Two Thousand & Ten

Box Elder - Microdots (mp3)

The Honey Pies - Bossanova (mp3)

Collarbones - Beaman Park (mp3)

Fire! Santa Rosa, Fire! - Animal Spirit Guide (mp3)

The Keepsakes - Tired (mp3)

Our Husband - Villages (mp3)

Fake Tan - I Won't Flirt (mp3)

Matt Banham - Save Me (mp3)

Steering By Stars - Ether (mp3)

Dialect & Despair - Prolific (mp3)

It's a tricky thing to list and I have probably definitely missed someone or something that I'll kick myself over later. But anyway, this is my top 10 for Adelaide in the last 12 months. I'm not sure if this list is a best album or best song or best EP hootenany, but I think it pretty accurately reflects the sounds from around this town that have left an impression on me and probably/hopefully others this year. No Battery Kids, no City Riots, no regrets. It might also be worth noting that three of my inclusions are apparently (although with no shortage of ambiguity) no longer with us, and for they we doth shed a tear. Guess which ones!

Tiger Choir - Young Loving (mp3)

Svavar Knutur - Emotional Anorexic (mp3)

Kins - United Fate (mp3)

Darren Hanlon - Scenes From A Separation (mp3)

Otouto - Astronauts (mp3)

Sufjan Stevens - Too Much (mp3)

Beach House - Lover Of Mine (mp3)

Best Coast - Crazy For You (mp3)

Hello Satellites - Building A Wall (mp3)

Jonny Telafone - Pitter Patter (mp3)

Dan Kelly - West Coast Fishing Incident (mp3)

Elsewhere, these are a bunch of sounds from interstate and abroad, some of which aren't particularly adventurous choices but have still provided an abundance of good listening from January to now. The more predictable picks (Sufjan, etc.) I was pretty sure I'd swoon over one way or another, but more than half of them have been complete surprises, artists from Hobart, Iceland and the wildernesses of... Melbourne(?) whom I probably wouldn't have heard but for a few lucky coincidences. In some ways that's the best kind of music, right?

Fingers crossed for 2011.

The Keepsakes

The Keepsakes - Bells (mp3)

Somehow I let eight months pass without mentioning it, but The Keepsakes released their debut album back in April, finally committing to tape (or hard drive) many of the finest guitar pop songs written in Adelaide in recent years. The album for the most part makes good on Wignall's knack for pretty amazing songs with effortless, buoyantly acrobatic melodies all delivered in his great Lucksmith-y voice with a distinctly Australian sound. The guitars are at times crunchy and at others soft, but always catchy and brimming with a relaxed suburban bliss. With this record we've finally had a chance to enjoy one of Adelaide's most naturally gifted songwriters in full flight, something hinted at throughout his involvement in bands from Zeta to Deja Entendu. Although admittedly the production does seem to dull the edges of some of the live favourites, and to me no full band recording will ever top last year's acoustic demo of 'Paper Bridges', it's still a darn good listen.

After absconding to the US after the release and leaving his bandmates to their own devices with 20th Century Graduates, it seems like the band have wound themselves down a tad in recent months while Wignall busies himself with new band Oh Minor. That said, their brief semi-appearance at the Honey Pies album launch in November with Mark Curtis on extra guitar was a fun reminder of just how good they and the songs on their album can be.

Crocodile Onesie on Bandcamp

Wintercoats

Wintercoats - Windmill (mp3)

Not entirely unlike a subdued, Melbournian Owen Pallett, James Wallace's music under the title Wintercoats is the sound of a glacier thawing. In a nice way mind you, with none of the nasty climate change connotations... just the natural ebb and flow of a slowly moving body of ice melting and refreezing under a winter sun.

Thus ended one of the more masturbatory passages on this blog, but not an entirely inaccurate one. Througout his Cathedral EP Wallace blends his knack for subtly chanted but involving vocal melodies with lightly pulsating string loops, and the result is pretty damn beautiful. While playing with imagery and influences drawn from the kind of romanticised winters found well above the equator, there is something Jae Laffer (The Panics) about his voice that lends a nice antipodean twist to some very Northen Hemisphere sounds.

Earlier in the month he also released a new track from his second EP, which while not quite as instantly brilliant as some Cathedral cuts still serves as quite an exciting prelude.

Cathedral EP on Bandcamp

Hazel Brown

Hazel Brown - Calligraphy (mp3)

I had the pleasure of interviewing Hazel Brown of Melbourne art-pop trio Otouto last week, which led me to an Unearthed page with several of the songs that constituted the solo project that eventually became her current bad. While these tracks don't have quite the same spiky, rhythmic quirk and space about them, her voice is still a little enchanting and a lot of the building blocks and raw grey matter remain. She does utilise a more conventional songwriting style and a more full bodied approach to instrumentation, with a robust, soulful rhythm section bobbing along to her crooning. While still featuring the drumming of present drummer and collaborator Kishore Ryan it's a little busier than Otouto, and though arguably not quite as hip or inventive (Brown seemed herself hesitant to admit the comparative merits of her earlier work) tracks like Calligraphy still have more than enough merit to warrant many a listen.

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Danvers & Ghost Knife

Danvers - Centre Of Town (mp3)

Y'all know Fire! Santa Rosa, Fire! right? Of course you do silly. Anyway, their affable co-leader and grower of ginger beards has long pedalled his far sparser and melancholic solo wares alongside his more celebrated output with the six-piece. While until now Danvers has consisted largely of a quietly released mini-LP 'Forest Witch' a few years ago and occasional personal appearances, the project has kept a fairly low profile. That might step up a notch now with the addition of the impeccably titled 'Ghost Knife', a backing band consisting of Fire! collaborator Sam Stearne and Rory O'Connor of Steering By Stars, ex-Aviator Lane and more recently Curses.

The solo + duo trio combo played their first show a week ago with Sincerely, Grizzly and while Rory and Sam never over-stated their presence (keeping their contributions to a pretty minimal drum and bass rhythm section for half the set and sitting down for the rest), they nevertheless added that little bit of grit and flesh that Dave's skeletal guitar work and softly sung compositions needed. Even if this is but a friendly side project to serve as an outlet for a quieter songwriting tangent performed to friends and well meaning fanboys like myself, its a pretty nice one.

They're playing early in the new year with Tasmania's Tiger Choir and locals Box Elder, a combination so dizzyingly swell by my watch that I may have no choice but skip Thee Oh Sees return show at Format, goshdarnit.

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Jonny Telafone

Jonny Telafone - The Ballad Of Samwise Gamgee (mp3)

Pat Lockwood of Box Elder turned me onto this tumblr which collects a whole bundle of free releases by known and lesser known Australian artists from Sydney and beyond. Aside from being a fantastic source of new local music that would probably be difficult to even know about outside of the geographically specific scenes from which they're drawn, they also introduced me to the work of Melbourne (not Canberra) electronic/folk artist Jonny Telafone.

Particularly great is his recent-ish cassette album 'Wherever The Wind Blows', which combines brittle acoustic guitars with creaky drums (both real and synthesised) and the kind of unchallenging but somehow incredibly intoxicating songs with a charm akin to sitting on a couch watching Lord of the Rings all day. Speaking of which, 'The Ballad Of Samwise Gamgee', one of many album highlights, incorporates some amusingly tongue in cheek Sean Astin dialogue at the tail-end of an otherwise pretty sincere sounding extrapolation of Tolkien's 'Road Goes Ever On'.

Outside of that excursion into fantasy literature, the album is grounded in a pervasive melancholy which pretty much drips from tracks like 'It's Only Ever You' and 'Howl At The Moon'. But as with Frodo's seemingly inescapable burden in the aforementioned ballad, there's always a sense of optimism just around the corner. While it mightn't be something quite as dramatic as the knowledge that there's some good in this world, there's an endearing lightness to the moping. There might be some forgotten sweets in the pantry, at least. In that respect it's similar in some ways to Matt Banham's acoustic output between his early No Through Road albums and more recent solo material.

All or most of his released can be downloaded from the Dream Damage website, and while I've made a big deal of loving his digi-folk stylings, its worth noting that his prolific output varies wildly and this one definitely sits at the friendlier, more accessible end of the spectrum.

Jonny Telafone @ Dream Damage

Atlas Sound

Atlas Sound - Mona Lisa (mp3)

There's little to naught that I can say add to the matter of Bradford Cox's amusing and a little inspiring Bedroom Databank adventures in November. Admittedly I'm a relatively recent convert to the Atlas Sound/Deerhunter magic bag of blogspot tricks, but all's I want to say is, Mona Lisa is one of the more effortlessly perfect pop songs I've heard this year, much as Shelia was in 2009. If the boy keeps churning out lazy hooks and nicely crooked sounding acoustic guitar and percussion arrangements like this it'd be alright by me. None of it is particularly challenging or earth shattering, but it has that undefinable quality that wraps you up like a comfortable doona.

But of course, he also releases similarly flawless 'proper' albums with his day job. Oh, and then he throws another sweet Christmas song into the ring as well, just for kicks. Sheesh!

Download all and more on Bradford's blog...

Traveller & Fortune

Traveller & Fortune - Little Plastic People (mp3)

As leader of The Art Therapists Tom West spent a few years playing around Adelaide and became familiar to me as that CD in the Big Star local artist shelf that I often considered buying but always ended up with another Poly&TheStatics EP instead. That excuse doesn't really fly with his most recent outfit Traveller & Fortune, where West showcases his intricately written folk pop and incredibly rich, Ryan Adams-esque voice. His lightly plucked and strummed acoustic guitar arrangements are also embellished by all sorts of instrumentation twee and/or otherwise, from double bass to saxaphone along with gorgeous three part harmonies courtesy of his lovely companions, which include the unrelated Jayne West who can also be found playing her own folk songs around our town.

They put out an extended EP a month or two ago, and from what I've heard it is pretty lovely indeed. It can be downloaded at this here link below:

Bandcamp