Glamorous Indie Rock'n'Roll

So, we will be doing a big Brits post tomorrow (like everyone else) although it must be said already that James Blunt winning Best Pop may even outdo Joss Stone winning Best Urban last year in comic awfulness.
But anyway, in the meantime there are other awards going on - nominations for the Shortlist New Pantheon prize have been announced (from the link, scroll down quite a lot, there's also a Patrick Wolf story along the way). Basically a rough attempt at a US equivalent of the Mercury Music Prize (although it's not restricted to US albums, preventing a repeat of the Antony & The Johnsons arguments), they are as follows:

Animal Collective - 'Feels'


Antony and the Johnsons - 'I am a Bird Now'


Fiona Apple - 'Extraordinary Machine'


Arcade Fire - 'Funeral'


Bloc Party - 'Silent Alarm'


Death Cab for Cutie - 'Plans'


The Decemberists - 'Picaresque'


Kings of Leon - 'Aha Shake Heartbreak'


M.I.A. - 'Arular'


Sufjan Stevens - 'Illinois'


I like more than half of these albums a lot but Pitchfork sum up its biggest flaw pretty well themselves - 'Looks a lot like Pitchfork's year-end list, doesn't it?'. The only way it could be any more predictable would be if Clap Your Hands Say Yeah hadn't somehow been misinterpreted as Kings Of Leon. And the idea of only including albums which have sold less than 500,000 copies (roughly equivalent to 100,000 in UK terms I think, which I'm sure that Bloc Party and even the Arcade Fire have easily surpassed here by now) is kind of noble but in practise, it's hard not to think, very wrong.
I may have been, erm, strongly disappointed when Joss Stone was nominated for the Mercury but, given that no-one really gives it that much credit as a rank of quality, the presence of the likes of Hard-Fi, Kaiser Chiefs and Coldplay (although surely three times was unnecessary in their case) lends the award its only real point.
Plenty of people who hadn't heard of The Go! Team, never mind Seth Lakeman or Polar Bear, tuned in to find out if one of the better known acts would win and at least some of them must have heard something that they liked - I know that that's how I found out about The Delgados a few years back, and the latter two I had never heard of before their nominations despite counting myself at least fairly knowledgable on new British music.
Perhaps its a misconception as to the level of public awareness of some of the nominees (after all, from the internet music world it would be easy to get the impression that M.I.A. is really successful) but it seems like there is barely any such split between the Pantheon nominees, with no mainstream acts or complete unknowns, just the usual indie acts, leaving them doomed to be talked about by people like me who are already familiar with all the nominees and probably past the stage of massive enthusiasm for them. Case in point.

The ha ha call

Thanks to Sweeping The Nation for bringing this latest Pete Doherty story to our attention. It may not even really originate from the ex-KLFers in question but is very funny nonetheless.

Valentine's gifts

Sorry if they seem to come up more often than not here, but there is a good reason now... Guillemots have a new EP, Of The Night, available here for free, with a new song by each band member. This includes Bad Boyfriend, two minutes of frightningly good electro-pop 'originally intended as a cash pony for the Black Eyed Peas' surrounded by 7 minutes of stuff which is, well, just plain frightening, and Aristazabal's gorgeous lead vocal debut By The Water.

Be warned that these are only currently available in WMA format with unusually horrid restrictions preventing you doing anything with the files but listening on the computer, although this should hopefully be resolved soon!

Well, crap

The series of Teenage Cancer Trust gigs at the Albert Hall for this year have been announced, including The Cure, Goldfrapp, Judas Priest and Razorlight.



Most enticing, though, is the date on 29th March, featuring Bloc Party, Biffy Clyro (who now haven't released anything for a whole year - is it a record?) and Mystery Jets. I like all of them a lot but the closest that I have come to seeing any of them so far was Russell Lissack's guest spot at Stars in December when he stood so far off to the side of the stage that I couldn't see him most of the time anyway.

Only problem is that I already have tickets for my favourite new band Guillemots on that day. But they are playing two days at King's College, so, my campaign to find someone who has tickets for Guillemots on the 30th March and wants to swap starts here! Any takers?

Ah, indie in-jokes, how I love thee

Wild Horses, B-side to The Research's new single Lonely Hearts Still Beat The Same is frankly rather ruined by being sung far more terribly than usual, but it does include the line:

'She said that she had a brother who listened to ¡Forward Russia!, I thought she had everything'

Science + music = confusion

Recent research into the influence that others have on people's music tastes (they found that when their test subjects could see that songs by unknown bands were widely downloaded already they were more likely to do so themselves - well duh, and that they were likely to rate them higher as well - hmm) has produced a range of different interpretations from 'people like what they're told to' to 'this is why crap like Britney is successful' to 'this is good news for new bands trying to get noticed on the internet'.

They do tend to have something in common, though.

And just as Smash Hits finishes, too

Popworld is to end, or rather is to lose Simon Amstell (and Miquita Oliver), but it's difficult to see much difference. Only a relatively ort time after I discovered its unique way with humour too.

Mysterious ways

The most puzzling thing about U2's multiple Grammy wins (they stopped Coldplay from winning anything etc. etc.) is not that they won so many, but that they didn't do so last year, when they only won awards for Vertigo, depite their album being released before the 2005 nominations. Was this a deliberate move to avoid having to actually leave them out this year?
Meanwhile 'How To Dismantle An Atomic Bomb' is also in the running for a Brit for Best International Album for the second year running, making its November release look like a brilliant move.

edit: I've been usefully informed (as I probably should have researched anyway) that the deadline for nominations is a while before they are announced and happened to fall between the single and album releases. Which just favours the idea of it being brilliant marketing I guess.

Good news

It looks like Iko's album 'I Am Zero' (#7 in my Favourite albums of 2005) will finally get a proper UK release soon. With added bonus tracks too!

The Picture Show (05/02)

Pink - Stupid Girls
Pink returns with a scattergun attack on as many people as possible in a bid to get noticed. The song is a bit of the mess but the video veers between funny and embarrassing impressively. From the album 'I'm Not Dead' which is the subject of Popjustice's latest album art masterclass.



Mystery Jets - The Boy Who Ran Away
Mystery Jets release the final single before debut album 'Making Dens', this time owing more than usual to The Futureheads.



Polysics - Mr. Roboto
This one is not new at all, but demands viewing anyway. Japanese electro-rock complete with dancing/fighting Transformers, this is the really funny video this week.

Something awful

Well, the songs that is, as Talent In A Previous Life's 100 Actual Worst Records Ever gets underway in earnest. I expect to like many of them, but it will be as fun as ever regardless.

Liam Frost at Water Rats (31/01/06)

There is something about one man with an acoustic guitar standing in front of a crowd and playing to absolute rapturous silence which can make almost any song sound stunning. After a self-effacing and awkward introduction Liam Frost (whose Mancunian-accented vocals have a bite which brings to mind I Am Kloot numerous times) begins by achieving this with his very first song, Shall We Dance?, which possesses an intense, dramatic swing to it far beyond the Fretwells and Tunstalls of this world, despite occasional assaults of unneeded harmonica (which dog a few other songs tonight too).
Rather than attempt this feat for a whole set, he brings out a five-piece band, The Slowdown Family, who seem very professional and accomplished but for a couple of songs seem to undermine Frost's efforts by being a little too assured for his songs of insecurity. As the set goes on he visibly grows in confidence, sharing jokes with the crowd and band members, and their endearing alt-folk comes into its own, with a thunderous finale of The Mourners Of St. Paul's as he brings out an electric guitar for the first time particlalrly impressive.
The serious problem which makes them appear enjoyable but inessential though is that of overfamiliarity. Not only are folky singer-songwriters so common but direct influences are all too apparent - three seperate songs are too close to Bright Eyes' 'I'm Wide Awake, It's Morning' for comfort.

In some ways support band Lisa Brown don't step too far from their main stated influences either - New Order and Doves are much in evidence - but turn them into such sweet, glittery pop that not even an awful sound setup and a short set can do much to stop them. What's That Sound is more forceful than on record but still pure disco fun and new songs are uniformly even better than old. Hopefully they'll play a headlining date down here soon.

New shin porn; Decemberists spoon

For London-area fans of US indie-pop unable or unwilling to get to Camber Sands for ATP, Koko in Camden is clearly the place to be this May, as Spoon, The New Pornographers, The Decemberists and The Shins all play warm up shows there within a week of each other (the firs two in a two-for-the-price-of-one type thing!)

Covers all round

First, Starsailor cover Sugababes' Push The Button (it's at the bottom)
Then Arctic Monkeys cover Girls Aloud's Love Machine.
Next Sugababes will release a cover of Arctic Monkeys' I Bet You Look Good On The Dancefloor.

With any luck we will see the Girls Aloud cover of Four To The Floor within months!*

*note: this won't actually happen.

Four Day Hombre at Islington Bar Academy (26/01/06)

It's been a long road for Four Day Hombre - not just in the sense that this is the end of their tour (and they seem visibly relieved) but also that it has been five years since they released their first EP. A month before their debut album release in the tiny, packed, Bar Academy, playing upstairs from Taking Back Sunday, it's fairly obvious why everything might finally right for them now.
Rather than suffering from being worn out, they seem relaxed and confident and are gently witty between songs in front of a very appreciative, if none too animated, crowd. And what songs they are - it's easy at first to make obvious comparisons with Radiohead, Elbow (in the excellent rolling trip-hop-like beats especially) and even Coldplay (Simon Wainwright's sparingly employed falsetto) but they are expansive beyond any of them, with almost all songs seeming to take on a life of their own, flowing gracefully and inventively to places unrecognisable from where they begin and never quite allowing you to get a firm grasp on them.
Extremely fine singles The First Word Is The Hardest (here ended via a mutation into a very pretty cover of Kate Bush's Running Up That Hill) and 1000 Bulbs don't even stand out as highlights and while throughout one fault is a lack of anything instantly memorable, in the encore they even prove to have a more immediate side which will be more likely to win over new fans too.

Now It's Off

January always seems to be a big month for bands losing members or splitting, and now sadly joining others including Ash, British Sea Power, Minuteman and the 22-20s are Grandaddy.

After a number of very small scale releases like 'Complex Party Come Along Theories' which barely made it out of their home in (can't-believe-it's-a-real-town-name) Modesto, California, they released fitfully brilliant full-scale debut album 'Under The Western Freeway' in 1997. It featured the mix of bloopy keyboards, beautifully fragile songs and obsessions with isolation, technology and its decay (see lost spaceman narrative Everything Beautiful Is Far Away) which were later to come together perfectly for 2000's widely adored 'The Sophtware Slump', beginning and closing with defining moments He's Simple, He's Dumb, He's The Pilot and So You'll Aim Towards The Sky. It was a very hard album to live up to, and 2003's 'Sumday' recieved a mixed reaction, having some fine moments but losing a lot of the depth and individuality of the past. They will release a final album, 'The Return Of The Fambly Cat' in May, but will not tour again.

For those yet to listen, Tote's Umbrellas have a few songs to download although it's biased a little towards the newer stuff.

And twice in a couple of weeks seemed funny

Pete Doherty arrested for second time today

We're off to see Four Day Hombre now, review to come in next couple of days, maybe even with photos.

The Feeling at Metro (23/01/06)

'Our manager told us to make sure we say that you can text to get a live download of this song sent to you!'

The Feeling's lack of any pretence that it isn't a business that they're involved in could at a stretch be seen as refreshing. Coupled with a polite and likable but resolutely uncharismatic presence though, it means that any magic here has to come completely from their songs.

Luckily for them debut single Fill My Little World (introduced with a reassurance that it will be rereleased some time) is exactly the kind of joyous blast of a song that would forgive far worse, and already sounds like it can barely be contained in the tiny cramped Metro. They even have two or three more songs (I Love It When You Call Me and Join With Us for instance) which are practically its match, packed with enough brilliant hooks and harmonies to make you forget not only any notions of cool but also lingering thoughts that they sound a bit like The Darkness with the metal taken out.

When they slow things down though, as on next single Sewn, these begin to take hold and while never unpleasant, it's unremarkable stuff, and clearly not making much of an impression - when they leave there isn't even enough noise to inspire an encore, and while this might in part be down to people being busy pointing out to their friends that Sophie Ellis-Bextor is in the front of the crowd or singer Dan Gillespie's complaints of illness, it does suggest a band who aren't quite yet the complete article being pushed forwards regardless.

Pop stars

Every time that you think it's not going to get any more extreme, it does. Yesterday alone: 118,501 Arctic Monkeys albums sold.
Interestingly this also brings to light the current holder of the record for biggest first week sales of a debut album (over 300,000). It's this one:

The Picture Show (21/01)

Especially as our digital TV offers a service for watching videos on demand and is impressively often and thoroughly updated, I find myself getting my first impressions of a lot of new songs complete with their videos. This feature will highlight a few of them each week.
(Apologies for any format problems with the online versions)


Delays - Valentine
First up is Delays, with the first single from new album 'You See Colours'. It follows on well from the hypnotic electro-pop-rock of stopgap release Lost In A Melody, but the video is quite something else. Stunningly hideous may be the best way to describe it, but it has to be seen to be believed.



The Research - Lonely Hearts Still Beat The Same
Rather cuter all round is this Catchphrase-featuring video, for the fourth single from forthcoming debut 'Breaking Up'. Awww.



Four Day Hombre - The First Word Is The Hardest
Finally, a video which is one of the most peculiarly powerful I've seen for ages - it doesn't make much sense, is a little pretentious and spends too long showing the singer, yet it somehow still leaves me dumbstruck and adds a lot to the (already impressive) song too.

A bit of an advert

Next Monday, moved a week from its original planned date, Domino will release an album by a band who just six months ago were almost completely unknown to the general public and are now getting ridiculous levels of attention. The band in question take any number of common British guitar band clichés and influences and somehow manage to revitalise them all into something special, completely new and of their own, aided by a lyricist who effortlessly turns the mundanities of everyday life into witty and thrilling songs.
You may already have seen adverts for the album, but it looks like this.

Whilst we're on Domino, another band of theirs have just done a Girls Aloud cover which works quite well, at least until they start laughing:

Arctic Monkeys - Love Machine

For a load more radio session goodies try AltShiftMusic's recent post.

And the midweek answer is...

Probably. Arctic Monkeys are not far ahead of Notorious BIG at number one and while it should be likely for them to be overtaken, that's what everyone said last time.
Meanwhile Belle & Sebastian might just get their biggest yet with Funny Little Frog, and in the album charts Hard-Fi are just beating Editors to number one with their similarly 6-month old (and heavily reduced in many places) album.
This leaves them with a little bit of a dilemna, having already reached the desperately re-releasing old singles stage of their album campaign before finally being widely noticed - do they fail to take any more advantage of an upsurge in interest or carry on releasing yet more singles, putting off a second album even further and risking alienating longer-term fans?

Better Do Better it is.

Something to watch

Inspired by a comment on one of the reviews of Heartbeats here, here is that advert which everyone apparently loves and has elevated José Gonzáles to the top 10. Although it's never been on TV when I've been watching.

Heard about your band brake-up

Yes, Eamon has left British Sea Power.

Meanwhile having discovered that Beyonce's new single is actually a decent pop song and not another awful ballad, and with Shane Wayrd still going strong we eagerly await tomorrow's midweeks to see if Arctic Monkeys can can trigger another round of articles about getting to number one by the power of the interweb alone.

New year, new bands #1

Guillemots



Who?: Anglo-Scots-Brazilian-Canadian quartet with, apparently, names like Aristazabal Hawkes and Fyfe Dangerfield (respectively adorable bassist and even more adorable singer). They play music which makes jazz-pop actually sound like a great idea, with parping saxophones and busy experimentalism kept in balance by glorious swooning choruses and everything shot through with a sense of innocently magical wonder which just doesn't come around very often.

Progress so far: Their debut EP on Fantastic Plastic (former home of Buffseeds and Ikara Colt), I Saw Such Things In My Sleep, sold out far too quickly for my liking and fetches around 40 quid on ebay these days. Helped by supports for Rufus Wainwright and a mention on The Culture Show, the follow-up Trains to Brazil might well have made the top 40 if it wasn't ineligible due to a sticker included in the single. An album is currently being worked on and the only note of caution personally is that the last new band I was this excited about was Hope Of The States, and things didn't go too well at that stage there...

Website: http://www.guillemots.com

Listen to (click to download):

New year, new bands #2

Lisa Brown



Who?: Misleadingly named Manchester band, first heard in mid-2004 playing delicate, dreamily uplifting songs which still had a certain urgency and immediacy to them. Apparently favourites of Elbow's Guy Garvey, although for once I only found that out afterwards...

Progress so far: Things have gone slightly slowly for them since, but they have expanded their range to include incredibly cute synth-disco and finally released a single, What's That Sound, showing off that side of the band in December 2005.

Website: http://www.lisabrown.net/

Listen to:
Hey I Really Love You

Resigned from life

Slightly inevitable news reaches us that Minuteman have split. Led by Matt Jones, former keyboard player for Ultrasound, they released one album of glam-prog-pop in 2002, which included singles 5000 Minutes Of Pain and Big Boy, memorably rereleased because ITV started regularly using about five seconds of it on The Premiership. They had played gigs intermittently since but a second album was looking increasingly unlikely.

New year, new bands #3

My Latest Novel



Who?: Scottish five piece playing ambitious, sweet and unsurprisingly literate indie, incorporating poetry and sweeping drama with occasional nods to The Delgados and yes, ok, Belle And Sebastian.

Progress so far: They've supported Stars and released one single on Bella Union, with an even stronger one The Reputation Of Ross Francis to follow next month and an album, 'Wolves', to be released on March 6.

Website: http://www.mylatestnovel.com

Listen to: (click to download)

New year, new bands #4

Jeniferever



Who? Swedish four-piece who make very long songs of rather stunning brittle beauty and have a marginally better grasp of the English language for songwriting than Mew.

Progress so far? Several tours including a couple of the UK (including a date at Margate last year!) and a couple of (very long, naturally) EPs. They have now been signed to DrownedInSound recordings, of Martha Wainwright and, briefly, Kaiser Chiefs fame, and release their debut album 'Choose A Bright Morning' in March. Can't wait.

Website: http://www.jeniferever.com/

Listen (click to download):

New year, new bands #5

Battle



Who? Four-piece post-punkers who formed at university in Canterbury (hurrah!) and previously got some minor attention under other names, mainly Killing Moon. Bloc Party are the most obvious recent reference point, but there is a certain raw desperation and hunger in the music and lyrics which is something else completely. Very good live, too.

Progress so far: A couple of singles have been released: Isabelle/Stay The Same on Fierce Panda and the rather brilliant Demons on Transgressive, with another, Tendency, to come in March and an album currently being recorded.

Website: http://www.thisisbattle.com/

Listen (click for download):

New year, new bands #6

iLiKETRAiNS



Who? Leeds post-rock quintet who are infinitely better than their name. Post-rock not in the sense of ten-minute instrumentals and no real songs though, but that of a slightly unconventonal take on things (somehow writing movingly about Bobby Fischer and historical railway politics) and skyscraping guitars, strings and epicness all round, not completely unlike a less try-hard Hope Of The States.

Progress so far: A couple of limited edition vinyl singles, Before The Curtains Close and A Rook House For Bobby, have sold out very fast indeed, and new material is being worked on at the moment.

Website: http://www.iliketrains.co.uk/

Listen: (click for download)

A belated link

...to the results of Sweeping The Nation's poll of UK bloggers for their favourite albums released in the UK in 2005. The winner is not especially surprising (and quite deserving, methinks) but some of the others are pretty interesting.

Click here

I guess this means...

Ten people buy Ordinary Boys album

New year, new bands #7

I'm hedging my bets somewhat less this year and merely writing about 7 new bands (one each day this week with any luck) who I expect big things for and/or really like.

First up...

The Feeling



Who? Their biog's description of them as 'the new gods of cool MOR' and explanation of how there's no need to be ashamed of liking non-credible music any more is perhaps a little too knowing and self-defeating. Their songs show no such self-consciousness though and are breathtakingly immediate, sounding not unlike a supercharged version of Keane's best moments (with added guitars of course). If this doesn't sound a good idea, you may be one of many annoyed by the end of the year... oh, and apparently one of them is married to Sophie Ellis-Bextor.

Progress so far: Well, they have a majot label contract with Island and a suitably flashy website. Their only release so far was the single Fill My Little World, which didn't trouble the charts but does seem to have now sold out.

Website: http://www.thefeeling.com

Listen: (click for download)

New year, new bands - 20 for 05 and how they did

At the end of 2004 I made a CD for friends with songs by 20 bands who hadn't released albums yet, with their inclusion based on if I liked them and (very importantly) if their website had easily downloadable songs as much as if they had any chance of success. OK, that is partly just an excuse for the large number of all-round failures here, but it's very interesting to look at what happened to them all. The tracklisting was as follows:

Kaiser Chiefs - I Predict A Riot See Sound Of 2005 piece.
The Departure - Be My Enemy I made fun of The Dead 60s for a rerelease of a number 30 single making the same place again, but the rerelease of The Departure's debut All Mapped Out actually managed to make 3 places lower. A big failure, suffering from the start from a general perception of artifice even more than The Bravery did, as well as the fact that their album was decent but unspectacular.
Bloc Party - Helicopter See Sound Of 2005 piece.
The Boxer Rebellion - Code Red I came across them in 2003 when they won a competition to play the Glastonbury new bands tent, beating Keane in the process. Their atmospheric Cooper Temple Clause like rock found a slightly unlikely home on Poptones, who did at least release an album, Exits (more than some bands here managed) which puzzlingly failed to include either this or their previous single. They are apparently already at work on a second album.
Saint Rose - Call For Calm Dramatic, slightly shoegazey indie and brilliant live, their website triumphantly announced a major label deal towards the end of last year, but now doesn't even exist. A bit of searching around finds that they are now The Bright Space.
Fans Of Kate - Tape 23 A keyboard-driven power pop band with a brilliant live set full of great and immediate songs, I'm genuinely surprised that they weren't more of a success in 2005. They've lost a member but are currently recording an album hopefully due for release before summer.
Arctic Monkeys - Scummy Now called When The Sun Goes Down, this is their next single. I don't think that I could have imagined at the time, having heard this one song on a CD from a friend and seen the occasional mention of them on messageboards, that it will be a surprise if it isn't number one, but there was a certain obvious spark here.
Vib Gyor - Church Bell Prog-indie discovered on the same CD, they have one of those names which sounds cool til you work out where it comes from. Not much mainstream attention here yet but they have supposedly been called 'a heavenly hybrid of Coldplay and Sigur Ros' by Entertainment Weekly in the US. Mmm. Can be heard on Myspace.
Mellowdrone - Fashionably Uninvited American and slightly electronic take on new wave, they haven't got anywhere yet but have an album 'The Box' coming out in a couple of months and sound like this.
Mystery Jets - On My Feet The most odd song they've put out so far, full of chanting and generally offbeat. More commercial (and Coral-like) songs like Alas Agnes and relentless publicity have managed to push them to the edge of the top 40, although whether they get any further and if their album is any good may depend on whether they manage to balance the two styles well.
HAL - Worry About The Wind Possibly their biggest problem was the massive gap of about a year between the release of this sweet, breezy single and the next one. Either that or The Thrills going out of fashion. Whichever, their album failed to make much of an impression in any sense, but Play The Hits was another great single.
Cranebuilders - So What Could I Do Nowhere at all on the commercial radar despite Elbow connections (supported them, on their label, Guy offers backing vocals throughout) but they did at least get a really good album full of haunting songs like this released.
Cherryfalls - In Your Arms Again A bit of a cautionary tale for new bands this one - they were signed to Island and released two fairly impressive singles in 2004, predictably slightly like later Coldplay but with a certain added force (some loud guitars and Standing Watching did contain the line 'I want to find you, I want to fuck you up') and supported Feeder, gradually becoming more known. They then in March 2005 released the astonishingly drippy My Drug, which sounded like it was written by a focus group and put anyone else's supposed critical grabs at success (Athlete, Snow Patrol) in perspective... and it did worse than Standing Watching did. At this point Island of course dropped them, before actually releasing their promising but inconsistent album 'Winter/Winter' but after sending out promos of it to the press.
At the moment they are trying to recreate themselves and confusion reigns - they may or may not be named The New York Fund. Or Ten City Run.
Mirima - Twister Mirima might still wish that they were Cherryfalls, though, as their site descriptions are starting to appear increasingly desperate.
Grand Transmitter - Under The Wheel Released one excellent EP of Muse/Buckley-like angst rock on Morning Runner's original label and have now seemingly vanished. The link to their official site from the label one goes here. Ulp.
Engineers - Come In Out Of The Rain They achieved surprisingly good reviews on the likes of Pitchfork but despite the NME's best efforts shoegazing never took off again here. Personally their album was one of the biggest disappointments of the whole year, failing to build on the promise of some gorgeous singles and managing to almost all go at a crawl but still achieve no atmosphere, until a fantastic final song which made the rest of it seem all the more limp in comparison. Oh well.
Pioneers - Slow Down Similar in sound as well as name, a mini-album was recently released and a full album may emerge sometime this year - perhaps they'll do a better job.
Pellumair - Iris One of three bands on here to no longer exist, which is quite a success rate! They split just before releasing their debut album of hazy acoustica 'Summer Storm', which is something which some other bands should have considered doing in the past, perhaps...
Morning Runner - Oceans Checked out on a the basis of a mention as Parlophone's priority for the year, this simple and beautiful piano song turned out to be unrepresentative of their sound in general, and they seemingly spent the year being forced down the throats of the public (Seemingly millions of support slots, most notably for Coldplay) to only a little avail. It's not difficult to see why, especially after Starsailor adopted a similar sound to almost as bad a response, but they have enough fine moments (second single Work the best example) to suggest that they might eventually win over a few more.
Lisa Brown - Picture House See forthcoming feature on new bands for 2006!

New year, new bands - (an honest) mistake

Lots of people are at the moment trying to predict the bands which will be success stories this year (well done to anyone sticking their neck out and going for Arctic Monkeys) which we will be doing shortly.
Some are also looking back at their predictions for 2005, including the BBC with a review of their Sound of 2005 roundup of 'music pundits' views here.

Yes, The Bravery were top. It seems like longer than a year ago that they were achieving a top 5 album and top 10 single, so quickly did they fall - the inability of the followup singles to even make the top 40 was comically remarkable, and they've been notably absent from any end-of-year lists.
Bloc Party never quite made the breakthrough into real stardom, not helped by a general perception of them as being boring and/or miserable in interviews, but did sell consistently well and just about dodged a huge backlash.
Kano did manage one more top 40 single than The Bravery, but his album went largely unnoticed. UK hip-hop chosen in these doesn't seem to fare well in general, in fact.
The Game was indeed a success although didn't seem to achieve a public perception much beyond being an extension of the 50 Cent brand.
Kaiser Chiefs managed the fourth best selling album of the year, so choosing them could be seen as a success if it wasn't for the fact that by the time the poll was published I Predict A Riot had already been a hit once (rules from the previous year dictating that acts shouldn't already have had a top 40 hit being diluted to exclude only those with top 20 ones - maybe this year they will go the whole way and include Arctic Monkeys...) and Oh My God was picking up airplay widely, and yet they were still only fifth.
KT Tunstall was a slightly more surprising success, perhaps, with Black Horse And The Cherry Tree seeing to suggest a slightly different proposition to her later more successful singles and a gradual buildup of momentum throughout the year to also reach the top 10 bestselling albums of the year.
The Dead 60s' Riot Radio reached number 30 back in October 2004 before the poll, and on its rerelease just under a year later reached... number 30. So well done there. Admittedly they did have some marginally bigger hits, but with album sales lukewarm and Hard-Fi doing a similar thing to better effect all round they were far from a success story.
The Dears, not actually at all new at the time having released their second album in North America in 2003 and the UK in 2004, look an even more puzzling choice when compared with the success of non-included fellow Canadians the Arcade Fire, who were picking up a lot more critical support already at the time and who had a really great year. 'Funeral' is now on sale in Tesco(!)
Tom Vek also never really got anywhere, with singles charting at 45, 60 and 59.
The Magic Numbers, in contrast, have achieved impressively massive album sales as well as generally good reviews, and having not even released a full-scale single at the time are behind only KT Tunstall in this list as a prediction of chart success which wasn't already happening.

Albums of the year

Before we start, my favourite two albums released in the UK this year are Stars' 'Set Yourself On Fire' and The Arcade Fire's 'Funeral', but neither are included as they were originally released last year and I had heard most of both of them by the very end of the year.

40. Hooker's Green No. 1 - On How The Illustrious Captain Moon Won The War For Us
39. Röyksopp - The Understanding
38. The Most Serene Republic - Underwater Cinematographer
37. David Ford - I Sincerely Apologise For All The Trouble I've Caused
36. Sigur Rós - Takk...
35. The Coral - The Invisible Invasion
34. Gemma Hayes - The Roads Don't Love You
33. Cranebuilders - Sometimes You Hear Through Someone Else
32. dEUS - Pocket Revolution
31. Broken Social Scene - Broken Social Scene
30. Death Cab For Cutie - Plans
29. Kaiser Chiefs - Employment
28. Franz Ferdinand - You Could Have It So Much Better
27. The Shortwave Set - The Debt Collection
26. Editors - The Back Room
25. Art Brut - Bang Bang Rock & Roll
24. Doves - Some Cities
23. Tom McRae - All Maps Welcome
22. Clor - Clor
21. Maxïmo Park - A Certain Trigger

20. Final Fantasy - Has A Good Home

Owen Pallett gained attention through aranging strings for The Arcade Fire and Win Butler is on guest shouting duties here for Please Please Please, but this steers firmly clear of injoke irrelevance despite some titles suggesting the opposite. Largely played with a violin, a few effects and little else, the variety of layered backdrops conjured up to the surreal, humorous songs is incredibly impressive as a result, and a few of them, like the This Is The Dream Of Win And Regine would undoubtedly be great however they were played.

19. Brakes - Give Blood

It's difficult to talk about this without mentioning the length of songs because its breakneck speed is its biggest asset - on the rare occasions when they slightly misfire the song doesn't hang around long enough for it to matter, and more often than not it makes for perfect songs like Heard About Your Band and Hi How Are You, hilarious and thrilling rants. It also beats Art Brut by a few places becasue there is even some depth beyond the initial rush, especially in morose closer Fell In Love With A Girl.

18. Coldplay - X&Y

Lyrically abysmal in places ('you cut me down a tree and brought it back to me and that's what made me see...'), but otherwise a logical progression of their advance to be the best stadium rock band around, with Guy, Johnny and Will all taking more of a chance to shine than ever.

17. Gorillaz - Demon Days

Inventive and dramatic but also, in the biggest advance from the debut, cohesive, it makes diverse sounds seem made for each other and still contains glorious pop moments among all the atmosperics and darkness.

16. Hard-Fi - Stars Of CCTV

Hard-Fi make their anthemic, combative songs sound almost too easy, but you only need compare to The Dead 60s' attempts at similar to see that there's real ability at work here.
Stealing mercilessly, not least from The Clash, but turning it all into something definitively now, their rise to success was inevatible as every song here hits its mark and who can't relate to the overall theme of wanting to escape their life?

15. Wolf Parade - Apologies To The Queen Mary

Never quite lives up to the incredible taut and propulsive opening song, but its all great fun regardless - pitched about halfway between The Arcade Fire and Modest Mouse (whose singer Isaac Brock produces here) with fine impassioned songs and some of the most awesome bloopy keyboard noises around as well.

14. Architecture In Helsinki - In Case We Die

An ever-changing kaleidascope of musical styles, occasionally resembling a sweeter version of The Coral's debut album, it would be easy for this to become annoying (which is the view that a few reviews seemed to take) but it is just too well done and the band too in love with life, the world and the music they can make for it to be anything but exciting and fun.

13. The National - Alligator

Blessed with a deep, rich voice perfect for the dark songs on offer here, Matt Berninger is the star of an album which is personal and dramatic but never loses hold of its wit and a certain lightness of touch.

12. The Decemberists - Picaresque

It's easy to get lost in talking about the lyrics - rich and wonderful stories throughout - but the music here makes just as many of the key moments work, from the dramatic build in The Bagman's Gambit to the swing of 16 Military Wives and the devilish finale of The Mariner's Revenge Song.

11. Turin Brakes - JackInABox

In a year when the previously reliable Doves, Tom McRae and to a lesser extent Coldplay released disappointing third albums, this was the first one to reassure that it wasn't just me going off the music which I pretty much started off with a few years ago. Although ignored or panned in most places, this is a complete turnaround from the constrictive MOR of most of 'Ether Song' to simple, joyful pop. There are acoustic beauties like Forever and Road To Nowhere, but the biggest joy is the new territory they throw themselves at - on the funky likes of Over And Over and the title track, it sounds like they could try anything and succeed.

10. Bright Eyes - I'm Wide Awake, It's Morning

This was the year when Conor Oberst came good, ditching the sprawling self-indulgences which made previous albums so individual but so frustrating and turning out not one but two albums that were focused and near faultless. This one was full of moments of stripped-back beauty with Emmylou Harris helping out with some amazing backing vocals and First Day Of My Life his sweetest, simplest song ever.

9. Bloc Party - Silent Alarm

Perhaps just a little longer than it needs to be, but with songs as tight and inventive as these it was difficult to care - there were few rushes this year as good as Like Eating Glass or the end of So Here We Are and Blue Light and This Modern Love showed that they could even do slow and moving as well as frenetic dance-rock that put all peers to shame.

8. Bright Eyes - Digital Ash In A Digital Urn

The general verdict on his two albums this year seemed to be that 'I'm Wide Awake, It's Morning' had all the songs and this all the experimentation, but for me the songs here are every bit as strong, if more melodramatic. It's my favourite of the two because the uneasy electronica seems to be a tighter fit with the subject matter and offers a wider scope for variety, from the minimalism of Time Code to the Postal Service moment Take It Easy and the flamenco-ish dance of Arc Of Time, probably the most joyful song about death all year.

7. Iko - I Am Zero

Kieran Scragg may sound like a girl, but his voice is one of astonishing purity and, crucially, believable enough in its emotion to sell the songs here which other bands could easily come across as whiny or sappy. Almost bereft of the brittle rock that his former band Buffseeds specialised in and stripped down to little but his voice in places, it also has an air of hopelessness which makes lines like 'stay just as you are, you're the nearest thing that I have to art' all the more affecting.

6. The Tenderfoot - Save The Year

Funnily enough, I first saw The Tenderfoot supporting Buffseeds in 2003, and wasn't especially impressed, completely forgetting about them before coming across their mini-album 'Vale Industrial' at the start of the year. Perhaps it's not surprising as this is gentle, unobtrusive music (helped by Darren Moon's soft voice which bears quite a resemblance to Gruff Rhys') which only gradually seeps into the conciousness until one day grabbing you completely and refusing to let go. Probably the day you first really notice the lyrics - near-perfect witty and affecting tales of being stuck in dead-end monotony, featuring some of the best one-liners around. Afterwards the music seems to make much more sense, subtle and economical but never repetitive or boring. They do seem doomed to be less succesful than their bassist's side-project band though.

5. Patrick Wolf - Wind In The Wires

Thanks to its reamining but sparser use of electronics than his debut it's almost possible to summarise as the perfect combination of the two Bright Eyes albums this year, but there is an added wonder and sense of place - it's beautifully evocative of howling storms and windswept cliffs and ruins. And among its ghostly beauty there is also still bite, especially in the madly hollering Tristan and the hugely entertaining and grandoise rant of The Libertine ('they sing through the bars of cliché and addiction' indeed...)

4. Super Furry Animals - Love Kraft

Immensely disappointing on first listen, it's best to forget that this is a SFA album altogether as, perhaps apart from 'Mwng', it bears little resemblence to any of their others. Bar the slightly awkward red herrings Lazer Beam and Psyclone! there is no musical wildness or immediacy, and the previously everpresent pop is all but gone from their sound.
Instead, though, there is dense, crafted, gorgeous detail which reveals itself over time, and the decision to allow all members of the band to sing for the first time pays off multiple times, with Cian in particular sounding innocent and vulnerable on the breathtakingly sweet Walk You Home.

3. Mew - And The Glass Handed Kites

It is perhaps lazy to describe this is where Muse meet Sigur Ros (Nearly the same name! And nearly the same country!) but it's also kind of true. Exhilaratingly daft and yet often incredibly pretty at the same time, the way in which the songs are linked together make it seem like it is permanently building towards an ever bigger climax, with the Apocalypso-Special-Zookeeper's Boy section most astonishing of all.

2. Sufjan Stevens - Illinois

I saw someone recently say that they liked this album more in theory than in practise and it's easy to see where that comes from - the idea and artwork, nevermind the song titles, have so much character by themselves that there could be barely room for the music itself to get noticed.
Indeed, the only way that it does is by generally being on the same thrillingly massive scale, with big orchestration stuck on almost everything, but despite this the personal moments like the heartbreaking Casimir Pulaski Day fit perfectly, the quality of songwriting holding everything together.

1. Elbow - Leaders Of The Free World

I'm almost guilty about the extreme inevitability with which this tops the list, but there is simply no other band that can compare in my eyes, and this is in many ways their finest moment to date, more accessible and complete than ever before, if without quite the depth and desperation that made some parts of 'Asleep In The Back' so unbeatable.
A lot of the stranger experiments of the past have been dropped, which could be seen as a move towards too comfortable MOR but they are just too good and when it gets close, like on the warm affection of An Imagined Affair, it is undercut brilliantly, in this case by the revalation that Guy Garvey's happy love is a drunken fantasy. Indeed, every song is filled with lyrics showing Guy on incredible form ('A callgirl with yesterday's eyes was our witness and priest/Stockport supporters club kindly supplied us a choir' from Great Expectations is breathtaking and a perfect example of the way he can make the everyday into the romantic) and the band succeed as ever in making the complex seem so simple that you barely notice how varied and inventive this music is, just how great it sounds.

Sorry

For the lack of updates of late, it has been caused by work but mainly by going to just too many gigs. I should probablydo some kind of overview of them soon.
I have also been working on writing about my favourite songs.

Just briefly, I find the current pop reviews at DiS fascinating. They were only grudgingly positive (6/10) and still stirred up abuse! Including the apparently serious
''your site is confirmed as being a total joke when you can give Girls Aloud 6/10 and Babyshambles' album 4/10. disgusting.'' !!

A couple more blog links

Dirrrty Pop!
Poptimists LJ community
Indie Girl and Pop Boy

If You Unhappy With You Need Blame Something

I'm not especially surprised to read that Alfie have split as they do seem to have been struggling frustratingly against indifference despite reasonable promotion and a Parlophone deal for quite some time. Even as someone whose distaste for James Blunt is well documented this seems a really unnecessary sour note to end on though:

"As you know, we have always endeavoured to stay 'true to ourselves' musically, and we perhaps somewhat naively thought that this would be sufficient to catapult us into the upper stratosphere of the popular music world. It wasn't, and unfortunately, although it's true that a single note of one of our songs holds more worth than ten thousand James Blunt albums (a chilling thought) this has never been apparent to the record buying public as a whole.''

They do make up for it a bit by actually thanking the fans too, I guess.

One more reason to go see Elbow

They're being supported by Mew!!
Unless you go in Leeds or Sheffield that is, but Cranebuilders are pretty good too.

That thing under the blog title

...is there because that title would seem even more crap and irrelevant otherwise really, at least until I get round to explaining it.
Anyway, when I changed it to Biology / Chemistry a few days ago I actually had, erm, Semisonic in mind for the Chemistry part, but I appear to have predicted the new Girls Aloud album title without actually trying.

I bet you look good in the midweeks (sorry)

So, Arctic Monkeys sold three thousand more copies of their single I Bet You Look Good On The Dancefloor yesterday than any other single managed, and are number 1 in the midweek charts. The song is of certainly great fun and sounds considerably beefed-up and more world-conquering than the demo version that I've listened to for a while but still isn't exactly revolutionary or one of my favourites, its B-side Bigger Boys And Stolen Sweethearts being way more lovable for a start. Plus Sugababes seem fairly likely to overtake them with the still great sounding Push The Button by the weekend anyway. Yet I still was happily smiling for a good while after reading the news.

Is this because it's genuinely exciting to see a band rise to a position where they have a shot at number one with their first proper single off the back of many brilliant songs being made available for free online and the resultant word of mouth, with major label cash and press hype absent until really quite recently?
Or is it because I have one of these?

You decide...

The serene Bluetones

The Bluetones release 4 track EP 'Serenity Now' at the end of this month, available only at their gigs and online here, probably sensibly enough since their chances of converting many new fans aren't too great. It's their first new stuff since 2003, which is especially slow considering that 'Luxembourg' was not much longer than 30 minutes. No word yet on whether it will continue the cool-in-an-alternate-universe spiky guitar pop sound of said album.

Some more gigs

Which I am a bit behind on talking about, apart from the Hard-Fi one.

• Elbow at the Koko, which I hadn't been to before and was very pretty for a venue, and not as stupidly hot as the similarly pretty Bush Hall. They didn't have a support band for some reason, which made the wait a little long after getting to the venue an hour before doors opened, but it was worth it. The 6 times that I've seen them previously have been more incredible each time and while that wasn't continued it was probably as much down to not knowing the new songs as anything. Great Expectations complete with xylophone solos and Puncture Repair was already breathtaking, Station Approach is a fantastic opener and I don't think that I will ever tire of Newborn live (though Red may be another matter), plus they played Any Day Now and oh so lovely Scattered Blacks And Whites to finish. Guy's posing and gesturing to cheer at the end of each verse of Switching Off continued to grate (save it for a less fragile song!) but was probably the only negative.

• Stars in front of a not huge crowd at the Highbury Garage, supported by average seeming Futureheads-alikes Roland Shanks. Stars released my favourite album of last year, Set Yourself On Fire, which sounds like The Delgados at their most grand with a few extra electro-pop bits. They played almost the entire album and only one other song, and for at least half the gig it was absolutely magnificent, extra force being given to the songs by the number of musicians on stage (eight or so I think) plus some trumpet playing by singer Torquil, who was also charming and funny between songs, not least in his interactions with other singer Amy. She didn't really manage to pull off sexy for Sleep Tonight very well at all but made up for it elsewhere, especially with the vulnerability for One More Night. That contains one chilling stop-you-dead moment stronger than almost any other song I can think of (if you've heard it you probably know the one), and live it made my insides leap all the more. Everything went slightly wrong towards the end of the gig however, starting from when they played single My Bloody Valentine-esque Ageless Beauty, my least favourite song on the album, and a minority of the crowd started pushing to the front and going absolutely crazy, before remaining there to be idiots and shout "we love you!" at Amy throughout the rest of the gig. It wasn't just them that were the problem however, as a couple of songs seemed to get lost to aimless noisy jamming, especially He Lied About Death. I was still impressed enough to definitely want to see them if they come back to London as promised though.

• Finally JJ72, at Islington Academy, supported by the hilariously terrible, or possibly terribly hilarious, Red Organ Serpent Sound. JJ72 have had more than their fair share of problems recently (as documented here) and it was almost a relief to get to see them at all having never had the chance 5 years ago when I loved them a lot more. It was a slight shame that they concentrated so much on their first album when playing older stuff rather than the underrated second album I To Sky, but when they have so many utterly perfect depictions of teenage angst like Snow and Undercover Angel to choose from it's hardly surprising, and we did at least get a beautiful version of Brother Sleep. So the old stuff was an fantastic as could be hoped for, but what about the album we've been waiting so long for? New songs were wryly introduced as being 'from our next album, due out 2007' and 'from the album after next, due out 2015', but to be honest it was slightly more difficult to feel sorry for their plight when the new songs were almost all terribly disappointing, stodgy rock with lyrics which were often embarrassingly obvious rather than the joyfully absurd poetry of old, recent single Coming Home the only decent one of the lot. That is, until they unleashed Radio in the encore, as immediate as anything from their debut but with an added depth and gorgeous chorus. Maybe there is still hope after all.
  

Will update more properly soon, but in the meantime...

This album has so far exceeded all my (high) expectations easily!




Oh and David Ford (formerly of Easyworld) has a really good single out this week and it's available as a free download on iTunes/

Oh so Xtreme

So, on Monday I went to the Mean Fiddler for Virgin Xtreme's launch night, since I won tickets and all. I hadn't been to the venue before and was surprised at how close to being as big as the next door Astoria it was.

Firstly, it didn't do anything at all to sell the radio station to me, as they played a loop of music about 3 times over which just sounded like xfm if it was even more based around the NME. Plus the compere was an incredibly irritating sterotypical laddish twat, coming out several times between bands, Stella in hand, to say 'fuck' a lot and to tell us all as often as possible to get to the bar and get ready, because obviously it was very important to show that he was a big fan of drinking and not some kind of poof or something.

The highlight of The Ordinary Boys' set was when they stormed offstage about 30 seconds into their first song. Possibly the highlight of the evening in fact, a hilariously farcical beginning.

The Dead 60s have a couple of good songs, but insisted on playing them several times over in quick succession. And some of their lets-see-how-many-guitar-effects-we-can-show-off instrumentals seem to go on for millenia.

Hard-Fi were therefore left to be the highlight of the night, and all was going fantastically well until a few songs in when Rich Archer's voice suddenly vanished. Watching them struggle through their singles, helped out no end by the crowd, after this was entertaining but still a bit of a let down, together with their set being rather short anyway. Still, it was free!

Finally, something from the Xtreme website:

I've won tickets to Hard-Fi next Monday!

And The Dead 60s and The Ordinary Boys, but oh well. It's to launch Virgin's answer to Xfm Virgin Xtreme, where the answer in question is presumably ''me too''. My girlfriend has also won tickets, which may be a coincedence or a sign that not very many people entered the competition. Given the number of tickets Hard-Fi are giving away on their mailing list, probably the latter.

Arcade Fire: Top Of The Pops, video

Click here to see them perform Rebellion (Lies) on Sunday's show.

It was exciting and surprising as it was to see them there, especially in these days when exclusives of future flops by the 'world famous' or endless repeats of the same songs are far more likely to get TOTP appearances than records which people have, you know, actually just bought. I think that the linked blog rather overstates the weirdness though: 'the Top of the Pops crowd clapping along. To the Arcade Fire. Very bizarre as I'm sure you'll see'. It is a great pop song after all.

To borrow from a different band...

Arcade Fire! Top Of The Pops!

Help: A Day In The Life (Part 2)

12. Hard-Fi - Help Me Please
I maybe wouldn't have been as likely to give Hard-Fi's album much of a chance if my girlfriend wasn't such a huge fan of them but I'm glad that I did as it's full of excellent pop songs and lyrics which work better than expected. Slower songs don't tend to be their thing though, and this is the slowest and most melancholy of all ('so many tears','being alone scares the life out of me'). Despite occasionally sounding like Oasis it is honest and simple enough to work pretty well though.

13. Belle & Sebastian - The Eighth Station Of The Cross Kebab House
Somehow I can't believe that eighth is spelt like that, but apparently so. Carrying on where the mostly brilliant Dear Catastrophe Waitress left off, this is gloriously instant and catchy, but it also adds a political edge here more blatantly than Elbow do, with lyrics about Israel, although they don't seem to take any side particularly strongly. The last line is absolutely brilliant, particularly in referencing Coldplay, a band who are now on this compilation.

14. Tinariwen - Cler Achel
Again, a little outside of what I would normally listen to, and doesn't seem to do much for me; pleasant background music but I prefer Emmanuel Jal.

15. George And Anthony - Happy Christmas, War Is Over
Everything about this is almost compellingly awful! I have heard a few Anthony And The Johnsons songs and while I thought that the arrangements sounded great and the lyrics ok, I still couldn't bring myself to like them because of that voice. To me it just sounds like someone doing a really bad Buckley impression. Even if I were to enjoy it I can't imagine finding this anything other than hilariously bad though, a nasty saccharine arrangement of a far from brilliant song with totally misplaced voices.

16. Gorillaz - Hong Kong
Firstly, calling this a Gorillaz song is slightly questionable because it seems to bear no relation to any of their other stuff and to be virtually be a Damon Albarn solo song, or in fact is closer to Blur's Out Of Time relocated from Morocco to Hong Kong than anything. With that out of the way, this can be praised totally as the most gorgeous thing on here by some way, 7 minutes of bliss.

17. Babyshambles - From Bollywood To Battersea
Trying to ignore Pete's other activities is pretty hard nowadays, but at least this doesn't actually sound like it must have been recorded by a total waster like Fuck Forever. Instead it ambles along pleasantly for a few minutes like a lesser acoustic Libertines song, which is something at least I guess.

18. Manic Street Preachers - Leviathan
A unintelligable talking bit at the start and a big riff, must be a new Manics song! Not exactly the most punk thing they've recorded in ages as they've claimed, it sounds like the kind of agressive but unremarkable song that they can probably knock out in their sleep, before puzzlingly fading out just as it gets going.

19. Razorlight - Kirby's House
Razorlight tend to veer very easily from likable to completely terrible as far as I'm concerned. This stays just about on the likable side, laregly steering clear on pomposity even in the 'epic' ending.

20. Damien Rice - Cross-Eyed Bear
What, not Damien Rice And Lisa Hannigan? I thought that their move to more correct crediting on the last single would be a permanent one, and on the basis of this it definitely should be, with Damien becoming increasingly hopelessly mired in MOR and the moment when Lisa starts singing being the best by far. Damien also seems to be sounding unusually gruff, perhaps in an attempt to further distinguish himself from James Blunt. Any hopes that I might have had for his/their second album have now pretty much totally disappeared in the three-year farce that has been the O promotional campaign (and most annoyingly of all, it's worked).

21. Mylo - Mars Needs Women
The tracklisting to this largely appears to have been decided at random, but putting this straight after Damien Rice is a brilliant move, making it sound twice as exciting, shiny and modern as it actually is.

22. Coldplay - How You See The World Part 2
Ah, Coldplay. I think, with my getting invited to secret gigs and having thousands of posts on their forum and all, on top of their status as The Biggest Band In The World™ and resultant omnipresence, that it's increasingly difficult to think about their music without getting completely lost in too much baggage. I can try though.
This is another political song: 'You put the world in a tin can, black market contraband, and it hurt just a little bit, when they sliced and packaged it' this starts, and it sounds like a more direct and angry cousin of X&Y's closer Twisted Logic. Chris Martin has never been technically the best lyricist but these days his love songs have started sounding more and more trite (check out A Message or Swallowed In The Sea) and the angrier he is the more brilliant they sound. Somewhat surprsingly it never sounds too simplistic, perhaps as confused despair is a pretty reasonable feeling to have.
It's a shame that this song is thrown away in such a manner though, and it further enforces the idea of X&Y as a compromise between what Coldplay wanted and what they imagined that people wanted. Apparently Twisted Logic almost didn't make it on as well.

Help: A Day In The Life (Part 1)

(see here)

So, first off, this whole venture, despite being yet another repetition of something done in the past, seems a whole lot more likable than either Band Aid 20 or Live 8.
Band Aid 20 raised a lot of money, but it also foisted an uninspired version of a not very good song on us, and felt like it was being bought out of a sense of duty rather than because anyone was really planning to play the song a lot. This could be seen to be pretty irrelevant in the face of doing something so important, but why not have a good song as well as a good cause?
Live 8 did offer something that (some) people would actually want, the chance to see lots of popular bands in one day from a very long way away, but seemed hopelessly muddled in what it intended to achieve by this. 'It's not about the money, it's about the awareness' we were told, before eBay was forced to stop people from selling tickets to it because they were apparently taking advantage of a charity, and a 'golden circle' was put in place, in front of the crowd, of people who had bought the privilege of getting to be slightly less far away.

Help, though, manages to both have a clear and good reason for its existence and to offer something which people really will actually want (a lot of people judging by the meltdown of the Warchild website last night), a lot of new songs by popular bands.

Plus it has outdone the original from ten years ago in at least one way, as that featured a fair few remixes and live versions which can't have been the most exciting, and this features only new songs and a couple of covers. But are they any good? Well, I've listened a few times now, and here are my current thoughts:

1. Radiohead - I Want None Of This
This is, truth be told, not the greatest start to the album. Sounding vaguely like a slightly less evil version of Hail To The Thief's We Suck Young Blood, it has Thom backed just by piano and ghostly wordless backing vocals, singing things like 'if it matters to you, you can sell it all out'. It seems stuck halfway between sinister and moving though, and generally unremarkable. It probably doesn't say anything about how their next album will sound though, and I can't imagine this being reused as Lucky was last time.

2. The Coral - It Was Nothing
The first thing to notice is that the first second or so is In The Morning! Second is that it sounds like it could easily fit onto most recent album The Invisible Invasion. Perhaps this is because The Coral work so fast normally that recording in a day was normal (they have released about 80 songs in 4 years, which is pretty impressive going), but also it is because so many of their mid-paced songs now do have a distinct (to anything else) but very similar feel to them, a problem which really didn't help the album.
This has a really nice mid-section with twangy guitar and 'ooh-ooh's but overall I can't help but wish for a return to the days of Skeleton Key and similar madness.

3. The Zutons - Hello Conscience
'Hello conscience, how do you do? I've come such a long way to talk to you'
The Zutons' lyrics show no sign of getting any less stupid, clearly, but that doesn't matter too much in an enjoyably mindless stomping pop song like this. It takes a little too long to get to the big, garish climax though.

4. Elbow - Snowball
Elbow are my favourite band (review of them live coming soon!), so I am pretty predisposed to love this, it actually took a few listens to sink in though. It is quietly, elegantly lovely (Guy Garvey has my favourite voice ever!) but it is only gradually that the accusatory tone of it becomes apparent too, with 'I told you so' repeated and devestating lines like 'the largest of mistakes can be forgiven, but a snowball of little white lies will crush your house' before building to a dense and furious close. Seemingly political without being crass, despairing and angry yet beautiful, it's definitely one of my favourite things here, although that is no surprise.

5. The Magic Numbers - Gone Are The Days
They still haven't totally won me over, in spite of Forever Lost being so very adorable, and this fits expectations really - almost too sweet for words, though a little forgettable with it.

6. Max Emo Park - Wasteland
Much the same as for The Magic Numbers really. I haven't been persuaded to get their album yet, although Acrobat is fantastic and I quite like the singles, and this is very pleasant and likable but isn't changing my mind on them yet either. The accent is really a fantastic asset especially for some of these lyrics, and it has a great sudden ending though.

7. The Go! Team - Phantom Broadcast
I have to admit to being almost totally unfamiliar with The Go! Team. I really like the sound of this though. True, it doesn't exactly do much, but it does have a fantastic sound! And it onyl lasts 2:30 anyway. So it's fine.

8. Emmanuel Jal - Gua
This is a little bit outside of being the kind of thing that I can comment on with much confidence (not white blokes with guitars, is it?) but for what it's worth I enjoy it. It never goes anywhere near preachiness in making its point, and has really great backing vocals too.

9. Keane & Faultline - Goodbye Yellow Brick Road
I don't know the orginal beyond this sounding vaguely familiar (and that's as much because the start sounds like Stars' Set Yourself On Fire as anything) so I can't really say how this compares. It's much better than Keane's cover of With Or Without You though. I don't know what Faultline actually did but the slightly distorted bits may be down to him, as usual it's mainly about that voice though, and even if it's easy to be tired of by now this is very pretty.

10. Kaiser Chiefs - I Heard It Through The Grapevine
Starts off sounding like Seven Nation Army, somehwat unexpectedly, and goes on to be not quite as much of a bad idea as I would have imagined beforehand. Still quite a bad idea though, and that's even as someone who normally really likes them.

11. Bloc Party - The Present
From a band who have released no new B-sides on any formats of any of their three singles this year, it's actually quite surprising to see a song on this as well as a properly new single soon. This is actually miles better than the rather limp Two More Years, building up extremely well and with some really brilliant echoey guitar, plus Kele in emotive but not quite full-on intense mode. Admittedly still not nearly as good as This Modern Love or Blue Light though.

(Part 2 to come tomorrow)

Yay for nice people

and accidently stumbling across their nice blogs while looking for the Clearlake story again.
Added to the links now is NOISE! which is written by someone who generally stands out a mile as the most reasonable person on the DiS messageboards, and also runs Clearlake's site for them which is nice!

'Same with (cough) 'Britpop'. In retrospect, we're told that it was all crap. Nope. Sleeper were. The Bluetones weren't (and aren't).'

I need say no more!!

Something To Look Forward To

Clearlake to release new album 'Amber' in January (finally!) Admittedly the clips of demos that I've heard seemed to be lacking a certain spark of brilliance that made 'Lido' and particularly 'Cedars' so special, but then they were clips. Of demos.

Next year's early release schedule is starting to take shape in general in fact:

• Embrace have written a new album in 9 days, which will be called 'Exploding Machines'. I am imagining at this stage an album full of Near Lifes but that may prove a little optimistic.
• Belle And Sebastian releasing 'The Goalkeeper's Revenge' too. Apparently named after an old book which I may in fact have read, I read too many football books at one stage and they were generally fairly indistinguishable from each other. If their new track on the Help:A Day In The Life album for Warchild (full review here later!) is anything to go by it should be at least as fantastic as 'Dear Catastrophe Waitress'.
• Grandaddy should have a new album ready to go soon, in the mean time they are releasing a mini-album in a few weeks while we wait.
• You never know, The Flaming Lips might actually finish 'At War With The Mystics'. Or, for that matter, their Christmas On Mars film.
• The Strokes are also looking for a January release, and are now slowly dripping news to the overexcited NME.

The Mercury Judges

Probably really really wish that The Arcade Fire were born in Chichester.

Home Fires still burning

It's a decidedly odd thing to watch a guy sit a few feet away from you in a small room and play the song which, more than any other probably, got you really, properly, interested in this whole new music thing in the first place. I had this experience on Wednesday at a gig in Farringdon by Fi-Lo Beddow ('folk-poet and pioneer', says his card), otherwise known as the frontman of The Bluetones Mark Morriss.
In particular it's odd when there are people standing off to the side who have a chance to listen to this amazing, moving piece of music and yet talk constantly, and when even the faithful present (and there still are some!) are much more into the older stuff played. But that's ok, because even half hearing an acoustic Keep The Home Fires Burning felt like a privilege to me. I can still remember the first time that I heard it, watching Top Of The Pops on a tiny old TV, with a couple of dents in the screen, in the corner of the room. And it still sounded almost as amazing as it did to me then, which is as much of a compliment as I could pay it, really.

Everyone Says That Everything Sounds Like Coldplay Now Now

Perhaps it's the same irrational need to defend commercial 'indie' music (after all, it doesn't need defending, it's totally dominant) as described in the post below which prevents me from finding Mitch Benn's 'hilarious' parody Everything Sounds Like Coldplay Now particularly amusing. Or maybe it's just that it isn't good enough to make up for such a completely lazy premise; everyone has already written about the load of new bands like Embrace, Snow Patrol and, according to a particularly chronologically confused New York Times, Travis who have apparently sprung up to replicate Coldplay's sound. Singing a song about this which sounds more accurately like Coldplay than any of them have come close to managing just doesn't seem to work.

On being a hypocritical James

I really can't stand this kind of thing. Something about the way in which it assumes that everyone needs to be saved from their current likes, and switch to the author's, is completely infuriating. Plus it is rather muddled to say the least: 'everybody likes something that is easy to understand – I’m a Hollyoaks fan myself' she says, before going on to criticise the existence of anything easy to understand (which of course the admittedly rather fab Mystery Jets couldn't possibly be!).
To be fair, my stuff on the same site is twenty times worse at least, but still.
The thing is... it's hard to tell how much of this dislike is down to the piece itself or how much of it is down to the fact that I really do like the bands in question. Yes, I like Travis, Embrace, even Keane!None of them are among my favourites, but then Elbow and to a lesser extent Coldplay are and plenty of people look upon both of those in the same way.
The idea of many seems to be that people who like this music either aren't really into music at all (the infamous '5-album a year' types) or are on their way to realising the error of their ways and liking either super-obscure Pitchfork-approved indie or mainstream pop music instead. this is a constant annoyance because it still hasn't happened to me. I wouldn't necessarily mind if it did, but here I am buying more like 50 albums a year, including some pretty obscure stuff, and a fan of Gwen Stefani, Natasha Bedingfield and all to boot, and yet 'pop by numbers' still holds a great appeal.
And what seals the idea that it's only because I disagree that I dislike it so much, and makes me feel vaguely uncomfotable, is that despite being possibly even more shoddy, I can't bring myself to hate this. Because I really really hate James Blunt. And I don't like hating something so seemingly harmless so strongly and irrationally at all, but I can forgive any nonsense in the article just because its main point is against him. Oh well.