There is something special about finishing something at the end of the year and starting the new year anew. I know that the calendar is just a method to track the sun in the sky, but every year it seems that more and more pressure is put on you at the beginning of the new [...]

What a nice album to end my project on. So many great artists have passed through my ears this year, and fittingly, this is the last that I will count for my project. While I have had some doozies to cover this year (‘My Morning Jacket’, ‘The Arcade Fire’, ‘Sufjan Stevens’, ‘Neil Young’, ‘Turin Brakes’) [...]

Working with Neil Young must have been a huge honour for the guys from Pearl Jam. Firstly, working with a genius like him would have been great, but for him to agree to release their tapes from their recording sessions must have been a trip. To know that you created music to a level that [...]

Another beautiful album from Starsailor, who I am beginning to think cannot do anything wrong. Like “Love Is Here” the music is epic, well written and at times, heart wrenching. James Walsh’s vocals could make the someone with a heart of stone weak at the knees and his collaboration with the rest of the band [...]

Gomez have the ability to flip and change as a musical beast from album to album (‘Abandoned Shopping Trolley Hotline’ showed this to great effect). Their first two albums were a little similar, but after that they got more and more adventurous. ‘How We Operate’ sees them return to their early career gameplan – sticking [...]

Elbow’s ‘A Cast of Thousands‘ surprised me. Having never heard of them, I had a preconceived notion that I wouldn’t like them, but found there was a lot of that album that was enjoyable. This album is a little different, one I would consider a little darker, but in a way, a little more organic. [...]

‘A Hundred Miles Off’ was released with the same fanfare here as ‘Bows and Arrows’ was; none. It was so under advertised, I completely missed it. Me taking my time to listen to it probably wasn’t helped further by the fact it was not given the same critical acclaim as ‘Bows and Arrows’ – and [...]

I’ve decided that Death Cab For Cutie are the best at what they do. They walk a fine line between pop, rock and indie music and do it well. Some of their stuff is catchy, some grows on you after a while and some takes a long time to get into. Ben Gibbard’s voice holds [...]