It seems Damon Albarn has spared us the 4-year wait between major releases and graced us with another LP just months after critically acclaimed ‘Plastic Beach’. And what makes this more exciting is that he did it all while on tour in America, using just his shiny new iPad, and all in time for release on Christmas Day! For free. What a quality guy.

While one can’t fault his festive spirit, it is still, after repeated listens, hard to gauge what exactly he has gone for here. ‘The Fall’ is a spirited potpourri of various styles, as is usually the case with Gorillaz. But it differs from the effortless fusion of Kano’s bleep-infested garage with Arabic sentiment as on Plastic Beach’s ‘White Flag’, and comes nowhere near tracks such as De La Soul style ‘Superfast Jellyfish’. Perhaps it is due to the time restraints he put himself under, but ‘The Fall’ ends up playing like a collection of B-sides plastered together, I suppose much like their previous ‘G-Sides’ or ‘D-Sides’ releases. Their sound is very much the same: plenty of interesting sounds and creative rhythms, yet for the most part it lacks the flair and groove we’ve come to expect from Albarn.

That is not to say, however, that it’s not worth listening to. ‘The Fall’ starts off solidly with a nod to Nine Inch Nails’ industrial technicality in ‘Phoner in Arizona’ and is followed up by two tracks in similar style. The unquestionable gem of the album is ‘Detroit’. Its sleepy, half-speed combination of reggae bass and warm guitar lines give it nonchalant summer sweetness akin to Major Lazer’s ‘Can’t Stop Now’. However, after this there is little that is particularly noteworthy. The latter half of ‘The Fall’ alternates between brooding electronic rumbling, tribal African drumming and neo-classical musing, believe it or not.

In this way, ‘The Fall’ has a distinctly conglomerate feel. And while you can’t really tout it as an evolution in his sound, if you take the album for what it is, an iPad-made soundtrack to his time in America, it really isn’t too bad – Albarn seems merely to be having some fun on here.

Fishscale was touted by many as the best hip-hop album of 2006 and Apollo Kids is certainly no different, doubtless throwing a large spanner in the works for many a carefully thought out ‘albums of the year’ list (at least in the hip hop category). Ghost hit forty this year, but you wouldn’t be able to tell from his music, which is still as raw, energetic and full of swagger as ever.

There are no skits and intros/outros are kept to a minimum so that the intensity is never allowed to drop, leaving a really compact, tight album. Granted it is not particularly adventurous – the feel is closer to the Wu-Tang albums of the 90s than other critically acclaimed contemporary efforts from artists such as Kanye West and Mos Def – but Ghost sticks to what he knows and does it very well, and the album succeeds because of it.

The production comes from an assortment of relatively unheard of producers but is very strong throughout. Most of the tracks have quite a marked, heavy beat which complements Ghost’s rapping style and helps drive the album forward, but within this framework there is a great diversity of styles. A particular highlight is the second track, ‘Superstar’, which sounds like it could have been taken straight out of a Blaxploitation film soundtrack, while ‘Purified Thoughts’ and ‘Handcuffin’ them Hoes’ exhibit the lilting rhythms and polyphonic synths characteristic of the more modern style of production. And as always, the album’s chock full of cracking soul samples, from funky bass riffs to wailing vocals.

As you’d expect from one of Wu-Tang’s most acclaimed rappers, the words certainly do justice to the beats. Ghost is always on the right side of aggressive, serving up punchy, quick fire rhymes full of witty boasts and slams. His refreshingly abstract style livens up the sometimes-hackneyed themes of ghetto storytelling and gangster posturing. The many contributors deserve equal praise. The Game returns to his best with a throaty, menacing verse, and Blackthought nearly steals the show on ‘In Tha Park’. But it’s Ghost’s Wu-Tang Clansmen that make this good album great. Raekwon, Method Man and affiliates Cappadonna and Redman all weigh in at the end with what are in my mind the three best tracks, bursting with same energy and clout as the best club-focused songs on Forever.

Churchill may have declared ‘this is not even the beginning of the end,’ but Ron Rosenbaum’s book will aim to inform us How The End Begins (March, Simon & Schuster). The Cold War is over but the threat of destruction by nuclear weapons sure isn’t, and with Trident renewal still up for debate, this may be an important book.

Meanwhile Atomic Postcards (April, Intellect) reproduces postcard images of test explosions and the like, complete with their handwritten messages, dating from Hiroshima to the fall of the Berlin Wall. ‘A fascinating glimpse of a time when the end of the world seemed close at hand,’ the publisher says. Perfect for the coffee table in your fall-out shelter.

John Gray’s The Immortalization Commission (January, Allen Lane) may not offer much comfort, for it will no doubt shine Gray’s bleak brand of scepticism on humanity’s ‘strange quest to cheat death.’ The combination of science, philosophy, and politics is what modernity is all about. 2011 will just see us hurtling on, in the same direction.

In Lars Iyer’s Spurious (Melville House, January), two intellectuals go on a quest to understand themselves, discover the meaning of life and find out why an unstoppable fungus is taking over one of their houses. A premise which combines Goon Show-esque humour with profound questioning is certainly intriguing; all the more so as it’s a philosophy professor’s fictional debut.

If cerebral fungi aren’t your cup of tea, look at Michael Cunningham’s latest, By Nightfall (Harper, January). When an unexpected guest arrives in his home, Peter, a New York art-dealer, is affected in a way he cannot quite explain. He comes to realise that he is in love with two people at the same time. His wife. And her brother. This taboo-breaking plot, likely, judging by earlier works, to be combined with a captivating innovation of style, and coming from the award-winning author of The Hours, promises to be a mesmerising literary experience.

But if you feel that you’ve already got enough weighty books on your reading list and want a page-turner instead, there’s always Before I Go to Sleep (S.J. Watson, Doubleday, April). After an accident in her twenties, Christine forgets everything of the preceding day whilst she sleeps. Every morning, she has to relearn the past twenty years she has forgotten. This may sound a similar premise to Fifty First Dates, but this chilling story is far from rom-com, especially when the one person Christine trusts may not be telling her the whole truth.

With the disappearance of an eight-year-old girl, the sleepy town of Hanmouth is suddenly put under the microscope of the press in Philip Hensher’s King of the Badgers (Harper, March). As the apparently calm community starts to fall apart, the often comic lives of the individuals who live there are laid bare. A realist novel about a community losing its privacy – cross Middlemarch with 1984 – a crime novel, a political novel, tragic yet humorous too: King of the Badgers sounds like an amalgam of different genres, and given Hensher’s previous success, the odds are this will be one worth looking at.

Finally, for those who prefer dipping into books, there’s Anthony Doerr’s collection of short stories, Memory Wall (Harper, January), which, like Before I Go To Sleep, investigates the correspondence of the past with the present. The nature of short stories inevitably facilitates diversity – and Memory Wall looks ready to exploit this to its full potential. Like another new release, Island of Wings, this book will make you travel with it across (four) continents – and through the minds of characters of many backgrounds and ages.

Apparently only three percent of all books published in the English-speaking world are works in translation. Some small presses have made it their mission to change that. Reading another country’s literature not only enlarges our understanding of the wide world, but it sets free cultural resources that were once fenced in by language-barriers. So in the New Year’s self-improving spirit, here’s a list to get you started.

In January, Dalkey Archive is putting out Brazilian Ignacio de Loyola Brandão’s The Goodbye Angel (trans. Clifford E. Landers) described as a “cross between a noir and a Greek Tragedy” in an exploration of Brandão’s “great subject” of the city versus its inhabitants.

Europa will publish Luis Sepulveda’s Shadow of What We Were (trans. Howard Curtis) in February. Summoned by an anarchist called “The Shadow”, three ageing revolutionaries meet in Santiago to complete one final mission. In the sudden absence of The Shadow, it is the bumbling Coco Aravena to whom the others turn.

This March, Melville House is publishing Fiasco (trans. Tom Wilkinson) by Hungarian Nobel winner Imre Kertecz. Fiasco has been described as reminiscent of the works of Kafka and Camus and is set during Hungary’s almost seamless transition from Nazi to Communist occupation.

And in April, in Dasa Drndic’s Trieste (trans. Ellen Elias-Bursac) published by Quercus, an old woman sits in north-eastern Italy surrounded by fragments which form a collage (“employing a range of astonishing conceptual devices” says the publisher’s website) telling the story of the son fathered by an S.S. officer and stolen during the Second World War.

East European fiction often cannot avoid the yoke of totalitarian regimes, but those who enjoy a melancholy tempered by humor or cheek might try Bohumil Hrabal, whose novel Harlequin’s Millions was just released in English by Archipelago this past December.

Start the year by avoiding London. (Well, go and see Modern British Sculpture at the RA as soon as it opens on January 22nd because it will be just incredibly amazing. But save the rest.) Instead, take the opportunity to see artists right here in Oxford. The O3 gallery opens with Rad Cam! on the 17th: artists’ responses to what is perhaps Oxford’s most iconic structure. The North Wall Arts Centre, meanwhile, presents the work of the Oxford Sculptors Group from the 24th to the 5th only. On February 1st the Oxford Art Movement are exhibiting work on the theme The Sublime and the Grotesque at Christ Church, and the Sarah Wiseman Gallery will show landscape paintings of Rajasthan by Jenny Eadon.

Back in the capital, Tate Britain opens a historical survey of the medium of watercolour on February 16th, which would be a great complement to the Eadon show. Its content ranges from medieval illuminations to work by contemporary artists like Emin and Hodgkin. Fine Artists might also particularly like to see Art School at the V&A, documenting the transformation of art school practice in the 19th century, including Turner and Constable’s early sketches.

Modern Art Oxford does not disappoint with the next two artists in its line up: with the installations, interventions and other art happenings from Roman Ondák and Michael Sailstorfer, it’s going to be an interesting experience walking into the gallery this March. The Ashmolean, meanwhile, has a summer show which completely departs from its last blockbuster. Images and the State explores the style and content of Chinese propagandist imagery in the Cultural Revolution. Definitely an antidote to all those Pre-Raphaelites. A little further afield, another show of pictures meant to play with your mind is the retrospective of Surrealist René Magritte, on at Tate Liverpool from June 24th.

Autumn means time for the next Turbine Hall artist and this year it’s Tacita Dean, who is perhaps most famous for her 16mm films documenting reflections and alterations of light on surfaces. After Ai Weiwei’s 2010 installation of thousands of seeds became look-and-don’t-touch because of health and safety concerns, it will be hugely exciting to see how Dean employs the space on offer.

Finally, the National Gallery rounds off a year of Renaissance shows with Leonardo da Vinci: Painter at the Court of Milan. The enormous, expensive, impressive shows have been scarcer than usual this year, but don’t worry. This is the most complete display of da Vinci’s surviving paintings ever held, with loans from all over the world, and looks set to be spectacular. Enjoy.

This lesser-known publisher is now my first and favourite supplier for international fiction that diverges interestingly and refreshingly from the mainstream; having achieved global success with their translations of Stieg Larsson’s Millennium trilogy, Quercus’ sense for the quirky and cutting-edge has now become their trademark.

The company’s passion for posterity over pulp is definitely evident in Anuradha Roy’s The Folded Earth, launched in January under the imprint MacLehose Press. Its setting in the remote reaches of the Himalayas immediately suggests the new perspectives this novel can convey to the reader as, seeking a fresh start, Maya chooses a settlement surrounded by these hulking mountains. Secluded, yet not isolated enough to avoid the collective threats of her past, the encroaching industrial development and the seemingly unaccountable behaviour of her fellow citizens. Provocative and thrilling, this promises to live up to expectations of Roy, who has already proved her prowess with An Atlas of Impossible Longing.

Continuing the travel trend, I’m excitedly anticipating reading Karin Altenberg’s début novel Island of Wings, another of Quercus’ rare birds, to be set free in April. Spanning not only an unfamiliar geographical landscape but also a different temporal one, it traces the tribulations of a Victorian missionary and his new wife as they arrive on an island at the margins of civilization. Closer to the eerie atmosphere of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness or Barbara Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible than to the harmonious island life of the Swiss Family Robinson, this colonial mystery augurs such haunting questions as the true fate of the natives’ vanishing children and the sanity or otherwise of each of the newlyweds. On an island, as in the mountains, no-one can hear you scream.

The sun still rising as we headed up in the chairlift first thing in the morning. (Clare Richards)

Clear blue skies, the perfect skiing weather, never lasted long. (Clare Richards)

The views were spectacular. (Clare Richards)

So people spent some time taking them in. (Clare Richards)

Approaching the challenge of skiing through the vast snow clouds that were rapidly building. (Clare Richards)

Misty skies as a long day drew to a close. (Clare Richards)

(Clare Richards)

Playing with fire at the largest underground club in Europe. (Clare Richards)

Fireworks, music, mulled wine and snow at the Street Party. (Clare Richards)

London managed to offer up a couple of musical gems to save us from the sea of shite that, as usual, marked out the festive period. Pushing against the tide of nauseating Christmas music was Dalston’s Cafe Oto, a venue that has spent the last year putting contemporary jazz, the free improvisation scene and other less popular music very much back in fashion. Oto’s Christmas party centred around the Academy Quintet’s raucous deconstructions of Christmas carols, primarily concerned with descents into aggressive bursts of free improv and winding passages of timbral manipulation, before giving us something vaguely approaching a Christmas song. I don’t think I will ever experience a more harrowing ‘Good King Wenceslas’, complete with dense tone clusters and furious flute solos. The savaging of carols paused only to allow brief appearances by Miss Dora Prawnshoe – claiming to be a legendary music hall star – to sing the odd song about oysters and ladies of the night. This was a comic musical marriage – and one that highlighted the Dalston free jazz scene’s ability to leave the highbrow sensibilities of Evan Parker (and other such stalwarts), and instead produce moments aimed at non-converts that fuse humorous accessibility with a convincing case for the merits of free improv.

The evening was bookended by performances from the London Snorkelling Team, a group of players that laid down a false sense of security with a twee sound world. Their music incorporated outbursts of dissonance with continuous improvising around a set of live overhead projections of hand-drawn cartoons, as well as a solo from Leafcutter John of Polar Bear fame, introducing a period of transcendental ambience to proceedings. You would be hard pressed to find a worthier music venue than Cafe Oto, which has now established itself as a much needed counter to the various wannabe Shoreditch nights that claim to offer experimental musical creations (whilst more often than not merely serving as a place for idiots to stand around wearing correspondent shoes and gargling overpriced wine). Over the next few months Oto will play host to legendary German saxophonist Peter Brotzmann and bassist Barry Guy among others. Don’t miss out.

 I headed back to more conventional territory with the Southbank Centre’s New Year’s Eve party presided over by their artists in residence, contemporary folk band Bellowhead, whose album Hedonism was surely one of the big sounds of last year. Having survived the Christmas-related musical bile that spews out of the Southbank almost continuously during this period, Bellowhead’s three sets were a welcome relief. Following a dance set and various cover versions whilst parading around in circus regalia, the band came hurtling into the third post-fireworks set with unmatchable intensity. Whilst their album Hedonism may have declined to take as many risks as their earlier 2006 offering, Burlesque, such considerations can be set aside in live performance. Their ability to fill the Southbank’s Clore Ballroom with a genre-defying festival dynamic was impressive in itself. Jon Boden’s fiddle playing conducted the endless stream of crescendos and perpetual peaks and troughs whilst in ‘Frog’s Legs and Dragon’s Teeth’ ripped through a demented solo, playing with the darkest timbres and flurried layers of sound. Meanwhile ‘New York Girls’ looks set to fast become a party favourite. This willingness to meld a festival sound with the intellectual considerations of Bellowhead’s early beginnings in folk duo Spiers and Boden makes for compelling listening. 2011 will be an interesting year to watch whether Bellowhead’s listenable experimentation can continue to occupy the ground between the relative fringes of popular music, and a more mainstream position.