I think I may very well be the only man alive that does not like the Uncharted games. It is a lonely feeling, made all the more bitter by the reactions I get when I say I don't care for them, and by the $55 I spent on Uncharted 2. Alas, the praise for the games was so universal that I bought 2 just as I was about to start playing 1, so that I could experience them back to back. And I think I actually like the sequel less than the original, which even puts me in the minority when talking about the games relative to each other.

A significant portion of my hate stems purely from personal taste. This portion has to do with combat, which is a significant chunk of the game. I do not care for first person shooters, nor do I care for their third person counterparts which are almost entirely like first person games. When you aim, the character is mostly removed from the screen, rendering the game virtually first person. I don't like cover mechanics anymore than I like the shooting mechanics. I never bothered to play Gears of War because I didn't have to to know that I would not care for it. I could try and explain my dislike for such gameplay elements, but it really doesn't matter - I hate (pseudo) first person shooters.

Thus, when I'm forced into a firefight by Uncharted and have to spend minutes crouched behind cover, occasionally peeking out to fire off a few shots and take down a few enemies, I get pretty annoyed. I just don't care for it. As a side note, I found that this seemed directly contradictory to my absolutely love of Resident Evil 4 & 5. Thankfully the original Uncharted sort of came to the rescue on that one by sending me against enemies that didn't fire back (melee only), negating the need for cover and removing a large portion of my ire. Mowing down zombies that cannot fire back is far, far more fun than playing duck-and-cover with a squad of similarly-armed commandos. Uncharted taught me this.

I hated combat so much, in fact, that I very nearly didn't finish the first game because of it. I dropped the difficulty to Easy within a few hours of starting the game, knowing that I wouldn't make it through it otherwise. Even on Easy I nearly didn't beat the last chapter, which is a rather infuriating firefight featuring an invincible boss who can instant-kill you. Oh, the curse words I screamed during that sequence. Actually, I let the game play itself for ten or fifteen minutes on that chapter as I prepared dinner one night, happily listening to the sounds of Nathan Drake getting shot down again and again and again, sad death-scene music sound utterly joyful to my frustrated ears.

Thankfully, Uncharted 2 introduces the Very Easy difficulty setting, which I gratefully switched to almost immediately. It's one of the areas of definite improvement from first to sequel, as it makes you all but invincible, which allowed me to go through the game punching commandos to death. I would have vastly preferred a button that immediately killed all enemies, but at least it's something of a compromise. Very Easy also reveals hints more quickly, which is just as welcome as being nigh invincible, and brings me to the other things I hate: the games' platforming. Combat is one half of the gameplay, which I hate, and platforming is the other half, which I think is poorly executed and crappy, and by and large, I hate it too, leaving me with almost nothing in the game to enjoy.

The Uncharted games are basically heavily cinematic adventure games. That is what they are, that is why they sell, and that is why people love them. It is also why they are shitty games. As anyone who has played a "heavily cinematic" game knows, such games are highly scripted, which means that the game will only allow you to do exactly what it wants you to do so that you can trigger the next highly scripted event. You are guided from event to event like water flowing through a series of pipes. You cannot deviate from anything in the least, because the game is simply not built to cope with that. You have to have all your weapons stripped from you by something before the chapter begins, because you cannot carry a rocket launcher in with you from an earlier mission. You can't do that because you cannot blow up the helicopter until you reach the 20th train car, and you can't do that because if you did it before then, you wouldn't have a dramatic run along the top of the train as the helicopter is gunning for you. And you especially can't blow up the helicopter before that because it needs to crash into the 19th train car, throwing you off of the track and starting the next chapter.

Unfortunately, the restrictions that come from the game being so cinematic carry on into the platforming sections and even the combat sections, too. As a note, do not play Assassin's Creed 2 before you play Uncharted. I made that mistake unwittingly, and it certainly helped to increase my simmering anger at the game. Assassin's Creed 2 is the game in which you can climb anything. Uncharted 2 is the game in which it looks like you can climb anything. During any given platforming sequence, there is one and only one route you can take.

In the bombed-out shell of one particular house, I was tasked with climbing to the remains of the third floor. "Oh, no problem," I said to myself, looking around the room. "I'll just jump up to that door frame right there, jump over to the window, climb up it, jump to that ledge, those bricks, and I'm good." I jumped up against the wall with the door frame, and Drake pretended it did not exist. This scenario plays itself out over and over again throughout the game. Drake can cling onto the tinniest of ledges, holding himself up and moving along when all he has is the grip of his fingertips. But when I jumped to a cliff that was blanketed in tree roots just big enough to fit solidly into the palm of your hand, he pretended they did not exist, and plummeted to his death. And when I tried to grab onto that ledge that I swear to fucking shit was jutting out, he didn't give it a second look.

Uncharted is really a lot like the much-maligned adventure games of old, in which you had to put the tape on the hole in the fence, chase the cat through the hole, take the cat hair now on the tape from the tape, and then glue the cat hair to your upper lip to create a disguise that would let you past a wary guard. You're not figuring out how to get from Point A to Point B as much as you're figuring out how the designers want you to get from Point A to Point B and then traveling down that road they've created for you. You're not figuring out how to blow up a tank, you're figuring out how the developers want you to blow up a tank, and then doing it.

To further diminish my enjoyment, there are two more aspects of Uncharted that tie into this whole deal.

First, I personally found that the controls quite often betrayed me. I cannot adequately communicate the shock and anger I felt when, on standing on a ledge below a turning gear, I hit X to jump up and grab the ridges in the wheel, and instead of jumping up, I jumped out, toward the camera, causing me to plunge to my death once more. Or the time when I held up and hit jump in order to jump-climb to the bricks above me and to my left, but instead I went to my right. Scenarios like this played out over and over and over, with Drake doing things that, as far as I was concerned, had between little and nothing to do with what buttons I was pushing. Were it not for the fact that there are checkpoints every few feet, I never would have beaten the first game.

The other factor is that the environments in Uncharted are ridiculously rich and detailed. I'll come back to this later, but this is one of those cases in which an apparent boon becomes a curse. Sometimes the environments are so crowded with shit that I had absolutely no fucking clue where to go next. And really, when I say "sometimes," I mean "almost every ten minutes." It's easy to miss a small, thin rope hanging against a wall when you're in a huge room full of pillars and chains and flags and crates and wreckage. It's easy not to realize that you need to go through that window, over there, when you're in a courtyard that contains twenty windows, five doors, two adjacent hallways, and five ledges.

Hints come up after you wander in circles aimlessly for a few minutes, after any enjoyment and goodwill the game has built up over the last scene has rapidly evaporated. Of course, sometimes they don't, and sometimes they're not helpful. I used a walk-through with both games, and my only regret is that I didn't resort to it sooner. Again, it's often like old adventure games on the PC, but instead of pointing and clicking on every possible thing in a given screen, I would wander through a given environment, trying to jump and climb on every ledge, until I finally found the one that worked. This was how I ended a significant portion of my gaming sessions - running in circles in a futile attempt to find whatever I was supposed to do next, until I finally got so frustrated that I jumped off a cliff over and over and over again, alleviating some of my frustration by sending Drake's broken body ricocheting off of jagged icy cliffs, laughing as the other characters screamed and cried at his death.

The puzzles were similarly pointless about half of the time. On said half I simply brute-forced or walk-through-ed my way past the puzzles, and when I had the answer in hand, the puzzle still didn't make any sense.

I'm also not much of a fan of the change in tone from Uncharted to Uncharted 2. Without spoiling anything, in Uncharted, Nathan Drake is a treasure hunter who kills in self defense. In Uncharted 2, he's a thief who robs art museums and murders the poor fuckers who happened to be on duty that night. I do not like this. Further, Uncharted was largely a fun adventure, whereas Uncharted 2 is more dark and less fun. I do not like this, either.

But now that I've described in depth what I hate about the games, and what they do like shit, allow me to elucidate on what they do well.

First of all, the writing. Plot, characters, and dialog are all top notch. The plot is very Indiana Jones-esque, and involves traveling to distant and exotic locales in search of a lost ancient artifact, all while racing a less-than-noble man who would like to take it for himself. Nathan Drake, as well as the supporting cast, are eminently likable and have depth and humanity, bolstered significantly by the absolutely fantastic voice acting and writing. The dialog is witty and humorous while remaining natural, and is present outside of cut scenes - e.g. while giving your partner a boost to a high ledge, as combat is beginning, while running from a tank - which really helps to both keep things interesting and give the characters greater depth.

The music is also about as good as a human can expect - out of a video game, or out of a hundred-million-dollar Hollywood movie. I don't know that I'm going to track down the CD, but the backing soundtrack does its job fantastically, conveying the proper mood for your circumstances, whatever they may be, and making things sound sweeping and epic. The sound effects are also well done, though I'd put them more along the lines of adequate than superb.

Uncharted's most striking feature, though, is the visual presentation. Not just the graphics, but the entire visual suite - models, textures, animations, and most notably, environments. I can only begin to guess what went into making the game what it is in that regard alone. Over ten million dollars? Dozens of people, putting in a combined hundreds of thousands of hours over a few years? The games are absolutely unparalleled when it comes to the environments. They are highly varied throughout the game, never smack of copy-paste, and even a corridor that you spend five seconds running through has more detail than the most pivotal and fleshed out portion of any other game I've ever played. The level of detail in these environments is eye-popping. The sweeping views you're afforded when you reach some of the games' pivotal moments are unbelievable.

Of course, all of this is like saying that I went to a restaurant, ordered a meal, and it tasted like rotting cow shit - but the presentation was lovely, the staff was charming, and the ambiance was wonderful! The gameplay feels almost superfluous when it's not downright annoying. I probably would have enjoyed the Uncharted games far more had I watched someone else play them, or had they been a movie. As far as I'm concerned, that's not much of a recommendation.

Sometimes it takes a developer a not-quite-failed game before they're able to realize the vision that they originally had - and that they managed to successfully convey to the marketing team, who successfully conveyed it to the rest of us. Fable wasn't bad, per se, it just wasn't the world we were being sold, nor the world that one feels like Molyneux and company were seeing in their heads. Hey, I know the feeling. At any given point in my life, whenever I sat down to draw something, the end product did not match the vision that was still there and quite clear in my mind. I could explain what I intended to draw to people, but I just couldn't manage it.

Assassin's Creed 2 is, as has been said by plenty, the game that its predecessor wanted to be, and the game that everyone expected when they purchased AC1. It is very nearly flawless, though that certainly does not correlate - in general, or in this specific case - to pegging 10 on the Fun O Meter. It is improved in virtually every regard, and for once, for once, thank you Ubisoft, it feels like the developers actually listened to the complaints of all the people who played AC1. There were many such people, and the complaints were numerous, but they've addressed nearly all of them.

So let's start with what they didn't address: combat. It is virtually unchanged. You have many more ways to assassinate people, which is awesome, and which are awesome, but actual combat is no better than it was. You have more weapons, yes, and you have more killing animations, yes, and you can disarm now, yes, but combat is still boring as fuck. You have two choices: A) smash the attack button until you kill the enemy, which could take ages, since they will likely block and counter you (ineffectively, at that), or B) stand around waiting for them to attack, at which point you counter or disarm them, and kill them. Either option is long-winded and painful as well as lacking in skill and fun and most of the other earmarks of video games. I understand that this is Assassin's Creed, not Warrior's Creed, or what have you, and you don't really want to encourage combat in the streets. But that can be done without making it as boring as sitting in a rooftop canopy, waiting for guards to stop caring about you.

While that is the main flaw that remains from the first game, the second does have a few oddities. My favorite is the absolutely nonsensical placement of posters. Killing guards and causing mayhem increases your notoriety, which you can thankfully now decrease by bribing criers who talk about you and tearing posters of your face off of the walls. Funnily enough, all of these posters are slapped up in the most ridiculous places. Places, one might say, that you and only you can reach. On second and third floor balconies, often with no door leading out onto them. Atop piles of brick and marble near walls. Not on main thoroughfares, not in squares, but, you know, places that the general populace will never, ever see. It's really more comical than frustrating. Look, guys, I know that you want lowering notoriety to involve some gameplay of sorts, but really, it's a small thing. Sometimes it's better to be a little bit boring than completely ridiculous.

AC2 also introduces "The Truth" mini-game, which is basically a conspiracy theory sort of thing that places clues in famous paintings and photographs, and trots out correspondence that implicates some of history's most famous figures as being Templars who derived their power from the artifact you spend the game hunting for. I thought it was great, really, and worked well within the game and with the game's plot. That said, trying to solve some of the later puzzles was more frustrating than fun, and hunting around on a picture with a magnifying glass, trying to find some tiny image is less than enjoyable. There were a few puzzles that I solved simply by brute force, clicking on every possible place on the picture, going through all practical painting combinations, and even when I had the solution, I didn't understand why it was the solution. It made no sense.

But those issues aside, Assassin's Creed 2 really is a lot of fun. The missions are far, far more varied with regards to the main plot. You have some escorts, some chases, some combat oriented missions, some assassinations, and even a few in which you make use of vehicles. The whole "arrive at a city, do three of the exact same quests, and then assassinate a guy" approach of the first game is completely gone, and I do not think anyone will miss it. Optional quests are also blessedly different. The design team had the wisdom to keep tasks that are, by their nature, repetitive - like beat-up and race missions - rare. There are one, maybe two per city, and there'll be hours of gaming between them. The optional missions that come in greater supply, namely assassinations, are thankfully almost as varied as the main missions. Some require tailing your targets until they reveal a larger group. Some require chases. Some require not being detected.

The characters and writing are also a solid step up in Assassin's Creed 2. The hero of the first game, Altair, was something of a mystery man whose only defining characteristic was that he was a raging asshole. Ezio, on the other hand, is a bit more sympathetic, and has far, far more personality. So do all of the characters in the game, really - and the supporting cast is markedly larger. So is the out-of-Animus cast, too. Shaun is a thoroughly convincing asshole, and Vidic does a good job of being a bad guy, even if it's all but absent from the title. The plot is a wee bit over the top, in ways, but if you let yourself buy into it, it's fairly intriguing.

The real reason you play the game, however, is for the cities, and for the way you interact with them: parkour free-climbing and free-running, and those aspects of the game are incredible. The controls for climbing, running, and jumping are smooth, easy, and intuitive, and the game is responsive. Granted, there were a number of moments - usually at the worst of times, such as when I was closing in on who I was pursuing - when the controls went wonky, and decided to make me jump left instead of up, or right of my target, sending me plunging to my death. For the most part, however, I felt like I was entirely in command of Ezio.

The cities - the two of note being Florence and Venice - are incredibly well rendered. Each feels unique and exactly as I would expect them to in the time period. Il Duomo towers above the tile roofs of Florence, as does Palazzo Vecchio. Canals wind their way through Venice, graced by gondolas. The Piazzo San Marco is present, and contains the clock tower, the basilica, and the Doge's palace. Venice is nearly half the game, if I had to guess, and I would also estimate that it has as much square footage as the real Venice does. It is huge, and despite this, never feels like it's full of copied-and-pasted buildings. I'm sure there is plenty of that going on behind the scenes, but Assassin's Creed 2 somehow makes it feel like every street is unique. It's almost worth buying for the cities alone.

Assassin's Creed 2 is a major, major improvement over the first. If there's as much of an improvement in the third title, I suspect it'll be the game of the year. AC2 still isn't even the greatest game of '09, but is a very good game that is entirely worth playing. If nothing else, I can tell you that it's the only platinum PS3 trophy I have besides the one for Resident Evil 5, which means it's in very good company indeed.

Expectations are a funny thing. It doesn't seem like they should impact your enjoyment of something, but they most certainly do. For me, this is typically a bad thing, as I tend to avoid things that have horrible word of mouth, leaving me only disappointment when things that have been talked up don't live up to their reputation. Avatar, James Cameron's new science fiction epic or what have you, which you've no doubt heard about - unless you're living on the dark side of the moon - actually manages to be one of the rare cases where I was pleasantly surprised. It's both a case of a the movie meeting high expectations, and exceeding very low ones.

Make no mistake, Avatar is, at heart, a visual spectacle. The movie is about 3D, computer generated humanoids, and an imaginary world rendered in ridiculous detail. It's the most expensive movie ever made, and with a cast largely made up of unknowns, the vast bulk of that cash went into the computer generated graphics that make up about 80% of the movie's running time. And, whatever incredibly high expectations you may have, Avatar actually manages to meet and exceed them.

Avatar looks entirely believable while also looking incredibly fantastical. Pandora is full of bizarre creatures and exotic fauna, all rendered in lifelike detail. The Na'vi, the ten foot tall blue feline humanoids who are Pandora's natives and the movie's focus, are rendered so well that you actually forget that they're computer generated. That's the movie's true success, really - all of the computer generated visuals are so well put together and executed that you stop noticing that they're computer generated. The Na'vi, the iridescent plants, the human warships, the floating mountains - all of it seems real. Likewise with the 3D, which is virtually always well used and not gratuitous (unlike nearly every preview - "I'll stab him with this stiiiick!" *jabs at audience*). After awhile it all just becomes part of the movie, though it enhances the experience a great deal, much like color over black and white.

The one way in which the movie exceeds expectations, though, is with regards to the plot. I'd heard plenty of talk about how you should go for the visuals even though you have to endure the plot, how it's trite and hackneyed, and how it's Dances With Wolves in Space. Granted, the last is essentially true, but there are only so many plots, you know? Yes, a few lines of dialog were groan-worthy, and the story is nothing incredibly unique and original, but I actually thought it was pretty well executed. I liked the characters, and I liked the Na'vi, and I did care, though admittedly not so much that I was terribly moved by anything that happened on screen.

All in all, though, there are many testaments to the fact that Avatar isn't pure visuals, and to how worth seeing the movie is. The box office numbers have stayed record-breakingly strong for a month, which is something that won't happen if the movie is pretty to look at but crap for substance. The almost three hour running length also feels shorter than some movies I've seen that are half that length. And lastly, at least on a personal level, I do intend to see it again - on an Imax screen, this time, and in 3D again. You do indeed go for the visuals, and you will be wowed by them and not the script, but the movie actually ain't half bad either.

It seems inevitable that any time I finish a fantasy series I go into Philosophical Fantasy Reader mode, whereby I try understand my strange love of and hatred for the genre, and even worse, try to reconcile the series I love with the series I just read and the series I love with the series I think I should love. For some reason, I find it very hard to read three or more books by the same author in the same world and then just talk about that series. I always have to speak of Robert Jordan and Terry Goodkind and whoever else. So here we go.

I've read lots of fantasy series. Serieses. Serieseses. That is an awkward plural. Whatever. Too many, most likely. Through it all, the two series that I love the most, the two that have brought my life to a grinding halt while I turned page after page well into the hours when I should have been asleep, are Robert Jordan's The Wheel of Time and Terry Goodkind's The Sword of Truth. The part of this that gives me trouble, though, is that, throughout all the series that I've read, the two that have pissed me off most, that have made me fire up the web browser, find a fan site, grip the keyboard irately, and pound my hatred out on keys, are Robert Jordan's The Wheel of Time and Terry Goodkind's The Sword of Truth.

Now, there are plenty of caveats and qualifications. I certainly found it within myself to hate on George R. R. Martin's A Game of Thrones to some extent, and I do adore Zelazny's The Chronicles of Amber. But nothing, nothing, makes me want to tear a book in half like reading Jordan and Goodkind, and no characters have made me care about their fates as much as the ones crafted by those two authors. Perhaps I love those series because they're fucking enormous, encompassing literally along the lines of 8,000 pages each. Perhaps it's like family and friends; you enjoy the company of them most of all people because you know them best, but holy fucking shit can they annoy the hell out of you with minimal effort - also because you know them best.

Still, I keep coming back to my knowledge that Jordan and Goodkind are so heavily, horribly flawed at times. Jordan tells the same dumb joke five times a fucking book, and Goodkind pens twenty page Objectivist monologues. Jordan's female characters are horrible bitches almost to a woman, and Goodkind bludgeons you over the head with rape and violence long past when it was established who the bad guys were. Jordan creates characters that you love, and then neglects them while he writes books about new ones you don't give a shit about. Goodkind creates characters that you love, and then neglects them while he writes books about new ones you don't give a shit about. But goddamn if I don't love to read their deeply, irrevocably flawed books.


Which brings me to Brandon Sanderson's Mistborn trilogy, which I just finished. It's composed of three books, each with a definite beginning and end, though they all tie into the series as a whole. Sanderson is something of an up and coming author in the fantasy field, and is rather prolific. Additionally, there's a pretty direct connection to the whole Jordan / Goodkind discussion, as he was hired as the man to finish penning Jordan's last three Wheel of Time books. I read Elantris, his debut, before Mistborn, and it was pretty decent. Not amazing, but solid. Mistborn is an improvement in virtually all regards - plot, characters, world building, prose.

The series' magic system is of particular interest. If there's no such term as "hard fantasy", ala hard scifi (or in other words, science fiction with good, hard science to back it up), these books merit the creation of it. Allomancy - and feruchemy, and hemulurgy - the book's magic systems, are creative and imaginative and have rules. They require the user to ingest and then "burn" metals, with the metal burned corresponding to the power that it confers. Each base metal has an alloy that also burns - e.g. iron and steel - each pair has a push and pull - in the case of iron and steel, literally, as one lets the user push metal and the other lets her pull it - and so on. Even early on in the series, when you - and the characters - don't know what all the rules are, things still behave by them. Everything makes sense eventually, and it always feels like Sanderson knew the rules all along (I'm sure he did), he didn't just paint himself into a corner and then find a way out. This stands in stark contrast to Goodkind's magic system, which is, simply expressed, "Richard has awesome magic and can do absolutely whatever the fuck he wants whenever the fuck he needs to, which will conveniently let me work my way out of any plot corners I paint myself into."

He also defies fantasy convention in a number of other ways. The world of Mistborn is a dystopian place, the skies perpetually clouded by ash from the world's volcanoes, with flakes of ash steadily falling day and night. Plants are brown, the night dominated by fearful mists, the bulk of the population enslaved, and the ruler of the kingdom a brutal dictator who is immortal and all but invincible. The main character is a female, and she actually grows stronger than her male mentor / competition, who has been doing this for longer than her, which is something of a reversal of the situations found in Jordan and Goodkind, wherein a hapless male finds he is born with incredible power and quickly outstrips the women around him who have been doing this shit for their entire fucking lives (see: Jordan, Rand & Aes Sedai; Goodkind, Richard & Aes Sedai whatever the fuck he calls his Aes Sedai).

The plot is something of a take on your standard fantasy, "band of ragtag adventurers thrown together by fate must defeat an ancient and mysterious evil force bent on destroying the world for no real reason." Fuck me am I ever sick of typing that phrase out. Mistborn follows it loosely (sigh), but does have the nuts to kill off some characters and to throw a few twists in there. I'd probably put plot down as the weak point, but it isn't bad.

The characters are lovable. The romance is believable and not ridiculously drawn out and might give you a few warm fuzzies (but not too many). The artwork on the covers (paper backs, anyway) is not horrible and insulting to my sensibilities. The world is solid, the impacts of the magic system broad and deep, the slang surrounding it perfectly picked. The pacing is solid, the action well written.

And this is my issue. I feel like, critically, Mistborn is a better series than The Wheel of Time or The Sword of Truth. Its magic is far more creative and unique, it takes bigger risks, is more unconventional, dares to kill main characters, begins, finishes, and ends, and has bad guys that aren't simply evil incarnate and female characters that are likable and not Objectivist lecturers. Yet I still never really cared like I did while while reading WoT or SoT. I only stayed up late reading the books at the very end of the series, and then not very late. It never put my life on hold. I liked the characters, but when some of them - even central ones - died, I went, "huh," and then I kept reading, with barely a pause. When I finished Wot and SoT, I scoured the internet for fan sites and interviews, I bought all the dumb books that were offshoots and blatant money grabs. I wanted more. Badly. When I finished the last book of Mistborn, I put it down, rolled over, and went to sleep. I was done with the characters and the world.

I suppose you can take that as my review. Intellectually, I can say to you that Mistborn was creative, unconventional, and well put together. The characters were likable, the world building solid and intriguing, and the plot decent enough. As far as actual enjoyment goes, well, don't expect it to mandate that you put off the rest of your life while you stay up late reading.

Two thousand and nine was perhaps not the greatest year for music. Perhaps this was simply a balance for the glut of good games; after all, we only have so many entertainment dollars, and it helps if one industry can help carry the burden by sucking a little bit. There were some pretty high expectation disappointments, like the double EP from Beirut, the new Incubus... thing, and The Decemberists' continuing march toward boring prog. I didn't even get to a fraction of the year's notable releases, but that's always the case for a reasonable human being with interests other than music. Of what I did get to, here's what I found notable:

Balmorhea - All is Wild, All is Silent - All is Wild, All is Silent is easily my album of '09, and Balmorhea is easily my band of '09. They're the year's entry on my New Favorite Bands list, the one act you should not miss. Their debut (or at least the other album you can buy), Rivers Arms, is also excellent, but All Is is simply superb. I listened to it again and again and again. Expansive, emotional, and incredibly pretty, All is Wild, All is Silent is a fantastic album.

Mono - Hymn to the immortal Wind - It's Mono. What did you expect? If they release an album, they're on here. It's not a revelation or a masterpiece, but it's damn good. And that noise solo in Pure As Snow - that is quality shit.

Jonsi and Alex - Riceboy Sleeps - This one barely snuck in before the end of the year for me, but damn is it a fine work of music. It's fragile, emotive, and surreal, like Sigur Ros gone ambient, which is essentially what it is. Strings, choirs, piano, and the creaking of an accordion bellows all blend together into a wash of wonderful sound. Anyone with even the slightest interest in it should give it a go.

We Were Promised Jetpacks - These Four Walls - We Were Promised Jetpacks win the awards for Most Mostly Unrealized Potential and Best New Basically Just Rock Band. These Four Walls is effectively a good rock disc with two awesome songs, It's Thunder and It's Lightning and Quiet Little Voices. If they can match the quality of those two for a full album, it will be an awesome set of songs indeed.