I love this. It’s their usual shimmering synth with spacey squeaks, and then at some point it just seems unable to contain its excitement and goes all-out eighties sax. It’s one of the best things to go.

The MP3 is free to download if you sign up for their newsletter or whatever.

Helsinki seem to reinvent themselves a little with every album these days. That Beep, the first single from this, has been out for almost three years, and is so funky and divergent that I’ve been itching to hear the rest of their latest experiments for way too long.

Surprisingly, Moment Bends is more conventional than their previous stuff: That Beep is nuts, but it’s more or less alone. The rest are polished pop, obvious but effective hooks and sometimes openly sentimental lyrics. Yr Go To is narrowly the best, for blending that with a slightly spacey feel, as if they got distracted while idly producing a great pop song.

Despite the loss of quirk, it’s a great album and easily the best of these three. The only bad track is Contact High, which they’re inexplicably using to promote it. It’s not just the worst track here, it’s the worst thing they’ve ever done. It has a last-verse key change, for Christ’s sake – why is that still legal?

£7.49 Amazon MP3

I only just got this, but Yeah Yeah Yeah is an instant favourite. The Sounds are usually pretty straightforward rock, but here they’re going a little more electronic – some tracks feel more about rhythms and samples than the conventional structure they’ve stuck to before. On Yeah Yeah Yeah it’s excitingly new, but the rest of the album isn’t standing up to Rubicon yet (see I’ve Got Confessions To Make).

£7.90 Amazon MP3

A few highlights here, not least the tumbling Try To Sleep (below). Especially Me (and probably you, the chorus adds) is another – disarming and gorgeous. Nothing But Heart is the one with the gut-wrenching distortion in what I guess you’d call a trailer for the album, but in the rest of the song the endless repetition of the title grates enough to distract from the wall of guitar.

The former two would have been at home on The Great Destroyer, a freakishly perfect album, so C’mon is a step up from the bleaker Drums & Guns.

£7.90 Amazon MP3

If you’ve been dissatisfied with any of the government whales you’ve been using lately, I can recommend the Freelance Whales. When an album starts with a song like this, you know you’re in for some pretty fucking gentle glockenspiel-banjo times.

The whole album is good, I got it from here.

Since I’m embedding a bunch of tracks from their site, I’ll also copy their referral codes for the buy links so any kickbacks go to them.

Apologies to anyone who recommended me something that didn’t make this top ten – I listened to over 700 tracks over the course of three weeks, so it’s likely I overlooked some good stuff.

1. Tennis – Seafarer

The gentle crooning of Cape Dory would have made as much sense in the forties as today, and it’s about the prettiest concept album I’ve ever heard. The whole thing is a half hour holiday to a series of remote isles, each track a different nautical adventure among deserted beaches.

Marathon is the track Gramaphone picked – an almost too-sweet finger clicking ballad about exploring a coastline, and my favourite at first too. I ended up prefering Seafarer for the way it keeps shifting – I lose track of the number of hooks, and every time I find myself humming Tennis it turns out to be just a different part of this song.

Buy

2. Joanna Newsom – Good Intentions Paving Company

I’ve never disliked a Joanna Newsom song, but they’re all so gentle and nice that I can’t distinguish between most of them. This is the one with a hook, and like a lot of artists who don’t usually do them, she turns out to be brilliant at it. The sharp curl of the chorus catches so beautifully on the way she rolls her unstressed syllables – she’s like if Holly Hunter was an elf.

It’s still sweet, and funny, it just happens to be catchy as well. So much so that I’m even happy to sit around while it takes a few meandering minutes to wind down at the end.

Buy

3. Sleigh Bells – Rill Rill

Buy

I love a song that can’t shut up, like there’s some itch in the vocal chords that tickles in every instrumental moment. Crown on the Ground was in last year’s Gramaphone roundup, but its poppiness is filtered through such a vicious assault on the ears I assumed the rest of their stuff would be something like a western Masonna.

Sleigh Bells are nicer than that, though, they just like seeing what your speakers can do. Rill Rill is a tumbling, clashing pop song with no unwanted teeth, which makes it the most listenable on the album. Elsewhere, Run The Heart has fun blending chorals with an oscillator and cutting in thick chunks of fuzz. Then Infinity Guitars jitters without momentum for most of its length before throwing itself through an unexpected brick wall of gut thumpingly thick noise.

They love to play with the texture of sound, and I love to hear them do it.

4. The Decemberists – Down By The Water

The King is Dead feels louder and brassier than the stuff that got me into the Decemberists in the first place. But that gives high points like Down By The Water a big, crisp satisfying sound that’s just fun to have around.

Buy

5. Menomena – TAOS

I had never heard of these guys, I have no idea what TAOS stands for, I don’t like anything else I can find of theirs on Spotify, but this track… God yes. Just the right mix of powerful riffs, fearless vocals and self-effacing lyrics that slowly turn sinister as the insecurities reveal their source.

Buy

6. Matt & Kim – Good for Great

Beep beepbeepbeepbeep beep. Beepbeepbeepbeep beep. Beep.

Buy

7. Belle & Sebastian – I Didn’t See It Coming

About the only one on this list I was able to figure out for myself – oh, Belle and Sebastian have a new album? You think I should listen to that? Good idea.

I Didn’t See It Coming is an anthem written to be shouted, a punch on every syllable, but sung as softly as possible. It’s really nice.

Buy

8. Cee-Lo Green – Fuck You

I love Fuck You for its incoherent impotence. It’s not a song about bragging – despite a disastrous ‘official’ second video that manages to miss both the point of the song and the video that made it popular. It’s not about self-pity, it’s not about betrayal, and it’s not even about putting someone down. It has plenty to say about the girl he’s lost, but she’s not the point either.

The chorus is addressed to someone else – the guy – and it’s a chorus for when you know why you’re pissed off, you know who you’re pissed off with, and you have absolutely no point to make about it. You’re not like, “Oh yeah? Well she’ll leave you too.” You’re not like, “Oh yeah? Well at least I’m better looking.” You’re not like “Oh yeah? Well I’ll get rich some day and make her jealous.” You’re like… fuck you.

Buy

9. Hello Saferide – Lund

A gorgeous band discovered via Duncan Geere’s excellent collaborative Spotify playlist: Sparse and Wintery. You can listen to the lovely Arjeplog there, and it was a close toss-up between that and Lund for my pic. Lund wins purely on music, that trickle of piano has a really distinctive atmosphere that reminds me of a time and place I can’t quite name.

Buy

10. Radio Radio – Nine Piece Luggage Set

I can’t stand hip-hop that’s about self-aggrandisement, money, violence or sluts. I am 100% behind hip-hop that’s about suitcases.

I can only understand about half the Acadian French in this song, but enough of it is in English to suggest they are, on some level, mocking the puerile materialism that leads hip-hop culture latch onto random accoutrements of anachronistic wealth ideals. But I love it for being so beautifully deadpan that after a few listens, you actually kind of lust after a really nice piece of luggage.

Buy

I spend my downtime in life analysing things, trying to identify comprehensible systems and figure out ways to beat them. Then I forget again. So this is a notebook of that stuff.

It’s what got me interested in philosophy, but since uni, my interest has shifted to the more practical consequences of it. It’s not hard to figure out the meaning of life, it’s harder to figure out how to pursue it. Hence, Advice.

The meaning of life is there isn’t one, which is to say there isn’t one other than the obvious one, which is to say be happy.

It gets clearer if you think about what you’d want for your kids: you might want them to have kids themselves, but that really only gets you back to the drawing board a few decades closer to the destruction of the planet. What you probably want, overall, is for them to be happy. Apart from anything, it’d make you happy.

This hedgehog agrees with me.

It’s probably not an exaggeration to say that some people have written a bit about how to pursue happiness, but a lot of it trips over a pretty basic hurdle at the starting line. We’ve noticed we are happy when we get things we wanted – love, money, sex, kids, shoes – and concluded this stuff is related. Or we’ve noticed we are unhappy when we can’t get things we want, and concluded we should stop wanting things.

At the heart of it there’s an assumption that we want what’ll make us happy, with a certain margin of error for when things aren’t what we expected. We think we’re almost rational that way, wanting things because of the happiness they’ll bring, or our estimation thereof. We are way, way off.

This won’t sound terribly profound, but we just want shit. It just happens. It’s not a decision, it’s a set of drives built into us by evolution to ensure we survive and reproduce whether it’ll make us happy or not. The desire to have kids has nothing to do with any felicific calculus about the happiness and sadness they’d bring, in the same way that hunger isn’t a judgment about how enjoyable food would be. Other desires that are less primal stem from these, usually via power, safety and status.

The upshot is: your brain, gut, heart, genitalia, and whatever other organs you want to assign desires to, are not trying to make you happy. When they say they want something – whether it’s true love or a breakfast burrito – it doesn’t mean they’ll thank you for it. And the question of how to make yourself happy has really very little to do with getting what you want. These posts will be about what it does relate to, and sometimes how.

You probably don’t want to hear about my year, particularly since it was good. So I’ll do what I did in 2009 and just pick some shots from it, and a track to listen to while you browse.

I invented a board game for my family to capture the basic mechanics of the amazing but single-player only Flash game Dice Wars. It had some kinks.

Rich’s housewarming. He has a trapdoor in his kitchen that leads to an underground well.

I made cookies for my family at easter, each customised to our esoteric tastes.

Ceramic.

My cheese and rosemary bread – best eaten while it’s still this hot.

Exhausted in an especially hectic New York City, I’m happy to find Max Brenner The Chocolate Man still exists, and is still an oasis of warmth and butterfat.

For our pseudo-anniversary, we fed Kim’s fixation with fish at the aquarium, and my fixation with steak at Hawksmoor.

Hawksmoor’s sticky toffee pudding.

I now own a barbecue, the final artefact I needed to complete my triforce of manhood.

Our old friend Al was back from New Zealand for a while, so Rich, he and I got together for a fajitas and margaritas night. We got through about a third of the Cuervo in margaritas before I passed out and Rich violated his vegetarianism. Welcome back Al!

It made us think.

30s party for my Gran’s birthday. Anna, me, and Kim.

Vancouver work trip.

Seafood with Relic. That’s Dan Kading, designer of Dawn of War 2: Retribution.

Halloween.

Christmas. Anna and I are transfixed by our dad connecting a battery and a magnetised screw so that it spins phenomenally fast.

These last few might look familiar.

The first entry of a Minecraft diary I’m starting just went up on PC Gamer – it’s just a short one to start with, but this might turn into a long-running thing. It’s about playing with a sort of permanent death rule: if I die, I have to delete the whole world and everything in it, then start again from scratch in a new one. It’s also starting from when I first played the game, so I know virtually nothing about how it works. The next entry will go up first thing tomorrow, and it’ll probably be every other day from then on.

I’m not going to harp on any more about how good Terriers is – it actually had a bit of a dip around episode 9, getting too bogged down with its heroes’ personal problems to investigate any clever plots – but I am going to give you the full song the ridiculously catchy theme tune is taken from. It was written by the series’ composer Robert Duncan specially for it, but I like that he wrote the full song too.

My Call of Duty: Black Ops review also went up on the site this week. I reviewed both the Modern Warfares, and it sometimes felt like I might be the only one not having his mind blown by the unending B-movie combat.

Both those games had a saving grace: the first had a few really smart sections, and a level of dazzle that was new at the time; and the second’s co-op mode is still the best thing the series has ever done. Black Ops has neither, and its multiplayer is too glitchy to get much out of yet, so it’s the first time the score really reflects how much fun it is to aim-and-squeeze your way through a badly written action movie.

Amusingly, the only other review on Metacritic with a score close to mine calls it “Truly a magnificent single-player experience,” “the best single-player campaign that the series has ever had,” and “stunning”.

Craig Mullins’ extraordinary BioShock 2 tribute art: ’1959′. The first image in years to immediately become my desktop background at home and at work. I love that he can make such a concealed place feel spacious and calm, and it makes me want a game where we see Rapture in its glory – even if it has to be without the people. He’s a concept artist who’s worked on Halo, Fallout 3 and one of the Matrix films.

Hard On, by Withered Hand. The name would have put me off, but this came up on shuffle when I was going through Said The Gramaphone’s songs of the year. I love the friendly advice tone of the lyrics.

Amazon customer reviews of a steering-wheel mounted laptop desk: everyone’s a comedian, most of them pretty good ones.

Man earns every World of Warcraft achievement: I won’t link it, but this was one of those strange stories where the only thing about the story isn’t true, and the people reporting the story all know it isn’t true. If it were mainstream sources, you’d assume it was ignorance. If it were the guy himself, you’d assume it was mendacity. When it’s disinterested parties who know their stuff, you can only imagine its borne of some kind of news desperation. It’s okay, guys, there’s plenty of news out there that actually did happen! You could report that! Long story short, he hadn’t got every achievement: a bug caused his total to be reported one higher than it is. The story therefore becomes: …

The Onion named Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind their film of the decade. An interesting choice – it would have been easy to go with There Will Be Blood without really thinking about it. They also make a good case for their equally surprising #2, another film I love. My list would be Memento, Serenity, Adaptation.

Just Cause 2 Vehicle Stunts Trailer: on top of everything else, I’m really excited by how good Just Cause 2 feels – the first game was only really fluid when you were parachuting. Here vehicles seem to have that same smoothness and momentum. Watch for the awesome jump at 2m52s.

Just Cause 2 Island In Chaos Trailer: Worth it for what he does after the end titles.

Jonty explains the London Underground’s mysterious Inspector Sands. I love codes.

Star Trek Online gives you ridiculously good in-game stuff for pre-ordering at various places. The worst use of game content and development time – as bribes to take sides in the puerile retail wars. Got me so annoyed I started an argument about it, which’ll be in the next issue of PC Gamer.

IGN’s Rogue Warrior review: “the hit detection is extremely hit or miss”.

A Claptrap in a tux. I just like this shot. I still haven’t played any of the Borderlands DLC.

Andy Dufresne is tweeting the Shawshank Redemption in first person, in order. “Oh dear God.” is a common update.

There really is a gnome of Noam Chomsky. Sad news via @icouldbeahero.

LightBox’s Trent Polack finds there’s a thread on the Avatar forums to help fans cope with the depression of returning to the real world after the awesomeness of the movie.

Cute but dark short by a Pixar animator, via Waxy.

roBurky notes that Calvin and Hobbes did the ‘where’s the future?’ joke everyone’s been driving into the ground back in 1989. As an eight year old, I don’t think I was actually tired of it then.

@ex0′s stupendous Captain Forever ship: like a flying cathedral made of rainbows and pain.

Facebook is now the size of the entire internet ten years ago. The average Facebook user spends 55 minutes on it a day.

I’ve been working my way through Said the Gramophone’s 75 tracks of the year with an odd cocktail of revulsion and delight. Among the delight, this wonderful song by Vic Chesnutt. Often songs that aren’t about what they seem to be about never let you in on the twist – it was years before I realised Belle & Sebastian’s Century of Elvis was about a cat. Vic’s is from the school of “Two minutes in, just come out and say it.”

I approve. It’d be a shame for anyone to hear a couplet so painfully double-edged as “When you touched a friend of mine / I thought I would lose my mind” and miss the grim joke.

Oh yeah, good news: I’m working on a really long post about a really esoteric subject that involves lots of strong opinions about game design ideas I have no experience working with.

Truffle fries in San Fran.

The restaurant of endless meat, with 2K’s Karl Unterholzner and Jordan Thomas.

Mr Gish unwisely shows his daughter the drawing Mr World of Goo did of him naked.

Dylan Moran, yesterday.

France’s pimary exports are textiles and macro photography.

Space Invader ice cubes.

Kim arranged I think my first ever surprise birthday party.

Halloween.

Prototype has caused me to break a mouse, and Star Trek has my brain quietly working on a master formula to generate Star Trek plots for Star Trek Online quests, and ways they could interact with a player-chosen crew.

Meanwhile, The Sounds have a new album. It’s nudged them back into the lead as my most-listened artist on last.fm, partly because their songs have a tight neatness to them that allows me to listen to them almost indefinitely without irritation, and partly because until this album, they were unique in never having produced a worthless song. That’s the last one on Crossing the Rubicon, but it’s their best album despite it. Two reasons, one of them is this:

Do you find that some bands just sound like two guitars and some drums? When No-One Sleeps When I’m Awake kicks in, it reminds me that The Sounds are one of the few that don’t. They produce a thick ribbon of undulating noise that your speakers seem happy to belt out, as if they’ve finally got something to sink their drivers’ teeth into.

The other reason is Home Is Where Your Heart Is, but it’s possible I’m just being a big sap about that one.

I see now why most swords extend in only one direction.

Via, of course, Waxy.

A regular feature in which I ask you to listen to a sound file with no idea what it’s going to be. Sometimes it’s voice, sometimes music, once it was just a noise. This one’s not super-obscure, but it’s ages since I actually listened to it, and to this day I find myself humming it when someone says the word ‘online’. It is dorky in the extreme.

Update! It’s not supposed to be all crackly and fucked up. But it’s sounding that way for some. See the comments for a link to the video.

It’s tumultuous music, melodic but booming and insistent, the vocal a few shades more fierce and assured than a new artist is allowed to be. I like a lot of gentle stuff, but it takes something bold and sharp to grip me this firmly. Like Dog Days, every listen ends with my heart-rate just slightly higher than when it started, and my mood a little warmer.

Anyone else care to recommend something they’ve been getting into lately? The great joy of Spotify is that I can investigate tips when I get them, rather than forgetting about them for six years.

A regular feature in which I ask you to listen to a sound file with no idea what it’s going to be. It’s an attempt to share the strange experience of rummaging through my old download folders, listening to forgotten MP3s with uninformative filenames. All I know about them is that I must have liked them at some point.

Volume Four was the shortest I’ve ever posted, this one is the longest – don’t click play if you’re in a hurry.

A regular feature in which I ask you to listen to a sound file with no idea what it’s going to be. A very, very short one this time, and hopefully mysterious. I’ll reveal its identity and why it’s interesting in the comments tomorrow, but beat me to it if you can.

A few things to say about this:

• As delightful as the game’s squishy look is, I’d still love it if the artwork was mediocre. But without the magnificent, booming, haunting, spacious music, this would have been a very different game, and a much less exciting one.
   
• Free, downloadable, and with full versions of tracks you hear only parts of in-game – this is the way to do it. A commercial disc priced to squeeze a tiny trickle of money out of your most devoted customers, lacking the tracks people are likely to buy it for because of licensing restrictions – this is not. Soundtracks are promos. The people who already have the game can just rip the music from its files, even if you’ve tried to stop them.
   
• There are lots of highlights, but my favourite track in the game is still the music to the Red Carpet level (pictured). I had the chance to ask Kyle about the music a few weeks back, and I said this one sounded like a bad dance track slowed down, which somehow made it majestic. He explained that it is a bad dance track slowed down, written as a joke on the awfulness of nineties music, and the full version on this soundtrack includes sections played at normal speed. Witness the shift from glorious to obnoxious and back again:
  Download audio file (KyleGabler-RedCarpet.mp3)

  According to the liner notes, the vocalist is “an astrophysicist named Jessica. I gave a her a chainsaw for her wedding and we never spoke again. The end.” I thought she was a keyboard sample.

Just put some of my Mirror’s Edge shots up, and it turns out they make a rather nice slideshow. I’ll have another post or two about it this week.

Update! Fishbro points out that watching this slideshow whilst listening to the game’s theme song, Still Alive (!), quote “Felt good.” I therefore embed it here, that you might stream it in the background while opening the slideshow (which has expanded a fair bit) in a new tab and watching it full-screen. GOOD DAY.

I have a special weak spot for songs that make me laugh with their opening couplet, and I have a special weak spot for spies, and I have a special weak spot for The Decemberists. So this song (via The World Forgot) was always going to win my heart – it didn’t need to be as catchy and fun as it is.

If, like me, you barely understood the basics of the Plame affair at the time, I suggest having it explained to you by Matthew Baldwin while you listen to this. It’s one of those rare occasions when you realise that thing you kept hearing about in the news was actually hugely exciting if you get the right person to tell you about it.

A regular feature in which I ask you to listen to a sound file with absolutely no idea what it’s going to be. Sometimes, after listening, you still won’t have any idea. Other times it’ll be obvious.

This was inspired partly by trying to clear out my downloads folder – I shoved all the unknown MP3s onto my player and listened to them on my way into work, never having any idea what kind of thing was coming next, only that I had for some reason deemed it download-worthy. It took me a long time to remember what the hell this was, and I still have no idea where I got it.