The end of the year: time for seasonal winter ales, low level sports betting, gaining weight and, um, best of lists.  Seriously though, is there not something down right human about spending an evening beside a roaring fire, using flickering candlelight to jot down your thoughts on the year’s music releases, reflecting on them, summarizing them, and ultimately ranking them?  Yeah, I thought so too!
 
Truth be told, my decision making about what the album of the year is came down to a race between 2 albums: Tea Tornado by Marmoset and Dragonslayer by Sunset Rubdown.  They’re both great albums, albums that struck me upon first listen and stuck with me throughout the year.  Beyond that thought, I would hazard that they are both genius albums, albums that display each band at their best.  Ultimately, however, whatever distinct allures I heard in the later were trumped by the former.  Marmoset’s latest was largely overlooked, but it has a beauty, a purity that I couldn’t ignore.  It has this immediate, slacker rock accessibility that gives way to an eerily tweaked world of innocence, death, longing and childlike metaphors that, upon repeated listening, was almost psychotropic in nature, at least for me.  What I mean is that it has haunted me since its release.  The songs are short and act like set pieces for the random moods of some hidden mind. Stoned and glorious, Tea Tornado is drenched in a conversational slanginess behind which resides some of the best songwriting of the decade, but it all feels so immediate, as if the first time I heard the album, I’d already heard it 20 times.  Such a strange familiarity that leads to bliss.