2008 has - like most years - been full of ups and downs. I’m suspicious of the end of year critics who proclaim it to have been either a vintage or meagre year for music. The tunes are always out there, it’s just a question of whether you’re lucky enough to stumble upon them at the right moments. The following seven songs may not have been the most popular or most prominent songs of the year, but I chanced upon them at the right moment to hear their magic.

City Middle - The National

This will, perhaps, be the song that stays most with me. For ever put off by the band’s name, this was the year I put my defences down and realised that I had missed one of the most innovative and important bands of the last ten years. In common with the rest of the album alligator (2005), this song pulls out all the tools at this gifted band’s disposal - from vocal lines through to the drums (how many bands can you name where the drums are used as an instrument rather than a fancy metronome?) - and employs them effortlessly to create a searing epic full of ambiguity and space. A band not afraid to aim high. 

Open Relationship - Ryan Mintz

How do you make a song brave, ballsy, and fragile at the same time? Well, you could do worse than listen to Ryan Mintz’s Open Relationship to take your cue. Everything here rests on Mintz’s voice - similar to Cat Stevens in some respects - which rather than being perfect is beautifully human. My chief complaint about soul-searching singer-songwriters is that most rarely manage that elusive alchemy that changes navel-gazing into art that can move someone else, or to put it another way, from a whine into a solid song. Mintz does just that here.

Folding Stars - Biffy Clyro

There’s nothing more satisfying - for a music fan - than watching a band progress, perfecting their art. For me, Scottish band Biffy Clyro had always been full of potential, but never quite lived up to their promise. The album Puzzle (2007), though announced itself as that moment when their intelligence, melody, and passion all gelled together in equal meaure - balanced,  and yet rocking on the edge. It was superb, and this was one of the best moments. A song facing death and loss, transforming the pain into a poetic, poignant, and huge love song. 

Italian Girls on Mopeds - Andy White

Andy White, I reasoned to myself back in the ’90s in Dublin, is an acquired taste and won which I don’t have. His voice too distinctive, his northern roots too apparent to make sense to me. It might be age or wisdom that lead me to re-evaluate this year, as I spent muchpleasant  time in the company of his songs - or perhaps it was simply that this song would win over the harshest of critics. It’s crafted, light of heart, and full of the joys of life. Rave on. Can’t find a decent video from youtube, so head straight over to Andy’s MySpace page to hear the song.

The Vanishing of Maria Schneider - dEUS

This year saw the welcome return to form of Belgian band dEUS, after the relative dissapointment of their last album Pocket Revolution (and relative is the key word there - even when they’re not 100% on form they’re more interesting than most others).  In an upcoming interview with TMO Tom Barman apparently* voiced dissapointment with how this track, a duet with Elbow’s Guy Barlow, turned out, but to my ears it’s just perfect. Lush, romantic, and experimental the song takes as its pivot the image of Maria Schneider, the star of Bertolucci’s classic Last Tango in Paris and becomes a grand meditation on ageing, fame, and the passing of time. The video is a live performance, from the studio (but it’s missing Barlow and the lush sound)

Gold - Interference

This is an old song, but one that suddenly found a new audience this year thanks to the huge success of the Irish film Once. While the film centres on the songs of Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova, there is a magical moment when, at a party, Fergus O’Farrel of the Interference sings this, one of his signature tunes. It’s apt because the song is, it seems to me, very much about being amongst friends - about the opposite of isolation. It opens with an acoustic guitar setting the tone, shortly followed by the other instruments joining in - and joining in is the key phrase here. Then O’Farrell’s unmistakeable voice, perfectly complimented by Hansard’s backing vocals, takes over - with the musicians playing around and in response. As his voice swoops, moulding the song to its climax, the various elements of the song unite into something positively thrilling.Beautiful is an over-used adjective when talking about songs, but there’s no more appropriate description here. This song is a thing of rare beauty. 

*TMO editor Andy Lawless did the interview recently, and let me see a draft.

It’s harder than you might think, choosing seven songs that in one way or another stamped themselves indelibly on your year. Far easier would be a round up of albums (which would certainly include those by lisa hannigan, robert plant & alison krauss, noah and the whale, and elbow), but that’s not, sadly, in my brief.

So, with a certain amount of caution and hesitation, here’s my seven songs from 2008

More News from Nowhere - Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds

The thing that makes rock such a redundant form is that it’s mainly bright young things playing it, or else boring old farts reworking their old tricks - often to great commercial success, like AC/DC or the Stones. In the other arts age is an advantage, creating complexity - Yeats is great not because he was inspired in his youth (although he was), but because of the contrast he displayed in a lifetime of work. One of the few artists actually taking up that baton is Nick Cave with  his bad seeds, who constantly seem to be re-inventing themselves and refusing to stay still. The process continued this year with Dig Lazarus DIg, a brilliant, clever, and articulate album showing that rythmn isn’t the exclusive prerogative of youth that we may have thought. This particular track has a great riff, however restrained (in fact, that’s the point), and lyrically catapults us into Cave’s version of Nighttown.

Lupe Brown - The Fratellis

Then again, there’s nothing wrong with throwing out a similar formula for your second album, if the formula sounds so good. The album on the whole didn’t excite me as much as their first, but this track is a stand out. It’s got it all, from the opening guitar riff, through to the eye-catching title. It’s amazing how a band that rips off so many other sounds, manages to sound so thoroughly themselves.

Crawled out of the Sea (interlude) - Laura Marling

I spent so much time this year listening to young women (duffy & kate nash for example) that I started to feel slightly grubby, but there was really no other choice given their talent, and out of a talented lot Laura Marling was, perhaps, the most accomplished. This song is delivered with a calm confidence that most performers would be lucky to achieve after a lifetime of performing. Mysterious and blustering, it has the good sense to stick to its ridiculously short 1.16 seconds level. Whisper genius.

1492 - Counting Crows

Not that they ever really lost form, but this year’s album from Counting Crows, Saturday Nights Sunday Mornings, made a welcome return to some of the themes and sounds from their second (and best) album Recovering the Satellites. This track (apparently one that was written a number of years ago) is worth it just for the guitar sound alone (producer Gil Norton working the same magic he brought to the band on that second album) - and Adam Duritz reminds us that as far as writing and delivering lyrics go, he remains far ahead of the American pack. It’s no regression, though, as they push, punch, and pull the songs through to reflect where the band are at now.

Venn Diagram - Lisa Hannigan

Three Monkeys went on the record a number of years ago with its unbounded admiration for Lisa Hannigan’s voice, suggesting back then that it was time for her to step out from the shadows as Damien Rice’s foil. It took some time - and a callous sounding order to pack her bags from Rice - but 2008 saw the release of Hannigan’s debut album Sea Sew, and it was well worth the wait.  The spine-tingling hook in this song is a non-verbal ‘a-ha’ refrain , which takes on shades - thanks to her inimitable voice - of passion, frustration, control and tenderness. The lyrics are great (”I stumble out into the afternoon. still salty from drink and the late night pool I’ll be gone an hour at most, you will be more diagonal “) but she could sing about the football results for all I care, as long as it’s with that voice. 

Armies - Anton Mink

 I listened to a huge amount of demo tapes this year, but one unsigned band stood out more than any other - the American band Anton Mink. The biggest challenge to a new band is having a sound that can immediately stand out and grab attention; Anton Mink’s heavy bass sound is upbeat, dynamic and open to space, but they know where their trump card lays and the focus is rightly on lead singer Chloa’s  rough, melodic vocals. Somewhere between Janis Joplin and Billie Holliday, her voice immediately stamps identity on songs that, on closer inspection have plenty of substance to back them up. Search them out.

Evil Urges - My Morning Jacket

Tenessee band My Morning Jacket’s 2008 album Evil Urges seems to have dissapointed and confounded as many as it’s pleased, coming on the heels of the more homogenous album z. As an album it’s an interesting and difficult beast to grapple with, but the title track grabbed me for various reasons. First, there’s that scrotum-tightening vocal where Jim James sings as if his soul (or other parts) were in the palm of the devil. Funky and yet deliberate, the band plays like a machine running at full throttle with the very real danger of falling apart.  It’s southern white boys hovering between Prince and Lenny Kravitz - and that hovering is all to the good. Last but not least there’s that crazed  southern-rock boogie that comes in from nowhere towards the end, where it sounds as if the band are down at the crossroads looking for a deal.

Although I claim to be a holier than thou leftie, there are some conservative impulses I just can’t budge, one of them being a rather straightforward, no-frills list of 7 songs which encapsulate 2008 for me. Yeah, I’m a party pooper, so what? Christmas is for schmucks anyway…

So in order…

(1) Midnight’s Another Day - Brian Wilson

Having critics on your side isn’t always beneficial for creative geniuses, not least of all for those who’ve had to grin and bare some appalling saccharine muck from rock’s Big Kahuna in the last 20 years. That’s why Midnight’s Another Day and its parent album That Lucky Old Sun feel like the casting away of a terrible burden, for Wilson, who has at last justified himself as something more than a corroding sacred cow, and for everyone else. Now we can say “nice one Brian” without having to bite our lips.

(2) Invisible - Paul Weller

Another lost soul redeemed. Weller’s knack for separating himself from N.M.E./Q pleasing dirges and replacing the dreary karma with a collection of finely crafted adrenalin rush observations no 50 year has any right to conjure, puts him back to a pedestal the liggers and starfuckers of 1995 this time won’t be able to slither up. Invisible is the pick of an alarmingly good bunch.

(3) La Vida Callada - Natacha Atlas

David Hutcheon from The Times took this one to his heart during the summer, obviously hypnotised by its lilting strings, sweet, yet prompt and guttural harmonies. While not to be left standing, an acoustic heartbeat gently thumped away on the comforts of a cha’abi moderne lineage. As Hutcheon was swaying underneath a setting sun/rising moon combo, he wasn’t the only one with the swishing sounds of nocturnal sands brushing against his ears…

(4) Geography - Messiah J. And The Expert

Something has never been (nor is going to be) resolved in post-colonial academia. The question, just what makes something Irish, has become so tiresome that guys like Messiah J. And The Expert do so much to give the nation a well deserved kick in the genitals, it actually wouldn’t matter were they from Ireland, Iraq, or anywhere else the donkey’s tail is pinned on to. All that matters is that Geography moves like a rattlesnake in a tornado and Ireland may at last be finding a penchant for groups who don’t need sob stories, goatees, and the approval of 98FM.

(5) L’Africain - Tiken Jah Fakoly

I first saw this guy at the Dun Laoghaire Festival of World Cultures in August in the company of a woman I would now rather forget. As for Fakoly, well, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

(6) Out Of Our Hands - Gemma Hayes

She now negotiates an uncertain middle ground the hyperbole of 2002 couldn’t have possibly imagined. A shame really, as the Tipperary singer-songwriter has yet to even hit her peak if classy material like this is anything to go by.

(7) Sex On Fire - Kings Of Leon

Because Of The Times is the album which preceded Only By The Night. Because this is by far the dirtiest pre/post-coital sonic frenzy you are likely to hear until Bon Scott stops being dead, you better accept that these hairy bums are here for the duration. In many ways they’re all the better for the abrupt end to critical idolatry, and a clearly visible media backlash, as without the frustrating binary to drive them, the hunger that sears right through Sex On Fire would surely have smoldered into dust.