What a Fool Believes

25. The Fall: Ersatz G.B. — If the voice of Tom Waits is a gargle of nails and screws, then the voice of Mark E. Smith is a cauldron of toil and trouble. After 29 albums, the bile and spleen no longer return to their proper place but linger in his throat, ready to be spewed again through microphones and out of speakers.
24. Wild Flag: Wild Flag — A riot of Nuggets Grrls occupying your basement. Give in to their demands.
23. The Horrors: Skying — Once we were goth punks screaming in black. Then we were psyched pupils of Geoff Barrow on the Autobahn. Now we’re swirling in the dreams left by Psychedelic Furs and Stone Roses. The hype is gone as the music begins to approach it.
22. Drake: Take Care — He’s got 1%er problems but refusing to rap about them in a wistful and charming manner over beats even more wistful and charming isn’t one.
21. Lady Gaga: Born This Way — Government Hookers, Heavy Metal, Judas Iscariot, Anthems, Leather, Clarence Clemons, Motorcycles, Bad Kids, Feminism, Jo Calderone, The Incubation Egg, Brian May, Monster Balls, Unicorns, German. What more could you want from Gaga?
20. Bon Iver: Bon Iver — Justin Vernon made a pilgrimage from a cabin in the woods, where he once sang lonesome songs to the snow, to the Range. Bruce, the boss of the Range, taught him the beauty in the slickness of autumn leaves and how to listen to the mandolin rain. Justin still has a lot to learn about the way it is though. Like what’s beyond the surface of those autumn leaves.
19. Girls: Father, Son, Holy Ghost — Like a remake of Harold and Maude. Harold (played Christopher Owens) is a young man with a troubled past who develops a relationship with Maude (played by The Purity of 50s/60s Pop). They cruise around the Bay Area in a suped-up convertible (played by Chet “JR” White) learning from one another until they reach Lombard Street and, while speeding down the winding road, fuse into a welcome anachronism that’s somehow fresh.
18. Stephen Malkmus & the Jicks: Mirror Traffic — Our Hero has now made as many albums with the Jicks as he did with the last crew. If you keep hoping for something new that sounds like something old, give it up already. If you love those old albums enough they will satiate you forever. (There was that reunion, too.) The Jicks are here to stay. And whether they’re jamming or making wily numbers with West Coast ease and Beck production, you should take them in. Not that Our Hero gives a damn if you do or not.
17. Tom Waits: Bad as Me — The carnival doesn’t rattle into town as often anymore, but it still shows up from time-to-time with that gravel-voiced misfit at the helm, shouting at you from a bath in the dunk tank or atop the rusted Ferris wheel about characters as salty, mysterious, and lovesick as him.
16. Yuck: Yuck — Teenage Fanclub’s Teenage Fan Club is all grown up. They’ve studied their saviors well. So well they’ve got their own take on the sound that’s got them their very own fan club.
15. M83: Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming — Like any good double LP, this one’s big and messy: slick and shimmering synth-pop for angel-winged lingerie models, a story-song of amphibious transformation by an imaginative child, pillowy interstitial atmospheres, spoken-word parting the maximalist maelstrom, odes to UFOs, and anthems with flute and saxophone breaks.
14. The War on Drugs: Slave Ambient — You could call it “Dreamericana” (see also: Real Estate and Kurt Vile). There’s as much time spent with the Traveling Wilburys as with the Cocteau Twins. The best time for this ambiance is in a car on the highway during the golden hour.
13. Cut Copy: Zonoscope — If Stereoscope is a technique for enhancing the illusion of depth by using two 2-D offset images combined to give the perception of 3-D, then maybe Zonoscope is a technique of combining multiple dance music sounds—Daft Punk and Fleetwood Mac’s “Everywhere” are just two examples—into one place, or zone, that the listener’s body will perceive as a dancefest.
12. Real Estate: Days —
“Hey it’s still nice out. Let’s go on the roof.”
“Yeah, definitely.”
“Grab that iPod dock”
…
“Where’d you get these lawn chairs?”
“Found em on the street.”
“Nice.”
“They’re almost exactly like the ones my parents had when I was a kid. The vinyl straps were just a different color.” 
…
“Want another beer?”
“Sure. This Octoberfest is good.”
…
“The sky’s lookin like peach juice.”
“Do they make peach juice?”
“I think so.”
…
“Turn this up.”
“It’s good, right?”
“Yeah. It’s nice.”
11. Kate Bush: 50 Words for Snow — The first snowfall of each year is just as spellbinding and wondrous an experience as it was the first time you saw it. But all too quickly the heavenly flurries turn to lead-gray muck that you have to slog through. Soon you begin to despise every single falling flake. Kate Bush has managed to capture that first snowfall in song and, though it touches on the long, cold nights to come, it never turns gray.
10. Radiohead: The King of Limbs — Motion is relative. Are you, anthem-craved, streaming over the landscape or is the landscape, of loop, twine, twist, and mesh, streaming over you?
9. tUnE-yArDs: w h o k i l l — Merrill Garbus is so vivacious that her Harry Potter Patronus would be a Godzilla of joie de vivre, gobbling up every sadsack into its big belly of de-light. Fill the streets and scream and dance with Joyzilla as the powerlines burst like fireworks.
8. Tim Hecker: Ravedeath, 1972 — Like listening to a ghost. You’re not hearing the organ directly so much as the effects of the organ’s afterlife filling the room.
7. Oneohtrix Point Never: Replica — SF-J was right on when he called this Blade Runner music. There’s a dystopian-future grime to the ambiance and loops of this record. Technology may not have caught up with what PKD and the film showed—no flying cars, no replicants—but Replica is there, spinning out of the speakers as Rick Deckard begrudgingly hunts around LA.
6. Iceage: New Brigade — It’s always the old that proclaim “Punk is dead.” The young are too busy discovering it, making it their own, and thrashing away to spout such bullshit.
5. Shabazz Palaces: Black Up — As Ishmael Butler clearly knows, any existential journey is going to be filled with twists and turns. He replicates the odyssey with shards of sound, staggering, morphing, popping, which he bobs and weaves around lyrically, the ideas stretching, mixing, snapping. But what makes this more than a hip-hop head trip is that Butler also knows that some things cannot be understood, only felt.
4. Cymbals Eat Guitars: Lenses Alien — An onslaught of words forming images of suburban teenage myths and exploits over indie rock born from Dinosaur Jr. and The Lonesome Crowded West. The onslaught and dynamic shifts can be a tough initiation but if you stay to explore all the parkways and cul-de-sacs, you’ll find it thoroughly rewarding.
3. St. Vincent: Strange Mercy — Cool compositions of anxiety, dread, sex, and violence, with guitar sounds like a lush revving Frankenstein’s Excitebike, by a woman who uses her physical and vocal beauty for creeps.
2. Atlas Sound: Parallax — The Man Who Fell to Earth as psychic state. He needs water for life, for communication of his alienation, programming droplets and channeling waves. With each new transmission his message becomes clearer, stronger, and, most importantly, more open. We listen to the expanse and wade out to join him.
1. Destroyer: Kaputt — Dan Bejar’s got a yacht and he makes one hell of a piña colada. Sometimes the sails are up, the sun is out, and the party’s grooving. Other times the wind is soft and the moon is glowing on the lazy waves lapping the hull. At all times it’s one slick voyage to Avalon.
00. Lou Reed & Metallica: Lulu — Oh man, you guys are funny!