Xmas party

Day off from the top 10 albums of 2009. Work Christmas party this evening, so you will have to wait another day to find out who made number 4 in the list ...

Top 10 Albums of 2009

5 Girls – Album
'Who is this miserable git?', Pootly1 asked first time I played Hellhole Ratrace in the car. And, although I hadn't really thought about it before then, he does sound like a bit of a sad case. Then there is the name: calling themselves Girls and calling the album Album should automatically mean that all the songs are rubbish, but in actual fact it's total genius.

At times it sounds like early Jesus and Mary Chain jamming with the Kinks and one (the catchy one) of the Beach Boys. Other times it reminds me of Pavement and Blur having a bust-up in the pub. And occasionally he sounds like Jarvis Cocker out on the pull. As you may have gathered it's not the easiest album to describe, however, trust me, people are going to be talking about this record for a long time and I would suggest that you get a copy soon so that you can look smug in about six months time when everyone starts asking – 'Have you heard the Girls? He's a bit of a miserable git, but they are going to be huge!'

Top 10 Albums of 2009

6 The Very Best – Warm Heart of Africa
Three guys: one Swedish, one French and one Malawian by way of a junk shop in Clapton, East London. Globalisation can be good for something after all.

Esau Mwamwaya is the Malawian part of the equation and it is his voice that infuses these songs with a wonderful sense of fun and energy. The other two are responsible for the music, and already have a bit of name and following as the DJ duo Radioclit. The title Warm Heart of Africa captures perfectly the happy, poppy sound and you would have be half-dead for this not to put a smile on your face.

The title track is insanely catchy and you'll be singing along to the half intelligible lyrics and wondering if that really is cow bell after about thirty seconds. From the cheesy synth pop intro of Chalo to the beautiful slow-building Yalira this album just makes you happy to forget about everything else for forty-five minutes and lose yourself in its visceral thrills.

They are also responsible for the best version of M.I.A.s Paper Planes that I've heard. I'd recommend that you find a download of their mix-tape (which is still knocking around the interweb for free) and it is disguised as track number three – Tengazako.

Top 10 Albums of 2009

7 Emiliana Torrini – Me and Armini
I enjoyed Emilíana's first album Love in the Time of Science, but thought it was a bit bland in places. Her second – Fisherman's Wife – was too twee and so I wasn't expecting too much from Me and Armini.

How wrong could I be? It's totally brilliant. From the dub groove of the title track to the sprightly acoustic pop of Big Jumps to the trip-hoppy Dead Duck to the PJ Harvey-esque Gun to the sublime Birds it's inventive and interesting without feeling like it's all over the place. I can't be sure, but I think a lot of it is down to her producer, Mr Dan (Dan Carey), who seems to have been responsible for most of the instrumentation. If I remember correctly he also worked with Dot Allison on the excellent Mo' Pop 12" and in a weird six-degrees-of-separation thing I have friends who know both Ms Allison and Mr Carey. Spooky or what?

Top 10 Albums of 2009

8 Fennesz – Black Sea
The distant sound of seagulls, is soon replaced by squelching electronic thumps and interference which takes some minutes to resolve into a beautiful chiming guitar line that ebbs and flows, almost fading to nothing at times.

Over the years I had read a bit about Christian Fennesz and heard lots of people rave about Endless Summer, but I never got around to listening to it and, before I did, I started to hear similar things about a new album – Black Sea. I guess this would be called an ambient album, but to me it feels like a soundtrack to some unmade, dark sci-fi dystopia and mostly the scene that keeps popping into my head is the bit at the end of Blade Runner with Harrison Ford in the pouring rain. I thought it would be good inoffensive background music for listening to on the crappy speakers I have at work, but in actual fact you really need to listen to it on the headphones late at night when everyone else in the house has gone to sleep and nothing else can distract you ...

Top 10 Albums of 2009

9 Geoffrey Gurrumul Yunupingu – Gurrumul
Gurrumul is mostly just Geoffrey and his acoustic guitar. Left-handed he plays a right-handed guitar Jimmy Hendrix style. Almost all the lyrics are sung in Gälpu, Gumatj or Djambarrpuyŋu (languages of the Indigenous people of north-east Arnhemland which are part of the Yolŋu Matha group of languages) with occasional fragments in English. Born into the Gumatj clan on Elcho Island, and blind since birth he is renowned for being intensely shy.

I can't remember exactly where, but I first heard him sing on a TV show sometime in late 2008. He seemed utterly out of place in the phony atmosphere of a day-time TV studio, but his remarkable voice cut through everything around him and you had the feeling that everyone was holding their breath as he sang. It sounds ridiculous, but it is one of those voices that sounds completely outwith normal time and space, ancient and modern, as if all his ancestors, family and history have manifested themselves in the vocal chords of this one diminutive, unassuming body. Listening to him sing never fails to calm and lift my spirits, inspirational music in its true sense.

Song for Sunday

Airborne Toxic Event – Sometime Around Midnight

Band/artist of the week: The Very Best
Song of the week: Efterklang – Modern Drift

Top 10 Albums of 2009

So, like a sadly anti-climactic advent calender that only runs for ten days instead of the requisite twenty-four here is the first of my top 10 albums of 2009:

10 The Airborne Toxic Event – The Airborne Toxic Event
Number 10 was going to be Idlewild's Post Electric Blues, but in a late change of heart they dropped off and these guys snuck-in. I almost dismissed them without listening, due to the terrible name, and initially I had them pegged as competent indie-pop magpies (Papillon is Arcade Fire-lite, Does This Mean You're Moving On? could be an outtake from Is This It and the arch Happiness is Overrated could almost be My Life Story or The Divine Comedy).

But after a few listens I found myself untroubled by their blatant plagiarism and increasingly charmed by the energy, enthusiasm and sheer fun of it all. Sure it is polished, professional and a bit portentous in places (like well-made American TV drama – West Wing and ER I am looking at you), but you can't deny that its great for what it is. If only the White Lies album had been half as good as this. The nine songs flash by in just over thirty minutes and I guarantee that you will find it hard not just to go straight back to the beginning before the bouncy Missy has completely faded out.

A golf course is not green

There isn't much cycling, or a lot about bikes, in David Byrne's Bicycle Diaries, but luckily the places he and his bike visit provide plenty of other opportunities for rambling on about stuff that he finds interesting and entertaining.

If you are interested in the same sort of stuff – music, art, food and urban living – then this will be a pleasant, thought-provoking few hours in the company of an erudite and genial guide to early twenty-first century life. If you aren't you will probably think that he is a pretentious, self-important wanker who only gets his witterings published between hardcovers because he once sang Psychokiller.

I thought it was mostly great, but then again I would probably also score quite highly on the pretentious wanker index.

He starts out with a quick and fairly simplistic history lesson about American cities and how many developed into inhuman car-centric, planning disasters with desolate centres and soulless, endless tracts of suburbia. As he acknowledges though, not all American cities are like this and many may still be rescued, helped by the recent economic downturn, peak oil and climate change:

Cities as a rule use less energy per capita than do suburban communities where people are living spread out [Thanks for explaining that David!], so as the cost of energy spirals up, those grimy urban streets start to look like they might have possibilities. The economy has tanked, the United States can lose its place as number one world power, but that doesn't mean that many of these cities can't still become more livable. Life can still be good – not only good, it can be better than most of us can imagine. A working class neighborhood can be full of life. A neighborhood that has many different kinds of people and business in it is usually a good place to live. If there were some legislation that ensured a mixed-use and mixed-income neighborhood would emerge when developers move in, it would be wise, because those are the liveliest and healthiest kinds of communities.

Then he heads off round the world to demonstrate what he means. Berlin – Istanbul – Buenos Aries – Manila – Sydney – London – San Francisco and back to his hometown New York. Although he seems to forget what it was that he set out to do and gets distracted by all the interesting people, music and art that he meets on the way. Which is fine, and I suspect makes for a much less dull book than if he had spent all his time trying to force his experiences to prove the point.

And to be fair he does get back to the point in the epilogue, The Future of Getting Around, which talks about how we can make our cities more attractive, livable and safer places. He highlights the work and thoughts of the wonderful Enrique Peñalosa, who was mayor of Bogotá from 1998 to 2001. During his tenure as mayor he created an efficient and inexpensive public transport network, closed streets to cars at weekends and made many streets pedestrian (and bike) only. Although initially met with resistance, his ideas have gradually been accepted in Bogotá and put into practice in other cities around the world. Not only has the city become a more pleasant place to live, but many other indicators like crime rates, school attendance and health have improved.

As Peñalosa himself explains:

When I got to city hall, I was a handed a transportation study that said the most important thing the city could do was to build an elevated highway at a cost of $600 million. Instead, we installed a bus system that carries 700,000 people a day at a cost of $300 million. We created hundreds of pedestrian-only streets, parks, plazas, and bike paths, planted trees, and got rid of cluttering commercial signs. We constructed the longest pedestrian-only street in the world. It may seem crazy, because this street goes through some of the poorest neighborhoods in Bogotá, and many of the surrounding streets aren't even paved. But we chose not to improve the streets for the sake of cars, but instead to have wonderful spaces for pedestrians. All this pedestrian infrastructure shows respect for human dignity. We're telling people, 'You are important--not because you're rich or because you have a Ph.D., but because you are human.' If people are treated as special, as sacred even, they behave that way. This creates a different kind of society.

Now, if only Robert Doyle and all the anti-clearway numpties would start thinking seriously about ideas like these, and how they could be used to improve Melbourne, then maybe we really would have a chance to live up to our billing as one of the world's most livable cities ...

Song for Sunday

And so this week in honour of winning Geography of Hope's album of the decade ...


The National – Apartment Story

Band/artist of the week: Little Birdy
Song of the week: Little Birdy – Stay Wild

Song for Sunday

To celebrate Original Pirate Material being named album of the decade by Observer Music Monthly ...


The Streets – Weak Become Heroes

Band/artist of the week: Little Birdy
Song of the week: Wild Nothing – Summer Holiday

Albums of the Decade

Getting the lists for 2009 started early the Observer Music Monthly has one with their top 50 albums of the decade. Here's the top 10:

10 Burial – Untrue
9 Salif Keita – Moffou
8 Jay-Z – The Black Album
7 The White Stripes – Elephant
6 Amy Winehouse – Back to Black
5 Arcade Fire – Funeral
4 The Strokes – Is This It
3 Arctic Monkeys – Whatever People Say I Am, That's What I'm Not
2 Radiohead – Kid A
1 The Streets – Original Pirate Material

As Mike Skinner would say, fair play to them: it's pretty much spot on. I would argue about Kid A and Back to Black but apart from those two, most of the others would be on or near my list.

Kid A is the album where Radiohead and I parted company, only making-up again with 2007's In Rainbows. Sure it has some moments of 'profound beauty and deep emotion' as the reviewer says, it is just that there aren't very many and most of the rest of the album is pretty much unlistenable. Sure it is ambitious and managed to sidestep the massive expectations that had built up for a fourth Radiohead album, but it really is the sort of album that only a music journalist could love. Music for beard stroking, not listening or enjoying. Whenever I take a batch of CDs in to the second-hand record shop I always try to slip this one in, but the staff always spot it and hand it back wearily – 'sorry mate, we don't need any more of that one.'

Back to Black passed me by when it came out, but the Amy Winehouse tracks I have heard don't exactly make me worried that I am missing out on anything. And then the soap-opera of her life further obscured what talent she surely has and left me without any motivation to give her music a fair listening.

I also have to confess that I haven't heard the Salif Keita album (and suspect it got artificially nudged a bit higher so that there was at least one 'world music' title in the 10, although I was sure that honour would go to Amadou and Mariam's Dimanche à Bamako), but given its illustrious company I may have to investigate further.

And so for your reference here's my top 20 list:

20 The Delgados – The Great Eastern
19 Eminem – The Marshall Mathers LP
18 Lucinda Williams – West
17 Maxïmo Park – A Certain Trigger
16 Low – Trust
15 AC Acoustics – O
14 Idlewild – The Remote Part
13 Bruce Springsteen – The Rising
12 M.I.A. – Arular
11 Mogwai – The Hawk is Howling
10 Miss Dynamite – A Little Deeper
9 Malcolm Middleton – Into the Woods
8 Glasvegas – Glasvegas
7 Burial – Untrue
6 Portishead - Third
5 Interpol – Turn on the Bright Lights
4 Arcade Fire – Funeral
3 The Streets – Original Pirate Material
2 Sigur Rós – Ágætis byrjun
1 The National – Boxer

I can't believe that Boxer or Ágætis byrjun didn't make the OMM list (not even the top 50!), but anyway please add your thoughts about either list, your lists or anything else that takes your fancy in the comments. Possibly I will write a bit more about the top 5 over the next few days, but I am not promising anything.

Coming up in December – the top 10 albums of 2009, my mix-tape of the year and possibly my top 20 songs of the decade ...

Song for Sunday

The Mary Onettes – Puzzles

Band/artist of the week: Bruce Springsteen
Song of the week: Film School – Like You Know

Song for Sunday

Phantogram – When I'm Small

Band/artist of the week: Malcolm Middleton
Song of the week: Phantogram – When I'm Small

The Age of Kali

It seems strange reading The Age of Kali now. Written as contemporary reportage in the mid- to late-1990s many of the events and personalities he covers have moved to centre stage while others have faded into obscurity.

Dalrymple is a brilliant writer and he has clearly immersed himself in India and all its chaotic glory. He seeks out fascinating stories; and by talking to people from all levels of this intensely stratified society he creates vivid pictures of events, issues and personalities that have shaped its recent history.

The best chapters illuminate and anticipate the momentous changes still underway in Indian society, which most other commentators are only now beginning to notice and come to terms with. However, the book doesn't feel cohesive or complete. I found myself wanting to know more of the history and background; and yearned for him to fill in the gaps between these individual stories.

The problem is that all the material had already been published in various newspapers and magazines and while many of the pieces have been reworked or expanded for the book, they still display off-putting variations in tone and style which make it far more disjointed than I felt it should be. The pieces for Tatler and Condé Naste Traveller sit uneasily alongside the more in-depth and interesting work for Granta and The Observer.

Rabbit Wisdom

Ronald Reagan reminding him of God: 'you never knew how much he knew, nothing or everything'.

On Judaism: 'must be a great religion, once you get past the circumcision'.

From John Updike's Rabbit Tetralogy, as noted by Julian Barnes in the Guardian a few weeks ago.

Upriver

It's supposed to be a book review of Peter Ackroyd's Thames: Sacred River but like some sort of demented secant to London Orbital Iain Sinclair turns it into a walking pilgrimage to the London Stone near the village of Grain.

London Stone photograph copyright © Roger W Haworth and licensed for reuse under this Creative Commons Licence.

I get the feeling I wouldn't like Ackroyd's book, but in the best tradition of LRB reviews Sinclair hardly mentions the work he is purportedly reviewing and, abusing his editor's good nature, wanders off into another variation on the many exhaustive explorations he has spent most of his life making from his base in Hackney. As on all good quests he encounters many obstacles on the journey and despite all his best efforts it looks like he will be thwarted at the last, only for a courageous sidekick to help save the day.

Like Sinclair I have always had a fascination for the marginal, (sub)liminal areas of civilisation and the landscape downriver of London, around the mouth of the Thames has always seemed particularly interesting because of its closeness but complete dislocation to the capital. Kingsnorth, Sheerness, Canvey Island, the empty stretches of Isle of Sheppey exert a peculiar attraction and I wish I had taken the time to explore when I had the chance ...

If you haven't crossed paths with him before then I can heartily recommend it as an excellent introduction to Sinclair's obsessions and writings. London Orbital is one of my favourite books of the year so far (longer review to come soon) and if your interest is piqued by the LRB article you should give the epic version a try.

Song for Sunday

Malcolm Middleton – A New Heart

Band/artist of the week: Camera Obscura
Song of the week: Phantogram – When I'm Small

Something Amis(s) in the world of publishing

I will pretty-much read anything that puts the boot into Martin Amis, but this short post is spot on. Not just about Amis and the other literary appendixes, but also on celebrity culture and what matters in the world of letters:

When writers like Amis, or Philip Roth – who declared this week that novel-reading would be a fringe activity in 25 years – make their apocalyptic proclamations about the state of publishing, it seems apparent that their pessimism may in fact be rather strongly influenced by anxiety that their new work no longer carries the kind of cultural clout they have grown used to, not because people aren't reading novels, but because people aren't reading their novels.

Continuing this theme I've got plans for posts on what is currently wrong with publishing and the future of reading for pleasure, but like 90% of my 'planned posts' they will probably languish with all the other drafts until they get outdated or I get bored and delete them ...

Song for Sunday

JJ72 – Long Way South

It has been over a year since the last JJ72 song, so it must be time for another one ...

Band/artist of the week: Fulton Lights
Song of the week: Fulton Lights – Healing Waters

Song for Sunday

Camera Obscura – The Sweetest Thing

Also have a look at their 'lovely' acoustic version of Some Guys Have all the Luck and this gorgeous version of Super Trouper.

Band/artist of the week: Fulton Lights
Song of the week: Fulton Lights – Healing Waters

Song for Sunday

We Were Promised Jetpacks – Quiet Little Voices

Song for Sunday

Girls – Hellhole Ratrace

Holidays

Mix CDs made? Check.
New Lego toys for plane? Check.
Suitcase packed? Checkish.
Sun cream packed? Check.
Twelve different types of healthy snack for plane? Check.
Reading matter finalised? Check.
Internet access? Nope.
Blog posts written and primed for publication in my absence? Sort of.

Off to the beach. See you in a couple of weeks ...

Song for Sunday

Little Birdy – Brother

Band/artist of the week: Low/Radiohead/Suede
Song of the week: Low – Back Home Again