We all know the public are idiots. We live in a world of intensely stupid individuals. Individuals who consistently fail to grasp, you know, what’s actually good and right and stuff. This is why they end up doing things like voting ‘No’ on the congestion charge in Manchester then go around complaining about how expensive public transport is. And this is also why they decided to so consistently ignore the following incredible records:
Vessels - White Fields and Open Devices
Radio is alive and well. Without the input of Mark Riley on 6Music I would have missed out on A LOT of great music this year. Vessels kick started that trend back at the beginning of the year. There’s been plenty of nonsense written about how tired and boring post-rock has become. But it takes one (or even two) bands to refresh the scene. Vessels are one of those bands. White Fields and Open Devices is an epic yet focused breath of fresh air. Making minimal use of vocals, their inventive sprawl of guitars create a shuddering wall of sound that, with the epically beautiful ‘Yuki’, show that you don’t have to be a one trick pony to hold the listeners attention. Already back in the studio recording new material, this is an album you want to hold close to your heart and cherish.
RICH HUGHES
Sambassadeur – Migration
Home to one of the great songs of 2008: ‘Final Say’. Swedish indie pop outfit Sambassadeur carved out a quiet classic this year. So quiet in fact, that I don’t think it was mentioned once on TLOBF. Which, in hindsight, is criminal. Migration is a master class in pop. The sound luxurious without being over-produced (helped with Dungen producer Mattias Glavå at the helm) with swathes of synth, luscious softly sung breathy vocals, New Order-esque bass lines, and infectious hooks. Yet, peeling away the sunny exterior reveals a certain melancholy within the lyrics. Tales of longing, mistakes and regrets never sounded so care free and joyous. The aforementioned ‘Final Say’ so beautiful that it has the ability to make your heart miss a beat. A perfect record, in pretty much every way. One to fall in love with.
RICH THANE
Meho Plaza - Meho Plaza
Of all the ‘gems’ released over the past year that I think a lot more people should have bought (Trouble Books, Keyboard Choir, Hawnay Troof, Truckasauras, Eagle & Talon… there’s an alternate-reality every-website-list-ubiquitous Top 5 right there), probably the one that has received the least attention- if not actually, even subjectively in the eyes of me, the best one- is not really a gem at all- its an abrasive, snappy, clangy chimera of a thing (although in its best moments, its totally transcendent)- the self-titled debut album by the almost (or, well, *actually*) willingly obscure Meho Plaza, a band I know nothing about, but I do know that their ‘The Beach’ is an unusually strong challenger to ‘The Leanover’ as my favourite song of this (lets face, it fucking brilliant) decade. Like being trapped in a dystopian (or should that be “dystophian”… no it shouldn’t because they don’t sound anything like them but WORDPLAY IS FUN) science fiction novel where you’ve been turned into a giant bug (but not in a Kafkaesque way, it’s a robot bug) and all your senses are screwed up so everything is *really loud* (but not in a natural way) and intense, only also in song form, if you get Meho Plaza’s album, I guarantee you will be impressed. Or at the very least by the most melodic tracks like ‘Your Future Looks Bright’ and ‘The Beach’. Yeah.
TOM WHYMAN
David Ford – Pages Torn From The Electrical Sketchbook vols. 1 & 2
David Ford is England’s premier under-achiever. Since finding a solid cult fanbase early in the decade through Eastbourne-based glam-rock band Easyworld, he has gone on to success in every aspect but commercially. Though he’s gained a few fans through his critically acclaimed solo albums I Sincerely Apologise For All The Trouble I’ve Caused and follow-up Songs For The Road, he still cuts an essentially cultish figure. The financial strain this cultish reputation has provoked is something he uses in the rather excellently named “How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love My Credit Card”, a song which uses the credit crunch as a thinly veiled metaphor for the instant-gratification nature of our society – as he said himself on his previous Charity extravaganza, Milk & Cookies, “why slog it out year after year playing toilet venues up and down the country when you can go on X-factor and get rich in two weeks?”. The irony is that, after what Ford called his “hardest year in this business,” without the constraints of a record label, giving most of the proceeds from these two EPs to charitable causes, and after spending a year playing toilet (or should that be “bathroom”?) venues up and down the United States, he’s producing his best music for years.
It’s difficult trying to write a recommendation like this – not quite a review, not quite a press release. The bottom line is that Ford would probably be my pick for over-looked artist of the decade. He’s not the finest songwriter the country will ever produce, he’s not without his faults, and he certainly isn’t (as certain parts of the press attempted to label him) the new Bob Dylan. What he is is a humble man, writing humble and hummable tunes for a generation of people who might just have lost touch with what music is really, really about.
ADAM NELSON
Nine Inch Nails - The Slip
It might seem strange to call The Slip overlooked, but it should have garned more press seeing as how, like Radiohead’s In Rainbows in 2007, the nature of its release gained at least as much coverage as the music itself. Released as a free download from the Nine Inch Nails website on May 5th, The Slip was in many ways a more concise, songful, and accessible counterpart to the huge instrumental set Ghosts I-IV which had been released two months earlier. Veering between perfectly machined clarity and the grimy dystopian noise, the album also features the haunting ballad ‘Lights in the Sky’ and the seven and a half minute ambient piece ‘Corona Radiata’. Consistently, the album sounds like insights into the damaged mind of a tortured soul, Trent Reznor’s unique voice illustrating portraits of isolation, loss of control, and death. In some ways it feels like a continuation of the last conventional NIN album, 2007′s Year Zero, with the extended outros that sometimes bogged that album down excised. As a result, The Slip comes across as a focused, agreeably restrained effort, which covers a lot of ground in a relatively short amount of time. On the closer ‘Demon Seed’, Reznor eventually declares, “Now I know what this is all about / now I know exactly what I am.” It’s still hard to say exactly what Nine Inch Nails is, being the ever-changing and evolving project that it is. But it’s not too hard to see what The Slip represents – it’s a challenging, sophisticated album which is every bit as exciting an innovative as the method Reznor chose to unleash it upon its audience. With 2008 having been such a big year for Nine Inch Nails, it’s going to be intriguing to see what awaits us in the future.
ANDY JOHNSON
Lau Lau - Nukkuu
Lau Nau (Laura Naukkarinen) is a Finnish artist who has put together a weird and wonderful world with lots of different instruments and sound sources, the help of her partner Antti Tolvi, and a traditional Finnish bowed lyre player called Pekko Kappi. She is signed to Finland’s premier acid drenched indie label Fonal, collaborating with free folk and improv groups and releasing a debut album in 2005. The lyrics on here on Nukku are sung in Finnish, the songs are led by lyre or guitar or a similar stringed instrument, and the overall feeling of the album is of… well now. Imagine trees covering a steep hillside, a warm, bright, overcast day with an intermittent breeze. Branches and leaves are bent, swayed by the wind’s progress, each moving in their independent ways, many pieces of a whole that are alive, but seemingly without any human sentience. Cloud shadows move over the trees and the fields around, long grass flowing in wind currents. Yeah, that.
The lyrics are handily translated on the back of the album, and they are unsurprising in that they say just what you think they would say from listening to the album. Nature, philosophical and poetical half-thoughts, stripped down images flashing out, like “Roughness so soft/Milk on a window/Hover between the dark/Rose mouth”. Her voice is soft and bright at the same time, suited to silence and muted backings and busy backings and strange melodies, but never quirky or whatever other reductive cliché you might be expecting. The bowed lyre sound is like a violin, but with that twist of the unfamiliar in there. It can sound like many different stringed instruments playing in unison, actually perhaps that is the way they came up with the sound, in any case Lau Nau’s vocal is tracked over itself, it matches the string sound and adds an ethereality and otherworldly dimension. Field recordings, organ, and other instruments are also present, helping to create songs that sound like a ropes fibres separating under tension (‘Rubiinilasia’), smoke rising from an acid stained amp (‘Lahtolaulu’), and a clear, cold mountain stream (‘Lue Kartalta’).
SIMON GURNEY
Superman Revenge Squad - This Is My Own Personal Way Of Dealing With It All
It’s not entirely surprising that the first solo album by Ben Parker, the singer-songwriter who was formerly half of Nosferatu D2 (their last gig was supporting Los Campesinos! at their invitation) and trades under the name Superman Revenge Squad, went by largely overlooked, as it was self released through his own My Best Unbeaten Brother Records and is only generally available through his Myspace (£2.50 plus postage, which is frankly giving it away). Musically it’s not much to go overboard about – languid vocals, fairly simple acoustic strumming. Yet it deserves your time and attention because it’s the content of those vocals that makes Parker stand out, by some distance, from most of his British peers. His worldview is one shot through with a mordant dark humour, a thoughtful polemic, a cross-referencing awareness of pop and pop culture and a willingness to bare his vulnerable soul yet couch the most personal and introspective of ideas in fitful self-deprecation.
There’s consideration of the nature of discontent, social isolation, creativity and crises of confidence, but it never comes across as self-pitying. Besides which, there’s verses about why he shouldn’t have trusted Billy Corgan, a song about a socially awkward superhero (‘Captain Non-Entity’), another which starts by wondering at what point Kevin Rowland realised ‘Come On Eileen’ would become an albatross and the self-explanatory ‘This Is A Happy Song’, which incorporates the first few lines of ‘Ice Ice Baby’, again without falling into the all-out comedic trap. Comparisons could, and have been, drawn with Jeffrey Lewis in terms of the antifolk suggestions, the loose narrative structure of a lot of these eleven songs and the references, but there’s a very individualistic streak in the way Parker conveys resignation, escape and reassurance after a fashion (“looking back you’re not as useless as all that/You once watched the whole of Philadelphia and it didn’t make you cry”) in such an intricate, personally touching, almost performance poetic streams of consciousness. Unbelievably for an acoustic singer-songwriter in 2008, Parker is already a hugely exciting one-off.
SIMON TYERS
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This is why they end up doing things like voting ‘No’ on the congestion charge in Manchester then go around complaining about how expensive public transport is.