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It's tempting to infer autobiographical insight from our favorite songwriters. Bill Callahan, the one-man force behind Smog, inspires that urge more than most. His gritty tales - commonly spun in first person around spacious arpeggios and loose drums - tell of scorned lovers and scorched earth. Callahan seems to have seen it all, and more than once. A River Ain't Too Much To Love follows Callahan to his new hometown of Austin, TX, with nylon string guitars and the occasional gospel call and response wedded to his trademark lo-fi, minimal approach.
On Tender Buttons, Broadcast's trademark fuzzy Moog textures, catchy tunes and Trish Keenan's haunting, detached vocals are recast in a stark minimalism, perhaps spawned by the Birmingham, England-based band's downsizing from a quintet to just the duo of Keenan and bassist James Cargill. Their thunderous Wall of Sound-style drumming is replaced by spare electronic clicks, and folkie influences find their place alongside Brill Building melodies.
Cecile Schott, a Parisian school teacher and self-professed loner, quietly released her second album of striking, clear-headed ambient music this year. As opposed to her sample-heavy debut, The Golden Morning Breaks is built entirely from live performance, often on instruments she has just picked up. Glass glockenspiels, music boxes, and cello wriggle in lazy, understated arcs amid tape hiss and fantastical, aquatic rumbles.
Will Johnson has perfected a kind of drowsy, loping Americana that never strays far from the well-worn path of pop. And with South San Gabriel (as well as his main band, Centro-matic), Johnson steers the lazy ship with his unusual voice - a mush-mouthed gargle of velvet marbles. And on 2005's The Carlton Chronicles, his lyrics and delivery are so universal (or unintelligible) that you'd never know that the album with the adventures, trials, and tribulations of a cat named Carlton.
Indie rock progenitor Stephen Malkmus bought a tape machine, headed to the basement, and made the damn record himself. It's a common move these days, but not everyone is Stephen Malkmus who, nearly 15 years later, still seems to have a preternatural ability to cast off perfect melodies like the rest of us do a sweater. All questionable Pig Libs forgiven.
Wolf Parade are the new faces at the indie rock roundtable, and their sturdy, inventive debut, Apologies to the Queen Mary, draws further, fresh blood from its heavily-pillaged stone. Their dual keyboards add nostalgic Casiotone touches under vocalists Dan Boeckner and Spencer Krug's agitated (and often yelped) lyrics. But all next-big-thing hyped aside, the Montreal quartet's naked conviction is enough to sweep us along for another run through these familiar, thorny fields.
As Matthew Dear's homonymous music veers further away from techno, the Detroit producer has instituted a new one – Audion – to keep the bass drums coming hard and heavy. Although Suckfish is a collection of previous 12"s and some new material, the album's alternately hard-driving and slippery, offbeat sound stands up surprisingly well as a 70 minute collection. Forget what techno can do. What the hell else should it do, if not turn you on from the inside out? Suckfish is pure audio porn.
Andrew Bird's The Mysterious Production of Eggs is an eye opening and seamless suite of songs exploring everything from psychoanalysis and economics to religion and the apocalypse. A one-man band, the songwriter weaves violin, guitar, glockenspiel and countless other instruments into a cohesive orchestral pop sound.
On Alligator, The National - two sets of brothers and an old friend from college at the microphone – perfect an already-winning formula. Matt Berninger croons his half-drunk lyrics in a reserved, Leonard Cohen baritone above dreamy rock that wobbles but won't fall down. On "Baby, We'll Be Fine," he recounts an especially memorable emotional rock bottom, complete with a drunken, 45 minute shower, failed attempts at amour and a final, howled "I'm so sorry for everything." It's a neat encapsulation of the bands dour disposition, and by Alligator's shouted conclusion, they manage to make isolated, numbing depression as sweet as warm honey.
Spoon frontman Britt Daniel has shown a career-long tendency to undercut his warm, melodic songwriting with detached condescension. This dichotomy has only increased with age, and oddly, so has the power of Spoon's music. On Gimme Fiction, the band's fifth album, Spoon continue to make rock the way they oughta: snares crack, pianos bang out chords, and you can feel Daniel coming and going in his pinched voice, questioning anything and everything that passes through his "Mathematical Mind."

Gang of Four
"What on earth are Bloc Party up to? Franz Ferdinand? All of these bands. They've borrowed our sound but they have not gone anywhere near our sociological lyrics. It's hard to describe what we do. I'm trying to avoid the word "political" because we're just not."		 Ghost
"We love the people in the States very much, except very conservative groups. They're so kind to us everywhere. But sometimes I'm afraid to say if they know how much they have rich materialisms in their lives instead of spiritualism. This nation is too young to see itself without a long history. "
Mountain Goats
"Right now I am writing about monsters. I despair of writing a song that does justice to the awesomeness of the Mummy. People think the Mummy is only to be played for laughs, but I suspect there's some pathos in there. The problem with the Mummy is that he doesn't really have any personality. I aim to correct that."		 The Soft Pink Truth
"The irony is that Martin isn't into house music - he doesn't like the idea of the Soft Pink Truth very much. He didn't go to my last show because he's protesting the band. I have too much on my plate between my fucking Ph.D and Matmos to bother with a third thing. I really shouldn't be doing this."
The New Pornographers
" We're always trying to mess with the genre. Just taking pop structures and conventions and trying to fuck with them a bit. When we're doing that kind of stuff, subverting the form, it might come across as ironic -- which it might be partly. But it's also celebrating and glorifying it, I hope. Everything we do is a love song to the pop song. "		 Feist
"I'm kind of a solitary writer. When I'm writing, I'm in a room with the door locked. I mean that as an analogy, not an actual thing. But it sort of happens when it happens. There'll be one idea and I'll throw it together with another idea and three weeks later I'll remember the whole thing. But with collaborating - it's sort of like kissing someone for the first time."
Ellen Allien
"Kraftwerk changed my ears. That was a German, minimal, and new sound. Since them I don't like too crowded music, I still prefer it minimal and reduced. Also David Bowie influenced me a lot. In my room was a huge poster of him when I was a child. I was learning English with his lyrics."		 Six Organs of Admittance
"I don't have a career, I never went to school, I don't really do anything. [Music is] just sort of how I pass my time. Some people make models or fly kites and I record music. I have a feeling it will slow down and stop fairly soon, though. So I am just happy that it hasn't, yet. There's just always one more record in my head to get out."
Broken Social Scene
"It's not an anarchist type situation, you know. Kevin [Drew] is definitely the jefe, you know what I mean? He very much is at the top of the chain of command. "		 Matthew Herbert
"I think it's important for people to take different positions when it comes to the possibilities of music, rather than just a fucking soundtrack to consumption, which it appears to be so much of, these days."

Illustration by Ron Schepper