It started with a list...
I asked Facebook which were its favourite Welsh albums of 2013. I wasn't trying to get other people to do my research for me, honestly I wasn't. I prefer to regard it as 'canvassing opinion'; keeping myself in touch with other people's tastes.
The worst thing about compiling end of year lists of The Best This, and The Best That – quite apart from the towering ego and misplaced sense of your own sense of self importance that's involved – is that it's too easy to overlook something important, hence the public appeal.
And so it proved; I had missed quite a few: too much Guinness and too many overplayed emotional melodramas, this year, for a fully-functioning memory come December.
This year also marked my 20th as a new music broadcaster. Thinking back to 1993, it's remarkable how much Welsh music has evolved since then.
A programme celebrating the best Welsh albums of 1993 would have barely lasted 15 minutes, let alone three hours.
As the list on my Facebook page grew... and grew... it dawned on me that we have just lived through a remarkable year for indigenous music. I will celebrate the full magnitude of 2013's Welsh Long Play sonic prodigiousness on my show this coming Saturday night at 10pm on BBC Radio Wales.
As a prelude to that, for the course of this week I will write about my 10 favourite Welsh albums of the year. Each and every one of them would make a great Christmas present for any music lovers you know, guaranteed.
The albums are listed in no particular order. My first two choices won't surprise anyone who listens to my show, as they're also the two most played artists of the last 12 months.
The Joy Formidable - Wolf's Law
It perplexes me that an album of such scope and magnitude, with a heart at least as big as its colossal riffs, has evaded critical acclaim in the UK while continuing to build a significant audience in the United States. This is soaring, elemental and anthemic rock from the very highest drawer, a number of parallel universes removed from the tepid, effete posturings and self conscious irony of the UK hipster set.
This Ladder Is Ours is as clever, sinuous and nuanced as stadium rock gets, a song a librarian could punch the air to; Tendons is an achingly honest paean to the fading emotional relationship that was the core of this album when it was being written; Little Blimp is a ferocious blast; Silent Treatment a bruised whisper. The Leopard And The Lung rides a comet right through the heart of the sun.
It's an album as wide and spectacular as the horizons in the listener's heart and imagination. If you've had both beaten to narrowness by tail-in-the-mouth UK tastemakers, it's no wonder the undoubted wonders here are invisible to you. This or Jake Bugg gnawing Dylan's ribs? This! This! This!
Perhaps Wolf's Law was too individual a beast for the UK critics. Perhaps we can only accept our artists succeeding in the US when they're been anointed by X Factor or a 'fame' school.
No matter. While the critics pandered to Haim and the kind of shiny, corporate, conservative pop that 'alternative' music used to be the antidote to, many of us were in The Joy Formidable's slipstream and thrilled by every second of it.
Suitable for: the niece who reads; a loner teen who needs reconnecting with the world. Anyone who appreciates a surge in music.
Unsuitable for: knee-brained hipsters. Know-it-all strawhearts.
Future Of The Left - How To Stop Your Brain In An Accident
I've been here before, eulogising Future Of The Left, making bold proclamations about each successive album. Their previous long player, The Plot Against Common Sense, won the Welsh Music Prize in 2012 and spat excellence, invention and a unique black poetry from every orifice.
But it was also bitty. For various reasons it was an album recorded in a number of different studios, patchworked together from demos and full album sessions. Lack of consistency felt like a pedant's criticism as the LP's final song, Notes On Achieving Orbit, reduced every other guitar-based song released that year to whey.
In the year since that album's release, Future Of The Left have formed their own label, and that autonomy has, on this album, blown a whole new hot wind through their creative furnace. The fact that the fuel in that furnace is more democratically, and artfully, shovelled by frontman Andrew Falkous' bandmates – Julia Ruzicka, Jimmy Watkins and Jack Egglestone – means that How To Stop Your Brain... is simultaneously more focused and more varied than its predecessor, a consistency aided by producer Charlie Francis and the use of great sounding live rooms at Monnow Valley studios near Monmouth.
When this album is heavy (Future Child Embarrassment Matrix) it's as dense and opaque as anything in their back catalogue: Black Sabbath if they'd been gym monsters instead of ganja cloud hippies with a Crowley flirtation. When it's pop (Donny Of The Decks) it's more nagging and insidious than anything they've done before: riveting Sparks to ironworks drums.
But it's the fact that this album does at least 43 things you really aren't expecting that astonishes: Singing Of The Bonesaws' marriage of a fruity, cultural Protect And Survive monologue to a piece of music that the members of Public Service Broadcasting would burn all of their tweed for; French Lessons' tender love autopsy; the woozy Norman-Bates-slashes-Supergrass-in-the-shower discombobulation of Something Happened.
That all of these new sounds and new turns still sound resolutely Future Of The Left is a mark of their strength of identity.
Like discovering whole new, unexplored regions at the edge of a well thumbed map. Brilliant from every angle.
Suitable for: any age/gender with fully functioning ear-to-brain-to-heart circuitry. Queen fans but not, necessarily, fans of The Queen. Nephews and/or uncles with a relatively civil, intellectual mosh pit in their craniums. Also nieces and/or aunties.
Unsuitable for: anyone for whom an expertly thrown curse word is a problem; 'conservatives'; indoor hat wearers.
