The Best 20 Tracks of 2009 (Part II)

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.

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).

Horror Show

4th June 2009
Concorde 2
The Horrors (w/ support from Factory Floor and Disconcerts)

Like a steady drip of mascara running down the plughole, they are converging. A mass of hairspray, pointy shoes and crushed black velvet, trickling inexorably south and east through the city of Brighton, to the doors of the Concorde 2. It’s eight in the evening on a bright summer’s night. The sun is still up, but something is awry. Among the picnicking families and sunbathing couples, they are there, everpresent, a steady tide heading east of the pier. There are scene kids on the beach. The Horrors are in town.

I must confess I never really knew what to make of the Horrors. I’ve never been one of those people to shun a band just for having the temerity to dress up – for if David Bowie, Siouxsie Sioux and Nicky Wire have taught us anything (and they have), it is that outrageous sartorial posturing is an integral part of the (leopard print) fabric of rock and roll. So what if they got an outrageous springboard into the British music press before they’d even released their first single? The band can hardly be blamed for the hyperactive hype machine that is our music industry. If anything they are to be admired for playing the system to their advantage.

What really matters, as always, is the tunes. Alright, so the ghost-train punk, Cramps stylings of their debut Strange House were hardly befitting any ‘saviours of British rock music’ tag that the Horrors were afforded, but the material they were producing was a damn sight more interesting than the Kooks of this world, and there was always an indication that they might have what it takes to justify at least some of the presumptuous fanfare. With their sophomore effort, overseen by the capable hands of Portishead’s Geoff Barrow, they seem to have done just that, with a leftfield turn into post punk and krautrock inspired territory that illustrates a desire in the band for a bit less style and a bit more substance.

The support acts for tonight’s show are wholly representative of that shift. Openers Disconcerts do the whole ramalama angular punk riffs thing with unbridled energy and enthusiasm. Unfortunately they are also pretty terrible, showing that producing two-minute bursts of abrasive noise is actually an art form that is harder than it looks. They were followed by Factory Floor, who opted for the more ominous industrial approach, building gradual crescendos over creeping bass grooves. Both represent an element of the Horrors’ back catalogue, but neither manage to do it quite as well as the headliners, although Factory Floor at least possess some of that trademark theatricality.

When the Horrors arrived it was to universal high-pitched myspace screams, proving that you can do what you like with the music as long as you still have those totally dreamy goth boys up on stage to make the tweenagers swoon. Relatively dressed down in an array of snappy black and white variations, they played a set almost entirely comprised of material from new album Primary Colours, only raiding the older stuff for the breathless encore of ‘Sheena Is A Parasite’ and ‘Count In Fives’. The standout was the less than obvious single ‘Sea Within A Sea’, eight minutes of pure Joy Division note-taking, interrupted by the sudden thrill halfway through of a neatly arpeggiated synth line that grew in stature until it consumed all before it. Whether they’re playing the old or the new, it is this intensity that is the common thread throughout their performance, and when the music swells, it is tough not to be drawn in by its impetuous volume. This is not to say that this was a perfect gig, far from it, but in live music, atmosphere is all, and the Horrors have that, at least, in spades.

Up Pip Brown, Tommy Sparks Down

19th May 2009
Digital, Brighton
Ladyhawke/Tommy Sparks


Any aspiring musician searching for the knack of how to ‘do’ pop whilst still retaining indie sensibilities and street cred would have done well to be at Ladyhawke’s packed out show at Digital Tuesday night. The evening was a veritable indie-pop 101 of ‘do’s’ and ‘do not’s’.

Lesson one – It doesn’t matter how good the songs are, how tight the band is, however catchy the melodies, it will all be in vain if your frontman is a charisma vacuum as huge as Tommy Sparks. As he strode out onto stage, all hair gel and lycra, announcing “I’m Tommy Sparks, and this is my beautiful band”, I felt a genuine pang of sympathy for the talented musicians who have to share a stage with this giant, unfounded ego. Every intriguing piece of electropop noise was brought crashing down to earth by his Butlins holiday rep schtick, his insistence on leading into each song with a grating “Oi-Oi-Oi” exercise in vocal numbskullery. A cover of Stardust’s 1998 hit “The Music Sounds Better With You”, that could with a bit of personality have been turned into an intriguing track, instead became an exercise in bland karaoke from a preening black hole of a man. Message to ‘the beautiful band’: get out now, you don’t deserve this.

Once Tommy had flounced off, and the stagehands had been in to tether and drag away his inflated sense of self-worth, there was a perplexing wait of almost an hour before the main act finally appeared. During this time it was as though all the energy were sapping out of the crowd, meaning that by the time Ladyhawke took to the stage, she would have to work hard to get the place jumping.

In the flesh, Pip Brown (why use a pseudonym if you have such a cool name?) doesn’t really come across as a pop phenomenon. Dressed down in a denim waistcoat, her blonde fringe obscuring her eyes, her interaction with the crowd was anything but T4 Beach Party. But there was something endearing in her nervous asides that captured a personality refreshingly opposed to her support act’s cruise ship histrionics and forced jollity. Opening the set with a trio of album tracks before dropping her first hit of the night (‘From Dusk Till Dawn’), she encountered a problem all too common amongst debut album success stories – a lack of material for her audience to sing along to. Until she has another album’s worth of songs and a few more hit singles under her belt, it’s going to be nigh on impossible for Ladyhawke to provide the kind of sustained energy needed for big, headline gigs.

It was not until the last four or five songs of her set that she began to roll out the big guns with ‘Paris Is Burning’, and the room really started moving. Finally the pop hooks began to come thick and fast, and by the time the band bounced off the stage, a palpable sense of goodwill left the audience on tenterhooks for the inevitable encore.

Inevitable, of course, because she had not yet played her biggest hit to date, the big, dumb, glorious romp of ‘My Delirium’. Whilst there could be hardly anyone in the room who didn’t know what was coming, Ladyhawke had one more trick up her sleeve, returning to the stage to belt out an impassioned Patti Smith number. For the few minutes of ‘Free Money’ she let go of her inhibitions just as much as her crowd had been willing to the whole evening, and her obvious enjoyment stirred those last reserves of energy among us for the big finish. And yet, when it came, this three-minute slice of indie disco perfection was curiously underwhelming. Brown seems to be tiring of ‘My Delirium’s status as the ‘big hit’ among her repertoire, and it was not infused with the same sense of glee with which she had owned someone else’s song minutes before. Whilst her enthusiasm may have been waning, however, the audience’s excitement still reached its crescendo, and it was impossible not to be swept along by the sugar rush grooves. If anything, by playing down her most famous song in favour of an obscure yet charming cover, Ladyhawke made herself a much more interesting proposition, for this reviewer at least. It is clear that she possesses a way with a grunge-pop melody, and her lack of interest in being seen as a ‘one-hit wonder’ hinted at further promise just waiting to be realised.

In Good HEALTH

13th April 2009
The Albert
HEALTH

If you can’t stand unbelievably abstract similes, look away now, because this review is going to contain a lot of them. Apologies, but that’s just the way it’s going to have to be. There’s a great difficulty in describing what HEALTH (all caps, don’t ask me why) actually sound like, chiefly because they sound like precisely nothing else. Looking at the four men standing on stage as the gig starts, you might be forgiven for thinking that the sound they’re about to produce can’t be that radical. I see a drummer, a bassist, and two guitarists, one with a microphone, one with a synthesiser. Sure, there are a lot of wires and pedals going on, but they can’t sound that dissimilar to a traditional rock band, right?

Wrong. Because after about five minutes of unadulterated mayhem, band members clambering over each other, beating drums, screaming, hammering god-knows-what buttons to produce full-throated blasts of multi-layered noise, you come to realise that you have never seen a gig like this before, and will probably never be lucky enough to see again.

HEALTH are only doing five dates on this UK tour, and Brighton’s The Albert is the first venue to play host. They’re famous enough (Their collaboration with Crystal Castles on ‘Crimewave’ charted in the UK top ten) that they don’t need to play gigs this small, but on tonight’s evidence alone, booking HEALTH into a succession of sweatbox rooms above pubs might just prove to be an artistic masterstroke. The sell-out crowd are packed in tight to the low stage, and the energy and enthusiasm is palpable, only increasing in fervour with the painstaking sound-check, each individual drum tested and retested a hundred times until the desired ‘robots fighting in a lift shaft’ tone is achieved.

Then suddenly, without warning, the show begins with new single ‘Die Slow’, hinting at a move into more dance-oriented territory, perhaps buoyed by the success of remix album ‘HEALTH//DISCO’, certainly the point in the band’s career at which they began to garner more attention in the music press. The band have remarked in interviews how often people come to their shows and shout for a song that has already been played, not recognising it from the remix, and it seems that their response has been to hone their chaotic noise palate into rhythms and grooves.

That’s not to say there isn’t plenty of chaos going on, but it steps up a notch when the band plunge into early single ‘Triceratops’, showcasing what made their noise-rock debut so suitable for remixing in the first place; that whilst the bizarre, roaring sounds HEALTH make may sound unhinged, as a unit they are incredibly tight, handling labyrinthine, polyrhythmic beats and guitars that sound like a jet engine playing a harmonica, at breakneck pace, without ever slipping out of time. Loops upon loops of feedback and zoothorned vocals pile on top of each other and coalesce into a dense, pulsing throb.

The crowd are certainly in a mood to move their feet. Heads and arms flail everywhere as the front five rows bounce and writhe with the noise. Up on stage, this unleashed energy is reflected by the band, who tear into each song, giving every last ounce of themselves to the performance. They speak only once in the whole hour they are on stage – “Hi, we’re HEALTH, we’re from Los Angeles. Thanks for coming out tonight. This is our last song.” – before exiting on the frenzied, minute-long ‘Courtship’. A drumbeat, a scream, some mutilated vocals and the spectacle is finished, and all that is left are the hundred or so reeling audience members, trying (and failing) to put into words what they have just witnessed.

Orchestral Manouvres in the Cowley Club

A version of this review appears at www.brightonmusicscene.com

April 10th 2009
Cowley Club
Lamp/Cove/The Pirate Ship Quintet

Let’s get this straight right from the off. I love post rock. LOVE it. It’s an alien thought to me that someone could fail to be sonically aroused by that simple yet brilliant concept of combining roaring wall-of-sound guitar with propulsive strings and brass, then proceeding to do the quiet-loud-quiet-LOUDER dynamic until the cows come home. It’s a genre that, provided everyone concerned knows what they’re doing, cannot fail to impress.

So objectivity be damned, then. It was never really in doubt that Friday evening’s entertainment at the Cowley Club would be an experience of total immersion in sound, and that I was always going to leave sated, and, more likely than not, grinning from ear to ear.

It helps no end that Brighton’s favourite anarchist bookshop-cum-bar is the perfect setting for such cacophony. Some might feel that orchestral rock is best suited to that more grandiose, ‘cathedral of sound’ kind of venue, but something about this cosy, collective atmosphere channels the intensity of the music into an altogether more absorbing beast. It’s as if the university string quartet and their noisemaking guitarist friends decided to crash their college lecturer’s front room during a drinks party. Books line the walls. There is an excited murmur of discussion about the use of time signatures. The real ale is thick, and the beards are thicker.

Some of the finest facial hair on display belonged to the unenviably named Lamp, who were first to take to the stage. A tight unit consisting of two guitars and a frenetically pounding drummer, their set demonstrated an almost telepathic level of awareness between the trio that was a sight to behold. Facing inward toward each other (as if the audience were simply privy to an intimate scene of three friends creating music for their own enjoyment), their individual, rhythmic phrases wound together to create a constantly shifting, off kilter aesthetic to their lyricless songs.

In fact, vocals were almost entirely absent from proceedings for the whole night. The closest we came was during second act, Brighton’s own Cove (what’s with all the monosyllabic band names, guys?), when the occasional verse of spiky, gain-distorted guitar thrash would be leant some added adrenaline (if it were needed) by garbled, spoken word interludes, as well as short bursts of the more traditional guttural yelps, reminiscent of Fugazi or At The Drive-In. Whilst the audience seemed less drawn in by Cove’s head-throwing antics than the more measured approach of the other two bands, they brought a louder, more visceral sound to the party that achieved a pleasing balance for the spectacle as a whole.

It was this noisy aperitif that brought us round, at last, to that long-awaited post rock main course. From the off, the Bristol-based Pirate Ship Quintet (who, confusingly, appeared to have six members) wore their influences on their sleeve. It is obvious that their cello and trumpet driven sound owes a huge debt to Godspeed You Black Emperor, but really, who’s complaining? If you’re going to emulate, you may as well try and emulate the best, and the Quintet proved themselves more than adept at handling the languid build-up, the swell and release of epic proportions, and of course the imposing ten minute track lengths that were required of them.
Whilst perhaps the group failed to demonstrate as great a range of subtle intricacies of tension and atmosphere that separate a band like Godspeed or Mogwai from the crowd, it would be churlish to complain about the Pirate Ship Quintet’s sound against such illustrious company. They do what they set out to do very well indeed, which is to make music that over-indulges the senses, absorbs you into it, and makes your heart beat just that little bit faster.

Any post rock outfit lives or dies by the standard of its orchestral element, and the strains of the cello, foregrounded by the squall of guitars that surrounded it, did not disappoint. Fingers danced over the instrument’s neck at often dazzling speeds, covering the whole range from delicate melodies (over a backdrop of subdued, chiming guitars) to frantically bowed bass lines (the same guitars now galloping like thunder). These cinematic soundscapes were furthered by the occasional, constantly ascending note on the trumpet, or screamed vocal, the human voice treated as an instrument for atmospheric effect, rather than leading the action. The rush of all these elements combined, allied to a constant, gradual push on the volume pedal, is impossible to describe, but when it hits the sweet spot, it hits hard, and the only sane reaction is one of breathless satisfaction.

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.

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.

All Apologies, All Eulogies

So I haven't posted in what, forever. November was not my month. Internet went down. Too cynical and writers' block. Life got in the way. I apologise unreservedly. It shall not happen again this crisp December. Think of it as an early resolution.

Richey Edwards was declared legally dead last week. From a concerned poster on my social networking wall: "I heard about the ruling on Richie, but do try not to act morose and distant. Don't let grief get in the way of being your normal cheerful self." (I believe the word is irony). I'd like to satisfy all wellwishers as to my mental state. I am not down (any more than usual). Life goes on. Although perhaps with more abstract and terse prose.

Okay, that's enough of that. I can't keep writing a post in this style, it's driving me insane. I read a lot of Don DeLillo this week, and it's hit my clauses hardest. Microsoft Word would have a field day - "Fragment- consider revising". That's irony too, isn't it? Is Bill Gates laughably hypocritical when it comes to sentence structure or what? Fragment. Consider. Revising. Where's the grammar in that? Practice what you preach, you unapologetic Creosote cretin. And make your operating system less infuriating while you're at it. And kill that fucking paperclip.

Anyway, Richey. Yes, this news is sad to me, as it will be to all true followers of the Bible (not that papery, leatherbound thing, the real Bible). That the obituary I linked to above was the most read article on the Guardian website for the day it was published indicates some of the level of devotion the man inspired. The thing is, this news doesn't really change anything for me or the legions of acolytes like me. We know Richey is gone, we've had 14 years to accept the fact. But he still lives. No, not on some Goan beach or secluded monastery, but in his words. I know this is corny (how else can one write a eulogy?), but his fierce genius still breathes through those machinegun bursts of lyrical insight that litter the Manics' early songs. I wish you peace, Richey, wherever you may be. A morality obedient only to the cleansed repented. You were stronger than Mensa, Miller and Mailer. You spat out Plath and Pinter. And you did not burn out, you will never fade away.

Album Review: 'Loveless'

I do seem to have set myself a bit of a challenge with my album review this week – how to get across in words the ethereal listening experience that is My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless? The only way I can think to do so would involve some sort of cack-handed synesthesia – ‘like the sight of eddies of dust caught in the beams of white light shining through a narrow window’, perhaps, or ‘the auditory equivalent of being gently massaged by thousands of hands at once’?

Alright, that’s enough of that. I’m aware of how difficult it is to interpret writing about music anyway, without it getting all meta. I promise from here on in not to overcomplicate what it is that makes this album great; the texture, the depth, the tone, the sound.

What must it have been like to hear new music in the sixties and seventies? Constant innovation, new sounds and recording techniques being developed all the time, record upon record, all of it sounding nothing like anything before, all of it new. But after this wave of innovation came, to some extent, a plateau. The growth of this palette of sound slowed, steadied. There could be fewer great leaps into the unknown. Come 1991, there was a sense that we'd heard it all before. There's a limit to what you can do to an electromagnetic signal.

But then along comes something like this. Kevin Shields’ guitar doesn’t sound like anything else, ever, over-italicised or not, it’s as simple as that. It has become something of a cliché to say that a guitarist ‘makes his guitar speak’, but with Shields it is more than that. He makes it sigh, breathe, cry. The range of resonance he coaxes from that battered Fender Jaguar is astonishing. It can sound huge and at the same time distant, as in ‘Touched’, where it somehow contrives to replicate the sound of dinosaurs mating. It can sound like diving jets and whirligig fairground sounds all at the same time, as in ‘To Here Knows When’. Most of the time, though, it sounds like a gale, a whirling maelstrom of pure white noise, but all the while concealing at its core a melody heartbreakingly fragile and beautiful. It is a music of contradiction.

You know those days where, despite yourself, you manage to fall into one of those half asleep, half awake states? The ones where you’re not sure when you were awake and when you were dreaming? Next time that happens, take my advice; seize the opportunity. Stick Loveless on the stereo, lie down and roll with it. There is no music more perfectly fitting for the liminal state between reality and dream. As you drift in and out of consciousness that rolling, chiming roar sweeps over you in tangled waves of feedback and scattered fragments of thoughts and memories. At points you surface and everything is clear, at other times there is nothing but the sound. Like The Holy Bible last week, the conflict at the heart of this album is between ugliness and beauty, yet here that tension is played out not in the lyrics, swamped and concealed by as they are by the voice of the guitar, but in that delicate balance of blissful noise, as if the listener had returned to the womb.

Loveless was a famously torturous album to produce, nearly bankrupting Creation, the label that funded it. But that effort is ingrained in every note and every glistening, distorted chime. It is a masterwork, the kind of record that defines an artist’s career. But Kevin Shields clearly wasn’t content with just the one, as we’ll see next week, when I’ll be talking about his work with Primal Scream (or prmlscrm) on XTRMNTR.

Album Review: 'The Holy Bible'

Last week, I posted my introduction to this new album review section. I waxed lyrical (a rather neat choice of cliche there, as you'll soon see) about how, for me, great music is more than just nice words and pretty tunes. It's atmospherics and intricacies, the ultimate dedication to all-consuming mood. I'm now going to be rather irritating, and plunge straight into a review of an album that is truly great, for precisely none of those reasons.

Hey, wait. Come back. Let me explain. Manic Street Preachers' The Holy Bible is my favourite album. It's been my favourite album pretty much since I first discovered it, three or four years ago, and immersed myself in its lyric booklet. Here was the spirit of Ginsberg, Camus and Plath, distilled into a near perfect hour-long outpouring of intelligent, literate rage. It's the voice of my hero, Richey Edwards.

Richey couldn't play his guitar. He didn't sing. He was an alcoholic, self-harming anorexic. But there was a fiery, poetic intelligence that burned within him, and lyrically, there is no other rockstar that even comes close to the attention to detail, the wealth of information in his songs. Nowhere was that talent so totally addressed as this, his legacy, his statement of intent. It's almost ludicrous, the quality and consistency of the words that make up this dark, intense beast. Songs about the extremes of human existence, about anorexia, prostitution, genocide, delivered with such a perverse, searing beauty that it's impossible to tear yourself away.

Take the couplet from 'Yes' that I quoted back in my very first entry on this blog, a paean to the prostitution of the self in one's art; "In these plagued streets of pity you can buy anything/for $200, anyone can conceive a god on video". Or the devastating introspection audible on the autographical 'Faster'; "I am idiot drug hive/The virgin tattered and the torn/Life is for the cold made warm and they are just lizards/Self disgust is self obsession honey and I do as I please/A morality obedient only to the cleansed repented". These aren't just words to mouth along to, they're complete works of art.

I'm not being completely facetious here, building up some manifesto one week only to tear it down the next. I do reserve the right to contradict myself (as Nicky Wire once said of his occasionally hypocritical TV interview rants), but there is musical genius at work here, too. At every turn, the ugly beauty of Edwards' vision is mirrored by some terrific (in both senses of the word) production. Take the doom-laden bass that crawls under your skin at the start of 'Archives of Pain', for instance, brooding and growling, gradually joined by keening feedback, before unwrapping itself into a scratched, battered and bruised guitar riff. You wouldn't think it possible for a guitar to sound like revenge, bloodlust and capital punishment, but somehow the way it writhes, contorts, it captures the fury of those lyrics.

Samples are scattered throughout these thirteen tracks, disembodied, disenfranchised voices, pulled from myriad sources, yet somehow bound to each other. A salespitching pimp. The anguished mother of a murder victim. A weary, ageing actor. At the midpoint, a snippet of taped interview with the author J.G. Ballard surfaces through the claustrophobic din, Richey's mantra. "I wanted to rub the human face in its own vomit, and then force it to look in the mirror." Ballard was talking about his novel, Crash, but he cuts to the core of what The Holy Bible is about.

The monolithic, six-minute penultimate song 'The Intense Humming of Evil', hyperbolic though it may sound, condenses all of these elements in a burst of controlled post-punk atmosphere that really does justify that title. Opening with a bed of industrial white noise, the sounds of a death-machinery, it builds unbearable suspense with a minute-long sample of a reporter at the Nuremberg trials; "From the ditch at Kerch, the dead will rise, bringing with them the acrid smoke and the deathly odour of scorched and martyred Europe. And the children, they too will come, stern and merciless. The butchers had no pity on them." Just as the crescendo becomes almost unbearable, it is interrupted by the snap and echo of reverberating snare, the beat itself becoming malevolent and machine-like. The guitars somehow manage the trick of seeming to constantly ascend, up and up, cranking the pressure further and further as Richey's words document with dignified respect the horror of the holocaust; "In block 5 we worship malaria/Lagerstrasse, poplar trees/Beauty lost, dignity gone/Rascher surveys us butcher bacteria". And the dread bass returns once more, still climbing further and further up, slowing and slowing, until finally it echoes quiet and all that remains is the shrill howl of the wind through Birkenau, where the birds no longer sing.

The Holy Bible proved to be Richey's epitaph. Just a few months after its release he vanished, never to be seen again. It is not known whether he is alive or dead, if he committed suicide or went into hiding, but this record remains, a document of his brilliance. It's an unflinching, confrontational, disturbing experience, and it's everything that great art should be. No compromises.

Next week, I'm going to the opposite end of the spectrum, to an album that delivers just as much intensity, almost without the use of any words at all. It's going to be the epitome of shoegaze, My Bloody Valentine's Loveless. See you there.

You got the money, I got the soul

When I set up this blog, I had a series of sort of vague ideas of what I was going to do with it. One of those sort of vague ideas was that I might occasionally turn my hand to music criticism, mainly just because it's a field of writing that's always interested me. Like just about every other music geek, I delude myself that my taste in music is better than everybody else's, act like a terrible snob when I find out that someone enjoys something that I consider unworthy, and more or less live in a perpetual state of fury that the whole world does not understand the music that I love. When I first read High Fidelity by Nick Hornby, I got tremendously excited, because I recognised so much of myself in those characters, who lived and breathed music with an all-consuming passion that far outstripped their ability to sustain functional relationships, even interractions, with other human beings. "That's me," I thought to myself,"I mean, with a much inferior taste in music though, obviously."

I have a tremendously unhealthy relationship with music. One of the first questions I have to get out of the way, before I can objectively judge whether I'm attracted to a woman or not, is "what do you think of Radiohead?". A negative response to that question is a bigger turn-off than syphillis, in my eyes. Start talking about the programming on Kid A, though, and I'll be making wedding plans within the hour. I swoon at girls who know their way around a microkorg or a protools unit. I know that this is disturbing. I can't help it. It's the way my mind is wired. I struggle to even have a proper conversation with someone until I've established that we at least like a couple of the same albums.

I don't really know where this obsession comes from. Both my parents have a fairly uninspiring attitude to music; they like some of it, they don't like most of it. My Dad will often say things like "you can't have a good song unless it's got a catchy tune", and other like statements which make me cringe with despair.

I first picked up the guitar when I was about thirteen. Now I play whenever I have a spare moment. Sometimes I write songs. Sometimes I play in a band. But I've always thought of myself first and foremost as a music fan above a musician. It's a troubling dialectic between words and music that goes on in my head. No matter how much of a feel I have for good writing, I can't shake the voice that says: Music is real. Rhythm and melody, they exist only as themselves. Art and literature are only refractions, shadows cast by music on the cave wall of reflection.

I've had an idea for a book that I've been toying with for a while, in which the lead characters' development is charted by a series of pieces of music criticism, the subject of each one hinting at the path his narrative will take. Some of the music writing that appears in this blog may be used for that project eventually, but for the time being it's just to satisfy that primal need, to share that music which stirs so much in me with others, to force them to understand.

Maybe it would help if I tried to explain what it is that makes 'great' music for me. Not just 'good' music, there's altogether too much of that for me even to think of writing about. Most of the music I hear I can find something 'good' in, but that's beside the point. If music is just 'good' I don't really want to hear it. That's like saying food is 'edible' rather than 'delicious'. I know lots of 'good' albums which I can listen to every so often. Everyone just wants a Big Mac from time to time. But you couldn't really call it the point of eating.

Great music illicits a gut response. It is hardwired directly to your involuntary muscles, provocative and tantalising. What I said earlier, about being a music fan rather than a musician? I guess that's because any time I hear a piece of music that really grabs me by the throat and moves me, it's because I'm thinking wow, I could never have made that. I need music to do things that I don't expect. I hate that old phrase "a tune that feels like you've heard it a million times before". What does that prove? Why would I want to listen to that, if I know where it's going? I'm not saying songs like this aren't good. I'm saying that they aren't great.

Intrinsically connected to this need is the need for detail, craft, layer upon layer of painstaking production. If I'm listening to an album for the hundredth time, I still want to hear something new, every time. I can't stand bands that try to record their albums 'as live'. Of course there's an energy and a joy to live performance, of course I love to watch music being played skilfully right in front of me, surrounded by like-minded fans, but you're not playing live. You're recording an album for fuck's sake. A piece of art, a legacy. If you don't make every conceivable effort to make each individual note or beat a vital and valuable part of the enterprise as a whole, contributing to this vast mosaic of an experience, well then, you don't deserve to be making music.

So to my mind, those are the two most important principles of great music. There are plenty of other principles which are vastly important, if not essential, of course. Valuable, intelligent lyrics that contribute to the piece, rather than vapid, shallow words. There is obviously something to be said for musicianship, the ability to do with an instrument what others can't. But above and beyond all other considerations, it is the adherence to and the pursuit of the mood, the atmosphere, the form. And the form of great music must only be the album, a complete and self-sustaining body of work.

So, starting next week, I'm going to aim to do a weekly critique of each of my favourite albums, trying to explain just why I love them so damn much. This is going to be one of the few regular bits of writing you're going to get from me that will be entirely positive; in fact it will all but shimmer with love and passion and good vibes. That said, I must warn you now, I'm going to lead off with one of the darkest, most confrontational and abrasive albums of all time (but also, in my opinion, one of the greatest ever to be recorded), the most indelible lyrical masterpiece to spill from the pen of the beautiful yet tortured soul of Richard James Edwards, Manic Street Preachers' The Holy Bible. See you next week.