Now then, on to the serious business. The auditory sprinkles on the fairy cake of popular music, if you will. It’s part two of my musical year in review, the top ten, the big boys, the best of the best of the best. Have yourself a cup of tea/tumbler of brandy/speedball (delete where applicable), and listen to some tunes, stupid.
10. Fuck Buttons – The Lisbon Maru
The epic centrepiece of by far and away the most exciting album of the year, ‘The Lisbon Maru’ showed Fuck Buttons delivering on the noisy promise of 2008’s debut Street Horrrsing tenfold. An exercise in suspense and release, every tiny development in its relentless march is plundered for maximum impact, from the gradual introduction of the drums, cymbal by cymbal, to the eventual heartstopping wall of feedback that drenches all before it in euphoric drone.
9. HEALTH - We Are Water
A track that gives the impression HEALTH just want to liquefy your brain, by any means necessary. With no let up in the breakneck beat (I personally nominate BJ as one of the most technically gifted rock drummers around) and constant, shuddering screeches of pure noise jettisoned from mangled guitars and keyboards, the track plays itself out across three minutes of amphetamine-riddled lunacy to a point where you would expect most bands to call it a day, before going even more insanely furious and stepping things up still further. And then it does the most effective half-tempo shift you’ve ever heard, to give you a chance to digest the complete awesomeness of what you’ve just experienced.
8. Yeah Yeah Yeahs – Zero
I’m leaving the video up for this one, partly because I love them for ripping it out of Jared Leto’s tremendously self-indulgent promo for ‘From Yesterday’, and partly because you need to look at Karen O in this video. Look at her. Isn’t she brilliant? And I want that jacket. Oh yes. Anyway, the song is three minutes of pop awesomeness better even than Blondie, and just goes to show that guitar bands ‘discovering’ synth doesn’t necessarily have to be a bad thing. Unless of course, the guitar band in question is Snow Patrol. Or The Editors. Or… okay, it’s only a good thing when Yeah Yeah Yeahs do it.
7. The Big Pink – Velvet
‘Dominos’ may have got all the indie club airplay, but it was this, the first single from The Big Pink, that really grabbed the attention with its printer jam rhythms and layers of guitar squall. Okay, you might accuse them of doing epic-by-numbers rock, but since when was that a bad thing? Please, oh please, let this herald the start of a shoegaze revival. Then in a couple of years time, when all the scene kids are buying Fender Jaguars and stacks of FX units, we’ll be able to say “Thanks, Big Pink – you may have been insufferably over-hyped by your friends in the music press, but at least you fought the good fight against the landfill indie jangle.”
6. DOOM – Gazillion Ear (Thom Yorke Remix)
The accumulation of wealth has proven such fertile subject matter for hip-hop for so long, but ‘A Milli’ this most definitely is not. In retrospect, Thom Yorke’s wandering, skittish beats provide an ideal complement to DOOM’s labyrinthine, arrhythmic flow – loose, unsettling, never anything less than intense. Yorke opts to use a more frantic, ranting delivery than the original cut, serving only to heighten that sense of claustrophobia with its breathlessness. But nothing detracts from the lyrical dexterity of the man in the mask as he throws the thesaurus at the usual range of bizarre pop culture references from Jake the Snake, to ‘Ernest Goes to Camp’, to the Large Hadron Collider, throughout a third person verbal deconstruction of the “villain man” who “won’t stop rocking ‘til he’s clocked in a gazillion grand” and “had his PhD in indiscrete street haggling”. As usual, it would take a sharp ear, an encyclopaedia and a few hits of mescaline to pull out every double meaning and fractured reference in there, but then, that’s half the fun, isn’t it?
5. La Roux – In For The Kill (SKREAM’s Let’s Get Ravey Remix)
Bass! How low can you go, as a wise man once asked. The answer, if I’m any judge, is very low indeed, because it will sound awesome. I know I’ve put the youtube player above, but seriously, don’t waste this shit on laptop speakers, it’s just not right. The best thing to come out of the ‘girls with synths’ explosion of ’09 (well, apart from lots of girls suddenly owning synths, which is, obviously, brilliant) was the rich seam of remix-ready lady vocals, once the annoying casio tones were stripped away. La Roux became this year’s answer to The Gossip by following their lead and producing a string of pretty awful singles which magically became fantastic the second a good producer got their hands on them, the epitome of this trend being SKREAM’s take on ‘In For The Kill’. All huge dubstep growls and bravely isolated vocals, the track is almost nothing but anticipation, the point of release held off for as long as humanly possible, audaciously pausing, even, for a few seconds of complete silence before the drop finally arrives, authoritative and driving, bringing home the final rush of endorphins.
4. The Horrors – Sea Within A Sea
Ah, krautrock. Is there any more nourishing morsel in the goth selection box? Easy to imitate, difficult to master, beloved of ‘difficult second album’ers everywhere, it’s one of those Marmite genres, not just because people tend to either love it or hate it, but because it almost seems to deliberately provoke that divide. It can be truly awful repetitive dreck, the rock equivalent of minimal techno, or, as here, manifest itself as a staggering work of genius. Brilliantly, seamlessly weaving its way across eight minutes, shifting moods and textures right across the spectrum, ‘Sea Within A Sea’ is first downcast, then hopeful, expectant, and finally, triumphant, as glorious arpeggiated trills and vocal chanting showers everything with unexpected revelation. Who cares if it’s a trick ripped straight out of producer Geoff Barrow’s Portishead how-to guide, when it works this well? Good on The Horrors. If you’re going to do art-rock cliché #1, then at least do it right. Incidentally, against all received wisdom, I’m actually pretty ambivalent towards Marmite. Gotta love that krautrock, though.
3. HEALTH – Die Slow
Second entry in my top ten for HEALTH, and much of what I said above for ‘We Are Water’ goes for this track too, but it achieves a higher ranking purely by having a slightly catchier chorus and also by sounding more like several angry robots having cathartic group sex.
2. Animal Collective – My Girls
The genius of Animal Collective is their ability to take digitally manipulated and synthesized sounds, and somehow make them sound completely organic. And of course their Beach Boys-esque harmonies and exuberantly joyful delivery don’t hurt either. Swelling from a primordial soup of noise, the good vibes are layered on top of each other thick and fast in an aural hug of swooping, cheering sound. The sentiment of the lyrics are no less slushy, as Panda Bear vows to build the “four walls and adobe slabs” of a house for his wife and children, his girls. Much like a good Spielberg film, it’d all be almost nauseatingly twee were it not for the craft, enthusiasm and sheer ecstasy of life displayed in the music, urging you constantly to join in with handclaps, harmonies and synchronised whoops of delight. Listen, experience, and be moved. It’s what music is all about.
1. Fuck Buttons – Surf Solar
7-inch Single Edit:
The full ten-minute album version:
EH eh-eh-eh eh-eh-EH!!!!! 2009 – The Year of Fuck Buttons. They made the best album, and with this cacophony of whirling loops, shrieks and good old-fashioned distortion, they made the best song. Listen to either the epically scaled album version, or the three-minute ‘pop single’ version above depending on how long you like your ears to be assaulted for - both are, simply put, total brilliance. It’s something of a tired line in music journalism to describe artists as ‘noise terrorists’, and it’s not a cliché that I would ever think of using, I’m just saying that if ever there were a song to soundtrack both the literal and metaphorical ‘fucking-up-of-shit’, this baby is it. Every time it comes on I lose all control and just start running into things, doing jumping jacks, smacking the floor with my outstretched hand over and over again – anything to express the relentless outpouring of energy that comes with hearing that cyclical, twisting beat and those huge blasts of depraved white noise. There was nothing else that sounded quite like this in 2009, but then there’s probably nothing else that sounds like this ever. 2010 better have something pretty special up its sleeve.
Showing posts with label lists. Show all posts
Showing posts with label lists. Show all posts
Friday, 8 January 2010
Thursday, 31 December 2009
The Best 20 Tracks of 2009 (Part I)
Here it is then, my musical year in review. I was initially planning to do a top ten albums like last year, but when I started making a list I quickly realised what a truly awful year for albums this has been. The only two exceptional albums I’ve heard in the last twelve months were Fuck Buttons’ Tarot Sport and Animal Collective’s Merriweather Post Pavillion. If you have ears and £20 of Christmas money left to spend, I suggest you go and buy them now, or you will be shunned when I encounter you on my travels. Decent efforts like HEALTH’s Get Color, The Horrors’ Primary Colours and Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ It’s Blitz abounded, but somehow it doesn’t feel right to celebrate albums that I feel are merely good rather than transcendental. And as for The XX, sorry indie credibility, but I just don’t understand them and I fear that I never will. But this being the season of goodwill, I must shed my Grinch-like demeanour for at least a few hours. Regardless of my personal worries about the whole ‘death of the LP’ thing being heralded in music publications the world over, there have been plenty of fantastic standalone songs to concentrate on showering with hyperbole, so here without further ado are my top 20, starting today with 20-11 and continuing at some point next week with the eagerly anticipated 10-1 countdown. Eagerly anticipated, that is, if you are no good at forming subjective opinions of your own, or just feel like bitching me out for not including ‘Dominos’. Shit, that’s a spoiler, sorry.
20. MSTRKRFT – 1000 Cigarettes
Best one-sentence youtube review I’ve ever read: ‘This track really punches you in the balls’. I couldn’t have put it any better myself. MSTRKRFT have translated the gut-vibrating energy of their DFA1979 bass driven sucker punch into a yet more frenetic bass driven electro-skronk. And for those of you who didn’t know, I don’t ever use the term ‘skronk’ lightly. And that’s all that I have to say about that, apart from the fact that I have probably thrown my arms in the air and danced to this song more times this year than anything else.
19. The Maccabees feat. Roots Manuva – Empty Vessels
Bit of a late entry, this one. I heard this on the radio last week (6music really does perform a valuable public service by being the only vaguely tolerable radio station out there), and since then I must have listened to it about thirty times, which is usually a good sign. For me Roots Manuva is the forefather of what NME would call the ‘urban poet’ explosion (just FUCK off) of recent years, and Mike Skinner, Arctic Monkeys et al owe him a huge debt of wry, grittily humorous gratitude (Jamie T doesn’t get included in that list because he’s not an ‘urban poet’, just an urban twat). Anyway, it’s good to see him back kitchen-sink philosophising and cramming as many celebrated musical references as he can into his verses. The Maccabees, for their part, deliver a handful of pleasantly downbeat cooing hooks that make the whole thing entirely suitable for daytime, before going all ‘The Chain’ for the coda.
18. Destroyer – Bay Of Pigs
So, instead of an album, Muse decided this year to put out a bloated wreck that somehow managed the neat trick of being impenetrably pretentious to even the most hardened Yes fan, whilst simultaneously containing some of their laziest, most insipid ballads yet (seriously, note to Matt Bellamy: you are a very, very good guitarist, but your lyrics are awful, so please stop forcing us to focus on them). Anyway, someone had to fly the flag for prog, and they came in the unexpected form of Destroyer, who went for a sort of ambient 9 minute take on ‘Shine On You Crazy Diamond’ with lyrics by Neil Hannon. It takes a whole 5 minutes for the bass and the beat to come in, at first glitching before resolving themselves into a pleasant Flight of the Conchords style singalong which, just as it gets into its stride, fades out. I don’t care if you don’t think this is prog at all, it infuriates and amuses me like the most indulgent half hour gong solo ever, and I bloody well loved it.
17. Manic Street Preachers – Peeled Apples
This is probably my equivalent of one of those best director gongs handed out for lifetime achievement rather than a particularly life-changing piece of cinema (I’m looking at you Marty Scorsese). But hey, Nicky Wire’s bass sounds filthier than it has done in years (now if we can just get him making inadvisable, unsolicited comments about famous people again we’ll be in business), and it’s the first Manics track to be blessed with Richey lyrics since ‘Kevin Carter’, plus there’s a really emo Christian Bale sample at the start, so let me have this one.
16. Radiohead – These Are My Twisted Words
Radiohead decided this year to trade in their frankly ludicrous long-player conversion rates for a more scattershot flurry of download single releases, but if that means more regular doses of Radiohead, I guess I can’t complain to vehemently, right? This is far from the best thing they’ve ever done, but let’s face it, Thom Yorke farts out songs that most UK indie bands would be quite content to build an entire career around, and sometimes it’s just refreshing to hear Jonny hitting up the whammy pedal again, even if it is in a little more subdued manner than on 'Just'.
15. Jay-Z feat. Alicia Keys – Empire State Of Mind
However fed up I am of Jay-Z’s increasingly targeted cross-promotional sales pitch flows (and it’s clear that he’s not really even trying here), there was no other hook this year more likely to make me pull diva-like vocal performances in my kitchen when it came on the radio than this one. So shut up.
14. Fever Ray – If I Had A Heart
Criminally, I still haven’t heard the Fever Ray album, despite ‘kind of like Kate Bush produced by The Knife’ sounding like possibly the best musical elevator-pitch ever (actually, after writing that sentence I realised what a fool I’d been, took a break, walked into town and bought the thing). It was a toss-up between this, the lead track, and its Fuck Buttons, steam-powered remix for inclusion in the list, but the original wins out in the glacial lovely/creepiness stakes, assisted by the fact that otherwise I could be accused of going on about Fuck Buttons a tad too much.
13. Yeah Yeah Yeahs – Heads Will Roll (A-Trak remix)
All the best bits of the original, but with more sexy Karen O yelping and a decent portion of squiggly bits that sound a bit like a synthesiser jizzing its pants. Also, mad love for being the only BIG HOUSE KEYS revival track that’s even vaguely listenable. Well, not just listenable, bloody brilliant, and with my favourite mentalist middle-eight break down ever.
12. Shakira – She Wolf
First off, big English graduate props for creditable use of the word ‘lycanthropy’. But honestly, I was already addicted to the intoxicating blend of flamenco guitar, eighties synths, string breaks and husky vocals before I even saw that video, which needless to say only propelled the thing even further into the stratosphere of genius. Awoo!
11. Thom Yorke – Feeling Pulled Apart By Horses
Isn’t life amusing? 2009 brought us the sheer ridiculous glee of witnessing Thom Yorke and Flea sharing a stage, surely the strangest musical personality mismatch since Morrisey teamed up with the fat one from Bowling For Soup (not really). Of course, with hindsight it all made a crazy kind of sense, when you consider the proportion of the Thomster’s basslines that really bring the funk. Like this here, created from an early version of the In Rainbows track ‘Reckoner’ (if you listen really carefully I think you can just about make out some of the chords), but warped into something like the most mental cut off The Eraser via skittery beats and one of those basslines that makes you pout like you’ve just smelt a bad smell (that’s why they call it ‘funk’, kids).
20. MSTRKRFT – 1000 Cigarettes
Best one-sentence youtube review I’ve ever read: ‘This track really punches you in the balls’. I couldn’t have put it any better myself. MSTRKRFT have translated the gut-vibrating energy of their DFA1979 bass driven sucker punch into a yet more frenetic bass driven electro-skronk. And for those of you who didn’t know, I don’t ever use the term ‘skronk’ lightly. And that’s all that I have to say about that, apart from the fact that I have probably thrown my arms in the air and danced to this song more times this year than anything else.
19. The Maccabees feat. Roots Manuva – Empty Vessels
Bit of a late entry, this one. I heard this on the radio last week (6music really does perform a valuable public service by being the only vaguely tolerable radio station out there), and since then I must have listened to it about thirty times, which is usually a good sign. For me Roots Manuva is the forefather of what NME would call the ‘urban poet’ explosion (just FUCK off) of recent years, and Mike Skinner, Arctic Monkeys et al owe him a huge debt of wry, grittily humorous gratitude (Jamie T doesn’t get included in that list because he’s not an ‘urban poet’, just an urban twat). Anyway, it’s good to see him back kitchen-sink philosophising and cramming as many celebrated musical references as he can into his verses. The Maccabees, for their part, deliver a handful of pleasantly downbeat cooing hooks that make the whole thing entirely suitable for daytime, before going all ‘The Chain’ for the coda.
18. Destroyer – Bay Of Pigs
So, instead of an album, Muse decided this year to put out a bloated wreck that somehow managed the neat trick of being impenetrably pretentious to even the most hardened Yes fan, whilst simultaneously containing some of their laziest, most insipid ballads yet (seriously, note to Matt Bellamy: you are a very, very good guitarist, but your lyrics are awful, so please stop forcing us to focus on them). Anyway, someone had to fly the flag for prog, and they came in the unexpected form of Destroyer, who went for a sort of ambient 9 minute take on ‘Shine On You Crazy Diamond’ with lyrics by Neil Hannon. It takes a whole 5 minutes for the bass and the beat to come in, at first glitching before resolving themselves into a pleasant Flight of the Conchords style singalong which, just as it gets into its stride, fades out. I don’t care if you don’t think this is prog at all, it infuriates and amuses me like the most indulgent half hour gong solo ever, and I bloody well loved it.
17. Manic Street Preachers – Peeled Apples
This is probably my equivalent of one of those best director gongs handed out for lifetime achievement rather than a particularly life-changing piece of cinema (I’m looking at you Marty Scorsese). But hey, Nicky Wire’s bass sounds filthier than it has done in years (now if we can just get him making inadvisable, unsolicited comments about famous people again we’ll be in business), and it’s the first Manics track to be blessed with Richey lyrics since ‘Kevin Carter’, plus there’s a really emo Christian Bale sample at the start, so let me have this one.
16. Radiohead – These Are My Twisted Words
Radiohead decided this year to trade in their frankly ludicrous long-player conversion rates for a more scattershot flurry of download single releases, but if that means more regular doses of Radiohead, I guess I can’t complain to vehemently, right? This is far from the best thing they’ve ever done, but let’s face it, Thom Yorke farts out songs that most UK indie bands would be quite content to build an entire career around, and sometimes it’s just refreshing to hear Jonny hitting up the whammy pedal again, even if it is in a little more subdued manner than on 'Just'.
15. Jay-Z feat. Alicia Keys – Empire State Of Mind
However fed up I am of Jay-Z’s increasingly targeted cross-promotional sales pitch flows (and it’s clear that he’s not really even trying here), there was no other hook this year more likely to make me pull diva-like vocal performances in my kitchen when it came on the radio than this one. So shut up.
14. Fever Ray – If I Had A Heart
Criminally, I still haven’t heard the Fever Ray album, despite ‘kind of like Kate Bush produced by The Knife’ sounding like possibly the best musical elevator-pitch ever (actually, after writing that sentence I realised what a fool I’d been, took a break, walked into town and bought the thing). It was a toss-up between this, the lead track, and its Fuck Buttons, steam-powered remix for inclusion in the list, but the original wins out in the glacial lovely/creepiness stakes, assisted by the fact that otherwise I could be accused of going on about Fuck Buttons a tad too much.
13. Yeah Yeah Yeahs – Heads Will Roll (A-Trak remix)
All the best bits of the original, but with more sexy Karen O yelping and a decent portion of squiggly bits that sound a bit like a synthesiser jizzing its pants. Also, mad love for being the only BIG HOUSE KEYS revival track that’s even vaguely listenable. Well, not just listenable, bloody brilliant, and with my favourite mentalist middle-eight break down ever.
12. Shakira – She Wolf
First off, big English graduate props for creditable use of the word ‘lycanthropy’. But honestly, I was already addicted to the intoxicating blend of flamenco guitar, eighties synths, string breaks and husky vocals before I even saw that video, which needless to say only propelled the thing even further into the stratosphere of genius. Awoo!
11. Thom Yorke – Feeling Pulled Apart By Horses
Isn’t life amusing? 2009 brought us the sheer ridiculous glee of witnessing Thom Yorke and Flea sharing a stage, surely the strangest musical personality mismatch since Morrisey teamed up with the fat one from Bowling For Soup (not really). Of course, with hindsight it all made a crazy kind of sense, when you consider the proportion of the Thomster’s basslines that really bring the funk. Like this here, created from an early version of the In Rainbows track ‘Reckoner’ (if you listen really carefully I think you can just about make out some of the chords), but warped into something like the most mental cut off The Eraser via skittery beats and one of those basslines that makes you pout like you’ve just smelt a bad smell (that’s why they call it ‘funk’, kids).
Friday, 16 January 2009
Linkage
So I wrote some stuff over on Wired For Style which is up now. For some reason my name's not been attached to it, which is a bit of an irritation, but trust me, them words up there, they're all mine. So anyway, if you want to know how to be cool like me, there's some things to start you off. I particularly want one of those House of Bendie hoodies. They look just the thing for job interviews in trendy 'experimental' London media offices. Enjoy.
Tuesday, 9 December 2008
Albums of the Year 2008
It is December, and in December it is traditional to do lists. I like this because I am male and slightly OCD (Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, Obsessive about Compact Discs). Here is mine, for my 10 favourite albums of the last year. Any one of these thoroughly deserves a more detailed album review, and will probably get one sooner or later (probably later) in my ongoing ‘great albums’ feature. They were chosen because I believe they are truly great works of music that stand on their own as one self-contained entity, and are as such deserving of a place on anyone’s CD rack. I know this because I am a blogger, and am therefore infinitely more qualified to write about music than some 'music journalist' with their 'journalism degree' and 'grade 9 music theory'. Oh yeah. My opinions count for a lot. There were some albums this year that contained some great music, but I can’t justify to myself putting on the list, mainly because they are let down by a few clunky tracks. Still definitely worth checking out though, are the efforts from Conor Oberst, Does It Offend You, Yeah?, Hot Chip, and MGMT. All contain musical genius and musical mundanity in equal measure. Then there were the ones that don’t make the cut solely because I don’t own them yet (and therefore can’t judge them as a whole body of work), but from the songs that I’ve heard, Foals, Santogold, Kanye West, Sigur Ros and Mogwai may deserve just as much praise, so go and buy them with my blessing. Anything else though, and I will judge you harshly, because that is just the kind of music snob that I am. Yes, I’m right and you’re wrong. And yes, there will be a test at the end. Thank you.
10. Pink Floyd – Oh, By The Way
Yes, yes, I know. I’m cheating. It’s a boxset, it came out at the end of last year, and I don’t even own it, despite what I just said. You name me 10 albums from the last 12 months that you thought were genuinely brilliant, then. Anyway, that’s why it’s at number 10 on the list, despite containing not just some of the best music you’ll hear this year, but very probably the best music you’ll hear, like, ever. In your lifetime. Even if they invent mp3s in the future that orally pleasure you while you listen. Let’s just accept that I’m putting this in the list as a tribute to synth pioneer and genius Rick Wright, who passed away earlier this year. If there was any justice in the world, it should have been a national day of mourning. However, it does feel a bit cheap for me to put this ridiculously extensive collection in at number one, despite Dark Side Of The Moon and Wish You Were Here knocking every other album on this list clear out of the water. And anyway, “ridiculously extensive” means that for every Dark Side eargasm, you have to sit through a Division Bell, the auditory equivalent of finally getting that girl you’ve pined for for ten years, only to find out that she’s now into coprophilia and trainspotting. So number 10 it is. Sorry, David. Sorry, Roger.
9. Death Cab For Cutie – Narrow Stairs
This one gave me a bit of a headache in its selection, because I only got round to buying it last week. Is a week really long enough to make a value judgement on whether an album is a work of art or not? Well, in the short time that I have had to listen to it, Narrow Stairs has won me over with its tried and tested deathcab formula of ever-so-fragile guitar, textured brass and string arrangements, and guess-how-emo-it’s-going-to-go lyrics. On this latest album, the vocals run the whole gamut from heartfelt to tortured, by way of pleading, introspective and melancholy. But for all the shortcomings of their admittedly narrow lyrical palette, deathcab really know how to push the sonic envelope. If David Byrne had been an emo in 1978, this would have been the sort of stuff he’d have been up to; subtly polyrhythmic, shifting, fragmented, but with a keen underlying sense of groove. Perhaps the oblique cover art is even a deliberate nod to the seminal Fear of Music. It still remains to be seen if they’re capable of making their own take on that kind album, or even their Remain in Light, but in 2008, deathcab took a couple of steps in the right direction.
8. British Sea Power – Do You Like Rock Music?
I’ve always been a massive fan of BSP; their so-uncool-it’s-cool image (Bird watching! Hiking! Real ale!), their kaleidoscopic lyrics about anything and everything (Dostoevsky! Canvey Island! The Larsen B ice shelf!), and of course their insane live shows, which usually draw to a close with equal parts piggybacks and feedback breaking out all over the stage in a sheer orgy of noise and spectacle. But I’ve always felt that they were yet to pull out their big statement, the album that defined them as a band. Not so anymore – 2008 saw BSP mature into a swirling, orchestral monster of an outfit, complete with horns, air raid sirens, and blissfully swollen production from the minds behind Arcade Fire and Godspeed You Black Emperor!. ‘Do you like rock music?’, the title asks, either inquisitive or reproachful, ambiguously daring. It’s certainly a call to arms both for rock music that rocks, and against the banality that in recent years has tried to pass itself off as ‘rock’. Do I like rock music? If this is what the term represents, then unequivocally yes.
7. Bloc Party – Intimacy
There was very little fanfare when the third Bloc Party album was quietly stuck up on the band’s website for download a few months ago, perhaps unfairly considering the fact that for all the commercial success of its predecessors, this incarnation is a far more satisfying whole than the band’s earlier, more patchy efforts. Bloc Party have honed their sound into a smart, charged whirlwind of sirens, beats and cut up vocals, sacrificing neither the pop hooks of Silent Alarm or the experimentation of A Weekend In The City’s more exciting tracks. And when it’s not a fluorescent explosion happening right now, the intimacy of the title comes to the fore with fragile flourishes, all the while building in tension until the next eruption of tangled and chaotic noise. It’s a giddy headrush of an album that constantly throws you off balance and cements Bloc Party’s credentials as by far the most intriguing by-product of this decade’s indie explosion.
6. HEALTH – Health//Disco
It should be fairly obvious from a casual glance through my favourite albums that there are two things that really get my blood pumping when it comes to music. With this compilation of remixes, HEALTH combine the squall of furiously huge noise rock guitar textures with furiously distorted squelches of towering synth, leaving you with little option but to give in completely to total immersion in the sound, flailing your arms and thrashing your head. Furiously. It’s rare for a remix album to be this painstakingly put together. The disparate sounds of different outfits providing their own take can often sound clumsy, interrupting the flow. But here the dark disco efforts of Acid Girls, Crystal Castles, Thrust Lab et al are united by the torrent of pure brooding noise into a pulsating cascade of amphetamine charged dance rock. There is no album quite like it for sheer adrenaline inducing, propulsive, driving energy, and for that it deserves to be played in full at every nightclub from now until the end of time.
5. Crystal Castles – Crystal Castles
In my ideal, fantasy life, I’d live in a basement studio with Crystal Castles’ frontwoman Alice Glass. We’d spend all day playing with vintage synthesiser effects and gameboy noises, both wearing too much eyeliner and adopting a superior attitude to the world in general. We would only come out by night to feed, screaming random strings of unintelligible gibberish at passers-by. But, being that she’s a successful French-Canadian goth-pop star and I’m a skint, unemployed blogger, my fantasy life will probably have to take a back seat for a while. Instead, I’ll have to make do with Crystal Castles debut album, a sleek, shadowy beast comprised of, you guessed it, vintage synthesiser effects, gameboy noises and screams of unintelligible gibberish. The treated vocals coat interwoven lines of gothic techno beats and eightbit keyboard in a glitter bomb of mystique as they intersect and collide like a fight between two giant robots in a disused Atari factory. It’s not quite a long-term relationship with your very own fantasy swaggering electro mistress, but it’s a good second best.
4. Fuck Buttons – Street Horrrsing
Let’s start with my mother’s capsule review: “That’s just noise. I know that’s what parents always say, but it’s literally just noise.” Which it is, inarguably. Noise is good. You’re going to have to accept it if you’re going to get anything out of listening to this audacious scream-of-consciousness, which veers from blistering feedback to tribal drumming to delicate windchimes to sub-bass hiccups and back to blistering feedback without missing a beat. It’s never going to make any best seller lists, that’s for sure. But this six-track, hour-long exploration of drones and tones pounds away at the senses, creeping into your consciousness until you start to wonder why all music doesn’t sound like this. Sex on Fire? It’s all very well and good, but couldn’t they have shrouded it in humming pulses of distortion-addled bass, added a faux-trance hook and delivered the vocals through a child’s toy microphone and an overdrive pedal? Noise. It’s the future. Deal with it.
3. TV On The Radio – Dear Science
Rock music isn’t supposed to have this much soul. It seems unfair that in the twin vocals of Kyp Malone and Tunde Adebimpe, TV On The Radio possess two of the greatest vocal talents in contemporary alternative music. Each breathless word is infused with the kind of wrenching emotion that your average anodyne indie vocalist just can’t muster. It helps that the music matches that intensity at every step, from the richly produced handclap beats to the warm tone of the full throated guitars. Add to that the glorious brass, courtesy of the Antibalas Afrobeat Orchestra, and the whole thing becomes a thick stew of swirling cacophony, constantly driving forward with the claustrophobic fury of a thunderstorm. Then everything drops back to reveal the vocals alone once more, still just as intense with nothing to support them but their own barely controlled emotion. And that’s the core to the greatness of this album; even as the music treads through a kaleidoscope of funk, electronica, rock, pop and jazz, TV On The Radio never veer far from the soul.
2. Radiohead – In Rainbows
It may have been available on the internet for the last few months of 2007, but it was kind of a sign that 2008 would be a great year for music when In Rainbows got its physical release on New Year’s Day. ‘Top this’, it seemed to be saying, and given that I consider any new album from the ‘head to be marginally more important than say, the ordaining of a new pope, the idea didn’t even seem conceivable. At least it would be fun to watch the other bands try. Alright, it’s not Kid A or OK Computer. But it’s a close bronze medal in the back catalogue of a band so consistent in their brilliance that it’s not an overstatement in my mind to say that they must possess some sort of God-like powers. Radiohead have returned from the left-field armed with the knowledge of how to make pop songs so perfect and detailed that you can listen to them a hundred times and still hear something new and glorious every time. 2008, hold your hands up; the messiahs have returned.
1. Portishead – Third
Anyone who knows me will know that it takes something special for any given album to get the nod over Radiohead, but boy, is this album something special. Within five minutes of starting to listen to it for the first time, I’d already broken into spontaneous applause and by the time it had drawn to a stately close an hour later I was completely overwhelmed and ready to crown them the best ‘head of 2008. Axl Rose, take note; this album took eleven years to make, and it shows. Every single track is a polished nugget of solid gold, traversing post rock, trip-hop, kraut-rock, electronica, jazz with aplomb, each song delivered with a nonchalant ease, yet in every case written and rewritten to perfection. Beth Gibbons’ haunting, fragile voice, easily one of the vocal performances of the year, soaring over a jigsaw puzzle of sounds ranging from lo-fi, scratchy acoustic guitar to ten megaton machinegun drums, never once sounding out of place. Without a single misstep the music constantly shifts gears from brain-throbbing intensity to ambient perfection, from intimate and swaying to warlike bombast. Eleven tracks, eleven years. And every one a masterpiece.
10. Pink Floyd – Oh, By The Way
Yes, yes, I know. I’m cheating. It’s a boxset, it came out at the end of last year, and I don’t even own it, despite what I just said. You name me 10 albums from the last 12 months that you thought were genuinely brilliant, then. Anyway, that’s why it’s at number 10 on the list, despite containing not just some of the best music you’ll hear this year, but very probably the best music you’ll hear, like, ever. In your lifetime. Even if they invent mp3s in the future that orally pleasure you while you listen. Let’s just accept that I’m putting this in the list as a tribute to synth pioneer and genius Rick Wright, who passed away earlier this year. If there was any justice in the world, it should have been a national day of mourning. However, it does feel a bit cheap for me to put this ridiculously extensive collection in at number one, despite Dark Side Of The Moon and Wish You Were Here knocking every other album on this list clear out of the water. And anyway, “ridiculously extensive” means that for every Dark Side eargasm, you have to sit through a Division Bell, the auditory equivalent of finally getting that girl you’ve pined for for ten years, only to find out that she’s now into coprophilia and trainspotting. So number 10 it is. Sorry, David. Sorry, Roger.9. Death Cab For Cutie – Narrow Stairs
This one gave me a bit of a headache in its selection, because I only got round to buying it last week. Is a week really long enough to make a value judgement on whether an album is a work of art or not? Well, in the short time that I have had to listen to it, Narrow Stairs has won me over with its tried and tested deathcab formula of ever-so-fragile guitar, textured brass and string arrangements, and guess-how-emo-it’s-going-to-go lyrics. On this latest album, the vocals run the whole gamut from heartfelt to tortured, by way of pleading, introspective and melancholy. But for all the shortcomings of their admittedly narrow lyrical palette, deathcab really know how to push the sonic envelope. If David Byrne had been an emo in 1978, this would have been the sort of stuff he’d have been up to; subtly polyrhythmic, shifting, fragmented, but with a keen underlying sense of groove. Perhaps the oblique cover art is even a deliberate nod to the seminal Fear of Music. It still remains to be seen if they’re capable of making their own take on that kind album, or even their Remain in Light, but in 2008, deathcab took a couple of steps in the right direction.8. British Sea Power – Do You Like Rock Music?
I’ve always been a massive fan of BSP; their so-uncool-it’s-cool image (Bird watching! Hiking! Real ale!), their kaleidoscopic lyrics about anything and everything (Dostoevsky! Canvey Island! The Larsen B ice shelf!), and of course their insane live shows, which usually draw to a close with equal parts piggybacks and feedback breaking out all over the stage in a sheer orgy of noise and spectacle. But I’ve always felt that they were yet to pull out their big statement, the album that defined them as a band. Not so anymore – 2008 saw BSP mature into a swirling, orchestral monster of an outfit, complete with horns, air raid sirens, and blissfully swollen production from the minds behind Arcade Fire and Godspeed You Black Emperor!. ‘Do you like rock music?’, the title asks, either inquisitive or reproachful, ambiguously daring. It’s certainly a call to arms both for rock music that rocks, and against the banality that in recent years has tried to pass itself off as ‘rock’. Do I like rock music? If this is what the term represents, then unequivocally yes.7. Bloc Party – Intimacy
There was very little fanfare when the third Bloc Party album was quietly stuck up on the band’s website for download a few months ago, perhaps unfairly considering the fact that for all the commercial success of its predecessors, this incarnation is a far more satisfying whole than the band’s earlier, more patchy efforts. Bloc Party have honed their sound into a smart, charged whirlwind of sirens, beats and cut up vocals, sacrificing neither the pop hooks of Silent Alarm or the experimentation of A Weekend In The City’s more exciting tracks. And when it’s not a fluorescent explosion happening right now, the intimacy of the title comes to the fore with fragile flourishes, all the while building in tension until the next eruption of tangled and chaotic noise. It’s a giddy headrush of an album that constantly throws you off balance and cements Bloc Party’s credentials as by far the most intriguing by-product of this decade’s indie explosion.6. HEALTH – Health//Disco
It should be fairly obvious from a casual glance through my favourite albums that there are two things that really get my blood pumping when it comes to music. With this compilation of remixes, HEALTH combine the squall of furiously huge noise rock guitar textures with furiously distorted squelches of towering synth, leaving you with little option but to give in completely to total immersion in the sound, flailing your arms and thrashing your head. Furiously. It’s rare for a remix album to be this painstakingly put together. The disparate sounds of different outfits providing their own take can often sound clumsy, interrupting the flow. But here the dark disco efforts of Acid Girls, Crystal Castles, Thrust Lab et al are united by the torrent of pure brooding noise into a pulsating cascade of amphetamine charged dance rock. There is no album quite like it for sheer adrenaline inducing, propulsive, driving energy, and for that it deserves to be played in full at every nightclub from now until the end of time.5. Crystal Castles – Crystal Castles
In my ideal, fantasy life, I’d live in a basement studio with Crystal Castles’ frontwoman Alice Glass. We’d spend all day playing with vintage synthesiser effects and gameboy noises, both wearing too much eyeliner and adopting a superior attitude to the world in general. We would only come out by night to feed, screaming random strings of unintelligible gibberish at passers-by. But, being that she’s a successful French-Canadian goth-pop star and I’m a skint, unemployed blogger, my fantasy life will probably have to take a back seat for a while. Instead, I’ll have to make do with Crystal Castles debut album, a sleek, shadowy beast comprised of, you guessed it, vintage synthesiser effects, gameboy noises and screams of unintelligible gibberish. The treated vocals coat interwoven lines of gothic techno beats and eightbit keyboard in a glitter bomb of mystique as they intersect and collide like a fight between two giant robots in a disused Atari factory. It’s not quite a long-term relationship with your very own fantasy swaggering electro mistress, but it’s a good second best.4. Fuck Buttons – Street Horrrsing
Let’s start with my mother’s capsule review: “That’s just noise. I know that’s what parents always say, but it’s literally just noise.” Which it is, inarguably. Noise is good. You’re going to have to accept it if you’re going to get anything out of listening to this audacious scream-of-consciousness, which veers from blistering feedback to tribal drumming to delicate windchimes to sub-bass hiccups and back to blistering feedback without missing a beat. It’s never going to make any best seller lists, that’s for sure. But this six-track, hour-long exploration of drones and tones pounds away at the senses, creeping into your consciousness until you start to wonder why all music doesn’t sound like this. Sex on Fire? It’s all very well and good, but couldn’t they have shrouded it in humming pulses of distortion-addled bass, added a faux-trance hook and delivered the vocals through a child’s toy microphone and an overdrive pedal? Noise. It’s the future. Deal with it.3. TV On The Radio – Dear Science
Rock music isn’t supposed to have this much soul. It seems unfair that in the twin vocals of Kyp Malone and Tunde Adebimpe, TV On The Radio possess two of the greatest vocal talents in contemporary alternative music. Each breathless word is infused with the kind of wrenching emotion that your average anodyne indie vocalist just can’t muster. It helps that the music matches that intensity at every step, from the richly produced handclap beats to the warm tone of the full throated guitars. Add to that the glorious brass, courtesy of the Antibalas Afrobeat Orchestra, and the whole thing becomes a thick stew of swirling cacophony, constantly driving forward with the claustrophobic fury of a thunderstorm. Then everything drops back to reveal the vocals alone once more, still just as intense with nothing to support them but their own barely controlled emotion. And that’s the core to the greatness of this album; even as the music treads through a kaleidoscope of funk, electronica, rock, pop and jazz, TV On The Radio never veer far from the soul.2. Radiohead – In Rainbows
It may have been available on the internet for the last few months of 2007, but it was kind of a sign that 2008 would be a great year for music when In Rainbows got its physical release on New Year’s Day. ‘Top this’, it seemed to be saying, and given that I consider any new album from the ‘head to be marginally more important than say, the ordaining of a new pope, the idea didn’t even seem conceivable. At least it would be fun to watch the other bands try. Alright, it’s not Kid A or OK Computer. But it’s a close bronze medal in the back catalogue of a band so consistent in their brilliance that it’s not an overstatement in my mind to say that they must possess some sort of God-like powers. Radiohead have returned from the left-field armed with the knowledge of how to make pop songs so perfect and detailed that you can listen to them a hundred times and still hear something new and glorious every time. 2008, hold your hands up; the messiahs have returned.1. Portishead – Third
Anyone who knows me will know that it takes something special for any given album to get the nod over Radiohead, but boy, is this album something special. Within five minutes of starting to listen to it for the first time, I’d already broken into spontaneous applause and by the time it had drawn to a stately close an hour later I was completely overwhelmed and ready to crown them the best ‘head of 2008. Axl Rose, take note; this album took eleven years to make, and it shows. Every single track is a polished nugget of solid gold, traversing post rock, trip-hop, kraut-rock, electronica, jazz with aplomb, each song delivered with a nonchalant ease, yet in every case written and rewritten to perfection. Beth Gibbons’ haunting, fragile voice, easily one of the vocal performances of the year, soaring over a jigsaw puzzle of sounds ranging from lo-fi, scratchy acoustic guitar to ten megaton machinegun drums, never once sounding out of place. Without a single misstep the music constantly shifts gears from brain-throbbing intensity to ambient perfection, from intimate and swaying to warlike bombast. Eleven tracks, eleven years. And every one a masterpiece.
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