Eclectik Electrik: A Year in Summary - 2012, Parts 2 & 3: Best in Show / Albums of the Year

With 2012 rapidly drawing to a close, The Professor casts his mind back and picks out some of the highlights of the year. Songs, albums, artists ... it's all here. A big THANK YOU to anybody / everybody who has read my blog this year and I hope to make 2013 an even brighter better place for us die-hard music fans. Watch this space! Salud!

Electik Electrik Presents The Best In Show Awards 2012

Best Debut Album: Royal Thunder – CVI

This was the hardest fought category of the lot. A good debut album is a pleasant introduction to a band or artist that you will grow to love. Royal Thunder's CVI is so much more than that. It was like witnessing a fully-grown person emerging from the womb – beautiful in a way but fucking shocking in many others. Mlny Parsonz, Lee Smith, Josh Coleman, and Josh Weaver have proven their caliber from day one. Will this have set the bar impossibly high for album number two? Only time will tell but I will be eagerly anticipating the outcome either way.

Runners Up: Storm Corrosion – Storm Corrosion, Pallbearer – Sorrow & Extinction

Best Comeback: Soundgarden

2012 was the year that Soundgarden crossed the line from nostalgia act running out the clock on the reunion tour circuit to full-blown shit-kicking rock band (again). Reasonable doubts had been raised about how well a band that built their reputation around powerhouse live performances would fare as they approached middle age. Their response was King Animal, an album that taught us not to be such cynical jerks all the time.

Moral Victory of the Year: John Frusciante

In 2010 guitarist/singer/songwriter/freakazoid John Frusciante announced that he had parted ways with Grammy winning act The Red Hot Chili Peppers, replaced by his own understudy Josh Klinghoffer. To 99% of music fans that pretty much doomed him to obscurity, because if you aren't in a famous who cares, right? Such attitudes tend to obscure the fact that he has been making music outside of the Chilis since 1994 (twelve albums and counting, along with two as Ataxia, and numerous Mars Volta collaborations besides). RHCP's last album, I'm With You – their first without the guitar wizard since 1995 – literally bored me to tears, whereas Frusciante's PBX Funicular Intaglio Zone continued to push the envelope and freak people the fuck out. RHCP, 0, John Frusciante, 1.

Musician of the Year: Godforbid

To this very day I maintain that it is a travesty that neither That Handsome Devil, or their eccentric frontman Godforbid, receive the international acclaim that they so dearly deserve. Godforbid has been a busy boy in 2012. First of all, That Handsome Devil released a free EP based on Disney's The Jungle Book and followed that up with a superb Pogues cover for Christmas. Godforbid's hip-hop collective Alaskan Fishermen released their long-overdue second album. Then as a solo artist he dueted with songstress Kendra Morris and released American Style Cardboard in collaboration with New York DJ Doc Delay. Congratulation, Godforbid, you have raised the bar for sarcastic, anti-social weirdos everywhere. I tip my hat to thee.

Best use of a Song in a Videogame: The Heavy – 'Short Change Hero' (from the intro of Borderlands 2)

You and three strangers are riding a train through the frozen wastes of planet Pandora, speeding towards the promise of adventure and untold riches. It becomes apparent that all is not as it seems as heavily armed robots storm the train cars and all hell breaks loose. This is the bleak and action-packed opening to Borderlands 2, a game packed full of humour and guns of ridiculous proportions. What makes the whole sequence so memorable are the spaghetti western strains of 'Short Change Hero' that ring throughout. It is as if The Heavy (best known for that 'How Do You Like Me Now?' song from every comedy movie trailer in the past three years) penned the perfect tune to accompany this very sequence in 2009 - years before the game was even made.

Runner Up: Incinerating the marijuana plantation in Far Cry 3 to Skrillex's 'Make It Bun Dem'

Best in Metal

Pallbearer – Sorrow & Extinction

Nachtmystium – Silencing Machine

Deftones – Koi No Yokan

Best in Prog

Storm Corrosion – Storm Corrosion

Ancestors – In Dreams and Time

Rush – Clockwork Angels

Best in Hip Hop

Doc Delay/Godforbid – American Style Cardboard

Death Grips – The Money Store