It’s that time of year when I start going through my music collection and try to decide on my favorite songs and albums of the past twelve months. There’s still a couple months left in 2012 and new stuff is surfacing all the time. Releases by U.S. Girls, Cody ChesnuTT, And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of The Dead, Tame Impala and Diamond Rings are freshly in heavy rotation on my turntable and car stereo. Overall, I it’s been a very good year for music. The lists will come later.

Right now, I’m really digging the new wavy sound of Diamond Rings. The project of young Canadian John O’Regan, The Rings sound like music made right around the time O’Regan was born in the early 1980s. If you you’re a fan of OMD, Depeche Mode, New Order and Pet Shop Boys, you’ll probabably dig Diamond Rings’ uncanny talent for replicating the sound and feel of those days when synth pop met goth and we were all just too pretty for words. The album is Free Dimensional and you can buy it here

O’Regan, with his John Sex hairdo and Klaus Nomi fashion sense, is being dimissed by the hipster presss as some kind of retro act for teenyboppers. But I say ignore the mouthbreathers at Pitchfork, Paste and the rest of those sad little men whose lust for life is confined to a firm grip on the toggle stick while navigating through the sexless realms of Skyrim.

Diamond Rings is fun music you can dance too and would have felt perfectly at home pumping through the speakers of the Mudd Club. You can catch them at Fun Fun Fun Fest in Austin on November 2.

Here’s two tracks from Free Dimensional.: “Everything Speaks” and “Put Me On.”

The video contains nudity and throbbing blobs of color.