PICK OF THE POPS - WEEK ENDING 6 JANUARY 1973

They’ve done this chart before, or one very near to it, since I remember listening to it on the way back down the post-festive motorway to London four winters ago, and I briefly referred to it at the time, but to paraphrase Dolly Parton (or, more disturbingly, Julia Bradbury and Tony Christie on last week’s Just The Two Of Us), here “you” come again.

20. Carly Simon – You’re So Vain
Valuable for its panther-stroking twin-bass intro and Carly’s “son of a gun” whisper, but it sold on the back of Jagger’s uncredited cameo and the song’s mystery subject, and while agreeably splenetic, its aura of privileged intracelebrity bitching is one of the factors which would eventually make punk necessary.

19. The Pipes and Drums and Military Band of the Royal Scots Dragoon Guards – Little Drummer Boy
Not played, but I’m sure you can make an accurate guess at what this sounds like.

18. Lynsey de Paul – Getting A Drag
Still a luscious lush of a song about tranvestitism, and I still think Elastica missed a crucial trick by not covering it.

17. Elton John – Crocodile Rock
The number one album of the period was a Ronco TV-advertised compilation with the oxymoronic title 20 All-Time Greats Of The Fifties – and by “The Fifties” they meant the pre-rock fifties of Johnnie Ray, Guy Mitchell, Frankie Laine and other members of my mum’s record collection – and this symbolised a general rash of unwarranted nostalgia; although glam was creeping up to its peak, there is hardly anything in this list which doesn’t double-bold/underline its debts to the fifties and sixties. “Crocodile Rock” does sum up “American Pie” in a rather more concise and lively manner; here the music dies for no other reason than Suzy leaving Elton for “some foreign guy” but he seems to be enjoying himself sufficiently with his pub-rock retread of “Speedy Gonzales.”

16. Donny Osmond – Why?
Not played, since there were two other Osmonds records higher up. And “Why?” did Dale not even mention the title of the single?

15. Wizzard – Ball Park Incident
Their first hit, and a slightly rawer prototype of “See My Baby Jive” with Wood’s rather less friendly growl telling its woeful tale of murder and his sax verging on the unhinged towards the end. Note the first appearance of the “dada dada dada” bridge later to become famous in “Waterloo.”

14. Gladys Knight and The Pips – Help Me Make It Through The Night
Not played! But Dale did play it back in 2003 so clearly there’s an obscure rota in operation. Nevertheless it is still one of the greatest female vocal performances (no Pips are evident at all) of the last fifty years; it could so easily have descended into cabaret tack from its intro onwards, but Knight underplays the desperation, is quietly generous in her passion (note the subtle “Little Drummer Boy” quotation in the muted trumpet line before the final chorus) and the record becomes one of the most moving of prayers for salvation in all of pop. We are indeed the lucky ones.

13. Elvis Presley – Always On My Mind
As seems to have become the case with Johnny Cash, critics and listeners tend to side with the Elvis in decline rather than the vibrant and beyond-sexy Elvis in his peak; perhaps in their middle age they find it easier to identify with the former. Thus the coded messages and pleas in Elvis’ endless cabaret ballad interpretations of his later years are mistaken for nobility in the face of defeat; but it has to be said that of the three famous recordings of “Always On My Mind,” Presley’s is the least interesting – the Pet Shop Boys beat the Pogues (rightly) to the Christmas number one spot in 1987 with their slyly ambiguous reading which may even stand as a final epitaph to New Pop, but my personal preference is for the quiet and genuinely noble reading done by Willie Nelson in 1982.

12. Michael Jackson – Ben
As with Donny, not played, but although the song was written for a film about a rat, it’s difficult to escape the notion that, even at thirteen, Michael is singing to himself (“Most people would turn you away”); that having been said, in its grace and willingness to pick up and embrace the discarded and rejected, this comes very near to Gladys’ “Help Me Make It” in terms of emotional impact – note how Michael’s emotions bend as the second verse unexpectedly begins in a minor key before returning reluctantly to the major.

11. Judge Dread – Big Seven
Inevitably, this was not played, but here’s the rub (ooer); having had all of his hits banned from TV and radio during his career – and even after his death, they have remained outlawed from the airwaves – most people simply do not know whether Judge Dread’s records were actually any good or not. In fact “Big Seven”’s musical setting will be immediately familiar to most readers since it deploys the same bluebeat backing track subsequently, and rather more creatively, used by the Dream Warriors for “Ludi.” Atop the music the good (?) Judge declaims and deconstructs nursery rhymes with a Benny Hill level of wit (“Great balls of fire” indeed!) and the obligatory cod-Jamaican accent. Not long afterwards he reverted to Cockney and the hits became progressively more vulgar but no less successful. Perhaps the real reason why you never hear Judge Dread on 2006 radio is the same reason why Love Thy Neighbour is never rerun on 2006 terrestrial TV.

10. Wings – Hi Hi Hi/C Moon
“Hi Hi Hi” was also banned by the BBC for some time (suspected drug references, shock and, as it were, horror) but Dale gave it a rare spin; as with “Girls’ School” etc., post-Beatles Macca “rocking out” is something of an embarrassment.

9. Moody Blues – Nights In White Satin
Like “My Way” or “Blue Monday” it has never really stopped selling (and during his lifetime also provided a more-than-adequate supplementary income to the owner of the publishing rights, Lonnie Donegan); this was the second of the record’s three distinct Top 40 chart runs. It also represents a bend in the river of psychedelia; now, instead of experimenting and going as far out with musical and lyrical structures, and often further out, than anyone would hitherto have dared, the lushness and big-budget (by 1967 standards) production of Sgt Pepper, rather than its contents, were taken as the yardstick – note the parallels with post-New Pop 1983 – and thus enter “symphonic” rock with meaningfully meaningless lyrics and endless swathes of purposeless instrumental dexterity. As with Justin Hayward’s solo “Forever Autumn” from Jeff Wayne’s War Of The Worlds, “Nights In White Satin” works better in the context of its parent album, Days Of Future Passed (too painfully relevant a title) amid its forest of portentous orchestral pronouncements, arranged and conducted by Peter Knight, who clearly failed to find this material as challenging or stimulating as that of Scott Walker’s. Strip the song of its mellotrons and choral bombast and we uncover a beat group ballad such as the Four Pennies might have crooned in 1965, if they’d been inclined to have a go at sub-Dylan jumbled analogies.

8. Roy C – Shotgun Wedding
Another revived oldie, and another record banned by the BBC at the time of its original 1966 chart run (“You, me, the baby makes three”). A slightly rawer take on the Sam Cooke template whose off-beat rhythm and lugubrious horns suggest an early bluebeat influence, and although Roy C (full name: Roy Charles Hammond) at times appears to be making the lyric up as he goes along, but the ramshackle nature does lend the record an even greater, more sinister undertone.

7. Chuck Berry – My Ding-A-Ling
As with “Living In America,” the man who started everything has his biggest hit with a tiresome novelty barely one notch on the aesthetic ladder above Judge Dread, though at least there’s a bludgeoning good humour about Berry’s baiting of his adoring Loughborough University student audience. Was there actually “a future Parliament out there” (this would have been the Blair-rearing era) or should he have tried the Oxford May Ball instead?

6. John and Yoko and The Plastic Ono Band with The Harlem Community Choir – Happy Xmas (War Is Over)
A record which is rather better than its reputation suggests; platitudinous to the point of perversion, perhaps, but it’s a far more humane variant on “Hey Jude” with an infinitely more subversive message – as Lennon did with “Imagine,” presenting the audience with a cosy fireside singalong and making increasingly radical demands within its framework – and also is sorely underrated from the point of view of being one of Spector’s finest and least heralded productions; a clear transition towards the slowly-drifting epics he concocted for the 1975 Dion and the 1977 Cher, and one of the best uses of sleighbells on any pop record (see also “Total Eclipse Of The Heart,” “Tiny Children”).

5. Slade – Gudbuy T’Jane
The most remarkable thing about Slade at their commercial and artistic peak was how naturally they swung as a group; “swing” is a quantity rarely applicable to ‘70s British rock but Slade manage it with Don Powell’s masterly, Meters-derived shuffle, Jim Lea’s endlessly inventive bass and Dave Hill’s lead guitar which never relents in its improvised commentary, and that’s before we get to Noddy Holder’s magisterial red-raw ringmaster of a post-Lennon voice, even though for several years I wondered why he was singing about Steve McQueen…

4. David Bowie – The Jean Genie
Next to Slade, Bowie’s Spiders sound incredibly lumpen and Bluesbreaker-ish. Famously appropriating the same Yardbirds/Sonny Boy Williamson riff as the Sweet’s “Blockbuster,” it doesn’t work nearly as well as a pop record – the cartoon-like artificiality of “Blockbuster” works in its glossy glammy favour. Despite “Jean Genie”’s plod and fifth-form word association, however, and its underlying air of 1965 revivalism (that harmonica!), in the context of 20 All-Time Greats Of The Fifties it is still possible to see how radical this seemed to people in attendance at the time, and how it somehow set everybody, from McLaren to Morrissey, off on a journey to begin time.

3. Osmonds – Crazy Horses
Despite the attendant irony of staunch Republicans putting in an early ozone layer protest, “Crazy Horses” still works to a degree. Although slightly overrated, I enjoy the stabbing horns and the general junior-pop-apocalypse environment, both borrowed from the Doors’ “Touch Me” but with a similar amount of residual energy, and the easy noise of the neighing Moogs.

2. T Rex – Solid Gold Easy Action
A faster and far harsher variation on “Jeepster” which veers schizophrenically between jittery epilepsy and slow, booming string-laden choruses. Bolan sounds as if he’s being pressed into a spiky corner; certainly and sorely the sheer fun and sex of his 1971 hits are missing, and this is the first step on his descent into the self-mythologising commonplace.

1. Little Jimmy Osmond – Long-Haired Lover From Liverpool
One of two number one hits from 1972 which involved the Mike Curb Congregation on glutinous backing vocals; the other was Sammy Davis Jr’s cheery not-about-drugs-honest song “The Candy Man,” a chart-topper in America but not a hit here, whereas Little Jimmy did not register at all on the Billboard lists. The latest in an increasing line of novelty Xmas number ones (how the Beatles were missed, even though two of them had singles out – with that “Liverpool” the residual memory remained) and essentially harmless tack, although it caused domestic consternation since Little Jimmy was only a year older than me; cue the agonised parent cries of “why haven’t you written a best seller yet, child prodigy?” Happily, though, in Scotland it was comfortably outsold by Billy Connolly’s “Short-Haired Police Cadet From Maryhill” which latter, thanks to lines such as “If ah catch ye smokin’ hashish up a close” and “short-arsed Shuggy,” didn’t get much play on the radio.

posted by Marcello Carlin Permalink

. . .

PICK OF THE POPS – CHRISTMAS 1968

There really are no better conditions for assessing the charts of years gone by than lying carelessly across a generous sofa in the warm and cosy front room of the family home on Christmas Eve, clad in my dressing gown and pyjamas, sipping a glass of Warnink’s Advocaat (ah, decadence; ah, decidedly guilt-free pleasures and no trademark) and generally feeling content with the world – so much so that it has taken me a week and a half to get around to writing it up (no computers in Bothwell, you see).

Adding to the comfort was the fact that the Christmas Eve Pick Of The Pops was a two-hour special focusing on the Christmas of 1968, the first real Christmas I remember; I was four years old and my main present was a sky-blue Petite typewriter – the first step to here. In addition it was a bloody good Top 20, and with two hours to spare I heard it in full, together with a rundown of the top ten album chart which reminded me about everything else that was going on over on the other side (Electric Ladyland! Beggars’ Banquet!! The White Album!!! Er, The World Of Mantovani!!!!). Give Dale his full two hours…it does make a difference!

20. Dusty Springfield – Son Of A Preacher Man
At Pauline Fowler’s funeral on Monday’s later episode of EastEnders they played “You Don’t Have To Say You Love Me” as the curtains prematurely closed on her coffin; a clever choice in terms of the related plot, with Dusty’s climactic “Believe me!” arriving in tandem with the police. There was quite a lot of Dusty music scattered about the radio and TV of Christmas, and the overwhelming feeling was one of renewed awe at the quietness and softness of her none-more-real passion. Her voice persuades (Hal David compared her voice to “fine malt whisky”), comforts, declares. She makes everything around her melt and combine, even Jerry Wexler’s Memphis hothouse from whence came “Son Of A Preacher Man” and its deathless parent album – when you listen to her singing “Breakfast In Bed” its double meaning is never more evident, nor more persuasive. The performance is proudly passionate but also sexy as true sex should be – that little nod at Hendrix’s vocal style when she rolls her tongue around the title near the fadeout. She made my Advocaat taste like the purest nectar.

19. Isley Brothers – This Old Heart Of Mine
As near as a holy testament as pop gets in my world – “And if you leave me a hundred times, a hundred times I’ll take you back” – its spring and bounce intact, its subtly insistent rhythm never allowing you to rest. “This old heart weeps for you” – that incomparable, near-androgynous vocal of Ronald Isley as powerful as it was on “Twist And Shout” or “Harvest For The World,” and the first shot in Dave Godin’s single-handed endeavour to reclaim the pop charts for Motown in particular, and black music in general. In addition, one of the first Northern Soul crossover smashes. The words are “the beginning of time,” and also “I’m yours whenever you want me.”

18. Barry Ryan – Eloise
“Everything in there, including the kitchen sink,” said Dale approvingly (and unsurprisingly so, since POTP frequently uses Ryan instrumental interludes, particularly from “Eloise”’s demented follow-up “Love Is Love,” as links between records). Twins Paul and Barry Ryan were the Bros of their day, but by 1968 they were slipping and needed to think of something else. Overcome by “MacArthur Park,” the Ryans turned up at a party hosted by Richard Harris and Jimmy Webb, wherein a drunken Paul Ryan proclaimed that he was in the process of writing songs in the same epic style. He hadn’t actually written any at that time but soon got around to doing so. The reconfiguration of the act had Paul in the Brian Wilson role of songwriter, with Barry doing the singing.

“Eloise” I recognised as a titanic monster at the time and it has stayed with me ever since. It is so ludicrously over the top that one blinks repeatedly at Barry’s gasps, screams and whoops (particularly the latter on the fadeout, where he nearly predicts Tim Buckley of Starsailor), at Johnny Arthey’s Grand Guignol arrangement (two drummers but no guitar) and at Bill Landis’ luxurious production, not to mention the theatrical pauses, rallentandos and accelerandos. But Barry makes you believe in his hapless plight (which if analysed really comes down to sexual frustration) by the sheer force of his more-than-evident sincerity. In its naked grandiosity “Eloise” stands as the missing link between Scott Walker and Meatloaf, and it also set the tone for an increasingly bizarre string of singles and albums which the Ryans continued to put out well into the seventies. The feeling that we have perhaps lost something important in the interim is emphasised by the fact that “Eloise” with its playing time of five minutes and 35 seconds, is exactly as long as the single edit of Spandau Ballet’s “True.”

17. Jeannie C Riley – Harper Valley PTA
A rather odd record to hit big in Britain, since it’s so intrinsically American, and Deep South American at that, but it stands up as an agreeably forceful performance very much in the vein of an angrier “Ode To Billie Joe” – her spitting out of the “p”s in “Peyton Place” and “hypocrites” is especially and deliciously venomous, and the ceaselessly nagging guitar behind her (Joe South?) digging the heels in just that little more bloodily.

16. William Bell & Judy Clay – Private Number
One of the best uses of the timpani in pop, beating its huge and bursting heart as Bell and Clay alternate between tension and liberation, uncertainty and commitment – the lead-up to the release of “Baby baby baby” is immense indeed and verges on the deepest of soul, even by Stax’s profound standards. God, this is a good chart – compare to December 1967, with its Val Doonicans and neutered Long John Baldrys, and it’s a pivot shift, if not quite (yet) a continental one.

15. Turtles – Elenore
In its chorus it sounds more like Roy Wood than Roy Wood, and there are similar methods of subversion at work here; satirising the teen love song as they go along (“You’re my pride and joy etcetera,” “Even though your folks hate me”). I found their Happy Together album on cassette just before Christmas – 50p out of the Trinity Hospice Charity Shop on Clapham Common; the fools were giving it away! – and its invention is remarkable, from its Sgt Pepper parody sleeve (featuring the stoned Turtles gurning at the front and their displeased besuited parents looking down on them from the rear) onwards – no wonder Flo and Eddie eventually hooked up with Zappa (though to my mind they far outdid him) and even less wonder that they provide the fantastic backing vocals on “Hot Love,” “Get It On” and so forth.

14. Tom Jones – A Minute Of Your Time
Oh dear, and we were going along so well. My mum loved it of course (though she hates Jones with the beard, referring to him as “Dracula”) but as a year-ending, would-be chart-topping ballad it lacks the universal “appeal” of “Green Green Grass” or “I’m Coming Home,” doesn’t really go anywhere, and thus missed the Christmas top ten entirely (though his previous single, the ghastly “Help Yourself” was still scuttling around in the listings, back up to #31).

13. Lulu – I’m A Tiger
Poor young Lulu. Where Dusty got to go to Memphis, Lulu – whose biggest international hit was relegated to B-side status in Britain – had to make do and mend with trite pap like this; even if Marty Wilde did co-write it, “Kids In America” it most certainly is not.

12. Bandwagon – Breaking Down The Walls Of Heartache
Oh glory glory! Early Britsoul classic usually thought to be a Northern Soul crossover, though the clubs didn’t start playing it until after it had been a hit; singer Johnny Johnson leaves you in no doubt whatsoever about his determination to fight his way back into the world of the living (“BRICK BY BRICK!” he roars). The record is endless climax, bold, brassy and bountiful. Brilliantly covered (at about 300 mph) by Dexy’s Midnight Runners a dozen years later on the B-side of “Geno.” And it got me off the sofa.

11. Malcolm Roberts – May I Have The Next Dream With You?
Terrible open-the-freezer-door/light-the-candles/After Eights and Babycham MoR ballad which sounds as though it had been written in 1928 with that equally terrible recorded in the bath echo prevalent on MoR records of the time. Roberts’ light tenor doesn’t visit any interesting places (he notably ducks the high C finish at the end) but it is bizarre to think that he went on to write, among other unexpected hits, Edwin Starr’s “Contact.”

10. Gun – Race With The Devil
As near to a lost classic as can be found in this list – it almost never appears on sixties compilations – this is prototype heavy metal with a brilliantly absurd full orchestral accompaniment as Paul and Adrian Gurvitz holler and howl their way through imagined post-Arthur Brown Satanic marginals. Adrian G returned to the charts in 1982 with the markedly milder-mannered “Classic” and its terrible rhymes (“attic” and, um, “addict”).

9. Fleetwood Mac – Albatross
It’s worth remarking on the unusually high proportion of instrumentals in this particular top ten; three in all (if you discount the wordless grunts on “The Good, The Bad And The Ugly”) while more than half of “Race With The Devil” is vocal-free. I cannot realistically account for this, apart from the prog-rock/pop crossover still being in partial force, but certainly the success of “Albatross” – still the only UK number one single by any manifestation of Fleetwood Mac – seems to have been directly attributable to a nature film used by the BBC as a link between programmes on TV. The template is pure Shadows (I imagine Hank and Bruce kicking themselves, and maybe also each other, repeatedly and furiously over not thinking of it first) out of Santo and Johnny’s “Sleep Walk” but the monotone, deep thud of Mick’s drums and the bluer coolness of Green’s guitar locate its astral ambitions in the dark, dank basement of the blues.

8. Hugo Montenegro, his Orchestra & Chorus – The Good, The Bad And The Ugly (Il Buono, Il Bruto, Il Cattivo)
Some evidence that Morricone must have listened to the Shadows – or at any rate Duane Eddy – as those low-slung twangs spiral like abandoned albatrosses across deserts of ahuman whistles, lamenting harmonica, choral swells and unattributable foreground grunts. Montenegro didn’t have to do much to it except add a backbeat, so it’s not that far away from Fatboy Slim remixing Pierre Henry.

7. Marmalade – Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da
“The Beatles,” my mum said approvingly, even though she knew it was Edinburgh’s finest – although no Beatles single was released for Christmas 1968, there are three Beatles-connected singles in this top ten, including the Christmas number one. And even at this late stage artists were still trying to get hits with speedy covers of album-only Beatles tunes. Singer Dean Ford keeps the mock-JA accent and it all chugs along agreeably enough if life is long enough for agreeable.

6. Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band – I’m The Urban Spaceman
Their only hit single (they generally tended not to go in for singles) boosted by McCartney producing (as “Apollo C Vermouth”) and their regular appearances on the pre-Python children’s TV show Do Not Adjust Your Set, and maybe one of the saddest of all hit singles; Neil Innes singing over a jaunty post-psych banjo, tuba and ocarina about how great and hip and perfect he is before coming to the final “Here comes the twist/I don’t exist,” which is immediately answered by a chorus of kazoos and the forlorn twanging of a tailor’s dummy. Worthy of Syd Barrett, as is the heartbreaking B-side “Readymades.”

5. Love Sculpture – Sabre Dance
The second-longest single in this list, clocking in at 4 mins 49 secs, and essentially a showcase for speedy, keen 16-year-old lead guitarist Dave Edmunds – the rampage through the Khachaturian hardy perennial was their rabble-rousing, crowd-pleasing set-closer – though the studio recording was speeded up for added impact; an early indication of Edmunds’ later and more ambitious productions.

4. Des O’Connor – 1-2-3 O’Leary
“Games I played with Mary” and it gets worse. Entertainment as light as light entertainment could be; though Des does keep a commendably straight face throughout, this is where the Morecambe and Wisecracks begin.

3. Nina Simone – Ain’t Got No…I Got Life/Do What You Gotta Do
Talk about contrast…”Ain’t Got No” was the first hint of the Hair phenomenon, but as with everything else she touched, Nina makes it mean something else, eight months after the King assassination (as indeed she does with the Jimmy Webb tune, though it was “Ain’t Got No” which got the airplay and the sales). The sea change became ever more apparent; in January 1969 Simone briefly had three singles in the UK Top 40 simultaneously. That wouldn’t have happened even three months previously.

2. Foundations – Build Me Up Buttercup
If you have to do bubblegum soul, this is how to do it; cheerful and inspiring in all the right ways, and not a Northern Soul staple, but it surely does sound like one. Ooh-ooh-oohOOH!

1. Scaffold – Lily The Pink
The Scouse performance art troupe featuring McCartney’s brother, a distinguished contemporary poet and a future Tiswas presenter (not to mention Tim Rice on backing vocals) galloping their way through their cheery kids’ singalong about a 19th-century medicinal compound whose inventor kills herself by swallowing paraffin, and nothing to do with drugs at all, honest mate. Even the obligatory novelty Christmas number one is of a different order. Christmas and 1968 – what a combination it was, and still is.

posted by Marcello Carlin Permalink

. . .

SOCKETS TO THEM, J.B.

As with many other artists, my delayed appreciation of James Brown was a direct result of the militant absolutism of mid-‘80s NME, the music paper which told its readers that they should listen to Aretha or JB for half an hour every morning (“Wood Beez (Pray Like Aretha Franklin)” indeed) in order to teach themselves some dignity, which routinely sneered at and decried the New Pop I loved in favour of a regime of grey purism. Those grunts and unadorned grooves seemed like the Protestant work ethic personified, sweating for the benefit of…more sweat? And all despite my love of electric Miles, of Sly Stone and George Clinton, of hip hop (when it’s good), and even unto Steve Reich and Kraftwerk…none of whom would have developed anywhere near the same way had it not been for what James Brown began.

Of course, JB’s grooves only sound unadorned and minimalist to outsiders. The key to the greatness and radicalism of his music lies in his inverse and decidedly non-Western approach to song construction; despite his unapologetic worship and reclamation of capitalism (which to the black society of the late ‘60s onwards, shaken to its core, was more than enough), Brown built his music from the rhythm upwards, as opposed to the melody downwards, as everyone from the Gershwins to the Beatles did. An early instructive comparison would be to play his Live At The Apollo Vol 1 side-by-side with Coltrane’s contemporaneous Live At The Village Vanguard; in both records, note how any concept of melody is systematically deconstructed until every voice, every instrument, is a drum (just as “Chasin’ The Trane” burns to its essence of tenor and drums alone).

Having thus liberated rhythm, there was nothing to prevent Brown from proceeding to rework notions of the song, or the single, as radically from a musical perspective as Dylan had done from the lyrical. “Papa’s Got A Brand New Bag” forms the bend in this particular river; his band having improvised a slow seven-minute groove, Brown simply speeded up the master, crammed it into three minutes and released it as a single. His multiphonic screams are as superhuman as those of Archie Shepp on “Mama Too Tight,” but the band are tighter than an unforgiving noose. And with “Cold Sweat” Brown eliminated almost everything except the rhythm – now stuttering yet slinky in a way R&B hadn’t quite managed up until 1967 – and his exclamations, though far from meaningless, appear as randomly cut-up as when Eric B and Rakim actually did cut him up from “I Know You Got Soul” onwards.

Like Miles, Mingus and Sun Ra, Brown was a legendarily hard taskmaster as a bandleader – and some of this tyrannical urge sometimes spilled over into his private life, with disastrous, and latterly comical, consequences. Unlike the great jazzers, however, who only drove their musicians in order that they could shed the trappings of cliché and express themselves directly, and originally, Brown seemed to want to make his band a single, indivisible, impersonal force, choreographing their arrangements and responses to the nanosecond. Yet this paradoxically freed them up; listen to things like “Mother Popcorn” or “Say It Loud, I’m Black And I’m Proud” – or, crucially, listen inside them – and note how musicians like Fred Wesley and Bootsy Collins actually emerge as recognisable individual voices. That is while you’re not busy luxuriating in the absolute certainty and elasticity of the horns and guitars, Clyde Stubblefield’s right-angled drumming (like Dannie Richmond with Mingus, he never quite nails the centre of the beat, merely suggests its existence). As a machine the JBs set the tone for the electro, hip hop and techno to follow a generation later; and both Reich and Kraftwerk are on record as stating how key Brown’s influence was on their own approach to the machines and humanity of rhythms. But Brown’s music is never quite inhuman; however stringently applied, he never stops swinging.

The Star Time box set is crucial listening; coming from the opposite pole from Ray Charles, but equally vital in inventing what we know as “soul music,” it is one of the documents of its century. But 1969’s Soul On Top should also be investigated; one of Brown’s rare excursions into maximalism, with Louie Bellson’s LA big band and Oliver Nelson’s arrangements, he tears into “The Man In The Glass” with appropriate ire, and the reworking of “Papa’s…” with Brown screeching traded fours with Maceo Parker’s tenor cements the umbilical cord with ‘60s New Thing jazz. And for those who justifiably decry Brown’s eventual descent into a Nixon-supporting, state-crossing car-chasing cartoon of himself – from the British commercial point of view, it is depressing that 1986’s unironic flag-waving “Livin’ In America” was his only top ten hit here, most of his sixties classics having been confined to the specialist soul/R&B lists thanks to the innate racism of the British music industry and media at the time - 1973’s double The Payback has to be absorbed; as chilling and desolate a commentary on post-Vietnam despair as anything Gaye or Mayfield were producing at the time, as stark a drug diary as Grievous Angel or Berlin. Then listen once more to the near-inhuman joy of side one of Off The Wall, or Prince when he still cared, or any hip hop, and realise how and why Brown mattered as much as – or even more than – Presley or Sinatra. Simultaneously showbiz and avant-garde, underground and mainstream, brother of the downtrodden and the richest motherfucker in nascent black capitalist society…where Sly noted blearily that there was a riot going on, Brown rolled up his sleeves, went out on national TV in April 1968 and literally stopped a riot. Functional yet multilayered, never less than bloody or driven, he started things in music which deserve never to be stopped.

posted by Marcello Carlin Permalink

. . .

THE CHURCH OF ME 2006 TOP 50 ALBUMS: THE TOP TEN

10. SLOAN: Never Hear The End Of It
“My name defined uncool
I didn’t belong
I didn’t belong.”

Sloan were my major musical discovery of 2006, and perhaps if they’d been enough people’s musical discovery of 1994, when their masterpiece Twice Removed was released, things might have been different. McGee was at one stage reportedly on the verge of signing them to Creation, but for whatever reasons that never happened; so outside Canada they remain a semi-closeted cult, whereas within Canada they are as feted and respected as Teenage Fanclub or Matthew Sweet or the Posies or any of those other briefly fashionable powerpop artists of the early ‘90s. Then again, even within Canada they’ve sometimes had to struggle; 1996’s venomous One Chord To Another they had to release themselves after being let go by BMG. Outside of remote specialist outposts such as Minus Zero, they do not register in Britain at all.

And that needs to change. If you want an album far more securely in the Beatles lineage, then forget Love (as most people already seem to have done) and seek out this seamlessly segued 30-track, 76-minute epic. Looking at them on the pastel pink cover, the four members of Sloan are clearly getting older and greyer – more than one of them is now a father – but if this is a comeback, or a reclaiming of their awesome strength, then it is a massive and generous gauntlet. Imagine if the Beatles had recorded the White Album directly after Rubber Soul, before the laughter stopped and the cynicism commenced, with all four having their say but patently playing together as a band, and you’ll get a pretty good notion of what Never Hear The End Of It sounds like; a non-stop procession of tremendous tunes (“And by December/reluctantly living the past”) which punch and bop and experiment with ideas and emotions. From the opening WE’RE BACK gambit of “Flying High Again” through the fabulous “Love Is All Around” – so much better than that other one – and on up past the wonderful “Someone I Can Be True With” with its appeal for “Someone to hear Hüsker Dü with/Someone to hate all things new with” (it’s OK; Chris Murphy is being ironic with that latter line) and soaring straight through the proto-post-psych jangling mirrors of “I Understand,” finally coming down with the slow and thoughtful likes of “I Know You” and “Last Time In Love” before coming up for Rickenbacker air one final time with the euphoric “Another Way I Could Do It” (“Yeah – better YET!”), it is a bloody brilliant pop record, The Pink Parade by Our Organic Romance, and if necessary you should purchase a ticket and fly to Toronto just to get a copy.

9. JOAN AS POLICE WOMAN: Real Life
Indeed there is room in this top ten for three visionary albums by female artists, and here is the first of them; this year’s Antony and the Johnsons, to the extent of having Antony himself guest on the slinky “I Defy” (“Promiscuous”? Really…). Free violin passages link gorgeously sumptuous ballads like “Feed The Light” and “We Don’t Own It” as Joan Wasser crouches down in awe before new-found lands of love. Breath of the year: the way she builds up to and holds that “Jonathan” down to an elongated whisper on the title track. I am in possession of signed postcard number 225.

8. THE MAGIK MARKERS: For Sada Jane
Clocking in at just over half an hour, this was the year’s most extraordinary improv record, principally because it works so astoundingly well as a record; they are a predominantly female Connecticut trio (though others drift in and out through these four tracks) and their music is revelatory. The opening “Blind White Alligators” begins like a Shangri-Las B-side before guitars and noise steadily shift the track out of tonality and into explosive, aleatoric noise with a purpose which makes the ears reel. “Infinite Regress” (is that title a manifesto?) is purer improvisation, demonstrating just how well the group’s empathy fuses in raging practice.

But the two other tracks go even further, and into somewhere else entirely. “Dance Upon The Steam” features glimpses of a melancholy, battered ballad – the Cowboy Junkies laid particularly low – over the thumping disco beat and jazz-funk muzak emanating from elsewhere in the bar. And “Shabbetai Tzevi/1666” goes beyond any attested category of known music; an unutterably gorgeous, mournful lament sung very softly over unanchored bass, guitar and organ, like Gillian Welch meeting AMM at the dawn of mourning, before it is abruptly and brutally cut off. This could be one of the greatest of all bands.

7. PATRICIA BARBER: Mythologies
There but for the gracelessness of Diana Krall goes Patricia Barber, the pianist and singer/songwriter who is the missing link between Bill Evans and kd lang – that same rich tangerine of a voice, the same patience – and how one can luxuriate and shiver in her exploration of Pygmalion, Orpheus, Persephone and Narcissus, none of her portraits obvious, all culminating in the final, graceful and quietly terrifying drowning of the world in “The Hours” with its whole tone doowop motif and dread-filled gospel choir. Radical in approach and execution, but it doesn’t need to brag about it; it just is.

6. BURIAL: Burial
And what would the world become after it had been drowned? The Burial album – and why do I hope that there might only be the one? – asks us to imagine a south London engulfed by waters, where nought rises from its shrivelled beds save delayed, transformed remnants of what was not an age of gold and idyll, but a blackened map of the paths which helped lead to apocalypse. Survey those titles – “U Hurt Me,” “Gutted,” “Forgive,” “Broken Home,” “Prayer” – and absorb the distant tinkles of breaking glass, the glinting click of knife or revolver, emptied bus stops (“Night Bus” is as gracefully immense as a Whistler nocturne), the decayed whines of obsolete synths, the haunted dancehalls, the dark, the thirty-nine dubbed steps into an ocean of eternal grey. The spent nightmare of Gerontius.

5. FUN-DA-MENTAL: All Is War
Society confronted by unsavoury challenges has long since learned that the surest way of stifling such voices is not to get outraged by them or outlaw them, but simply to ignore them, quietly and discreetly, until the message is allowed to dwindle into welcomed irrelevance. So it is scarcely surprising that the most sustained and articulate outburst of targeted anger on any British record since the first Sex Pistols album was left to wither in the racks, unrewarded (with one brave exception) by extended five-star broadsheet reviews, determinedly ignored by exponentially envelope-pushing music websites who at the same time berate their readers for socialist envy at failing to empathise with the banked wraith that is Paris Hilton.

You didn’t have to agree with everything said on All Is War, but by God – or by Allah – you were swept along by the lucidity of its passion and attack; and then, having sped through the triumphant estampie of “Bark Like A Dog” to arrive at the devastating lament of forced bereavement and decimation that is “Screbinicia Massacre,” via the balancing quotes from bin Laden and Guevara, you understand that this is the cry, and maybe the last warning, from the dispossessed, the excluded, and the consequences of what might come to pass (away) if we cannot find any way to accommodate them in the world. Listen, learn, understand and then do something about improving it.

4. EMILY HAINES & THE SOFT SKELETON: Knives Don’t Have Your Back
The escalator comes back down from the hill to raise me up once more…the cover was an indicator, the Robert Wyatt sleevenote and Carla Bley thank-you all the confirmation I needed to know that this was the best record released by a female artist in 2006. No big-budget string sections or sub-Holbein sleeve design was needed; just Emily, her piano and Wurlitzer, and some of her friends and colleagues, playing because they want and need to. “Crowd Surf Off A Cliff” is about as lonely as popular music can get this side of Roy Orbison, and yet she works her way back, back to us, reaching for and grabbing that windowsill…

…and then you look at me and ask “When you talk, can I tape you?” and tell me “We’ve got time…all the time” and the humblest and kindest “mmm-mmm”s you ever heard, and everything is made better and tolerable and that’s what the greatest music does to a human being – “She’s drawn in breath and drawn you in, too” Wyatt says. I say – “It’s again.”

3. ACOUSTIC LADYLAND: Skinny Grin
We’ve almost been here so many times before, it’s not true. The Softs, Hatfield and the North, Centipede in one age; Rip Rig and Pigbag in another; the nearly bypassed likes of Pinski Zoo and Xero Slingsby as the eighties unforgivably bleeded into the nineties…but this time, I think they may just have got it…

So many have tried that improv/pop crossover, and invariably failed at the last hurdle – and more often than not it wasn’t their fault. Yet Acoustic Ladyland, with their mind-turning fission of speed metal, punk jazz and…whisper it…Britpop Mks I and II…are developing into something potentially world-changing.

The soft/loud jumpcut dynamics of “Road Of Bones” are learned from Albini and Cobain. On “Your Shame” saxophonist Pete Wareham burns with an incandescent fire which links George Khan to Alan Wilkinson, the John Surman of 1969/70 with the John Zorn of tomorrow, and Seb Rochford once again proves himself the best improvising drummer to come out of Britain since Steve Noble veered out of Oxford and into the last days of Rip Rig & Panic a generation ago.

But I can find no real musical precedent for things like “Red Sky” or “Cuts & Lies” which start out as jagged shards of shouted song before mutating into plaintive Cocteaus/Dif Juz caverns of echoed, epic melodies, like Coldplay if they’d had a nerve. And in the record’s latter third, the group change tack yet again for a set of moodily acerbic pop songs, Wareham now on vocals, sounding for all this world like Blur with Coxon in greater charge, though even Blur have never done anything as stark as the genuinely disturbing “Hitting Home” (the verb is transitive; it’s about domestic violence).

Its most magnificent track, however, is “Salt Water,” which not only features guest altoist James Chance, howling in tandem with Wareham’s tenor like Trevor and Evan in the good ol’ SME days, but is also mixed by Scott Walker, who typically deploys abrupt and violent changes of perspective and overpowering echoes and loops of gurgle. I can honestly say that I have heard nothing like it in any British jazz, or any British music for that matter – and yes, I want to see Top Of The Pops brought back so that Acoustic Ladyland can appear on it and get in the charts. Let’s hope they can develop and mutate this fantastic music even further; if their third album turns out to sound like Spyro Gyra jamming with Keane, I doubt I shall ever forgive them. This time, let’s get it right.

2. SCOTT WALKER: The Drift
If I’d heard anything like The Drift before, it would only have been in the form of Scott Walker’s previous work, each chapter of which leads methodically onto the next. And there’s an important lesson to be learned here. We keep wondering what the Beatles or Hendrix would have sounded like if they’d kept going; and yet this is the point every sixties revivalist misses…the vital voices which rose in that generous decade and managed to persist and survive never, if they could help it, looked back. No matter where you cast your eye – to Cale, or to Cohen, or to Dylan, or to Young, to the Lee Hazlewood so serenely accepting of his own imminent end on Cake Or Death?, to the Derek Bailey who kept right on to the end of his road – the great innovators of the sixties simply kept going, kept pushing their allotted envelopes, and therefore always have a new story to tell, more pages to add to and strengthen the existing book. That’s how they were brought up; not to recreate the Woody Guthrie and Charlie Christian records they loved, but to take them as a starting point before striking out into new pastures. It was expected of you. Even the protracted silences of Lee, Barrett and Erickson provide their own reproach – we invented it, now you take it over.

It may seem to be asking too much to suggest that in order to appreciate The Drift fully you need to have prior knowledge of Walker’s previous work in full, since it stands so firmly and monumentally on its own as a record; however, it is the logical cumulation of those strands of thought and expression commenced in those far-off (or are they?) sixties records, Scott hearing Brel and Hardin, then interpreting them his own way, then finding new angles to develop and nurture his own themes, or obsessions – and the haunted bedrooms of 1966’s “Orpheus” lead very directly to those of 2006’s “Clara.”

There isn’t much point in describing The Drift further here, since I used enough words to do so at the time of its release. It is perhaps the fullest-formed musical statement by any artist thus far this century; meticulously choreographed yet spontaneous, it commits the supreme virtue of ruthlessly discarding sentimentality in favour of looking 2006 hard and square in the face, and the bones and blood beneath that face, of recognising that in extremis the worst has to be faced down before life can be resumed.

And that whisper right at the end of “A Lover Loves” – I thought he was whispering “Scared?” but on closer listening he is actually saying “It’s OK.” Rescued at the last second.

And when you are rescued from the irreversible finality of death, you have to embrace life…

THE CHURCH OF ME 2006 ALBUM OF THE YEAR

1. BROKEN SOCIAL SCENE: Broken Social Scene
In truth, it led the pack from the beginning (Emily Haines again: “What’s a wolf without a pack?”) and in the end it has to come above The Drift because it is so clearly a record about, and in favour of, life. Acoustic Ladyland may be approaching a startling and unexpected new musical fusion, but Broken Social Scene play as though that fusion has long since been accomplished; in You Forgot It In People you could sense something, as yet impalpable, waiting to burst, and in Broken Social Scene, the album, they have achieved it. Yes, to a degree it is the Toronto All-Stars, from K-Os through Feist to the aforementioned Ms Haines, but the phenomenal creativity to arise out of contemporary Canadian music here finds its peak.

“Major Label Debut,” “Bandwitch” and “It’s All Gonna Break” are all songs, as such, but not in weary set patterns; they bring back the spirit of those groups and artists where, if you listened to the beginning of their songs, you were never certain about how, or where, the songs would end (thrillingly, the artists appeared to be in a similar position) – the artists thus learn in tandem with the listener. So Broken Social Scene’s songs float and detour and sometimes atomise into nothing, or everything, but there is such fluidity and intuition that it not only unites the individual components of what was great and thrilling about 2006’s finest music, sums them up, but also takes them and moulds them to create a truly new music; one which relies on process, reflex and human interaction in the here and now. To listen to everyone shoehorning their contributions into “Windsurfing Nation” but never jostling for position, rather working together to create a genuine greater good, is a defiance of music as a predetermined commercially-driven artefact, argues eloquently against standardisation, celebrates the mess of humanity, enables deeper and finer art. That is their achievement – the fulfilment of a musical environment as socialist paradigm; music reclaimed as art to be shared between human beings. Canada led the way, and therefore Broken Social Scene lead this list, as a tribute, not only to their revolutionary greatness, but even more so to the woman who led me back to music, to the world, to me, to us, for us.

Our hearts, in the end, have mastered the incinerators.

posted by Marcello Carlin Permalink

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THE CHURCH OF ME 2006 TOP 50 ALBUMS: 20-11

20. SUFJAN STEVENS: The Avalanche
Does he ever get tired? Does he ever run out of ideas, or things to say? One would sometimes be suspicious of such prolix activity, but with Stevens it’s clear that his stories need to be told with as much length as patience allows. Only two states into his fifty-state project, and while he has claimed that each record may have a different format – he has, for instance, threatened to make California a seven-inch single – the fact that we already have a 75-minute album of outtakes from the second album proper makes one wonder whether he’ll live long enough to get it all in. And if that weren’t enough, he has lately released a five-EP box set, Songs For Christmas, which spans four of the last five winters and lasts for a combined total of over two hours.

Yet it is all necessary. I include The Avalanche as partial penitence for amnesically omitting Illinois(e) from last year’s count, but also because I think it marginally the better record. His blend of Phil Ochs, Rundgren, Free Design and Steve Reich remains intact, and while there’s nothing quite as deliciously decaying as “Jacksonville,” which is like “Lay Lady Lay” slowly being laid to rest, there are many sparky and powerful moments; although I cannot quite concur with the exasperated sigh of “Dear Mr Supercomputer” (especially since musically it is so bountiful) since without computers I would not be here, in any sense, but I identify with his weary compassion, and – when it comes, in the devastating “Pittsfield” – his palpable rage as he buries his family demons for good (with Songs For Christmas it’s worth mentioning that Stevens recorded these as a means of persuading himself to like, or believe in, Christmas again, after early familial traumas which he describes unambiguously in his accompanying sleevenote), and its passion grabs and stings; eventually, the soul overspills and the album blasts to its end with a completely unexpected Sonny Sharrockian free guitar explosion – one of the best FUCK YOU endings to any recent album.

There are also three marvellous alternate takes of “Chicago,” Illinois(e)’s emotional and structural centrepiece, the best of which is the “Adult Contemporary Easy Listening Version” which with a little tweaking could provide him with a major dance hit. Still, the emotion and purpose remain – “All things go, all things go,” “If I was crying in the van with my friend/It was for freedom from myself/And from the land.” Now – remembering that the stunning “Springfield” commemorates the home of Barack Obama – numerous mistakes can be rectified.

19. FIONA APPLE: Extraordinary Machine
You could make it up. The Jon Brion album scored for orchestra and doorbell which her record company didn’t want, the reluctant re-recording by Mike Elizondo which ended up far more avant-garde than the original, an extended online campaign – all combined to make one of the year’s funniest, most spiteful and profound records wherein Apple bangs her head against numerous walls (and, on “Window,” through a café window, or nearly) in search of love, or throwing it away, or rediscovering it. “Get Him Back” and “O, Sailor” are Victoria Wood remixed by Eno; the tormented torrent of “Please Please Please” and “Red Red Red” flattens even the most flexible of endurances, and, with the final, tired acceptance of “Waltz (Better Than Fine),” a compromise of happy sorts.

18. ARCTIC MONKEYS: Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not
They have already become fatally resentful where they should have settled for documenting their city with candour and irregular originality, but this takes nothing away from their frequently smashing album, smouldering in reflection in the midst of a riot (“Red Light Indicates Doors Are Secured”), a sprightly insolence which wasn’t that far removed from Girls Aloud (the latter would have located the essence of “I Bet You Look Good On The Dancefloor” far more speedily than the Sugababes) and true poignancy in “Mardy Bum” with its “cuddles in the kitchen”…oh yes…and the touching “A Certain Romance” which may yet prove their premature farewell.

17. CHARLOTTE GAINSBOURG: 5:55
I don’t really know why I can’t get a handle on the Jarvis Cocker album; once again, the elements are all there – the “Crimson And Clover” quote in the chorus of “Black Magic” doesn’t sound gratuitous, the sentiments of “Baby’s Coming Back To Me” melt me from reading the lyrics alone, “Tonite” is as lovely as anything on Coles Corner (the good Mr Hawley is on lead guitar duties throughout), Philip Sheppard’s string charts for “Disney Time” and “Big Julie” are as audacious as those which he provided for The Drift, and it is impossible to argue with the logic or truth of “Cunts Are Still Running The World” – even though the juxtaposition of “I Will Kill Again” and “From Auschwitz To Ipswich” has lately become unfortunate.

I think there may be a problem with Jarvis himself; his voice sounds a little too portentous, and on the slapstick murder rave-up “Fat Children” he comes perilously close to sounding like some absurd, prematurely middle-aged Daily Mail columnist. And anthems like “Don’t Let Him Waste Your Time” tread a little too near to late-period Boomtown Rats (“Never In A Million Years,” anyone?) for comfort.

This feeling is accentuated by the precise brilliance of Cocker’s lyrical contributions to 5:55 – but Air provide the music, Nigel Godrich produces (maybe Cocker should have hired him for his own record) and Charlotte Gainsbourg sings the words with a tenderness and mischief which Jarvis seems to have lost. Indeed I had not forgotten that a decade ago she was Jane Eyre – even if William Hurt isn’t my idea of a Rochester – and that openness and determination persist into 5:55. It is worth listening to both records in tandem since there occur direct links from time to time; the saddening contemptuous pity of “Little Monsters” balances out “Fat Children,” “Tel Que Tu Es” is the calming response to “Heavy Weather,” the dream Cocker inhabits in “Quantum Universe” is the same dream from which Charlotte awakens in “Morning Song” – so who, if either, is doing the dreaming? However, 5:55 is so clearly the better record; both lighter and deeper.

16. BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN: We Shall Overcome – The Seeger Sessions
Can multimillionaire rock icons still touch the humblest soul? Perhaps Bruce had to find his own again, and treat it with kindness; following nearly two decades of gloomy, unbending solemnity from Tunnel Of Love to Devils And Dust, he suddenly sounds happy again with his floating pool of scratch players – and I’m wondering whether he’s checked Sufjan out of the far corner of his left eye; there is that same sense of community which, whatever else this world of now might tell you, is still needed; venerable warhorses like “John Henry” and “Pay Me My Money Down” are played as if for the first time, with lusty singing and gusto-filled playing. Meanwhile the title track is intoned gospel-style (“I’ll Take You There,” as good as) in a bloodied-but-not-beated tone of dignity.

But the most profound thing here is “Shenandoah” which conveys the illusion of stretched and suspended time; as the protagonist and river flow ever steadily westward, there is a near-transcendence of identity and location – you feel as though this song could play forever, and somewhere out there in undefined space it is still resonating, like conscience made light, or the Titanic refloated. After this year’s Congressional elections it also feels like the starting point of the turnaround.

15. CAT POWER: The Greatest
Dusted down in Memphis – Chan finds some of Al Green’s old sidemen and decides to iron out her owned soul. “Love And Communication” is the triumphant cathartic release, “Lived In Bars” and “Islands” part of the slower-than-visible burn; “Where Is My Love?” its magnificent and radiant centre. From “I hate myself and I want to die” to “You called me and you were not hunting me” – there’s another journey I recognise.

14. NEIL DIAMOND: 12 Songs
The best of the Rubin rehab records, and on paper it could so easily have been the worst; Diamond verges on the glittery rim of the glitzy self-glorifying epic on “Hell Yeah” but pulls back without needing to be told, and then it becomes a deeply relevant song of personal redemption. The gargantuan build-up of “Evermore” you anticipate from the “let Neil start it all by himself” intro, but you actually want it and savour it; Diamond needs the big gesture even in a smaller world. But the songs are among his finest; “Delirious Love” and “Save Me A Saturday Night” stand equal to any of his ‘60s classics, “What’s It Gonna Be?” is confidential but bluff, and the drunken romp of “We” does what Modern Times doesn’t quite.

13. PLAN B: Who Needs Actions When You Got Words
The intelligence and brutally ambiguous rationality of “Sick 2 Def” made it 2005’s best single, and Ben Drew wastes no time here expanding his substantial palette. No Streets-style whingeing about unnamed celebrities here; just a candid and callously considerate overview of life trying and failing to rise above a status of shit. The paternal rejection of “I Don’t Hate You” and “Tough Love” make Sufjan’s resentment explicit; the violence experienced in “No More Eatin’” or described by “Couldn’t Get Along” engender real rage that life still has to be nothing save perilous existence. However, the emotional axis here is “Everyday,” in which Drew wakes up to a pallid parody of life but realises that he has to take the first step towards changing his view. Lily Allen views all of this from her expensive limited edition pushbike, but Ben Drew lives it. Folk music for this degraded century which Seeger would understand in a second.

12. ORNETTE COLEMAN: Sound Grammar
This is not the first time Ornette has worked with a line-up of sax, two basses and drums; a shortlived 1968 quartet featuring Charlie Haden, David Izenzon and Ed Blackwell appeared with Yoko Ono at the Royal Festival Hall in 1968 (and a fragment of their rehearsal tape can be found on the Yoko Ono/Plastic Ono Band album). But I witnessed the present group at the Barbican two years ago, as part of the same tour from which this German live recording is taken. The unpromising sonic recipe was – as though I could be naïve enough to doubt! – provocative, swirling and danceable in vibrant practice.

Denardo is on drums, as ever, while of the two bassists Tony Falanga generally anchors the rhythm, leaving Greg Cohen (a name well-known to Tom Waits fans) to concentrate on bowed work, turning his bass effectively into a second horn, this group’s Don Cherry or Dewey Redman. And the music is as fantastic as I recall it being here in London; “Jordan” swings like a newly-oiled grandfather clock, Ornette’s alto as sharp and fresh as ever; “Sleep Talking” is a beauteous ballad, but the punctum really comes with the climactic reinterpretation of “Song X” which unleashes a million hitherto undreamed rhythmic crosscurrents – as Ornette switches to violin, scribbling away in unison with Cohen’s bass, the music turns into an insane new form of country and western; a harmolodic hoedown which affords a suitably euphoric reaction from the audience. Ornette at 76, sounding like the second coming of ’76.

11. TIGA: Sexor
Canada meets Belgium and I’m in the middle; I prematurely spoke of the year’s best New Pop album some seventeen places ago, but this transcends any eighties entrapment by virtue of reliving and recasting it with such poignant grandeur; “You Gonna Want Me” IS Human League Purple. “Louder Than A Bomb” induces the Nation Of Millions to Follow The Leader – how unknowingly did we cross each other’s paths in those Hampstead streets of 1988; how joyfully do we light each other’s path in these Hampstead streets of 2006! – and “Brothers” updates New Order to connect with the floating John Foxx rig of “Sir Sir Sir.” Electro? Shiny red Newer Pop? Danceable, tender and echoing such perfect mirrors of our unified souls – it is an undying, undiminishable jewel of pop punctum.

posted by Marcello Carlin Permalink

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THE CHURCH OF ME 2006 TOP 50 ALBUMS: 30-21

30. J DILLA (JAY DEE): Donuts
Dictionary definitions are one thing, but for these necessarily selfish purposes I will take “hauntology” as using elements of the past to signify memories of a future that never was, could never have hoped to have passed. In the case of Donuts this assumes the form of a bright, summery absence – tell me about it – with its thirty-one brief instrumental cuts and loops. All we know is that had J Dilla not succumbed to cancer he would have done something different from what has been left us here. Never intended as anything more than potential breaks for rappers, some of the tracks were used on Ghostface Killah’s Fishscale, a record likely to loom large in end-of-year polls, and not unreasonably so, since it may be the Wu’s Blood On The Tracks, their final autumnal glint of stark brilliance. Yet I prefer the lush, unpopulated spaces of “Time: Donut Of The Heart” or “One For Ghost,” if only because their welcoming deserts revive the unrepeatable summers of 1975 or 1995, all Bonnard splendour and Rothko rueful shade, but also because anyone who uses 10cc’s unacknowledged greatest single (“The Worst Band In The World”) as the basis of a break (“Workinonit”) has – or had – to be someone of rare discernment and vision.

29. JENNY LEWIS WITH THE WATSON TWINS: Rabbit Fur Coat
Some of 2006’s sweetest music underpinning some of 2006’s most savage words; Rilo Kiley never really floated out to my boat, but Lewis alone (to a degree; her numerous collaborators here include Conor Oberst and M Ward, the latter giving a far more convincing account of himself on his own rather flat Post-War) is exceptional; she gives Bush and The War a double blow with “The Big Guns” and “Rise Up With Fists!!,” decries fake love on “Melt Your Heart” and “Happy,” is sometimes so naked you have to retreat for several emotional miles (“Born Secular,” “It Wasn’t Me”), does the year’s best neu-folk ballad in the form of the title track, and also wins my award for the year’s best cover version with her calamitously calming reclaiming of the Traveling Wilbury’s “Handle With Care,” an object lesson in capturing and describing the perhaps unintended emotion within certain songs, as well as being one further example of Dylan’s songs (even in part) being better sung by others.

28. ELLEN ALLIEN AND APPARAT: Orchestra Of Bubbles
Arguably the year’s best New Pop album, if such a thing can still be recognised; beats propel, twist, fade, reside and arise in numerous subtle combinations amid great damaged pop songs like “Way Out” and the New Order-outdoing “Floating Points”; Ms Allien whispers rather than announces, while the magnificent “Turbo Dreams” may be the real missing link between Thomas Leer and Boards Of Canada. If ever an album deserved to be entitled Confessions On A Dancefloor, it is this one.

27. METRIC: Live It Out
Another one which really belongs in 2005, but then again it didn’t get a full British release until this year, and as the only Canadian entry in NME’s otherwise lamentable Top 50, I can hardly overlook it, particularly as it demonstrates in Emily Haines a female talent who I think has already crossed the threshold into greatness (and that before I realised who her father was). In a year when so much tiresome posturing masequerading as strength of character ended up with the plaudits and the sales, how refreshing it was to turn to Haines’ immense talent and her superlative voice, caressing, tempting yet disturbed and compassionate. Terrific (and sometimes terrifying) songs like “Poster Of A Girl,” “Monster Hospital” and the brilliant “Ending/Start” display rock music of attainable elasticity, moving very naturally between the dynamics of guitars and electronics. And it would have placed higher in this list were it not for the even more remarkable record which Haines made on her own, of which latter, more anon.

26. GRIZZLY BEAR: Yellow House
So much candied drivel has flowed under the wrong bridge under the pretext of paying homage to the Beach Boys that we forget that sometimes the real advances on their pioneering work can come from wholly unanticipated corners. This New York quartet are largely acoustic, with apposite dabs of electronica where needed, but on such selections as “Little Brother” and the enormous “On A Neck, On A Spit” (where the repetition really is with them), I think of the temporarily stranded Beach Boys of Sunflower, or the remoter areas of Holland, slowly nudging forward as a statue might lurch to walk. At times, as on “Marla,” I am put in mind of a patient elephant dragging along a wagoned community of prematurely disaffected refugees – there is such a hugeness to such seemingly finite musical resources (“you can’t possibly go without that”) and their control of dynamics is so instinctively understood and wonderfully realised that one thinks this to be one fertile place where “rock” could roll once it’s passed the final recognisable post.

25. SKREAM!: Skream!
He is more resuscitation than revival. More than anything, Skream!’s work reminds me of the seldom-cited ‘90s garage outfit 187 Lockdown – down to the album’s yellow cover – whose “Kung Fu” might just be my favourite single of that decade in a “Mouldy Old Dough” way. Listening to “Midnight Request Line” or the staggering “Stagger,” those oddly familiar slashing synth strings, Bernard Herrmann chord changes and beats more implied than pronounced conjure up shades of reluctantly leafy Camberwell streets at dubious dusk, supermarkets precariously balanced halfway up Dog Kennel Hill. “Check-It” with its brilliant Warrior Queen vocal punches and zigzags like I wish Lady Sovereign had done.

But “Summer Dreams” might be 2006’s single most moving piece of music; garage beats like they used to be – before guns and forces and misguided money and pointless death came into the equation – over which Martin Shaw’s miraculous trumpet improvises a hurting, articulate lament for a scene, a belief, which may no longer exist; I think of Laura and me in the coach, late summer 2000, on the way back home, listening to “21 Seconds” through our shared Discman headphones over and over, working out who was who, marvelling and celebrating…well, more than enough said. When Shaw’s solo, and the track, end, we hear a modest but enthusiastic round of applause as the landscape gradually atomises into ashes. It is 2-step’s “Being Boring” and it is eternal.

24. LES GEORGES LENINGRAD: Sangue Puro
With its talk of “Mammal Beats” and “Get on the beast with the four-legged meat” there is a reminder of Bow Wow Wow’s return to nature; with its amazingly fleet sense of improv freedom, Montreal’s Les Georges Leningrad may be the true successors to Rip, Rig and Panic; from the tentacles of “Skulls In The Closet” to the macrobiotic fidgets and smears of “The Future For Less,” they retrieve the swamps and go primitive in the Rousseau/Spencer sense – No Wave goes shamanic as no one has done since the second Slits album, which latter incidentally Sangue Puro gobbles up for breakfast.

23. LUSHLIFE: West Sounds
Markedly less praised or publicised than The Grey Album, but this Beach Boys/Kanye bootleg conference works just as well, and perhaps a little more profoundly (the “You Still Believe In Me” input into “Jesus Walks” makes it doubly apocalyptic, like Brian Wilson-as-God laughing at Kanye-as-humanity’s hapless lot) and sometimes a lot more humorously (the fabulous juxtaposition of “Wouldn’t It Be Nice?” with “The New Workout Plan”). In the unlikely event of a Beach Boys Love equivalent (For The Love Of Mike?) this would still be the superior work of art.

22. THE MELIGROVE BAND: Planets Conspire
While it’s obvious that Rough Trade has a special distribution deal with the Meligrove’s people, it still struck me as a significant sign, returning to London after Easter, to see it in their shop, two months ahead of its official UK release date, seeing as how Lena had sung its praises to me before the holiday, and at a time when I felt (and still do feel) that being away from a computer (and therefore, to all practical intents and purposes, away from her) was akin to having my arm pulled off. So its heartfelt, brilliantly arranged songs of love and faith regained (“Isle Of Yew,” “Grasshoppers In Honey”) hold a special value for me. There is a greater sadness throughout its second half, but this in itself is not discouraging. I found the record uplifting when I was at my lowest, and supremely reassuring when at my highest. There are still twenty-one records to go in this account – and I have concentrated long and hard on their order – but all fifty records here are more than worthy of your money and attention. For now, the Meligrove Band are yet another Toronto triumph, in a year where Canada triumphed, for music and for me, so many times…and this Canadian delegation is still far from complete.

21. OUTKAST: Idlewild
As immense as and arguably more encyclopaedic in style and ambition than its dual predecessor, but there was no “Hey Ya” equivalent and so it seems to have subsided into quiet ignorance, which is extremely unjust. Those of us who thought that Andre was running off with OutKast’s creative baton are summarily corrected here, since Big Boi seems on this occasion just to have the edge of adventure; the luxuriously avant-garde balladry of “Peaches” and “Morris Brown” is largely Antwan’s work; his “Call The Law” is the Prince of 1986 stuck in the middle of an On The Corner traffic jam, while “Mutron Angel” makes all other attempts at “futurism” in 2006 appear as quaint as Guy Mitchell. But none of this means that Andre is left lapped; the extraordinary hip hop/swing fusion of “Idlewild Blue,” “Chromomentrophobia” (song title of the year) and the outrageously supine “Life Is Like A Musical” reveals Dr Buzzard’s Original Savannah Band rescued for our newer age (as Aguilera so conspicuously failed to do with her own similar attempts). His Macy Gray collaboration “Greatest Show On Earth” is exquisitely aqueous and unmoored in tonal or rhythmic waters, while the startlingly bleak eight-minute-plus closer “A Bad Note” features Andre’s ghost moaning at 16 rpm midnight (cf. the Associates’ “An Even Whiter Car”) while David Whild’s guitar duly weeps.

My favourite of all the 25 tracks, though, is the Andre/Antwan collaboration “Hollywood Divorce” which with its Aphex poignancy and Snoop/Li’l Wayne running commentaries, made that Saturday night in August even more magical, as Westwood played it, let it fade, paused for a few seconds, then let out a contented sigh, or purr: “I really am feeling that at the moment.” So were we. Though I have no desire to see the parent film (cf. Under The Cherry Moon), Idlewild truly is the sort of record Prince used to be capable of making as a matter of routine; it’s that great and it must not be overlooked.

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THE CHURCH OF ME 2006 TOP 50 ALBUMS: 40-31

40. I’M FROM BARCELONA: Let Me Introduce My Friends
Senior CoM readers may recall the Polyphonic Spree – lots of them, all singing in and about ecstatic redemption – and have long since resigned themselves to wondering what they might have been like had they remembered to write whole songs and not just middle eights. Although I’m From Barcelona are in fact from Sweden, they present a far less intimidating picture of how such a group might have sounded. There are by my count 29 musicians in the line-up on this record, and though I suspect that the vast majority of these sing and beat sundry percussion instruments, the communal feeling is convincing and the songs quite marvellous. In balancing huge, optimistic tunes, in various styles ranging from indie to schaffel and even, on the sublime closer “The Saddest Lullaby,” gospel, with lyrical sentiments which are warm and welcoming but also betray reserves of fear and insecurity (“They’re all trying so hard to make a man out of me/But there’s always gonna be this little boy inside of me”) they reach the heartstrings perhaps no longer within the orbit of the Flaming Lips, whose At War With The Mystics simply tried (my patience) too hard – in particular the opening three or four tracks are so naturally euphoric as the Guillemots’ euphoria is painted on with yellow-coated turpentine; after hearing “We’re From Barcelona” with its lively, catchy chant of “Love is a feeling that we don’t understand/But we’re gonna give it to ya” you want to rush out and hug trees (and indeed the next track is entitled “Treehouse”) in a C86 Go! Team sort of way. Whether you can tolerate half an hour of the same thing may be an open question, and they will have to paint some fresh colours for the next album, but into this 2006 I’m From Barcelona fit with magnificent aptness.

39. KID KOALA: Your Mom’s Favorite DJ
His Carpal Tunnel Syndrome debut I will always associate with the late spring Monday morning in Abingdon when I bought it – it made me laugh as so much earnest post-Shadow DJ cybernetics were singularly failing to yield any humour (has there ever been a deader end in music than UNKLE’s Psyence Fiction?). However, the Montreal maestro’s bona fide debut, the Scratchcratchratchatch mixtape which he only ever intended as a demo, is reportedly his masterpiece – two fifteen-minute long sides of scratching and sampling antics which have never been given a formal release. Your Mom’s Favorite DJ is an attempt to recapture and update that record’s jouissance, deploying the same format, and it’s fantastic; an aural slippage of fragments, beats and, in the various “Slew Test” takes, startlingly avant-garde, like the Red Krayola smooching the Antipop Consortium (and better than either). However, the general mood is one of zippy, nippy playfulness; and I note from the CD booklet that Kid Koala is willing to provide mixtapes for weddings free of charge. I wonder if he would be interested in doing a mix for ours…?

38. ISLANDS: Return To The Sea
37. THE MOST SERENE REPUBLIC: Underwater Cinematographer
More relishable goodness from Montreal; Islands are primarily Nick Diamonds, who organises his various friends, including Arcade Fire’s Regine Chassagne, into moulding some wonderfully light pop which isn’t too light to exclude shifts of perspective and improvisational tropes. “Don’t Call Me Whitney, Bobby” is a contender for song title of the year, but my favourite is “Jogging Gorgeous Summer” featuring Regine clanging away on her steel drum, and in a perfect world one of the happiest, most hopeful number ones you’ve ever heard.

The Most Serene Republic are from Toronto, and their mainman appears to be one Adrian Jewett, but this is a quite spellbinding display of articulate, low-budget post-surf pop whose remit ranges from joyful singalongs (“Where Cedar Nouns And Adverbs Walk” with its refrain of “I think we know all the words by now!”) to extraordinary post-psychedelia brainscapes (the closing “Epilogue”). As with the Islands record, you never feel that this is being scientifically assembled on a Hoxton-approved conveyor belt – this eclecticism is instinctive and attractive. I also like the human(e) touch of the individually numbered (in ink, handwritten) copies – I own copy number 1650, though am sure Cromwell would never have approved…

36. NOBLESSE OBLIGE: Privilege Entails Responsibility
They are initially a rather savage, sour and arch male/female electropop duo (anyone else remember Eddie Maelov and Sunshine Patterson?) bent on (or over) assaulting everything and everyone within their reach (“Offensive Nonsense”) and who even, on “Fashion Fascism,” sample Goebbels. Yet tunes like “Bitch” and “Daddy (Don’t Touch Me There)” are compellingly danceable, and the record’s real key to potential greatness lies in the unlisted extra tracks of low-lit, bluesy acoustic readings of these songs which reveal a painfully personal grief and shows them to be the most vulnerable parties of all.

35. THE BICYCLES: The Good The Bad And The Cuddly
Can’t he get enough of Canadian indiepop? Er, no…especially when this partial Meligrove Band spinoff (Canadian musicians, you see, have no problem whatsoever with playing in different bands in different combinations for different purposes) furnished a better Beatles/Monkees marriage (they even cover “Cuddly Toy”) than the bloated echt-Beatles of Love managed; it sounds as adventurous yet approachable as powerpop has always threatened to be, and songs like “I Will Appear For You,” “I Know We Have To Be Apart” and the quite startling “Australia” are timely rejoinders to the where-did-all-the-tunes-go lobby (2006 model). “Ghost Town” isn’t the Specials classic, but in its individual way is extremely special.

34. SUNSET RUBDOWN: Shut Up I Am Dreaming
33. WOLF PARADE: Apologies To The Queen Mary
And apologies to Feist, K-Os and the Constantines (among many others) for not getting into this list on a semi-strict “released in 2005” basis – and no apologies whatsoever for the dominant Canadian presence in this list; Britain, you just didn’t try hard enough, or alternatively far too hard. The Wolf Parade album properly belongs to the end of last year as well, but didn’t permeate British record shops in earnest until early January; and anyway, it would be unjust to exclude this harsher downside of Arcade Fire light – once again, bold advances meet up with irresistible songs, most mightily of all “Shine A Light” (not the Constantines number, but its blood brother) which melts and stings like rapturous honey newly extracted from the hive with a rogue drone still attached.

As the cover of Shut Up I Am Dreaming attests, “Spencer Krug is in Wolf Parade. This is his other band.” If anything, the Sunset Rubdown disc is even more adventurous, especially with mindblowing long winders like the seemingly unending “The Men Are Called Horsemen There.” But there is also a defiance which rises above mere petulance, such that the record does seem like the kind of album a 2006 Bowie should be making.

32. HARRY MILLER’S ISIPINGO: Which Way Now
Bearing very much in mind the notorious 1985 NME albums list which included in its top ten albums of ‘60s archive recordings by the Velvet Underground and Sam Cooke, I gave considerable thought to whether I should include this thirty-one-year-old recording in my own list for this year. Is this defeatism, a white flag surrendering to the “truth” that 2006 wasn’t a great year for music? My reply is: normally, yes it would be – but music this vital and alive has to be recognised, particularly as it has never been previously released commercially and is thus strictly speaking a new record, unlike, say, the Sibylle Baier album which I have regrettably excluded since vinyl copies were circulated and sold, albeit in miniscule quantities, back in 1973 (otherwise it would have been a shoo-in for the top twenty).

Those familiar with my Maja piece on the Ogun label will recall that Isipingo only released one album in their, or Miller’s, lifetime, 1977’s astonishing Family Affair. This Radio Bremen live recording stems from 14 months previously; Osborne, Tippett and Moholo are all present and correct, but Nick Evans assumes trombone duties and Mongezi Feza, Wyatt’s conscience on Rock Bottom, with less than a month to live, is on trumpet – and such an eloquent and insolent trumpet it still is.

There are four very long tracks, and although the Tippett/Miller/Moholo rhythm axis hasn’t yet burst quite as freely as it would do throughout ‘77/8, the horns look out fervently forward; Evans’ solo on “Children At Play,” burningly articulate and passionate, is his finest on record, Feza fuses Booker Little lyricism and Don Cherry puck throughout without any apparent effort. Meanwhile, Osborne’s alto is initially mild mannered, but then he suddenly catches fire midway through “Eli’s Song” and, as he always did, cuts right to (and through) the listener’s core. Furiously powerful music, and one of two arguments in this list for burying the parlous myth that British jazz is incapable of embracing greatness.

31. FINAL FANTASY: He Poos Clouds
Back to Montreal (via Toronto) for today’s final entry, and all those who still imagine Ys. to be the beginning of everything to follow are gently pointed in the direction of this frequently breathtaking – and genuine – fusion of orchestral manoeuvres and lyrical intensity. It does help that Owen Pallett’s voice is far more palatable to the tender ear than Newsom’s; an appealingly vulnerable light tenor (almost Todd-like) which floats and darts amidst and around his orchestrations. Often very funny (“This Lamb Sells Condos”), Pallett’s music swiftly dovetails into corners far more challenging – the vaporous cloisters which arise out of “I’m Afraid Of Japan,” and the hard-won tenderness (“The scars of self-abuse with a couple of hours in a private clinic”) underlying “Do You Love?” As droll and moving as Randy Newman at his (12 Songs) finest; and note how the strings rise, fall and breathe with the voice in perfect symbiosis. Oh yes, Canada ruled in 2006 – and there is yet more to come.

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THE CHURCH OF ME TOP 50 ALBUMS OF 2006: 50-41

50. BONNIE ‘PRINCE’ BILLY: The Letting Go
i am loving always holding while she sleeps her song unfolding epic song it tells of how she and i are living now

Here is how this particular epic begins to unfold. Recorded in Iceland, there are two voices here, a man and a woman. The music is ghost-folk and is taken so slowly and patiently that it sometimes approaches Fennesz stasis. Oldham and Dawn Adamson sing so quietly as if snuggling up

i thought you had took all you had to take but you snuggled to me on the ground in the winter and your breath smelled like honey in the frosty air wake

beneath an avalanche aftermath, using the snow as their blanket, keeping as quiet and still as possible so as not to disturb the crush. With “Then The Letting Go” the tempo and tonality work themselves loose and we enter a world whose options are afterlife

and from the branches dangle i

or new life.

we kiss we find ourselves in love again the older that we get we know that nothing else for us is possible when i was quiet i heard your voice in everything

The next album must be a record of drinking songs, recorded in Kentish Town during a Saturday happy hour in early March.

49. CAMERA OBSCURA: Let’s Get Out Of This Place
48. ALEX SMOKE: Paradolia
The only two Scottish entries in this list, both strongly redolent of 1986. The second Camera Obscura album is more “produced” and less successful than its predecessor, but still has plenty of lovely moments – “Dory Previn,” the title track (“We’ll find a cathedral city you can be handsome I’ll be pretty”) and the disintegrating, echoing closures of “Razzle Dazzle Rose.”

Meanwhile, Alex Smoke ushers in a fruitful year for minimal house, in a world where Larry Heard rather than Duran Duran turned out to be the major influence (and therefore a substantially more pleasing world). His spaces (“Persona”) are thoughtful, his flourishes (“Prima Materia” – Victory At Sea recast in Detroit) generous and his shadows compelling; the stumbling, eternally descending anthill of a bassline of “Never Want To See You Again” finds honest reflection in Smoke’s morose Glaswegian lead vocal.

47. BOOKA SHADE: Movements
Frosty (even in midsummer) Berlin IDM, with lonesome bass plunks genealogically trailing back to Jet Harris, ideally listened to on a Sunday morning in a semi-detached Kingston, libraries and castle relics jostling with nine-lane roads and pseudo-pastoral bus stations at opposing ends without clear linkage. Highlights: the turnaround in “The Birds And The Beats/At The Window,” the harmonic, and therefore emotional, ambiguity throughout “Darko.”

46. PETER, BJORN AND JOHN: Writer’s Block
Here for “Young Folks” and “Amsterdam” as heard in Brighton in the August rain and as fully discussed elsewhere, as well as for the other examples of truly intelligent indiepop to be found on the record. Mid-eighties again, but in a good, future-permitting, OMD-not-resorting-to-“Locomotion” way.

45. JUNIOR BOYS: So This Is Goodbye
Canada makes its initial modest entry into this list. A very real improvement on Last Exit; Jeremy Greenspan’s vocals now more confident, even if the music is all about the absence of confidence. The “No One Cares” recasting is bold but doesn’t quite come off. However, “In The Morning” seems a genuine breakthrough with its effortless bonding of Frankie Knuckles bassline, Clifford T Ward anguished yet gracious vocal and Kraftwerk neon flotation tank. Nick, you dumb fuck, you should have lived to hear this.

44. GOTAN PROJECT: Lunatico
It may be approaching winebar decadence, but that’s the fault of winebars, and are you turning into Jools Holland and why aren’t you listing the Kode 09 and Spaceape album instead (answer: Spaceape)? But think of the ghost of Grace Jones’ “Libertango” (did she ever exist?) and the substantial socio-political history behind Domingo Cura’s tango universe, and swim in the scarlet sensuality of “Diferente” – but never forget the pain underneath, as they prove they haven’t done by beating Ry Cooder at his own game (their take on/rediscovery of “Paris, Texas”).

43. FUCKPONY: Children Of Love
42. HOLDEN: The Idiots Are Winning
Fuckpony’s IDM is as spacious as Booka Shade’s but lighter and more egregious, and also a far more directly physical experience, as proven by one-hand-in-the-air tracks like “It’s Only Music” (the Scissor Sisters, with added “if only”). Meanwhile, James Holden’s debut album is really a calling card, or a craftily extended CD single (there are two “Quiet Drumming” interludes, and track eight is appropriately entitled “Intentionally Left Blank”) but principal tracks “Lump,” “Flute” and “Idiot” are all very fine indeed; protracted stretches of forgotten vocal murmurs, ruminations of omitted songs, closing in on the ear as though to have a chat.

41. DANIEL JOHNSTON: Lost And Found
His best since Fun; some blanched at the participation of a full backing band – wasn’t it more fun to witness Johnston trying to fit in all the parts himself? – but remarkably it works; song titles include “Rock This Town,” “The Beatles,” “It’s Impossible” and “Everlasting Love” but there are no cover versions; the songs are alternately, and frequently simultaneously, harrowing and hilarious – “Rock Around The Christmas Tree” is akin to Sufjan hiccuping laughing gas butterflies.

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