Thought I would publish my list, for the benefit of the good people over at The Hype Machine. Here goes.
A full extended, 25 album list can be found on spotify, here: http://open.spotify.com/user/steelersfan_uk06/playlist/46BLRANz7AFRJZxc8olOh5
Here's the top ten:
Foals - Total Life Forever.
Gorillaz - Plastic Beach.
Arcade Fire - The Suburbs.
Kele - The Boxer.
Bombay Bicycle Club - Flaws.
Two Door Cinema Club - Tourist History.
Delphic - Acolyte.
Ellie Goulding - Lights.
The Boy Who Trapped The Sun - Fireplace.
Yeasayer - Odd Blood.
That is all!
Monday 6 December 2010
Thursday 2 December 2010
Boycotts - 'Start a Boycott' EP review
Boycotts – Start a Boycott EP
Name-checked in Radio 1 DJ Vic Galloway's ever-respectable (and somewhat not as straightforward as you may think) "50 Artists to Watch in 2010", Glasgow and Edinburgh based quartet Boycotts release their long-awaited debut EP Start a Boycott through Andy Miller’s What If Music project. There isn’t too much out of the ordinary here – the casual listener would be forgiven for lumping them in with The Long Blondes, Pull in Emergency and many of the other “indie-riff-with-the-female-twist” bands emerging from the latter half of the noughties. Boycotts aren’t too far away from this – short, sharp pop songs are the clear agenda here throughout the four tracks. But a closer listen suggests more – lead singer (and perfectly named) front woman Stina Twee’s elegant vocals wrapped within the Scottish accent give the band the well-needed edge they require. A heart-wrenching call for help comes in the form of the slower-paced “A Lesson in Gravity”. Sitting on nearly five of the EP’s fifteen minutes, the chilling “…did you hear the splash? ...I’ll freeze to death if you don’t find me soon.” shows signs of what could be hidden at the core of this young indie pop outfit, and suggests Twee has more emotion to throw in than the four songs here let on.
Start a Boycott is available now through EmuBands and What If Music, and look out for Boycotts’ debut single around the end of the year.
Friday 9 January 2009
Top 15 albums of 2008 - Number 15
First off the reason i'm writing here is because MSN very kindly deleted the blog-side of things over on my Space. Which was kind of them considering I have been using it for about... 5 years, or so?
Anyways to show my anger at them I'm going to post the first significant piece of information of 2009 to this thing - its my best albums of 2008 (15 to be exact). Everyone else (NME, Q, Rough Trade, Drowned in Sound, MixMag etc) was doing it so i thought i would as well. It took me a good while to figure it all out (maybe 3 hours, killer!), even taking a look at iTunes and Wikipedia's "List of albums released in 2008" (here) page.
I started by trying to find all the albums which i could say i had actually listened to all the way through. Which, looking back on it, really wasn't all that much. I got a bit bogged down by Radiohead's In Rainbows (along with various live bootlegs of theirs recorded throughout the year) as well as listening to Favourite Worst Nightmare by Arctic Monkeys (Which, if i may say so, is probably the best album of the last decade). So, the longlist consisted of about 18 (18!) albums which i could honestly say i had spun every track, whittled down to a list of 15 just especially for everyone here (apologies to the other three. I'll explain them later on.)
So I'm sitting with my top fourteen albums of 2008 ("What fourteen albums are they Murray" - "If you would be so kind, I'll get to that later on"), and the fifteenth place i've decided will be either We Are Scientists' Brain Thrust Mastery, Oracular Spectacular by MGMT, Fight With Tools from Flobots, Iglu & Hartly's & Then BOOM (it probably didn't have capitals when they named it. Much like how i always used to write "PANIC! At The Disco") and the above mentioned self-titled debut by Glasvegas. So it was wittled down as follows.
Flobots were the first to go. I realised that regardless of when I had heard it, Fight With Tools had been released in late 2007, then re-released in 2008, with "Handlebars" and "Rise" being subsequent re-released singles. So they no longer qualified. Good album none the less!
The perfect snippet? "Stand Up" - political messages to rival the mighty Rage, with tunes which ... aren't too far off, are they?
Then, it was the turn of Iglu & Hartly to take flight. In all seriousness, it is a very good album, marking something which i'm preeetty sure "hasn't been done before" (Oh God, one of those albums) by incorporation rap, synths, and that general American "I live on the beach and grind benches" attitude of oddles of laid-back-ness. "In This City", the stand out track from the album and first single which got me into them, has this resonant feel of commitment to someone or something (I'm not quite sure) - a message which for some reason had me caught up quite a bit in a way I wasn't too sure about. Every time I listened to it it reminded me of all them summers gone past which involved basically sitting around in a park doing nothing, or doing something like sitting on a beach somewhere in America with your "one true love" or someone along those lines (something which I'm probably not going to be doing any time soon for numerous reasons, but oh well). Only a few things went wrong with this album, which was the reason why i didn't name it in the fifteen (I'm probably going to keep calling it "the 15" purely for how cool it makes me look). Firstly, when i was listening to it, after about 7 tracks or so (I think it has about 12 in total) i did actually change over. Which is never a good thing. This could have obviously been a sudden urge to listen to something else, but as far as i remember, it was due to things getting a bit samey. I&H have a very good formula for good music worked out (probably the most significant thing they've done their entire lives), but every now and again they will have to mix it up a bit, something which wasn't done particularly well on the album. On the other hand, you've got "Hey, if it works, why change it?". I know. I've said my bit. And secondly, i can't help but think that that 2/10 NME review branding them "MGMT rip-offs" (Though you didn't mind asking them along to Glasgow to do an NME Awards Show, did you guys...) was in my mind somewhere a bit.
Highlight of the night:"In This City" - NME gave this track an 8/10, a whole six...things better than the album review. Listen to it, and you'll know what we're talking about.
Now, with the two "Alt rap" artists out of the way, all that remained were WAS, MGMT, and, uh, GLSVGS (that could catch on). Now these are three artists who have some very defining characteristics; they stormed the festival season, they had a number of very well-reveived singles - both by the UK Charts and the critics, it seemed - as well the having the ability to be very, very funny. Realising that Glasvegas were probably not gonna take it on that last one, here's why i gave them it on the former two.
Ok, so singles-wise, its been We Are Scientists with "After Hours"/"Chick Lit"/"Impatience", MGMT with "Time to Pretend"/"Electric Feel"/"Kids", and Glasvegas had "Geraldine"/"Daddy's Gone" (I'm not going to include that Snowflake thing [nothing more than a stop-gap EP to me], or any of the singles before the album, which were basically singles off of Home Tapes [Glasvegas' demo tape released a while back]). Looking at the above, most people would put Glasvegas out of the running straight away, myself probably included. So i decided to look past these singles and try and think of stand out tracks from their respective albums which were not released - as i think so much criticism of an album these days is actually criticism of one particular single.
This is the point where I crossed MGMT off of the list. Whilst O.S. is something of a very unique effort, if you do take away the three singles above, you're pretty much left with the bare bones. I'll admit, I loved "Time To Pretend", "Electric Feel" was pretty solid, and "Kids", i suppose, has cool noises in it - but without these, i don't think the album can stand on its own two feet. It certainly didn't live up to those Zane Lowe-voiced television adverts. For an album which started off so strongly with "Time To Pretend", it dips gradually to a background lull by the time you're at the final track, again being something which i lost interest in. Hell, even now people are remembering "Kids" more for what Soulwax did to it rather than the original. A lot of people rated this album extremely highly, but for me, not material for the 15.
Download, and forget the album - "Time To Pretend" - Lyrics are the definition of my generation. Probably.
So We Are Scientists or Glasvegas. No brainer, eh? Not quite.
Using the tried and tested "can-you-remember-anything-that-wasn't-a-single?" method shown above, I decided that the two were probably on a par. WAS' had the benifit of someone bootlegging (word?) so many of their festival sets, so i had them subconciously inserted in my brain through that as well. The album includes "Lethal Enforcer", a track which i feel is one of their strongest, and probably should have came out instead of "Impatience". The latter was a song which i was also quite fond of prior to its release, and could tell you a significant chunk of the lyrics. On the other side of the coin, Vegas had "Its My Own Cheating Heart That Makes Me Cry" (a very interesting concept if you think about it), "Go, Square Go!" (The inclusion of the "!" varies, and could this have been first mention of the line "Here We Fucking Go!"?) and "Flowers + Football Tops" (the first song I ever heard them play, I originally hated it...). You might be starting to see where this is heading.
We also had their spectacular live performances, with the two bands taking somewhat opposing directions. We Are Scientists, if we're talking live performances here, usually do storm it. I'm sure EVERYONE remembers that gig at the Academy a couple of years back (the one where everyone was there, the one where we all nearly got killed, the one where we all were split up, the one where they finished with the cover of "End of the Road", usually goes by any one of those titles), but from there it somewhat dips. Playing more recently at the ABC to what was a mediocre crowd, the new songs went unwelcomed and Keith Murray (the other Murray, obviously)'s humour failed to rouse the crowd. Following this at Reading, We Are Scientists played on what was the indiest stage of the summer (I'm pretty sure anyways - The Killers & Bloc Party headlining, backed up with The Raconteurs, Editors, Dirty Pretty Things, The Subways, British Sea Power, The Automatic, and of course We Are Scientists) in a slightly better performance than that of Glasgow's, but i couldn't help thinking following hearing the songs I had waited to hear ("It's a Hit" and "After Hours") that i was missing something.
Glasvegas made their move in the opposite direction. Now it may not have been the smartest move, but the first time I saw the band was due to someone booking them to support The Wombats (really not the best idea I've ever heard - there's really no similarities there), in a performance which i could probably deem the most uninteresting live concert i have ever been in attendance of (I'm going to casually slip over Maximo Park's Edge Festival 2008 performance for now). I remember it exactly, they opened with "Flowers + Football Tops" and closed with "Daddy's Gone", and the whole way through, we didn't move, we booed, we nearly got killed by the natives. It really was bad. By the time Underage Festival rolled around, "Geraldine" had dropped and I'd considered that I maybe actually liked them. A combination of patriotism and lack of other good bands playing in Victoria Park in London that day led to my first proper Glasvegas concert, one which i ended up viewing from the second row with a few other Scots (nice to see we weren't the only ones making the trip) and enjoying quite a bit, actually. I remember "Go Square Go" being quite a higlight, and for some reason singing along to all of the songs - and here was me thinking this was a band i didn't really like.
Reading next, and Glasvegas' performance was a bit special. I turned up late to the set, because I was off watching Tenacious D. But as I arrived, performances of the last two singles really did stand out at the festival, in what was probably the best set i'd ever seen them play (although that wouldn't have been very hard to come by at that point me thinks).
So taking all that into account, I finally decided. The fifteenth best album of 2008 (such an achievement, I'm sure) was:
15. Glasvegas - Glasvegas
Looking back over Brain Thrust Mastery, its really quite unashamedly...2007. Firstly, the "Brain Thrust Mastery" tour did actually take place in 2007. As well as this, "After Hours" was released of December of that year, tipping it that side of the boundary a bit more. Again this was not in any way a bad album, I just think that by the time they released "Impatience", the whole harmonising gang-vocals thing was getting just a bit too country for me, and the band who created "The Great Escape" seemed like something of a distant past. Definate contender for No. 16 here.
Brianstorm of Mastery - "After Hours" - probably the best thing this band have ever released, I've heard its about death though, which makes me a bit sad.
The first question that arises from that is how can i say that Glasvegas is barely the fifteenth best album of 2008, when other publications are heralding it as "An audio version of Jesus" (May not be actually published in any major work)? Glasvegas are a bit like Marmite. If you put them on toast, they won't taste very nice. No. Wait that came out all wrong. What i meant was, 50% of the population will listen to them and say "This man is a genius.". The other 50% will listen and respond with "What the hell's wrong with that guy's voice?". Me? I'm somewhere in between. I think that the crowd's participation in the performance actually makes you want to listen to them more (probably most evident when, at both Underage and Reading, when Scottish flags were waved as they played "Daddy's Gone"). But there's only so much sadness which can be listened to in one go. Everyone likes a tearjerker, but not 10 back to back. As mentioned earlier, the lyrical content of "Its My Own Cheating Heart That Makes Me Cry" is almost laughable, and subsequent "Christmas album" A Snowflake Fell... is disappointing, at best. Personally I honestly can't quite say i see what people love about this band so much, but I love them just enough to give them this.
Pure dead Brilliant track - "Geraldine" - One of the more happier numbers on the disc, and one of the few not about dying or death.
Right so I'm hoping the explanation above won't be the same for the next fourteen albums. What can I say? Its been a long year! I
I would very much appreciate it if anyone wished to comment on everything I've written. Tell me your best and worst!
I'll post up the next bit soon enough. Thanks for reading!
Muzza2k6,
local music journalist
to be
obviously
Anyways to show my anger at them I'm going to post the first significant piece of information of 2009 to this thing - its my best albums of 2008 (15 to be exact). Everyone else (NME, Q, Rough Trade, Drowned in Sound, MixMag etc) was doing it so i thought i would as well. It took me a good while to figure it all out (maybe 3 hours, killer!), even taking a look at iTunes and Wikipedia's "List of albums released in 2008" (here) page.
I started by trying to find all the albums which i could say i had actually listened to all the way through. Which, looking back on it, really wasn't all that much. I got a bit bogged down by Radiohead's In Rainbows (along with various live bootlegs of theirs recorded throughout the year) as well as listening to Favourite Worst Nightmare by Arctic Monkeys (Which, if i may say so, is probably the best album of the last decade). So, the longlist consisted of about 18 (18!) albums which i could honestly say i had spun every track, whittled down to a list of 15 just especially for everyone here (apologies to the other three. I'll explain them later on.)
So I'm sitting with my top fourteen albums of 2008 ("What fourteen albums are they Murray" - "If you would be so kind, I'll get to that later on"), and the fifteenth place i've decided will be either We Are Scientists' Brain Thrust Mastery, Oracular Spectacular by MGMT, Fight With Tools from Flobots, Iglu & Hartly's & Then BOOM (it probably didn't have capitals when they named it. Much like how i always used to write "PANIC! At The Disco") and the above mentioned self-titled debut by Glasvegas. So it was wittled down as follows.
Flobots were the first to go. I realised that regardless of when I had heard it, Fight With Tools had been released in late 2007, then re-released in 2008, with "Handlebars" and "Rise" being subsequent re-released singles. So they no longer qualified. Good album none the less!
The perfect snippet? "Stand Up" - political messages to rival the mighty Rage, with tunes which ... aren't too far off, are they?
Then, it was the turn of Iglu & Hartly to take flight. In all seriousness, it is a very good album, marking something which i'm preeetty sure "hasn't been done before" (Oh God, one of those albums) by incorporation rap, synths, and that general American "I live on the beach and grind benches" attitude of oddles of laid-back-ness. "In This City", the stand out track from the album and first single which got me into them, has this resonant feel of commitment to someone or something (I'm not quite sure) - a message which for some reason had me caught up quite a bit in a way I wasn't too sure about. Every time I listened to it it reminded me of all them summers gone past which involved basically sitting around in a park doing nothing, or doing something like sitting on a beach somewhere in America with your "one true love" or someone along those lines (something which I'm probably not going to be doing any time soon for numerous reasons, but oh well). Only a few things went wrong with this album, which was the reason why i didn't name it in the fifteen (I'm probably going to keep calling it "the 15" purely for how cool it makes me look). Firstly, when i was listening to it, after about 7 tracks or so (I think it has about 12 in total) i did actually change over. Which is never a good thing. This could have obviously been a sudden urge to listen to something else, but as far as i remember, it was due to things getting a bit samey. I&H have a very good formula for good music worked out (probably the most significant thing they've done their entire lives), but every now and again they will have to mix it up a bit, something which wasn't done particularly well on the album. On the other hand, you've got "Hey, if it works, why change it?". I know. I've said my bit. And secondly, i can't help but think that that 2/10 NME review branding them "MGMT rip-offs" (Though you didn't mind asking them along to Glasgow to do an NME Awards Show, did you guys...) was in my mind somewhere a bit.
Highlight of the night:"In This City" - NME gave this track an 8/10, a whole six...things better than the album review. Listen to it, and you'll know what we're talking about.
Now, with the two "Alt rap" artists out of the way, all that remained were WAS, MGMT, and, uh, GLSVGS (that could catch on). Now these are three artists who have some very defining characteristics; they stormed the festival season, they had a number of very well-reveived singles - both by the UK Charts and the critics, it seemed - as well the having the ability to be very, very funny. Realising that Glasvegas were probably not gonna take it on that last one, here's why i gave them it on the former two.
Ok, so singles-wise, its been We Are Scientists with "After Hours"/"Chick Lit"/"Impatience", MGMT with "Time to Pretend"/"Electric Feel"/"Kids", and Glasvegas had "Geraldine"/"Daddy's Gone" (I'm not going to include that Snowflake thing [nothing more than a stop-gap EP to me], or any of the singles before the album, which were basically singles off of Home Tapes [Glasvegas' demo tape released a while back]). Looking at the above, most people would put Glasvegas out of the running straight away, myself probably included. So i decided to look past these singles and try and think of stand out tracks from their respective albums which were not released - as i think so much criticism of an album these days is actually criticism of one particular single.
This is the point where I crossed MGMT off of the list. Whilst O.S. is something of a very unique effort, if you do take away the three singles above, you're pretty much left with the bare bones. I'll admit, I loved "Time To Pretend", "Electric Feel" was pretty solid, and "Kids", i suppose, has cool noises in it - but without these, i don't think the album can stand on its own two feet. It certainly didn't live up to those Zane Lowe-voiced television adverts. For an album which started off so strongly with "Time To Pretend", it dips gradually to a background lull by the time you're at the final track, again being something which i lost interest in. Hell, even now people are remembering "Kids" more for what Soulwax did to it rather than the original. A lot of people rated this album extremely highly, but for me, not material for the 15.
Download, and forget the album - "Time To Pretend" - Lyrics are the definition of my generation. Probably.
So We Are Scientists or Glasvegas. No brainer, eh? Not quite.
Using the tried and tested "can-you-remember-anything-that-wasn't-a-single?" method shown above, I decided that the two were probably on a par. WAS' had the benifit of someone bootlegging (word?) so many of their festival sets, so i had them subconciously inserted in my brain through that as well. The album includes "Lethal Enforcer", a track which i feel is one of their strongest, and probably should have came out instead of "Impatience". The latter was a song which i was also quite fond of prior to its release, and could tell you a significant chunk of the lyrics. On the other side of the coin, Vegas had "Its My Own Cheating Heart That Makes Me Cry" (a very interesting concept if you think about it), "Go, Square Go!" (The inclusion of the "!" varies, and could this have been first mention of the line "Here We Fucking Go!"?) and "Flowers + Football Tops" (the first song I ever heard them play, I originally hated it...). You might be starting to see where this is heading.
We also had their spectacular live performances, with the two bands taking somewhat opposing directions. We Are Scientists, if we're talking live performances here, usually do storm it. I'm sure EVERYONE remembers that gig at the Academy a couple of years back (the one where everyone was there, the one where we all nearly got killed, the one where we all were split up, the one where they finished with the cover of "End of the Road", usually goes by any one of those titles), but from there it somewhat dips. Playing more recently at the ABC to what was a mediocre crowd, the new songs went unwelcomed and Keith Murray (the other Murray, obviously)'s humour failed to rouse the crowd. Following this at Reading, We Are Scientists played on what was the indiest stage of the summer (I'm pretty sure anyways - The Killers & Bloc Party headlining, backed up with The Raconteurs, Editors, Dirty Pretty Things, The Subways, British Sea Power, The Automatic, and of course We Are Scientists) in a slightly better performance than that of Glasgow's, but i couldn't help thinking following hearing the songs I had waited to hear ("It's a Hit" and "After Hours") that i was missing something.
Glasvegas made their move in the opposite direction. Now it may not have been the smartest move, but the first time I saw the band was due to someone booking them to support The Wombats (really not the best idea I've ever heard - there's really no similarities there), in a performance which i could probably deem the most uninteresting live concert i have ever been in attendance of (I'm going to casually slip over Maximo Park's Edge Festival 2008 performance for now). I remember it exactly, they opened with "Flowers + Football Tops" and closed with "Daddy's Gone", and the whole way through, we didn't move, we booed, we nearly got killed by the natives. It really was bad. By the time Underage Festival rolled around, "Geraldine" had dropped and I'd considered that I maybe actually liked them. A combination of patriotism and lack of other good bands playing in Victoria Park in London that day led to my first proper Glasvegas concert, one which i ended up viewing from the second row with a few other Scots (nice to see we weren't the only ones making the trip) and enjoying quite a bit, actually. I remember "Go Square Go" being quite a higlight, and for some reason singing along to all of the songs - and here was me thinking this was a band i didn't really like.
Reading next, and Glasvegas' performance was a bit special. I turned up late to the set, because I was off watching Tenacious D. But as I arrived, performances of the last two singles really did stand out at the festival, in what was probably the best set i'd ever seen them play (although that wouldn't have been very hard to come by at that point me thinks).
So taking all that into account, I finally decided. The fifteenth best album of 2008 (such an achievement, I'm sure) was:
15. Glasvegas - Glasvegas
Looking back over Brain Thrust Mastery, its really quite unashamedly...2007. Firstly, the "Brain Thrust Mastery" tour did actually take place in 2007. As well as this, "After Hours" was released of December of that year, tipping it that side of the boundary a bit more. Again this was not in any way a bad album, I just think that by the time they released "Impatience", the whole harmonising gang-vocals thing was getting just a bit too country for me, and the band who created "The Great Escape" seemed like something of a distant past. Definate contender for No. 16 here.
Brianstorm of Mastery - "After Hours" - probably the best thing this band have ever released, I've heard its about death though, which makes me a bit sad.
The first question that arises from that is how can i say that Glasvegas is barely the fifteenth best album of 2008, when other publications are heralding it as "An audio version of Jesus" (May not be actually published in any major work)? Glasvegas are a bit like Marmite. If you put them on toast, they won't taste very nice. No. Wait that came out all wrong. What i meant was, 50% of the population will listen to them and say "This man is a genius.". The other 50% will listen and respond with "What the hell's wrong with that guy's voice?". Me? I'm somewhere in between. I think that the crowd's participation in the performance actually makes you want to listen to them more (probably most evident when, at both Underage and Reading, when Scottish flags were waved as they played "Daddy's Gone"). But there's only so much sadness which can be listened to in one go. Everyone likes a tearjerker, but not 10 back to back. As mentioned earlier, the lyrical content of "Its My Own Cheating Heart That Makes Me Cry" is almost laughable, and subsequent "Christmas album" A Snowflake Fell... is disappointing, at best. Personally I honestly can't quite say i see what people love about this band so much, but I love them just enough to give them this.
Pure dead Brilliant track - "Geraldine" - One of the more happier numbers on the disc, and one of the few not about dying or death.
Right so I'm hoping the explanation above won't be the same for the next fourteen albums. What can I say? Its been a long year! I
I would very much appreciate it if anyone wished to comment on everything I've written. Tell me your best and worst!
I'll post up the next bit soon enough. Thanks for reading!
Muzza2k6,
local music journalist
to be
obviously
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