One of the true highlights of my year is the summing up of the years cultural events at the end of the year.
For someone like me who cares very little about football, the end of the year lists in NME, Uncut etc are like the FA Cup. This year has been a great year, particularly for music. For the first time in recent memory the best album has been by a British artist, so maybe we just won the World Cup.
I love it when I find something great. It rarely happens.
People use the word genius far too much. People also tend to get excited about stuff that we all know they don't listen to. But me... when I say something is great, trust me, it is. So here is the greatest music of 2007. Read and weep. If you do not know this stuff go and get it now. Download it all. It's out there right now.
A menu for a feast of greatness.
(Music is here now today. The best books, films, TV and other tings will follow when I get round to it, in the next day or so.)
BEST MUSIC - TOP 6...
1. Findlay Brown - 'Separated By The Sea' - an otherworldly album of great songs that chime with love. It sounds both classic and thoroughly modern.
2. Radiohead - 'In Rainbows' - a band in 'full flight'. Free of their guilt, they rattle this album out. It flies at you - pushing and pulling. I feel kinda lost in this album; there always something going on that takes me away from where I think I am with it.
3. Richmond Fontaine - 'Thirteen Cities' - to start by saying another masterpiece by Richmond Fontaine could sound to the uninitiated as a little lame. But to those who know Richmond Fontaine, another great album by RC is as good as it gets. Poetry and country rock, with the sound of the desert in background; it sounds epic in parts. Full of tender despair.
4) Arcade Fire - 'Neon Bible' - better than Funeral. The sound of the apocalypse as per a group of nice Canadian people. BUT, they pull it off. It is dramatic . It takes itself very seriously but despite this it works. I can't fathom it out. It just sounds great.
5) Six Organs Of Admittance - 'Shelter From The Ash' - More end of the world stuff. This time the menace and paranoia sounded real. For me there's poetry in the sound of Ben Chasny's guitar strings buzzing against the frets. The sparse words foretell something coming that is not good. It sounds prophetic and sad. It illuminates the dark corners not to show you what is there but to remind you that you are not alone.
6) Lucky Jim - 'All The Kings Horses' - a lost classic. Great songs. AOR, MOR ? Sounds like Gene Clark fronting Interpol, at times. 'Don Quixote' is truly a song to live with.
There you go.
Happy Christmas
T
1 comment:
I think any attempt to compile a ‘Best of the Year’ list for 2007 does no more than lend support to the argument that this has been a very poor year for music.
What have you heard in 2007 that was like nothing you ever heard before? What stopped you dead in your tracks? Where was the genuine innovation? It should have come from Battles, but Mirrored failed to deliver big time.
Of your list, I’ll take Neon Bible (although Funeral is better), but the rest go nowhere beyond mundane (I haven’t heard Lucky Jim). And Six Organs of Admittance? It just doesn’t work on any level for me. Less the sound of the apocalypse than the sound of a mild yeast infection as played by Antonio Banderas in Desperado, backed by The Shadows, with an epilepsy-sufferer in mid fit on percussion. But somehow worse.
So, a set of ordinary records then, yet I’d have no defence to the charge that my own list is at least as ordinary. In fact, I can’t even name 5 albums worthy of a place in any end-of-year list. All I can offer is:
1. The National – Boxer
2. Arcade Fire – Neon Bible
=4. Feist – The Reminder
=4. Okkervil River – The Stage Names (proud owner of the best closing 132 seconds of any record all year)
A list that even I find entirely unexciting, and as such a list that sums up 2007 perfectly.
Here’s to a fresh start and hopefully some fresh ideas in 2008.
Happy new year!
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