1. Allo Darlin’ – The Polaroid Song

2. Voxtrot – The Start of Something

3. Tigercats – Banned at the Troxy

4. Betty and the Werewolves – Tu Veux Jouer

5. Cats on Fire – Your Woman

6. Math and Physics Club – Baby I’m Yours

7. The Lovely Eggs – Have You Ever Seen A Digital Accordion?

8. Oh No! Oh My! – I Have No Sister

9. Los Campesinos! – There Are Listed Buildings

10. Johnny Foreigner – Salt, Peppa and Spinderella

11. Shrag – Rabbit Kids

12. Heavenly – C is the Heavenly Option

13. Airport Girl – The Foolishness That We Create Through Love Is The Closest We Come To Greatness

14. Standard Fare – Fifteen

15. Belle and Sebastian – I’m A Cuckoo

16. Comet Gain – Love Without Lies

17. The Pains of Being Pure at Heart – Heart In Your Heartbreak

18. The Wave Pictures – Leave the Scene Behind

19. Kenickie – Punka

20. Help Stamp Out Loneliness – Record Shop

21. Camera Obscura – French Navy

22. The Smiths – There Is A Light That Never Goes Out

23. Moustache of Insanity – We Need More Awesome

24. The School – I Want You Back

25. Neutral Milk Hotel – Holland, 1945

26. Tullycraft – Twee

27. Los Campesinos! – Romance is Boring

28. Arab Strap – The Shy Retirer

29. Allo Darlin’ – Kiss Your Lips

30. The Postal Service – Such Great Heights

31. The Go! Team – Ladyflash

32. The Pains of Being Pure at Heart – My Terrible Friend

33. The Lovely Eggs – I Like Birds (But I Like Other Animals Too)

34. Shrag – Faux-Coda

35. Art Brut – Good Weekend

36. Another Sunny Day – You Should All Be Murdered

37. Summer Camp – I Want You

38. Go Sailor – A Fine Day For Sailing

39. The Moldy Peaches – Who’s Got The Crack?

40. Standard Fare – Love Doesn’t Just Stop

41. Pulp – The Night That Minnie Temperley Died

42. Lemon Jelly feat. William Shatner – ’64 aka Go

43. The Feelies – The Boy With Perpetual Nervousness

44. This Many Boyfriends – #1

45. World Atlas – The Winter Stories

46. Destroyer – Painter In Your Pocket

47. Acid House Kings – Are We Lovers Or Are We Friends?

48. Voxtrot – Raised by Wolves

49. Pants Yell! – Your Feelings Don’t Show

50. Butcher Boy – Carve a Pattern

Things that may or may not be on the playlist:

It was all the way back in February 2006 that I first decided to put out a music blog.  Back then, it seemed to be the thing that everyone was doing.  My own motivation was rather more personal: I’d recently gone through a break-up and wanted something to throw myself into.  It rapidly became more than that though.  It grew to a fair size, was assimilated somewhat into the ecosystem of music blogs and gained a bit of a recognition of press via places like The Guardian and even the BBC.

That blog is not the same blog as it is today.  The numbers pretty much fell off of a cliff when I stopped posting less than legal songs, relying only on what was legally distributed.  Which I expected, but what I didn’t expect is that they would never recover.  Numbers stagnated, and due to a number of reasons through 2007/2008, my interest waned somewhat, leading to a more sporadic posting pattern than the original near daily updates.

Somewhere in the middle of this, I found myself becoming more and more at home within the indiepop scene, and this started making up the majority of what I wrote about, and still remains that way today.  Now I don’t know how familiar you are with this scene, but it’s not exactly large.  Indiepop drove the numbers even lower, but honestly, by this stage I was perfectly fine with that.  I was writing about music that genuinely excited me, and if it’s only to a small audience, that’s absolutely fine.  That’s the nature of the scene, and being part of it at all is a lovely thing.

It’s kind of funny looking back on some of those earliest artists that I wrote about.  Some of them have gone on to great success.  The Los Campesinos! demo we all raved about set the tone for three stunning albums and their growth as a remarkable live band.  Johnny Foreigner went from recordings that sounded like they were put together in a dustbin and being first on at the Dublin Castle to being hands down one of the best British bands around.  Kate Nash was someone I wrote about a lot in the past, and though she went from superb songwriter to mainstream hit factory, it was still nice to see.  More recently championed bands like Allo Darlin’ and The Pains of Being Pure at Heart have gone from strength to strength.

On the other hand, a lot of those early bands have sadly fallen by the wayside too.  The Young Republic, the first band I ever covered, recently announced that they were no longer functioning as an active band.  Hartley Goldstein, the second artist covered, never released anything further and walked away from music altogether.  One of my absolute favourites, 4 or 5 Magicians, recently called it a day after doing their thing for five years without ever obtaining the success that they deserved.

I’m not sure what the future holds for Another Form of Relief.  I still like doing this, but it’s no longer the full-on venture that it once was.  I’ll always be writing about bits and pieces that I like, but I don’t feel obliged to follow a schedule, or find the “next big thing” anymore.  My interests within music have evolved over the years too.  The more I find myself involved in the indiepop scene, the more I want to explore new ventures like putting out records and putting on gigs, particularly on a local level.  How feasible these things are, I don’t know, but it’s something I’m keen to discover.  There’s also something a little archaic about a blog these days too.  So much of what I would have spun into full posts (odd Youtube finds, announcements of new singles etc.) is now just thrown out on the AFoR Twitter, so you’d do just as well following there as following here.  Still, there are some interesting things coming up (I want to explore those 2006 bands and what happened to them in more detail) as well as some new stuff I want to push upon you, so I do hope you’ll keep reading, whatever the next five years might bring..

Which means I can’t hear very much.

Which means I can’t really listen to music.

Which means I can’t really post about music.

Which means I’ll probably be back sometime next week.

(I will however still be rambling away on the Twitter.)

First off, for the past 18 months, my father has been pretty ill, resulting in him being constantly in and out of hospital. This most recent incident began in November of last year and is still ongoing. This makes it pretty difficult for me to arrange much beyond working, visiting hospitals and sleeping. This has cut quite significantly into the time I have to not only write here, lessened my ability to get to gigs and also finding and listening to new music in the first place.

The second is rather more mundane in that I’d become somewhat bored with the process in general. Pretty much the whole thing fell into a routine formula of pick a song, write a little about it and post with no variation in that format. There was a time when that seemed like the most efficient way to post, but the end result is lazy, both in content and writing.

For the past couple of weeks I’ve been kicking around various ideas to get us going again here. A few new features, and most importantly, not dragging out three paragraphs about a song I kind of like that can be achieved in one. Hopefully this’ll be more pleasant to read, and better for me to write. How much time I’m going to get to write though I have no idea. So no bullshit about posting everyday or anything similar. Posts when I’ve got time to post, and something worth posting about.

Let’s see where we end up.

This is the first thing that I have posted on this blog for the best part of six months. There are a great many reasons for this, but I have no desire to go over them here. Suffice to say, more important things have kept me away, sadly leaving my own little spot of the music blogoplanet neglected.

Starting in the next few days though, that will change. As we approach the third anniversary or this place, the music will once again begin flowing. Assuming I can find enough at least. I am horrendously out of touch at this particular moment, having hardly listened to any new music in quite some time. I am to rectify that as we go though, and hopefully fill in the gaps of the last few months.

While my inbox is still overflowing with promo emails from whatever band Pitchfork is banging on again this week, I do struggle to find the motivation to read them all. So if you, kind reader, would like to suggest anything (even your own band!), leave a comment or email me. All of which is a very lazy way to find out exactly what I’ve missed.

Still, new content will be coming either way, and hopefully without any further interruption in the near future.

Random notes:
i. New design is still being worked on, so don’t worry if something isn’t quite right.
ii. Full posts are now available through RSS, thus rendering any new design irrelevant.

I will return, hopefully with news, maybe with pictures, on Monday.

No matter though, as we’re heading into the new year with a hopefully revitalised blog. Anyone who visits occasionally will have realised that I’ve been slack with this thing lately. This has been brought on by a number of things. Most of them are out of the way now though, so we should be getting back to normal. I’ve got a brand new layout a bunch of ideas in my head for how I want to take things over the year, and we’ll have to see how many of them actually stick.

So tomorrow we’ll start with the first part of my top 44 songs from 2007. There’s no real reason why it’s 44 anymore than there was a reason for it being 49 last year. After that, I’ll hopefully settle into a format that I have kicking around that will allow for regular updates without draining me too much. Either way, there will be more content than there has been recently, so let’s see where we go from here.

It occurs to me that I never got around to covering any other Great British Hopes beyond Johnny Foreigner. The series would have also included 4 or 5 Magicians, Sky Larkin and Kotki Dwa. Go check them out and take in their awesomeness.

The Another Form of Relief supercomputer is currently experiencing some technical difficulties.

We’ll be back shortly.

- My continuing recovery from an ear infection.
- My computer only playing music out of one speaker, which makes listening to music a bit more challenging.
- The death and subsequent replacement of my car, followed by multiple return trips to the dealer to sort out random niggles.
- Going to the Great Escape festival in Brighton, where I spectacularly managed to see no more than a handful of bands.

I’m also incredibly lazy, and these things have unfortunately had to take priority. Tomorrow though, normal service will resume. For real this time, with posts every day and everything. Of course I’m sure it’ll last only a few days before I fall off the wagon again, but boy is there going to be some good stuff before I do.

Without getting all self-satisified, I’d also like to point out that from tomorrow, this blog will be going 100% legal in the music that I post. It’s been pretty close to that for a while now, only posting commercial tracks occasionally, but I’m finally going to take the plunge into legality and see how it works out. This will probably mean more obscure bands and songs at times, unless of course the major labels get on board with this free music thing. I’ll also probably end up cheating by including things like Youtube video content instead too, like this lovely new video from Kate Nash below:

It’s called Foundations and it’s probably only being released on vinyl or something, but who cares? It’s catchy as hell, and most importantly, it’s not Caroline’s a Fucking Victim. And if a lovely, lovely person would like to send me an mp3 of it (you can ignore this now – thanks to everyone that hooked me up!), I’d be their bestest friend forever.

In the meantime, go and check out some cool new kids on the indie bloggering scene like Fucking Dance and Hi-Fi Heart. Both are writing about great music in an entertaining way, so go and say hello or something.