Oh Alright Then - The Best Music of 2005 (and potentials of 2006)

The only point in these end-of-year best-of top ten lists really is to highlight some albums and artists that may have passed you by in the last twelve months. You will already know that albums by Franz Ferdinand, Gorillaz, Hard-Fi and Kaiser Chiefs are great; their precise order of merit is irrelevant. You may even have ventured toward albums by Editors, Elbow and Super Furry Animals from The Distractor's recommendations - and well done you if you did. And finally you could do a lot worse than seek out albums by Jose Gonzalez, Brendan Benson and Hot Hot Heat. There you go, there's ten.

But once the calendar clicks round to new year The Distractor likes to look forward rather than look back, and its hunger for things new and exciting becomes insatiable. So what do we have to look forward to? Well, it's make or break time for the Arctic Monkeys - you worry that they've given themselves too much to live up to. Also worrying is the news that The Streets' new album is to be a treatise on the "realities of the music business" - uh-oh - and that Scissor Sisters are "out to prove that they're no novelty band" - thereby completely missing the point of why people liked them in the first place. Hopefully Snow Patrol will be able to resist the temptation to do an album full of songs like "Run" - they're so much more than mere Coldplay copyists. Also imminent is the return of Radiohead - lord, please don't be shit - and the new Pet Shop Boys album is being talked up by the always readable and usually reliable Popjustice.

And what of the exciting new bands? Who is lined up to be the next medium-sized thing? Well, the good folk at Take Your Medicine are banging on about a couple, and that's usually reason enough to check them out - The Bridge Gang and Bromheads Jacket. Karma Download's tips for 2006 are worth seeing, but the pick of them for me is The Sunshine Underground - like The Music, only with tunes. You already know of The Pipettes - and the sneaking power-pop fan in me can't help but blurt out a love for Orson and The Feeling.

So 2005 - not as bad as all that, and plenty of reasons to be cautiously optimistic for the new year. Hopefully there'll be some musical atrocities too, otherwise we'll have nothing much to write about.