Amazing in many ways. While his album was a disappointment after the incredibly good debut mixtape (released FOR FREE — including the hit “Day N’ Nite” and equally gorgeous “Maui Wowie”, “Is There Any Love?” and “50 Ways To Make A Record”), the mixtape in question and his ability to work with people like David Guetta, Kanye West, Common, MGMT and Ratatat and feel at home with each of them mean I will be awaiting album number two with excitement. And if he gets back to his senses and releases “Enter Galactic” as a single, he’s guaranteed a number one on my chart.
Cover design of the Year: La Roux, “La Roux”
Iconic. Gorgeous. Breathtaking. And, simply, beautiful. I haven’t fallen in love with music, but I definitely fell in love with this image. Awesome.
Title of the Year: “Rhubarb & Custard”
Just because not many people really write songs about either, and there they are both!
Disappointment of the Year: Sharleen Spiteri
“The Movie Songbook”. Does that sound like an inspired title to you? It might sound like one to me, had I not actually taken part in the disastrous poll by Mercury Records asking questions such as “Which of those albums should Sharleen record: a 60s inspired record, a record with covers of her favourite movie songs, an album of dreary elevator muzak?” and “Do you see Sharleen promoting: Perfume, Coffee or Wrinkle creams?” (OK, those are not exactly the questions asked, but trust me, they were close.) There is NOTHING redeemable about “The Movie Songbook”. Yes, “Xanadu” is quite a solid cover of a nice song. But it says nothing to me about my life. And I dread to think about why exactly Sharleen became the first pop star to record an album based on a poll among “casual music listeners”. If this is what future is like, please shoot me.
There was a year when Saint Etienne were the best band in the world, and, very surprisingly, that year was 2009.
Not that anybody noticed. Saint Etienne have always remained a well-guarded secret, largely due to own attempts at avoiding commercial success (following “He’s On The Phone” with “Sylvie” three years after the former became their biggest ever chart success? Following “Tell Me Why”, their only ever top 10, collaboration with trance DJ Paul Van Dyk with the beautiful, but as distant removed as possible “Heart Failed”? no video since “Side Streets” in 2005, but enough budget and interest to make full-length movies instead?) and 2009 didn’t change that, despite the fact they released staggering 11 full-length CDs in the last 12 months.
This is not a typo. London Conversations, a 2CD retrospective, duly compiled all their singles and best album tracks in chronological (partly) order, adding two new tracks — a remix of “Burnt Out Car” (embedded above) which is, basically, their “How Soon Is Now” — the b-side that should have been the a-side, and a new song, “Method Of Modern Love” which was amazing, gorgeous and beautiful and charted at #56 in the UK. Obviously, it omitted both “Tell Me Why” and 2008’s “The Journey Continues”, because the whole point of putting out a 2CD compilation is to not include your biggest hits on it. They followed it with four re-editions of their albums, remastered, expanded with bonus CD each and a thick sexy booklet filled with trivia, photographs and gorgeously designed by Paul Kelly. And they released what technically is a new album — Foxbase Beta (nominated for Album of the Year), Richard X’s remix of the entire Foxbase Alpha.
Yes, I spent a lot of money on Saint Etienne records in the last 12 months. Each of them has been worth it. Unreleased songs have sometimes proved to be better than ones that actually saw the light of day (I still can’t believe “Winter In America” wasn’t a single, and not only it wasn’t but it has never been released until 2009.) The remixed, updated and renovated Foxbase Beta pissed from great heights at most of actual new albums released in 2009. Remastered albums sound amazing; booklets provide new perspectives (except for Sound of Water which for some reason has a really boring booklet — well, it’s never been their most accessible album, which maybe is the reason) and, ultimately, spending money on all those 11 CDs has been a pleasure if only so that I could take a trip down memory lane and discover that the music that excited me immensely 10 or 15 years ago still excites me today.
I remember first reading on Popjustice forums about a new “summer jam” by someone called Pitbull. I immediately took a dislike to the idea of a rapper called Pitbull. Those dogs are ugly, dangerous and most often owned by assholes who are turned on by the illusion of macho power.
And then I heard the song. And after hearing it first, I had to replay it. It didn’t quite compute. It didn’t sound like the work of someone called Pitbull. It sounded… fun. And light. And absolutely not macho. In fact, the more I found out about Pitbull, the less it computed. What kind of a macho gangsta rapper samples Nightcrawlers’ “Push The Feeling On”? And those “Daaaahlin’” quips? How is that macho?
Ultimately since “Calle Ocho” was released Pitbull never really left my chart, recording with Jennifer Lopez (and giving her the biggest hit on my top 30 since 2000’s “Let’s Get Loud”) and Akon (who might be one of those people who never troubled my musical universe but sounds rather enjoyable on “Shut It Down”), and hearing reports of a song he is doing with Janet Jackson is much more enjoyable than I would like to admit. If only he called himself something a bit more dignifiable, like, dunno, Kid Cudi or summat. *sigh*
My first encounter with Miss Allen hasn’t been favourable either: I found “LDN Is A Victim” shit, “Smile” shit and irritating at the same time, and the entire Alright, Still album simply annoying. And then A1 started going on about how amazing her new single, “The Fear” was, and I sighed and sighed and finally succumbed and played it. And it was amazing.
Greg Kurstin produced It’s Not Me, It’s You has been an immensely enjoyable trip. From “The Fear”’s synthpop through “Not Fair”’s country-lite through “22″ which is far smarter than you’d expect from a, erm, 22-year-old, the album spawned a grand total of 5 singles, each of them a top 10 on my chart. Not bad for someone whose previous record I still refuse to listen to because not even the amazingness of It’s Not Me… is going to salvage the ska-infused juvenile grossness. Where Alright, Still was the sound of someone going “yayyayaya I WANTS TO BE A POP STAR LULZ”, It’s Not Me, It’s You is the sound of someone who actually has something to say and does so in a very grown-up and interesting way. And I hope that Lily’s announcement — the one where she informs us she’s quitting music — proves to be false, because the world in which Lily Allen gives up on music and Heidi Montag continues is quite a disastrous place to live in.
I still stand by every sentence of my “Joe Sent Me” review: it is a magical, mysterious album, full of smoke, poetry, sexuality, adultness, beauty and did I mention poetry yet? Yes I have.
Since the (self-produced) “Joe Sent Me” Vanessa released a collection of remixes called “Daouhaus” and a podcast called “Love Among the Shadowed Things”. None of them are as essential as “Joe Sent Me” but both expand the image of the sultry songstress (lazy writing on my part — she’s been referred to as “sultry songstress” approx. 837154 times in the past) who has a past ranging from dance/house music through jazz through pop to pure and simple spoken word poetry. Before “Joe Sent Me” I thought of Vanessa as a singer with gorgeous voice; now I think of her as a fully realised, multi-talented artist. When I grow up, I want to be like Vanessa.
This is a double issue due to the fact amount of physical singles released in the UK on Jan 25 was 3. Yes. Three.
This leads me to updating my rules (which have been pretty relaxed anyway). Anything goes — if it’s out there in some form, legal download, video or a physical out in Somalia in 37 copies, I can chart it. Therefore… ram tam tam! #1, #4, #7, #8, #12 are all completely and totally legit chart tracks. Result! (Result being lots of new entries.)
1 3 3 ROCKET
Goldfrapp
2 1 4 WONDERFUL LIFE
Hurts
3 2 4 CRUEL INTENTIONS
Simian Mobile Disco feat. Beth Ditto
4 ! 1 TELEPHONE
Lady Gaga feat. Beyonce
5 4 4 THIS MUST BE IT
Royksopp feat. Anneli Drecker
6 5 2 SPACE SHOT
Ash
7 ! 1 HOLD THE HEATHEN HAMMER HIGH
Tyr
8 ! 1 MEMORIES
David Guetta feat. Kid Cudi
9 6 7 ALL OVER THE WORLD (REMIX)
Pet Shop Boys
10 ! 1 HOLLYWOOD
Marina and the Diamonds
(more...)
Charlotte’s second album, 5:55, is my favourite record of all times. That accolade was always going to be difficult to top, and, I have to report, IRM — the follow-up — doesn’t seem to be a record I would want to listen to repeatedly for the next five years. However, the lead single “Heaven Can Wait” is absolutely smashingly amazing, and the video directed by Keith Schofield is the best video I have seen last year.
Most major label artists have slid into the “let’s make the same video we always have, just cheaper” mentality. Pet Shop Boys’ “Did You See Me Coming” looks like their own “Minimal”, sans budget. Madonna’s “Celebration” looks like “Hung Up”, sans budget (and, mercifully, sans pink leotard). I could go on.
On the other side we have videos that take two years to complete, require “fan participation” and illustrate completely uninteresting songs. I will refrain here from naming examples, largely because I forgot them already, so memorable they proved to be. They have no budget, no story and largely consist of webcam shots of something or other.
“Heaven Can Wait” is none of those. It looks bloody expensive — how on Earth did Gainsbourg’s label gather budget for that? It looks bloody gorgeous — slow-motion here and there, loads and loads of extras, gorgeous shots in gorgeous daylight, gorgeous Charlotte, slightly less gorgeous Beck (hey, he’s trying). It doesn’t seem to have a story, being, instead, a gathering of dream-like sequences, that are somewhere between disturbing and exciting, scary and warm, retaining the dreamy quality throughout. It’s memorable, beautiful and unique, and so is the song, which makes it a rare case in the age of record labels scrapping album promotion a week before the release of the lead single.
There used to be a time when anything Pet Shop Boys put out was amazing. That time ended around 1993, and after that they became, sadly, a much more hit and miss kind of band until the point where after the disastrous Release I vowed to never buy a Pet Shop Boys album again without listening to it first.
Love Etc., produced by Xenomania, changed that. It was as if they remembered their lead singles used to be traffic-stoppingly amazing and went “oh! well, perhaps we should do one more then”. And they have. It sounds nothing like any other Pet Shop Boys song, yet it sounds entirely Pet Shop Boys. It’s got a chorus that features call-and-response, male choir (including Bob Stanley of Saint Etienne!), heartbreaking melodies (Neil Tennant’s voice never lost the ability to sound unbearably sad while singing a jolly melody) and those quirky one-liners Neil used to be able to deliver in his sleep — “[you] don’t have to be beautiful, but it helps”.
Love Etc. duly became the biggest hit of 2009 on my chart, restoring PSB to their previous god-like ability to top the chart for ages (six weeks, 29 weeks in total in top thirty) and restoring my faith in them. I went and bought the 2CD special edition of Yes based solely on the amazingness of Love Etc., and while nothing on the album reached those heights of amazingness, I wasn’t disappointed. Perhaps they will never make another Please or Actually, but they can still — if they try hard enough — write a song that I will still want to hear every single day a year after its release.
An upgrade of Wordpress resulted in the blog being temporarily disabled due to MySQL needing an upgrade as well (which Wordpress conveniently hasn’t alerted me about until it was too late) and so the winners of Ray’s Chart Awards have not been announced yet… this week, though, should result in EXCITEMENT GALORE!!1!!1!!!!! …and exciting show of GLAMOUR and ACTION.
@ShelbyHellbound Me too! This is so wrong. Waiter! One blonde wig for Ru please, and hurry up! 4 hours ago
World is so cruel RT @mat_johnson "Is Santa real, daddy?" "No." "Is God?" "No comment." "Are clowns real?" "Yes, son, they are." "Oh shit." 5 hours ago
