The Weekly Sweep

Alan MX - Warpsichord [Myspace] (Kicking off this week with the great white hope for quite some time now of Smalltown America, the label that considered the blogger poll results worthy of website front page reportage; from Basingstoke, a poetic bedroom electropop auteur in the Napoleon IIIrd vein. He calls it "intimate exhibitionism", we call it new pop's own IDM)

Animal Collective - Brother Sport

Banjo Or Freakout - Mr No [Myspace] (Another Italian! Alessio Natalizia actually now lives in London and has made a minor online splash with his minimal covers (Archangel, Someone Great, Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa) but his own material, a mix of shoegazey noise, glitch beats and Caribou-ish filtered dreampop, is strong enough)

Blue Roses - Does Anyone Love Me Now [Myspace] (One of the other problems we have with this orthodoxy of 2009 The Year Of The Female Synthy Singer-Songwriters is that, in the same way a lot of female singer-songwriters suddenly got tarred with the New Kate Nash brush regardless of when they'd actually started to make their move or how alike they were - George Pringle was dubbed a New Nash by Q! - when Foundations was a hit, there's quite a few really interesting women about at the moment, Laura Groves resolutely among them, who through no fault of their own bar being less commercially aware are likely to be now seen in the shadow of Welch/Hesketh/Brown)

Bon Iver - Blood Bank [live YouTube]

Cats On Fire - Horoscope [Myspace]

Darren Hayman - Amy And Rachel [mp3 from Hayman's site] (Pram Town, out on the 26th, is Hayman's semi-concept album about hope, escape and Harlow)

Emmy The Great - First Love [YouTube]

Fanfarlo - Harold T. Wilkins [YouTube]

Franz Ferdinand - Ulysses [Myspace]

Johnny Foreigner - DJs Get Doubts [Myspace]

M Ward - Hold Time [YouTube]

Pagan Wanderer Lu - The Bridge Of Sighs [Myspace] (Album in March, finally, called Fight My Battles For Me, featuring a track called Ten Cities Is Not A European Tour. Andy's also started a blog)

The Phantom Band - Folksong Oblivion [mp3 from 17 Seconds] (Forgot to mention last week that Chemikal Underground release album Checkmate Savage - produced by ex-Delgado Paul Savage, which goes to show that if you have no better ideas for your album title why not filch a studio injoke - on 26th January. They play an instrument made from metal shelf brackets and one of them calls themselves Richard The Turd. We... we think we'd best tread carefully around these)

Sky Larkin - Beeline [YouTube]

Speedmarket Avenue - Enlightened And Left Wing Indeed [Myspace] (Tremendous English-as-foreign-language title, isn't it?)

Teitur - Catherine the Waitress [Myspace] (A debut Sweep appearance for a Faroe Islands artist, not unreasonably; romantic but secretly gleeful maxi-pop not terribly well served by his press release)

TV On The Radio - Dancing Choose [YouTube]

The Voluntary Butler Scheme - Multiplayer [YouTube]

The XX - Blood Red Moon [Myspace]

If you have Spotify, we've constructed a STN Select playlist - everything we could find from an album that appeared in our top 30s of the year plus some other singles and songs we've supported.