And here is the cream of 2008… in my very humble opinion.

5. Dance, Dance, Dance – Lykke Li

The young and beautiful Lykke Li released her debut album Youth Novels early in 2008, which was met with great fanfare through the blogosphere, which had been primed with the early release of Dance, Dance, Dance. In the song Lykke Li claims that her dancing hips lie and she is actually terribly shy. I love how wonderfully unique, catchy and adorable this tune is.

4. Sleepy Head – Passion Pit

I wrote about this track as one of those fabulous crooked trees, those fabulous tracks that are both strange and wonderful. Passion Pit independently released Sleepy Head early in the year, which resulted in multiple labels vying for the artist to sign with them. In the end, Frenchkiss Records won out, and the album Chunk of Change was released in mid September.

3. Walking on a Dream – Empire of the Sun

The Empire of the Sun are a diversely talented pair from Australia. I posted about their haunting track Country earlier this year, but neglected to tell you about their ridiculously catchy, soon to be pop classic Walking on a Dream (I wouldn’t doubt that you heard about it anyways!). It took a couple of listens for this track to sink into my psyche, but it didn’t take long before I was searching through the tracks on my mp3 player so that I could hear this gem again.

2. Electric Feel – MGMT

The young pair from Brooklyn dropped an amazing album on the scene with help from The Flaming Lips producer, Dave Fridmann. Oracular Spectacular contains several stand out tracks that made MGMT one of the top bands of 2008. While I adore the majority of the album, Electric Feel is the stand out track that I listen to over and over. Sadly, I didn’t get around to posting about MGMT this year, but I’m excited to post about their future offerings.

1. Day ‘N’ Nite (Crookers Remix) – Kid Cudi

This song isn’t even officially out yet, it’s set to hit the shelves January 13th, 2009. But, I have the satisfaction in knowing that I posted about it 8 months ago. This killer track earns my top spot in this year’s best of list with the fresh, thick sound that The Crookers bring to the up and coming rapper Kid Cudi, aka. The Man on the Moon.

I was  a little too young to appreciate David Lynch’s enigmatic series Twin Peaks when it originally aired. Once I had been shown the light back in the late 90’s I could not get enough. I believe I watched the full series 3 times over that year (I was a student with lots of free time… I miss those days!).

The series had a very devout following and for good reason: the show was a complete original! I’m sure the multitudes of ridiculously good looking people helped quite a bit as well, but the real draw of the show was the intriguingly strange story of what happened to Laura Palmer. The influence of Twin Peaks can still be found in every facet of the entertainment industry, including music.

Go – Moby One of Moby’s tracks from his self-titled release, from way back in 1992, directly sampled Laura Palmer’s Theme from the Twin Peaks soundtrack. Go was Moby’s first tune to hit the charts. The haunting ambient tones from the series mixed with Moby’s unique production and rhthyms create an interesting, and very dancable tune. You can definitely hear the early 90’s in this track, which I suspect Moby was well aware of when he re-did the popular tune for his compilation CD in 2006: Go – The Very Best of Moby.

Country – Empire of the Sun Empire of the Sun broke out on to the scene hard with their super catchy tune Walking on a Dream. Since their album’s release in early Auguest the blogosphere has been ripe with rave reviews for the Australian pop duo. Their track Country, has the same haunting feel as the theme to Twin Peaks, with a similar slow and low base line. I figure that they must be fans of the show (who wouldn’t be really?). The track is both an eerie and beautiful instrumental that illustrates the diversity of the band. I expect to be hearing lots from this group in the future.

In writing this post I discovered that the complete Twin Peaks collection was released on DVD a year ago! I don’t know how I missed this one, but the Twin Peaks – The Definitive Gold Box Edition (The Complete Series) on it’s way to my mailbox now! Now, I must go, my backwards-speak talkin’ doppelganger is beckoning from behind the red curtain! I leave you with the intro to the much loved show Twin Peaks: