A good month for records. Here are Robin’s favorites, mine will follow later and keep an eye on the site over the next few days as some of our contributors let us in on theirs.

Fuck Buttons “Tarot Sport”
This record is what I imagine it would be like taking pills to soundtrack the end of civilization. Produced by Andrew Weatherall and seemingly recorded in the middle of some kind of radioactive meteor storm, this is utterly brilliant. Album of the year, no competition.

Beak> “Battery Point”
Portishead take time between records. the last wait was just over a decade. Great to hear mainman Geoff Barrow keeping himself busy in downtime with Beak>, his other band. The record is mainly instrumental, at times Kraut-y, at others worrying doomo metal, others glistening transcendent post-rock – imagine Mog-adon-wai and you’re halfway there.

Paddy McAloon “I Trawl The Megahertz”
Slightly cheating as this has been out a while… A friend recommended this record to me four years back. Shamefully I first put it on two weekends ago. I can’t believe the time I’ve wasted not listening to this record. None of the arched eyebrow-ness of pop maven McAloon’s Prefab Sprout is on display here – instead, a sublime, trippy spoken word and orchestral document of a period in his life where he all but lost his eyesight. The result is deeply strange and stop-in-your-tracks magical.

The XX “Teardrops”
Completely brilliant cover of the Womack & Womack classic by a bunch of 19 year olds just out of school. Really, teenagers should never sound this wracked with emotion.

Manic Street Preachers “Cleaning, Cooking & Flower Arranging”
Cheeky plug for Manics remix record I put together – the Underworld remix that comes at the end of the record really is something else – how to make Welsh polemic punk rock band sound like Rotary Connection. Also, the Fuck Buttons mix is just awesome too…MSP/Fuck Buttons.