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I’ve missed far too much music in the past year to make a proper best of list, so instead, here’s a list of 22 songs that I’ve loved from 2009. Listed in alphabetical order, not preference. Even though all of them are bloody good.
4 or 5 Magicians – Preaching to the Converted
So 2009 didn’t turn out to be the year that 4 or 5 Magicians finally “made it”. They did manage to put out their first proper album though, and despite a few missteps, it’s an excellent start. Dan Ormsby’s great talent as a songwriter shine through throughout, perfectly chronicling both a struggling band and the state of the country side by side.
Obama is your new Che Guevara / Scouting for Girls are your new Nirvana / You’ve written ‘Free Tibet’ on the back of your hand / But you figure Tibet is a part of Iran
Youtube
Allo Darlin’ – Henry Rollins Don’t Dance
Pretty much the song of the year for me, although The Polaroid Song put in another strong effort for Allo Darlin’ Seemingly going from strength to strength at the moment, I’m half expecting them to be everywhere this year.
But in my head you’re Patrick Swayze / You drag me from the corner and call me ‘baby’ / But baby you don’t even wanna see Dirty Dancing
Youtube
The Answering Machine – Another City, Another Sorry
The album as a whole never quite lived up to the promise, but The Answering Machine did manage to deliver some superb individual songs. Kind of what the Arctic Monkeys might be sounding like now if they hadn’t turned to shit.
I’m sort of lacking certainty / Situations tease the drunk out of me
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Art Brut – Demons Out!
Three albums in and Art Brut seem to be stuck in a holding pattern. No real advancement in terms of songs or abilities. A set of decent songs that are a hell of a lot better when performed live due to the natural charisma of Eddie Argos. I suspect Art Brut are about as a popular as they are ever going to be at this point. Which is why we can expect plenty more songs like Demons Out! in the future.
How am I supposed to sleep at night when no one likes the music we write / Record buying public, we hate them / This is Art Brut vs. Satan
Youtube
Camera Obscura – French Navy
2009 seemed to be the year that Camera Obscura finally came into their own, to the extent that after 13 years, the band were finally able to give up their day jobs. Each album has seen the band grow considerably, with more complex and elaborate arrangements making their way in. It might have taken a while, but they certainly aren’t the “female Belle & Sebastian” any longer.
Spent a week in a dusty library / Waiting for some words to jump at me
Youtube
Cats on Fire – Horoscope
The album was a little patchy, but Horoscope is an excellent little song. Mattias Björkas’s voice is the standout attraction here. He may sound like a Euro-Morrissey, but it’s incredibly easy to drift away in his voice.
I don’t believe in happy ever after / A pyramid scheme, I keep telling you
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Dananananaykroyd – Pink Sabbath
A band that creates such a ruckus that they require a whole new genre has to be created for them (fight pop). Dananananaykroyd’s album was an assault on the ears from start to finish, but in a good way. If such a thing is possible.
Buy it, run it, kick it, fuck it, yeah
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Emmy the Great – First Love
It took her the best part of five years, but Emmy the Great’s debut album just about lived up the high expectations. Boldly leaving off a number of “old favourites” in favour of a more structured collection, the album is a grower, but worth investing the time in.
You said I have a room / At the top of the stairs / I have a room with a view
Youtube
Fight Like Apes – Something Global
Possibly the most exciting band that I came across this year, I can’t think of album that has anywhere near as much play on my car stereo. And boy does it sound superb when bombing along at speed. Wonderfully unhinged.
So give me my hook / I know it might sound lame / Do you like my new look? / Waistcoats are so today
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Go Away Birds – The Year of Letting You Down
The first of two songs on this list to feature Catherine Ireton, who quickly became one of my favourite voices. A small start for someone who deserves to be huge.
I met with a little success in my work / You wouldn’t call it taking off / But you wouldn’t call it starving
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God Help the Girl – God Help the Girl
..and here’s the second. For some reason that’s baffling to me, the Gold Help the Girl album didn’t seem to get the acclaim I expected it to. The fact it’s not showing up on many end of year lists is deeply confusing to me, but I suppose you can’t win them all. The song choice here is pretty arbitrary, as it could have just as easily been I’ll Have To Dance With Cassie, Musician Please Take Heed or a handful more.
The dawn will touch me in a way a boy could never touch / Their promise never meant so much to me
Youtube
Johnny Foreigner – Choose Yr Side and Shut Up!
An excellent song from what was an ultimately disappointing second album. Don’t get me wrong, I do like it and all, but it doesn’t even come close to Waited Up Til It Was Light. This album opener hints at the bigger things in store though. Short and to the point, it has anthem written all over it.
So we scattered pretty / Arcs across the city / Turned pockets of doubt / Into blankets of hope
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Let’s Wrestle – We Are The Men You’ll Grow To Love Soon
A slightly disjointed debut album from Let’s Wrestle still brought us a bunch of excellent little songs, if nothing incredibly exciting. Still, a band very much of their time. Few others can so perfectly articulate life in modern Britain.
We’re going down the job centre / And soon we’ll come out with a job
Youtube
Loney, Dear – Airport Surroundings
Typically late to the party with stuff like this, I never got into Loney, Dear (is there a comma or not?) much when the critically loved Loney, Noir came out. I absolutely love Airport Surroundings though. You’d think that would inspire me to check out the rest of the album, but I still haven’t got around to it. One day.
The last pain got away when I gave up myself / I bought a ticket to hell when I met up with you
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Los Campesinos! – The Sea Is A Good Place To Think Of The Future
Utterly, utterly perfect. The album is quite good too. So I’m told.
I ask her to speak French and then I need her to translate / I get the feeling she makes the meaning more significant
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Pocketbooks – Footsteps
The debut album from Pocketbooks delivered on all of the promise of the past few years. One indie pop gem after another, it makes me very excited for the future. From their adoration soaked performance at Indietracks to high profile support slot of God Help the Girl, bigger things are almost certainly in their future.
From the supermarket aisles to the dance floors of provincial towns / I’d occupy my vacant hours just waiting for something
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Projekt A-ko – Molten Hearts
It always great when you discover a great band that is still rocking as if it’s 1994, and that’s exactly what Projekt A-ko do. Distortion, lazy vocals and even the odd “woo”. More like this in 2010 please.
I’ve got no fashion sense / I haven’t got any sense / I’ll never make any sense
Lastfm
Stagecoach – Break
Another band unashamedly influenced by the 90s US indie rock scene, Stagecoach bring the sound of Seattle to Brighton. Break is three minutes of song perfection, from a band we’ll be hearing a lot more of in the near future.
It’s not like her to cross the line / But she crossed it before and she’s gonna cross it one more time / Shit breaks / I kick in her face
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Superman Revenge Squad – Super Sad Morgan
Pretty much any song from the supremely talented Ben Parker could have made it onto the list. I actually debated placing a Nosferatu D2 song on here, but it seemed to be pushing things a little. His songs are a masterclass in the writing of lyrics. Quite why a label hasn’t snapped him up is completely beyond me.
If someone mentions Woolworths again I think I’m gonna combust / We stole all of the Pic ‘n’ Mix from out her hearts
Lastfm
Tigers That Talked – Black Heart Blue Eyes
One of the most beautiful songs of the year from a band I really need to listen to more of. Black Heart Blue Eyes has such a wonderfully theatrical sound to it, topped off with some perfectly snappy wordplay.
Bigotry’s obligatory around here / There’s nothing for me to defend / Just got to go
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Voxtrot – Berlin, Without Return…
Everything that the debut album should have been but never managed. Ramesh Srivastava’s vocal is as pitch perfect as ever, once again with a song worthy of his talents.
Do you spend your whole life trying to get back home? / Where do you go?
Youtube
The Young Republic – The Wolf
Now a fully formed band, The Young Republic may not be the same band they were a few years ago, but they know exactly what they want to be. Shifting from orchestral indie pop to Americana isn’t the easiest leap, but they’ve pulled it off with style. Incredibly self assured.
It hasn’t been this bad since my grandpa was a kid / He made it through, he never told us what he did
Youtube
(Apologies for the lateness of these reviews. I came back from Indietracks and quickly came down with something I immediately feared to be swine flu. Thankfully, I was quickly reassured that it was merely twee flu and that it was perfectly normal. What a relief.)
Indietracks isn’t the first festival I’ve gone to this year, nor will it be the last. It’s hard to see how it will be anything other than the most enjoyable event of the year though. Launched in 2007, Indietracks is the ultimate in niche festivals. A tiny capacity, a very precise view of the kind of bands it puts on, with all of this set in a small rail yard. It’s a wonderful feeling (and an unheard one at a festival) that you can walk between any of the stages within a couple of minutes. Most importantly of all, it’s by far the nicest festival that you’ll ever visit.
 Arriving at Butterley station on Saturday morning, things didn’t seem so perfect. Bands are starting to play, yet to access the site you have to wait a little while for a steam train to come along and take you there. It’s not a huge inconvenience, and one that was rectified on each return trip to the site by driving around back lanes and being able to park right by the main stage. Seeing as there was nobody on immediately that I was excited about upon reaching the site, there was time to pop round to Brittan Pit Farm. The llamas there have become the stuff of Indietracks legend, and it was mildly disappointing to not see them spit on anyone while visiting. No problem though, as the farm as a whole proved to be a lot of fun, with it’s dalmatian ponies, goats and birds regularly providing a welcome diversion from the festival excitement.
The Frank & Walters ended up being the first band caught in the afternoon, who I wasn’t familiar with beforehand. Typically, just as I arrived to watch their set, they suffered a power cut, which ended up with them having a kickabout on stage (almost bringing it down in the process) to fill the time. They were back on track again within a few minutes, and they turn out to be a pretty enjoyable way to get started. At times they come across a little rocky and perhaps out of place at such an event (at one point asking “is this a trainspotters festival?”), but they seem to go down quite well with everyone.
 Wandering over to the train shed, which acts as the main indoor stage, it’s time for Butcher Boy, a Glasgow band I’ve liked for a while now. This was the first time seeing them live, and they managed to greatly impress. Their songs lose none of the zeal of their recordings. Sounding perfectly arranged, in a few minutes they managed to prove that not all indiepop has to sound ramshackle. Unfortunately, I have to confess that I didn’t pay attention to a part of their set as I’d spotted the mighty merch stall for the first time. A vigorous browsing session later and I’d left with albums by Cats on Fire and Zipper, a label sampler, a Ballboy shirt and some Fortuna Pop badges. I could have spent a hell of a lot more there, so let’s be thankful that there wasn’t a cash machine on site.
Some general wandering of the site followed, which saw a bit of Speedmarket Avenue’s set (fine, but not really my cup of tea) and The Lovely Eggs setting up on the church stage. Annoyingly, the setting up was about all I did see, the heat/crowd in the church quickly becoming too much. Apparently their set was incredibly good too. Back to the train shed again, and it’s time for Cats on Fire, a wonderful band from Finland, who manage to bring on the dancing for the first time of the weekend. Their set was rather heavy on their latest album, which I hadn’t heard much of beforehand, but the almighty singalong and general happiness that radiated through the set meant that I had a copy by the time I left the festival. Alas, I missed the later part of their set as it was time to wander over to the main stage for Camera Obscura.
I was a little anxious about seeing Camera Obscura as while I’m a big fan of their music, they don’t seem to have the greatest live reputation. Fears are rapidly quelled though with a stunning set that healthily mixes in new album material with a number of the old classics. The band themselves may look utterly miserable on stage (I’m sure they aren’t really), but the beautifully arranged sound played out with a backdrop of the sun setting behind the stage makes for one of the performances of the festival.
Back to the train shed once again where Emmy the Great should be playing, but there’s actually no sign of her. Nothing has been set up on stage, everyone looks a bit confused and I even overhear someone discussing how she hasn’t turned up yet. Eventually her band hurry onto the stage about 45 minutes after the scheduled stage time, and within minutes the set is under way. Apologies are made about being stuck in traffic on the M1 in between songs, but it’s seemingly ruined any flow the set may have had. She lurches from song to song without a setlist, constantly checking how long she’s been playing for before finishing up barely past the thirty minute mark. Still, the storming version of Where Is My Mind? means that most complaints are quickly overlooked. As a whole, the songs individually are fine, but as a set, it left a lot to be desired.
This is about where Saturday at Indietracks ends up for me. On the way out, I caught a few minutes of La Casa Azul, who was putting on an electro-pop set both mystifying and brilliant on the main stage. Would have stayed longer if not for the desperate need for food and some sleep.
Well, that was just about the most perfect weekend ever.
A proper review (you know, with words and stuff) will be following tomorrow, but here are 134 pictures from the joy that was Indietracks 2009.
As usual, you can click through to Flickr for the full size versions.
When I was first approached by BBC Music to put together a list of albums I think should be nominated for the Mercury Music Prize, I was initially hesitant. First of all because I don’t much care for awards, and if I’m honest, have never paid attention to the Mercury Prize. Secondly, because I hardly ever listen to complete albums these days. I want to be an elitist snob and pretend that I do, but most of my music is absorbed via an iPod on shuffle.
Throwing around the year’s music in my head though, I realised that it’s actually been a bloody good year for British music. I initially came up with a couple of albums, then a couple more, and it kept going from there. In the interests of brevity, I’ve limited the final tally to seven exceptional albums and a handful of honourable mentions at the end. I don’t expect a single one of these to actually be nominated for the prize, but hey, I’m happy to be proved wrong.
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God Help The Girl – God Help The Girl
Okay, so it’s not a radical departure for the Belle & Sebastian mould for Stuart Murdoch’s solo/side/whatever project, but that’s no bad thing. It’s not often these days that albums tend to tell a complete story, and that is what we have here. Ably held together by Catherine Ireton and an array of guests, it’s not absolutely perfect – the Funny Little Frog cover is especially misguided – but it unashamedly embraces the album format when everyone else seems to be fleeing from it.
MP3 God Help The Girl – Come Monday Night
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Dananananaykroyd – Hey Everyone!
I’m under no illusions that the prize would ever get near an album like this, but that doesn’t make it any less deserving. To find a band with this much energy on stage is rare enough in itself, but to get the same urgency on record is near impossible. Dananananaykroyd manage it, giving us one of the finest debut albums in years. It’s loud, it’s messy, and it’s a hell of a lot of fun.
MP3 Dananananaykroyd – Pink Sabbath
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Camera Obscura – My Maudlin Career
Camera Obscura give us three out of three so far for the Scots. It felt like Camera Obscura had reached their peak with their previous album Let’s Get Out Of This Country. Then My Maudlin Career pops up and blows it out of the water with it’s beautifully textured songs. It’s taken more than a decade, but this is the album Camera Obscura were destined to make.
MP3 Camera Obscura – My Maudlin Career
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Emmy the Great – First Love
Out of all of the albums on this list, I’d imagine First Love is the one most likely to turn up on any Mercury lists if any of them do. I can’t quite pinpoint why, but Emmy does seem to fit the slightly left of the centre singer-songwriter style that seems to have made the lists in previous years. The album is a grower for sure, but there is some stunning songwriting on display here. Emmy has only barely scratched the surface of what she is capable of.
MP3 Emmy the Great – We Almost Had A Baby
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Los Campesinos! – We Are Beautiful, We Are Doomed
Los Campesinos! remain the most posted band on this blog, and rightly so. Coming out with a good first album and then following it up with one of the best albums of the year within six months is no mean feat. Evolving beyond the “tweexcore” fun of the first, this is an album that actually has emotional depth and philosophy added to the proceedings. All while still continuing to sound like quite nothing else that’s around at the moment.
MP3 Los Campesinos! – We Are Beautiful, We Are Doomed
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Thomas Tantrum – Thomas Tantrum
Thomas Tantrum pick up right where the dearly missed Life Without Buildings left off. Rough, random songs jump all over the place, but the appeal here is in the voice of Megan Thomas. Breezily floating between gentle and slightly unhinged, she gives the songs an unpredictable air. That their debut album is so strong is all the more impressive given they were a pretty mediocre live band only a year earlier.
Video Thomas Tantrum – Work It
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Aidan Moffat & The Best Ofs – How To Get To Heaven From Scotland
Seems only fitting that we end with yet another Scottish album, resulting in them making up more than half of the list. It’s taken Aidan Moffat a little while to find the project that suits him after Arab Strap split, but The Best Ofs seems to be it. Allowing his songwriting and voice to be front and centre plays right into his strengths and results in an album more consistent than anything he and Middleton put out.
MP3 Aidan Moffat & The Best Ofs – Big Blonde
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Honourable mentions
Fanfarlo – Reservoir
It Hugs Back – Inside Your Guitar
Ballboy – I Worked On The Ships
Sky Larkin – The Golden Spike
Thanks to me being a little out of it over the past week (constant painkillers = fun!), I’ve been pretty lazy in my blogging. This means that I haven’t posted about some awesome new band or whatever in over a week now, which is pretty awful. I assure you that this will be rectified in the near future, but for tonight I’d like to present you with Another Form of Relief’s fourth mixtape, entitled ‘Let’s Get Literary!’.
The theme of this one is pretty simple. It’s a collection of songs that have some literary theme, either through their words, their subject matter or in a couple of cases, their titles. It’s not the tightest collection ever put together, but it’s kind of fun, particularly for dorky music listeners like myself who get a kick out of references to authors and books and the such. Best of all, there’s not a Thom Yorke song in sight.
MP3 Belle & Sebastian – Wrapped Up In Books (expired)
Not really a literary song in it’s own right, but how could you have a mixtape of this nature and not include some Belle and Sebastian, particularly when they have an awesome little song called ‘Wrapped Up In Books’? Belle and Sebastian songs always come across as being closer to prose in their lyrics than most pop songs anyway, so I’m happy to let them slide in here, and it does set a wonderful tone for the songs that follow.
MP3 The Pop Project – House Of Books (expired)
The Pop Project are a band from Michigan that I discovered thanks to Bethanne at Clever Titles Are So Last Summer (two shout outs in two posts.. terrible) writing about them. They have a nice, cheerful sound that works perfectly, assuming you don’t mind a little sunshine in your music from time to time. The song is all about living inside a fictional world made out of your books or something. Not that it really matters when it’s this much fun.
MP3 Ryan Adams – Sylvia Plath (expired)
Well you can always rely on Ryan Adams to bring the mood down, can’t you? ‘Sylvia Plath’ is a great song, but by god it’s depressing. The melancholy vocals, the restrained piano, and the general miserable subject matter of wanting someone who is depressed to the point of suicide. That said, Ryan Adams is far better when he’s in this kind of a state than he is when trying to rock, so I’m not going to complain too much.
MP3 Modest Mouse – Bukowski (expired)
One of my favourite Modest Mouse songs, although it isn’t particularly about Bukowski other than the narrator singing about how his life is turning into something out of a Bukowski novel. The song itself is pretty much entirely a slight against the fundamentalist view of what God is supposed to be (“If God takes life, he’s an Indian giver / .. / God, who’d wanna be such an asshole?”). I’m a fan of any song that tries to challenge beliefs or offer up something controversial, and being a proud rider on the Heathen Bus makes me appreciate this all the more. Take away the content though and it’s still a mighty catchy song.
MP3 MC Lars – Ahab (expired)
MP3 MC Lars – Mr. Raven (expired)
A couple of literary adaptations offered up by MC Lars. Being an English major, he seems to enjoy working a lot of literary content into his work. There’s a third song like this called ‘Rapbeth’ but it’s pretty awful. ‘Ahab’ is an awful lot of fun, telling the story of ‘Moby Dick’ from Ahab’s point of view, somehow managing to work in a Supergrass sample for the chorus. ‘Mr. Raven’ does much the same thing for Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Raven’. It also has to be the most stacked pop culture namecheck song ever, managing to work in Paris Hilton, Bob Dylan, Michael Moore, the Fugees, Fred Durst and Nietzsche all into the same song, as well as a fun Vanilla Ice parody. All this and it still manages to retain the story of ‘The Raven’ relatively well.
MP3 Holiday With Maggie – A Girl Like You (expired)
So we enter a little section on relationship songs that somehow connect to literature. Holiday With Maggie are a band that I keep meaning to write about, but never seem to get around to thanks to not really liking their newer material. This song though is from a time when they still sounded like 60s pop crossed with Weezer, and thus is rather excellent. The literary link is tenuous, pretty much just the guy first saw the girl in the library reading. It’s enough for me though, even if half of these are just very poor excuses to get a bunch of good songs in one post.
MP3 Rhett Miller – Our Love (expired)
I know a lot of people find Rhett Miller to be a little too middle of the road for their liking, and I’m one of them on the most part. I like a handful of his songs though, and this is one of them. The choruses are pretty cheesy, but the verses make up for them, with nice little stories about the unrequited love of both Richard Wagner (I originally wrote Robert..) and Franz Kafka. The upbeat style of the song masks the misery in the words (“Kafka in his letters to his lover Milena was alive / But he was waiting for a love that never would arrive”) very well. It’s just a shame that the depth in the choruses couldn’t get beyond the repetition of “our love”.
MP3 Pants Yell! – My Boyfriend Writes Plays (expired)
The point where the relationship with a writer falls apart. The narrator is getting bored of his relationship with his playwright boyfriend (“It’s some sense of purpose for you / Fuck your stories, I’m leaving, it’s true / All your prose and one act songs / Were never meant for me”) and keeps promising to leave. Whether this is an idle threat or not, we’ll never know, that ambiguity adding to the song. I also have a great love for any band that can use the word “fuck” with such seriousness while still sounding so twee. It’s not an easy move to pull off.
MP3 Camera Obscura – Books Written For Girls (expired)
A song from back when Camera Obscura didn’t solely make upbeat 60s pop numbers. Actually, that might be a bit harsh, I haven’t really listened to ‘Let’s Get Out Of This Country’ enough yet. ‘Books Written For Girls’ is a melancholy piece about the end of a relationship between seemingly two very quirky people (“Give me marks out of ten for the clothes that I wear / .. / He reads books written for girls / Prides himself on being a man of the world”). There is always a certain sadness in Traceyanne’s voice whatever the song is, but something like this just brings it out even further.
MP3 Belle & Sebastian – Le Pastie De La Bourgeoisie (expired)
And so we come full circle and end with one of the finest Belle and Sebastian songs. A fun song about a slightly nerdy girl who doesn’t really fit in with everyone and so takes refuge in the worlds of Salinger and Kerouac as a means of a escape. Which may be slightly weird worlds to want to take refuge in, but I guess they would be pretty interesting. Oh how I wish B&S still made songs like this one.
I hope you enjoy at least some of the songs here. I had a lot of fun putting it together anyway. Now I just need to come up with an idea for our next mixtape type thing. They seem to be appearing every two or three weeks at the moment, which is quite a good rate I think. We’ll be getting back to more regular posting following this one seeing as I’m feeling a fair bit better than I have been over the past week, so be sure to keep checking back to actually see some new content!
I’ve always liked Camera Obscura, but only to a certain point. I thought their last album, ‘Underachievers Please Try Harder’ was a fun record, but never quite had that final something to make it into a really great one. This has always been their only problem to me. I can’t put my finger on exactly what it is, but there’s always been something lacking.
So I went into the new songs from their upcoming release, ‘Let’s Get Out Of This Country’, which much the same attitude. I expected some fun pop songs, but nothing stunning. I was pleasantly surprised though that some of these songs have quickly joined my rough list of favourites for this year. Their sound seems tighter than it did before, each song more focused, and the lyrics have moved up a level too. There’s a lyrical wit amongst some of these songs that didn’t exist in previous releases, and I certainly welcome it.
The title track from that album is simply a great song. Sounding like a country tinged 60s pop classic, it works perfectly as a taster for the upcoming album and as a song in it’s own right. Traceyanne’s vocals have seemingly added an element of quiet desperation to the usual sense of melancoly, giving this song a sadder sound than it really should have.
MP3 Camera Obscura – Let’s Get Out Of This Country (expired)
‘Let’s Get Out Of This Country’ will be released on June 6 on Merge Records in the US, and Elefant in Europe. As usual, more Camera Obscure goodness can be found on their website and Myspace. And just to prove that they are even cooler than all those other bands, they even have a blog!
Hey you! Buy a shirt!
The ultra cool kids amongst you will already know this, but Threadless is running one of it’s $10 t-shirt sales again, which given the quality of their shirts, is pretty close to just giving them away. I just ordered myself the classic ‘Dark Side of the Garden’ shirt, but there’s something there for everyone, so get over there and find one before they put the price back up again or they run out.
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