"Don’t rely on other people: In my experience group blog projects suffer way more delays and hiatuses than solo ones. If anyone could potentially write the next entry, anyone could also potentially not write it. If you’ve got a way of making group blog projects work well I would love to hear it – this is very much a nut I’ve not cracked."
(Tom Ewing, Freaky Trigger, less than a month before Noughties By Nature started)
Ah well, we gave it a shot. That doesn't mean we're not hugely thankful for everyone who did take part, so thanks to Oliver Billenness, Thomas Blatchford, Mark Bowen, Jay Breitling, Penny Broadhurst, Dave Bryant, James Edwards, Adam Elmahdi, Iain Forrester, Matt Gaynor, Ben Hall, Paul Hawkins, Simon HB, John Helps, Mark Jones, Rhian Jones, Simon Lawson, Fraser McAlpine, Trev McCabe, Jamie Milton, Tim Murray, Chris Nichol, Ryan O'Grady, Nick Olsen, Dom Passantino, Seb Patrick, Ian Pointer, Jack Pop, David Pott-Negrine, Mark Price, Andy Robertson, Doug Robertson, Robin Seamer, Joe Skrebels, Joe Sparrow, Matt Sullivan, Dunc Vernon, Alex Wisgard, Jamie Woods, TJ Worthington and Peter Wyeth, as well as everyone else who expressed an interest.
As is the nature of this style of crowdsourced list, it's been interesting to see what didn't make the cut. Among the 111 were three unreleased songs, a B-side and one unreleasable (in its original form) track, such being the nature of the beast. And yet no Radiohead, Strokes, Arctics, Kanye, White Stripes, Winehouse, Franz, Elbow, Coldplay, Outkast... What did make it, so that we have all the links in one safe place, were the following:
Spotify playlist
Aaliyah, Adam Green, Airport Girl, Ali Farka Toure and Toumani Diabate, Amanda Palmer, And So I Watch You From Afar, Arcade Fire, Ash, Art Brut, At The Drive-In, The Avalanches, Ballboy, Battles, Bearsuit, Billie The Vision And The Dancers, Blakfish, The Bobby McGees, Brakes, Bright Eyes, British Sea Power, Broadcast, BrokeNCYDE, Burial, Chris T-T, Clock Opera, Colour, Comet Gain, The Concretes, The Coral, Dan Deacon, Darren Hayman, David Cronenberg's Wife, The Delgados, Deerhunter, Dizzee Rascal, Eastern Lane, Eels, The Eighties Matchbox B-Line Disaster, Euros Childs, Felix da Housecat, Girls Aloud, Girls On Top, Half Man Half Biscuit, Hefner, Helen Love, The Hold Steady, The Horrors, Hot Hot Heat, The Indelicates, Jarvis Cocker, Johnny Boy, Johnny Flynn, Johnny Foreigner, Justice vs Simian, Kat Flint, Kate Nash, Klaxons, The Knife, Kylie Minogue, Lambchop, The Libertines, The Long Blondes, Los Campesinos!, The Lucksmiths, Lupen Crook, The Manhattan Love Suicides, Maps, Mclusky, Minnaars, Mint Royale, Missy Elliott, Misty's Big Adventure, Mo-Ho-Bish-O-Pi, Moldy Peaches, Monkey Swallows The Universe, The National, Neon Neon, New Order, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, Patrick Wolf, Pelle Carlberg, The Pipettes, Primal Scream, Pulp, Rachel Stevens, The Research, Robbie Williams & Kylie Minogue, Ryan Adams, Saturday Looks Good To Me, Saul Williams, Saves The Day, Sebastian Tellier, Sergeant Buzfuz, Snow White, Spiller feat. Sophie Ellis-Bextor, Stars, The Streets, Sufjan Stevens, Sugababes, Sunset Rubdown, Super Furry Animals, Tim Ten Yen, The Ting Tings, Town Bike, The Unicorns, Von Sudenfed, The Wave Pictures, Why?, Wyclef Jean, XX Teens and You Slut!.
Showing posts with label noughties by nature. Show all posts
Showing posts with label noughties by nature. Show all posts
Sunday, November 29, 2009
Saturday, November 28, 2009
Noughties By Nature #111: Tim Ten Yen – Sea Anenome
It often feels that the last decade has scene a growing chasm between the “mainstream” and “underground” music scenes in Britain and it also often feels that Tim Ten Yen – who writes pop songs but moves in underground indie circles - is a man caught between these two camps, lacking the major label clout to dominate the airwaves whilst being misperceived by sections of the independent media as an exercise in post-modern irony.
Which is a massive shame as he writes joyous, catchy and indescribably wonderful songs that are simultaneously utterly universal and entirely unique. Over the past couple of years I’ve introduced Tim Ten Yen’s music to a variety of people – both hardcore music lovers (from a variety of backgrounds) and casual fans – and the overwhelming majority have fallen in love with it too – it seems his songs can’t help put a smile on people’s faces. Once you combine this with the fact he’s as charming, engaging and charismatic a live performer as I’ve ever seen it’s a winning combination.
Sea Anemone is the absolute pick of the bunch – on first listen simply a fantastic piece of throwaway pop but further listens reveal it to be a complex and moving contemplation of mortality. It’s utterly life affirming stuff and up there with the finest songs of the decade. At one point Tim Ten Yen sings “I don’t want what I don’t deserve”. On that basis he’d be utterly justified in wanting international stardom.
Paul Hawkins
[Spotify]
[YouTube (live)]
[Album: Everything Beautiful Reminds Me Of You]
Which is a massive shame as he writes joyous, catchy and indescribably wonderful songs that are simultaneously utterly universal and entirely unique. Over the past couple of years I’ve introduced Tim Ten Yen’s music to a variety of people – both hardcore music lovers (from a variety of backgrounds) and casual fans – and the overwhelming majority have fallen in love with it too – it seems his songs can’t help put a smile on people’s faces. Once you combine this with the fact he’s as charming, engaging and charismatic a live performer as I’ve ever seen it’s a winning combination.
Sea Anemone is the absolute pick of the bunch – on first listen simply a fantastic piece of throwaway pop but further listens reveal it to be a complex and moving contemplation of mortality. It’s utterly life affirming stuff and up there with the finest songs of the decade. At one point Tim Ten Yen sings “I don’t want what I don’t deserve”. On that basis he’d be utterly justified in wanting international stardom.
Paul Hawkins
[Spotify]
[YouTube (live)]
[Album: Everything Beautiful Reminds Me Of You]
Noughties By Nature #110: Ali Farka Toure and Toumani Diabate - Hawa Dolo
One big feature of this decade has been African music. No, not Vampire Weekend and young white boys with highly-strung guitars. Actual music from Africa, by African people. Maybe I was too trapped in a hermetically-sealed indie world to notice before, but it seems that the last ten years have seen much more coverage of music that wouldn't have normally featured in the rock press. Quite right too. I've only dipped a toe in the vast ocean of awesome African music out there, but the little exposure I've had has expanded my tiny mind.
Probably my favourite African album of the decade is Ali Farka Toure and Toumani Diabate's In The Heart of the Moon, a gorgeous album featuring mostly nothing but Toure's guitar and Diabate's kora, recorded without rehersal in a hotel in Mali. It's effortlessly beautiful, and culminates in Hawa Dolo, a track that's amazing enough on its own, but hearing it as the climax to all that comes before, it's breathtaking. There are few songs I've heard this decade that are quite so simple and devastating.
Tim Murray
[Spotify]
[Album: In The Heart Of The Moon]
Probably my favourite African album of the decade is Ali Farka Toure and Toumani Diabate's In The Heart of the Moon, a gorgeous album featuring mostly nothing but Toure's guitar and Diabate's kora, recorded without rehersal in a hotel in Mali. It's effortlessly beautiful, and culminates in Hawa Dolo, a track that's amazing enough on its own, but hearing it as the climax to all that comes before, it's breathtaking. There are few songs I've heard this decade that are quite so simple and devastating.
Tim Murray
[Spotify]
[Album: In The Heart Of The Moon]
Noughties By Nature #109: Sebastian Tellier – Divine
Eurovision entries seldom seem to crop-up in year-end lists, never mind decade-end ones, and that’s usually for a good reason. Whilst the contest isn’t quite the car-crash viewing everyone supposes it is – the X Factor has cornered the car-crash market much more successfully, I think you’ll find, whilst Eurovision yearns for credibility – it has to be said that truly ‘classic’ moments are very few and far between.
Spin back to May 2008, then, and watch as respected French artist Sebastian Tellier coolly ploughs his way on to the Eurovision stage on a golf cart, his hair flickering slightly as he goes. The performance he went on to give was below-par due to a ridiculously dated Eurovision ruling which insisted he had to create all the sampled vocal noises on the track ‘live’. The single itself, however, was the most sublime release of the year.
Divine could teach most half-arsed eighties revivalists a thing or two about classic, adventurous pop structures. Beginning with a droning keyboard and the Art of Noisey samples the Euro-chiefs seemed to find objectionable, it reveals itself to be a pocket symphony of small, perfectly formed ideas – taking Brian Wilson song structures and making them sound sleek, digital and luxurious.
Tellier’s Sexuality album from the same year was actually rather patchy, but long after the memories of the tracks from that have faded away, Divine stands strong, sounding like pop music at its most thrilling and adventurous. Oh yeah, and naturally, this was never voted into the top half of the Eurovision scoreboard – what world do you think we’re living in, exactly?
Dave Bryant
[Spotify]
[YouTube]
[Album: Sexuality]
Spin back to May 2008, then, and watch as respected French artist Sebastian Tellier coolly ploughs his way on to the Eurovision stage on a golf cart, his hair flickering slightly as he goes. The performance he went on to give was below-par due to a ridiculously dated Eurovision ruling which insisted he had to create all the sampled vocal noises on the track ‘live’. The single itself, however, was the most sublime release of the year.
Divine could teach most half-arsed eighties revivalists a thing or two about classic, adventurous pop structures. Beginning with a droning keyboard and the Art of Noisey samples the Euro-chiefs seemed to find objectionable, it reveals itself to be a pocket symphony of small, perfectly formed ideas – taking Brian Wilson song structures and making them sound sleek, digital and luxurious.
Tellier’s Sexuality album from the same year was actually rather patchy, but long after the memories of the tracks from that have faded away, Divine stands strong, sounding like pop music at its most thrilling and adventurous. Oh yeah, and naturally, this was never voted into the top half of the Eurovision scoreboard – what world do you think we’re living in, exactly?
Dave Bryant
[Spotify]
[YouTube]
[Album: Sexuality]
Friday, November 27, 2009
Noughties By Nature #108: The National - Slow Show
I was relatively late in discovering The National, having only found out about them after their most recent full length effort, 2007’s Boxer. Before this I would admit to being pretty naïve musically, my favourite band having been Kings Of Leon (in my defence they hadn’t at this point composed a ditty about incendiary intercourse), who had, a couple of months previous, released their third album Because Of The Times, which had left me immensely disappointed and in somewhat of a musical crisis; fearing that if I didn’t like the new direction my favourite band was taking then there was little hope for me to enjoy any other music.
Then, after one night of internet searching, I chanced upon The National’s music for the first time via a Youtube video that sets Boxer’s centrepiece, Slow Show, against clips from Jean-Luc Godard’s Masculin, Féminin, the multimedia marriage of which works tremendously well both in terms of style and narrative.
On first listen I was brought close to tears and so overwhelmed by the song that, despite it being roughly 1am and raining faintly outside, I decided upon taking a 5 mile walk to meditate on what I had just heard (musical epiphanies make you act a little irrationally, apparently): the initial wash of feedback that is reminiscent of water moving through old rusty pipes; the bright, urgent strums of the acoustic guitar; Matt Berninger’s plaintive vocal; the way the song expands into an elevated chorus as the kick-snare pattern changes from spirited punctuation to a skip in the step of the protagonist. And just as the song breaks dramatically into its piano and tom-tom coda, with the narrator reciting, with mantra-like security, “you know I dreamed about you for 29 years, before I saw you. You know I dreamed about you; I missed you for… for 29 years,” so too did my musical preferences change irrevocably thereafter. I found the music I had been dreaming about and missing for 20 years.
Chris Nichol
[Spotify]
[YouTube (live)]
[Album: Boxer]
Then, after one night of internet searching, I chanced upon The National’s music for the first time via a Youtube video that sets Boxer’s centrepiece, Slow Show, against clips from Jean-Luc Godard’s Masculin, Féminin, the multimedia marriage of which works tremendously well both in terms of style and narrative.
On first listen I was brought close to tears and so overwhelmed by the song that, despite it being roughly 1am and raining faintly outside, I decided upon taking a 5 mile walk to meditate on what I had just heard (musical epiphanies make you act a little irrationally, apparently): the initial wash of feedback that is reminiscent of water moving through old rusty pipes; the bright, urgent strums of the acoustic guitar; Matt Berninger’s plaintive vocal; the way the song expands into an elevated chorus as the kick-snare pattern changes from spirited punctuation to a skip in the step of the protagonist. And just as the song breaks dramatically into its piano and tom-tom coda, with the narrator reciting, with mantra-like security, “you know I dreamed about you for 29 years, before I saw you. You know I dreamed about you; I missed you for… for 29 years,” so too did my musical preferences change irrevocably thereafter. I found the music I had been dreaming about and missing for 20 years.
Chris Nichol
[Spotify]
[YouTube (live)]
[Album: Boxer]
Noughties By Nature #107: Minnaars - Are Lovers
Picking a song from your local music scene in a list such as this is a risky business, but I genuinely believe this deserves to be here on it's own merit. At six minutes long, the fact that it made the daytime playlist on Radio 1 should be pretty astonishing, but from start to finish this is a painfully current, expertly crafted pop opus that touches all the right basses and builds to one of the most perfect indie-math-pop-dance crossover crescendos you could hope for.
John Helps, Maybeshewill
[YouTube (live)]
John Helps, Maybeshewill
[YouTube (live)]
Noughties By Nature #106: Town Bike - Ride Of Ya Life
I guess now, everyone has their myspace story. Arctic Monkeys, Lily Allen, Kate Nash BLAH BLAH BLAH. Yes, I first heard Nash on myspace and I fell in love a bit, but when I first heard Town Bike and their only song, Ride Of Ya Life, on Myspace, I fell in love a lot.
You know how every band’s first album is so much better than their second? They reckon it’s cos you’ve got a lifetime to write that first album, and a six-week bubble inbetween touring and cocaine and models and fame and fortune and big coats and Top Of The Pops to write the second LP. The Clash, Elastica, Definitely Maybe, The Stone Roses... anyway, the point is, is that this is one of those first album songs, about being in a band, and learning to play and everything is so fresh and exciting.
There are some wonderful self-deprecating lines about the band’s supposed inability to sing / play / write lyrics, and yet they can do all three ever so naively well, after all, this is gonna be the ‘Ride of your life, Town bike’. It’s a fun fresh burst of punk pop youth and vigour, synth lines and handclaps. As Lammo said when he played them on his show recently, ‘it’s the kind of record that I think John Peel would have played’: I can’t say it any better than that.
Jamie Woods, Super Kawaii POP!
You know how every band’s first album is so much better than their second? They reckon it’s cos you’ve got a lifetime to write that first album, and a six-week bubble inbetween touring and cocaine and models and fame and fortune and big coats and Top Of The Pops to write the second LP. The Clash, Elastica, Definitely Maybe, The Stone Roses... anyway, the point is, is that this is one of those first album songs, about being in a band, and learning to play and everything is so fresh and exciting.
There are some wonderful self-deprecating lines about the band’s supposed inability to sing / play / write lyrics, and yet they can do all three ever so naively well, after all, this is gonna be the ‘Ride of your life, Town bike’. It’s a fun fresh burst of punk pop youth and vigour, synth lines and handclaps. As Lammo said when he played them on his show recently, ‘it’s the kind of record that I think John Peel would have played’: I can’t say it any better than that.
Jamie Woods, Super Kawaii POP!
Noughties By Nature #105: Von Sudenfed – Flooded
Despite starting them with The Unutterable and Are You Missing Winner – albums with undeniably flashes of brilliance, yet hardly considered solid efforts even by the hardiest MES aficionados – the 2000s have seen the strongest rebirth(s) of the Fall and their most inspired music since forever. Still, even with a decade that saw him recording career-best Peel sessions (I’d argue), singing with The Monks, appearing on a BBC Three sitcom as Jesus, reading the football scores, scaring Newsnight viewers and knocking out a rambling autobiography, teaming up with Mouse On Mars and producing an album as Von Sudenfed was the best decision Mark E Smith has made in the last ten years. Mouse On Mars have hardly had a bad century so far either, coming up trumps with their own albums of pneumatic, quirky IDM, as well as continuing their label Sonig. But Tromatic Reflexxions would take the disco biscuit.
Both parties were hardly strangers to collaboration on meeting. Jan St Werner had worked with Wolfgang Flur on his album Time Pie (Flur’s autobiography, I Was A Robot, is essentially a long novelised advert for it) and moonlighted as Microstoria with Markus Popp from Oval. Meanwhile, even if you don’t count The Fall as one long string of shifting pooled resources with Smith as conductor and arranger, he had previously popped up on record with everyone from Inspiral Carpets and Elastica to Coldcut and DNA (not that one). It may have been these years of experience that mean Von Sudenfed brings the best out of both of them, plunging them out of their comfort zones yet garnering harmonious results, and nowhere is this seen more pertinently than on Flooded. St Werner and Toma weave pounding layers of dancefloor-orientated, burbling, distorted techno fodder and, when it’s needed, manipulate the voice of MES to buggery as he recounts a tale that came to him in a dream of a DJ urinating so heavily behind the decks that it floods the club he’s performing in (obviously). Mark has hinted that a second foray with “The Sud” is possible – if anything of the calibre of Flooded appears in the future then the 2010s have at least one treat in store.
Thomas Blatchford
[Spotify]
[YouTube]
[Album: Tromatic Reflexxions]
Both parties were hardly strangers to collaboration on meeting. Jan St Werner had worked with Wolfgang Flur on his album Time Pie (Flur’s autobiography, I Was A Robot, is essentially a long novelised advert for it) and moonlighted as Microstoria with Markus Popp from Oval. Meanwhile, even if you don’t count The Fall as one long string of shifting pooled resources with Smith as conductor and arranger, he had previously popped up on record with everyone from Inspiral Carpets and Elastica to Coldcut and DNA (not that one). It may have been these years of experience that mean Von Sudenfed brings the best out of both of them, plunging them out of their comfort zones yet garnering harmonious results, and nowhere is this seen more pertinently than on Flooded. St Werner and Toma weave pounding layers of dancefloor-orientated, burbling, distorted techno fodder and, when it’s needed, manipulate the voice of MES to buggery as he recounts a tale that came to him in a dream of a DJ urinating so heavily behind the decks that it floods the club he’s performing in (obviously). Mark has hinted that a second foray with “The Sud” is possible – if anything of the calibre of Flooded appears in the future then the 2010s have at least one treat in store.
Thomas Blatchford
[Spotify]
[YouTube]
[Album: Tromatic Reflexxions]
Thursday, November 26, 2009
Noughties By Nature #104: Sergeant Buzfuz – Here Come The Popes (Parts 2 and 3)
UK anti-folkers Sergeant Buzfuz wormed their way into the 6 Music schedules with a series of satirical ditties about corruption in the Catholic church. Whilst their lyrical content seemed to hail from a completely different century, protesting about Papal orgies, the suppression of information and the suicidal ex-wives of Priests, the treatment sounds quite like nothing else – traditional folk fiddles battle with honking horns, Joe Murphy’s Steve Harley-esque vocals, mob cheers and some abnormally funky bass guitar lines.
Part two of the song is a laidback, acoustic treatment which wanly documents various incidents of corruption, Murphy’s vocals seeming detached and despairing. Part 3 then pans out into a louder, more anarchic scene, blasts in with a fanfare, and continues the theme with a distinct sense of vengeance. ...Popes manages to be political, amusing, adventurous, intelligent and incredibly memorable, features which are rare in isolation, and seldom ever found in the same song at the same time. It’s quirky without being whacky, imaginative without being self-indulgent, and funny without being throwaway. It may even at times make you feel angry.
In the underbelly of the indie music scene, this is exactly what the best material sounded like in the noughties – far away from the bright lights of the Reading main stage and the predictability of the XFM daytime schedules, there’s a sense that the seeds of something more thrilling are being sown.
Dave Bryant
[Spotify (Part 2)]
[Spotify (Part 3)]
[YouTube (Part 3)]
[Album: High Slang]
Part two of the song is a laidback, acoustic treatment which wanly documents various incidents of corruption, Murphy’s vocals seeming detached and despairing. Part 3 then pans out into a louder, more anarchic scene, blasts in with a fanfare, and continues the theme with a distinct sense of vengeance. ...Popes manages to be political, amusing, adventurous, intelligent and incredibly memorable, features which are rare in isolation, and seldom ever found in the same song at the same time. It’s quirky without being whacky, imaginative without being self-indulgent, and funny without being throwaway. It may even at times make you feel angry.
In the underbelly of the indie music scene, this is exactly what the best material sounded like in the noughties – far away from the bright lights of the Reading main stage and the predictability of the XFM daytime schedules, there’s a sense that the seeds of something more thrilling are being sown.
Dave Bryant
[Spotify (Part 2)]
[Spotify (Part 3)]
[YouTube (Part 3)]
[Album: High Slang]
Noughties By Nature #103: Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds - Breathless
To be honest I feel a bit of a fraud writing this induction. I'm sure that every hip groovy person reading this will own a least one Nick Cave album, I don't. I do own this song, but only from iTunes. I can't even pretend to know all of his back catalogue and yet here I am writing the entry that will seal Mr Cave's place in Noughties by Nature. I bet you really wished that you wrote that e-mail now eh?
But for me Nick Cave's Breathless really is a song of the noughties as it's impact on my life has spanned six years. I remember first hearing it on Mark Radcliffe's late night Radio 2 slot some time in 2004 when he would always remark about if he was playing the version with the crazy flute playing at the beginning or not. Either way the song was beautiful. Light and peaceful to the ear but with a real bite to the lyrics, which had Nick saying that without the love of his life he's breathless.
At some point during this being on Radio 2 near-constantly I found myself a girlfriend (or rather she found me). I played her the song, she liked it and liked the video with the bunnies even more.
So when I proposed and she foolishly accepted there was only one choice for the music of our first dance*. And it fitted perfectly. After telling my family and friends in June 2008 how much I loved my wife, having a song to reinforce that declaration made the day even more perfect.
So thanks to Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds for playing at our wedding. I'm sure you'll be played at every anniversary as well.
* Rilo Kiley's I Never came close but there wasn't much of a beat to awkwardly dance to.
Ben Hall
[Spotify]
[YouTube]
[Album: Abattoir Blues/The Lyre Of Orpheus]
But for me Nick Cave's Breathless really is a song of the noughties as it's impact on my life has spanned six years. I remember first hearing it on Mark Radcliffe's late night Radio 2 slot some time in 2004 when he would always remark about if he was playing the version with the crazy flute playing at the beginning or not. Either way the song was beautiful. Light and peaceful to the ear but with a real bite to the lyrics, which had Nick saying that without the love of his life he's breathless.
At some point during this being on Radio 2 near-constantly I found myself a girlfriend (or rather she found me). I played her the song, she liked it and liked the video with the bunnies even more.
So when I proposed and she foolishly accepted there was only one choice for the music of our first dance*. And it fitted perfectly. After telling my family and friends in June 2008 how much I loved my wife, having a song to reinforce that declaration made the day even more perfect.
So thanks to Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds for playing at our wedding. I'm sure you'll be played at every anniversary as well.
* Rilo Kiley's I Never came close but there wasn't much of a beat to awkwardly dance to.
Ben Hall
[Spotify]
[YouTube]
[Album: Abattoir Blues/The Lyre Of Orpheus]
Noughties By Nature #102: Kat Flint - Fearsome Crowd
Kat Flint’s 2006 debut was a quiet masterpiece of songs about the everyday world we find ourselves in, made in a living room with borrowed favours and a car boot orchestra of children’s toy instruments. Its opener, Fearsome Crowd, is a four minute poem to London life – its mundanity, the strained quietness of millions of people sharing the same space, the same time but sharing little else but the emptiness and anonymity that comes with living in the capital.
The song flows like a tube ride with each station stop a lull as another instrument, another recollection is introduced. Secret thoughts and hopes bounce along, propelled by her distinctive voice, acoustic guitars and cardboard box drums. Somewhere in the middle a synth appears. There are lots of "bop ba da"s to sing along to. I love songs about London but I don’t think I’d ever heard anyone manage to describe the aching loneliness that you can feel living there until I heard this.
Peter Wyeth
[YouTube (live)]
[Album: Dirty Birds]
In a city where the drunks are dressed in suits worth twice my rent, they fall asleep
On the shoulders of the strangers on the trains that map out every working week
And the streets run red with buses and blood from the fights that break out between friends
In a sea of eyes that look but never smile we're heading home
So we can all be alone
The song flows like a tube ride with each station stop a lull as another instrument, another recollection is introduced. Secret thoughts and hopes bounce along, propelled by her distinctive voice, acoustic guitars and cardboard box drums. Somewhere in the middle a synth appears. There are lots of "bop ba da"s to sing along to. I love songs about London but I don’t think I’d ever heard anyone manage to describe the aching loneliness that you can feel living there until I heard this.
Peter Wyeth
[YouTube (live)]
[Album: Dirty Birds]
Noughties By Nature #101: The Coral - Dreaming of You
The Coral debuted in 2002 with a melting-pot of an album, bowled along on waves of retro-rummaging and sea-shanty-imbued psychedelia. Second single ‘Dreaming of You’ is perfectly structured pop that shines like a diamond dug out of a Merseybeat time-capsule, but remains sufficiently scratched with the band’s spirit of unpolished experimentation to rise above mere emulation of their influences. It’s a deceptively jaunty two-and-a-bit minutes, smoothing over the raw melancholic isolation displayed in its lyrics with a torrent of ramshackle harmonies and a restless and infectious melodic vitality. While subsequent albums would see The Coral’s envelope-pushing lead them down increasingly complex musical paths, ‘Dreaming of You’ is a slice of straight up-and-down genius whose star never fades.
Rhian Jones
Rhian Jones
Wednesday, November 25, 2009
Noughties By Nature #100: Johnny Foreigner - All Moseley Gardens
Were it not for the band being wonderfully prolific, drawing a line between "old Johnny Foreigner" and "new Johnny Foreigner" would be sort of a ridiculous endeavor. After all, we're talking about a relatively young band that played its first gigs only four years ago. But facts are facts and there is a hell of a lot of Johnny Foreigner music to pore over, and in this writer's opinion much of it stands out as being among the best of this waning decade. The early Johnny Foreigner stuff falls squarely into a "we made it at ours" bucket, versus the newer "we made it at theirs" material whose production was paid for and the product of which is manifested in the torrent of singles and the EP and two albums that have been on offer for the last three years. But early on, in the pre-Best Before years (more accurately "the Laundrette years" or the "we recorded it in our lock-up" years), hunting out the music was almost as exciting as the music itself. Even from the beginning there were scads of tracks, and ardent searches of web sites that launched and shuttered in rapid succession yielded massive rewards. We currently have 149 tracks from the Birmingham-based noise-pop outfit in our iTunes.
Perhaps our favorite among these (and, actually, statistically our favorite song based on iTunes playcount) is the early acoustic ballad All Moseley Gardens. Fans either first encountered the track among the stuff collected in the various demos collections (there were at least two versions of I Like You Mostly Late At Never, and another called Every Day Is A Constant Battle, if memory serves) or as The Hidden Track At The End Of The EP, 2007's Arcs Across The City. We went to see Johnny Foreigner's American live debut in New York two years ago, drank a lot, and have a vague recollection of drummer Junior Laidley telling us that the trio included All Moseley Gardens on Arcs because we kept blogging about it. Given our proclivity for generating and believing false memories, this probably didn't happen. But who knows?
While we wouldn't discover it until about a year later, the production of All Moseley Gardens is dead similar to that of the music on the "lost album" We Left You Sleeping And Gone Now. Which is a shorter way of saying adventurous lo-fi production that includes voices - and sheep? - in the periphery, borderline inscrutable but memorably poignant lyrics, weird keyboards, xylophone - you know, "old Johnny Foreigner," yeh? But the real hook of All Moseley Gardens is the stinging emotional weight conveyed in Alexei Berrow's murky lyrics. Berrow's words ("on the train back I think I said get out as fast as you can... and you're never gonna change your mind, no you're never gonna change your mind...") gather into a kind of bruise the broken-hearted can carry with them like a lucky charm to try to ward off the shittier days. That makes for a pretty great song.
Jay Breitling
[Spotify (after 4:11)]
[YouTube (live)]
[Mini-album: Arcs Across The City]
Perhaps our favorite among these (and, actually, statistically our favorite song based on iTunes playcount) is the early acoustic ballad All Moseley Gardens. Fans either first encountered the track among the stuff collected in the various demos collections (there were at least two versions of I Like You Mostly Late At Never, and another called Every Day Is A Constant Battle, if memory serves) or as The Hidden Track At The End Of The EP, 2007's Arcs Across The City. We went to see Johnny Foreigner's American live debut in New York two years ago, drank a lot, and have a vague recollection of drummer Junior Laidley telling us that the trio included All Moseley Gardens on Arcs because we kept blogging about it. Given our proclivity for generating and believing false memories, this probably didn't happen. But who knows?
While we wouldn't discover it until about a year later, the production of All Moseley Gardens is dead similar to that of the music on the "lost album" We Left You Sleeping And Gone Now. Which is a shorter way of saying adventurous lo-fi production that includes voices - and sheep? - in the periphery, borderline inscrutable but memorably poignant lyrics, weird keyboards, xylophone - you know, "old Johnny Foreigner," yeh? But the real hook of All Moseley Gardens is the stinging emotional weight conveyed in Alexei Berrow's murky lyrics. Berrow's words ("on the train back I think I said get out as fast as you can... and you're never gonna change your mind, no you're never gonna change your mind...") gather into a kind of bruise the broken-hearted can carry with them like a lucky charm to try to ward off the shittier days. That makes for a pretty great song.
Jay Breitling
[Spotify (after 4:11)]
[YouTube (live)]
[Mini-album: Arcs Across The City]
Noughties By Nature #99: Neon Neon – I Told Her On Alderaan
It feels ridiculous to say it now, but early reports concerning the debut (and presumably sole) album by Neon Neon could easily have suggested a project ready to deliver horrific results. Gruff Rhys has produced two wonderful solo LPs over the past decade, proof that he is at his best when in control instead of a co-pilot; Super Furry Animals are a band for which democracy does not work, seeing as the degree to which the rest of the band have had songwriting credits and a chance to do vocals has been inversely proportional to the quality of their longplaying output. That it would be with Boom Bip who, despite making incredible and cerebral leftfield hip-hop with Doseone, had already turned out a disappointing collaboration with Rhys – the downbeat aural dishwater of Do’s And Don’ts, a track sounding so un-arsed it was almost comatose – made this a more unnerving prospect. Add to that rumours of an appearance by Har Mar Superstar and a general ‘vibe’ in thrall to Eighties saccharine like Debbie Gibson and Janet Jackson, and concern was heightened further.
It turns out that there was no need to worry though, as they definitely pulled it out of the gold lamé bag, making a concept album that told through Gruff’s trademark lateral lyrical imagery and Bip’s newfound super-sleek production the rise and fall of automobile godhead John DeLorean. Stainless Style not only portrayed glamour, sleaze, debauchery and downfall vividly but held, in instances like I Told Her On Alderaan, the same perfect pop sorcery to rival their own biggest influences (McCartney II, Songs From The Big Chair, the Back To The Future soundtrack, the PWL back catalogue). While not as evocative a narrative as, say, the closing track, where DeLorean is fancifully buried in one of his own cars, the song instead tells with panache a love story based on Princess Leia’s home planet Alderaan, presumably about DeLorean’s second wife and radio KPBI’s advertising mascot Kelly Harmon (“If you ever got a bad reception / She’d flash a smile and change the perception”).
Since then, thanks in the most part to La Roux and the return of both Duran Duran and Spandau Ballet, the Eighties have been dragged formulaically back into the populist imagination with a style-over-substance zeal not seen since Romo. Just a year earlier, for Neon Neon to have not only seen the potential in an oft-maligned era of pop and a disgraced car manufacturer but done the both of them justice, seemed nothing short of extraordinary.
Thomas Blatchford
[Spotify]
[YouTube]
[Album: Stainless Style]
It turns out that there was no need to worry though, as they definitely pulled it out of the gold lamé bag, making a concept album that told through Gruff’s trademark lateral lyrical imagery and Bip’s newfound super-sleek production the rise and fall of automobile godhead John DeLorean. Stainless Style not only portrayed glamour, sleaze, debauchery and downfall vividly but held, in instances like I Told Her On Alderaan, the same perfect pop sorcery to rival their own biggest influences (McCartney II, Songs From The Big Chair, the Back To The Future soundtrack, the PWL back catalogue). While not as evocative a narrative as, say, the closing track, where DeLorean is fancifully buried in one of his own cars, the song instead tells with panache a love story based on Princess Leia’s home planet Alderaan, presumably about DeLorean’s second wife and radio KPBI’s advertising mascot Kelly Harmon (“If you ever got a bad reception / She’d flash a smile and change the perception”).
Since then, thanks in the most part to La Roux and the return of both Duran Duran and Spandau Ballet, the Eighties have been dragged formulaically back into the populist imagination with a style-over-substance zeal not seen since Romo. Just a year earlier, for Neon Neon to have not only seen the potential in an oft-maligned era of pop and a disgraced car manufacturer but done the both of them justice, seemed nothing short of extraordinary.
Thomas Blatchford
[Spotify]
[YouTube]
[Album: Stainless Style]
Noughties By Nature #98: Burial - Archangel
If I say woodblocks and Auto-Tune, you'll probably cry for all the wrong reasons. See also: it sounds like being on a night bus at three in the morning, standing alone in a Tube station, sitting at a computer after you get in and your eyes drying with insomnia and screendeath or driving back up the M1 in the cold and pissing rain when all that's left on the bridge of Leicester Forest services are tureens full of stew where the gravy has boiled down to evil-looking mud and bones stick out threateningly. It makes my sentences run on, and your blood run cold.
It's how it is, though. "Good at being alone...tell me I belong...if I trust you" could be the story of my life, and it isn't even a song as such. Although the vocals are unusually for Burial pretty much audible and distinguishable and the beat is upfront rather than crackling in the background, it still bears his hallmarks of ghosts, deep water, twitches and breaths. The echoes of the night. Streaking sodium lights. It doesn't sound like T-Pain, it doesn't sound like brostep, get those thoughts out of your head, it sounds like Blue Jam and your aching heart and rattling through tunnels. Bend, skip, bend, sigh, drop. Soul.
I'm never sure whether I prefer the first, self-titled, Burial LP or whether my favourite is Untrue, the album from which this track is taken, but if I only had to have one piece of music from this decade it would be this. There's a gaping cavern in my chest with a lump of granite on it pushing me down and this is the only thing that can move.
Penny Broadhurst
[YouTube]
[Album: Untrue]
It's how it is, though. "Good at being alone...tell me I belong...if I trust you" could be the story of my life, and it isn't even a song as such. Although the vocals are unusually for Burial pretty much audible and distinguishable and the beat is upfront rather than crackling in the background, it still bears his hallmarks of ghosts, deep water, twitches and breaths. The echoes of the night. Streaking sodium lights. It doesn't sound like T-Pain, it doesn't sound like brostep, get those thoughts out of your head, it sounds like Blue Jam and your aching heart and rattling through tunnels. Bend, skip, bend, sigh, drop. Soul.
I'm never sure whether I prefer the first, self-titled, Burial LP or whether my favourite is Untrue, the album from which this track is taken, but if I only had to have one piece of music from this decade it would be this. There's a gaping cavern in my chest with a lump of granite on it pushing me down and this is the only thing that can move.
Penny Broadhurst
[YouTube]
[Album: Untrue]
Noughties By Nature #97: The Long Blondes - Once And Never Again
Any band that emerges from Sheffield will always have to face up to the Pulp comparisons, regardless of what their sound is, and The Long Blondes where no exception. Initially grouped in with bands like The Cribs and The Kaiser Chiefs in the media concocted "New Yorkshire" scene, The Long Blondes ploughed their own furrow to create one of the most accomplished debut albums of the decade, Someone To Drive You Home.
To pick only one track from the album was always going to be a difficult choice, however Once & Never Again just edges out the feral sounds of Separated By Motorways or the kitchen sink melodrama of Weekend Without Makeup. Opening with an impassioned Kate Jackson proclaiming "19, you're only 19 for gods sake, you don't need a boyfriend" like an exasperated agony aunt, perhaps even looking for advice she should herself have heeded at that age, across a jangling guitar riff by Dorian Cox that you cant help but dance to.
The song then moves on to Jackson almost propositioning the subject matter of the song, "Come out with me and find out what you really want" before facing up to the facing up to the fact that she is no longer that young, and a confessional " I spend an hour getting ready every day, and still end up looking more or less the same" but we all know experience > youth in certain circumstances. The song ends in a clash of chiming guitars, and the innuendo laden line "How I'd love to feel a girl your age" and like all the best songs, clocks in at just under 3 minutes.
Sadly with the illness effecting Dorian the band split, but we were left with one perfect album (and one slight mis-step with "Couples"), containing many perfect songs, with Once & Never Again being the jewel in the crown, and a reminder, that boys may be the most prominent face of rock and roll, it's only once the girls are involved that the magic happens.
Andy Robertson
[Spotify]
[YouTube]
[Album: Someone To Drive You Home]
To pick only one track from the album was always going to be a difficult choice, however Once & Never Again just edges out the feral sounds of Separated By Motorways or the kitchen sink melodrama of Weekend Without Makeup. Opening with an impassioned Kate Jackson proclaiming "19, you're only 19 for gods sake, you don't need a boyfriend" like an exasperated agony aunt, perhaps even looking for advice she should herself have heeded at that age, across a jangling guitar riff by Dorian Cox that you cant help but dance to.
The song then moves on to Jackson almost propositioning the subject matter of the song, "Come out with me and find out what you really want" before facing up to the facing up to the fact that she is no longer that young, and a confessional " I spend an hour getting ready every day, and still end up looking more or less the same" but we all know experience > youth in certain circumstances. The song ends in a clash of chiming guitars, and the innuendo laden line "How I'd love to feel a girl your age" and like all the best songs, clocks in at just under 3 minutes.
Sadly with the illness effecting Dorian the band split, but we were left with one perfect album (and one slight mis-step with "Couples"), containing many perfect songs, with Once & Never Again being the jewel in the crown, and a reminder, that boys may be the most prominent face of rock and roll, it's only once the girls are involved that the magic happens.
Andy Robertson
[Spotify]
[YouTube]
[Album: Someone To Drive You Home]
Tuesday, November 24, 2009
Noughties By Nature #96: The Horrors - Who Can Say?
The Horrors’ pantomime-Cramps shtick and ropey 2007 debut had seen them sniffily dismissed and quietly filed away under overhyped, overstyled and over. So in a decade that’s been low on musical surprises, the slew of positive reviews garnered by their second album took place against a borderline-hysterical backdrop of various hats being eaten. As gratifying as backtracking by their detractors must have been, on the slab of intrepid post-punk Who Can Say? the band sound self-aware and self-assured enough to do without external validation. The song wears its influences unabashedly, draped in a swathe of My Bloody Valentine guitars and relentlessly dour vocals. There’s also a po-faced spoken-word break that keeps the song’s head above the backwash of 80s revivalism, scraping off the panstick to reveal as much substance as style.
Rhian Jones
[Spotify]
[YouTube]
[Album: Primary Colours]
Rhian Jones
[Spotify]
[YouTube]
[Album: Primary Colours]
Noughties By Nature #95: Girls On Top – We Don’t Give A Damn About Our Friends
Whilst thinking about tracks to nominate for this list, I did try to consider any major leaps or bounds which occurred in musical styles throughout the decade. The more I thought about this, the more I came to the conclusion that the main noughties trend which appeared to be without precedent (bar a couple of jokey examples towards the end of the nineties which set the ball rolling) was the mash-up.
Taking the melody of one record and splicing the vocals (or other aspects) of another across the top of it has become an online phenomenon, although the limits of such an idea meant that the whole affair appeared to have totally lost the interest of most record buyers by early 2005 (and I remain convinced that I first heard somebody say mash-ups were 'over' in 2001). From starting life as a bold way of crossing genres and making people realise that everything is, as Andy Partridge once said, pop, then becoming a worn and tired gimmick, it's perfectly possible that people will actually be nostalgic about mash-ups next year if things move fast enough.
This really was the deserved pinnacle of the phenomenon, a Richard X track which merrily spliced Gary Numan’s Are Friends Electric with Adina Howard’s Freak Like Me, and managed to turn Numan’s alienated, distraught paean to the collapse of a relationship into a sassy, savage little declaration of intent, flipping the concept almost entirely. Unlike many mash-ups which seemed to have brief moments where the tracks obviously clashed and jarred slightly, the pair seemed absurdly made for each other, and this became something of an underground favourite.
Of course, the natural upshot of the track’s fashionable cultish following was that the Sugababes ended up covering the mash-up in an example of post-modernism gone utterly, utterly mad, and their first number one was assured. In fact, there’s not an enormous degree of difference between the two versions, and this entry could just as easily belong to them – but the original has a bit more rawness and punch to it thanks to Adina’s vocals, and still sounds astonishing even now whilst the trend seems passé.
As for the inevitable question of what the trend of recycling old material and splicing it with other old material really said about the state of pop as the 21st Century began, I actually quite like the fact that, right at the starting block, we had a phenomenon that claimed that all music was just pop, and could be listened to as such - that artists who seemed to exist at polar opposites to each other actually weren't as far apart as one might suppose, and could co-exist happily. It's perhaps not the terrible start to the century some would say it is, and reflects the rather more open approach to music which has been instigated as the Internet has allowed people to sample a much broader range of styles for free. Now though, perhaps it’s time to move on to the future, whatever that may be.
Dave Bryant
[Part stream from Richard X's Black Melody site]
Taking the melody of one record and splicing the vocals (or other aspects) of another across the top of it has become an online phenomenon, although the limits of such an idea meant that the whole affair appeared to have totally lost the interest of most record buyers by early 2005 (and I remain convinced that I first heard somebody say mash-ups were 'over' in 2001). From starting life as a bold way of crossing genres and making people realise that everything is, as Andy Partridge once said, pop, then becoming a worn and tired gimmick, it's perfectly possible that people will actually be nostalgic about mash-ups next year if things move fast enough.
This really was the deserved pinnacle of the phenomenon, a Richard X track which merrily spliced Gary Numan’s Are Friends Electric with Adina Howard’s Freak Like Me, and managed to turn Numan’s alienated, distraught paean to the collapse of a relationship into a sassy, savage little declaration of intent, flipping the concept almost entirely. Unlike many mash-ups which seemed to have brief moments where the tracks obviously clashed and jarred slightly, the pair seemed absurdly made for each other, and this became something of an underground favourite.
Of course, the natural upshot of the track’s fashionable cultish following was that the Sugababes ended up covering the mash-up in an example of post-modernism gone utterly, utterly mad, and their first number one was assured. In fact, there’s not an enormous degree of difference between the two versions, and this entry could just as easily belong to them – but the original has a bit more rawness and punch to it thanks to Adina’s vocals, and still sounds astonishing even now whilst the trend seems passé.
As for the inevitable question of what the trend of recycling old material and splicing it with other old material really said about the state of pop as the 21st Century began, I actually quite like the fact that, right at the starting block, we had a phenomenon that claimed that all music was just pop, and could be listened to as such - that artists who seemed to exist at polar opposites to each other actually weren't as far apart as one might suppose, and could co-exist happily. It's perhaps not the terrible start to the century some would say it is, and reflects the rather more open approach to music which has been instigated as the Internet has allowed people to sample a much broader range of styles for free. Now though, perhaps it’s time to move on to the future, whatever that may be.
Dave Bryant
[Part stream from Richard X's Black Melody site]
Noughties By Nature #94: Half Man Half Biscuit - For What Is Chatteris...
Those people who've actually listened to more than a couple of tracks of Half Man Half Biscuit's output will already know that they're deserving of far more than the "novelty band" tag they're often given by people who know them as nothing more than the purveyors of Trumpton Riots or All I Want For Christmas Is A Dukla Prague Away Kit. But even those who actually have a lot of time for Nigel Blackwell's unique blend of biting satire, pop culture references, canny wordplay, Thomas Hardy quoting and guides to hillwalking can find ourselves surprised, on occasion, by the hidden depths he's able to demonstrate. Case in point - For What Is Chatteris..., just two minutes long and unassumingly sitting as the third track on what may still be the high point of their later career so far, 2005's Achtung Bono.
A charming little love song, Chatteris has a sweet yet sad - and, crucially, sharp - premise at its core. Describing the idyllic, timeless and markedly English countryside beauty and perfection of the titular village ("The swings in the park for the kids have won awards / The clean streets, acknowledged in the Lords"), Blackwell goes on to lament that all of it is ultimately meaningless if it can't be shared with an unnamed (presumed departed) love: "My bag's packed and I'm leaving in a minute / For what is Chatteris without you in it?" he declares, before concluding that he "may as well be in Ely or St. Ives".
Aside from being somewhat heartbreaking, it is of course - as ever - the craft and wit of Blackwell's poetry that makes this; and he still manages to make a lament brilliantly funny with couplets like "You never hear of folk getting knocked on the bonce / Although there was a drive-by shouting once". And how many other songs can you name with the word "quintessence" in?
Seb Patrick
[YouTube (live)]
[Album: Achtung Bono]
A charming little love song, Chatteris has a sweet yet sad - and, crucially, sharp - premise at its core. Describing the idyllic, timeless and markedly English countryside beauty and perfection of the titular village ("The swings in the park for the kids have won awards / The clean streets, acknowledged in the Lords"), Blackwell goes on to lament that all of it is ultimately meaningless if it can't be shared with an unnamed (presumed departed) love: "My bag's packed and I'm leaving in a minute / For what is Chatteris without you in it?" he declares, before concluding that he "may as well be in Ely or St. Ives".
Aside from being somewhat heartbreaking, it is of course - as ever - the craft and wit of Blackwell's poetry that makes this; and he still manages to make a lament brilliantly funny with couplets like "You never hear of folk getting knocked on the bonce / Although there was a drive-by shouting once". And how many other songs can you name with the word "quintessence" in?
Seb Patrick
[YouTube (live)]
[Album: Achtung Bono]
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