TOP ALBUMS OF THE YEAR

HERALD REVIEWERS PRESENT THEIR 10-BEST LISTS FOR 2012

1. Diamond Rings — Free Dimensional

The best music defines a time, but defies time. It’s that which tweaks in you memories that are often contained to one moment, but can easily be used to recreate that moment over and over and over again.

Perhaps that’s why the sophomore album from Canadian synth pop artist Diamond Rings (a.k.a. John O’Regan) struck such a personal chord this year. Call it nostalgia, call it pining for lost youth, call it simple navel-gazing, but Free Dimensional was like stepping into a time machine back to the early ’80s when those most important personal bonds with music and identity were being formed.

It was then, in those postpunk days, that the world opened up, then when it all felt so new.

Band and artists such as XTC, Depeche Mode, Orchestral Manoeuvres In the Dark, The Fixx, Cabaret Voltaire, Ultravox, Payolas, Duran Duran, Howard Jones, The Cure, The Human League, Thomas Dolby weren’t the traditional, North American idea of what rock music was supposed to be.

It was somehow more worldy. They were doing something that seemed so cold and futuristic, but offered such warmth and humanity and romanticism to someone who was just getting a handle on what those things meant.

And they and their music defined moments both large and small because they were omnipresent, the soundtrack to that entire age of discovery. These songs feel like that. Sound like that.

But, and this is what makes it the one album that was easy to return to with something other than simple nostalgia, it also sounds and feels so fresh and new. It long passed the point of merely the past and is remarkably in the present.

It now lives in a place all its own. And it’s one that, song by song, begs revisiting.

And whether it’s tugging at memories or making new ones, that ultimately is what good music should do — feel, define and defy. And that’s why Free Dimensional was the album of 2012. 2. The Heavy — The Glorious Dead 3. Kathleen Edwards — Voyageur 4. Dr. John — Locked Down 5. Smashing Pumpkins — Oceania 6. Bob Dylan — Tempest 7. Japandroids — Celebration Rock 8. Leonard Cohen — Old Ideas 9. Sharon Van Etten — Tramp 10. Fiona Apple — The Idler Wheel Is Wiser ...