Gum in late bid for 2013 glory

Just as the lists have been written and the year's best-of compilation is in preparation, Gum's latest 7" ('Sinking' b/w 'Over') thuds onto the doormat, a mere two and a half months after its advertised release date...

It's lush and lovely and layered; a good step forward, ahead of the album the band are now recording. 'Over' makes an intriguing break into Cocteau Twins territory and I am sure there are further developments to come.

Give the single a try on Bandcamp here and see if you're swept away too.

Great video, good cause

Another unbiased Eden On The Line recommendation for this festive offering from the creative genius behind Secret Sessions.

Not quite a music video, but it is a video with music in it, so fully within our terms of reference here...

2013: the gigs of the year

Another tremendous year for live music. I was lucky enough to get to about 25 different gigs, as well as two festivals in Canada and the Great Escape here in Brighton. I held off finalising this list until I'd caught Kurt Vile last night, to round off the year.

As usual, it's difficult to weigh big concerts by established greats with an audience in thousands against some young whippersnapper - like Braden Gates here - playing to tens of people in a bar.

But I'll try – and here we go:

5. Roy Harper - Royal Festival Hall, London, 22 October

Reviewed here. 38 years since I last saw him and both the voice and the songwriting skills are remarkably intact. The best bits were magical. Power and sweetness and (generally achieved) ambition, with some trademark off-the-wall moments.

4. Leonard Cohen - Brighton Centre, 28 August

Reviewed here. Leonard's late, late, Indian summer is simply phenomenal: a wonderful band, beautiful singing, the two-way flow of love and respect between the singer and his audience. The irony is that, while he might not have been born with the gift of a golden voice, he has certainly acquired one, as well as creating one of the all-time great songbooks for it to roam through.

3. Neil Young & Crazy Horse - O2, London, 17 June

Reviewed here. Lovely to see him back with the Horse - and to get up close to do so. The staging was inventive and the sound superb. Living and audible proof that there need be nothing even faintly ridiculous in sexagenarians rocking out with electric guitars. Which has to be a good thing to know...

2. Van Morrison - Europa Hotel, Belfast, 16 March

Reviewed here. Van at close quarters in his home town, and happy to be there. He sang beautifully, his band were excellent: a very special gig.

1. Braden Gates - Miners Union Hall, Canmore, 3 August

Why's he number one, then? A 21 year old who's just released his first album beating some of the very best writers and performers ever?

You can see my reaction at the time here. It was one of those experiences which get better and more memorable on reflection. The key difference is that I knew what Roy, Len, Neil and Van were capable of before I went to see them; I was word perfect on quite a few of the songs they played. They deserve to be on this list because they more than lived up to my expectations.

But with Braden, I had no expectations. I'd never heard of him. We'd escaped from the (dry) main festival site in Canmore to have a drink at an ad hoc bar without much thought as to whether the music we'd hear there would be any good. Which meant that it was a wonderful and truly memorable experience to be smacked round the ears by a naturally confident performer who plays fine fiddle and decent guitar, writes well and covers with taste and verve.

Who knows where his career will go? He's got the talent to do very well and it's going to be fascinating to watch what happens, having chanced upon this view at the ground floor.

For the second year running, Bruce Springsteen misses out despite playing one of his usual phenomenal sets: Wembley is just too big and they hadn't sorted out the sound properly.

Just bubbling under my top five are a sizeable list including Lisa Hannigan, Del Barber, Billy Bragg, Michael Chapman, Dave Alvin, Hiss Golden Messenger, Tom Russell and Yo La Tengo. Beat that if you can, 2014...

Kurt Vile

Just back from seeing Kurt Vile at the Concorde on Brighton's seafront.

A good show. He did his thing very well - without persuading me of anything new.

Nice guitar textures, with crunch and chime. Interesting chord progressions and some good picking. A lack of really killer songs. Far too much echo on the attractively mannered vocals, making much indecipherable. (He'd ambled on clutching a bottle of Jägermeister, but didn't obviously make use of it, so I don't think that was the issue.)

He was able to carry off a solo three song sequence with aplomb, before the the Violators came back on for a finale that has left my ears ringing.

So, no cigar - and, actually, not that close, given the strength of this year's competition. The gigs of the year announcement - which I know you've been aching for - will follow in the morning.

2013: the records of the year

This has been an interesting process. I started compiling my list a couple of weeks ago in something of a grump, feeling that it had ended up being a somewhat disappointing year – with some of my established favourites not quite hitting former heights and not many new people bursting through, in a way that tickled my rather particular eardrums. Then I went back and re-listened to the year's acquisitions.

After that further reflection, I am happy to tell you that it has been a more than solid year for record releases – and, as usual, I've had to do a lot of crossing out and rewriting to limit this Top Ten to just ten.

A few broad points to make before unveiling the list: 

• there's a danger in acquiring too many records (alongside all the obvious plus points). There were quite a few this year that I thought I'd got the measure of pretty quickly and moved on to other listening targets. But I should know by now that the best ones don't always reveal their charms immediately;

• no-one can listen to everything and my tastes seem to be off to one side of any mainstream. Our excellent Brighton record store Resident produced a top 100 for the year. I have just seven of that 100, and only one out of their top 20 - and I don't like that one very much (step forward, Devendra Banhart). Just two out of my top ten are in their top 100 (David Bowie and Yo La Tengo, since you ask). Looking elsewhere, the recent Grammy nominations are similarly mostly mysterious to me (but a big shout out to Kacey Musgraves and to Secret Sessions for grabbing her while she was still bubbling under). And it's not as if I'm immersed in one particular genre – my overlap with, say, No Depression's Americana favourites will only be partial;

• how do you compare the n-th release of someone's decades-long career with a youngster's fresh, exciting and inevitably flawed debut? There's no scientific algorithm. I'm ready to give credit for the thrill of the new, but can also expect old dogs to show a pretty good grip on their established tricks before branching out. It can go either way, folks;

• so I make no claim to my top ten being the best records of the year - they are the ones that have given me the most pleasure. As we'll see, some of that comes about from associations with memorable live shows. But these are ten records I can unequivocally recommend as worthy of any music fan's investigation, regardless of those associations.

Here we go, then, in the traditional reverse order:

10. Steve Earle & The Dukes (& Duchesses): The Low Highway. This is one of those I didn't give enough time to first time round. May be not the strongest set of songs Steve has ever put out, but there are some good ones. More persuasively, he is in great voice and musically it's great. Hats off to the Mastersons – Chris on guitar and his wife Eleanor Whitmore on fiddle. The convincing crunch of 'Calico County' is an excellent place to start.

9. Laura Marling: Once I Was An Eagle. Brave, intelligent and inventive. Laura continues to develop and grow: this is her fourth album and she is still just 23. Hugely impressive poise and control - and some lovely arrangements (seek out the Al Kooper-style organ on 'Where Can I Go' and 'Once'). I tend to find it head music rather than always feeling it in the gut, but there are certainly intense and gripping passages here.

8. Del Barber: Headwaters. It was a real pleasure to interview Del in September, having seen his impressive performances at the Canmore Festival the month before. This is his third album, with a fourth due in February. Excellent country/folk music, well sung and played by an engaging performer - he's an impressive story-teller both in his songs and between them.

7. Yo La Tengo: Fade. Their 13th album in 27 years of recording and it's remarkable they can still bring the openness and vulnerability to their music-making that the best songs display. 'Ohm' and 'Paddle Forward' are the stand-outs here for me - as they were at their Bexhill concert last week - but it is a strong set overall.

6. Hiss Golden Messenger: Haw. Another burst of leftfield Americana, featuring MC Taylor's distinctive, yearning vocals and frequently bible-referenced lyrics. The album gains a lot from some able collaborators and nicely varied arrangements, featuring, amongst other things, banjo (from Black Twig Picker Nathan Bowles), lugubrious saxaphone and field-recorded soundscapes of local wildlife...  A live solo set I saw, though certainly powerful and enjoyable, was comparatively lacking in range and dynamics.

5. Wussy: Wussy Duo. A seven song mini-album (released in a numbered 600 CD pressing for Record Store Day) from the band's writing and vocal core, Chuck Cleaver and Lisa Walker - and some of those seven are lightweight, verging on the throwaway. But there's more than enough here to justify its place on this list while we wait for a full band album, particularly Lisa's gorgeous 'New American Standard' and 'North Sea Side'. She has one of those strong/vulnerable voices that just hooks itself into my heart, while Chuck's gruffness provides a perfect foil...

4. Steve Gunn: Time Off. A new discovery for me this year, via another RSD release - his Golden Gunn collaboration with MC Taylor which was itself a contender for this list. Steve has previously played with Kurt Vile (and his album of this year, Wakin' On A Pretty Daze, was also in the running...). The guitar is the star on this record, chiming, luminous and occasionally jaw-dropping in the John Fahey/American Primitive tradition. Beautiful.

3. Braden Gates: Break It To Me Gently. I came upon htis young Canadian singer/songwriter, fiddler/guitarist by chance at the Canmore Festival and was struck by his verve, confidence and sheer ability. This is a short release (just 30 minutes) and there are rough edges: some slight songs, a tendency to the sentimental alongside his crisper observations, not enough use of his excellent fiddle-playing. But if you listen to, say, 'Last Boat In The Harbour', 'Gator's Gym Girl' or the title track you'll recognise a talent with huge potential - and enough convincing character to carry you through the lesser ones.

2. Roy Harper: Man And Myth. An extraordinary return to form. This is a record that sits entirely comfortably alongside his classic albums from 40 years ago, from Stormcock through to HQ. A lot of ambition and a familiar unconcern with being thought pretentious, mixing in amongst the love songs a lengthy reworking of Greek myths, social commentary and science fiction imagery. Beautifully arranged, beautifully sung and reproduced superbly live in his concert at the Royal Festival Hall. Roy is a one-off and it was very sad news that he is now facing sexual abuse charges – but let's leave that sub judice and concentrate on a really good album.

1. David Bowie: The Next Day. Another one-off at the head of the list and another unexpected pleasure. He managed to spring his new recordings on us and, for once, the slew of publicity that followed was entirely justified. No resting on laurels from an elder statesman here, with some crunchy confrontation, powerful playing and striking lyrics, alonside lush melodies. If in doubt, try the unexpected twists in 'I'd Rather Be High':

I stumble to the graveyard and I

Lay down by my parents, whisper

Just remember duckies

Everybody gets got.

The bubbling under category, almost making it into the top ten, included the likes of Bill Callahan (lovely sound, songs less strong than usual), Billy Bragg, Kurt Vile, Ahab, Black Twig Pickers and Promised Land Sound.

As usual there were some great archive releases in 2013 to listen to alongside the new stuff: special mentions for Bob Dylan's Another Self Portrait and the Grateful Dead's Sunshine Daydream.

Finally,there's no competition for my favourite label of the year - North Carolina's splendidly-named Paradise of Batchelors has been exemplary in both the music they've chosen and the way they've packaged and produced it. I've just bought Chris Forsyth's Solar Motel – yet more lovely guitar playing, hmmm, do I need to reconsider the ten?