You’ve had the chance to tell us your favourite local albums of the year in 'Mess+Noise'’s third annual readers poll. Now, it’s our critics’ turn to respond.

Here’s the first installment of our selections for Album of the Year 2008.
Check in later today for the coveted top five.

20.  Spod
Superfrenz
(Valve Records)

19.  Ross McLennan
Sympathy For The New World
(Mistletone)

18.  Grand Salvo
Death
(Spunk)

17.  Kes Band
Kes Band
(Mistletone)

16.  Pivot
O Soundtrack My Heart
(Warp/Inertia)

15.  Die!Die!Die!
Promises, Promises
(Etch N Sketch)

14.  Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds
Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!
(Mute)

13.  You Am I
Dilettantes
(EMI)

12.  Cut Copy
In Ghost Colours
(Modular Recordings)

11.  Fabulous Diamonds
7 Songs
(Nervous Jerk)

10. Ohana
Dead Beat
(Imperative Residence)

Less is more, as they say. It’s a principle Ohana took to heart with their second album Dead Beat, trimming their sound of all excess fat (and then some), reducing it to little more than bone, sinew and a few discordant blood spatters.

Dead Beat is Ohana’s coming-of-age, on which they outgrow their influences – My Disco, Shellac, At the Drive-In – and truly find themselves. That it’s quite possibly their swansong is, to be honest, a crying shame. If tracks like ‘One on Four’ and ‘They Scoundrels’ are anything to go by, Ohana have a lot of mileage left in their combination of hypnotic, lockjaw rhythms and jagged, spidery guitars yet. – Adam D Mills

9. Charge Group
Escaping Mankind
(Remote Control)

You know you’ve found a great record when it inspires you to discover everything that came before it. Escaping Mankind triggered a wave of indie nostalgia for me. I found myself religiously listening to Big Heavy Stuff albums. I was buying June of 44 records while rekindling my love for the ephemeral Wollongong act How Machines Work. I also went back to that which preceded Charge Group: Purplene, the much-loved and equally lauded Newcastle act.

With the spectre of Purplene looming over them, Charge Group’s debut offering was always going to be highly scrutinised by those who were anticipating it the most. They are, essentially, Purplene minus one (or as Emmy Hennings put it in her Mess+Noise article, it’s Purplene plus one). That plus one, violinist Jason Tampake, ends up making all the difference though. His plaintive, emotive violin lines weave between Matt Blackman’s dark guitar melodies and colonial lyricism. It gives Escaping Mankind a cinematic feel, big and epic. With Blackman’s antipodean tongue, this could have been the soundtrack to Baz Luhrmann’s bloated film Australia. Except Charge Group succeeded where Luhrmann didn’t, creating a masterpiece that’s both beautiful and emotionally affecting. – Dom Alessio

8. Witch Hats
Cellulite Soul
(In-Fidelity Recordings)

Witch Hats are the inversion of sugar-coated rock’n’roll. They take melodies and bury them in trash. They sing harmonies as if they were protest cries. They are my favourite delinquents of the year, a gang of malcontents dragging around the ghosts of Beasts of Bourbon and Scientists with basslines heavier than a lead pipe.

Formed in Melbourne by three brats from Tasmania – brothers Kris and Ash Buscombe and Duncan Blachford, with second guitarist Tomas Barry joining later – the band's debut album Cellulite Soul is a celebration of fury and petulance and the pissed-off spirit of youth. 'Climing Up Yr Cable' is the catchiest song of 2008 that sounds like a garbage truck tipping over (there needs to be an award for this); while on 'Doors Film', one of the Buscombes screams "I DON'T WANNA GO TO SCHOOL TODAY!" as if it were an ethos for living. Witch Hats are one of the best new Australian bands to get it – if you're not pissed off about something, you're not doing it right. – Andrew Ramadge

7. Oogas Boogas
Romance & Adventure
(Aarght!)

Are they an elaborate joke, a side project or a real band? Does it really matter? The Oogas LP was hard to get hold of for a while, seeing as they sold so many on their US tour, but very simple to grasp once you heard it. It’s a greasy, beery late night record, based on primal beats, piled high with sharp guitar and spiked with, well, if not filth then at least smut — all good natured, though.

It came with some astonishing cover art too, no matter which version you got: the gatefold vinyl or the hand-stamped CD. In addition to their involvement with the Flip Out festival in September, The Oogas also provided one of the gigs of the year with the launch of this beauty. It was memorable for all the right reasons including beer and free pizza. – Trevor Block

6. My Disco
Paradise
(Stomp)

While the go for most bands is the gradual expansion of their musical palette, My Disco have carved out a niche by taking the invert route, arriving at third album Paradise after shaving their unique post-punk aesthetic to the threshold of minimalism.

This is music for knives, cut away to its barest elements – clipped vocal shots, guitars sawing and buzzing incessant, polyrhythmic drumming snaking the space between – disciplined into skeletal, rhythmic structures and scraped across the only textures that seem left: metal and grinding teeth. Yet its perfection lies in the fact the band always just step back from the precipice to make sure Paradise is utterly fucking listenable, seething as it does with a propulsive power that intimates incitement. – Lawson Fletcher

+

Compiled from the votes of: Adam D Mills, Matt Giles, Trevor Block, Patrick Emery, Dom Alessio, Tim Scott, Daniel Herborn, Carl Dixon, Ben Gook, Lawson Fletcher, Darren Levin, A.H. Cayley, Danny Bos, Andrew Ramadge, Rene Schaefer.