45 The Cornshed Sisters - Tell Tales
If the Unthanks developed a modern arena for north-eastern female close harmony folk singing, the non-familial Cornshed Sisters are the more playful, less retrospectively minded end. For all that, their debut never shies away from foregrounding its depths, the four-part harmonies pitch perfect, what should by rights be well trodden subject matter seem fresh by approaching them from an odd angle, homely seeming but not afraid to wrongfoot the listener by heading down more disturbing paths deceptively lightly. If nothing else there were few less likely joyous moments this year than the three-part harmony on "good job on the gravy".
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44 First Aid Kit - The Lion's Roar
The Söderberg sisters, having done their musical growing up in semi-public, worked with Mike Mogis on their second album and came back more confident for the experience. Mogis' countrified expansive production suits the filling out of both the songs, a shuffling modern Nashville romanticism a la Gram Parsons, and Klara and Johanna's dead-on harmonies, their voices richer and more fulfilling. They haven't transcended their influences yet but there's clear chemistry and ability here that mean that will likely come with time. For now, it more than gets by on the ability to juggle heartbreak and perhaps surprising dustcloud darkness in such an elegaic way.
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43 Liars - WIXIW
So drums are dead. Never willing to go back through whatever they did last time, Liars re-emerged as almost a completely different type of band, channelling their dark hearts into electronic boxes, synths and samples. Skittering rather than clattering, any intention to overwhelm is superceded by ground-up dark, uncertain depths, coldly efficient in its shimmering and pulsing amid underlying fragility, leaning as much towards freak-folk's full frontal soundscapes as Kid A's learn-as-we-go experiments. Such depths and hidden colours and crannies, whether left to drift alone in hostile waters or pressed up against the glass, are what make it of a piece with their approach after all.
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42 Jo Mango - Murmuration
Glaswegian Mango possesses a voice of absolute close-miked crystalline beauty, which on this second album she gives the sort of sentiments that sound simple but are in reality vexed by the nature of life and the haunting of past love and memory. Poetically both abstract and achingly personal, her fingerpicked folk guitar is accompanied by clever production courtesy of Adem Ilhan which decorates the edges around Mango's front focused almost stage whisper of a delivery with a variety of embossed instrumentation which, without being minimal as such, never comes near challenging the central attraction, that thoughtful, seductive late night beauty.
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41 The Sound Of The Ladies - The City Of Gold And Lead
As many other hats - quantum physicist, university lecturer, popular podcast soundman - as Martin Austwick wears, there's nothing thrown out there about The Sound Of The Ladies. His second full-length develops the sound while sharpening the storytelling to a more consistent degree, invegilating ideas, images and sometimes uncomfortable poetic notions into an alt-folk framework that lands somewhere close to a very English equivalent of Elliott Smith's close-up sensitivity, if one who doesn't foreground personal ailments as much as existential loss and painted stories of love going awry. It's also likely to be 2012's only album to reference Joseph Bazalgette, creator of the London sewer network.
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