A Very Sweeping Christmas: the complete collection

This compilation is still downloadable but is gradually being superceded by Sweeping The Nation Christmas Special

Readers! Give your friends the gift of nigh on five hours of alternative festive tunes.

A VERY SWEEPING CHRISTMAS

A VERY SWEEPING CHRISTMAS 1
Arcade Fire (And Friends) - Jinglebell Rock
Grandaddy - Alan Parsons In A Winter Wonderland
Low - Just Like Christmas
Joy Zipper - Christmas Song
Jose Feliciano - Feliz Navidad
Bright Eyes - God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen
Beck - Little Drum Machine Boy
Big Star - Jesus Christ
Kate Bush - December Will Be Magic Again
Belle & Sebastian - O Come, All Ye Faithful
Rufus Wainwright - Spotlight On Christmas
The Three Wise Men - Thanks For Christmas (XTC)
The Raveonettes - The Christmas Song
Snow Patrol - When I Get Home for Christmas
Fountains of Wayne - I Want An Alien For Christmas
The White Stripes - Candy Cane Children
The Wedding Present - Step Into Christmas
Eels - Everything's Gonna Be Cool This Christmas
Glam Chops - Countdown To Christmas
The Ramones - Merry Christmas (I Don't Want To Fight Tonight)
No Doubt - Oi To The World
The Fall - No Xmas For John Quays
The Long Blondes - Christmas Is Cancelled


A VERY SWEEPING CHRISTMAS 2
Joseph Spence - Santa Claus Is Coming To Town (Bahamian folk singer's unique interpretation)
The Ronettes - Sleigh Ride
Sufjan Stevens - Come On! Let's Boogey to the Elf Dance!
Cocteau Twins - Frosty The Snowman
Saint Etienne - I Was Born On Christmas Day
Foxes! - Christmas Songs
Denim - I Will Cry At Christmas
His Clancyness - This Xmas No Trees Just Soul
James Brown - Go Power At Christmas Time
Smokey Robinson & the Miracles - Christmas Everyday
Peter Broggs - Twelve Days Of Christmas
Lauren Laverne - In the Bleak Midwinter
Darlene Love - Winter Wonderland
Ben Folds - Bizarre Christmas Incident
De La Soul - Millie Pulled A Pistol On Santa
The Walkmen - Christmas Party
Rilo Kiley - Xmas Cake
Boyracer - Every Day Is Christmas With You
Mew - She Came Home For Christmas
Kat Flint - Silent Night
Half Man Half Biscuit - It's Clichéd To Be Cynical At Christmas
REM - Good King Wenceslas
Coldplay - Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas


A VERY SWEEPING CHRISTMAS 3
TBC Poundsystem - Losing My Sledge
Casiotone For The Painfully Alone - Cold White Christmas
Arab Strap - Xmas (Baby, Please Come Home)
Hefner - The Little Baby Hefner's Xmas Song For Holland
Emmy The Great & Lightspeed Champion - Christmas In Prison
Hot Uncles - The Joy Of Giving (Steven Adams of the Broken Family Band/Singing Adams and Dan Michaelson of Absentee/himself)
The Bellrays - Merry Christmas Baby
Nosferatu D2 - It's Christmas Time (For God's Sake)
Thee Headcoatees - Santa Claus
Noah And The Whale - To Cyril At Crunkmas
Eux Autres - Merry Xmas Everybody
Kurtis Blow - Christmas Rappin'
Harvey Danger - Sometimes You Have To Work On Christmas (Sometimes)
Chris T-T - 100,000 Turkeys
The Joseph And Mary Chain - The Twelve Days of Christmas (Futureheads, Field Music, Kathryn Williams etc.)
Allo, Darlin' - Baby, It's Cold Outside
Velocity Girl - Merry Christmas, I Love You
Lucky Soul - Lonely This Christmas


A VERY SWEEPING CHRISTMAS 4
Reuben - Christmas Is Awesome
The Kinks - Father Christmas
Weezer - Christmas Celebration
They Might Be Giants - Santa's Beard
Squeeze - Christmas Day
Dennis Wilson - Morning Christmas
Ed Harcourt - In The Bleak Midwinter
Donny Hathaway - This Christmas
Feist - Lo, How a Rose E're Blooming
El Perro Del Mar - Auld Lang Syne
Stina Nordenstam - Soon After Christmas
My Morning Jacket - Christmas Time Is Here Again
Trembling Blue Stars - Christmas And Train Trips And Things
Ron Sexsmith - Maybe This Christmas
Acid House Kings - Christmas
The Lucksmiths - The Thought That Counts
Yo La Tengo - It's Christmas Time
Luna - Egg Nog
The Maytals - Happy Christmas (The Christmas Song)
Of Montreal - Christmas Isn't Safe For Animals
Hello Saferide - iPod Christmas
The Pipettes - White Christmas

Sweeping The Nation Albums Of 2007: Number 21

One of the criticisms levelled at the second album proper by lugubriously voiced Swede Lekman is that the lo-fi charm bolstered by samples of his much admired earlier work has been superceded with his signing to proper labels by the sort of recording budget by proper string and horn sections, whether live or recorded by someone else, that dilute its production values into a kind of retrogressive MOR, before the first vocal And I Remember Every Kiss already being subjected to rolling timpani and swelling strings. Actually, it's only a partial giving in even if you accept that, which we don't really due to the way Lekman makes it work for him (bar Sipping On The Sweet Nectar's guileless Barry Manilow hints) - even when that same song is exploding into brass fanfares like a budget Walker Brothers you'd hardly recognise it as a chorus and there's that old Lekman puppy dog romanticism about its key lyric "I'll never kiss anyone who doesn't burn me like the sun".

And whatever the surroundings, Lekman is still one of indiepop's great chroniclers of ordinary life, here through the prism of his tainted new surroundings in the Gothenburg suburb of the title. The Opposite Of Hallelujah matches a soul stomp like Berry Gordy remixing Postcard-era Orange Juice with lyrics about failing to articulate self-doubt, A Postcard To Nina is a gauchely observed tale of awkward graces as Lekman pretends to be a lesbian's boyfriend when she sees her parents. Your Arms Around Me makes sentimental capital from Lekman accidentally cutting his index finger slicing avocados when surprised by the titular loving event, even with a ukelele solo bridge. Shirin meanwhile is a song of love to his Iraqi immigrant hairdresser which, not content with changing pace and time signature completely just for the middle eight, features the lyric "what if it reaches the government/that you have a beauty salon in your own apartment?/I won’t tell anyone". The contemplative flute and xylophone-riven It Was A Strange Time In My Life tackles his own growing pains, pausing for a near-acapella central section in which he declares "Most shy people I know are extremely boring/Either that or they are miserable from all the shit they've been storing". Unusually it's the last track at which the album hits uptempo paydirt, Friday Night At The Drive-In Bingo documenting life as a city boy in a Swedish country village (Lekman worked in a bingo hall during a career break) and bringing Lekman's singular personality to bear, as he does throughout to great effect.

LISTEN ON: Friday Night At The Drive-In Bingo
WATCH ON: Sipping On Sweet Nectar

**

My favourite album of 2007 is...

Gerry Del Guerico, SixNationState: "The Maccabees - Colour It In or The Good The Bad & The Queen. If I had to choose between the two (which it tears my heart to do) it would be The Good The Bad & The Queen."

Charles, Slow Club: "I reckon the Shins' new album is the only album I've been out and bought this year. It's pretty awesome, shame they stink live."

The Only Chart That Counted: 1977

Because we like a good Christmas chart, here's what was going on in the days long before semi-ironic Radio 1 DJ campaigns, download virals and novelty efforts, the British Market Research Bureau-bothering top 40 of Christmas week thirty years ago. It was semi-ironic Radio 2 DJ campaigns then.

40 The Emotions - I Don't Want To Lose Your Love
Earth, Wind & Fire associates who did The Best Of My Love, later plundered by many a girl band wanting to sound soulful and wear low-cut dresses rather than leather but not go for the hard stuff.

39 Neil Diamond - Desiree
Essentially the sweet tale of his one night stand with an older woman, and he still makes it schlocky.

38 Baccara - Yes Sir I Can Boogie
Awkwardly dancing Spanish duo who'd "already told you in the first verse and in the chorus". Both now tour their own Baccara. Lawsuits have been launched for less.

37 Santana - She's Not There
Latin rock cure for sleeplessness wails all over the Zombies' song and inevitably turns out with the far more popular version.

36 The Banned - Little Girl
Not the band formed by Sharon, Kelvin and Wicksy after being barred from the Vic, leading to Fairlight fantasy hit Something Outta Nothing but a single minor hit for some also ran London punks.

35 Abba - The Name Of The Game
The start of the complex structural period people like Paul Morley have always raved about, currently being covered very well live by Charlotte Hatherley.

34 Althea & Donna - Uptown Top Ranking
On its slow way to number one. Under-representing themselves on both pop and style, we feel.

33 Boz Scaggs - Hollywood
One of those people the middle aged-aiming music magazines used to toss in as a comparison a lot without ever explaining what they sound like, we've never knowingly heard anything Scaggs has ever done.

32 Barron Knights - Live In Trouble
Redoing Angelo, Float On, Loving You, You Make Me Feel Like Dancing, D.I.V.O.R.C.E. and Lucille. We need a new Barron Knights, really.

31 Carl Douglas - Run Back
Kung Fu Fighter goes pretty much legit to little effect.

30 Diana Ross - Gettin' Ready For Love
Where's a Bee Gee when you really need one?

29 John Otway & Wild Willy Barrett - Really Free
Self-proclaimed "Rock and Roll's greatest failure" back when peoplem thought he was a punk rather than a loon.

28 Bob Marley - Jamming/Punky Reggae Party
Half thought out commercialisation of early glories backed with actual tribute to the 100 Club kids and their idols. "No boring old farts will be there!"

27 The Muppets - Don't Dilly Dally/Waiting At The Church
Lew Grade aside, an odd decision for the globe colonising Hensonites to go all music hall for their vinyl debut. The first track is better known as My Old Man (Said Follow The Van), and Miss Piggy gives it the full Eliza Doolittle.

26 Donna Summer - I Love You
The love theme from her album Once Upon A Time, "a modern-day Cinderella-themed story through means of disco music". And they laugh at Tarkus. Because they're right to.

25 Status Quo - Rockin' All Over The World
John Fogerty finds his work taken away from him.

24 Julie Covington - Only Women Bleed
As Leona Lewis is now reinsisting. Covington was among other things in the original cast of The Rocky Horror Show. She was the original Janet Weiss. Oh, no, that was Lora Macfarlane.

23 Dooley Wilson - As Time Goes By
By the Lord Jesus Christ, I name this child Dooley. In fact Wilson was Sam in Casablanca and As Time Goes By was the song he'd played for her and would now be playing for him. Why this now? Who knows.

22 Queen - We Are The Champions/We Will Rock You
Never was a record so precisely aimed at a single demographic, that is PA announcers at sports grounds.

21 Yannis Markopoulos - Who Pays The Ferryman
Him out of Foals, possibly, does the theme to a long forgotten BBC drama of the same name.

20 Electric Light Orchestra - Turn To Stone
Let's boogie with the synths! One thing you can say about Jeff Lynne, he didn't keep still with their sound that much.

19 Chic - Dance Dance Dance
The clue's in the title.

18 Crystal Gayle - Don't It Make My Brown Eyes Blue
We're sure we're not alone in getting her confused with Crystal Waters (GYpsy Woman (La Da Dee)? Please yourselves), but Gayle was Loretta Lynn's sister and this was uncalled for.

17 David Soul - Let's Have A Quiet Night In
Soul, like David Cassidy and Lionel Richie, now destined to be one of those people who turns up on chat shows every so often to get screamed at by middle aged women, which is of course the worst sound in the world.

16 Boomtown Rats - Mary Of The Fourth Form
Fourth form? She'd be fifteen, Bob!

15 Elvis Costello - Watching The Detectives
He's invented a new music called reggae. This was Declan's first charting single and has virtually added itself to the language, albeit very specifically.

14 Elvis Presley - My Way
Especially posthumously, doesn't this sound like the worst thing in the world?

13 The Dooleys - Love Of My Life
"The Dooleys were 'possibly' the best of all MOR type pop groups from the 70s and 80s. Not only were they good looking, they could sing, play their own instruments and were among the 'NICEST' people you could ever hope to meet." To be honest, it's not selling us.

12 Showaddywaddy - Dancin' Party
We nearly met Dave Bartram earlier this year. There's one to tell the kids. We have a soft spot for them, largely due to their pissing off teddy boys, who scare us, but it's not great development from Under The Moon Of Love, is it?

11 Boney M - Belfast
It's Boney M, and by extension Frank Farian, with a compassionate hymn for the Troubles. How well do you suspect this would go?

10 Hot Chocolate - Put Your Love In Me
Subtle. Well before crooning Imagine at Tory grandees he was making sure not every one of his band's run of hits was wedding reception disco-bound with this extended unfunky thing.

9 Jonathan Richman - Egyptian Reggae
It can't just be us who didn't realise this now much used Egyptcentric underscore library music was by one and the same person as the Velvets-obsessed faux-naiveatollah. Malcolm Middleton is probably getting ready to feel like Richman must have.

8 Darts - Daddy Cool
If only Javine and Harvey had been in a musical based on this Daddy Cool.

7 Bonnie Tyler - It's A Heartache
Gravel-gargling Welsh vixen whose arse, crucially, nobody has seen on a tabloid front page, although on last year's greatest hits cover she does look disconcertingly like Emma Bunton's mum might.

6 Donna Summer - Love's Unkind
Although obviously Sophie Lawrence off Eastenders later did the definitive version.

5 Bing Crosby - White Christmas
Crosby's cash-in next film, Premier Travelodge, bombed. Crosby had in fact just died, which explains this, and this was the biggest selling single in the world before Candle In The Wind '97.

4 Ruby Winters - I Will
A soul cover of a Billy Fury song Have you, less-than-30-year-old young buck, ever heard of Ruby Winters in your life? We hadn't. She's not even on Wikipedia.

3 Bee Gees - How Deep Is Your Love?
Tearing ourselves away from the detail that in 1969 Maurice Gibb and Ringo Starr made an album of primitive synth experiments that would have been called Modulating Maurice, this was their first single from Saturday Night Fever, which went on show on December 14th. What idea of the film would you have got from this?

2 Brighouse And Rastrick Brass Band - The Floral Dance
Sit back, everyone. The Floral, or Furry (much better), Dance is a tradition of the small Cornish town of Helston. In 1911 musician Katie Moss, whom records do not suggest ever dated a model called Petra Doherty, put words and music to a slightly altered version of the tune. Terry Wogan's to blame for this becoming a hit - six weeks at number two! - and if you must know, Brighouse and Rastrick are both towns in the Calderdale borough of the Yorkshire East Ridings. Wogan's own vocal version came out a month later, which seems a missed opportunity to us.

1 Wings - Mull Of Kintyre/Girl's School
"Girl's schoooool/Socks rolling up to the knee..." Anyway, don't know that one, but everyone has memories imprinted of Paul, Linda, Denny and some others plus three score and ten bagpipe wielders of the Campbeltown Pipe Band paying tribute to a peninsula in western Scotland near where the Maccas were then living and everybody in the country buys it, sending it top for nine weeks. Apparently, it went rhodium. Don't ask us. Glen Campbell once covered it. God knows what that ended up like.

Sweeping The Nation Albums Of 2007: Number 22

Person Pitch opens with what appears to be the sound of a chain link ferry, overlaid with what sounds like some sort of township ritual of campfire handclaps and 'ah's, over which comes the vocal of Noah Lennox AKA Panda Bear, pitched, multitracked and echoed to sound like the Beach Boys, most likely those of the often regarded as underrated albums that came after Brian Wilson's breakdown. This continues throughout Comfy In Nautica's four minutes, overlaid with occasional effects, found sounds and unidentifiable gurgles, eventually fading into white noise. Is this what you expected an Animal Collective solo project to sound like? Well, yeah, probably, as there's occasionally been a Beach Boysian harmonic element buried somewhere beneath all those layered sounds. It's barely straightforward, either.

Or particularly user friendly, coming in at 45 minutes for seven tracks. That campfire oddness comparison is maintained throughout, Take Pills spending its first half with delicate guitar, tambourine and some sort of industrial noisescape which subsumes it and deposits it seconds later as a classic 1950s teen film beach party singalong, albeit one recorded from under the sea. Bros starts its twelve and a half minutes like Jan & Dean working with a scaled down Wall Of Sound on a convertible road trip song, the usual random effects bursting briefly in, before getting bogged down on a fairground ride and turning with vocal editing into a stripped down version of the parent band without breaking rhythm. That it's followed by I'm Not's Gregorian chant sampling forming a self-sampling ethereal drone, and then Good Girl/Carrots' looped tablas which form heavy avant-garde dub patterns before suddenly becoming the second half of the title's loping, oddly Stone Roses-esque groove before changing again into dub Wilson, seems jarring but is really in keeping with the atmopshere of dislocated laidback sunshine, perhaps indicative more than anything of Lennox's move to Lisbon. The weird ambient of Search For Delicious and closing almost simplicity in context of Ponytail don't add much, but then you couldn't really take away a lot. In a field of people trying too hard it's rare you find an experimental album that's as much aimed for the heart as much as the head and that despite being built out of loops never sounds the same from bar to bar.

LISTEN ON: Comfy In Nautica
WATCH ON: Bros (edit)

**

My favourite album of 2007 is...

Johny Lamb, Thirty Pounds Of Bone: "That's a difficult question....I have been greatly enjoying the Deadutantes and Bad Wizard. Also Freddie Keen and Oscar Kainer. But I love Electric Soft Parade's No Need To Be Downhearted. Also, I Fed Thee Rabbit Water by Birdengine."

In shops tomorrow: 10/12

Singles

Tipping Foals for 2008 commercial success is, we feel, more out of hope than bitter experience - Skins or no Skins (and do search out that special episode for Yannis Phillipakis' acting cameo, proving David Bowie and Sting have serious upcoming competition in the pro-am stakes). They may want to make the fashionable kids dance, but the charts are so unpredictable at the moment and their own herky-jerkiness so left of centre that we might be sitting here in a couple of years wondering where it all went wrong. We learned the hard way from Clap Your Hands Say Yeah. All of which is mere bagatelle next to the intricate mechanics of first full-scale release Balloons, the first fruits of their work with Dave Sitek. Holy Fuck also have their own approach, creating what often sounds like pre-programmed dancepunk sequences without the aid of any programming whatsoever, just a lot of antique synths, a lot of percussion and a lot of fluid rehearsal. Milkshake propulses like little else. It'd be stretching the point to call Miracle Fortress propulsive, but they made a pretty good stab at 2007's sub-genre of One Person Sounding A Bit Like Smile Did In Brian Wilson's Head, the person here being Montreal's Graham van Pelt. Have You Seen In Your Dreams also reminds us of the Sleepy Jackson's psychedelic excursions before Luke Steele stopped making out he was mad and became actually mad. The New Wave of New Wave of New Wave, as we like to think of it, may well have settled into bland orthodoxy by now but it can still provide the odd ear-pricking new band of excellence. The Chiara L's - fronted by one Chiara Lucchini, which while hardly thinking outside the box at least gives them a free pass away from the other modern trend of appalling new band names - take audible inspiration as much from Kill Rock Stars and K Records as C86 and fellow Leodensians Gang Of Four on debut double A Knives/Kate's Kid. Watch them carefully. The first Christmas single of the year is also out, and you'd think that they'd have been more careful with the release date with a full week still to go, especially as chart watcher - alright, BBC chart-based show watcher - Eddie Argos is involved. The Black Arts is, give or take a couple of people, Argos plus the reconstituted Black Box Recorder, and Christmas Number One is the post-modern, well-vowelled pre-ironic pop that combination sounds like it should be. Why is Fairytale Of New York back out again? (Unless it's for Justice For Kirsty, in which case fair enough)

Albums

They said it'd never happen, for mental health reasons more than anything else, but even in this age of the comeback it's a pleasant surprise to hear through the cyber-mouthpiece of Lord Snooty's giant poisoned electric head that thirty six years after Let's Make Up And Be Friendly, the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band have made a new album. It's called Pour l'Amour des Chiens, and reunites all living members of the original line-up, the enormous hole in the middle that Vivian Stanshall left filled variously by Phill Jupitus and Adrian Edmondson, who went on tour with them last year (we saw them; it was spectacular), and Stephen Fry, who's been mentally filling Stanshall's position for a good twenty years anyway. No idea what it sounds like, and we can't say the prospect of a cover of I Predict A Riot fills us with great levels of anticipation, but you never know, and to quote Jupitus' final words on said night, "it's the fucking Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band!" There's a DVD of unreleased live material too. Anthony Reynolds was nearly the Big Shot around 1996-97 as singer with lowlife romantics Jack, and his debt solo album British Ballads still sees him treading the Scott Walker route, with guests Vashti Bunyan, Dot Allison and Simon Raymonde of the Cocteau Twins. Radiohead may now be bringing down the entire record industry and its antediluvian concepts of payment (apart from the £42.50 for London gig tickets, natch) from within their pre-fabricated concrete cold bunker but EMI will have the last laugh yet, as while Discboxes arrive at front doors nationwide they're putting out a box set of all six previous studio albums plus the live set I Might Be Wrong. If everybody knows that a healthy body makes a healthy mind, Shaun Ryder's lopsided lyrical flows have a raison d'etre. Bummed and Pills 'n' Thrills And Bellyaches recall the good times of 1988 and 1990 respectively and come with an extra disc of remixes, in the former's WFL's case those that nearly defined a clubbing generation. MF Doom and Madlib's Madvillain collaboration Madvillainy was enough to burst the bag, sir, of many a leftfield hip-hop fan in 2004 and is widely regarded as the genre's best independent release of the decade. And as the air turns cold and town centre international markets resemble the sweet essence of giraffe, those Christmas compilations keep on coming back out, this week's choice being last year's The Best KIDS Christmas Album In The World…Ever Ever Ever (the Wombats, the Young Playthings, Popular Workshop, Oppenheimer, It Hugs Back, Findlay Brown).

Books

Our bookshelf, just up there, has a steadily growing collection of the works of 33 1/3, the series of small books about influential albums. As a demonstration of its scope, 33 1/3 Greatest Hits Volume 2 features extracts from numbers 21 to 40 inclusive, which are about... Armed Forces, Murmur, Grace, Entroducing, Kick Out The Jams, Born in the USA, Low, Music from Big Pink, In the Aeroplane Over The Sea, There's a Riot Goin' On, Doolittle, Paul's Boutique, The Stone Roses, In Utero, Highway 61 Revisited, Loveless, The Who Sell Out, Bee Thousand, Daydream Nation and Court And Spark. Adding itself in fifty-second place to the big list this week is Nick Drake's Pink Moon, given the once-over by by Pitchfork's Amanda Petrusich including interviews with Joe Boyd, Robert Kirby and the creatives who chose the title track for an American VW advert.

Sweeping The Nation Albums Of 2007: Number 23

Although now expanded to a live four-piece The Western Lands is still resolutely Nick Talbot's studio baby, but you could be forgiven for thinking added personnel had moved the Gravenhurst sound on. They're very definitely still rooted in folk writing, cemented here by a track in tribute to Sandy Denny and an actual Fairport Convention cover, but the introversion of his earlier work has been long overtaken by a willingness to experiment with the tropes of studio trickery and crossing the limitations both of what this should sound like and what it should be addressing. Opening track Saints, for example, is built on gorgeous fingerpicking-esque intricacies, but behind it are electronic washes and early on Talbot sings of wanting to "murder ten to save a hundred, drown the whole world in my faith". Followed by the Denny-dedicated She Dances, a haunting piano-underlaid slab of doomed dreaminess which is eventually overtaken by almost Edge-esque guitars, it's clear we're dealing in a world of soundtracking desperation.

And a louder, more abrasive soundtrack than that would suggest too, recalling fellow Bristolians Flying Saucer Attack or at times a more legible version of Factory Records mainstays the Durutti Column. Hollow Men accidentally falls in with the nu-gaze brigade and effortlessly tops the lot of them, breaking down completely 2:15 in, slowly regenerating itself and exploding back into dissonant life. Without warning the pace then shifts back down for the ghostly meditations of Song Among The Pines. The second half is more muted but no less claustrophobically intelligent - playing solo at Truck this year it was clear how complex the guitar parts underpinning many of these songs are, and Hourglass' hypnotic circular riff benefits from the lack of showy surroundings. Elliott Smith admirers will find much in this, and if these tracks lend themselves to easy comparisons - Grand Union Canal doffs its cap to Red House Painters/becalmed Mogwai slo-mo, while the instrumental title track is an Americana Slowdive scoring a western - it only serves to reinforce that Talbot is an auteur capable of subtly shifting from his base camp sound to wilder climes without ever losing focus.

LISTEN ON: Saints
WATCH ON: Hollow Men

**

My favourite album of 2007 is...

Eugene McGuinness: The Good The Bad And The Queen

Erik Sandberg, Wake The President: The Shins - Wincing The Night Away

Sweeping The Nation Albums Of 2007: Number 24

When Monkey Swallows The Universe arrived last year with The Bright Carvings many had them marked as the twee-r opposite to fellow Sheffielders the Long Blondes, partly because that was released on the Blondes' onetime label Thee Sheffield Phonographic Corporation and the two have toured together. This eventually shifted in the direction of playful folky storytellers, and while that's not completely untrue of The Casket Letters the palette has expanded. The nearest hometown comparison now would be a more hushed, less showy (and more feminine) Pulp, such is the way they take indirect inspiration from the classic English songwriting lineage and forge it into their own image which isn't afraid to look back but is equally of the moment.

A good reason for such confidence is Nat Johnson's voice, importing a youthful tenderness and sensitivity to these tales of love over all, death and the afterlife and the antipathy between Queen Elizabeth I and Mary Queen Of Scots (yeah, like we need another song about that). It's really in the context of the album's delicate optimism that the album works as opposed to as a group of strong acoustic-led songs. Johnson's a clever lyricist in such matters too, Science's laidback shuffle weighing biological urges over faith in technology (her own explanation: "if we were to suddenly realise one day that planes don't work, they'd all just fall from the sky at that moment. And if similarly we realised that our bodies don't actually make sense either, we'd just drop dead"), Gravestones a beguilingly poised ghost story and a fine example of the shade now often provided by violin and cello. Elizabeth & Mary, the aforementioned royal to-do tale, rocks, but gently, while Matterhoney is like Tigermilk-era Belle & Sebastian getting into singalong folk anthemry. Their wry inscrutability is still in evidence on Ballad Of The Breakneck Bride, a faux-country duet with Rhys Edwards of local eccentrics Smokers Die Younger about a pair of lovers running off to get married, being killed in a car crash and pledging to meet up in the afterlife. And they carry it off, with the sort of lightness of touch that marks the band out as producers of likeable fragile beauty. (And then this week went on indefinite hiatus.)


LISTEN ON: Elizabeth & Mary
WATCH ON: Science

**

My favourite album of 2007 is...

Nat Johnson, Monkey Swallows The Universe: Gruff Rhys - Candylion

Sweeping The Nation Albums Of 2007: Number 25

If you're calling your album The Throne Of The Third Heaven Of The Nations Millennium General Assembly, then not only are you providing a gift to anyone watching their word count - it's named after an ambitious set of outsider art sculptures created from found materials in his spare time by Washington janitor James Hampton - but you're going to have to justify yourself quickly before you get filed under 'frankly trying our patience'. Luckily, Le Loup, or on records just Sam Simkoff, have/has far more about them than to fall for that. The press for the album refers to it being produced during a state of catharsis, and the first and penultimate tracks, Canto I and Canto XXXIV, take their names from another great work produced in turmoil, Dante's Inferno. Understandable, therefore, that much of it has the weight of the world on its shoulders, but there's also a hope and optimism driving much of the narrative as well as a goodly amount of spirituality in all its forms.

Musically, we're back in freak-folk territory, Canto I coming across with the same headphone listening-aided layering and communal off-kilteredness of Grizzly Bear, followed by Planes Like Vultures taking on the calmer moments of Animal Collective with many multitracked vocals while the lyrics develop from "this world was made for ending" to "our prayers are answered". Like both bands, as well as occasionally audible influence Sufjan Stevens, it's heavy on the banjo, making that connection back to founding father Americana, but as on We Are Gods! We Are Wolves! isn't afraid just to run off keyboard effects. Look To The West is reminiscent of Britain's own Tunng if they used an overdriven electric guitar, while Le Loup (Fear Not) revisits the Sufjan/Panda Bear/Grizzly Bear comparisons, breaks down into wordless harmonies, gets overtaken by a pinpoint riff and ends up suggesting pre-fame Modest Mouse. Seven minute plus closer I Had A Dream I Died comes on like a funeral march for freak-folk, the chorus continually suggesting "this is the end" as the lyrics wonder whether we can get everything sorted before passing on. Not exactly new Memphis Industries labelmates the Go! Team, then, but a bravely ambitious and highly singular attempt at gaining strength through multi-faceted chorality.

LISTEN ON: Planes Like Vultures
WATCH ON: Le Loup (Fear Not) (live)

**

My favourite album of 2007 is...

Sam Simkoff, Le Loup: "The Shepherd's Dog by Iron And Wine. It's a lot more intricate and energetic than previous albums by them, I think, and the instrumentation and melodies are fantastic."

Sweeping The Nation Albums Of 2007: Number 26

A band is never necessarily dulled because they're adjudged to be moving closer to approachability. The Flaming Lips, for instance, made the best two albums of their careers when they leavened the really weird stuff. While nothing on Blonde Redhead's seventh album 23 will unduly worry the producers of High School Musical, they're no longer the band who produced screes of no wave almost out of spite for the compressed melodies in minute quantities therein, bringing in mixing desk heavyweights, two co-productions by Mitchell Froom and mixing from Alan Moulder. Melding such Billboard-eyeing commissions to their usual angular art-rock shouldn't have been an easy tightrope act, but all that has really come of it is a refinement and sifting of their latterday strengths, the warped tunes, flickering drum patterns, the awkwardly cooing vocals of Kazu Makino and and soundscapes owing plenty to Sonic Youth and shoegazing, just more expressive and focused than their more decodeable previous two albums.

The title track opener points a certain way, as while the abundance of tremelo and cyclical rhythms are purest Kevin Shields Makino takes on a Liz Fraser of the Cocteau Twins or perhaps Bjork on Debut-like mystical quality, hovering over the ethereal mess with her own multi-tracked extemporising. There's almost a hidden simplicity to the album as a whole, with much use of psychedelically tinged loops to embellish fairly simple, clear structures. Silently allows Makino to be more upbeat as the song revels in the warmth of laidback guitars not unlike, oddly, Lush, while Spring And By Summer Fall gradually uncoils to a latter day Radiohead-like rocker (think Optimistic), controlled arpeggios over a bed of uncertain textures, Top Ranking doing much the same but with the guitars mixed down in favour of cyclical drums suggesting Be My Baby and multi-tracked vocals. Publisher suggests Radiohead too, but this time their haunting electronic experiments as pulsing phased drums border advancing guitars and keyboards until Makino's vocals join those of Amadeo Pace and both eventually intertwine and take off just in time for the fade. The overall impression is that while 23 is an album that leaves plenty of room for manoevure when it comes to their next move, this time around they've moved on even from 2004's Misery Is A Butterfly into sonic landscapes that might even suit them better.

LISTEN ON: Spring And By Summer Fall
WATCH ON: 23

**

My favourite album of 2007 is...

Adam Woolway, The Strange Death Of Liberal England: "Bearsuit - OH:IO : an album so schizophrenic and clever it just about doesn't make sense."

Sweeping The Nation Albums Of 2007: Number 27

To borrow another band's self-description, the Delgados were all about ordinary magic. From their fuzzbomb beginnings to the low-key melodic grandiosity of Peloton, still one of the 90s' great albums for our money, then the enormous swells of Scotpop Flaming Lips/Mercury Rev that was The Great Eastern and back down to Hate's unsettling anthemry and Universal Audio's shot at commercialism on their own terms, their sound took the building blocks of what used to be gladly called indie and doing something special and ambitious with it. Thus, when we say Emma Pollock's debut solo record Watch The Fireworks is of a piece with her now defunct band's oeuvre, it's not to imply that she hasn't moved on but that she's never lost that knack of writing tunes that could easily be on daytime radio and taking them somewhere that doesn't compromise either her integrity or their musical attributes.

Taking into account the lack of Alun Woodward and the lack of the orchestral swells phased out of the band around Universal Audio, the Business As Unusual sign is hoisted by the chorus of opener New Land, a waltz about vulnerability and making a clean break if possible. If it's that last album's unclean subject matter over cleaner riffage that marks out the most radio-friendly fast tracks such as Acid Test and the Coldplay with a heart of Adrenaline, the actual standouts outgrow such concerns while maintaining a maturity learnt through twelve years' experience. And where most try to become more mature and lose whatever they had, Limbs takes a hushed folky lead and Paper And Glue is a graceful, dynamic pop song about regret that sets up base camp well under the skin. The acid-tongued If Silence Means That Much To You's pounding rhythm and Here Comes The Heartbreak taking on Teenage Fanclub at their own game establish that she really means business being back here, and by the time The Optimist finishes the record on a note of overcoming self-doubt it's clear there's far more where this is coming from. Plus ca change.

LISTEN ON: If Silence Means That Much To You
WATCH ON: Acid Test

**

My favourite album of 2007 is...

Steven Adams, The Broken Family Band: "Turns out all my favourite albums of this year came out last year. I’ve realised I’m usually a year or so behind, but I’ll plump for The Miracle Inn by Euros Childs and if I’m allowed two then I’ll have The Body The Blood The Machine by The Thermals. I can’t speak for the others. I know two of them have been listening to Sikth a bit too much."

Sweeping The Nation Albums Of 2007: Number 28

It's been a strong year for single-minded solo artists - in cases such as this, one hesitates to use the term 'singer-songwriters' - and Monster Bobby has been around longer than most. Having been the mainspring behind Totally Bored, the club venture that gave springboards to the British Sea Power/Electric Soft Parade/Brakes/80s Matchbox first wave of this decade's Brighton-based achievers, he's best known as guitarist and "concept technician" behind the Pipettes. Tellingly, that band's name is conspicuous by its absence from the label site, press release, press interview and sleevenotes of Bobby's debut album Gaps - not that there's no element of pure pop manoevures in Gaps' DNA, it's just that such comparisons only serve to throw off the scent of such bedroom recorded crackpot invention.

One thing is does have is ADD. 17 tracks in 32 minutes, including the three minute total of the ambient opener and static-laden closer; ideas cut off well before the usual song structure has elapsed, others smothered under samples or digital distortion, fragile acoustic-led songs ripped open by effects straight from the BBC Radiohonic Workshop. It's not much more radio friendly when decodable - The Closest Experience To That Of Being With You Is The Experience of Taking Drugs is the Field Mice working with Animal Collective, quite apart from being given that title - but it has a heart often missing from such sonic throwing ideas at a wall. Beyond The Reach Of Arms and I Heard You Moved Away are dreamy lovelorn vignettes where loops and actual horns boost rather than take over, Bedtime Baby would be a highlight of any Magnetic Fields album and Last Stop All Change invokes both the Postal Service and annoying train journeys. It's this often emotional insight leavened with humour (not least the phobia rockabilly of Let's Check Into A Hospital Together, or the album being labelled for WMP under the genre 'Comedy') and at its basest level being in the hands of someone who knows what they're doing with this sampling technology that stops this from just being a wilfully misleading stylistic experiment a la Max Tundra and ensures it makes a connection.

LISTEN ON: Beyond The Reach Of Arms
WATCH ON: Let's Check Into A Hospital Together (live)

**

My favourite album of 2007 is...

Monster Bobby: "Either the Bonde Do Role album or the Robyn album but I can't remember what either of therm are called. (With Lasers and Robyn respectively - Ed.) Probably Bonde Do Role. In fact this year has really been all about Brazilian music for me - getting really into tropicalia, the Souljazz postpunk comps, still loving lots of bossa nova and baile funk, bumping into CSS and Bonde Do Role at just about every summer festival in the world..."

These we have Swept

The first of our compact reviews of this year's cheap STN content - who have been the most recommended acts on this year's 42 Weekly Sweeps?

20= (9 mentions) Blood Red Shoes
20= (9) iLiKETRAiNS
20= (9) Jetplane Landing
20= (9) Patrick Wolf
20= (9) Rumble Strips
20= (9) Spoon
20= (9) Those Dancing Days
15= (10) Dan Le Sac vs Scroobius Pip
15= (10) Bat For Lashes
15= (10) Friends Of The Bride
15= (10) Interpol
15= (10) LCD Soundsystem
12= (11) Battles
12= (11) Cajun Dance Party
12= (11) Napoleon IIIrd
11 (12) Emmy The Great
9= (13) Goodbooks
9= (13) Okkervil River
8 (15) Foals
6= (16) The Go! Team
6= (16) Lucky Soul
4= (17) Arcade Fire
4= (17) Sky Larkin
3 (19) Johnny Flynn & The Sussex Wit
2 (22) Future Of The Left
1 (28) Los Campesinos!


Now there's a surprise, apart from how they were left out of fourteen. Does this pre-empt the albums and singles of the year lists? Well, we'll see.

Sweeping The Nation Albums Of 2007: Number 29

For all their connections with the mid-90s US alt-rock explosion, there's always been a soul bent to mark Spoon out from the pack. Their fifth album, Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga is the moment when Britt Daniel and co seem to have stopped messing about with trying to fit in with Guided By Voices/Afghan Whigs motifs and struck out for their own sound. It may have gone top ten in the Billboard album chart, but this isn't a sound destined to follow the Shins and Modest Mouse to the amphitheatres, pitching itself as being far too awkward and studio bound while retaining its summery pop roots. There's a groove at work that's rarely really exploited in the college radio favourite conglomeration, and when allied to such strong songwriting that occasionally manages to be both melodic and otherwise, often in the same song, it makes its mark all the stronger.

As demonstrated by their evolvement from their straighter early works, Daniel is not a writer prone to sticking to what he already knows works. The Ghost Of You Lingers owes more to Philip Glass minimalism than their Anti Records labelmates and stylistic bretheren, as reverb-heavy clashing vocals and backing wails are overlaid with an insistent programmed electric keyboard, a brave decision to take for track two between the dark Kinksian opener Don't Make Me A Target and the slightly diluted Motown horns plus vibraphone of You Got Yr Cherry Bomb. Whatever shifts they do instil add light and shade rather than ruin the flow; My Little Japanese Cigarette Case is a cocksure strut, classic Spoon in a way, coloured by harp and Spanish guitar breaks and revving synths before falling apart without warning, while The Underdog a call to arms for the radio disenfranchised that, produced by Jon Brion (Kanye West, Fiona Apple, Aimee Mann, reportedly Dido) and featuring a joyous horn fanfare, sounds like something that could litter even American rock radio. The semi-acoustic heartfelt closer Black Like Me, Daniel vocally desolate ("I'm in need of someone to take care of me tonight") over Sgt Pepper strings, proves in finality that Spoon are that rarity, a band who know what they're here for and where they're going, but even then aren't content to just wait for it to come to them.

LISTEN ON: You Got Yr Cherry Bomb
WATCH ON: The Underdog

**

My favourite album of 2007 is...

Ed Seed, The Mules: "I've only bought one album that was released this year, and it's The Early Learnings of Eugene McGuinness. Technically it's a mini-album, but it's brilliant, so that's my vote."

James Lesslie, Fireworks Night: Panda Bear - Person Pitch

In shops tomorrow: 3/12

Singles

One of our most inventive and colourful singer-songwriters releases their third proper single on Monday, That's right, Stan's Bin Bag Song by Stan Boardman. Oh yeah, some chancer called Emmy The Great's got a 7" out as well. Again self-released, which when Adele is getting the sort of production treatment usually reserved for Melanie C records is a very good thing, Gabriel is apparently about a teenage fan, which makes the delicacy and turn of phrase of the kind of love song slightly disturbing if you ask us. In a land where the female singer-songwriter gates are flooded, as one fan of 60s female singers might have it, it's pleasing that they're not all signing the first deal that comes their way and are actually concentrating on making their art better and more individual. Don't you think? Surprise Radcliffe & Maconie record of the week Wake The President's Remember Fun? is, depending on what you believe, out either last Monday or next Monday, and as you know in all such cases of miscommunication we take the mean average. Whichever, it's well worth taking note of their Orange Juice-meets-Felt-meets-Malcolm Middleton indiepop like momma used to make. Definitely last week, but we've only just found out, saw the release of oddball antifolkers The Bobby McGee’s latest EP, S'Amuser Com Des Fous, featuring songs called When Father Died Ferrets Licked Away the Tears, Sussex Uni Solipsists Society, CoalMine Kampf 1984 and a touching Christmas song called Danny Baker/Bob Marley. If they still make glitter and tinsel-encrusted fanzines somewhere they'd be all over them, and they'd be sharing cover space with Bearsuit, whose handclap and Casio with an undertow pop now produces 7" Foxy Boxer. Back in the world of professional musicians with record deals and production budgets, Interpol get self-serious like few others can on download only No I In Threesome

Albums

Just when you thought you could settle into top thirty of the year complacency this year of plenty still has one more surprise up its sleeve. Le Loup are a live seven piece but in essence are Washington native Sam Simkoff, who with a laptop and a bare minimum of instruments put together an album bravely titled The Throne Of The Third Heaven Of The Nations Millennium General Assembly, after a notable piece of outsider art. This is in our end of year chart, we'll tell you now, so marvellous is it, but if you want to beat the rush that will no doubt ensue you'll need to know that this takes in Sufjan Stevens' Appalachian dreaminess, Animal Collective's occasional calmness and the communal off-harmonies to the depths of just about half the bands North America currently produces. Clone Quartet may originate in Belfast but their heart is with those ever rising gangs of indie-electro kids based just outside greater London. Luckily they pull it off a lot better than most of those do, Well Oiled Machine just that, letting the electro touches enhance rather than overwhelm their Crimea-reminiscent hooks. They're also on the other new release by their label, the inestimable Smalltown America, who are also using this week for the latest in their roundup of new and unsigned talent, Public Service Broadcast #9, an album so long awaiting release that one of the 22 bands on it, Optimist Club, have split up. Also featured and still operational are Pagan Wanderer Lu, Holy Fuck, Pocketbooks, Dragonflies Draw Flame, Tiger Force, Lovvers and You And The Atom Bomb. From Upton upon Severn comes Luke Leighfield, a very English take on Ben Folds-esque poetic singer-songwriter who used to play violin for Get Cape Wear Cape Fly and now brings out Fan The Flames (mail order from here). Room for a quick Christmas album? A Very Cherry Christmas Volume 3 (mail order again) features new festive commissions from MJ Hibbett and the Validators, The Bobby McGee's, A Smile And A Ribbon and twelve bands we don't know. Why can labels never get anniversary reissues right on time? Ian Dury's seminal New Boots And Panties, an album whose themes and directness apparently shocked even seasoned punks who heard it, was released in September 1977, and thirty years and two months later it's back out with four extra tracks including Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll - a phrase Dury brought to the language, lest it be overlooked - and two rarities on CD for the first time, from an NME cassette and a competition winners' 7" B-side. Also making its proper debut, via extra DVD, is the Blockheads at Queen Mary’s College, London for the BBC, which actually was thirty years ago this week. Ah, all comes round in the end. With the Wedding Present rounding off their twentieth anniversary tour two more albums fill a shelving gap, Ye Ye (The Best Of The RCA Years) taking in the high water marks of Bizarro and the Albini-altered Seamonsters plus the twelve singles in twelve months ploy, while Shepherd's Bush Welcomes The Wedding Present is a set from just two years ago. The second leg of The Verve's reformation tour kicks off at the O2 in a week, so high time the 2004 Best Of This Is Music: The Singles 92-98 sprouted a DVD. At least Mad Richard must have signed it off - something called Music Club Deluxe has brought out a load of 2CD Best Ofs to little fanfare this week, chiefly Killing Moon: the Best of Echo & the Bunnymen, Kings of Rock 'n' Roll: the Best of Prefab Sprout and - now come on - Dandy Highwaymen: the Best of Adam and the Ants. Out in the margins Music Club Deluxe would fear to tread we have B Loves Ze, another trawling of the New York discopost-punk label's highlights including James Chance and the Contortions, Lydia Lunch, Teenage Jesus & The Jerks, Alan Vega, Cristina and Was Not Was.

Sweeping The Nation Albums Of 2007: Number 30

On the surface of it there's something almost too ethereal about the three New York women that make up Au Revoir Simone, from that front cover shot to the wind chimes and piano over simple synth line that makes up more than half of The Bird Of Music's opening track The Lucky One. That opener's wistfully cheery minimal keyboards over three part homily harmonies is a red herring, though, as the overall impression of the album is that of a trio who aren't averse to being away with the fairies but at heart are more rooted in femininity and glacial beauty, something like the Mountain Goats' John Darnielle acting as svengali to a My First Electrelane. And aside from all that art, this is just a great, deceptively simple pop record.

In fact, just skip that first track if you want a full impression of what they do, as the scene is better set by the two tracks that follow it, Sad Song running on programmed pulses of vintage synth and drum machine, followed by Fallen Snow sketching out crossthreaded textural beauty while whichever one of Erika, Annie and Heather it is recounts that "nothing hurts like seeing you hurt like me". They do the 80s synth sounds better than a lot of bands who claim to specialise in it on I Couldn't Sleep, Dark Halls and Night Majestic, the latter of which are set straight for the school dancehall direct from the Go-Gos/Waitresses playbook. Stars comes on like a junior Postal Service, while Lark's gradually fuzzed out sound and the Young Marble Giants-recalling The Way To There, which also employs a string section, prove there's a sophistication that belies their otherworldly imagery. Throughout the aura is of a dreamy warmth that evokes St Etienne's retro dancefloor stylings or Tilly & The Wall with a moog or two. Too clever for twee, too uplifting for electronica, its awkward hope, love and loss matched by the textural quintessence.

LISTEN ON: A Violent Yet Flammable World
WATCH ON: Sad Song

**

My favourite album of 2007 is...

Au Revoir Simone:
Annie: Oh No! Oh My! - Oh No! Oh My!
Erika: Lavender Diamond - Imagine Our Love
Heather: Dirty Projectors - Rise Above

Sweeping The Nation Albums Of 2007

30 Au Revoir Simone - The Bird Of Music
29 Spoon - Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga
28 Monster Bobby - Gaps
27 Emma Pollock - Watch The Fireworks
26 Blonde Redhead - 23
25 Le Loup - The Throne Of The Third Heaven Of The Nations Millennium General Assembly
24 Monkey Swallows The Universe - The Casket Letters
23 Gravenhurst - The Western Lands
22 Panda Bear - Person Pitch
21 Jens Lekman - Night Falls Over Kortedala
20 GoodBooks - Control
19 Scout Niblett - This Fool Can Die Now
18 Holy Fuck - LP
17 Piano Magic - Part Monster
16 Jonquil - Lions
15 Gruff Rhys - Candylion
14 M.I.A. - Kala
13 Field Music - Tones Of Town
12 The Go! Team - Proof Of Youth
11 PJ Harvey - White Chalk
10 Johnny Boy - Johnny Boy
9 Jetplane Landing - Backlash Cop
8 LCD Soundsystem - Sound Of Silver
7 Lucky Soul - The Great Unwanted
6 Les Savy Fav - Let's Stay Friends
5 Battles - Mirrored
4 Napoleon IIIrd - In Debt To
3 Arcade Fire - Neon Bible
2 Future Of The Left - Curses!
1 Okkervil River - The Stage Names

Sweeping The Nation Covermount 3.5: A Very Sweeping Christmas 2

What's this all about? Well, last year, just ahead of party season, we posted more than forty songs you don't find on typical Christmas compilations. Taken in alphabetical order, those whose festive songs we used were: Arcade Fire, Beck, Belle & Sebastian, Ben Folds, Big Star, Bright Eyes, the Cocteau Twins, Coldplay, Darlene Love, De La Soul, Eels, The Fall, The Flaming Lips, Fountains of Wayne, Grandaddy, Half Man Half Biscuit, James Brown, Jose Feliciano, Joseph Spence, Joy Zipper, Kate Bush, Lauren Laverne, The Long Blondes, Low, Mew, No Doubt, Okkervil River, Pet Shop Boys, Peter Broggs, The Ramones, Randy Newman, The Raveonettes, Rilo Kiley, The Ronettes, Rufus Wainwright, Saint Etienne, Smokey Robinson & the Miracles, Snow Patrol, Sufjan Stevens, The Walkmen, The Wedding Present, The White Stripes and XTC. That's enough for two.

Anyway, it seemed to go down well, so as it's that most special time of the year again, we thought we'd upload both sets of songs again. So...

A Very Sweeping Christmas 1
A Very Sweeping Christmas 2
(don't forget, click 'free' at the bottom of the first page)
More details

But that's not all, because after finishing with that, we found we had a few left over, and that for us can only mean one thing...

A Very Sweeping Christmas 3


TBC Poundsystem - Losing My Sledge (Perhaps better if you're acquainted with the original Losing My Edge for this one)
Casiotone For The Painfully Alone - Cold White Christmas
Arab Strap - Xmas (Baby, Please Come Home)
Galaxie 500 - Listen, The Snow Is Falling
Hefner - The Little Baby Hefner's Xmas Song For Holland
Emmy The Great & Lightspeed Champion - Christmas In Prison
Hot Uncles - The Joy Of Giving (A one-off between Absentee's Dan Michaelson and the Broken Family Band's Steven Adams. First line NSFW)
The Bellrays - Merry Christmas Baby
Eels - Christmas Is Going To The Dogs
Noah And The Whale - To Cyril At Crunkmas
Sufjan Stevens - Get Behind Me, Santa!
John Cale - Child's Christmas In Wales
Harvey Danger - Sometimes You Have To Work On Christmas (Sometimes)
Chris T-T - 100,000 Turkeys
The Joseph And Mary Chain - The Twelve Days of Christmas (A bringing together of much of the Sunderland scene - the Futureheads, Field Music, the Golden Virgins, Kathryn Williams, This Ain't Vegas, George Washington Brown and Marie Nixon (nee Du Santiago of Kenickie) among others)
Kurtis Blow - Christmas Rappin
Lucky Soul - Lonely This Christmas

Christmas comes but once a year

So the year in which we passed 1000 posts and didn't notice (it was this one, for the sake of completion) is almost up, and from now until the early days of 2008 is where we go into blogging overdrive as is now traditional. The Weekly Sweep and Weekender are being put away for the rest of the year, the latter to re-emerge anew as detailed in the last one, and instead there's a barrage of words, ideas, charts and flights of fancy coming your way.

Here's how we're rolling: tomorrow we're reposting links to A Very Sweeping Christmas Volumes 1 and 2, and in a Christmas reissue spirit, albeit without the sense of being ripped so hard off you'll require a catheter as it's all free, we're adding a third volume. Yeah, another CDR's worth of Christmas songs for your office party, should you wish to take particularly unpleasant aural revenge on your workmates.

Then from the 1st to 30th inclusive is our usual rundown of the Sweeping The Nation Top 30 Albums Of The Year, basically everything we've been saying all along about our well established favourite artists expanded to fill a few hundred words a shot while putting them all into some sort of almost conclusive order. Alongside these this year we've actually decided to ask some of those we've spent the last eleven months and more talking up what their own favoured listening of 2007 was, and we'll be running their replies alongside our own prevarications throughout December. Many thanks to everyone who took the time to respond.

Alongside these we'll be presenting our final Top 100 singles of the year, harking back to Christmas charts of yore and calculating the detritus of the year. Our usual mighty review of the year's moving and shaking comes on New Year's Eve. We'll also be running a sideline polling the bloggers of the nation to produce the third annual UK Blogger Albums Of The Year Poll. Who will the cognescenti elect to follow Funeral and Return To Cookie Mountain into the almost hallowed hall of fame? You'll see on January 1st. Two days later comes a Class Of '08 Covermount, and then the year begins in earnest yet again.

And so this isn't quite so self-absorbed, some things we noticed from watching music this week: British Sea Power are inviting votes on what is Rock Music and what is Non-Rock Music; and the ever reliable fine rock sons of Aldershot Reuben have come up with a Christmas single and the year's first festive video:



EDIT: And a second! The ambitiously named Christmas Number One by The Black Arts, which is important as it's the work of Eddie Argos (Art Brut) and Keith TOTP (Art Brut hanger-on and general man about town) guesting with the reconstituted Black Box Recorder, about whom it's rumoured there is proper new material on the horizon:



And... The Young Ones has just been issued in full on DVD for the first time, and this sequence, often cut from VHS versions for copyright reasons, has been reinstated - Ken Bishop's Nice Twelve, a conglomerate of Jools Holland, Chris Difford, Stewart Copeland, Rowland Rivron, Derek Griffiths apparently, Peter 'the one who writes loads of TV themes, including The Young Ones' own, not the one out of Field Music' Brewis and others) cover Subterranean Homesick Blues:

They said it couldn't be done

...but ahead of tomorrow's official launch of our festive/end of year activity, three more mp3s acquired through perfectly legal means that we want to drop off with you...

First up, a band we namechecked just two days ago, Love Ends Disaster! The Nottingham fivesome, who've drawn comparisons to Talking Heads, British Sea Power and the Only Ones, had the Colin Murray/Huw Stephens/John Kennedy trinity behind them for their last single and they've supported Yo La Tengo, Babyshambles, Foals, Maps and, erm, INXS. Wisely not on their press release, that one, but we have eyes and ears everywhere. Moving on, LED! released a double A side yesterday; they describe this half of it as "an expression of the reverence and respect that they, as young musicians, naturally feel towards Elton John. God bless you Elton and a very Merry Christmas."

Love Ends Disaster! - Dinosaur

Bring Back The Guns are a lively Houston, Texas band who have just released debut album Dry Futures. This press release reckons they're "an experiment in messing around with music at its molecular level: ignoring rules whenever possible and coming up with songs that obey their own whims". What this means is your usual Les Savy Fav/Q And Not U touchstones for any American band who are a bit jittery and loose with time signatures and basslines, plus a heap of Minutemen and Fugazi.

Bring Back The Guns - The Art of Malnutrition

This update's Band Who Sent Us A CDR is Tim Goalen And The Tremors, a London outfit who are equally at home with Brand New Cadillac-flavoured rockabilly and Americana country influences

Tim Goalen And The Tremors - Let's Make It Alright All Night

You know they're no good

One of our favourite ways of passing the time is dissecting newspaper reporting styles, but even by our contemptuously cynical standards the Brighton Evening Argus on Friday printed a piece so completely mad it must have only made it in because the layout team realised they were running a page short. It starts promisingly with the headline:

Winehouse says 'no no no' to Rehab with The Argus

So what could that be? Do they have an exclusive on Troubled Star Amy Winehouse seeking to come to terms with her issues?

What do you think?

We tried to make her go to Rehab, but she said: "No, no, no".

Beehived crooner Amy Winehouse has astonishingly rejected an offer of a champagne and canape laden interview with The Argus at Brighton Marina's Rehab bar.

We invited the hellraising Amy to the popular venue with the promise she could unburden her soul to one of our top reporters over a leisurely lunch.

The rejection, as the troubled star perpares for a rare gig in the city, has left us and a legion of fans gutted.

"Astonishing". Local newspaper fails to arrange interview with celebrity. Of course it's in a bar called Rehab, because if the story didn't come off, there's your angle even if they don't get to serve bottles of champagne to a woman commonly thought to have a major drink problem. It's almost like dealing with General Musharraf. Note also that this is "a rare gig", like she's Madonna.

Talented Winehouse is due to perform in front of a sell-out crowd at the Brighton Centre on Monday and many of those who bought tickets hoped she would open her heart during a rare visit to the city.

Instead of snapping up our offer, the 24-year-old instead went back to black, donning a short sleeved mini dress at the court appearance of caged hubby Blake Fielder-Civil.

Eh? The gig is tonight and yet they wanted to take her to Brighton a week in advance? Yeah, how dare she go to court to see her husband's bail proceedings rather than give another rambling, answer-free interview nobody reads.

Time her "gutted" "legion of fans" spoke.

Kelly James, 23, from Brighton, said: "I thought she might say a few words before the gig. I was hoping. I guess she is too busy trying to sort out Blake at the moment."

Rehab owner John Lardner said: "It is disappointing, I know a lot of the guys here were looking forward to meeting her."

That's one person who's not really that disappointed and the bar owner. It's virtually a march on Island records.

However Winehouse's record label, Island, said they were unable to fix up the interview.

A spokeswoman said: "There's no way she can do it."

Argh, still half a page to fill. Quick, think hard, team...

It comes as the city braces itself for the arrival of drug addict Babyshambles rocker Pete Doherty.

The former squeeze of leggy model Kate Moss is set to play the Brighton Centre on Sunday, just a day before Winehouse.

Security around the Brighton Centre during both gigs is expected to be beefed up with burly staff being provided by the pair's record labels.

However Brighton Centre staff said they would not be laying on any extra staff.

A spokeswoman said: "I don't think there will be anything out of the ordinary for either of them. It's just business as usual."

Again, so much journalese to admire. "Leggy model Kate Moss", and never mind that at 5ft 6 she is commonly thought to be far less leggy than the modelling industry standard. "Burly staff provided by the pair's record labels", as if Island and Rough Trade have bouncers on their payroll rather than it being Showsec's business.

Still, at least those going have things in perspective.

Thousands of fans have already snapped up tickets to see both singers.

Karen Hoy, 40, of Brighton, said: "I can't wait to see Amy Winehouse on Monday as she is currently the number one reality show.

"I am going along in the hope she will sing, however, there is an element of voyeurism about going to see her, as her on-off stage performance is a good old fashioned rock and roll lifestyle which is not manufactured by some PR company.

"It's just real life tragedy unfolding like Kurt Cobain and Elvis. You want to be able to tell your friends that you saw Winehouse before she died."

No, Evening Argus, nothing worthy of comment there. Obviously nobody really calls anyone "currently the number one reality show" or talks in terms of "good old fashioned rock and roll lifestyle which is not manufactured by some PR company", but as we say, space to fill. Good that she's hoping Winehouse will be singing, though. It sounds like no more than Ms Hoy deserves to see, although Amy ODing live on stage might just edge it out for her.

Sussex Police also confirmed it had no plans for extra officers to patrol the Brighton Centre.

A spokeswoman said: "We trust them to behave themselves."

Tch. Redlands, the Viper Room and the Brighton Centre - it's the internationally recognised trinity of music business debauchery. Don't the police even know that? Who's paying their wages?

Still, every cloud has a silver lining:

While the champagne may have been put on ice for Amy, Rehab is offering a lucky reader a meal for two at its Seasons restaurant to mark the singer's appearance in Brighton.

Email us at news@theargus.co.uk and tell us why you think Amy would make a great date. Answers should be no more than 100 words and entrants must be over 18. The usual Newsquest competition terms and conditions apply.

Yeah. That Amy Winehouse, the one who you know is an unreliable drunken heroin-head who won't even talk to the press? You'd love to go on a date with her, you would. We'd like to see how many entries that gets.

Weekender : pretending to be a circus clown

FREE MUSIC: As well as having a right bugger of a Myspace code-wise, New York's The Vandelles would quite like you never to have heard the Raveonettes in your life. Past that, and this is your ever welcome sounding low-down distorted fuzzy beat group rock'n'roll for the youth of today. Oh yeah, and never to have heard the Jesus & Mary Chain. Lovely Weather is their key song.

HEY YOU GET OFFA MYSPACE: Winnipeg's Blue Sky Addicts claim to combine "the upbeat joy of Electric Light Orchestra, the enchanting dominance of Sigur Ros, the simple but unpredictable beauty of Hawksley Workman, and the vulnerable sentiments of Stars". There's more Torquil Campbell than Jeff Lynne here, but not by much, and quite a bit of Ben Gibbard and one of that plague of nu-MOR British bands were they not so middly and actually listened to those they portend to take after. There's plenty to enchant, essentially.

VISUAL REPRESENTATION: As it's that special time of year, which we'll come back to, some random clips from our big list. A rare video for the Pop Group's She Is Beyond Good And Evil, for instance. Spizzenergi's Where's Captain Kirk? ramshackle live. The Violent Femmes live in 1984. C30 C60 C90 Go! The Shadows in front of an appreciative Belgian TV crowd in 1964. Prime Dusty Springfield. Erm, prime Captain Sensible. All that sort of thing.

VIRAL MARKETING: British Sea Power release third album Do You Like Rock Music?, a title we can't make up our minds as to whether it's good or bad, on January 14th. Recorded in Hotel2Tango, Montreal, it gives their 1983-as-now sound a good lick of A Silver! Black Fire paint, as previewed on a recent tour of unlikely places. Lights Out For Darker Skies has been played since at least Brighton in May, while single Waving Flags and whatever this one is called were captured at All Saints Church, Newcastle.

FALLING OFF A BLOG: Occasionally we remember we've forgotten to do one of the big hitters in blogworld, such as Hate Something Beautiful, and oddly when we check its latest posts we more often than not find that blog is far more Anglocentric (in this case Kate Nash, Does It Offend You Yeah?, the Ting Tings and someone called The Broken Hearts - London DJs with burlesque fashion, apparently, which has put us right off them before we've heard any of their music) then the top UK bloggers. Odd, that.

EVERYBODY GET RANDOM: One more blog? Oh, go on then, it is Pampelmoose, maintained by Dave Allen, four-string maestro from the Gang Of Four. Given their stance on capitalism it's interesting to see him querying whether Band Of Horses were right to sever advertising links with Wal-Mart, but even more interesting are fragments of two of his band's new demos (one's on the sidebar) as free mp3s, with two more promised this week.

IN OTHER NEWS: And indeed this is the final Weekender of 2007, just as that was the last Weekly Sweep of this year. It'll be all change once we get the tinsel and turkey out of our system - the Sweep moves to Saturdays, while Weekender goes back to Sundays with a rejigged format incorporating a much shorter but no less thorough version of In Shops Tomorrow. From next weekend, you see, it's time for the STN end of year brouhaha, but that's an entirely different matter and one we'd best get cracking with if you don't mind...

In shops tomorrow: 26/11

Singles

Friends Of The Bride are from Raynes Park, SW20, which according to Wikipedia is also home to Richard Briers, ex-Charlton midfielder Graham Stuart and Dave Benson-Phillips off the kids' telly. The Times called them "nu-croon", a title Google also ascribes to Josh Groban and Cherry Ghost. Friends Of The Bride sound like neither. What So You Think You Can Dance, their second far too cool for school single for and generally another ripe picking from Young & Lost Club, does sound like is Brit-beat meets swing meets post-ironic attitude, a sound we've previous labelled "rat pack fuzzpop". As we generally say about bands who sound simultaneously retro and modern, were radio not so much in the pocket of the self-appointed NME zeitgeist this sort of thing should be all over the daytime schedules and picking up more than the small but ever growing cult passing following they currently have. Judging by the turnout and audience participation for their End Of The Road Festival set the Wave Pictures already have a passionate enough live crowd, and of course we're going to love them - two of them are from Leicestershire, they were based for a while in Cardiff, they take their lead from Darren Hayman, they've been on tour with Emmy The Great, they've played with Jeffrey Lewis and have issued records on 4AD and, in the case of the splendid Richmanish double A side We Dress Up Like Snowmen/Now You Are Pregnant, Moshi Moshi's singles club. A very big 2008 album awaits. As if to remind us that we should never have doubted her, Emma Pollock's album Watch The Fireworks is turning into quite the slow burner. That it sounds not that far from the latter days of the Delgados helps, of course, but it's definitely a record bearing a very personal stamp. Paper And Glue has a gorgeous melodic glaze covering an awkward structural feeling and is rightly making Radio 2 sit up and take note. Speaking of ethereal songwriters, presumably Island picked The Piano from PJ Harvey's White Chalk because, featuring drums and a crescendo, it's as close as they'll find to something remotely commercial. Like the rest of the album, it's otherwise totally out of line. This Is Fake DIY have followed Drowned In Sound and PlayLouder into the online magazine-becoming-label market, and their latest signings are Love Ends Disaster!, the Nottingham outfit who've been 'promising' for far too long now without getting their deserved breakthrough's Suzanne/Dinosaur double-A 7" doing the Maximo Park-channelling-Sonic Youth 'thing'. It stays well on the right side of the clean/dirty equation of post-punkishness, which Editors' The Racing Rats is busy leaping Fonz-style. The Electric Soft Parade just had to finish off their comfortably reputation re-establishing No Need To Be Downhearted album campaign with Appropriate Ending, a digital release also bearing covers of Elliott Smith and the Aislers Set. Deerhoof are occasionally called pop by mad people, but Matchbook Seeks Maniac is as sunshine pop as the American underground will ever make, even starting with the Be My Baby beat (see Covermount passim), while Electrelane bid not farewell but adieu, or whichever form they intend the word 'hiatus' to take, with the ethereal shards of In Berlin. Also that Mules single documented last week got moved back.

Albums

One of the most interesting things in the last couple of years has been the rise of the mini-album, whether giving an up and coming act time to put their older material out while writing for the proper full-length debut or to give an explosive new talent a helping hand. It's very much the latter in the case of Birmingham trio Johnny Foreigner, who've had a couple of ground level 7"s out before but on Arcs Across The City explode into glorious Sony Bravia-style technicolour of taut leftfield heavy riffage and Sonic Youth-cribbing knives through the heart of dull old linearity. Imagine Seafood's American-flavoured melodic hyperactivity colliding at full pelt with Los Campesinos!' million ideas in three minutes or less, but Los Campesinos! (who they've supported on several occasions, as they have Sky Larkin, so it's a foregone conclusion we're going to follow them whatever) if Gareth's love of Xiu Xiu was all-pervading, in one airtight package. By God, this is an exciting 21 minutes 20 seconds to give hope at these end of the year blues. Once upon a time Johnny Foreigner would have had little problem with the blanket genre description 'indie'. Probably. Man, 'indie' used to be such an unbesmirched term, indeed one which told you nothing other than its circumstances of release, often therein acting as its own badge of quality. Of course, twelve or so years ago the majors barged their way into the private party like drunk latecomers possibly tipped off by a Myspace bulletin and now everyone hates it as a subjective we're seeing indie without its rug. How different to 1982-83, when indie was something Peel and perhaps Long played and the rest of broadcast media bought bargepoles specifically for the purpose of not touching that row with, and Cherry Red records brought out its celebrated label sampler Pillows And Prayers, complete with sleeve instruction "pay no more than 99p". Skinflints got to hear the Monochrome Set, Felt, the Nightingales, Attila the Stockbroker, far too many Tracy Thorn and/or Ben Watt projects and a splendidly out of place Quentin Crisp among other luminaries of the student bedsit, and now it's back out with an extra disc of label obscurities (ver Set's Jetset Junta? We'd have thought so!) and a bloody DVD. Someone should mount a sculpture dedicated to this stuff for Trafalgar Square's spare plinth. Pixies were never so downtrodden so they just settled for being the greatest rock band ever (our perspective only). Dig For Fire: A Tribute To Pixies sounds like one of those tribute albums featuring obscure Norwegian light metallers that get flung out into bargain bins every so often, but in fact features British Sea Power (Caribou), Mogwai (Gouge Away), They Might Be Giants, Joy Zipper, the Rosebuds, OK Go and assorted US underground flyweights. They've done all their reforming, but Squeeze head around the country from Monday and take with them self-released document of their summer US tour 5 Live and the second in Glenn Tilbrook's mining of his demos cupboard, In The Sky Above: Demo Tapes 1993-1998.

DVDs

There's quite a bit of Roxy Music revivalism going on at the moment, now that the coast is clear from the half-arsed half reunion tour, and it continues with The Thrill of It All: A Visual History 1972-1982, featuring the art school dandies doing what they did on video, telly and stage, much commercially unreleased before now. One thing it unfortunately doesn't feature, which we might as well give you as we're in a good mood, is their MusikLaden set of 1973, featuring this version of Re-make/Re-model chiefly notable because a) it's mad and b) the audience are only roused by the drum solo. Sparks, who did a similarly coolly received set for the same show around this time, have fans who would only cheer a drum solo were it fed in by the backdrop projection. Dee Vee Dee - Sparks At The London Forum is a document of their high concept show from last September.

The Weekly Sweep

The Chiara L's - Kate's Kid [Myspace]

Emma Pollock - Paper And Glue [YouTube]

Emmy The Great - Gabriel [Myspace]

Foals - Balloons [YouTube]

Friends Of The Bride - So, You Think You Can Dance? [YouTube]

Future Of The Left - Manchasm [mp3 from The Merry Swankster]

The Futureheads - Broke Up The Time [Myspace]

Holy Fuck - Milkshake [mp3 from nialler9]

Johnny Flynn & the Sussex Wit - The Box [YouTube]

Johnny Foreigner - The End And Everything Else [Myspace]

The Kills - URA Fever [Myspace]

Laura Groves - I Am Leaving [Myspace] (This lovely thing, oddly reminiscent to us of Lightspeed Champion in a way, was allowed to slip by virtually unnoticed last month, while Adele's cheap homilies over rejected Melanie C synth string arrangements get the uber-hard sell. What gives?)

Lucky Soul - Lips Are Unhappy [YouTube] (So yeah, they won that Last.FM Christmas chart challenge thing and got to play a rooftop gig in 'fresh' mid-November for their promotional troubles. We, however, can only recommend taking part so far, to be exact to the point where the promo blurb references "real music". Are we really not past such linguistic high-minded stupidity?)

The Mules - This Is Your Life [Myspace]

Pulp - Sunrise [live YouTube]

Restlesslist - Dirty Pint [YouTube]

This Ain't Vegas - Short Term Long Term [YouTube]

Wake The President - Remember Fun? [Myspace]

The Wave Pictures - We Dress Up Like Snowmen [Myspace]

Wire - Our Time

Fancy a Brewis?

Exciting news: School Of Language, the cut and paste project of Field Musician David Brewis, releases debut album Ship To Shore on February 4th, Memphis Industries in Britain, Thrill Jockey in America. It features guest slots for Barry and Jaff from the Futureheads plus one Marie Nixon. That's Marie du Santiago to you.

It also looks like he's already got Frank Sidebottom onside.

Rip groove

Back in the last post we made reference to how the circle of musical life and regeneration is getting ever smaller. In the couple of days since, something has occurred to us that throws it into even sharper relief - UK garage is back. And not just because Craig David is giving interviews to whoever wants him to speak.

You remember UK garage. 2-step, as it became known - first there was speed garage, which was essentially speeded up house with time-stretched vocals, then sub-bass and the removal of two beats per bar made it 2-step, which became in its vocal R&B-mixed form the crossover hit of 1999-2000, which in turn went darker and deeper underground and re-emerged as grime.

And now? It's back from the northern clubs where it's been stewing these past few years. At number three in this week's midweeks is T2 feat Jodie's Heartbroken (and fans of absolute disgraces may like to note Micah Richards in the car at the start of the video), which sounds like Artful Dodger, and this is going to be far from the only hit with the broken beats and sped up house over the next year or so. It's apparently being called 'bassline' or 'niche' in the clubs, but we had these genre title debates years ago and frankly it's all the same thing at its core. And after that's been digested, go and listen to the boundary-crossing critical success of Burial's album Untrue, hailed as both the apotheosis and the transcendence of dubstep, but that drumbeat, that bassline, those varispeeded rave diva vocals... we know where that's actually come from.

While we're here, on a no less production-minded note but otherwise completely different, Song, By Toad has posted a fine piece about mixing levels that follows the similar piece the late Stylus magazine did a few years ago and makes what's happening clearer.

(* Can we point out Wiley's rhyming of 'garage' with 'garage' with 'garage' with 'garage'?)