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...

Whether it's socially acceptable that I should start with new noise-pop acts and then work my way backwards onto 2008's debut Crystal Castles album or not, it's what I've done. Back then I was still quite wide-eyed and eager to just delve into classic rock stuff, and it wasn't really until the release of Sleigh Bells' debut that I thought "hang on, maybe this sort of stuff is nice too". Thus I found Alice Practice , the Toronto duo's biggest shot at a crossover hit, and a love bloomed. Although something of a nightmare for album title searches, Crystal Castles have done little that disappoints thus far. They've pulled off collaborations with Robert Smith and Thurston Moore, so y'know: good signs all around. With their third release, though, something fails to click. Sonically, the record's fine - it opens with the haunting, echoed 'Plague', a rich house influence poised with these screeching, ripping synths that make...