5. stars get their hearts broke too

favorite albums of 2009



#5

The-Dream "Love Vs. Money"

Rock bands have taken a lot of drugs in order to sound this completely off the wall, The-Dream it seems just leaves it as his default setting. Notice the way he announces "radio killa!" on almost every track, as nonchalant as Babe Ruth pointing out past center field. Listening to The-Dream you realize that differentiating between "album" artists and "single" artists has always been a false choice, or at least low expectations. Most bands are lucky to do one well, but the best do both effortlessly. Nobody has pulled it off quite like Love Vs. Money, an album which is a continuous conceptual and sonic whole but from which any song could be extracted and placed at the top of the Billboard Top 40. It's an astonishing feat. The-Dream doesn't write singles in any real sense: for him there is only one ceaseless, circular song that he will be writing until he dies, refracting and rephrasing and studying the pieces, holding them up to light, looking from a million different angles, and trying to put it back together. It's because she left him, it's because he thought he knew but found out he didn't. This is the gargantuan crystal city he has built out of dreams, serpentine and interlocking, an empty monument he's made out of his heart. It's made from memories and fantasies and the way she smelled and the albums they listened to and the little scrap of paper with her handwriting that he forgot to throw away. It's the battle he fights every day that she's gone, trying to reconcile himself with a world that no longer makes any sort of sense: Love Vs. Money... stunning sonics pierced by love, lust, and loss, wielded as weapons in the eternal battle between spirit and flesh.

I used to know what love songs meant. I used to walk down the street in the assurance that everything was in its right place. Once I was sure. But I was wrong, and now I can never be sure again. Now there's confusion, conflict, anger, grief, the cycle of pleasure and pain. This is The-Dream's dilemma, the album's defining conflict. "Love" and "Money" are maybe the most obvious, and he lets each side play out in a two part song that act as divergent realities, but the album continues on. I didn't notice it until the very end of the album, the final breakdown in the last few moments of "Mr. Yeah." After everything he's done here, you realize all the bluster and braggadoccio is just an act, he's still trying to impress her, to win her back. "You can always come back..." he sings over and over, you hear his heart breaking because he knows it can't be true. It's a moment of weakness, the flaw in this diamond of an album, and the entire magnificent thing crumbles around it. This is Dr. Manhattan on the surface of Mars, building brilliant and spiraling crystal cities out of his thoughts, machinery to make up for her leaving. This is a man turning the thousand tiny fractures that form a break up into diamond-sharp synthpop symphonies as if that could ever be enough to fill the hole, as if that could ever be enough to bring her back. He builds these elegant, elaborate songs up just to shatter them, he breaks himself again and again and again against the unsolvable problem: love. But you wonder, if a man with these sorts of powers could ever fix himself, could ever find some semblance of content, if he could learn to love again, if he could remarry, if he could begin working on a new album to complete this love-lost trilogy, what then would he be capable of? If he ever found his way out of this sonic labyrinth, that would be a very dangerous man indeed.


MP3: Right Side Of My Brain

VIDEO: Walking On The Moon


20 09:
5. The-Dream "Love Vs. Money"
6. Passion Pit "Manners"
7. The Dirty Projectors "Bitte Orca"
8. Wild Beasts "Two Dancers"
9. Miranda Lambert "Revolution"
10. The Flaming Lips "Embryonic"

11. St. Vincent "Actor"
12. The Maccabees "Wall Of Arms"
13. The xx "xx"
14. Paramore "Brand New Eyes"
15. The Twilight Sad "Forget The Night Ahead"
16. Atlas Sound "Logos"
17. mewithoutYou "It's All Crazy! It's All False! It's All A Dream! It's Alright"
18. Bat For Lashes "Two Suns"
19. The Horrors "Primary Colours"
20. The Decemberists "The Hazards Of Love"

6. everything is going to the beat

favorite albums of 2009



#6

Passion Pit "Manners"

I detest cynicism. Maybe that's obvious from the way I write. I understand it, you have every right to it, but in myself it's something I can't quite stand. I've never wanted it. That's a big reason why I respond to music that is ambitiously, unapologetically putting out there everything it has. Passion Pit has that kind of sound. And that the entire project began as a belated Valentine's gift, and that it ultimately didn't work out, endears it to me even more. That this geeky, puppy-eyed love letter could be so unappreciated and misunderstood... believe me, I understand. This thing has grown much larger than a guy sitting on his bed with his laptop. And yet so much of Manners is still about those things we do for someone, sometimes out of exuberance, sometimes out of exasperation. It's about the people we become when we are with other people. How we begin tacking on pieces, trying on parts of us we wouldn't normally wear, and how after a while of changing you become changed, gradually over time you might end up a completely different person from where you started off. The You-with-someone might not even recognize Real You walking down the street. That doesn't mean that part is gone though, for better or worse. Sometimes it's better, you might find you like the you+more better than you like the old you, you might try to move on and leave that old you behind. Or worse, you might find you can't, and after all this time it's all been an act... fooling yourself most of all. Rules and rituals we attempt to reconcile but always remain foreign to our true nature because the truth is we're young and we're stupid and we have no idea what we're doing. Manners.

Melodies careen across swirls of homemade synthesizers, hopscotch drums, and the giddy shrieks of children's choirs... everything shaken up together and set to explode like a soda can, all sugar and fizz. Like Peter Pan wrestling his shadow, here we are trying to pin the joyous, boundary-less mania of youth. But the endless sugar rush glazes over the album's complexities, exquisitely constructed and tightly wound, even if you half expect the lyrics to be dotted with hearts and XOXO's. As gigantic as this glitchy, cartoon-bluebird-flanked Technicolor wall of sounds is, it still goes back to that bedroom, it still all bends and moves to the beat of single heart. A very big album about very small things, stratospheric bursts of sound come fluttering from the tenderest emotions like butterflies being born. Epic anthems about the choices we are making, learning how to be strong, how to love one another, how to become those things we want and cast aside those things we can no longer stand. Like stars burning holes right through the dark. It's a brave and audacious flight, like the bumblebee this is something that shouldn't seem to be able to escape gravity and so every time it does is just as breathtaking and miraculous as the time before. Manners is everything I could ask for in a debut, and honestly I have no idea how they could top it, but then I never saw how they'd make it past "Sleepyhead" either, and yet they have, with flying colors, and they just keep going... higher and higher and higher. It makes you think maybe you actually have a chance against all the walls, against your rules, against your sin. It takes you back to a place of childlike wonder, so infectious is its energies. Maybe this all makes me seem like a big dope, but whatever, I'd gladly trade all the wisdom and credibility in the world for one day back there. Wouldn't you?



MP3: Sleepyhead


VIDEO: The Reeling



20 09:
6. Passion Pit "Manners"
7. The Dirty Projectors "Bitte Orca"
8. Wild Beasts "Two Dancers"
9. Miranda Lambert "Revolution"
10. The Flaming Lips "Embryonic"

11. St. Vincent "Actor"
12. The Maccabees "Wall Of Arms"
13. The xx "xx"
14. Paramore "Brand New Eyes"
15. The Twilight Sad "Forget The Night Ahead"
16. Atlas Sound "Logos"
17. mewithoutYou "It's All Crazy! It's All False! It's All A Dream! It's Alright"
18. Bat For Lashes "Two Suns"
19. The Horrors "Primary Colours"
20. The Decemberists "The Hazards Of Love"

7. okay, open your eyes

favorite albums of 2009



#7

The Dirty Projectors "Bitte Orca"

Beauty, albeit all tangled up in guitar lines and drifting in and out of key. Unique, complicated, unconventional and contradicting. You have to dig it out, you have to learn it because it's real, it's worth it, and it's like nothing you've seen before. It is that most rare and precious thing in this flat and terrible age: a new world. 2009 has come and gone, which is fitting since so much of it already felt like the past. It was supposed to be a year of promise, of change, maybe even of destiny... but seemed a lot like more of the same, places we'd been long before. It makes you wonder. Is it just getting older? Is this all life is anymore, a solidification? A slow, shading-in of the already defined? Are we growing old, or are we growing cynical and more cynical, numb and more numbed? Can we change things, do we really have that in us? What if we had gone for the extraordinary instead of the merely necessary? Reached beyond our grasp for once instead of moving everything towards the middle? What if we had been allowed to fail? What if we had lost everything? Might that not be such a bad thing? Better than this middling half-life? The Dirty Projectors' Bitte Orca is an odyssey through the imagined ruins of such an America.

Dave Longstreth has created a mismash of post-American music, odd bits and pieces from across the cultural wasteland... a detuned guitar, Wings of Desire, a dirt-smeared Mariah Carey cassette, the sheet music of a three penny opera, "Sad-Eyed Lady Of The Lowlands", an old violin... all of it piled together in the back of his gypsy wagon as he and his band of misfits (two empathetic angels as spirit guides) survey all that once was and all the someday will be. Businessmen roaming the streets in packs, world leaders choking one another for the last drop of oil. Artists and rebels create communes to rebuild society's structures in what was once suburbia, vast fields of dream homes abandoned in the bubble-burst and left for coyotes to reclaim. This is where our story takes place, people building new lives out of the old pieces, returning to the essential beauty of nature and away from the arbitrary comforts of society. These are mystical ruminations on what we've surrounding ourselves with, skyscraper mountain tops and traffic jam rivers. A world of glass, concrete, and stone smashed and reconfigured by love into what they represent for us: mindfulness, stillness, the desire to ascend. That longing you feel is necessary. We have a choice, every day, as to what world we're living in. Learn to look for it. Unique, complicated, unconventional and contradicting. You have to dig it out, you have to learn it because it's real, it's worth it, and it's like nothing you've seen before. Beauty, albeit all tangled up in mundanity and drifting in and out of days.


MP3: No Intention


VIDEO: Stillness Is The Move


20 09:
7. The Dirty Projectors "Bitte Orca"
8. Wild Beasts "Two Dancers"
9. Miranda Lambert "Revolution"
10. The Flaming Lips "Embryonic"

11. St. Vincent "Actor"
12. The Maccabees "Wall Of Arms"
13. The xx "xx"
14. Paramore "Brand New Eyes"
15. The Twilight Sad "Forget The Night Ahead"
16. Atlas Sound "Logos"
17. mewithoutYou "It's All Crazy! It's All False! It's All A Dream! It's Alright"
18. Bat For Lashes "Two Suns"
19. The Horrors "Primary Colours"
20. The Decemberists "The Hazards Of Love"

8. my heart between your teeth

favorite albums of 2009




#8

Wild Beasts "Two Dancers"

"And he was there in the wilderness 40 days, tempted of Satan; and was with the wild beasts; and the angels ministered unto him." --The Gospel of Mark

It's been a banner year for British music, after a decade spent recovering from the existence of The Strokes, and here finally is the best of the lot. These are the true libertines, undaunted in tracing out the deepest and darkest places a young man may find himself... tragedies and thrills intertwined. Perhaps the most romantic album of the year, but I mean romantic like Byron's Don Juan, that is to say perverse and poetical all at once. Their's is a raw pagan poetry made in the middle of the night out of gasps, sighs, and moans. Two Dancers is aptly named for such a beautiful ballet, the record is always affecting a delicate balance... between dueling vocalists, between angular guitars and lyrical arcana, between a man and a woman. You feel it, coursing with blood, ripe and warm, you feel the heart beating behind the drums, you feel the nimble fingers running guitar strings, you feel the faces flushed with singing. England has not felt such dimension or humanity in its sounds since In Rainbows as far as I'm concerned.

Bombastic, wanton with decadence, and sexy as Spanish poetry, this sound is a complete oddity. Really I cannot stress just how weird this thing sounds, but you might find it somewhere between the slutty strut of glam rock and the self-seriousness of post-punk. Newcomers might find Hayden Thorpe's countertenor off-putting at first, if only because he has the voice of a fallen angel. Ironic since the title track seems to be a rather visceral recounting of Sodom and Gommorah ("they dragged me by the ankles through the streets"). The band have found a sound to match the coos and quavers, every moment burns bright with passion and sensuality while also reverberating some unknown, otherworldly ache. The album is about young men let loose in the city without anyway to stop their falling, and the mistake of thinking love is some small or insignificant thing. For every rush and push, for every fresh pleasure of the flesh, for every gorgeous indulgence, there comes a price. There is a darker side, an underbelly. There is you shivering and bone-thin begging to be let in again, brought down so low, so wounded, dying for love.

It's a common conceit for a band meted some success to lose themselves down this path, the hubris, the gluttony, the excitement, gorging on life like so much birthday cake until you make yourself sick. Rare is the band that can come back this forcefully from that cycle of desire that wastes so many hedonistic young heathens. But once you've been found empty and wanting, you can know fullness. You had it all, now empty your bowl and begin again. Almost never are these things put as beautifully or felt as deeply as they are with Two Dancers. It's everything, the grand and maddening see-saw of young adulthood. It's that struggle, that wild oscillating, that they've captured here. The dance, the stumbling, the grace. Something that shouldn't quite work, but does. Wild Beasts are made of such things. Their haunting melodies, spiraling rhythms and sparkling guitars somehow come together to announce a new and majorly important band, one whose eccentricities become a source of endless delight, and who have made an album which will last as long as all these twentysomethings keep finding themselves in love and in trouble and coming undone. If that's any indication, then I'll be listening to this for quite a while.


MP3: This Is Our Lot

VIDEO: All The King's Men


20 09:
8. Wild Beasts "Two Dancers"
9. Miranda Lambert "Revolution"
10. The Flaming Lips "Embryonic"

11. St. Vincent "Actor"
12. The Maccabees "Wall Of Arms"
13. The xx "xx"
14. Paramore "Brand New Eyes"
15. The Twilight Sad "Forget The Night Ahead"
16. Atlas Sound "Logos"
17. mewithoutYou "It's All Crazy! It's All False! It's All A Dream! It's Alright"
18. Bat For Lashes "Two Suns"
19. The Horrors "Primary Colours"
20. The Decemberists "The Hazards Of Love"

9. what that vision did to me

favorite albums of 2009



#9

Miranda Lambert "Revolution"

Things really kick in around the time she puts a bullet in the radio. That line from "Maintain The Pain" is heavily symbolic, a warning shot fired by someone fed up with the stymied songwriter factory of Music City. I suppose the easiest comparison is with Loretta Lynn, both are fiercely independent iconoclasts in constant love/hate with a Nashville system where they have to work twice as hard to get half as far. But to me, Miranda bears even more resemblance to the Texas Outlaw movement... Merle, Townes, Waylon and Willie, rogues and rebels who retreated to the edge of the west to restore the rough-hewn honesty that had been drowned out in country music by the machinations of Music Row. There the only respect for the past they show is an obsession with radio plays and SoundScan numbers. But here you have to throw away the typical, because Miranda Lambert refuses to be judged. Throw away your marketing strategies, your gender roles, your gallons of gloss. She's as tough as any man, as pretty as any woman, she has songs that resonate with bare-bones honesty and a voice like a grievous angel. She also has a hand gun permit. She's that rare and fleeting thing, a true artist in an industry content merely with stars. And with Revolution she has created an explosive, all-over-the-map album that reminds me more of The White Album or Exile On Mainstreet than anything you'd think country music capable of. Yet for all its sonic exploration, this is country at its best: music that speaks, clearly and in the common tongue, the language of the heart.

"I'm not easy to understand," Miranda sings at one point and it sounds like the understatement of the year. In fact, she is impossible in the best sense... her songs are something wild and dangerous and beautiful. Look at "Makin' Plans" (at Revolution's Ryman debut she nervously introduced it as the closest she's come to writing a love song, forgetting for the moment "Love Song" which sits a few tracks down) and look at the way it resists every empty romantic cliche that country music seems to capitalize. Miranda and her songs resist easy emotion and categorization, they are impossible to pin. Gospel and grunge stand side by side in the sonic sprawl of Revolution, heartbreaking ballads sit beside dirt-clogged rockers. The world tries to box us in, tries to make everything understood, covers us with labels and fills us with expectations... nowhere is that more prevalent than in the myopia of Music City. Miranda joyously makes a mess of those things, her music is boundary-less, nameless, breathtaking, heartfelt, both complicated and completely natural. She has made an album which stretches out promise like the great highways of the west, a sound big enough to fill the Texas sky. Crazy Ex-Girlfriend was a truly classic country album, but now she's transcended even that. This is a woman who can no longer be judged by any standard other than her own. Ex-Girlfriend was a point of perfection but Revolution marks a point of departure. You can't get here from a hit factory, you have to get here by your own road, you have to keep digging into yourself, keep opening and letting go, heading further and further out from everything you've known. The truth is Miranda Lambert has as genuine and free a spirit as this legendary town has ever produced, from Patsy to Dolly to Emmylou, but by nature she defies any comparison. Miranda Lambert is just Miranda Lambert. Now, with Revolution, that means quite a lot: it's a powerful creative statement, it's the maturation of country music's most vital new voice, and it is the beautiful, aching emergence of one of the finest songwriters of our time.


MP3: Airstream Song

VIDEO: Dead Flowers



20 09:
9. Miranda Lambert "Revolution"
10. The Flaming Lips "Embryonic"

11. St. Vincent "Actor"
12. The Maccabees "Wall Of Arms"
13. The xx "xx"
14. Paramore "Brand New Eyes"
15. The Twilight Sad "Forget The Night Ahead"
16. Atlas Sound "Logos"
17. mewithoutYou "It's All Crazy! It's All False! It's All A Dream! It's Alright"
18. Bat For Lashes "Two Suns"
19. The Horrors "Primary Colours"
20. The Decemberists "The Hazards Of Love"

10. i wish i could go back in time

favorite albums of 2009



#10

The Flaming Lips "Embryonic"

The last garbled transmissions of a dying civilization somewhere on the edge of space beaming bits of emergency signals, mass hysteria, machinery noise, prayers, political speeches, scientific thought, and lovemaking through the dissonance of their exploding sun. The Flaming Lips have spent a decade since The Soft Bulletin shaping their mystical meanderings into pop songs, but now, with Embryonic, they don't even seem to need that form anymore, we're going down even deeper, back even further. We were made, at the beginning, out of exploding star guts. Think about that, you are literally apart of everything in this universe, and it is a part of you. So really that Embryonic serves as both a powerful, spiritual look at human nature and also a gigantic celestial star map should come as no surprise. If you just learn how to move the rest of the junk out of the way... ego, culture, intellect... deep inside you is a very old sun. These are massive, open-ended freeform structures that once held the shape of songs but no longer need the pretense and are just opening, opening, opening. Finally, after ten years of trying, The Flaming Lips have made an album so unconcerned with being a masterpiece that, effortlessly, it becomes one.

Embryonic finds the band stripping away forms and structures, back to what is elemental and, yes, embryonic. Experimental, acid-laced studio symphonies made out of blown speakers and cell phone noise... the band aren't making pop songs, they are attempting to alter your molecular vibration, they are trying to take you with them on a trip through alternate dimensions and alien worlds. They are trying to bring you back. From the edge of existence, from the abyss of day in, day out. They are trying to make everything matter the way it should. An album as an acid blotter, it can be an intense and sometimes frightening thing. Sounds come at you from everywhere, dark krautrock grooves, Floyd-ian space flights, gong hits, and free jazz freak outs. But really this record has few, if any, touchstones. Lightyears beyond the uplifting power pop of Bulletin and Yoshimi, this isn't feel good music anymore, we're on the dark side now... this is where the trip goes bad, and time stops moving, and you are chased down by your demons and forced to finally confront the dark parts of you that you hide even from yourself. Gone is the sugar coat and sheen of their earlier work, yet the explosive transfigurative power and the raw cathartic blast of Embryonic easily stacks against anything else in the band's career.

This was, at the end of the 00's, a band that had cheapened itself, a band once inspiring for its ephemeral, off-planet lunacy had become mired in the material world, whether through obvious political sentiments, or festival pleasing stage show gimmicks, or asinine shit-talking feuds. They had given up their magic, in many respects, and become dangerously close to normal again. But in the studio they were always learning to let go, and here they have broken through the atmosphere again. It's difficult to walk around as the wild, world-defying shamans they appear on record... it's impossible, we all forget what we are, what we're capable of, we give it up so easily to the muted expectations around us... but here, musically, the band's powers have been restored and they choose to use this moment of realization to record what might outlast even Soft Bulletin as their defining document. Like all good double albums, this is a towering monument to the self... but the band managed to point it backwards, they've turned it in the other direction and brought it crashing down, using the sprawl and excess against itself as forces of deconstruction and leaving its listeners breathless and liberated. If we really are just star-stuff, I think it makes sense that the notion of self is ultimately a black hole, seeming limitless in capacity and impossible to escape. From a certain angle. But with Embryonic, The Flaming Lips have found a way to just turn into it, and they've shot straight through, and they've emerged out the other side, and if we ever find ourselves stuck in it they've left us a map for our ears to help us find the way back out. No one is ever really powerless, Wayne sings as if from a place of utter defeat. A few records ago, he might have turned that idea into an anthemic chorus, but he was so much older then. When we really need it is in that place of despair, as a reminder. No one is ever really powerless, he keeps repeating, half-believing. But listening to the single unceasing big bang of Embryonic, we know he's right.

MP3: See The Leaves

VIDEO: I Can Be A Frog


20 09:
10. The Flaming Lips "Embryonic"

11. St. Vincent "Actor"
12. The Maccabees "Wall Of Arms"
13. The xx "xx"
14. Paramore "Brand New Eyes"
15. The Twilight Sad "Forget The Night Ahead"
16. Atlas Sound "Logos"
17. mewithoutYou "It's All Crazy! It's All False! It's All A Dream! It's Alright"
18. Bat For Lashes "Two Suns"
19. The Horrors "Primary Colours"
20. The Decemberists "The Hazards Of Love"

11. h-e-l-p

favorite albums of 2009



#11

St. Vincent "Actor"

Walker Percy's The Moviegoer is a book about a guy who goes to the movies. He can pull their plots and patterns out of his own life, gradually he becomes nothing more than an actor... the events of real life have no more value or consequence than what he watches occurring onscreen. I think sometimes its easy to get wrapped up in the parts we play, the characters we are constantly putting on, and then soon before you know it you've become an extra in your own story. Actor is often about that. For a while I struggled to connect with St. Vincent, but with Actor I realized I was never supposed to. I noticed it in the second song, the way she allows what I assume is a synthesizer (but in reality sounds like a horribly detuned harmonium) to lead the song in, the way she dwells on it, an unending Vertigo shot throwing everything off balance, the way a director might linger on a shot long after it's natural end just to see what happens, it's uncomfortable, instinctively you expect a cut, but it doesn't come. Then there's the cover: a traditional head shot of a young woman who is by most accounts quite visually pleasing, but beauty isn't so beautiful when it's shoved in your face. The effect here is like something out of David Lynch's films... the shot that starts Blue Velvet where he forces the camera down through the prim, well-manicured suburban back yard into the dirt and worms and shit beneath it. I think you are meant to stare at this simple, cutesy image until you begin to understand all the oddity, and tragedy, and absurdity that lies beneath it. Laughing, with a mouth of blood. It's a sudden switch of perspective, a plot twist, and suddenly you have to reconsider everything.

This isn't singer-songwriter confessional, we're not interested in mere understanding, these are the bold and rule-breaking inventions of an auteur. That's the way St. Vincent composes her music... genuinely cheery, delightful melodies belie more difficult emotions and then unknowns attack... her compositions are often derailed, crushed, and/or unwound by dissonance with a fury of guitar skronk. The angles all incongruent, everything cast askew. It's a tableau of utter chaos exploding with razor-sharp shards of emotional truth, pieces, glimpses of feeling, they are scenes she is setting: today you found a lump in your breast, this morning you looked at your wife and saw a stranger. "Action." This is a musical maybe, but it's one like Black Orpheus or The Umbrellas Of Cherbourg where even life's most crushing uncertainties have somehow been ensnared in song. The sound is truly cinematic, at once whimsical and heartbreaking. These are songs but also scenes, character sketches, and like any good dramatic work they are constantly unfolding, developing conflict, gathering layers of meaning. At its core this is a deeply felt album about people, characters in which we recognize ourselves: we see our desire to be loved and appreciated, our valiant efforts to make sense in a senseless world, how all of our intentions from the noblest to the most flawed get caught in the technicalities and inexorability of everyday life. It's a bittersweet and complicated story, like a Woody Allen film. Actor goes for the things that escape us, the parts of life we can't seem to wrap ourselves around no matter how hard we try, and records it all, that beautiful dance number, in stunning VistaVision. No third act, no big speeches, no happy endings, here like in life nothing gets fixed, nothing resolves, the credits don't roll and there is no fade out. There's just certainty, and confusion, and a sudden cut to black. If I had to pick a soundtrack to score the year I've had, it would be this one. Here's hoping for a decent sequel.

MP3: Save Me From What I Want
VIDEO: Marrow


20 09:
11. St. Vincent "Actor"
12. The Maccabees "Wall Of Arms"
13. The xx "xx"
14. Paramore "Brand New Eyes"
15. The Twilight Sad "Forget The Night Ahead"
16. Atlas Sound "Logos"
17. mewithoutYou "It's All Crazy! It's All False! It's All A Dream! It's Alright"
18. Bat For Lashes "Two Suns"
19. The Horrors "Primary Colours"
20. The Decemberists "The Hazards Of Love"