If ever a song was recorded as an excuse for a music video, it was ‘Born Free’. The track itself – a bass-driven and mildly adolescent hymn to, y’know, being yourself and all that – is actually faded out for most of the video’s nine gruesome minutes.

Let’s not beat about the bush: the video depicts an episode in a ginger genocide. Stop sniggering. It’s not funny. A SWAT team batter their way into an apartment building, bash about a chubby couple in mid-coitus, then haul off a man with red hair. He joins a busload of other gingers. They are driven out into the desert, and lined up in front of a minefield. ‘Let’s fucking move!’ bellows the Rainbow Six extra. They don’t. So he shoots a twelve-year-old in slow motion at point-blank range. And the redheads begin to run. And the mines begin to go off.

Director Romain Gavras, the man behind the riot on the steps of the Sacre Coeur in the video for Justice’s ‘Stress’, strikes again with another piece of mind-blowing banality that somehow sticks in your head and keeps replaying itself on your eyelids every time you blink. ‘Born Free’ is childish, gut-wrenching and unforgettable in equal measure. Watch it and weep.

Imagine being married to Matt Berninger. If The National’s High Violet is anything to go by, I’d be concerned. ‘We belong in a movie / Try to hold it together ’til our friends are gone’ the front man of The National sings on ‘Conversation 16’, a song with the romantic refrain ‘You’re the only thing I ever want anymore’ which grows more desperate as the song goes along. It fits in with the lyrical theme of the album, which is probably most summarily encapsulated in the title of the opener, ‘Terrible Love’.

That this isn’t just another depressive US indie album is partly due to the compelling play of the rhythm section. Bryan Devendorf’s drumming gives ‘Bloodbuzz Ohio’ tremendous energy from the off, and his atmospheric performance on the opener adds mounting tension and a euphoric climax to what is otherwise a slow ballad.

But what really saves the album from the trappings of stereotype is Berninger’s vocal and lyrical performance. His baritone voice creates distinctive melodies which act as a counterpoint to the simple guitarwork. The thoughtful lyrics convey the concerns of a new father, using hyperbole to maximum effect (‘I was afraid / I’d eat your brains’).

It all comes together in the standout track, ‘Runaway’. Berninger’s vocals suggest a deep-voiced defiance, but his crackling voice as he stretches up to the line ‘What makes you think I’m enjoying being led to the flood?’ reveals a vulnerability and desperation beneath.

Carin Besser, Berninger’s wife, directed the video to ‘Bloodbuzz Ohio’. Let’s hope she’s been listening to her husband’s lyrics, or she might be for a shock.

2010 has spoiled us with a succulent smorgasbord of new music. The sheer eclecticism which has flooded the scene this year has certainly been something to celebrate. For me, the rebirth – or, better, rejuvenation – of great American rock and indie has been the most exciting trend of the last twelve months. Bands such as Best Coast, Avi Buffalo, and Wild Nothing have breathed new life into a genre which, across the pond, had just been showing signs of wilting.

Grimy, growling blues-rock saw a mini-revival this year as acts like the Black Keys, the Dead Weather and Black Mountain all released captivating new material. Meanwhile, The Strange Boys illustrated the timeless appeal of back-to-basics rock-‘n’-roll on Be Brave, while the country-infused Hawk, by Isobel Campbell & Mark Lanegan, and Laura Marling’s I Speak Because I Can, were both examples of great songwriting. Indie-poppers Foals and Kisses also concocted an instantly identifiable sound for themselves on their respective new LPs. However, the best album of 2010 from my point of view came from Beach House.

It’s hard to imagine Alex Scally and Victoria Legrand making a more perfect record than Teen Dream. The album blends woozy, swaying guitar riffs, delicate synth work and haunting vocals into songs of mirage-like fragility. Tracks such as ‘Norway’ and ‘Zebra’ are indicative of the little dream-pop niche that the Baltimore duo have carved for themselves; meanwhile, the skeletal ’10 Mile Stereo’ swells with gradually mounting euphoria. Teen Dream is mature, clever, and astoundingly beautiful.

My favourite individual track of 2010 was the stunning ‘Bloodbuzz Ohio’ by the National. The Cincinnati melancholists released it abck in March, ahead of their fifth album, High Violet. It’s a heavy, smoky, whiskey-soaked number which creaks with almost unbearable loneliness and submission. Matt Berninger’s rich, slow, Johnny Cash-like drone is constantly tugging back at the propulsive cocktail of drum, piano and brass, while the lyrics ache with a palpable hardship.

While an acknowledging nod should go to the likes of Two Door Cinema Club, the Drums and Yuck, in my opinion the best new act this year was Villagers. The Irish folksters’ debut album Becoming A Jackal was released to almost universal acclaim in May; frontman Conor O’Brien shows an adroitness of composition, and an eloquence of lyricism, which place him head and shoulders above this year’s other emerging singer-songwriters.

So another year has almost passed, and it’s time to look forward to the next. I’ll be interesting to hear the long-awaited new LP from The Strokes, the recording of which has been teeth-grindingly lengthy at times. My favourite lo-fi garage-rockers, Smith Westerns, have a new album out in January called Dye It Blonde, while there’ll hopefully be a second record from teenage Dutch two-piece, The Death Letters, who play a stripped-back, White Stripes-style brand of rock. Roll on 2011.

Winter is drawing in; the days are getting shorter, the weather colder. At this time of year, there’s nothing Alex and Matt like better than to curl up beside a roaring fire and reflect on the past twelve months of music over a cup of mulled wine. What changed in 2010? What didn’t? How will the sound of 2010 be defined for posterity?

Most strikingly, the boundary between pop and alternative music became blurrier than ever. After their debut album Sigh No More went double-platinum, folk-rockers Mumford & Sons attracted a fanatical following. Elsewhere, the muted tones of indie minimalists The xx, the adolescent pop-rock of The Drums, and a toned-down, nostalgic Arcade Fire came to define the mainstream rock sound of the year. The xx in particular, what with Four Tet’s remix of ‘VCR’ and Jamie xx’s collaborations with a range of eclectic electronica artists, promoted a new strain of tasteful indie-electro fusion that’ll grow in 2011.

In the charts, the success of acts like Jason Derulo and The Wanted demonstrated the enduring appeal of insipid, lowest-common-denominator music, while the Simon Cowell battery farm continued to breed and milk its annual cash cows. But thankfully, the reactionary spirit that so triumphantly thwarted Joe McElderry’s hopes for the last year’s Christmas Number One remains. A growing desire to embrace the underground has seen genres such as drum ‘n’ bass and dubstep – in the guise of Pendulum, Chase & Status et al – elbow their way into the mainstream.

Accordingly, the standard ‘popstar’ model is growing more sophisticated. Florence Welch and Lady Gaga are following the examples set by Björk and Madonna in cultivating striking, warped media personas. On the other hand, as Laurence Osborn argued last week, the ascendancy of artists such as James Blake and Rudi Zygadlo heralds the emergence of the bedroom producer as a star in his own right. Whereas electronica was once the preserve of weird nerds like Aphex Twin, strands of it are now acquiring legitimacy through their clever Burial-esque sampling of catchy 90s RnB (see ‘Best Single of 2010’, opposite). Blake’s very personal cover of indie singer-songwriter Feist’s ‘The Limit To Your Love’ indicated his genre’s crossover potential.

At a time when cutbacks in funding are plaguing cultural institutions and undermining artistic industries the country over, the UK music industry’s becoming ever more dependent on live shows as a source of revenue. But it’s working – on the back of sold-out festivals like Glastonbury and Reading/Leeds, the industry actually grew by 5% in 2009, and possibly by even more this year. Bestival 2010 stood out as a commercial success story – not only did it sell out, it did so on the back of a non-mainstream lineup that represented a bizarre conflation of genres. Is this kind of all-purpose music festival a thing of the future?

As new music becomes ever easier to record, upload and listen to, breakthrough acts now have to think further outside the box. Although the role of the album as an artistic statement remains important, we’re seeing a shift in focus to the four-minute single, the live performance, and the construction of a striking public image. Whether these trends continue to develop in 2011 remains to be seen.

So what’s your literary New Year’s resolution? If you don’t read Proust now, in your youth, it will be all the more sad when you come to it late on in life – retired, tired, in search of lost time. Far better to invest now for future reward. And obviously, don’t waste time with books about Proust, that’s just putting it off. This short guide is all you need.

First, practical tips. Don’t read every volume one after the other. Spread them out, a year should do it. This book is a whole life, don’t rush. Also, don’t fret about which translation you read, whatever your library has will do. Not having French is no excuse. What you will get from this, and keep, is not the words themselves, but a set of experiences, attitudes, and feelings.

Everyone knows memory is what it is about. This is too deep for you. It rises to the surface only when you look back, like a ship’s wake. Then you’ll see it easily. The way to read Proust is precisely to ignore this what it is about and ask, what else? So much that I can only offer here a ‘summary of key themes.’

As in Jane Austen, you’ll appreciate more of the humour if you read for themes of class, money, and status. One of the best tricks of (our hero, the narrator) Marcel’s introspective alienation is that it gives him a platform to mock everyone else, from his servants to the grandest grandees. And with most vitriol, of course, the upward-moving bourgeoisie, the nouveaux riches – his own kind, by most reckonings.

Onto the next comparison. Neurosis, self-doubt crossed with an artistic arrogance and scathing criticism of the personalities of others, and a dose of young-girl fantasy. That’s right, it’s Woody Allen. Love and trust are held, for Proust, in a corrupting web, both from within and from without. Society, psychology: both are to blame for the impossibility of true love. Our emotions cannot but be self-destructive. ‘Everything that seems to us imperishable tends towards decay.’

But what about a third theme: art, culture, mimesis? The truly beautiful things Proust creates are works of art. Vinteuil’s “little sonata”; the paintings of Elstir; the church at Combray. These are the icons of a radical subjectivist philosophy. Vinteuil’s sonata moves us only through Swann; Elstir’s art, loved by Marcel, goes out of fashion; the church finds its beauty in the shifting sunlight. And all three exist nowhere but in words, in this book.

How you experience them, how you read Proust, is quite in your own hands. As he writes, ‘in reality, each reader is, while he is reading, the reader of his own self.’

Tucked away in the Oxford Castle complex is the O3 gallery, whose new show of work by Rachel Ducker and Rachel Owen makes it a key Oxford art destination outside the walls of the Ashmolean. As its title suggests, this exhibition is preoccupied with ideas of change, and in particular with capturing the moment in which an object turns from one thing into another. The gallery even provides a little sheet explaining the rationale behind the title, giving a quotation from Ovid about the transformation of Daphne into a tree to escape Apollo’s advances.

This idea of a human/tree figure mid-transformation recurs in many of the wire sculptures, but Owen’s prints seem to relate to metamorphosis in other ways, making the comparison less relevant. Owen’s screenprints and monoprints seem concerned with the effect of crepuscular light on buildings and trees, questioning whether objects alter as the light falling on them gradually shifts to darkness. It is as if, in this liminal space between night and day, what we see becomes distorted and skewed out of visual proportion: a tower impossibly high, a tree horrendously monstrous and black, almost strangling the picture frame towards which its branches reach.
Owen’s prints are striking in their use of sharp contrasts, as well as shades of dark grey on grey. Owen draws clearly from the sights of Oxford: there are images of old stone steps leading up to an indefinite white space, the sharp shadows leading our eye up the angles of the stonework. One of the largest works on show, a montage of several views of a vaulted stone ceiling entitled ‘Magic Forest’, was a focal point of the exhibition and seemed to draw together the sharp lines of Owen’s prints with the magical, other-worldly spectacle of Ducker’s sculpture.

Ducker’s creatures are very much the product of an artistic imagination, and seem to become more striking the larger they get in scale: one life-size work of a figure seated on a chair deserved a more prominent position in the gallery space. With a work this large, the smooth curving silver wires seemed to turn into an expression of the flesh and sinews of a living body, interconnected in a smooth design. Ducker experiments with the applications of her materials in almost every piece: in ‘Reconstructed Tree’, sections of wood are bound up within a tightly-coiled metal wire framework in the shape of a tree, suggesting an intersection of nature and artifice.

The small space is packed with art: even between the closely-hung prints on the staircase you can spot the occasional wired figure suspended in the air, veiled in mesh or leaping through space. The curation within such a small commercial gallery is always going to be limited by extraneous factors: the grey pulpy stonework of the gallery walls detracted from the stark black and white contrasts particularly in Owen’s work, and amidst some of Ducker’s sculptures at the back of the gallery was an apparently unrelated cabinet of vintage button jewellery. There was also a series of screenprints of a young girl’s face, which perhaps represented metamorphosis from child to adult, but it was difficult to reconcile this tender subject matter with the more brutal, bleak landscape depicted in the rest of Owen’s work.

Nonetheless, this is an innovative and subtle body of work in a gallery which deserves more of our attention.