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.