To kick off my series of weekly round-ups, I’ve a confession to make. When it comes to music, while I love the raw sexual energy of old-school four-to-the-floor rock & roll or the swagger of dirty dancefloor beats which hit home deep inside the hips, I also like it nerdy. All up in the head and consciously clever. Brainy, smart, even occasionally smarty pants.

So I’ll kick off the year in review with a couple of key releases at the brainy end of the musical spectrum.

This year – in fact this month – saw the release of a compilation from the granddaddies of the geek pop kingdom, the Smiths.

The Sound Of The Smiths is a double compilation made up of one disc that’s got pretty much every classic Smiths song you’ll ever want to hear and another of B-sides and rarities, all remastered for the first time. The 45-track compilation rarely descends into filler – although personally, while I understand it’s a vegetarian anthem, I find “Meat Is Murder” dirgy to the point of dull at the best of times, and I could live without this particular live version.

But that’s a small and subjective criticism of an otherwise stand-out release. The influence and enduring bequest of this Manchester band is enormous, particularly given the group existed for only four short years. I don’t know anyone who loved them at the time who doesn’t still listen to and adore them now, albeit without the same charged teenage compulsion.

A band made up of boys barely more than teenagers themselves but immediately carving its patch in the indie rock world, Vampire Weekend released its self-titled debut this year, and if the natty matching tie/shirt combos don’t give the members away as brainiacs of their form, the craftily composed pop songs will.

Using a mouli of Graceland-era Paul Simon and the Afro-influenced parts of Talking Heads to filter indie rock – all served with a new wave twist – the result is smart, upbeat, jaunty and unmissably catchy. (Another great, if less preppy album out of the States, released locally in 2008, which also snatched from the same Talking Heads period was Yeasayer’s All Hour Cymbals.) Vampire Weekend has managed to go straight to commercial alternative audiences while being super contemporary and astute enough to keep their edge. Clever? You bet.

Like the Smiths, built upon the meticulous guitar lines of Johnny Marr, there’s a musicality to Vampire Weekend which takes them way beyond much indie rock, which can often labour – ironically enough – under a deliberate lack of affectation. And that’s what defines the best brainy pop, along with a lyrical literariness – something also shared by Vampire Weekend and its Mancunian antecedent.

There was always a braininess to Australia’s beloved Go-Betweens too. 2008 was the year that Robert Forster, half of the songwriting team at the heart of that band, released his first recorded work since the 2006 death of cohort Grant McLennan; and his first solo offering in a dozen years.

As the Go-Betweens, Forster and McLennan didn’t present so much as co-writers as a tag team, taking lead vocal turns on four-minute tales that were always finely drawn, with a craftsman’s keen eye for description. (Forster is not only a creator of fine intelligent pop music but also writes about it, and his regular column for independent journal The Monthly is as highly recommended as one of the domestic musical highlights of 2008 as his recorded output.)

On this year’s album The Evangelist, Grant McLennan is credited as a co-writer with Forster on three tracks (enough to garner the immediate attention of fans yearning for a last McLennan moment), including the heady track “It Ain’t Easy”, a clear album stand-out.

Forster has created an intimately recorded collection of songs in The Evangelist – an album as cerebral and stimulating as we’ve come to expect, in spite of its deceptively loose feel.