, their songs always feel precision-designed and constructed more than written - a pursuit of pleasure in sounds and their interaction above all else. Yet their gorgeous interlocking synth lines and piled up anonymised voices still always have a certain ticklish warmth.

The patriotically titled JPN comes at the end of a mindblowing run of singles from A-Chan, Kashiyuka and Nocchi across 2010 and 2011 (and doesn't even include their endearingly bizarre cover of "Lovefool" - I guess it would rather have disrupted the flow). "Natural ni Koishite" kicked it off with a relaxed swing and a chorus of bubbly happiness. "VOICE" was next with a big English chorus and a concentrated sugar rush of sound that more closely resembled classic Perfume. "Nee" took that, applied a darker synth pulse and introduced the unhinged madness of sampled fragments of voices as percussive bridge. Then "Laser Beam", which took that abstractness a step further and barely even bothered with the standard song part, beeps and stuttered words taking over until barely distinguishable, a mess of WHAT IS HAPPENING sound as constant stimulation which is one of the most exciting three minutes of pop released this or any year. Finally "Spice", a gently gorgeous and crystalline thing which even allows a natural voice out for a minute, and now closes the album with a satisfying contentment. And in Japan they were all #2 singles!

As if that wasn't enough, there are even more treasures on the album, including some very Perfume sounding rapping on "575", the synthetic jazzy whimsy of "Have a Stroll" which falls into the subgenre I'm never going to stop thinking of as Katamari music, and synth siren banger "GLITTER". Especially to anyone who liked "Spice", I strongly advise checking the whole thing out, despite the difficulties in doing so (Kyarypamyupamyu's new single is on Spotfiy and JPN isn't even on iTunes? Even though Perfume got used on Cars 2? That sucks).