10 Killer Under-the-Radar 2008 Albums

Sometime Parenthetical Girl Luke Wyland cobbles together quite the musical circus on his second LP as Au (pronounced, in letter-by-letter fashion, as 'ay you'). Splashing together an inspired mishmash of thrumming ambience, pattern-recognition piano, lusty-voiced community choirs, dead-zone percussion, baroque orchestration, and a heaping helping of utter joyousness, Verbs is a genre-dodging outing that manages to sound compositional yet improvised, experimental yet pop, silly whilst profound. The only real —if admittedly obvious— frame-of-reference for Wyland's singular musical stew is Animal Collective. Whilst that's an easy comparison to toss around, it's an impossible one to live up to. The genius of Verbs is that it actually does.

Speaking of those beloved Collectivists, the AC-helmed Paw Tracks imprint had a mighty ought-eight. As well as issuing Rings' ungodly-good Black Habit, they unearthed Philadelphian one-woman-band Tickley Feather, before unleashing her upon an unsuspecting public with a run of Animal Collective support slots. Rather reminiscent of another Paw Tracks discovery —analog-frying tape-op alchemist Ariel Pink— Annie Sachs' self-styled, hand-made, largely out-of-tune tunes were born in a musical realm beholden only to her inner logic. Working with rudimentary drum-machine beats and wonky organ chords, Sachs is like a painter using only bleeding, muted hues; her pop-songs buried in an opaque fug that makes every number sound somehow sinisterly.

Once upon a time there was one Berliner lass, one New Yorker chap, and the record that tied them together. Palms, the collaborative union between Nadja Korinth and Ryan Schaefer, is a fragmented affair; a tri-lingual (German, English, French), genre-smearing collection of odd sketches that add up to an uneven whole. Though the influence of the Velvet Underground is apparent in all that they do, Palms never settle into a singular style; with discursions into electro-pop and krautrock incongruous to the LP's eerie lullabies. What the long-distance pair do find is an evocative mood; It's Midnight in Honolulu capturing that late-at-night time in which joyful dancefloor reverie gives way to an aching, caving sense of inner despair and sadness.

Though they've released two albums in 2008, Eleanoora Rosenholm are still a mystery. Seemingly, at varying times, either a trio, a seven-piece, or even just the work of vocalist Noora Tommila, the Pori-based collective play a disconcertingly strange form of pop-music. Mixing Lizzy Mercier Descloux-inspired new-wave funk-pop with a post-rock-esque fondness for effects and crescendo, Eleanoora Rosenholm make music loaded with a wilfully theatrical, almost baroque sense of the perverse (something evinced by each of their two music videos). Recording for the Finnish freak-folk imprint Fonal, the outfit are seemingly out to undermine beliefs and subvert expectations; they both more accessible and more strange than their out-there label-mates.

Feeling more like a transcendental state than a mere compact-disc, Nalle's second record is a holy meditation on communal playing and the spatial plane. Using an array of ancient instruments and abusing the powers rhythm and drone, the Edinburgh-based avant-folk trio summon the spectral worship of traditional music, whose over-generations oral tradition imbues songs with the spirits of the dead. Suitably enough, Nalle's shamanist folk bristles with mystery and magic; The Sirens Wave a song-cycle spun by the incantations of Finnish singer Hanna Tuulikki, whose siren-call is rather more of a strangled banshee wail. With a Newsom-ish vocalist and an Incredible String Band-esque sense of adventure, Nalle are future freak-folk royalty.

With her hoarse, gasping, masculine voice persistently reminiscent of both Patti Smith and Bob Dylan, it's no surprise Pepi Ginsberg so grandly evokes the archetype of the rock-n-roll poet. Singing things like “the dull boxed/to the long-hand of the clock” and “he's 90 per cent real/just like perfect fiction,” Ginsberg is unafraid of the turn-of-phrase, and she shows an open fondness for her words by carefully, lovingly teasing out every syllable via her stirring, slurring voice. Her third —but first widely-available— album plays up to this 'classic' songwriter's persona by matching it entirely to vintage sound. Produced by fellow Philly retrophonic dreamer Scott McMicken of Dr. Dog, Red infuses every note with an old, knowing joy.

In another Earthly realm, Red Hunter would be a rock-n-roll saint, a songsmith held in the same reverential measure as Will Oldham or Phil Elverum. The Austin-based Hunter is, like those gents, a wanderer, a traveller, a storyteller; chronicling his journeys literal/personal in songs both classical and experimental. Thus far, Hunter's only released one 'official' album as Peter & the Wolf, 2006's Lightness, but that hasn't stopped him cultivating a cottage-industry of home-made CDRs. Two have turned up this year —the poignant The Ivori Palms and smooth Mellow Owl— and each shows Hunter in command of his songcraft: marshaling frail acousticism, rag-tag choirs, and ad-hoc ethnomusical trinkets into an achingly personal take on Americana.

If you live in France, Belgium, or parts vaguely thereabouts, Mathieu Boogaerts surely isn't operating under-the-radar. An almost-superstar in his homeland —and parts vaguely thereabouts— the minimalist songsmith only loses his celebrity when it comes to the non-French-speaking world. Where he remains essentially anonymous. Yet, Boogaerts' fifth LP shows an artist begging for a global cult-following; a silly, self-styled entertainer who should be to droll, hypnotic, keytonal pop what Michel Gondry is to twee cinema. It may not be Boogaerts' finest hour —that'd be 2002's wonky-country fantasia 2000— but I Love You is still a joy from start to finish; its shuddering, robotic rhythms smoothed to a gliding shine by the strangely funky playing.

Even though they've issued three LPs for iconic Chicago label Thrill Jockey, Pit er Pat remain a band unloved and undervalued by the pop-cultural massive. Essentially lead by drummer/vocalist/producer Butchy Fuego, they're a peculiar, post-jazz pop-trio that foregrounds percussion; Fuego's poly-ethnic, polyrhythmic playing pirouetting around the nimble-fingered keyboard parts of nominal front-woman Fay Davis-Jeffers. Vocally, Fuego and Davis-Jeffers recall another boy-girl tag-team: Amedeo Pace and Kazu Mikano of Blonde Redhead. But, where that band build dewy layers of dream-pop guitar, Pit er Pat eternally keep things elementally skeletal. For them, rhythm is the ultimate communicator; and that's an ideal High Time articulates stylishly.

Issued only as limited-edition vinyl pressing by Thurston Moore's impossibly-hip Ecstatic Peace! imprint, it seems this glorious outing for rock deconstructivists Little Claw isn't even deemed to be a 'proper' album. Yet, if we're to mark Spit and Squalor Swallow the Snow purely on artistic merit, it qualifies not merely as actual album, but as one of best underground outings of the ought-eight. The second record for the recent Portland relocatees proudly bathes Kilynn Lunsford's mighty pipes in a barrel-load of delay, as she and her bandmates bash out single-chord trance-states that channel the reductionist spirit of garage-rock recidivism into a heightened, empowered primitivism. Meaning: it rocks; albeit in a tense, frightening fashion.