1. Bic Runga: Birds (2005): Music For Rainy Streets At Night

There's so much good music in the world that it's impossible for me to say what would be my all-time favourite record - or even to say what records would make a top-ten or top-50 list - but I'm fairly sure this album will always make it quite high on the list. And if, as at the moment I write this, darkness has fallen, the wind is howling and rain splatters the windows, it definitively is one of my first choices.

I first stumbled over Bic Runga´s music quite accidentally. I read about her somewhere, then looked up her Myspace page, since artists from New Zealand rarely are heard here in the North - with one exception, really, and Neil Finn is featured on piano and backing vocals on this record - and consequently, her records were not exactly stacked on the shelves of local record shops. Luckily, my wife was about to make a trip to London at the time, and she brought me this gem of a record.

The first thing that captures me is the voice. At times Bic almost whispers, at times she floats lightly above the music as in a dream - yet she never sounds shallow, and there is nothing otherworldly about her singing, but rather a strong feeling of presence. It is underlined by the arrangements and instrumentation - mainly acoustic, fairly intimate, piano-driven, but nor shying strings or guitar when needed. Close your eyes and listen to this record loud - it's indeed as if she and her band were playing in the room.

And of course the songs are top-notch. The athmospheric starter "Captured", the wistful "Say After Me", the soulful "That's Alright"... actually, every song is worth a mention, most often through one or more of the adjectives I used above. A funny characteristic of the record is that new songs keep coming to the fore at every listen - this time, "Listen" was the song that captured me most, even though it's no particular favourite of mine, but "just an album track" in all its splendour.

And, as I enjoy the gorgeous "It's Over" - one of my contenders for the best torch song ever, and the record nears its end, I realize that one of the main strengths of this keeper of an album is that it combines a very uniform overall feeling - the soundtrack for walking home alone through rainy streets - with a unique bouquet of individual songs that never become monotonous. Small works of art within fairly narrow confines, yet always producing small sensations of delight.

And by the way, it sounds just as good in broad daylight.

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