The date that is synonymous with fun, anticipation, and heart-pounding excitement all rolled into one. So let us cut to the chase and discuss

THE TOP 10 20 ALBUMS OF 2004.

For much of this year, I felt as though I wasn't hearing much new music and would barely be able to scrape together a top ten. My purchasing tastes went the way of "more for less", as I bought cheap hard-to-find used disc after cheap hard-to-find used disc, siphoned what would have been money for new CD's into an internet connection, d/l'ed anything which struck my fancy -- and of those -- bought only a few of my favourites (or even better, went to their gigs). It was an economically sound strategy, if I do say so myself. Namely, (unless it was too cheap to pass up) buy only the music that couldn't be easily downloaded (if at all), and download the rest.

Yet somehow, despite not feeling as though I'd done a good job of keeping up with new releases, at the end of the year I found nearly fifty new albums from 2004 in my collection, which is far more than I amass in a typical year. Plenty for choosing a top ten, or even a top twenty, which is in fact what I will be doing since I'm submitting a top twenty ballot for an ILM end-of-year poll.

Despite having such an embarrassment of riches to choose from, there must be a good reason why I feel as though I haven't connected strongly with many 2004 releases this year. I've got this huge pile of new stuff, but why does it feel like I haven't been *listening* to it? Oh yeah, I know -- because I haven't. Clearly, there's the problem of sheer volume ... the problem of giving the new Dizzee Rascal and Bark Psychosis albums a fair shake (both are records that were critically lauded but I feel as I though I never really "got" them. The BP album drifts by beautifully, it's a piece of art that I appreciate but cannot admire, much like the more understated/vastly more boring album by fellow post-shoegaze alumnus Rachel Goswell. Kudos to Rachel for "Coastline", one of the finest tracks I've heard all year on an otherwise umemorable record. And Dizzee's record certainly walks tall and carries a big stick, but doesn't kick my teeth in like the last one did. When he strips his tracks waaay down to little more than lo-fi, spasmodic beats and basic bass loops -- "Everywhere" is particularly outstanding -- then he's helping to realize my personal ideal hip-hop sound) when they're competing for headspace with Donnacha Costello and Saint Etienne albums that I'm scolding myself for not buying years ago. I remember more moments with years-old music by Galaxie 500 or Magnetic Fields than with most of these albums from 2004. In that sense, my 2004 recalls my 1998, when I spent far more time obsessing over past albums by the Velvets and Drugstore than anything released in 1998 (and surely this contributes to my feeling that 1998 was a poor year for music). Not to mention the long shadow cast by last year's outstanding crop, including a Plastikman album that obliterates anything released by anybody this year. Sure, it's not fair to hold up 2004 to the standards of ghosts from the past, but it's hard not to when I'm more often in the pleasant company of the ghosts than the unfamiliar company of the living.

Having said all that, there were several excellent albums released this year -- honestly! More so than any other year, this list is a "listening" list, which made for easy ranking. Essentially, these are the albums that I listened to the most. I keep coming back to some them because they keep blowing my mind. Some of them are significantly flawed, or even disappointing to me, but I keep coming back to them to capture specific moods, because they make me feel nostalgic, or because they're just too damned fun to play loud (in fact, there's my thirty word summary of the Fennesz album). Rest assured, I look at this list, and I see the same old me. Noisedroneambient! Canadians! My Token 80's Throwback is here! And reassuringly, just like all the other years, there were two or three albums that rose to the top and decisively separated themselves from the pack.

Again:

THE TOP 20 ALBUMS OF 2004.

20. THE ORB -- BICYCLES AND TRICYCLES. In this, the Winamp and iPod Age, we typically cue up albums by a bunch of artists and pump their songs through a random play format. Thus, sometimes it's a bit difficult to remember who you're listening to at any given time. A pumping tech-house track would come on, and I'd assume I was listening to a song from a Kompakt compilation. But no -- it would be from "Bicycles and Tricycles". Later, a droning ambient piece -- the Mutek comp, yes? Nope, "Bicycles and Tricycles" again. The occasional weird and goofy samples remain intact from their ambient house beginnings, along with the playful melodies (albeit in a completely different style of dance music) that give a nod, of sorts, to the tongue-in-cheek humour in abundance on so much of their best work. For me, this was one of the year's biggest surprises -- an album that was a million times better than I thought it would be.

19. DEERHOOF -- MILKMAN. If Deerhoof didn't exist, then an International Coalition of Indie Record Store Workers would have to invent them. They would come into creation via a document that would read "Be it resolved that, we, the ICIRSW, hereby create Deerhoof, a band which exists solely for the purpose of being played in Indie Record Stores, by members of we the ICIRSW, the undersigned. ICIRSW members are forbidden from playing Deerhoof at home, because once the music begins to infiltrate the bedrooms of the real world then it will detract from the indie-ness of our workplaces. The aforementioned Deerhoof will write songs about meaningless and silly subjects, such as dogs on sidewalks, and the milkman. The vocals must be flat, because that is the way of indie. The songs will sound bonkers, with no verses, hummable melodies, or choruses discernable within three listens, and not recallable by memory within six listens. After those six listens however, the indie minions will be inexplicably drawn to the music, meaning they will be drawn to our stores since that is the only way that the music can be heard. Those who have not the patience to make it through three or six listens will find the music to be formless and tuneless, therefore, they will feel uncomforable in its presence, which will effectively weed them out of our store without having to subject them to our asshole chic when they inquire about the Fantasia Barrino album. We are indie, and this Deerhoof entity is ours and ours alone".

18. BROKEN SOCIAL SCENE -- BEEHIVES. "Backyards" makes this album indispensible, in which BSS crush every indietronica act at their own game. That track is a slice of heaven that goes from gentle balladry to swirling shoegaze to twee ambient as if that combination has been the natural order of things since the peak of the Brill Building era. The rest of the album is an anodyne affair that die-hard indieheads will be sure to ignore, but screw those haters -- "Beehives" may be the best chill-out album of the year.

17. DDAMAGE -- RADIO APE. Bonkers. Jittery beats and throbbing melodies punctuate nearly every second of this release. It's a style much like that of Datach'i, except with Datach'i I'm able to recall at least a little bit of what I've heard once it's over. I've heard this record countless times and every time I play it, I hear a completely different record. It brainwashes you and steamrolls the brain squeaky clean, leaving a totally blank slate in time for the next listen.

16. MAGNETIC FIELDS -- i. There's a four year gap between "69 Love Songs" and it's successor, but when the smoke has cleared, "i" will likely be considered little more than an appendix to its gargantuan predecessor. The fanatical genre-hopping is arguably becoming gimmicky (a side-effect of being love songs #70-#83),and being a Verve Release won't help matters, either. Hopefully the strengths of the disco-fied "I Thought You Were My Boyfriend", the fragile opener "I Die", and the perfect, bittersweet closer "It's Only Time" won't soon be forgotten.

15. THE CURE -- THE CURE. They can't get more nu-metal than this, can they? Oh right, forgot about "Never Enough". And the entire "Pornography" album, man, that was a real downer and a half. So why was I surprised that they could sound so good with Ross Robinson at the helm? For those still not convinced, the bonus tracks on the Japanese import are a time machine back to keyboard-laden "Disintegration"-era Cure. Nevertheless, they somehow managed to squeeze out their best pop song in well over a decade, "(I Don't Know What's Going) On". Still going strong.

14. THE DELGADOS -- UNIVERSAL AUDIO. Where did all the sound go? The lack of strings (=HUGEness) was a disappointment at first, the songs seemed bare and empty, but that's just a normal reaction to having the sonic rug pulled out from under you without any warning. Less morbidity, more fragility, and every bit as tuneful as they've ever been.

13. FENNESZ -- VENICE. "Endless Summer" did a great job of uniting people with otherwise disparate tastes. It was noisy enough to keep the noise fans happy. It's melodic, chinstroking moments drew in the folktronica fans (and the Beach Boys references didn't hurt in that regard either). There was even enough mayhem for the Tigerbeat 6 fans to appreciate. But the release of the "Field Recordings 1995-2002" stopgap album (AKA Fennesz's strongest record) ended up foreshadowing the new one -- a return to dense, drifting, hazy music. Unlike "Endless Summer", this is not picnic music for dewey-eyed lovers, although the crescendoes of guitar, raining down on tracks like "Circassian" and "The Stone of Impermanence", are every bit as wonderous as the finest of nature scenes.

12. TAYLOR DEUPREE -- JANUARY. It's full of icy voices, all strung-out and whimpering for attention. They flicker, slowly morphing in intensity, but I'm standing outside a bus stop in the dead of winter, jangling my keys in my pocket, and in my head I can hear the metallic jangling fed through a sampler and stretched in time until the metallic clanks become echoey croaks. This is a chilly album. Or maybe it's just the title.

11. BRIAN WILSON -- SMiLE. It feels like a trip back in time. The physical recording sounds like a Spectorian relic -- as if it was literally recorded in the sixties. There are seventeen tracks here, but at least three times as many distinguishable song ideas. Every song changes its direction multiple times, and every new melody and harmony which emerges sounds more delicious than the last. It turns out that "Good Vibrations" was a preview for Brian Wilson's very own Teenage Symphonies to G-d. No matter how much I read about the mythical "SMiLE", I just couldn't fathom that Brian could really duplicate "Good Vibrations" another sixteen times. Now, I have no idea how to rank this among all the other album, again, it's like it has parachuted in from another era, I'd just as soon attempt to rank "Pet Sounds" among this year's best releases. Ask me about it in another forty years.

10. MÄRZ -- WIR SIND HIER. It's a bizarre mix of psych-folk and glitch, with a German singer blessed with a voice oddly reminiscent of Peter Gabriel. The actual sounds are almost entirely electronic (acoustic guitar is prominent as well) but there's nothing on "Wir Sind Hier" that wouldn't sound great around a campfire. At its heart, this album is aural comfort food -- folk pop with a few electronic embellishments.

9. TIM HECKER -- MIRAGES. Darker and more brooding than previous work, but losing none of the lonely majesty that impels you to stare blankly out a window for hours. Give this man a permanent exhibit at a planetarium. Please.

8. JAKE FAIRLEY -- TOUCH NOT THE CAT. It's an album stuffed with ballbreaking, yet rumpshaking rhythms. Schaffel enough for the club kids who dance among bright lights, hard techno enough for the people who dance in underground dungeons with low ceilings and a thick fog of smoke.

7. ORBITAL -- BLUE ALBUM. Orbital bowed out this year with their best album since the unassailable "In Sides". In 45 minutes, you too can relive all the ups and downs of Orbital's career, from the moronic humour of "The Altogether" ("Acid Pants"), to the introspection of "In Sides" ("You Lot") to the 4/4 banging techno of the Brown album ("One Perfect Sunrise").

6. DEATH IN VEGAS -- SATAN'S CIRCUS. Talent borrows, genius steals. Pardon the cliche, but a spin through "Satan's Circus" provides more "spot the reference" fun and games than the first Elastica album. Except that the DIV album doesn't suck! The opener (and first single) "Ein Für Die Damen" recalls the more sprighty indie rock of their previous album, "Scorpio Rising". But after that, it's sayonara to the chick music and hello to the pitch dark motorik of "Black Lead", the "I Can't Believe It's Not NEU!" mid-tempo motorik of "Sons of Rother", and the chiming popdrone relaxed motorik of "Anita Barber". Not a tribute to NEU! and Kraftwerk as much as it is reincarnation of them.

5. THE ARCADE FIRE -- FUNERAL. The first layer is the vocals -- perhaps my skin has been thickened from listening to the wailing on all those A Silver Mt. Zion albums. The tunes lay under the next layer -- one mini-epic after another, shifting from pleading power ballad to dronerock disco as if it's the most natural thing in the world. The final layer is the lyrics -- recurring motifs of snow and ice blanketing ye olde neighbourhood, and sneaking around behind parents' backs in the name of love and lust. Like Pulp's "His N Hers" and "West Side Story", it magnifies the toil of young love to a point near myth.

4. OREN AMBARCHI -- GRAPES FROM THE ESTATES. At times it moves glacially slow, thanks to clear sine tones that stretch themselves out like a slow pull on a slice of caramel. And just when you find yourself thinking that's a drone album and nothing more, delicate guitar lines appear and the exact same drones take on a pastoral quality. Certainly the most soothing album of the year.

3. BEEF TERMINAL -- THE ISOLATIONIST. The title might have fit better with Beef Terminal's debut album "20GOTO10", which was a more maudlin affair thanks to many long, ambient, pieces. Even the dancier tracks, such as the standout "Sick Love Under Toronto", wasn't much of a party, unless you like to dance to records that evoke the seedy underbellies of a seemingly decaying city. "The Isolationist" is more the work of a man reclining on his front porch, singing his heart out via his guitar. It's a lazy record (again, lazy as in reclined, not perfunctory), thanks to simple hip-hop rhythms that relax the pace, but the looped guitar licks suggest nostalgia and fond memories to me, rather than sadness. Even though it's well-known his mother died during the time that the album was recorded, I still choose to listen for the nostalgia and not the sadness, and I'm sure that the strong presence of the fomer qualities is no accident. The style might seem a bit same-y over the course of an entire album, but the rich (yet wonderfully lo-fi!) tones display a great attention to detail in sound creation, and it's these fascinating timbres which turned me into a devoted regular listener.

(technically released at the tail end of 2003, but wasn't really reviewed or promoted until 2004. I feel safe deeming this a 2004 release).

2. FELIX DA HOUSECAT -- DEVIN DAZZLE AND THE NEON FEVER. One fun thing about the 80's is that I used to sing along to lyrics as dumb and simple as the ones on Van Halen's "1984" and didn't think twice about it. Never stopped to analyze them and dismiss their peurility. As time passed on, things came full circle and I started to appreciate how hard it could be to write a (apparently) simple song. Which brings us to the sassiness of the putdowns and handclaps in "Short Skirts". Or the way "Everyone Is Someone In LA" makes me long to spend the rest of my days as a stand-in driver for one of those helicopter panorama shots of the city that opened the first sixty seconds of seemingly every episode of "Knight Rider". "Ready To Wear" is the most joyous and fun three minutes of the year, and its parent album is all about black eyeliner, striking a pose at your leisure at any time day or night, and shirking the responsibilty of real life for the more pressing responsibility of looking fabulous.

1. XIU XIU -- FABULOUS MUSCLES. There are plenty of frightening noises on this album. Such as the ghastly scrapes that populate "Support Our Troups" and "Mike". Or the queasy videogame death disco of "Crank Heart". Even more startling is the vocal work of Jamie Stewart, who possesses a voice every bit as curdling as the caustic, lo-fi sounds he coaxes from his equipment. All this, and a title track that is one of the most disturbing yet touching love songs I've ever heard. If Trent Reznor, as a follow-up to "The Downward Spiral", hadn't corrupted himself with the perils of starfucking and Marilyn Manson, and had instead locked himself in a remote wood cabin for ten years with unrelenting thoughts of starfucking *with* Marilyn Manson, then he might have taken visceral self-deprecating music to this kind of a new level. "Fabulous Muscles" can (un)comfortably take its place amongst the most unsettling albums ever made.