So, I’ll do my best to explain some of my perhaps more controversial selections and exclusions.

Fuck Buttons: What I first appreciated about this record was the size of its sound. It supplies one of the richest and most enveloping sheets of noise I’ve ever run across, somewhere in the domain of Yellow Swans, but crunchier. Every track sounds like a mountain crumbling. But then there’s this glorious innovation that distinguishes them from most other noise groups: a harmonic underpinning. There’s always a grinding synth bassline, and that makes the whole experience immediately much more seductive to me; it propels the music ever-forward and gives all those wispy sprinklings of high-end melody something to dance with. Pitchfork was right, I think, to describe this contribution as having a post-rock heritage. It’s possible that if you had seen them live, as I was fortunate enough to do, it might’ve clicked with you more. At the very least, it was the loudest set I saw all year.

GGD: I love propulsive, synth-heavy dance music and I love shimmering ambient guitar freakouts. I’ve never heard the two soundworlds collide so gracefully. It’s a completely original cocktail, either the artiest and most sonically colorful dance record I’ve ever heard, or the most booty-shaking experimental rock record I’ve ever heard. It was about fifteen times better than I thought it was going to be. I’m hooked.

Deerhunter: I always admired this band’s sound tremendously—a Krautrock rhythm section with spacious, textural guitars on top and a winsome, alienated, confessional vocalist is a pretty winning formula, to me—and wished that they might write some real songs that might bring said sound to its fullest potential. They did it. The songs have finally arrived on this record, and they’re all over the map stylistically, and they’re all great. There are ten thousand things going on on each one, and yet a pop sensibility always shines through; just when you’re getting lost beneath the noise blanket, a new, haunting, beautiful melody punches its way out, either in the vocals or the lead guitar. [In my mind, it parallels the breakthrough Sonic Youth made with EVOL.] These guys have given new meaning to the term “dream pop.” Every song is gorgeous and scary, and life-affirming and emotionally pure, and simultaneously dense and vivid, like the best dreams. You feel lost, but always pulled in a direction, toward something.

Vampire Weekend: Maybe this statement (and, necessarily, the album with it) will date horribly, but I don’t think so: Vampire Weekend’s debut might go down as the best pop record of this decade. Not only does the sound betray an utterly original patchwork of styles, but the songs truly have an eternal, “channeled” quality, like the best pop songs do. “Oxford Comma” and “M79″ honestly are perfect. Like, Beatles perfect. It’s amazing that such a young band playing with such a new sound could, on their first album, write songs that make such stunningly lapidary use of said sound. There’s not a note out of place or an ounce of fat to be found; this kind of refinement is supposed to take ten years with no lineup changes. It was a trendy release and few blogs deigned to give it the top spot, but I couldn’t not; it delivered more pure joy than anything else I heard in ‘08, and for a while in the late spring I couldn’t be bothered to listen to ANYthing else.

Women: An awesome album that barely missed the cut. “Shaking Hand” was monumental, “Lawncare” is a terrifying lullaby, and “Black Rice” is a great late 60s throwback. I have no doubts that album number two will kill.

Abe Vigoda: I did acquire this album after hearing it in your car, Cary, and gave it one good committed spin. It’s a fresh sound, to be sure, but kinda one-note. I found myself fighting to stay in it by the end. Then the title track hit; it’s almost surely the best song on there, and on its strength I was compelled to revisit some of the earlier ones. And I found there was still not quite enough for me to sink my teeth into. I’ll probably dig it out again in the next year or two, to prepare myself for when the second album comes out, but I can’t say I’ll play it too much for pleasure.

I second Cary on Deerhunter: nothing bad about them, but also nothing that really reaches me.

As you know, I share your enthuiasm for Fleet Foxes, Marnie Stern, PJWA, No Age, Portishead, Vampire Weekend and Bon Iver. Some of the albums on your list are predictably not my thing (i.e. those with strong aesthetic debts to the 80s – Cut Copy, M83), but there are a few records that you included that I would almost think of being more up my alley traditionally than yours but which, oddly, I don’t care for. Given that, I was hoping that you could maybe try to explain your fondness for them.

Fuck Buttons – Can’t find a way into this so far

Gang Gang Dance – I suspect that part of my issue here are the keyboard textures (again, maybe an 80s artifact)

My biggest question for you, though, is what makes the Deerhunter record special to you? The classic indie rock canon is probably are most shared taste, and in spite of trying I haven’t been able to hear Deerhunter as anything other than a run-of-the-mill mediocre indie rock band.

And, as we’ve discussed, Dear Science just never did it for me, in spite of how great I think TOVOTR have been in the past.

Did you hear the Women record by any chance? I’ve been a late comer to that, but it seems to me like you might dig it, too. I think it’s pretty great.

Behind Au and Fleet Foxes on my as-yet-uncompiled Best of Albums list would be the Abe Vigoda record, too. Did you ever get to hear that outside of my car?