And the beat goes on – three more of our top dogs have put forward their reasons why music is so damn tasty this year. Yum yum.

InMe - Herald Moth

InMe – Herald Moth (Graphite Records/Northern Music)

By James Barrett

It is a pleasure to bring to you my album of the year by a band close to my heart. I’ve followed InMe since seeing a performance at the Camden Palace circa 2002-ish and, with Herald Moth, I feel the band has taken a further step to challenging people’s attitude towards them.

Too heavy to appeal to the indie crowd, dismissed by the metal scene as ‘kids’, InMe occupy a very unique position. Herald Moth showcases a maturer sound for InMe’s fourth offering, with a crushing mix of heavy riffs, spider-webbed guitar solos and touching moments of clarity that previous releases haven’t quite managed to pull together across a whole album.

Dave McPherson (lead singer/guitarist/song arranger/tea maker etc) and his merry men have produced a high octane, passionate rock/metal/pop hybrid, coupled with McPherson’s distinctive vocal melodies. Visiting subject matter like self-belief, lost love, individuality and renewed hope, McPherson wears his heart on his sleeve lyrics-wise. Two of the softer songs (‘All Terrain Vehicle’, ‘I Will Honour You’) include lush string sections and piano; another progression from the early days. Comparing yourself to an ATV while singing about muddling through hardships may sound ridiculous, but McPherson just has a knack of pulling these things off.

For those of you that like to air guitar, Herald Moth should be right up your street. It really shows off McPherson’s and Ben Konstantinovic’s ability to thrash their axes. ‘A Mouthful of Broken Loose Teeth’ starts off with a solo that is finger tapped into submission and if the intro to ‘Master Storm’ doesn’t get you head banging like a classic metal cliché, then you don’t deserve to be in the mosh pit. The first single from Herald Moth ‘Single of the Weak’ will raise a smile too, with its bash at bands who compromise their artistic endeavour to have a hit on the radio: “What’s that shit on the radio?!/It sounds like they made it, so they could make it!”

Overall, InMe has produced an album on its own merits and it has received extremely favourable reviews in the more well-known magazines and websites of the music world. Maybe people will finally wake up and judge InMe on what it can offer, not just about what it can’t.

Best track on the album: ‘Strange Tragic Fiction’
In my opinion, this brings together the best of everything on the album and brings Herald Moth to a satisfying conclusion. Other strong contenders: ‘Nova Armada’, ‘Master Storm’, ‘I Will Honour You’.

Any improvements that could have been made
The only slight criticism I can bring to the table is sometimes the lyrics can border on the naïve, bringing unintentional smiles when serious matters are being sung.

The best of the rest
Green Day – 21st Century Breakdown

Manic Street Preachers – Journal For Plague Lovers

Iwrestledabearonce – It’s All Happening

Prodigy – Invaders Must Die

Plasticines – About Love

Charles Spearin - The Happiness Project

Charles Spearin – The Happiness Project (Arts and Crafts)

By Amir Adhamy

It is perhaps a disservice to the merit of my chosen album that I should begin extolling its virtues with a disclaimer, but there’s something about ‘end of year’ lists that doesn’t sit particularly easy with me. Subjective responses delivered with the assumption of authority- such declarations of conclusion can seemingly never please everyone, and accusations of bias, clique-ism, or narrow-mindedness usually follow such posts. Arguably, the format serves to inspire debate as much as to cement an album’s place in the ‘canon of whatever year’. So, it is with these concerns in mind that my choice for the album of 2009 doesn’t aim to be the last word on the year’s music, nor to allude to the objective ‘best’. I’ve settled on a record which has not garnered mainstream press and is in itself the smallest of statements.

Having cut his teeth in some of Canada’s finest (Do Make Say Think, Broken Social Scene, Valley of the Giants) Charles Spearin’s solo debut album of sorts, The Happiness Project, is a perfectly-formed album of revelatory moments and life-affirming sentiment. Furthermore, you are unlikely to hear an album composed in this style ever again. It started as an experiment: to record audio interviews with the neighbours on your street regarding their perceptions of happiness. Having achieved this, Spearin listened to the recordings over and over- identifying interesting moments of cadence, turns of phrase, incidents where meaning of sentence and musicality of voice uplifted each other. Instrumentation was inspired directly from the inflections in voice that gave it a ‘sing-song’ quality. And so came about eight pieces of music that wove interview and musicality together with staggering success.

Spearin presses a small cross-section of society on the subject. Schoolchildren, the elderly, a women who has only recently had surgery to correct her deafness and a lady who works with the mentally ill all give fascinating and articulate accounts, entirely subjective and borne of experience, that each provide small revelatory meditations on one of life’s most involving philosophical questions. What is happiness? How does one attain or hold onto it?

The recording was pure chance and must have been a deeply humbling and engaging process for Spearin and his neighbours. This record was the very antithesis of super-stardom, it’s composer merely facilitating the creative process. Furthermore, the album pertained to write itself or play out by serendipity. Spearin was a party to the album’s compositional unfurling and had no way of foreseeing how successful, if at all, the project would be. What struck me about this record more than any other released this year is that it sought, perhaps without knowing it, to re-articulate the creative process. What does it mean to be a recording artist in 2009? Whereas certain aspects of culture have only grown more gargantuan, allowing artists to speak to us from pedestals of spectacle and multi-media, the democratisation of recording technology has also allowed for an unprecedented return to music’s more community-based roots, music as social glue, as ‘event’. What’s most lacking in contemporary societies is that sense of community, and Spearin’s album has reflected both the merits of brave experimentation and of talking to your neighbours.

Best track on album: ‘Mrs Morris (reprise)’
Opening and closing the record, Mrs Morris’ wonderful summation of love, happiness and gratitude is here set against dreamy guitars awash with reverb, an underlying beat and a playful saxophone solo. Simplicity in itself and an utter joy.

Any improvements that could have been made
Arguably, the album’s most successful moments are those in which the relationship between spoken word and musical turn of phrase are most evident. And certainly, the album is a real curio released on a small independent label and is in no way seeking the mainstream approval. As with the artist’s recording history, it will reward those who take time to discover it.

Best of the rest
The xx: xx
A masterclass in simplicity and ‘mood’ – something far too many albums seem to have forgotten these days. And it’s an excellent album, lyrically beautiful, addictive and unique. They’ll probably fuck it up with their second record, but this debut was impossibly modest.

Raekwon – Only Built for Cuban Linx II
Proper 1995-sounding hip-hop like they don’t make anymore. A truly refreshing reminder of class in a genre dominated by Floridas and Lil Waynes.

Lady Gaga – The Fame Monster
Having spent half the year criticising her out of hand, I had something of a Damascus moment. We’re now agreed: Alluring, shameless, dirty, self-aware, ironic, disgusting, indulgent, a disgrace and reflection of part of society, art in it’s truest sense and truly postmodern pop.

Alix Perez - 1984

Alix Perez – 1984 (Shogun Audio)

By Kristina Georgiou

This debut album from Belgian DJ and producer Alix Perez has been anticipated by those in the know long before its October release date. Perez (born in 1984, hence the title, not just because he’s read George Orwell’s book) has released melodic rolling drum and bass tunes since he started. 1984 stays true to his diverse tastes and seals another good year for the genre. Beats roll smoothly over vocals such as ‘Forsaken’ featuring Peven Everett, the man behind 90s garage-soul hit ‘Gabrielle’. Renowned spoken-word artist Ursula Rucker seeks the true meaning of life in ‘Intersections’, and British hip-hop act Foreign Beggars rap over ‘The Cut Deepens’; a moody step-up slice of the funk pie. British rapper Yungun also spits lyrics on ‘Calm of Cast’, while emotive electro bleeps and waves over ‘Hemlines’, reminiscent of Mercury Prize 2008 nomination Burial. Because Perez has slowed down the normal D’n'B range of 170BPM on a few tracks, this album of the year reaches more baseheads.

Best track on the album: ‘Contradictions’
A handful of strong artists from the scene feature on the album – Zero T, Lynx, and long collaborating partner Sabre – but its Perez’s atmospheric ‘Contradictions’ that is the cream of the crop. A mellow liquid D’n'B anthem with just the right ingredients: soft swaying piano chords, uplifting beats, but with an opposing hint of the melancholy that lingers in the mind.

Any improvements that could have been made
There are a couple of unmemorable fillers – robotic tracks that shriek and crunch – but the skilled production of the rest of the album shines through. And it’s a nice touch that four extra tracks mark the vinyl edition.

The best of the rest
65 Days Of Static – Escape From New York

Rodrigo y Gabriella – 11:11