My Five Year Plan

Here’s where it gets good. Remember what I said about this year being a bad year for music? Well, it was - but the following ten are all albums I can support 100%. Hope you can too.

10. Tokyo Jihen - Adult
Sample song: “Toumei Ningen”

Tokyo Jihen is the band of one-time solo J-Pop icon Shiina Ringo, and it’s all sorts of crazy 60s Yakuza jazz stylings with elastic cartoon vocals, angular guitarwork, and handclaps galore. I know not a word of Japanese, so I can’t tell you what a single song on this album is about (except maybe “Superstar”), but I can tell you that every song on this album is worth listening to. Again and again.

9. Drive-By Truckers - A Blessing and a Curse
Sample song: “Wednesday”

Critics said, “It’s not as good” because it’s not a song cycle about mythical Southern figures and thus its gritty hard rock contains no safe distance from the sheer emotionality. No, there’s no distance here - just personal songs about hard luck, dead cousins, addiction, and living in a trailer park near Cape Canaveral. It’s the most personal album from the band yet, and one of their best - evoking the spirit of the modern post-industrial South just as vividly as earlier albums explored the legends of the past.

8. Amy Diamond - Still Me Still Now
Sample song: “No Regrets”

I’ll be perfectly honest - if Amy Diamond’s debut album This is Me Now had been released in 2006 (when I heard it for the first time), it’d probably be my number one. Really. I am the biggest fan of this little girl - she’s fourteen, she’s from Sweden (of course) and she sings these relentlessly upbeat pop songs which feature a thousand hooks and great production. Where This is Me Now leaned a little on the electro-pop side, Still Me Still Now explores and bends genres - ska, rock, Jon Brion-style baroque pop. The songwriting, perhaps, isn’t as consistent as it is on her debut, but the performance is - expressive, unique, and with nary a hint of autotuning, Diamond is a pop singer par excellance, and Still Me Still Now is a fine venue for her unbelievable talent.

7. Josephine Foster - A Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing
Sample song: “An Die Musik”

Josephine Foster, she of Born Heller, is nothing if not a daring experimentalist, and this is by far her most ambitious experiment yet. The rules are simple - take 19th century German art songs by the likes of Brahms, Schubert, and Schumann, add acid guitar wanking. Repeat. That the results are so overwhelmingly successful is shocking - Foster’s haunting soprano (double and triple tracked in close harmony) winds their way through lyrics alien to her intended listener, skirting between melodrama and spiritual purity to create an entirely unique revision of ‘classical music.’ By far the most difficult track is the twelve-minute freeform dirge “Auf Einer Burg,” with Foster’s vocals buried deep, erupting into strange vibratos and processed segments in counterpoint to the buzz and hum of guitar. It’s basically musique concrete at this point, but it’s also one of the most relatably human works I’ve heard all year.