A God-awful Small Affair

Now, for the best bit... It's common sense that the album is the most rewarding and complete phenomenon within music, and that's why the whole prediction that the mp3 would kill it off turning out to be a load of nonsense overjoyed me. Sure, there's been a lot of deviation from the format: download-for-free EPs and mixtapes and so on - but these have always existed since the cassette generation. Maybe it's with the benefit of hindsight that I scoff at that, but it's mostly preamble to my painstaking and largely arbitrary decision to crown my favourite fifty albums of 2012. I haven't quite got around to reviewing as many albums as I did in 2011 - 50 fewer, in fact, as it stands, although I endeavour to close that gap by at least five over the festive period - and in all honesty I've not really been wowed in 2012 with as much frequency as I was in 2010 or 2011. For that reason, a lot of the first twenty are filler albums, and aren...

There hasn't been this much fuss made over a pair of American lips since Monica Lewinsky. It was all so promising at the beginning - the nostalgic amateurism of the music video for last year's Video Games dazzled an online audience and the sinister, deathly tinge on her breed of romance enchanted many. And there's little on show here that'll hush the haters - she nonchalantly sings "money is the anthem of success" in a way sure to prompt much sardonic eye-rolling - but there're times when I'm convinced that many online music fans will hate over the most pathetic of things. The issues of her authenticity are pooed when you pore over the careers of David Bowie and Madonna, and any qualms over her supposed plastic surgery are frighteningly shallow at best. When did music become such a hotbed of misguided misogyny? Why can't popstars just emerge without about seven million claims of falsehood and artificiality, now? The album begins with the title tra...