Ladies and gentlemen... please enjoy our Top 75 new albums of 2012, with links to the original reviews where possible. Tomorrow, we'll post the Top 30 best reissues, box sets and compilations.
The last 25, then. A few of you have asked for some help as to what these records sound like. I’ll try and put some links into these lists over the next few days, and also a blog of favourite track clips that might help a bit. See you what you think, anyhow…
Previously: 112-76Previously: 75-51Previously: 50-26
The Allah-Las make their UK debut in the back room of a north London pub on a freezing December night, the inhospitable weather not something familiar to in their native Los Angeles, where it probably only gets this cold in disaster movies, palm trees turning brittle with frost, the ocean becoming ice, CGI snow drifts on Sunset Strip and Denis Quaid in a parka and Bermuda shorts standing square-jawed and wrinkled-kneed against the elements.
Preamble: I’m going to start rolling out this list over the next couple of days whenever I get a chance to post. Apologies, first, for the weird number…
As many of you will have seen by now, the current issue of Uncut features our Top 75 albums of 2012 and, as usual, there’s been a fair amount of comment online about the list. I’m going to try not to be too defensive about this, but as the person who compiled the list, I thought it might be useful to post a few notes that’ll hopefully clarify one or two issues that have been raised.
Sometime in the summer of 2011, I spent a pretty amazing Saturday morning at a small recording studio in Green Lanes, North London. When I walked in, a hesitant but beautiful piano line was coming through the speakers, and one of the most emotionally compelling voices I’ve encountered in the past few years was singing a song which, it transpired, would be called “Never Ending Happening”.