Top Albums Of 2011: 20-16

Only two more days to vote in the festive fifty here.

Moving into my top twenty albums of the year:

20. JD Meatyard - JD Meatyard (Probe Plus)
John Donaldson goes (roughly speaking) solo, takes his Levellers 5 and Calvin Party heritage with him and delivers a stunner that, had not only arrived a couple of days before I started writing this list, may well have been higher.

19. Go Tell Fire To The Mountain – Wu Lyf (Lyf Recording)
Much-hyped and deservedly so, mining that rich Mancunian tradition of fuck-you individuality and sweetly arrogant stylings and adding a curious mellow brashness.

18. Zeroes QC – Suuns (Secretly Canadian)
First seen at the Green Man and immediately loved. Effortlessly sunny guitar trip from sublime Canadians, with an edginess borrowed from Clinic at their best.

17. Morbido – The Dreams (Kill Shaman)
Ragged, idiosyncratic revision of what would once have been called post-punk from French collaborators.

16. Hardcore Will Never Die But You Will – Mogwai (Rock Action)
Scottish Peel-giants unleash their most consistent collection for years. The Mogwai steamroller rolls on – better to get in the front seat with it than stand pondering in its path.

Top Albums of 2011: 25-21

Only six days left to vote in the festive fifty here. You know what you need to do.

Meanwhile:

25. Ghetto Ass Witch – Ritualz (Self-Released)
Mexicans defy their witch house heritage by giving themselves a name my keyboard can make sense of and putting out something good. The remix albums that followed were pretty damn fine as well.

24. Sensitive – Trevor Sensitive & The Locals (Self-Released)
Quirky, sub-Smithsesque parables on emotional conundrums that poke far into the recesses of convention beneath the slick indie pop veneer. They did a great session for my show during the year too.

23. Bells & Proclamations – Big Block 454 (Self-Released)
A not-before-time discovery and a rabidly contorted take on folk conventions and urban anthropology. Subsequently released much of their stunning back catalogue – it’s been a joy belatedly to discover it all.

22. Guider – Disappears (Kranky)
Delivering a swift kick to the l’cks to those who claim sublime guitar stylings like this are a thing of the past.

21. Laced – Psychedelic Horseshit (FatCat)
Indelicate noisemakers with their finest collection of abrasive guitar-driven noise cocktails yet. Less of the woozy gaucherie of releases past, but thankfully the maturing of Psychedelic Horseshit has brought the attraction of something reliably rough yet still more sublime.

Top Albums of 2011 - 30-26

Only 11 days left to vote in the festive fifty here.

As for my albums of the year, the countdown continues:

30. Paris Burning – Derajah & The Donkey Jaw Bone (Chapter Two - right)
Superior reggae served up with considerable warmth (check out ‘My Sista’, which I’ll be playing in my December show for an example). One of several very late releases to muscle their way into this list (out at the end of this month).

29. This Day Is A Good Enough Day – Prince Edward Island (Crocfingers)
Scottish indie pop with hooks for hands. Anyone afflicted with doubts concerning the potential for current indie poppers to dish out original tunes need look no further for treatment.

28. All Rights Reserved – The Evolution Control Committee (Self-Released)
Veteran cut-and-paste iconoclasts rip up the world and put it back together in a far more pleasing fashion.

27. Proxemics – Social Studies (Daddy Tank)
The album that introduced me to the fantastic Daddy Tank label. Lengthy hip-hop treatises deliver a considered and considerable punch.

26. Relics – Matt Stevens (Self-Released)
The most innovative guitar instrumentalist since John Fahey. His ‘Live In Blackpool’ release would be in here too but for some reason I don’t include live albums.

Best Albums of 2011: 35-31

A reminder that you can vote in the Festive Fifty - the only chart that really matters - up to the end of November here, but in the meantime please check the latest instalment in my countdown of my favourite albums of the year:

35. Crust Of Utopia – The Infinite Three (Self-Released)
Growling guitars underpin a dark, intelligent masterpiece. Written about in loving detail elsewhere on this blog.

34. S-750 – The Tinopener’s Art (Self-Released)
German-based electronic magician with his best work yet. Includes collaborations with Julien Auroux, another favourite of my show.

33. Senseless Sense – Piatcions (I Blame The Parents)
At the psychedelic end of the shoegaze spectrum. This excellent band deserves credit for getting XFM to play something as good as this (after Dandelion Radio had got there first, of course).

32. Hungry Ghosts – Lee Negin (Passing Phase)
Brain-teasingly original electronic brain-scrapings from eighties Peel favourite.

31. Red Barked Tree – Wire (Pink Flag)
Art-punk veterans still standing apart from everything else.

Best Albums of 2011: 40-36

My top forty albums of the year, out of an original short-list of about 120, to be revealed during the course of November and December. A good smattering of self-released efforts. One record label features twice and another three times, but other than that it’s single appearances only, if indeed they appear at all…

40. Apocalypse – Bill Callahan (Drag City)
Best work since his Smog days. A steamy, atmospheric appraisal of an America in crisis.

39. Palace Of Toxology – Bashed Nursling (Enough)
Hungarian’s latest offering of brain-shredding electronic hammering. No one exposes the subtleties within electric noise better, and then batters hell out of them.

38. Greezy Man & Stinky Man Meet Smutty Ranks On Tarantula Hill – Dog Leather (Ehse)
Best album title of the year by far. Content doesn’t disappoint.

37. The Big Fish – Kiran Leonard (Self-Released)
Oldham-based innovator’s rich mine of varied sonic textures. You suspect he can, and will, continue to get better and better.

36. Ersatz GB – The Fall (Cherry Red)
Not their strongest effort, but for The Fall that’s like Messi not scoring a hat-trick. Still beats the pants off most of what’s out there. ‘Nate Will Not Return’ features in my November Dandelion Radio show, by the way.

And remember voting is open in the only chart that really counts…the festive fifty. Let us know yours at www.dandelionradio.com/festive50.htm.

Vote in the official festive fifty

Voting is now open in the official festive fifty add Dandelion Radio, in partnership with SoundsXP and l'apartament18. Vote for your three favourite tracks of 2011 here. They don't have to be tracks played on Dandelion Radio, but if you want a reminder of what we've been playing throughout the year, find it here.

And while you're visiting the site, check out our November shows. I'm featuring an exclusive session from the excellent Benjamin Shaw in mine.

Mark W

The Infinite Three - Crust Of Utopia

Always a good sign when a band contacts me via a mutual interest in The Chasms, yet somewhat perilous given that few could hope to match the admiration I hold for the Isle Of Man threesome. Thus did The Infinite Three pass the initial taste test. Faced with the obligatory and much more demanding 'But do they have anything to offer other than just good taste in music?' test, I was pleased to report that they passed this with almost conspicuous ease. Only the 'OK they're good, but do they have anything new to offer me?' test to go. Result: flying colours.

Thus did The Infinite Three's 'Crust Of Utopia' album find its way into my life. Unlike the aforementioned Chasms' latest opus and its sledgehammer attack, it's an album with a brooding presence, somewhat akin to opening a difficult can of beans with a broken tinopener, only to find that there is much more than merely beans inside, and that what does lurk within the can is actually wonderfully unclassifiable. Opener 'Lights Out For The City' lulls, fades and generally creeps its way into your life and under your skin. 'Blooms Of Immediacy' - which I play in my October show on Dandelion Radio - is, I believe, the third track I've played on my show to feature direct quotations from a William Blake poem. I'll leave you go guess what the others are, but aside from this the mystical Blakean presence is there throughout the album, not in the playful way it permeates, for example, Billy Bragg's 'William Bloke' album, but with the sinister, mystical undertones that infuse Blake's original works and in particular the challenging sparks that fly off the best of his innocence poems as well as glimpses into the dark hearts of experience.

I could easily follow this with a full pararaph on Blakean spiritual influence, but far better to discover 'Crust Of Utopia' for itself, delighting in picking the scabs from its sumptuous surface, bathing in the piranha-infused wash of its growling guitars and allowing yourself to prowl amid its sub-gothic dialectic. The Infinite Three don't offer easy routes into their music. Theirs is the messiness of dark art and not the clean dissection of science. They offer a world of conundrum and colour, of the visceral and the virtual in unbalanced but unquantifiable amounts, of the cinematic and the savage.

There's an uncommon depth to all you find here, even within the relatively accessible 'Is Erased' while, in the midsts of tracks like 'Three Blooms Dub', The Infinite Three test the fabric of their own universe with a drone that leaps into something even more startling somewhere around 4.21. Abandon yourself and enter.

You can get hold of a copy of 'Crust Of Utopia' at their bandcamp site - download is 'name your price' while a limited edition physical copy is damn good value at £5. And you can find out more about The Infinite Three here

Mark W