Some love them, others hate them, but at the end of the year I'm always compelled to make lists. Lists of good music and bad, disappointments and pleasant surprises. I realize I'm late to the party, and that this makes my lists even greater exercises in meaninglessness - but here I am all the same, because I'd regret it if I didn't record things for posterity.

Some heavy caveats: This list is being compiled in a tuscan village called Pari, atop a hill, and I'm many many miles from Canada. What is here, then, is pulled from memory and the little I can browse on my iPod.

Because I went a-travellin', I didn't hear most of the last quarter's releases - neither U2, REM, Annie, Ted Leo, the Bad Plus, Eminem, Stars, Okkervil River, Mase, Estelle or d12. And as I was stooping in Slovakia, hungerin' in Hungary, I didn't catch some of those innumerable things I might have discovered these months, were I at home. Instead, I found Hungarian folk-metal, Slovakian garage rock. Which I'm still sorting through.

All right - on with it.

The Best Albums of 2004

I've read several peoples' year-end lists, and I feel like I might be in the minority when I say that 2004 was a poor year for albums. Exceptional music was recorded and released this year, but I'm not sure it coalesced into too many exceptional full-lengths. On the Best Songs list, below, my cup runneth over; but when it comes to enumerating the year's best LPs, I had to stop at three.

But a few words on the honourable mentions; sparkling and listenable, - even moving, - yet ultimately flawed. Some were too long, others too plain, some too short on singles or just a little bit boring. And yet they're all fine things, worthy of purchase, just not the stuff of end-of-decade compilations, of halls of fame.

They are: The Frames - Burn the Maps, Julie Doiron - Goodnight Nobody, Jolie Holland - Escondida, Kanye West - College Drop-Out, The Killers - Hot Fuss, Wilco - A Ghost is Born, Devendra Banhart - Nino Rojo, The Streets - A Grand Don't Come for Free, the Fiery Furnaces - Blueberry Boat.

And the best records of 2004, doubtless no surprises here, are -

03. The Go Team! - Thunder Lightning Strike

Thunder Lightning Strike kicked me open like a surprise party. No album this year was been so unexpectedly wonderful, so familiar and original at once. The Go Team are like those childhood daydreams, those fantasies of jetpacks and tree-houses. They're the gang I never had, the brood of hooligans that smiles and laughs, with finger-snaps and ball-games and little sleights of hand. It's unclassifiable and mile-a-minute, dance music and pop-music and indie rock and hip-hop. Chalk-lines on a playground, double-dutch rocket launch. [more thoughts]

02. Joanna Newsom - The Milk-Eyed Mender

When I die, if a song is to be sung about me, I would like for it to be written by Joanna Newsom. Not because she plays a harp, a big one, nor because she sings in a borrowed voice, something sharp and spurred and sometimes gobsmackingly beautiful. No, the finest thing about Milk-Eyed Mender is the words, the play of language on a tongue, the images that bound out from her wild melodic turns. She's better than Dylan, better than Waits, better that Sheff. She builds sculptures out of twine, stories out of beetle-shells; she makes me giddy, glad and indeed sometimes sad. But most of all she sings true things that I had never imagined, in a voice too ballsy to lie.

01. The Arcade Fire - Funeral

And the Arcade Fire, well, what can I say that I haven't already. Funeral is splendid and brave and every week I have a new favourite track. This is a band I've loved for a long, long time, and here's an album that will never go away, that I can always turn back to, that will shimmer and flash even years from now. It'll bring memories of dark, hot or flush days; not of childhood but of the time after, of when everything loomed big, when my heart beat big, when I wasn't scared of death, only of life. These are songs whose lyrics flash behind my mind's eye, realer than other scenes; they're songs that are meant, made blazing with feeling, and yet, for all this earnesty and wisdom and narrative, so too are they songs for dancing, for singing, for loving and listening to. These are pop-songs for the end of the world or the beginning of it, for Wendy remembering Peter, for broken, whole and beating hearts. And I thank them. [more thoughts]

Best Production on an Album
David Newfeld's amazing work on The Apostle of Hustle's Folkloric Feel, which goes a heck of a long way towards making this superficial, repetitive record a thing of majesty. Synthesizers, strings and electric guitars; voices, whispers, bursts of noise. It falls together and falls apart, drums tumbling in and out. So much to hear, so well-knitted, so carefully and capably assembled. Broken Social Scene's You Forgot It In People suggested it, but this confirms Newfeld as the best producer in alternative music today.

Best Idea
For the love of god, someone please take Howard Bilerman up on his offer and let him at those Leonard Cohen tapes.

Best Avant-Folk Record
Les Mouches - You're Worth More To Me Than 1000 Christians

Les Mouches did something this year that I can't quite understand, that I don't fully grok, and that didn't feel right next to Joanna and Jolie and the Killers. But listen - their debut LP was shockingly good, strange and noisy and hushed. There's a tremolo voice that recalls Xiu Xiu, but then there's the splay, bang and splat of percussion, the glimmer of chords, and we're somewhere else entirely, on the verge of something, lost, afraid and unsettled - and glad for it.

Punctuation Most Over-Used During Sean's Time at Said the Gramophone
The comma.

The Best Songs of 2004
I could go on and on, and on, about the songs that came out this year, how diverse and rich and transporting. But I shan't. I'll say simply that you should hear and know each one of these songs; that the list could span much longer; and that I feel proud that I shared so many of these songs with you, that Said the Gramophone lived up to its mission statement.

Because it would have drived me nuts, I have only ranked one song by each artist. If they released other songs which would 'rightfully' be in the top 40, I have included those songs in parentheses.

01. The Arcade Fire - "Tunnels" ("Power Out," "Crown of Love," "Haiti")
02. Modest Mouse - "Float On"
03. Britney Spears - "Toxic"
04. Wilco - "At Least That's What You Said"
05. Joanna Newsom - "Bridges and Balloons" ("Clam, Crab, Cockle, Cowrie")
06. Eamon - "Fuck It"
07. Estelle - "1980"
08. The Mountain Goats - "Dance Music" [via TTIKTDA]
09. Jolie Holland - "Do You?"
10. The Go Team - "Bottle Rocket"
11. Wolf Parade - "Dear Sons and Daughters of Hungry Ghosts"
12. The Streets - "Dry Your Eyes"
13. Kanye West - "Slow Jamz" ("Family Business," "Workout Plan," "Jesus Walks")
14. William Shatner - "Common People"
15. Natasha Bedningfield - "I Love You" [sic?]
16. The Divine Comedy - "Our Mutual Friend"
17. Janet Jackson - "Love Me For a Little While" [via The Rub]
18. Mase - "Welcome Back"
19. One-T and Cool-T - "The Magic Key" [via Fluxblog]
20. Sam Bisbee - "Miracle Car" [via TMN]
21. Adem - "Ringing in my Ear"
22. Old 97s - "Won't Be Home"
23. The Hidden Cameras - "Builds the Bone"
24. Royal City - "Jerusalem"
25. Bell XI - Alphabet Soup"
26. Avril Lavigne - "My Happy Ending"
27. Plastic Operator - "Folder" [via Fluxblog]
28. Counting Crows - "Accidentally in Love"
29. Rachel Stevens - "Sweet Dreams my L.A. Ex" [via Fluxblog]
30. Tom Waits - "Hoist that Rag"

Most Anticipated Albums of 2005
in descending order of interest...

Wolf Parade, Hood, Beck, Magnolia Electric Co, Sigur Ros, Greg Macpherson, Bishop Allen, The Clientele, LCD Soundsystem, Destroyer and Frog Eyes, Damien Jurado, Sun Kil Moon...

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The Sean update, for those who give a hoot:

It's my birthday on the fifth, but shortly after that I'll be returning to Canada for a few weeks; I'll try to return to the blog with at least a handful of posts on the music I've discovered on these travels.

And following visits to Ottawa, Toronto and Montreal, this little writer will be flying to Edinburgh, to Scotland, where I will stay, work, and write for the foreseeable future.

And hopefully I'll be back to Gramophone, too.

Apologies to anyone who has written me but not heard back, recently; internet access has been extremely brief and intermittent. Things will improve when I leave Italy - and when I buy my new iBook.

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Happy New Year! I hope all of your 2005s will be full of laughter, reassurance, and yes some grand blooms of sound.