And so, last but not least, our intrepid travellers come to their conclusion on this year in music, album-wise. Our final fateful trio of happy-go-lucky sound bandits look into the eyes of their loyal subjects and tell them that, yes, this year was a good one for the ears.

Brainlove Records - Fear of a Wack Planet

Brainlove Records – Fear of a Wack Planet (Brainlove)

By Matt Gardner

I’m going to turn into a bit of a luvvie here, so much so that I’ll likely rival Daniel Day-Lewis in one of his many pseudo-masturbatory speeches after winning countless awards for his method acting. However, this time it’s justified and genuine, instead of being an attempt to make myself look indirectly better. Like Daniel Day-Lewis. Who is a tosser.

Brainlove Records is a label run by the eponymous John Brainlove, one of the blessed in regards to the underground music scene. His self-set task is to break out the prime material of lesser-known, hardly-seen bands who have genuine talent. Groups you’ve never heard of are joining the label regularly and those who example the very best work ethic: doing their own thing for anyone who cares to listen to their style. Oh, and carrying it off extremely well.

Okay, I’m well aware that Fear of a Wack Planet the only compilation on the Sound Screen list and while I may be a maverick in this sense, I can’t argue with the overall quality of the record.

Sure, some songs are better than others, though to judge the artists as poor when basing it on one track is crass, even if Brainlove picked them, especially for showcasing purposes. As a result, I’ll avoid even naming them, although this is partially because I don’t have enough time or space to fawn over each one individually.

There’s certainly a running theme, regardless of this; if you like anything in the brackets of electro, pop, folk, indie, dance, acoustic, then you’ll get your money’s worth from this outing. After all, it’s a measly £5.

There’s something for everyone here, essentially. Six-minute tracks are interspersed with sub-60 second tunes. The strength in performances across the board prove that to be original, artists don’t need to be pompous, pretentious or outgoing – just convinced in their own abilities.

Brainlove Records allowed them all their creative freedoms. The man behind the plan also shows that the UK continues to be a world leader in music, partially because any of the bands could step up to the plate and carry on the exportable quality of British talent, should a comedy music virus take out all contributors to the Top 40 in the last five years.

£5 is absolutely nothing for the amount you’re getting back. Think of it as an investment; you’ll keep rediscovering the record, even if you only have the one track to listen to and enjoy.

Brainlove will go places. If not, I am completely shrugging off the notion of our lord God. Well, just moreso than usual.

Best track on the album: Fidel Villeneuve – ‘Two of the Beatles Have Died’
I can’t really put my finger on why this track is so lovable, it just is. The hammering together of sweet radio ditties from the 1960s with bass-laden madness somehow works, especially with an early expert twist of the dial to bring everything back for the second chorus after teetering on the brink of wanton destruction.

While the samples can sound a little contrived or out of place on certain listens, in others they act as a switch for the next part. It’s essentially two songs expertly sewn together without wanting them to work well with one another, and it’s spot on.

Any improvements that could have been made
Naturally, it’s a compilation, so there are bound to be songs I don’t particularly like. Still, the overall feel of the album isn’t a take-or-leave affair, while the poorer songs are not necessarily bad. The format of the collection overrides your desire to criticise because everyone is given an equal opportunity to give it their all and you can tell that they do.

The best of the rest
Stricken City – Songs About People I Know
Simply the most consistent release from any band this year. Each track is fantastic and was just edged out of having its virtues extolled above.

Kippi Kaninus - Happens Secretly
Like atmospheric Icelandic electro? Of course you do. It doesn’t get much better than this. The end of ‘Purer, Softer, Deader’ sounds like a Disney depiction of a crazy scientist’s production line for questionable children’s toys. ‘The Comfort of My Eyes’ is also the best opening track on any album this year, and you don’t know it, so I suggest you get hold of it. Oh, it’s Brainlove-affiliated, by the way.

The Bronx – Mariachi El Bronx
Sabotaged by 6Music’s desire to play two songs over and over again, this new direction from the punky bastards from New York is remarkable. It’s a one-off overindulgence but one which is consistent. It just works.

Laroca – Valley of the Bears
‘Elevator Tester’ is one of the most relaxing songs you could possibly listen to. ‘Brassic’, ‘Unit 125′ and the title track all contribute to a very well-rounded effort.

Pentatonik – A Thousand Paper Cranes
R Simeon Bowring, how you make my heart flutter. If it doesn’t sound like the soundtrack to Blade Runner or Lawrence of Arabia, it’s numbing all senses not involved in listening to music, making it a pure experience. It’s a masterpiece which transfers music onto the world and makes you reconsider life. This sounds like an excerpt written especially for Private Eye’s Pseud’s Corner. Still, it’s completely and utterly true.

The Pains of Being Pure at Heart - The Pains of Being Pure at Heart

The Pains of Being Pure at Heart: The Pains of Being Pure at Heart (Slumberland)

By Thomas Brewster

When The Pains of Being Pure at Heart’s self-titled release hit earlier this year it didn’t make an immediate impact on some – perhaps emblematic of a band who had been around a few years before releasing this sumptuous album.

The fuzzy pop songs seemed too much of a pastiche; not enough freshness on the first visit, but those who went back to the work for repeat listens were treated to an intriguingly-nuanced piece of indie genius. Right from the aptly-titled opener,’Contender’, Pains mix heavy distortion with effortless melodies to position themselves as more than just challengers to the crown of the most refreshing indie outfit to emerge in years.

In terms of singles, they are plentiful. ‘Young Adult Friction’ is the most rousing and most immediately appealing number, with its breakdown to rolling bass and thumping drums, building back up to the simplest of guitar lines and an equally straightforward yet effortlessly catchy refrain. The album’s closing track ‘Gentle Sons’, meanwhile, takes on a more ethereal tone, a subtly expanding cacophony that still maintains the simple melodies and dreamy vocals.

But what is really great about The Pains of Being Pure at Heart is that it can be taken on a variety of levels other than a collection of great singles. Firstly, those who complain of the apparent lack of originality are missing the point – this is, in part, a homage to the C86 period, a reminder of what was a particularly exciting movement. No pretence, just a love of the form and appropriating it in the most ebullient of ways.

It is also an exploration of adolescence, youth and sexual awakening. ‘A Teenager in Love’, ‘Everything With You’ and ‘This Love is Fucking Right!’ are symptomatic of the piece’s lyrical openness in conveying the excessive yet seemingly pure feelings experienced at that time in life.

And it is perhaps this reading of the album that is most rewarding – a reminder that adolescence, for all its confusion and misleading giddiness, can be an emotionally joyous time in your life. Pains’ EP Higher Than The Stars, which emerged later in 2009, confirmed that the group could still provide that same feeling again and again, and yet somehow still feel fresh.

Best track on the album: ‘Young Adult Friction’
The cliché that the best songs are the simple ones is often a reductive generalisation that disregards the beauty of complexity. However, ‘Young Adult Friction’ is the epitome of excellent simplistic songwriting. An eight-beat drum pattern brings an immediate energy, but the song bursts to life when synth, guitar and bass all come crashing in seamlessly to infuse sheer ecstasy into the track. The aforementioned breakdown and build-up only makes the song more enthralling.

Any improvements that could have been made
If you’re looking for something avant-garde, this is perhaps not the place to look. Those that do delve in further will note the subtlety of the composition, its ease of transition, but you could complain of a dearth of originality, yes. Again, however, you would be missing the point.

The best of the rest
Animal Collective – Merriweather Post Pavilion
Life-affirming excellence from the most-lauded act of 2009.

Antlers – Hospice
A heart-wrenching, ethereal and yet rousing as well as cathartic story of personal tragedy.

Bill Callaghan – Sometimes I Wish I Were An Eagle
Funny, warming and incredibly subtle folk music for those who love the sound of a deep-voiced wise man admitting to not being so wise.

Why? - Eskimo Snow

Why? - Eskimo Snow (Anticon)

By Adam Fletcher

Imagine you were to find a deep, deep well inside a hollowed-out cloud during a particularly weird dream. And if you were to wind the crank and recover a bucket from its depths, and fetch from inside the bucket a fairly ordinary looking Dictaphone of unknown branding. And you press play, and listen in disbelief, before gleefully scribbling down the words you hear. When you wake, you find a notebook by your bed full of weird symbols and cryptic lines, potentially letters. You can’t remember writing anything last night. Intrigued, you type them up as best you can, and shiver gently at the words as they come together. The message is of one of your own mortality, your failings and your minor successes. Are you really so insecure? With mixed feelings you press record on your eight-track and read the words into your microphone, singing when the feeling takes you, plain rapping when it doesn’t. An orchestral-sounding five-piece band, which plays distantly, as if coming from the house across the street, counter-points your dreamy rhymes; swirls of organs and swathes of steel-string rattle from under their stairs.

Such was the arrival of the latest Why? record. At times brooding, brimming with brutal honesty and stark imagery, at others ironic, glib, wry. In the context of its predecessor, 2007′s Alopecia, which dwelt heavily on life and death: transience, love, sex, introspective sobriety and reflection, Eskimo Snow shines like a sapphire in, well, the snow. It is a breath of cool air to a fetid imagination sparked by a story of release and cathartics. It charts the timely acceptance by singer Yoni Wolf that mortality isn’t anything he’s likely to escape any time soon.

This decade, singer Yoni Wolf has honed a technique that surpasses the label of ‘white-guy rap’, slowing his delivery bit by bit whilst retaining a flow and lyrical content that smacks of a hurried rapper’s. Listening to a Why? record can be like listening to rap at the wrong speed. The band has also improved its capacity to evoke surreal landscapes and impossible meanings through ingenious instrumentation, playing out on pump organ, glockenspiel, bass drum, steel-strung a back-catalogue of twisted dreams.

The mystery behind Eskimo Snow is what makes it so fun. Thankfully, it can be difficult to work out what singer Yoni Wolf is alluding to through the hypnotic imagery he describes, but the beauty of the thing is plain to see. Closing title track ‘Eskimo Snow’, annoyingly exquisite, seems doomed to be killed through repetition in the hands of the lonely, who find solace in words of such tender resignation. “All my words for sadness/Like eskimo snow on unmanned crosses/All planted in threes/in a field for living trees”. You wonder what else this band could do; their potential seems huge. For now, sadly, Eskimo Snow is the most beautiful record they’ve ever dared record.

Best track on the album: ‘This Blackest Purse’
The great faculty that Why? has of working through what might otherwise be just deluded thoughts, in a manner methodical and precise like some rap-Holmes, is demonstrated so powerfully on ‘This Blackest Purse’ that it makes you shiver: “Still sporting my ex-girlfriend’s dead ex-boyfriend’s boxers/I wanna operate from a base of hunger/no longer be ashamed and hide my tears and shower water while I lather for pleasure…”

The best of the rest
Themselves – CrownsDown

Akira The Don - The Omega Sanction