Various
‘Rough Trade Shops Counter Culture ‘09’
(Rough Trade)

The annual hipster compendium rolls around again, and a reasonable concoction of the effectively weird it is too. While the flavour is distinctly youthful (as it probably should be), one can’t help but feel like there were still an awful lot of records released in 2009 that should’ve been on here. Still, it is as good a mix as you might expect from an album compiled by record shop employees and the like. Some tunes feel like old friends being welcomed back, like Emmy The Great’s ‘We Almost Had A Baby’ and SFA’s ‘The Very Best Of Neil Diamond’ (wot no ‘Inaugural Trams’?!), and others simply feel like twee retreads, but there is more enough health in here to encourage us to continually place some faith in Rough Trade as a whole.

Daniel Ross