To immerse yourself in HTRK’s world is to call upon your greatest fears and insecurities and to fall in a fallow heap on the floor. It’s the chill sound of sensory deprivation that envelopes and preys up the mind. Occasionally it teases, thin ripples of romance and eroticism, as found on their debut Marry Me Tonight, but still dysfunctional and warped to the core. It is something only the willfully perverse would invite though their door.

Picking up the pieces following the suicide of bandmate is an excruciatingly tough and precarious position for a band to find themselves in, especially one whose sound is so emotionless and bleak, loved and unloved. Stewart’s basslines, still intact from when Work (Work, Work) was in the early stages of being written, are a potent and sad reminder of his immeasurable talent and his lynchpin position in the band.

Work (Work, Work) finds HTRK trapped by circumstance. Quoted as wanting to let the album come out as is, unfinished from when Sean took his life to let those recordings be the final word for that era of the band, Work (Work, Work) captures a band trying to restructure and redefine their sound with mixed results. The ghostly minimalism that is their calling card, the flatlining 808 pulse and metallic clang remain, but Stewart’s undulating throb which added an element of dread and discomfort to their sound no longer anchors and amplifies vocalist Jonnine Standish’s dispassionate murmurs.

The mood is confusing, which does factor in upon the disorienting nature of HTRK, but it leaves the listener questioning what is Work working towards? The closing ‘Body Double’, appears to blackly comment on their decision to continue as a band while pointing the way forward, with the lines “There’s nothing personal about it/It’s just business, baby”, playing out into the final muffled refrain, “New blood for hire…”. This is a sad record, and clearly a difficult one for any band. Work (Work, Work) should be regarded as less a new beginning and more a moment for HTRK to collect themselves before moving forward.

New Jersey’s four-piece Real Estate made some real waves with their self-titled debut album, a concise gem of a record filled with bright indie jangle pop rock songs. Less than two years later, they’re back with another set of ten brief songs, an almost identical LP in regards to length, but quite different thematically.

Both of Real Estate’s albums were released in the fall, but Days is the first to really sound like an autumn record. The songs are glazed with garage rock production, heavy on the echos, and with a melancholy bent. Just as melodic, if not more, than on their self-titled debut, but with a tendency for sweeping choruses and instrumental-heavy tracks. Each cut stands alone by itself really well, and works even better as an album.

Think Belle & Sebastian at their simplest, or Rogue Wave at their quietest. “Easy” opens the album with restrained spunk, a very pleasant melody wrapped around slightly gloomy guitars and chords that vary from the confident to cautious in a matter of seconds. “Green Aisles” follows suit with a slower tempo and plenty of instrumental filler. The construction of each of the songs would be fairly repetitious (jangle guitars, drums, repeat) if Real Estate hadn’t been so good at nailing the melody and the ethereal vocals. Martin Courtney’s gentle treatment of the lead vocals blends in seamlessly with the music and is easy to lose in the mix without focusing in on them.

“It’s Real” is about as catchy and spirited as the album gets before retreating into another introspective cut, “Kinder Blumen”. There’s a lot of subtle charm to the album, such as “Younger Than Yesterday”, a laid-back nod towards mellow 90’s alt-rock, and “Wonder Years”, a delightful little folk tune (remember the Belle & Sebastian comparison?) complete with do-do-do-do chorus and layered harmonies. Real Estate closes the LP with “All The Same” which eventually breaks down into a mini jam before finally sputtering out.

The extra creativity on this final song could have been useful throughout more of the album, as I’m sure some listeners will tire of the band’s narrow musical palette, but it also caps off an otherwise flighty album with a seven minute instrumental flourish, and is a welcome twist to the norm. Where Real Estate really shine is their ability to craft sweet, simple songs underneath a moody, yet gorgeous, shell. This more than trumps the lack of variety, it makes it a non-issue, and should ensure Real Estate’s sophomore record will have a place amongst 2011’s best.

A popular post-2000 practice is to add the word “art” to the front of any genre name: art rock, art punk, art pop. It denotes strangeness, and usually a sense of clinical restraint. Otouto is a self-proclaimed art pop band, and you can’t really fault them for the label, because all other ways of describing their fantastically unique aesthetic — minimalist soul, cupboard pop — sound much stupider. This Melbourne-based band consists of Kishore Ryan and sisters Hazel and Martha Brown. Both sisters sing, Hazel plays guitar, Martha sings, and Kishore plays not only the drums, but also the pots. And, though Pip does sound as if it could have been cooked up by some art school grads just goofing around, that doesn’t mean it’s not an extraordinary debut and one of the year’s best records.

Opener “Astronauts” is restrained but not passionless, self-assured in its own power. The effect is astonishingly refreshing; this is exactly the right choice for track one. The melody twists and turns as the drums tumble erratically, like falling hail, building to a strangely sparse, odd, and beautiful chorus: “Falling in love is like watching a really long video.” Follow-up “Cartoon Shoes” is gorgeous. In sound it echoes its predecessor, but in tone forges new, exciting territory. The next few songs, however, are less impressive. They’re much more art than pop, and the sound suffers for it. “Low Dan” evolves from a plodding, art house bore in the verse to a decent but forgettable pop song in the chorus. Its best moment is the bridge, a rhythmically and melodically interesting flicker in an otherwise uninteresting song. “Twelve Ten” is mathematical and dull, notable only for glimmers of strings and feedback that hint at a much better song.

But after a pretty annoying 50-second instrumental segue, “Autumn” marks the album’s return to something great. Folksy and brooding, the intriguing contrast of the atonal guitar work and rich melody carry it far. Here the band stays true to their genre’s characteristic restraint: with any other band, this song might explode at the climax. The subtlety is oddly satisfying. “W. Hillier” is an eccentric, staccato romp, an odd little dream-poem about Walter Hillier (a British diplomat and sinologist). It’s absurd but fun, and if it’s excessively arty, it’s too well executed to matter.  By contrast, “Tennis Players” is a stunningly emotive breakup song. It’s abnormally lucid and narrative. This is the album’s most profoundly beautiful song, and lyrically its best: “The only reason I want to see you/Is to give you back/All of the shit you weighed me down with.” The band returns to absurdity with “Sushi,” which has the closest thing to a danceable groove on the album, and a rather successful one. “Plum” is a strange closer. The lyrics consist primarily of a single looped phrase, while the music ebbs and flows of its own will, building into an electronic bombast that is easily the album’s emotional high point before dissolving into a flutter of snare drum.

Already a seasoned opening band, with this album Otouto prove they’re ready to be opened for instead. Pip’s highs easily exceed its lows, but even if they didn’t, their perspective is unique, which, in a media-saturated world, is a triumph in itself. Marrying earnest pop emotionality with a DIY art house aesthetic, Otouto give art pop a good name; their followers should be proud to earn the same label.

Owen Pallett would make a fascinating pop icon. He’s doe-eyed and shy, but remarkably charismatic. His virtuosity is not debatable: catch him live and watch in awe as he outlines each instrumental part, using a looping pedal to stack one upon another like bricks, until a song has formed. And he’s eccentric; one has to be to construct an album centering on its protagonist’s realisation of the fact that a singer has created him, and his subsequent rebellion. Pallett is most commonly identified as a violinist, but composer is a more accurate term. On record, Pallett is less obviously brilliant, because it’s not clear how much of the production and instrumental effort was his own. But, given patience and attention, his work comes to life. It spills out of speakers and edges its way into the rest of your life, the sonic texture now a permanent component of your reality.

“Midnight Directives” delves the listener immediately into the fantastic sonic foliage of Pallett’s world. Violins swirl at the periphery like vague animal shapes in the wilderness. Then in the final minute it trips over itself magnificently, becoming impatient, frenzied — hinting at the excitement to come. After a collapse, “Keep the Dog Quiet” builds back up and coasts until peaking at the tense coda, “Mount Alpentine”, and then “Red Sun No. 5” brings us back to calm with the album’s subtlest, most electronic offering.

It is here that the album truly takes flight. “Lewis Takes Action” has the shuffle and melody of a pop song, without forsaking any of Pallett’s trademark fantasy or classicism. Voice traced by the violin melody, Pallett sings of the protagonist’s violent rebellion: “I took a No-Face by his beak/And broke his jaw/He’ll never speak again.” Here, too, emerges the album’s postmodernism, in the protagonist’s acknowledgment of Pallet. “My every move is guided by,” sings Pallett, in the protagonist’s voice, “the bidding of the singer.” “The Great Elsewhere” hints at a return to the subdued electronics of “Red Sun No. 5,” then erupts into an anthem, the off-kilter beat joined by rhythmic violins and soaring vocals. “Oh Heartland, Up Yours” feels as if it were stolen from a musical, but not in a bad way: the arrangement is clever, the melody soothing, the sentiment appealing. “Lewis Takes Off His Shirt” reaches the album’s greatest emotional height thus far, culminating in the majestically proclaimed, repeated line, “I’m never gonna give it to you.”

The album climaxes with “Tryst with Mephistopheles.” A minor epic in itself, the song climbs from little more than a steady bass and the sting of self-doubt (“I stumbled on the summit’s path/Clumsy, clumsy/No paragon am I”) to a tremulous murmur of strings, a calm before the storm, wherein the protagonist confronts his creator (“‘Your light is spent! Your light is spent!’ I cried/As I drove the spike into Owen’s eyes”) and is capped by a regal coda, before devolving into fading strings and keyboards. The grace of this song fades into the closing track, “What Do You Think Will Happen Now,” a dissatisfying conclusion to a powerful record, but one that may be artistically necessary to complete the narrative.

Heartland is a cohesive album in the classical, rather than the pop, sense. It’s a theatrical arc — entertaining, but dense. The average twenty-first century listener will have tired of the album in the time it takes to truly sink in. But for those with more patience, or for whom Pallett’s fascinating, archaic lyrics and pristine violin melodies are worth sticking around for, Heartland reveals itself as a masterpiece.

There are some hefty theatrics at the beginning of Lightspeed Champion’s latest and second LP, Life Is Sweet! Nice To Meet You.  Perhaps it’s the bass drums, or the way the opening song, “Deadhead Blues,” slowly builds from a whispered open to soaring chorus and, finally, instrumental breakdown that gives us this cinematic impression, as if this is the record’s overture or opening credits.

It definitely feels like a departure from the Lightspeed of old, with burlesque refrains and chimerical accompaniments replacing the familiar slide guitars and genteel strings.  But the track closes on a jagged guitar note before sliding into the rambunctious, catchy first single, “Marlene,” and one of the clearest examples of how this new album connects with the old: it’s still gaudy, and filled with beautiful songs giving bitter testimony to broken hearts and failing relationships, the main reason we loved Lightspeed from the beginning.

This is just Dev Hynes being Dev Hynes.  The man behind Lightspeed used all sorts of ugly imagery and depressing stories juxtaposed with sweet melodies from the very start, and there is no desertion here, in fact at times the strains are more overt.  ”Hurts to be the one who’s always feeling sad,” he almost sarcastically bemoans on “The Big Guns of Highsmith” before a wall of voices interrupt him with, “Oh just stop complainin’!” with Queen-like flair.  The contrast between lyrical and musical themes are even bolder on this record because of all the variation, and highs and lows; Hynes really flexes his classical chops with guitar and violin virtuosity and even throws in instrumental intermissions and a piano etude.

Sadly, consistency is the album’s main enemy.  The good songs are very good, the bad are bland and unmemorable.  Whereas Falling Off The Lavender Bridge offered a smooth ebb and flow and seamless songwriting from beginning to end, Life Is Sweet! features the unfortunate fruits of experimenting with a more vast array of styles.  This isn’t necessarily a result of Hynes being sloppy or lazy but growing into his craft, and despite all this still a very strong sophomore effort.

The creative ceiling for Hynes is immeasurable at this point.  His side project Blood Orange has yet to be explored and exposed, his work with classical orchestras and crossover music is impressive, and his other artistic endeavors in short fiction and comic books have been both shocking and humorous. Following a musician of his abilities is reassuring since it’s not if he’ll produce a masterpiece but when. There are hints of this all over his current work; consider them preliminary footnotes to a brilliant career.

These days you can make a great debut album, and it will be one of hundreds, thousands released that year, destined to be heard by everybody or nobody. There’s no art to making music, just like there’s no art to making art. Call it what you want. Put it where you will. See who takes notice. One of those great, but largely ignored, debut albums of last year was Hatcham Social‘s You Dig The Tunnel, I’ll Hide the Soil.

Cloaked in a kind of school-boy slash art school wistfulness of songs about girls called Penelope, playing out on the sidewalk or reciting from Jabberwocky, it was both skilful and melodic, and dark and daring, embodying the spirit of classic English 80’s pop, restoring it to its proper firmament. Originally released in a limited ‘how the fuck do you get a copy?’ edition of 100 on 10 inch vinyl with fan drawn sleeves (the fan who drew mine really needed to try harder), “Sidewalk” has now been released as a digital download for those who missed out.

A 6 track taster of new, familiar, demoed and covered, “Sidewalk” hastens the accomplished listener down the road to album number 2, while allowing us to pause and wonder where that road will take Hatcham Social. With two songs taken from You Dig The Tunnel, both “Sidewalk” (the song that gives the album its curious title) and previous single “Crocodile” shed light on the band through separate lenses, “Crocodile” being the more immediate pop whimsy, while “Sidewalk” takes a dreamy, romantic approach with a bassline reminiscent of a snails-pace rendition of The Cure’s “Primary”.

Remixes of the title track by The Horrors and Breton Labs are hit and miss, with The Horrors remodelling the tune into a shoegaze snowstorm, which is marginally more palatable than Breton Labs ‘dance’ mix. New track “Wild Creatures” is like a 3 minute breakfast of The Jam and Orange Juice, while “King Kong” sounds uncannily like early-90′s also-rans Adorable (“Sistine Chapel Ceiling”, Caleb?).  A playful romp through the Beach Boys immortal “Surfin’ Safari” adds to the eccentric vigour the band ply into their craft.  Onward and upward.

Perhaps in another hundred years Luke Haines will receive the recognition he’s craved/deserved/spurned outside of the dozen or so hacks and fans who‘ll praise a man who‘s rarely put a foot wrong; even when he broke both legs to avoid climbing the stage to perform for us. His one-time chance at the top with The Auteurs was short-lived, but the Haines name stuck throughout the 90’s and 00’s like a burr on pop music‘s back, with it being attached to his own solo work, side-projects and a film soundtrack. His ire and love of England undiminished.

Having released a comprehensive collection of rare/unavailable tracks from his varied career in Luke Haines is Dead, Haines’ resurrection in 2006 with Off My Rocker at the Art School Bop came a little too soon for this modern day Lazarus. Incredibly, 21st Century Man is his fifteenth album (counting Auteurs, Black Box Recorder, etc) and finds Haines at his most potent and memorable, like a commentator glancing back at the 20th century, stringing together disparate cultural ‘icons’ like Peter Hammill and Klaus Kinski, tongue firmly placed in cheek. In some ways it feels like it’s his most quintessential album. A man looking back over his own career, realising what worked, what didn’t and harnessing it.

“It’s the same old story we’ve heard before”, Haines begins, topically self-aware and never one to stray outside his comfort zone with the Satanists that lurk in “Suburban Mourning” and his recurrent themes of death and dying grimly given, yet cheerfully delivered. From “Peter Hammill” of Prog rockers Van Der Graaf Generator to “Klaus Kinski” (which manages to rhyme “lucky” with “fuck me”), Haines is still hot for the Glam Rock revival, culminating with the glitter band “Rock and Roll Part 2“ moon stomp of “Wot A Rotter“. The soft strummed “Love Letter To London” is Haine’s own “Waterloo Sunset” castigating those “who used you like a playground when they were young” and then fled to the suburbs to have children.

Stylistically 21st Century Man does feel like a quick whip-round the Haines back catalogue, with the Baader Meinhoff beats of “Our Man In Buenos Aires” making light of a miss-reported rumour that he’d departed England for another kind of paradise. As always, Haines saves the best, and most poignant moment till last with the epic autobiographical title track that farewells the 20th Century while namechecking the Rolling Stones and T-Rex. It’s a testament to Haine’s cultural recollection, the forgotten heroes of the past, and his self-effacing nature,  “I was all over the 90’s/I was all over in the 90’s”. It’s not all over yet.

Logos quickly became a headache for Deerhunter’s Bradford Cox as soon as word went round he was working on a follow-up to last years lengthily titled and ultimately disappointing Let The Blind Lead Those Who Cannot See But Can Feel. Cox who had fallen in and out of strife with his blog postings since Deerhunter became indie scene darlings, had made the mistake of hosting an unfinished version of Logos on his mediashare account, which unknown to him was accessible to all those who went a-poking. Having used his blog to give away his virtual 7” series under his Atlas Sound moniker, Cox was suitably aggrieved when he found his treasure chest looted, threatening to bury Logos altogether.

Thankfully, he didn’t. Released in early 2008, Let The Blind… was a cold, impenetrable and challenging album. Largely recorded by Cox alone on a laptop it was a distant shadow of his work with Deerhunter, but in the space of 18 months, his talent as an artist has grown to match his stature. Making the record slightly less personal, Cox enlisted the help of Noah Lennox of Animal Collective and Laetitia Sadier from Stereolab to turn Logos into what is very much a laid-back pop-oriented album. Logos extends beyond being just a collection of Cox’s home demos and laptop sketches into an enticing cross-section of musical stylings, from acoustic psychedelia and ambient soundscapes, to lush Germanic grooves and effervescent 60’s pop.

Throughout Logos, Cox has threaded a loose stream of consciousness effect that drifts through his lyrics and into the presentation, the overall effect being one of sleepwalking through song, each track seeming to contain a number of loose vocal takes that drift in and out, while the instrumentation is an uncluttered mix of acoustic guitar, live drums and looped ambient pieces seemingly recorded and assembled on the fly. Opening track “The Light That Failed” falls into this blissful dream-like folk-tronica category while songs like “An Orchid” and “Criminals” bring to mind the phrase (and this is not to be taken negatively) “acoustic shoegazing“.

Logos more enticing moments come via the Sesame Street bounce of “Walkabout” built around a sample from “What Am I Going to Do” by 60’s band, The Dovers. It’s a meeting of two minds, combining Animal Collective’s joie de vivre with Deerhunter’s closeted introspection that together outshines the best efforts of either band. The collaboration with Laetitia Sadier “Quick Canal” neatly breaks up the loose folk-loop feel of the album and almost steals the show with its metronomic groove and Sadier’s gallic angelic voice, and at almost 9 minutes long is Logos centrepiece track. But it’s the unabashed romantic pull of “Shelia” that resonates the strongest with its pared down arrangement and oddly poignant “well die alone together” coda that proves just how effective Cox can be on his own.

Originally released to coincide with Magic Dirt’s October Australian tour, White Boy has become something of a sad epitaph for this much-loved Melbourne rock band. The tragic passing of bassist and co-founder Dean Turner in late August took everybody by surprise, mostly the fans who were unaware of his condition, and by his bandmates who hoped his tireless enthusiasm and droning basslines would never stop.

With the lead track taken from their recent album Girl, White Boy brings together an odd selection of new, unreleased and rare material including duets with Gareth Liddiard of The Drones and Rowland S. Howard of the Birthday Party, both representing the new and old guard of Australian music. In fact, you could probably pair up vocalist and guitarist Adalita Srsen with almost any Australian singer of reasonable repute and the track would quickly turn into spun gold. The fact that she’s chosen two of the most enigmatic and unique men about Melbourne town shows as much about her taste in music as well as the musicians that inspire her.

“White Boy” is pure Magic Dirt noise terror. Not an obvious track to pull from the album, but as case study in ‘What is Magic Dirt?’ the answer lies within the lurching beat and bludgeoned riffs. The wistful gothic romance of “Summer High” has Adalita and Rowland S. Howard locked in a tender seasonal embrace and is perhaps one of the Dirt’s finest recorded moments. “Deep In A Net Of Red” and “Valley Of The Rose” are both melody-charged gems from the Girl sessions, that like “Summer High” seem wasted on this lucky-dip vault-clearing EP. Rounding out the disc are two tracks taken from their sold out tour EP of last year, The Drones meets Magic Dirt meets Neil Young‘s “Cortez the Killer“ with “Love Is The Armour” and the 10 minute rock deconstruction epic “Future Fuck”.

Having gamely soldiered on with a temporary bass player filling in for the October tour, and the future of Adalita’s solo album that Turner was producing with her thrown in doubt, what is to become of Magic Dirt is a little uncertain. With a work ethic that often resulted in non-stop touring and recording, you always got the feeling that Magic Dirt were building up to something career defining. Hopefully this won’t be the last we see of them.

Great reggae has this timeless effect. It’s inspirational, empowering and moving. The depth of rhythm inhibits your body like a second heartbeat and propels you to get up and move. It shakes you up. It informs and entertains, and acts as a potent social commentary. Pama International aren’t unknown to enthusiasts out there, having hit the headlines in big way when they became the first new signings to legendary reggae label Trojan in 30 years in 2006. That simple sentence speaks volumes, but over the last decade and with six albums to their names already, the music speaks louder.

Pama International isn’t a band as such, but a collective of musicians led by bandleader Sean Flowerdew on organ and longtime collaborator Finny on vocals. Like the previous album Love Filled Dub Band, the core line-up of the band remains the same, including The Specials’ Lynval Golding and Horace Panter and Fuzz Townsend from Bentley Rhythm Ace. The album is co-produced again by John Collins who was at the controls when The Specials recorded their iconic swansong “Ghost Town”. The sheer pedigree of talent and experience on hand helps create not so much a soundclash, but a seamless coalescent groove state.

Pama Outernational is no straight-up dub reggae record, its influences cross the ocean, harnessing 60′s American soul and funk, but the sound remains firmly English. From the outset, you’d swear the album was recorded in the 70’s. The slow dub of “Equality & Justice For All” sounds like it could’ve been taken from the flipside of “Ghost Town”, capturing that same haunting and sinister quality. The strong harmonies and Stax swing of “Are We Saved Yet?” soars with an incredible sax solo but suffers from a premature end, the fate of several key tracks on the album. Many of the songs hover around the 3 minute mark, meaning they cruelly fade out just as you’re expecting them to amp up the intensity.

The pumping brass of  “I Still Love You More” would find a perfect home on the dancefloor in some Northern Soul nightclub, and the raw emotion of “Still I Wait” exposes the ‘love in vain’ side of reggae that pulls at the heart, and along with the family struggle of “He’s More Like His Father” finds easy room amongst the party and politics. The album’s true highlight is in the slow soul skank of “What You Do Now”  — a near six minute blue mood masterpiece that’s hidden away at the end of the album. The light-hearted and lightweight credit crunching song “Trade It All For More” may not be the best track, but it contains the core message of Pama Outernational  — “I‘m not greedy/but I want more“. After listening, it’s exactly how you feel. Incredible stuff.