Flamboyant weirdness was the signature theme of 2005, a year in which the outcasts and oddballs staged a creeping – sometimes creepy – take-over.
Antony and The Johnsons and Arcade Fire, the two break-out acts of the past 12 months, harked back to something older and sadder than pop. With I Am A Bird Now, the former, a riddle trapped in an enigma trapped in a Herman Munster impersonator, invited us to gaze over our shoulders towards The Brill Building and the buttoned-down ennui of the jazz-era supper club.
Arcade Fire, meanwhile, stumbled upon an entirely new genre: epic raggle-taggle. Their songs bore the outward aspect of alt.rock yet, beneath the skin, blended blue-grass, cajun and Americana (though based in Montreal, the group originated are from Texas).
Were rock music to have evolved in the 19th rather than the 20th century, its fruits might have sounded very like The Arcade Fire. Or are we reading too much into their penchant for dressing as Abraham Lincoln’s touring band?
Sufjan Stevens was another artist to explore a quintessentially American sensibility. A whiff of novelty sometimes clung to Stevens, whose stated ambition is to fete in song each of America’s 50 states. His execution, however, transcended the quirkiness of his conceit
On his second leg of the journey, Illinoise, Stevens gave tender homage to the Prairie state, evoking the haunting vastness of the great plains and the statuesque clutter of Chicago.
Stevens, we would learn, is a devout Christian and it seemed almost enough to make Jesus funky again.
As ever , the best music was often to be found in the margains. Electronica yielded many pleasures. Colleen’s A Golden Morning Breaks saw the French composer take up real instruments in place of a sampler, producing something fragile and affecting, like a pearl of dew framed by a misty sunrise.
Elsewhere, the digital melancholy of Vector Lover’s Capsule For One sounded as stark, mysterious and menacing as one of Kubrick’s monoliths, while Smoosh, two pre-teen sisters from Seattle, gave us 05’s finest moment of indie-pop, She Like Electric.
The year’s one true masterpiece, unquestionably, was Rufus Wainwright’s Want Two, an album that seemed to collapse into the listener’s embrace in an exaggerated swoon.
Wainwright began 2005 as a mentor of sorts to Antony Hegarty. Now, he splutters in the vapour trail of I Am A Bird Now. Sometimes the world can be a cruel and crazy place.