My favourite albums of the decade #25 and #24 (fuck this is going to take a long time)

Tweet Time to stop gnawing your fingernails guys, the exit poll results from my brain have started to trickle in. But first..a picture of Santa, taken after he rolled into Kells atop a fire engine and heroically switched on the Christmas lights. Thanks Santa, we were genuinely worried this year.

As you can see from the picture, Santa also managed to accidentally light up a person. Thankfully, she only suffered minor burns, and, being in the civil defense, was able to regenerate the damaged flesh using her special suit.

But second...Candy Claws (Santy Claus's lil indie cousins) are dropping by tomorrow night as part of their virtual tour! Pop in at 7pm to catch their exclusive video.

Right then, the list. Oh one last thing. I said I'd be rigorous, but didn't really manage. The closest I got was faffing around with scraps of paper with album titles scribbled on them last Sunday afternoon. It's a list in flux, but I'd like to think it's representative of my relationship with music over the last nine years. In others words, some stuff is pretty obvious, and some is less so. It's all very personal though.

#25 Bloc Party - Silent Alarm (2005)

A couple of weeks ago I listened to Silent Alarm for the first time in a while and it pretty much punched me in the face for not remembering its brilliance. It also kneed me in the gut with this deep and weepy sense of nostalgia, which is odd because it only came out in 2005. While my getting smashed and hopping around indie niteclubs to 'Helicopter' might partly explain this response, I think Kele Okereke's songs themselves should probably shoulder most of the blame. Especially the less visceral and more romantic numbers like 'This modern love' and 'So here we are'. Indeed, I'd go so far as to say these songs are so breathy and evocative that they colour memories in retrospect. Like, did I really run down Brighton Pier with Tamara one chilly December night to watch the stars turn to dawn over the English Channel, holding hands as the MDMA we got from Effie's mate...shite, that was an episode of Skins wasn't it?

Silent Alarm: a lighthouse in the decade's dark ocean of NME guitar indie, and better than the Libertines.

#24 Luomo - Vocalcity (2000)

In the sort of marriage between the visual and the audio aesthetic that I love, the cover - a face fragmenting into tiny squares across an ice-blue disco ball - gives you a bit of an idea of what's going on with this one. Volcacity is the Finnish dance producer Sasu Ripatti's (aka Vladislav Delay)'s first and best release as Luomo, the moniker he adopted for recordings that spin endless lengths of strange fabric out of the bones of house music (fruit of the loom-o?). Beats rattle and click like marbles dropped on hard surfaces in huge hollow spaces while analogue bass lines contort themselves in a receding sea of jazzy movement that shifts seamlessly across lengthy tracks. All the while, that mainstay of house music, a treated vocal (male? female? joyous? mournful? emotionless?) is an ever-present will o'the wisp leading us through Vocalcity's organic musical terrain. Actually, the word 'organic' gets bandied around a lot in relation to certain types of dance music. Volcacity deserves the description though. If you buried it in your back garden and sprayed it with baby bio, it would probably grow into the next Luomo album.