Best music recordings of 2011

This French psychedelic-pop sextet crams its songs so full of ideas that they sound like they could burst -- and they sometimes do. Tossing together `60s California-style vocal reveries, pithy surf-punk ditties, titanic anthems and progressive-rock mini-suites, the Bewitched Hands behave as though they were discovering all these ideas for the first time, imbuing them with a joy that destroys jadedness.