They said it couldn't be done. I said "Phooey".
They said it was too early. I said "No, no, no". Oh, wait, that was Amy Winehouse.
Up until now, I had assumed that the race for that bogus but necessary title, album of the year, would be a two-horse affair between Espers' "III" and "The Courage of Others", by Midlake. They are both albums that reward, no, demand, repeated listening. Although I am totally into the Midlake at the moment (it was wrong of me to say that it doesn't have a "Roscoe"; it may actually have two or three), I suspect that it is the Espers record that may turn out to be the more lastingly "significant" of the two.
As we turn into the back straight of 2010, however, a third horse, which has been slowly creeping through the field, its vision obscured by the other contenders, has suddenly broken into a gallop and overtaken them all. That record is "Swim", by Caribou.
It has taken me some time to get past the fact that "Swim" isn't "Andorra" part two. It has none (or very little) of the luscious pastoral electro/acoustic psychedelia of that album. My early impression was that this quality hadn't actually been replaced by anything at all in particular, and thus I struggled to find a way in. But piece by piece I found myself being drawn to it, and now I'm in the kind of phase that I don't get into all that often these days, where this is frequently the only record I want to listen to. A similar thing happened last year with the Junior Boys' "Begone Dull Care", and so it was surprising, but also perhaps inevitable, that Mr Greenspan's (no, not that one) name turns up on the credits for "Swim". There is a similar attention to detail in the two albums, a sense that each individual sound has been given a serious amount of care and attention, and tweaked until, like the littlest bear's porridge, it is Just Right. You wouldn't want this quality in everything you listen to, but when it works it's more than a bit special.)
"Swim" may not be a terribly "immediate" or "direct" album, but, like "Andorra", it turns out to be totally psychedelic in its own way, and is almost overstuffed with wonderful passages, sounds and ideas. I still find it impossible to imagine that Caribou's songs are constructed, essentially, out of bits of other people's records: they seem too organic for that. Ah, the mysteries of the creative process. I suspect if I were a musician I would be even more in awe of this record than I am.
"Album of the year", then? What about Joanna Newsom, I hear you cry. Tracey Thorn. Real Estate. Tunng. Numerous African reissues. Tindersticks. The Magnetic Fields. The Fall. (It's been a long, long time since I would have seriously considered nominating a Fall album as the best record released during a particular year, but there is none of the usual best-record-since-whatever over-egging about "Your Future Our Clutter", it's a genuinely urgent, intense, compelling marvel.) Woods. Emeralds. Jeremy Jay. Tame Impala. "Total 11". jj. Ellen Allien. The Books. Julian Lynch. Lindstrom and Christabelle. Max Richter. A few others that I have no doubt forgotten to mention. And what about the unknown albums still to be released in 2010? (Not forgetting, either, the other two records mentioned earlier.) And that's without even acknowledging the existence of the elephant in all of our living rooms. [Hey, wait, James Murphy might be a big bloke, but he's not *that* big -- Ed.]
But this is where I sit, or "swim", for now.
