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...

More often than not I miss the debut of someone genuinely exciting or interesting - I can't keep ahead of everything by myself. So I'll treat this as I treat debut albums (with a "for fans of" spot at the bottom), since I suspect there're more than just little old me with the same predicament. Twin Shadow, stage name of George Lewis Jr., a Dominican Republic-born, Florida-raised, did technically breakthrough in 2010 with his debut album Forget (which I'm told is rather brilliant, but haven't got around to listening to yet). A mere year and a half later, Confess emerges on the wave of Florence + the Machine support slots, and (perhaps with her influence) a whole new range of 80s sounds. Persisting throughout the entire listening of this album there's a nagging feeling that you've heard a certain chord or instrumental inclusion somewhere else. It's unexplainable. But opener 'Golden Light' is one such moment, a synth-powered g...