The new year’s newest Mojo features New Order on the cover and a covers comp of the band’s Power, Corruption & Lies. Tackling tracks from the ’83 LP (along with “Blue Monday” and b-sides) are Golden Filter, Fujiya & Miyagi, and Destroyer whose “Leave Me Alone” you can hear below while you peruse the tracklist.

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It’s been fun, but now it’s time to wrap up the Gummy Awards with the big final list: your picks for the year’s top 10 albums! And the final result is: You guys more or less agree with us! Every album in your top 10 appeared in our top 50, most of them near the top. Your #1 was our #3, and our #1 was your #3. You guys don’t like rap or mutant R&B as much as we do, and you boosted St. Vincent and James Blake and Destroyer and tUnE-yArDs way up the list. Still, we mostly agree with each other! High fives all around! And we have to say: This is an absolutely rock-solid top 10 list. Click below to see your picks.

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The clip for Destroyer’s languid Kaputt track “Savage Night At The Opera” follows a golden-hour motorcycle’s-eye-view trip through some urban downtown without breaking its point of view or switching camera angles. It finally comes to rest on a really nice image that I don’t want to spoil. David Galloway directs. Check it out below.

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Pitchfork Fest Friday inspired thoughts about the intimate and situational appeal of much of today’s crop of independent artists, and the challenges inherent to translating that allure in sunny festival climes. Fittingly, Saturday’s most successful performers were those that were malleable enough to play to the festival, not in spite of it — or just had the charisma and experience to dominate on their own terms. Which is why Gang Gang Dance ruled the afternoon — experienced, charismatic, and shape-shifting in equal measure — letting Eye Contact jams vamp on, pleasant and comfortable and just slightly on edge, reflecting the shape of the 4 o’clock hour’s blissful breeze and harsh sun. Lizzi Bougatsos traipsed off stage and along the security barrier while her group offered their sunny seance, later giving those musical interludes texture with exotic vocal stylings. She’s a star. Everything about that set felt perfectly calibrated for, and reflective of, the place and the moment. For the likes of Zola Jesus and Twin Shadow, the fest’s attention was commanded via the sheer force of their personae, and charisma. The Dismemberment Plan, despite being only recently reunited, won on the grounds of being sharp players with years under their belts. No Age’s attempt to blast punk energy into the sunstricken crowd was appreciated, though it was Woods’ early day set, full of pocket bong jams and lo-fi psychedelic rambles that felt most dialed in, with an onstage lineup that rotated in and out with Real Estate’s Alex Bleecker and Matthew Mondanile (Ducktails, on drums). And Woods’s success anticipated the headliner’s.

Sub Pop beard merchants Fleet Foxes played a day set on the same stage some years ago, with Robin Pecknold seated and a great many J Tillman jokes. Yesterday Robin stood while strumming and singing forcefully, symbolic of the pretty psychedelic folk group’s always surprising, dynamic vitality onstage. It was the headliner the day, it’s sun, it’s mellowness, and it’s weather, deserved. Check photos of the day’s lineup above, by Mr. Graeme Flegenheimer.

We still have plenty of time and music left in 2011, but since we’re at the halfway (or so) mark, we thought it made sense to pause and take stock of the best albums of the year so far. There was some science behind the final tally: Each one of us made a list and assigned points to the records on it; Scott handled the complex mathematics and figured out the exact rankings based on those results. (Not all the bands each one of us voted for made it onto the Top 20, so we’ve also included smaller lists of personal, excluded favorites.)

Things to consider: We didn’t include any albums that haven’t surfaced (aka “leaked”) on any larger scale as of yet (see: Beirut). We also didn’t include deeply underground metal or noise: You’ll notice a couple of metal bands on the Top 20 (and one noise project) — all are groups we believe have crossed over enough into the non-metal/noise dialogue/iPod and make sense for inclusion. (For a more extensive metal-specific list, you’ll have to wait for Haunting The Chapel to get its act together.)

Take a look, and let us know what we missed.

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Destroyer performed a mellow five-song set of old and new songs for Seattle radio station KEXP FM’s Audioasis: The Your Blues track “Certain Things You Ought To Know” gets the Kaputt soft-rock/jazz treatment (in retrospect, its easily reimagined in that later style), but outside some lite(r) horns, Destroyer’s Rubies‘s “Painter In Your Pocket” sticks to its original arrangement. Take a listen/hear for yourself at kexp.org.

[Photo by Morgen Schuler]

Last night Dan Bejar & Co. did “Downtown” from Destroyer’s excellently deadpan ninth album Kaputt. It was Bejar’s network television debut and he wore leather. Cue the horns, etc.

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We’ve gone on (and on) about Destroyer’s great (aka more than alright) ninth album Kaputt (1/25, Merge). Hear it from start to finish over at HypeM and say yes to another excess, etc.

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This week we’ve got new videos from Destroyer, Discodeine (featuring Jarvis Cocker), Hercules & Love Affair, and Lupe Fiasco. We’re still in a new video drought, post-Christmas and pre-most-release dates, which is why this week’s biggest (though not the best) video is a leak, while others came from weeks prior. Some of this week’s videos go for creep or shock value, I’m glad most of this week’s clips are good, clean, joyous, kaleidoscopic fun. It’s harder to pull off.

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Yesterday I tweeted about people having a lot of sex to Kaputt in 2011. That’s because Dan Bejar’s excellent Malaparte-nodding, electro jazz-tinged ninth Destroyer album’s a smooth one. As you’ll see in the glossy Dawn Garcia-directed video for the title track, Bejar is well aware of the sexiness. (Along with the ambition, nerdy braininess, etc.) Chase girls and cocaine through the backrooms of the world:

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