List Power

It’s coming up to the time of the year when publications show their colours, pin them to the mast and then strenuously claim the meant them to look like everyone else’s. Or put more simply, its list time. Album of the Year, Female of the Year, Hairstyle… Its usually a race to the blindingly obvious, with only a few side angled odd balls thrown into prove some sort of indie credentials. The problem for these lists is two fold. Firstly they are usually decided upon by committee, so the lower common denominator usually prevails. Secondly, they limit themselves to the past years releases. Both of these seem reasonable, but for me, if the list is to have any relevance or informative prowess, then they’ve to be utterly subjective, and be dominated by the personal experience of the last year, rather than the dates on the inside of the sleeve.

So here are my colours, I guess some of the others will violently disagree:

Band of the Year

The Kleptones. They are not strictly band, and I actually first heard them there in December last year on Nick Johnson’s Plastic Soul Show on Trinity FM so I fail on even my own criteria, at the very first hurdle. Still here’s the reason – they are brilliant and easily my most listened to artists this year, aside from Bonnie Prince Billy and Love, and I’ve been listening to them for way to long to even try and justify their inclusion. So here we go: The Kleptones approach to music is seemingly so antagonistic it is difficult to see how it works, sandwiching upwards of twenty slices of movie dialogue into samples from Eastenders, using widely hated artists like Phil Collins, before his chocolate revival, and Minnie Ripton, mixed through with great big smiles of hiphop and classic rock. Or rather, lets smash everything together and see how it works. It does. These gentleman are master aural engineers, the tracks fit so seamlessly together that you can hardly believe that the mixes were not the originals anyway. And they give there stuff away for free. Brilliance.

Hon Mentions to Bloc Party and Kings of Leon for keeping the standards high (sic). Hot Chip for giving me the sound track to a February depression. Iron and wine/Calexico for having the self indulgent brilliance of having a Spanish Man solo in the middle of He Lays in the Reins. Fight like Apes for making me give a damn about Irish music again. Kila for consistent live greatness.

Individual of the Year

Final Fantasy, literally one of the best one man sets I’ve ever seen. And a manful attempt to stand up to the bullies in Architecture in Helsinki who tried to drown him out during the jam session at the Picnic. Not so memorably brilliant recorded as live, but still a damn site better than most of the other indie dross piling out of Montreal at the moment.

Hon. Mentions to Sufjan Stevens, for making Christmas music fun again all those (three?) years ago and still doing it today and to M.M.I.I.A.A.M.I.A who continues to flourish despite no obvious talent by cynically taking ownership and exploiting the imagery and language of terrorism to give her heavily borrowed music an edge its got no god damn right to have. You go girl.

Track of the Year

Thou Shalt Always Kill, by Scroobius Pip vs Dan le Sac is right up there. A beautiful self help guide for hipsters in the form of song. Like the Sunscreen Song but good, relevant and funny. Likewise Dan le Sac’s track CUPID on Dylan was brilliant.

Album of the Year

Untrue, by Burial. I only got this there last week and am utterly entranced by it. It reminds me of films such as A Bittersweet Life and Collateral (which basically copied much of Bittersweet’s cinematography anyway), both of which were love letters to cities at night, forgetting their plots. Endless fluorescent images flicker and mirror, muffled snatches of conversation and buttended sentences jog the memory. Untrue is the follow up to Burial’s eponymous first album, and continues in the slight manner of that work. The unnerving half constructed beats of dubstep seek to impose order upon the music, but fail, instead adding to the confusion and beauty, like a depressive who seeks control in self harm. Untrue also provided one of the funniest album reviews I’ve read in a while, when the pitchfork reviewer actually apologised for likening it to DJ Shadow, because he was too well known for it to be a proper reference. Please god, don’t ever let Analogue fall into that prattling level of pretentiousness.

Gig of the Year

Its difficult to look past Fight Like Apes set up in the TFM studio a few weeks ago, but then I’m reliably informed (by reason, no less) that that was not actually a gig, so I guess it’ll have to be the old fall back of the Electric Picnic. I suppose its a lazy choice, but then it marked so much for Analogue and for us all personally. The music was outstanding, from the utter jaw dropping brilliance of Bjork, to the understated frenzy of Final Fantasy, by way of perennially consistent performers Hot Chip, Kila, and on and on. It can’t really be called a gig, but I don’t go to enough festivals to warrant adding another category for them. So yeah, it was the greatest moment of the year, spinning madly, laughing at the top of our voices at the top a Ferris wheel at four in the morning, with the rest of the crew, the sheer mayhem and brilliance of the Picnic in a moment…

Publicity Stunt of the Year

Got to be Radiohead’s cynical ‘pay what you will’ album launch (the market research of the demographic spread etc of what people are willing to pay will surely cover any gaps in their profit projections), laughingly emphasised by the utterly overpriced their tickets were for next summers gig. Boo. Still they are the reason I will be making the pilgrimage to Roskilde next year, so whatever, I’m a hypocrite.

And that’s it.