best album

Jewellery by Micachu and the Shapes (Warner Bros)
The best thing about this record is… dum, dum dummm… it sounds so new. That's right: new. Micachu is wildly talented, youthful, androgyne lass Mica Levi who, with superwhizz producer Matthew Herbert has made the best alt.pop/ lo-fi/ scratchy/ found sound/ electronica album ever. Enjoy catchy tunes made from tea cups, junk shop guitars and a dash of grime.
Helen Skinner

Micachu and the Shapes.
Photo by Olly Hearsey

La Nueva Yma Sumac: What the Revolution Left Us by La Casa Azul (Elefant)
The Guille Milkyway Europop posse have done it again with the most incredibly exiting record of 2009. Imagine a world where Jeannette and Abba meet. If you want pure pop pleasures then Spain is where it’s at. And if you want to enhance your mood, check the bands from Elefant and Siesta records. The children of Mike Alway (él records) & Tot Taylor (Compact Organisation) are here to be found.
Jean-Emmanuel Dubois

Journal For Plague Lovers by Manic Street Preachers (Sony)
Not a fashionable choice perhaps, however with Journal For Plague Lovers the Manics sliced away their recent MOR pop flab to release a record of uncompromising Steve Albini recorded excellence. As the record consists of long time awol Richey Edwards' exhumed lyrics, it's likely they'll never be this potent again. Uncommercial, poignant and life affirming this is one of the most stirring rock records of recent years.
Mark Fernyhough

Unravelling England by The Singing Loins (Damaged Goods)
This was sent to me to review and I knew next to nothing about the band, but I immediately loved its lyrical content and sense of darkness and fun. In a year that was lacking in anything special musically, this made me smile.
Iain Aitch

No More Stories… by Mew (Sony)
On first glance, the Danish band's fifth studio album has an unnecessarily long title and mildly baffling artwork. But these are by no means reasons to dismiss this sublime and imaginative collection of songs, and all is forgiven with the first listen. That's not to say the appeal of No More Stories... is totally immediate – it improves considerably with each play. Moving and strangely danceable in its own spasmodic way, this record has refined Mew’s unique brand of ethereal pop.
Alexis Somerville

The Cesarians by The Cesarians (Imprint)
The ‘Soundtrack to the New Depression’ they call it – and this collection of reeling waltzes, junkyard blues and cemetery polkas is the most original, inventive and glamorous work this writer has heard in at least a decade.
Cathi Unsworth

The Cesarians is probably one of the only recorded musical documents to have come out of the whole modern cabaret/ burlesque lark that’s worth a whole lot of hoots. Uplifting and suprisingly catchy. For about a week I played it as non-stop as a near forty-year-old tends to play albums non-stop nowadays.
Stephen Prince

above: The Cesarians.
Photo by Emma Summerton

Vinonaamakasio by Shogun Kunitoki (Fonal)
Sounding like a medieval ancestor of Stereolab, this is the second album from the unique Finnish prog rock quartet. A glorious marriage of electronics and primitivism.
Cornelius Cullivan

Riceboy Sleeps by Jonsi & Alex (EMI)
The side project of Sigur Rós frontman Jón Thor Birgisson and his lover, Alex Somers, it’s quite simply beautiful.
Billy Chainsaw

Living in Dreams by Sandy Dillon (Tradition and Moderne)
Not having fitted any modern fashion, London-based American singer-songwriter Sandy Dillon’s personalised blues music has had a hard time finding all but a small and devoted audience in England. This, her latest album, deals with love, loss and death in a more stripped-down and melancholy way than previous albums, with “Saliva Gland” – the Mississsippi blues standard “You Gotta Move” rewritten lyrically by Dillon to describe the cold-sweat build-up to a particularly serious and frightening surgical procedure she recently endured – being a stand-out example of how the blues can still be interpreted in a way that is personal, real and surprising.
Jay Clifton

Glitter and Doom Live by Tom Waits (Anti)
A live album which compensates in some way for his neglecting to bring the tour to London. Words in Tom’s hands are worth two million in George Bush's.
Simon Charterton

Dracula Boots by Kid Congo and the Pink Monkey Bird
(In The Red)
The ex-Cramps and Gun Club guy makes good. Cheesy organ, driving rock ‘n’ roll drone guitars and loose psychedelic dub grooves. Perfect album.
Simon Murphy

Alight of Night by Crystal Stilts (Angular)
Like a girandole lighting a witching hour jaunt through a hall of mirrors, Alight of Night’s spinning cluster of fireworks illuminates, distorts, and delightfully re-imagines a host of influences on its journey. As shades of Iggy Pop, Siouxsie & the Banshees, Joy Division and Bauhaus merge with the Shangri-Las, The Beach Boys and The Zombies. But Crystal Stilts are no hand-me-down hobbledehoys, they twist and swirl with a lustre all of their own through this album of sparkling titles to create a fabulous refulgent fractal.
Guy Sangster Adams

Dark Night of the Soul by Danger Mouse, Sparklehorse and David Lynch (Powerhouse)
This collaborative effort, which also features contributions from Iggy Pop, Black Francis, The Flaming Lips and The Strokes’ Julian Casablancas, sounds like a cross between a moody concept album and a phantom film soundtrack. It was actually released with an accompanying book of photography by Lynch (who created dark images to illustrate the songs), except a legal wrangle with EMI stopped Danger Mouse from making the music available. So what you get with the book is a blank CD and a not so subtle hint to download the music (which you can do legally from npr.org/music).
Miles Fielder

Three Fact Fader by Engineers (Kscope)
The most gorgeous noise of the year, sounding like the dronier, proggier, darker Brian Eno-loving UK cousin of The Beach Boys if Dennis Wilson had been more in charge. Great laid back and dreamy goodness with big hooks and washes of noise. Perfect for drinking, sleeping and thinking. It only just pipped Exploding Head by A Place To Bury Strangers which sat at the opposite end of the shoegaze spectrum sounding like My Bloody Valentine fighting with The Jesus and Mary Chain to headline a filthy dirty sex party.
Rich Lehman

best book

Flat Earth News by Nick Davies (Vintage)
Sub-titled: An Award-Winning Reporter Exposes Falsehood, Distortion and Propaganda in the Global Media, this is the book that journalism needed. Though it’s perhaps not enough to save good writing from disappearing from newspapers.
Iain Aitch

Bad Vibes: Britpop and My Part in its Downfall by Luke Haines (Heinemann)
A suprisingly light and easy read. Very very funny. Favourite line? [Brett Anderson’s] “pseudo-bumboy androgyny is more Grange Hill than Bowie”. Hell hath no fury like a middle-aged chap that’s put a few pounds on, lost some follicles and didn’t sell as many records as some of the other fellows in Britpop but who, let’s face it, probably has a few more braincells.
Stephen Prince

Carravaggio: The Complete Works (Taschen)
A wonderful 300-page, large format hardback covering Carravaggio's entire oeuvre (as we know it today), detailing many of his paintings in close-up, as well as analysing his work and career.
Heike Schneider-Matzigkeit

The Death of Bunny Munro by Nick Cave (Canongate)
Deliciously dark and hilariously funny – wake up and smell the fact that Cave’s added “comedy genius” to his repertoire.
Billy Chainsaw

Little Fluffy Gigolo Pelu Vol 1 by Junko Mizuno
(Last Gasp)
No one combines cute and fluffy with dark and adult themes quite like Mizuno. This offering is a case in point, featuring a fluffy alien named Pelu from an extremely girly and psychedelic planet populated mostly by hot naked manga women. Our hero travels to Earth to find a bride, embarking on a series of adventures involving sassy girls and naked singers; adventures which are at once trippy, hilarious and beautifully drawn.
Alexis Somerville

An Equal Stillness by Francesca Kay
(Weidenfeld & Nicolson)
A fictional biography, this debut novel tells the story of Jennet, an
artist whose talent is overshadowed by that of her Dylan Thomas-like artist husband, until her star begins to rise. The prose is as vivid as a painting and it's a compelling portrait of women's lives through the mid years of the 20th century.
Katie Allen

Typical Girls? The Story of the Slits by Zoe Street Howe (Omnibus Press)
Finally! The Slits get their props this year with this book and the expanded/ remastered reissue of their debut album, Cut. All the main players feature here… the ladies themselves and also friends, fans and associates such as Don Letts and Keith Levine. Street Howe joins the dots between the records and offers up some choice anecdotes.
Helen Skinner

Bad Penny Blues by Cathi Unsworth (Serpent’s Tail)
Cathi may be one of our writers but there's no nepotism in this nomination. Based on the unsolved “Jack the Stripper” prostitute murders, Bad Penny Blues sees the real Sixties London explode in a nasty, sickening, swinging mess with an intoxicating mix of violence and death, pop art, fashion and clairvoyancy. It's utterly gripping, and every time it feels as if it’s about to turn a little too unpleasant then some good comes to the fore again. Brilliant.
Suzy Prince

International Film Guide 2009 (Wallflower Press)
This year’s International Film Guide: The Definitive Review of World Cinema is a total winner and well worth your time. This annual publication has recently been taken over by Wallflower Press, a great independent publisher putting out great books about cinema and moving images with that ‘educated but easy read’ vibe.
Rich Lehman

Heureux Parmi Les Morts by Elisabeth Barillé (Gallimard)
I hope this book will be translated one day in english as it's a brillant novel that deals with death and how a colorful cast of character cope with it. This book shows how conformist we are in the way we judge other people or expect them to be. A big, ugly, fat, crippled worker turns out to be very curious about culture whilst a pseudo-rebelious goth chick turns out to be very dull and predictable. Proof if it were needed that modern French literature isn’t all about Houellebecq and Beigbeder.
Jean-Emmanuel Dubois

The Imagination of the Heart by Barry Gifford
(Seven Stories Press)
Barry Gifford's fiction is never less than compelling and this novel makes a fitting final return to the “Sailor and Lula” series of novels he started in 1989 with Wild at Heart and completed around eight years later with Bad Day for the Leopard Man. In the character of Lula Pace Fortune, now an elderly – but still romantic – widow who sets down her thoughts and feelings diary-style in the early parts of the book, he may have created one of the most likeable and memorable protagonists in modern American fiction.
Jay Clifton

Weapons of Mass Instruction by John Taylor Gatto
(New Society)
Author of the best-selling treatise on education, Dumbing Us Down, and schooling's greatest critic, in this new book Gatto cuts to the ugly heart of pedagogy. You want to understand your world? Read Gatto.
Cornelius Cullivan

More Miles Than Money: Journeys Through American Music by Garth Cartwright (Serpent's Tail)
This is an epic road trip to find the lost soul of American music, which is part social history of a country that seems anything but the land of the free, and part love letter to those musicians and artist who almost always never get mentioned in similar tomes – particularly the Mexicans and Native Americans. A true heir to Studs Terkel, Cartwright’s book just manages to pip my other favourites of the year; Jake Arnott’s The Devil's Paintbrush, Jon Hotten’s The Years of The Locust and David Peace’s Occupied City.
Cathi Unsworth
 
Inherent Vice by Thomas Pynchon (Jonathan Cape)
The great American postmodernist fiction author’s most accessible novel to date. It’s a stoner noir set in late Sixties LA that reads like The Big Lebowski plays and which disproves the received wisdom that if you can recall the psychedelic decade, you didn’t actually live it. Now a septuagenarian, Pynchon’s pungent evocation of the West Coast purple haze could only have been written by a scenester. It’s a pretty damn cool hardboiled crime mystery, too.
Miles Fielder

Go Down Together: The True Untold Story of Bonnie & Clyde by Jeff Guinn (Simon & Schuster)
A cinematic landmark the 1967 film may be, but it played so loose with the facts that it’s surprising how unfamiliar the real story of the Depression-era gangster duo remains. Even already knowing the ending, this gritty, exhaustively researched bio feels urgent as it hurtles towards its bullet-riddled conclusion.
Graham Russell

Memoirs of a Geezer: Music, Life, Mayhem by Jah Wobble (Serpent’s Tail)
It is not only the reverberations of Wobble’s passion for the bass guitar that flow through Memoirs of a Geezer, but also London, and more specifically the East End, his birth place, which for forty years, provided a point of stability in a life that has equally oscillated between the highest highs and lowest lows – all engagingly recounted in this salutary tale of taking the knocks but refusing to be cowed. The book is also a reflection both on the creative processes of making music and the inherent battles in getting that music to wider audiences, and a fascinating and highly evocative cultural history, of people and places, many of whom and of which have now changed beyond recognition.
Guy Sangster Adams

Kill Your Friends by John Niven (Vintage)
I was advised to read it by a friend. He’s still alive so in that sense if failed to convince, but a feel a special affinity as the central character shares my obscure middle name!
Simon Charterton

See our competitions page to win copies of the three Serpent's Tail books mentioned above!

best film / dvd

White Lightnin’ (Momentum Pictures/ 18)
Set in the Appalachian mountains, Director Dominic Murphy’s fantastic and phamtasmagorical fictionalised biography of the mentally disturbed ‘dancing outlaw’ Jesco White – a man born with the devil in his blood – does little to counter the prevailing view of the Deep South as a gothic stew of hard-drinkin’, rape, buggery, murder and religious extremes.
Ian Lowey

above: White Lighgtnin'

Telstar (Momentum Pictures/ 15)
An excellent, slightly stagey but rather moving look into a semi-forgotten time in recent English history. Last time but one I saw the director Nick Moran it was in an afterhours Soho drinking den where he’d had a few ales and criticised the cut of my jacket (his dad had been a tailor), which seems kind of appropriate.
Stephen Prince

The Bed Sitting Room (BFI Flipside/ PG)
Forty years after it was first screened, this dystopian masterpiece of British Surrealism directed by Richard Lester and starring Dudley Moore, Peter Cook, Spike Milligan and Rita Tushingham, finally gets its first commercial release, on DVD.
Cornelius Cullivan 

The Damned United (Sony Pictures/ 15)
Based on the best-selling novel by David Peace, this is a movie about football that even the Mrs liked! A hugely enjoyable film in which Michael Sheen (also excellent as David Frost in Frost/ Nixon) dazzles as the larger-than-life Brian Clough. As well as portraying the flawed genius of Clough, The Damned United brilliantly evokes the state of British football in the late-60s/ early-70s, with delapidated stadiums, muddy pitches, tubby players and dirty play Those were the days!.
Bruce Chippings

Comrade Couture aka Ein Traum in Erdbeerfolie (ARTE)
Inspiring funny and moving portrait of the ups and downs of a
rebellious post-punk East Berlin fashion/art collective in the
oppressive last years of the GDR, brought back together for a party 20 years after re-unification.
Simon Murphy
above: Comrade Couture

(500) Days of Summer (20th Century Fox/ 12A)
As sharply painful as a papercut from an old love letter, this was
probably the truest film I have seen in a long time. Knowing, never
straight-forward, wistful, witty and with a spot-on soundtrack.
Katie Allen

Broken Embraces (Pathé / 15)
Pedro Alomodovar’s most recent offering is quite simply a wonderful story told well.
Iain Aitch

It met with mixed reviews, but Almodovar and Penelope Cruz’s follow-up to their 2006 triumph Volver was a lush, dark melodrama that confirmed their partnership belongs in the tradition of great European auteurs and their actress-muses: think Von Sternberg and Dietrich, Antonioni and Monica Vitti, Fassbinder and Hanna Schygulla.
Graham Russell

In the Loop ( Optimum Releasing / 15)
Directed by Armando Iannucci, this is a blisteringly funny satire, that like it’s TV counterpart The Thick of It, defines the madness of this era. Also noteworthy was the long-overdue arrival (as part of Optimum Home Entertainment’s London Collection box set) of The Small World of Sammy Lee, Ken Hughes’ 1963 depiction of Soho lowlife with a monumental central performance from Anthony Newley as scamster Sammy. If you want to know why David Bowie fell so hard, watch this.
Cathi Unsworth

Let The Right One In (Momentum Pictures/ 15)
So good you just knew they'd want to do it slightly worse in Hollywood. Now a Bollywood version, that I'd like to see!
Simon Charterton

This low-budget Swedish film about teenage vampires will almost certainly be picked up and remade in the US – but it won't be a patch on this sympathetic portrayal of the problems that accompany being a vampire in the modern world. A poetic, bloody and haunting meditation on what it means to be cast as an outsider.
Suzy Prince

Slacker Uprising (Optimum Home Entertainment/ 12)
A film which follows Michael Moore’s 60-city tour to motivate the 50% of the electorate who do not normally vote in the closing stages of the 2004 US Presidential Campaign. Watching the film now it is impossible not to get caught up in the momentum of the battle – to really believe that Bush would be voted out of office in 2004. Though undoubtedly some of the ability to relax whilst watching the film stems from it now being less than a year since Obama ousted Bush, and hope reignited remains largely intact.

But Slacker Uprising carries a message that should be borne in mind not only across US politics, but also by other nations, most eloquently expressed in the film by actor Viggo Mortensen: “When we as Americans see ourselves as different and superior to peoples from other nations as George W Bush with his go it alone agenda would have us do, we are not freeing ourselves or anyone else, we are not respecting ourselves or anyone else, we are rather enslaving ourselves by willing building the wall of our own prison one ignorant brick after another. It’s not a question of being liked by the world, it’s a question of belonging in the world.”
Guy Sangster Adams

Man of Violence (BFI Flipside/ 18)
Recently reissued as part of the excellent BFI Flipside series, this 1968 movie by cult director Pete Walker makes me all misty-eyed for pre-Thatcher Britain.
Jean-Emmanuel Dubois

Up (Disney-Pixar/ PG)
Computer animation pioneers Pixar just keep getting better and better. Their 10th feature, a South American jungle adventure featuring an old codger, an obese boy scout, a dog called Dug and a flying house carried aloof by 10,000 balloons, is their best yet. The remarkable use of 3D is the least impressive thing about a film that’s at once melancholic, mature and emotionally affecting and enormously entertaining, particularly for fans of golden age Hollywood movies, which Up pays homage to.
Miles Fielder

I wanted to say The Hurt Locker, or Moon, or of course, Let The Right One In. All amazing, but the fact is, Pixar films become incrementally more astonishingly wonderful with each and every one. Which is saying something since they started out at a 101% in the first place. Pixar make everything seem OK and show that the biggest and most powerful on the creative block are there because they are plainly the best and the coolest. So I am not ashamed to say that this years best film was not 'indie', hip or cool. Up was just perfect. Simple as that.
Rich Lehman

Antichrist (Artificial Eye/ 18)
A work of primal magnificence that proves writer/director Lars Von Trier doesn’t give a flying fuck about commerciality or critical opinion.
Billy Chainsaw

JUMP TO PICK OF THE YEAR PAGE 2>>