Albums of the Year, 2009 : 20 - Alec Ounsworth - Mo Beauty

"...as anyone who has been there can attest, New Orleans is not really the best place to be sad. It is a better place to rage, either like a Mardi Gras amateur stripper or a seersuckered epicurean with whiskey and meunière sauce stains trailing down the front of his shirt. Ounsworth falls into the latter category of partygoing on the darkly propulsive rockers like "Modern Girl (...With Scissors)," "Bones in the Grave," "That Is Not My Home (After Breugel)," and "Me and You, Watson." The moment in "Modern Girl" where Ounsworth lingers over the lyric "All this useless beauty" with his characteristic wail before making way for a smoky saxophone solo is emblematic of the record's strengths. Or take the nourish "Bones," in which the singer narrates a grotesque tale while riding a snaky guitar line provided by Berlin. Here and elsewhere Ounsworth incorporates New Orleans's unique energy into his own vision, a kind of sweet spot at the intersection of Dylanesque folk-rock, 1970s funk, and classic indie-rock."

- Wilson McBee, Slant Magazine

Albums Of The Decade : 3 - Clap Your Hands Say Yeah - Clap Your Hands Say Yeah (2005)

The all-encompassing internet buzz that surrounded Clap Your Hands Say Yeah’s emergence may have well-and-truly died down by now, with the band on possibly permanent hiatus and frontman Alec Ounsworth’s impressive debut solo album released this year to next-to-no-fanfare, but their debut LP serves as an ample reminder of what got people into such a lather over the band in the first place. ‘The Skin Of My Yellow Country Teeth’ would have been enough on its own: sounding like a delirious, skewed modern take on New Order’s ‘Temptation’, it was at once anthemic, fiercely original and eminently danceable. On most records it would stick out like a sore thumb, but here it’s simply another stunning track on an album full of them: the chiming, loping glide of ‘Over and Over’, the ragged, harmonica-led rave-up of ‘Heavy Metal’, the giddy, bluesy sway of ‘Gimmie Some Salt’...All brilliant, but perhaps the best moment of all is halfway through the sublime shoegaze bliss-out of ‘In This Home On Ice’, where there’s a mini-breakdown before vocals and instruments lock back in in a moment of sheer sonic ecstacy. At which point you realise that sometimes, the hype is bang-on.