And there was only ever going to be one winner for me in 2012. How To Dress Well's record stands apart, taking R&B into divine new places, and for that 'Total Loss' sits proudly at the summit of an incredible top 10.
Into the top 20, from Kendrick Lamar's opus and its Janet Jackson sampling Poetic Justice, via a quartet of Pitchfork Paris standouts through to Angel Olsen's otherworldly modern folk. Oh, and the 30 minute video of Dan Deacon at SXSW below is insanely good. What a guy.
20. Kendrick Lamar - 'good kid, m.A.A.d city'
19. Dean Blunt & Inga Copeland - 'Black Is Beautiful'
The next 10 brings some of the best choruses to grace 2012 in First Aid Kit's Emmylou and pretty much every track off Jessie Ware's 'Devotion', while if this is, as rumoured, the last Grizzly Bear record, what a way to go.
The next ten brings a lot of love for merry ole England and its audio-visual output, with Micachu's Lambeth walking vid for Easy, the warped urban dystopia of Alt-J's video for Fitzpleasure, taken from their Mercury winning 'An Awesome Wave', through to NZCA/LINES' awesome self titled debut.
I could suggest that the reason for this being a top 52 is to allow for one album per week. That would be neat. Except it would also be a lie, the truth being that my indecisive nature has meant I'm unable to trim my favourite albums of 2012 list down any further. It just wouldn't be fair.
As such, here is the first installment of incredible music that actually did make the cut (and there was a cut), taking in 'SFV Acid #2''s fractured electronic beats, the psychedelic swoon of 'Melody's Echo Chamber' and the lo-fi blitzkrieg of PAWS' debut 'Cokefloat'.
52. Lands & Peoples - 'Pop Guilt'
51. Menomena - 'Moms'
50. OMBRE - 'Believe You Me'
49. Mount Eerie - 'Clear Moon'
48. Nite Jewel - 'One Second Of Love'
47. The Walkmen - 'Heaven'
46. Ceremony - 'Zoo'
45. Cold Specks - 'I Predict a Graceful Explosion'
Everything Fort Romeau touches turns to genius, and his reworks of Alt-J's Something Good and CYMBALS' Like An Animal for their next single releases are no exception. Listen below, while you can pick up his own work 'Kingdoms' on 100% Silk now.
Earlier this year, Art Is Hard Records pulled together some of its favourite artists and like-minded thinkers, and got them to share a couple of original tracks. The result is the quite brilliant 'Family Portrait' EP.
Diverse despite evident similarities in approach and shared influences, the result is a cohesive record of UK lo-fi, from the reverb heavy, MBV stylings of Gum's Cherryade opener to the two minute alt-punk thrash of Playlounge's Revolution Summer.
Listen below, or by in any format you could dream of from the label's Bandcamp.
What seems like, and in fact is, mere months after the release of 'The Money Store', the ever-generous Death Grips have offered up yet another long player of menacing, genre melding hardcore rap in 'NO LOVE DEEP WEB'. Do tracks like Pop and Hunger Games point towards a radio friendly, mainstream courting change of direction? Not. A Chance.
Post punk can get awful repetitive at times, but when you are as adept at delivering looped drums and riffs with The Fall-like intensity then repetition becomes instantly alluring.
Fog Cutter, taken from Cold Puma's long awaited debut LP 'Persistent Malaise' fits this mould, almost four minutes of controlled yet unraveling aggression to blow out your mind and make you want to play it over and over and over and over.
LA's Zane Reynolds (AKA SFV Acid) has pulled a stellar second record out of the bag in 'SFV Acid #2', full of fractured electronic beats that despite their destructive, discordant nature manage to come together as a realistic whole. It's even soulful at times, as on Chaco Love Steve+Happy Acid Kinesinte and Summers Vage Cloud. Take a listen to the full album below, courtesy of PPM Records.
Man of the moment Frank Ocean has just released a video for standout 'Channel Orange' track Pyramids, an 8 minute short full of gun shots and strip clubs to accompany Ocean's modern soul vocal. Check it out below.
Juliana Barwick and Roberto Carlos Lange are doing pretty exciting things on their own right now, but as a team they form Ombre, and have just released and album packed with electronic eccentricity, meditative loops and haunted house vocals. Not least on Dawning and Weight The World. Take a listen to the whole of 'Believe You Me' below, which you can own for your own at their Bandcamp.
Welcome to No Action.
Based in Bow, East London, writing about stuff that sounds good.
No Action has also written for High Voltage and The Fugitive Motel.
