[SYRFox]

15. Atlas Sound - Let The Blind Lead Those Who Can See But Cannot Feel: Bradofrd Cox has talent. Enough to release an excellent disc with Deerrhunter in 2007, and come back in 2008 with a new double album and his solo project debut album. Behind this romantic title are hidden 14 (20 on the European reissue) tracks, forming a noisy pop puzzle, a whole of an incredible cohesion. It's trippy, ethereal, beautiful. And the worst part is that he's already got a new one ready for next year.

14. Animal Collective - Water Curses EP: Only four songs, from Strawberry Jam's studio sessions, in order to wait for Merriweather Post Pavilion. Let's get back to those four songs, because they're totally worth the hearing: after the fantastic eponymous track, the band gives us three quiet and trippy tracks, giving this EP a cohesion that's not often reached for that kind of exercise.

13. Genghis Tron - Board Up The House: The perfect fusion of extreme metal and complex electronica. Even though it's incredibly violent, this album does not forget to sometimes let the intensity get down, with a few segments of aerial ambiance which are really beautiful. The power of the hardcore parts is then accentuated, and the vocalist's saturated screams, dissonant riffs and blasting programmations are getting reenforced by this contrast. Highly recommanded if you aren't allergic to hardcore screams.

12. Deerhunter - Microcastle / Weird Era Continued: After the awesome and mysterious Cryptograms in 2007, I was a bit frightened, reading everywhere that the band had adopted more classical schemes. And in fact, well yes, Deerhunter's landscapes are now less strange than in the past. Still, nothing here is banal: all those noisy pop songs have something making them catchy and unique, whether it be the most energical or most ambient songs, most classical (on the first CD) or most experimental (second CD) ones. And finally, I think that this album really is as good as the previous one.

11. Autechre - Quaristice: Electronica masters are back, and this album is obviously different to their previous works: if they used to slowly explore soundcapes during long minutes, they're now going straight to where they want to, synthetising their ideas on a 3 or 4 minutes format - and therefore rising the number of tracks, and so atmospheres, of the disc. It implies that this disc will be hard to get into - as any ae album -, but it ends up offering a lot of magical compositions, of a constant complexity hiding unfathomed melodies and atmospheres. Congratulations.

10. No Age - Nouns: More accessible, less noisy than on Weirdo Rippers, No Age often let here their ambient side out to express their melodic side. The adaptation might be hard at the beginning, but the disc finally reveals its charms, and it's lot of great compositions, especially this awesome second half of album and it's succession of gems.

09. Indian Jewelry - Free Gold!: After the excellent Invasive Exotics, Indian Jewelry are back with a shoegaze-influenced album. But the Houston-based band hasn't lost its hypnotic capacities: the aerial singing and tribal and electronic rhythms will lead you to trance during fourteen tracks - and as much good compositions.

08. Neptune - Gong Lake: For this first album for Table Of Elements, the Boston band offer us an awesome noise rock album, alterning between experimental impulses and furious synthetic compositions, all of it being covered by a dark layer. Grey Shallows is one of the tracks of the year: percussive rhythms, hypnotic sounds, massive bass, explosions, everything's in its right place.

07. Women - Women: After only one year of existence, Women release this splendid eponymous, with gorgeous melodies, fantastic vocal harmonies, and a characteristic lo-fi production. This music seems inoffensive on first contact, but soon becomes addictive, and those songs will soon stay in your head all day.

06. The Present - World I See: Incredibly rich, this album only contains six tracks, but each one includes such a high number of ideas that it's unbelievable. From tribal sections to ambient segments, from subtle melodies treated with feedback to dissonant and noisy passages: it's really a difficult listen, but once you're into it, you will never get out of it.

05. Fuck Buttons - Street Horrrsing: Melting the power of abrasive noise and post-rock nice melodies, hardcore screams and drone's oppressive side, Fuck Buttons builds in six tracks a saturated and mysterious soundscape: under layers of distorsion are hidden emotion-full melodies. Fuck Buttons clearly is one of the year's revelations.

04. Clark - Turning Dragon: Clark is back with a techno album. Infernal dancefloor disconstructed and complex rhythmics (on Volcan Veins for instance - best 2008 techno track?), but he does not forget the electronica melodies which have made its charm in the past. Oppressive, devastating, yet beautiful: a masterpiece.

03. Oneida - Preteen Weaponry: With this first volume of a trilogy that will end next year, Oneida give us a long drowning into an experimental and percussive atmosphere, slowly evolving, near trance. Long crescendos, slowly moving melodies, like a less oppressive cousin to Liars' Drum's Not Dead.

02. Gang Gang Dance - Saint Dymphna: It was hard to me to think that Gang Gang Dance could possibly release something as good as their masterpiece God's Money. Well, they did with Saint Dymphna, which mixes a incredible number of styles, getting without trouble from one to the other, and all of that with an improbable cohesion: what we've got there is an almost perfect album, from the beginning to the end.

01. Mahjongg - Kontpab: Totally crazy, populated with strange polyrhythms, weird guitars, retromodernists or post-regressists synths, out of there voices, dephased, this disc is at the same time dancable, catchy, from beginning to the end, including a lot of improbable hits (Problems, Mercury, and the awesomfantasticgenius Kottbusser Torr). It's original, mad, new, unclassifiable, yet amazingly groovy: everything on there can move your brain and your legs at the same time. In short: genius.