Devastations

Yes, U
Beggars Banquet / Remote Control, 2007

The move to Europe is as much a part of the Australian rock 'n' roll story as the stretch of highway between Melbourne and Sydney. For the Devastations, it was a chapter that had been written too many times before. Their second album Coal was overshadowed by comparisons to expatriate icon Nick Cave and eager questions about living in Berlin. It wasn't until Yes, U that they broke away from the history and found their own identity.

Yes, U is one of those poncy art-rock records that takes a while to "grow" on you. On the first listen it sounds like a collection of aimless electronic pop tracks punctuated by two thumping rock songs, 'Rosa' and 'Mistakes'. Part of the appeal is hearing it change with each spin, as the minimal electronic-based songs unfold into odysseys. The effect is like looking at a patch of empty space and then discovering that you're actually staring into a black hole. The seductive opening pair 'Black Ice' and 'Oh Me, Oh My' sound as if they've fallen from another planet and landed on a record. Some critics have argued the album's darkness is a reflection of Berlin – if Yes, U was in fact a city, it would be located on an outer-space satellite sometime in the future and have more strip clubs than Kings Cross.

Yes, U is a collection of love songs, but one with a curious idea of what love is. It can be sexy and redemptive, but also something very dark. It is what brings the narrator of 'Oh Me, Oh My' to life and then leads them back to death. It is the motive behind a string of letters left for an estranged lover by a sinister down-and-outer in 'The Pest': "I've waited so long that whoever loved you is gone/ So things will be different from now on... You'd make a beautiful wife/ Have I made myself clear?" Love is painted as lustful and creepy, and it is captured so perfectly that listening to the album can make your thighs twitch. I like to think of Yes, U as a challenge to other Australian bands - if you're going to fuck off to Berlin for a while, you'd better come back with something as good as this.

This column is the last in a three-week series covering the best local releases of the year.

Aleks And The Ramps

Pisces Vs. Aquarius
Cavalier, 2007

There is a cartoon I like called Harvey Birdman: Attorney At Law which is constructed almost entirely through references to other pieces of pop culture. It has very little in the way of character development or traditional notions of plot. The characters are drawn as heroes and villains from older and sometimes very obscure cartoons, who seem to have been reincarnated as lawyers for some reason left entirely unexplained. Each episode is made up as a series of clichés from other television shows and genres – especially the law firm soap – which are turned on their head for comic effect. For pop culture junkies, it's hilarious. For everyone else, I imagine it appears confusing and probably pointless.

Like Harvey Birdman, Aleks And The Ramps require a well-stocked knowledge of other pop music to be appreciated and there is a certain humour in hearing them subvert the usual rules of pop songwriting and performance. But the Melbourne band's debut album isn't in my "best of year" list just because it's some sort of in-joke for music fans – after all the tricks, Pisces Vs Aquarius remains an excellent and almost prodigiously imaginative record with strange and often disturbing themes. In other words, it has smarts and soul.

For some reason left entirely unexplained, the characters in Pisces Vs Aquarius are always trying to kill one another. Each song is a fragment of the same story, told either before or after various tragedies with acerbic and black-humoured attention to detail. The funniest track is the last, 'Diary Of A Lizard Man', in which the narrator watches their lover choke: "An earring fell off your ear and into the cereal bowl/ I couldn't help stopping what I was doing to watch you eat it whole/ Your oesophagus and I didn't know what to do/ Apart from watching your face turn blue/ It filled me with regret, but what was far worse/ Was that I didn't get the phone number of the nurse/ That I met when I visited you in intensive care." In terms of both storytelling and experimental pop music Pisces Vs Aquarius is a masterpiece. It makes Architecture In Helsinki sound like The Wiggles.

This column is part two of a three-week series covering the best local releases of the year.

Young & Restless

Young & Restless
Dot Dash, 2007

On stage before the election, Karina Utomo looked like John Howard's nightmare – an angry, female Muslim immigrant with plenty to say and a whole bunch of kids preparing to vote for the first time to say it to. The interplay between Karina and bassist Ross, a tall skinny white guy with a mop of black hair hanging over his eyes like the incarnation of the masculine rock 'n' roll dream, was magnificent to watch. About half his height, she would duck under Ross's arms while he was holding his guitar up to the crowd and then jump up on the foldback speaker and run her finger across her throat while screaming. After stage-diving into the audience, Karina would hang in the air on the kids' fingertips contorted into a weird position like she was having a seizure and belt out the next song.

Young & Restless's debut full-length captured the intensity of the band's live show better than most studio albums. It was a half-hour blast of metal-inspired noise with razor-sharp bass lines and track titles including 'Police! Police!' and 'Satan', on which Karina vented her very swollen spleen like a shrieking axe-murderer. "I'm sick of saying yes, oh I'm sick of saying yes," she chanted on the wonderful 'Black (Kids)' and "I'm not speaking your language, no/ Just don't tell me to!" during 'I Pointed At You And You Burst Into Flames'.

Released on a trendy label and accompanied by slick publicity shots, the band's album ended up falling into the gap between the mainstream and underground – too polished for bleeding-edge critics and too abrasive for the majority of casual listeners. But no other Australian group captured the pissed-off spirit of youth or released anything with as much balls this year, and the fact Young & Restless were overlooked for Triple J's end-of-year award after winning Unearthed is only due to the fact they haven't had 15 years to descend into middle-of-the-road drivel like Silverchair. I can't think of a better way to re-phrase the introduction I used for an article in July: "Indonesian siblings form metal band with maths teacher and advertising type, hire gangly bassist and blast out of Canberra playing songs about the devil." Young & Restless are 2007's Frankenstein.

This column is part of a three-week series covering the best local releases of the year.

Low

Things We Lost In The Fire
Kranky, 2001

During the early 1990s, as grunge was building upon the aesthetics of punk and metal, another group of underground bands quietly took their art in the opposite direction. Finding inspiration in the dark, minimalist sounds of Joy Division, they encountered a single problem: the songs were too fast. A decade after Ian Curtis’s death, Galaxie 500 would release a cover of 'Ceremony' (originally performed by Joy Division, later to emerge as New Order’s first single), Bedhead a cover of 'Disorder', Low, 'Transmission' and Codeine, 'Atmosphere' – all of them played at half the speed of the originals. And even though this string of languid tributes would span six years in total, outliving half of the bands involved, it’s easy to imagine them as the single defining moment of slow-core.

Marked by skeletal music and the speed of its name, slow-core harnessed the drone of art-rock and shoegazing but allowed it to lap at the feet of fragile guitar melodies rather than coercing it into waves of noise. By the time Low formed in 1994, Galaxie 500 no longer existed and Codeine were to separate only a few months later. Bedhead went on releasing their beautifully simple guitar melodies until splitting in 1998, two years after Low had begun to receive attention for their low-key classic The Curtain Hits the Cast – which included a brilliant 15-minute ambient track called 'Do You Know How To Waltz?'

By the time Low released Things We Lost In The Fire in 2001, they had become the last surviving slow-core band. The album began with a track called 'Sunflower' that had a sweet melody and surreal lyrics: "When they found your body/ Giant Xs on your eyes/ With your half of the ransom/ You bought some sweet sunflowers/ And gave them to the night." It's the calm before the storm – second track 'Whitetail' is darker than most would enjoy – and one of the finest mixtures of sweetness and sorrow ever to grace my ears.