A funny year for music so far, personally speaking. It seems that, despite the many albums I’ve liked, there have been a good few that’ve been, one way or another, kind of disappointing: albums I’ve looked forward to very much, then neurotically restrained myself from writing about, due to my self-imposed rule about negative criticism generally wasting time and space. There’s still too much stuff to enthuse about, after all. I’ve been sat on James Murphy’s “Greenberg” soundtrack for a while now, and it’s only recently that I’ve started to really like it. Initially, Murphy’s extra-curricular business sounded oddly self-conscious, an academic satire on the sort of music that stereotypically accompanies a notionally indie-ish movie: could the xylophone-and-strum conjunctions of “Dear You” sound any more twee? That might still be true, but the strengths of these sketchy songs are becoming ever more apparent, I think. A bunch of them, it transpires, are co-written and performed with Al Doyle from Hot Chip (a peripatetic member of LCD Soundsystem, if memory serves), who evidently shares Murphy’s penchant for a kind of obsessively clever record-collector rock. Consequently, the superb “People” finds Murphy essaying his clenched falsetto (as heard on a section of “45:33”, though his voice sounds strikingly less adenoidal this year) on a piece of skinny electro-soul that’s one part Suicide, one part Lee Perry, and about 18 parts Timmy Thomas’ “Why Can’t We Live Together?”. “Photographs”, meanwhile, is a frail and affecting piano ballad that has something of The Kinks about it. And so it goes on, charmingly. “Sleepy Baby”: “Another Green World”-era Eno. “Birthday Song”: ingenuous indie-folk, with squeaking guitar strings for added lo-fi credibility. “Thumbs”: gamelan-ish homebaked Glass systems. “Gente”: flamenco! It’s all good, climaxing with “Please Don’t Follow Me”, one of Murphy’s fabulously awkward stabs at being plaintive, built on a needling piano line that reminds me indistinctly of something from “Berlin”, or “Hunky Dory”, maybe. There are also smart/droll selections from Galaxie 500, Steve Miller, The Sonics and Duran Duran mixed in, and a song credited to LCD Soundsystem, “Oh You (Christmas Song)”, which hits the jackpot for reference-hunters by being, ostensibly, an NYC post-punk rescoring of Pink Floyd’s “Money”. In the hands of most other musicians, this sort of intensive magpie-pop would get bogged down by its own cleverness, but Murphy can process this stuff with a wit and sleight-of-hand that makes it satisfying beyond providing sport for his fellow trainspotters. And none of it, for what it’s worth, sounds much like the forthcoming LCD Soundsystem album…

Quite a good run for the Kranky label of late, with a bunch of albums I’ve enjoyed a lot from Ken Camden, Jonas Reinhardt and Disappears. For the past week or so, though, I’ve been really taken with “Endless Falls” by Loscil, discreetly asserting itself as maybe the pick of the bunch. Loscil, it transpires, is the work of a guy from Vancouver called Scott Morgan, who also purportedly drums for Dan Bejar’s indie band, Destroyer. If Wikipedia is to be believed, “Endless Falls” is something like his eighth album, though while the name’s vaguely familiar, I can’t actively recall hearing any of his previous music. I should probably fix that, because “Endless Falls” is a hugely beguiling record. There are elements here that aren’t, to be honest, immediately appealing: the slightly corny sleeve image of raindrops on windscreen; the affinities with a certain school of crypto-classical music, which encompasses plenty of stuff that I like (Max Richter, say, some of Johann Johannsson’s early work) but also a good few things I’m less keen on, which have the whiff of Sigur Ros about them (some of Johann Johannsson’s more recent work, for a start); a somewhat self-conscious last track. And, yes, the title track does start with heavy rain and sombre violins, but stick with this one. Soon enough, Loscil starts moving into more abstract, ambient territory, where beats and crackle prove subtly dominant. Some tracks, like the superb “Lake Orchard”, for instance, are close in spirit and substance to Wolfgang Voigt’s Gas, and consequently wouldn’t sound out of place on one of Kompakt’s “Pop Ambient” comps. Other pieces, such as “Shallow Water Blackout”, “Showers Of Ink” and “Dub For Cascadia”, remind me more of a Jan Jellinek or Farben album from the early Noughties, or something from the same period on Mille Plateaux. It’s a tremendously engaging take on minimalism, and when the classical aspirations occasionally recur, they’re gently diced up in a manner which recalls, perhaps, Murcof’s digital attempts to reconfigure the sacred spaces of Arvo Part. Finally, there’s “The Making Of Grief Point”, which features some more impressive looming music, but also the (deliberately?) portentous pensées of Dan Bejar. Far be it from me to criticise someone for pretention, but I’m not entirely convinced that Morgan’s music is improved by having someone awkwardly intone, "I have lost interest in music: it is horrible," and "The answer to the making of grief point is picnic baskets filled with blood," over the top of it. At least he had the sense to pack the track away at the back.