/Rock-Pop/British / European
/Merchandise/Rough Trade Merchandise
/Rock-Pop/Indie Pop

VARIOUS - ROUGH TRADE SHOPS - COUNTER CULTURE
various - rough trade shops - counter culture 08

Release Date: 26/01/2009

we present our annual 'best of the year' release, 44 new curiosities selected in the name of encouraging your continued patronage of independent record stores everywhere. big-hitters on the shop floor, staff favourites, exciting new artists, exclusive edits and a few rough diamonds, from folk and indie-pop to dubstep and electro-techno, from the warm and friendly to the de-tuned and experimental, a cd selected as if a good old mix-tape. it was an excellent year for those who like their music reflective, with the folky, the low-key, the lo-fi and the shoe-gazey featuring strongly in our chart. some stunning debut albums from bon iver, headless heroes, peter broderick and atlas sound are represented here on cd1, alongside some that we believe will do well next year, the acorn and the low anthem among them. rough trade staples indie-pop and garage have been reinvented once again, this time by the pains of being pure at heart, the school, crystal stilts and the vivian girls, while noisenicks sic alps and times new viking have been bubbling for a couple of years now on the excellent siltbreeze label. we have much to recommend in the form of what you could call 'outsider' music, health reconfigure no-wave, indian jewelry provide a unique lo-fi gothic brew and the upset! the rhythm collective have wow-ed us with some out-there live shows and some wax to match from the likes of high places and softboiled eggies, while gaz wiiija came up trumps again by turning us onto the indie-electro of telepathe. loudest and proudest are boris and the shitty limits. musically as well as geographically, they are poles apart, but both bring the serious noise to this release. southern lord's boris are a jet engine of ramones-influenced lo-slung skuzz, while the shitty limits inject a hardcore dose of seventies punk into the mix. the 'limits track is only about a minute long but, like all their releases, it is straight-to-the-fucking-point business, and they could well be the most exciting band of the next 12 months...that's if shit and shine did not exist though. here they present us with a total solid gold exclusive that once again shows them to be the most original band in england at the moment. from concrete riffs to this heat style electronic jackin' - they do it all and 'shit no' is absolute killer (it's not techno - it's 'shit no' - get it?). we are honoured to have them. representing digitally, we re-present alva noto, his 'unitxt' album is so killer that we had to invite him back again. dusk + blackdown have produced an album that fuses dubstep with documentary, while 2652 take it to detroit with haunted rhythmic tricks. only for rustie to bring it back, robbing the crunk from atlanta with his pounding electro-hip hop biscuit 'zig-zag'. and how can we not mention the totally fucked-up short-circuit grunge-electro of flying lotus and tobacco. indie label legend domino has also been looking good on the dancefloor this year, and we have plucked a bumping yo majesty track from them and slid it up against the electro-tech from zzt's 'the worm', a 12" that flew off the wall at both shops. if disc 1 is good to stick on while yr in the tub, just try not pogo-ing to disc 2.
see full tracklisting