Local stars Witches have been nominated in the 2008 Indy Awards. The awards were launched last year ‘to celebrate, reward and recognise the hard work of live music venues, promoters and the talented artists they showcase and help develop’ (it says here), and Truck have nominated Witches as a band to watch for this year. Get involved and cast your vote for Witches before 31st March to send them on their way to the showcase finale in April.

Well, it’s December, and every blog in the known universe is doing their end of year roundups, so for what it’s worth here’s my top ten albums from 2007… what are yours?

1. Parts & Labor - Mapmaker

This came along at just the right time to hit me hard this year. No one else manages to noise sound as uplifting as this - it’s brilliant.

2. El-P - I’ll Sleep When You’re Dead
Good old El-P. Takes him ages to do a record ‘cos he’s too busy making beats for everyone else, but when he does it’s a belter.

3. Holy Fuck - LP

The best live band I saw this year, and matched on record. Some crazy mad-scientist version of krautrock, like nothing you’ve heard before. Well, nothing I’ve heard before anyway.

4. Dalek - Abandoned Language

Yeah, OK, so they’re a bunch of splitters who pulled out of playing Audioscope for the second year running, but I almost forgive them on this count. ‘Subversive Script’ - what a tune.

5. PJ Harvey - White Chalk

Wow, what a great record. Actually quite an unnerving experience for the first few listens, and just amazing to see someone so obviously pushing themselves.

6. Burial - Untrue

7. Sennen - Where The Light Gets In

8. Witches - Heart of Stone

9. Aesop Rock - None Shall Pass

10. Liars -Liars

Ladies and Gentleman, we have a winner. Without a doubt, the finest record to come out of Oxford this year must be Witches’ ‘Heart of Stone’, a record that is alternately and simultaneously beautiful, mysterious, violent, plaintive and wondrous. Four or five tracks could be Radio 1 hits, but the peculiar excellence is the consistency of the vision and near-perfection of the execution.

The band was put together by ex-eeebleee frontman Dave Griffiths, but the musicians he has found create a sound-world far from that band’s anxious electronica. The emphasis now is on traditional instruments, and indeed Witches are regular magpies when it comes to instrumentation, with glockenspiel, harpsichord and trumpet making important contributions to many songs. Production values are high and the producers have been careful to limit the exposure of the more outlandish instruments: these are emphatically genuine songs and not vehicles for experiments in sound.

An example of this control comes in the opening ‘Lost Without’. The first couple of minutes are given over to an attractively wasted guitar-based ballad which then builds steadily into an ecstatic trumpet solo. By holding back the trumpet, the band keeps the interest growing, rather than blowing all their ideas at the start. ‘Josef’s lament’ is a little more uptempo, with a tense electric guitar part which could have come from the Polly Harvey classic ‘Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea’. Again trumpeter Benek Chylinski shines, with a striking trumpet riff which Ennio Morricone would have been proud to call his own punctuating Griffith’s hushed singing. Richard Thomas’s percussive harpsichord adds further chills to one of the most potent songs I’ve heard in ages.

‘Putting you back in the ground’ has an almost nursery-rhyme universality and Griffiths’ vocals are superbly bleak and cracked. His is not a voice that everyone will love, but for rendering stories of loss and remembrance I can hardly think of better. His lyrics are not sophisticated: all of that quality has been poured into the music. That said, the supernatural themes of the album are an important unifying feature; they are clearly not of the Halloween, pantomime-devil type beloved of metal monsters everywhere.Griffiths’ ghosts are Ibsen’s ghosts: aggressive elements from the past that invade the present life and try all too successfully to bring it to a halt.

There are many more highlights: the gorgeous ‘Sleep like the Witch that You Are’ sounds like The Band playing The Pixies while the title track offers a lovely melody and even some measured optimism. But to be honest, despite the doom-laden lyrics running through the album, the whole record is a statement of optimism: that even in 2007 pop music can still surprise, inspire and delight.