This blog has moved!
Really!
The new address is analanalanimals.blogspot.com.
12.1.10
Pitchfork 500: 9. Patti Smith - Rock N Roll N*gg*r
Probably the most telling reaction I have to this song is the fact that my absolute favourite part is now and always has been, the bit where Lenny Kaye takes over the lead vocals.
Kaye, complier of the classic 'Nuggets,' sings with New York cool, energised in the heat of the moment but still holding some back. But not Patti Smith. Oh no, she holds nothing back and ends up trying way too hard. She oversings like a mother fucker on this track, no subtlety, nothing but pure vamping theatrics.
I imagine for a lot of people that could be the attraction for the song, how she sings it like she'll never get a second chance and if she sounds foolish, then so be it. But an ironic mullet is still a mullet, and she still sings too hard on this track, no subtlety, no holding back. Of course, holding something back makes us want it more. Which I why, fifteen, twenty years after hearing this song for the first time, I still would love to hear Lenny Kaye sing the whole thing.
And of course the subject matter is so over the top as well. Whatever her points about the oppressed, the way she frames the argument is almost eye-rolling. I mean, when John Lennon pulled that same shit with 'Woman is the Nigger of the World', it didn't work then, and it didn't really work, at least for me, with this track. Smith is going out on a limb, pushing things forward, but really, this song is just stupid. Smith was thirty-two years old when this song came out and quite frankly she should have known better. Just because someone is confronting issues, hypocrisy and prejudice, all laudable endeavours, doesn't mean that the way that it is done is any good.
But in Smith and her group's favour, the instrumental track just fucking rocks.
Haiku of the Day
Tumbleweeds rolling,
Blowing through empty classroom -
Exam season starts.
Got a cool Hotmail story? Tell us now
11.1.10
Haiku of the Day
The delight of snow,
In its white and fresh crispness,
Is getting tired.
Got a cool Hotmail story? Tell us now
Pitchfork 500: 8. Television - Marquee Moon
I love that when the British got punk, they took a very select interpretation of it: basically, the Ramones were all they needed and wanted, and culturally that was all it took to slay Emerson, Lake and Palmer et al. And then they sold this version of punk back to the world. But Television, one of the first wave of New York punk bands, listed who played what solo on what song on their album cover; they couldn't have been farther away from British punk if they tried.
I was just critical of theTalking Head's "Psycho Killer" because of David Byrne's vocals and lyrics. But that was a song with no song beyond the vocals. In "Marquee Moon," I have no idea what the lyrics are. None at all. I have loved this song for at least fifteen years, and I have never bothered to actually figure out what it is about, what the "Marquee Moon" actually is. Because is doesn't matter. Tom Verlaine sings it like the only record ever made was the Velvets' Loaded and what he is singing doesn't matter because he sings it right. And then the soloing starts.
Generally, I hate guitar solos. And solos in general. They usually strike me as wankery. And the solos here aren't particularly great and transcendent. But they work with the song, those two intertwined repeating riffs that just keep building and building. Because Television learned more from Loaded than just how to sing, they also learned about repetition, and how repetition can equal greatness. Because the song just keeps going, and going, building and building until the 8:15 mark when all the guitars just start going up their scale and the drums get going and the song literally climaxes and we are left with a sort of blissed out guitar-as-sea-gull floating lull. And then the riffs start again, and the vocals come back. And it all starts over again.
In the original vinyl version of the song, it fades out during the lyrics, but the CD reissues add another forty seconds or so that bring the song to a proper conclusion. But I like the original and the implication that it will never end, just cycle through again and again forever.
8.1.10
Pitchfork 500: 7. Talking Heads - Psycho Killer
I've never "got" the Talking Heads. A greatest hits record is mostly filler for me, and "Psycho Killer" is one of the filler tracks for me. I think it is because to me there is no song. Musically, there isn't much here, its pretty skeletal, all support for David Byrne. That's where the song is, in his vocals, in his delivery. And the song is stupid, just a series of non sequesters strung together and held together by that fact that they are next to each other. Or maybe it's the "Qu'est-ce que c'est?" and my longtime aversion to french gets in the way.
David Byrne is just one of "those" artists - if you get them, you love them, but if you don't, well, a lot of people can't get past Dylan's vocals, and I can't get past Byrne. Though having said that, I am a fan of the quirky vocalist, and I have no issue with Byrne's vocals. It's what he's singing that I can't get my head around. The almost collage aspect of the lyric, the french, the shifting perspectives, clever, I suppose, but not effective for me.
There is a brief moment in the outro, when the organ starts rocking, that the song makes an effort to be liked by me, but other than that it is as alienating to me now as it probably was to mainstream listeners back in '78.
7.1.10
Album sales still down
An interesting article at the Beeb proclaiming Downloads up as album sales drop (featuring a picture of Susan Boyle presumably signalling the end of the album or something) notes that for the fifth year in a row, album sales - including whole album downloads - are down, but single song sales, particularly from downloads, are way up. If you think about this date, it is pretty clear that downloads are killing the music industry. But it is the legal ones. The fact that it is now easy to buy the one or two songs you like from an album have made the rest of the album pretty disposable. For years, I've been saying "Want to increase album sales, Big Music? Then stop releasing shitty albums".
I wonder if the sale of independent artists CDs are down as much? These are artists who generally look at an album as a whole work and are selling to a market that respects the album as a whole work. I wonder what the case is there? Ever since the music industry, particularly in America, killed the single to stimulate album sales, people have been bitching about having to buy entire, shitty albums to get one or two good songs. And now they don't have to. So really, the fall in album sales is in fact a normalising of album sales, and after inflating sales through the nineties with catalogue reissues and shitty albums, Big Music is going to have to deal with the fact that they aren't nearly as likely to shift multi-multi-platinum "artists" and should maybe instead look at building sustainable careers out of gold selling artists. Like they used to.
Pitchfork 500: 6. The Ramones – Rockaway Beach
Now part of the whole thing behind my Pitchfork 500 series is that it is about listening to these songs and reacting to them, without actually reading the book. That is a book about songs, this is a series of blog entries about listening to them. But I can't figure out why this song is in the book. I will read the book, when I'm finished listening, but this one is curious.
Not that it isn't awesome. The fact that it sounds like a cover of an early sixties song only makes it more awesome. And the theoretical original would have an awesome organ solo, you know it would. But it is a Ramones original. So, like, awesome. Taking that garage rock template and updating it with musical aggression and irony was a winning formula. And of course it is all over in barely more than two minutes.
But what is really shocking was that 'Rockaway Beach' made the book and 'Sheena is a Punk Rocker,' from the same album, didn't.
I suppose when I read the book, things may become clear, but 'Sheena...:? Damn that's good Squishy.
David Cameron's giant head
The new Tory billboard campaign annoys me on several lever. First, it is from the Tories. But if we set that aside, it bothers me because, obviously, the election hasn't been called yet. Now we all know that it is going to be called fairly shortlyish, but still: that's just not cricket.
Another thing that bothers me, in a political sense, is the fact that the billboard is putting the focus on Cameron at the expense of actually mentioning the Conservative party. Is he running for President now? Or leading his party?
But what bothers me more than that, and maybe most of all, is that I find the photo pretty creepy. If David Mitchell from Mitchell and Webb were to do an impression of a self absorbed, pompous politician that thinks he is better than you, the photo would look almost exactly like the one on the billboard. And because billboards are always above you, it puts his head into a perspective that emphasises that gigantic forehead and narrows his (controversially photoshopped) chin, making his smug visage even more like some sort of creepy alien overlord whose dead eyes are staring into your very soul. He has exactly the sort of benign smile that reads as malevolent and patronising: through the power of his stare he will make us all vote Tory! Beware! Beware!
Snow Day Delight!
I have a snow day today, and I am very thankful for it. The drive home last night was bad; my Mini, despite how much I love it, is not equipped for driving in ice and snow.
And this morning, there was a welcome delight on the interwebs: Scott Pilgrim using a flaming sword while Gideon looks on! Excitement!
6.1.10
Pitchfork 500: 5. Brian Eno – 1/1
A really frustrating listen for me; on one hand, slightly - just slightly - too interesting to be ambient music, but at the same time not interesting enough to make me want to actually listen to it. This might be a track that suffers from the whole "active listening" experience I'm trying to create for myself. Basically, I'm trying too hard.
I'm hardly an expert on ambient music, but really the name of the genre gives the game away. As a track from the album 'Music for Airports,' 1/1 would be a nice bit of ambient music piped into an airport to calm the whole place down. I suppose it does succeed on that level, as actual "ambient" music, music designed not to actually be listened to, but felt.
Oddly, as I was listening to it, I kept expecting a narrator to enter at almost every point, with some sort of banal story about Growing Up and Coming to Terms with things. It would start, "It was the summer of my thirteenth year . . . "
Haiku of the Day
What is the forecast?
Students silently praying,
Hoping for more snow.
Add other email accounts to Hotmail in 3 easy steps. Find out how.
5.1.10
Haiku of the Day
Breath taken sharply,
Quickly, a stab to the lungs –
Gasp of frozen air.
New! Receive and respond to mail from other email accounts from within Hotmail Find out how.
Pitchfork 500: 4. Kraftwerk – Trans-Europe Express
A while ago now, a friend of mine made me a tape of the Stooges. He was convinced of their genius, and I hadn't yet explored their discography. So I listened, with some expectation. They were, of course, seminal.
My response was very simple: I heard what they were doing, I heard the effect they clearly had on rock and roll, and I heard that there was no need to ever listen to them again. They were a seismic event that were important in their influence, but all the bands that followed them did what the Stooges were doing, but did it better and more interestingly.
I'm sure a lot of people would think blasphemy, but I feel much the same listening to 'Trans-Europe Express"; it's just not very good. It goes nowhere. It doesn't build, it doesn't progress, there isn't any actual sense of movement in the track. The synth chords are too resolved, the vocodered vocals, and the synth lead just seem like individual elements that don't work together. They are just separate elements over top of the rhythm, a rhythm that would quite frankly work better without any of Kraftwerk's additions that supposedly make the song.
4.1.10
The Monday Trade: Diary of a Wimpy Kid
I became quite intrigued by this book when it kept ending up on the best selling graphic novel lists at Amazon. It's aimed squarely at kids, so I was intrigued as to what sort of book it was, what sort of introduction to comics the kids were getting. The title was very promising, and with it I suspected the book might be able to transcend its kids book origin and work for adults as well; publishing is rife with these sorts of things right now, so it was a pretty reasonable suspicion.
The reality is quite different. When a copy of the book showed up at my school, I gave it a read and was quickly disappointed.
First, it isn't a comic book. It is an illustrated novel, albeit a heavily illustrated one. One of the things that a comic book needs in order to be a comic book is that the graphics carry part of the narrative load, and in <i>Diary of a Wimpy Kid</i> the illustrations far more often than not simply illustrate. Sometimes they feature a bonus joke (and are rather cute and engaging in a barely past stick figure style), but the text is doing all the heavy lifting.
Second, it's pretty bad. Now I know I am not the target audience for this book, but in my place as an "educator," one who does read a lot of children's/teen's/what have you's books, I have some idea what I am talking about. Greg, the protagonist, is an unlikeable punk. He may be "wimpy," but he has few of the qualities associated with the sensitive and bullied. Greg is callous and conceited, and will always miss the moral of a lesson. Now, for a certain sort of kid, he is perfect, but as a likable character for those of us who are capable of being functioning members of society, he's just punchable. And after over two-hundred pages? I couldn't wait for the book to end.
The plot, as it were, is episodic over the course of the school year, as Greg gets into mischief and prankery, alienates his friend and somehow gets him back, which only goes to show his friend is actually pretty stupid. But there you go.
Now I'm going to throw <i>Diary of a Wimpy Kid</i> into my book box, and a certain subset of my reading classes are going to love it, and somehow get themselves tricked into reading a two-hundred and fourteen page book, so score a victory for accidental education. I just wish they were reading something better.
Haiku of the Day
A welcome delight,
No more tripping over the seams –
A brand new carpet!
Use Hotmail to send and receive mail from your different email accounts. Find out how.
Pitchfork 500: 3. Lou Reed – Street Hassle
This is simply a fantastic song; complex and ambiguous with multiple narrators and shifting perspectives, its three "movements" just build on each other and gain their power not just in and of themselves, but in their juxtaposition next to one another.
I'll admit, the 'My First String Arrangement' riff that the song is built on verges on the shear annoying. There is very little subtlety in the arrangement, built around a riff that sounds great on a guitar (as seen in the second part - and in Spacemen 3's 'Ode to Street Hassle'), but quite frankly beggar's belief in its terribleness as the song opens.
But then Lou starts singing, one of his best lyrics since the Velvet Underground days. The first section recounts the story of a woman and the trick she picks up and the good time they have together. On its own, it is alright, but the song really kicks in in the second section, where the narrative shifts, and Reed takes on the persona of a slurring junkie bummed out by the dead girl in his flat as he implores her fella to get her out. The juxtaposition next to the first section tells us that it is the same couple, but the only thing that tells us that is their proximity next to each other. The ambiguity works for the song, we're pulled in. How soon after part one does it take? The next morning, the next week, month? Are they the same characters? And who is the junkie? (As an aside, I like it when Reed takes on a different singing voice to play a character. He's hilarious in 'Songs for Drella' as Andy Warhol)
And then Bruce Springsteen shows up. He wanders through with a "rap" before Reed pops back in to conclude the song, with another narrator, one who's story shifts in the telling. At first she appears to be the dead girl, imploring her dead lover to slip away as well and join her, but by the end of the verse she seems to be the lover, begging his dead girl to come back. The shifting narrative and narrators, quite simply, works. Rather than being off putting or alienating, they pull the song together. Its a song with depth, with layers, layers that play off each other and reveal more together than apart. The song rewards multiple listenings in the way great novels and poems reveal more with each successive reading. Not a lot of rock music does that, not a lot aspires to that, and even less achieves it.
3.1.10
Pitchfork 500: 2. Iggy Pop – The Passenger
Iggy Pop is less an artist than a pop cultural signifier. Recetly, he's been selling insurance in Britain, his leathered mug starring out of billboards all the way down my drive to work. On their most recent album, the Hold Steady kick it off with the awesome couplet "Me and my friends are like/The drums on 'Lust for Life'". They dug him up in the nineties to ironically duet with fellow survivor Joan Jet, crooning 'Let's Do It'. In the eighties, 'Real Wild One' got pimped out for commercials before it even seemed to get released. Or maybe its all me and in my head, but Iggy Pop as a viable musical artist seems, well, he isn't. He isn't real anymore, he's an idea, an icon, a physical representation of Madison Avenue's idea of whatever the "counter culture" stands for this month. Even in the novel 'Trainspotting,' the other characters couldn't understand Renton and Co.'s love for "Ziggy Pop", because even for them he ceased to be an artist and was an icon.
Which leads us to 'The Passenger'. I don't know what to make of it. I can hardly take Iggy seriously as having anything to say other than it is cool to be made of leather and be insured. 'The Passenger' is a decent alterna-pop song that is somehow connected to that leering purple face on my commute. Iggy Pop is a series of signifiers signifying nothing and 'The Passenger' is along for the ride. La la la la la la la.
The Prestigious Darren Album of the Year Award, 1987-2009
Updating my list from a few years ago.
1987 U2 - The Joshua Tree / The Beatles - Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band
1988 U2 - Rattle and Hum
1989 Prince - Batman / Tom Petty - Full Moon Fever
1990 They Might Be Giants - Flood
1991 Billy Bragg - Don't Try This At Home
1992 Rheostatics - Whale Music
1993 U2 - Zooropa
1994 Pavement - Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain
1995 Oasis - What's the Story (Morning Glory)
1996 Trashcan Sinatras - A Happy Pocket
1997 Yo La Tengo - I Can Hear the Heart Beating As One / The Weakerthans - Fallow
1998 Belle & Sebastian - The Boy With the Arab Strap
1999 b'ehl - Bright Eyes *
2000 The Salteens - Short Term Memories
2001 Stephen Malkmus - Stephen Malkmus **
2002 The Reindeer Section - Son of Evil Reindeer
2003 Belle & Sebastian - Dear Catastrophe Waitress
2004 Delays - Faded Seaside Glamour
2005 Bloc Party - Banquet
2006 The Hold Steady - Boys and Girls in America ***
2007 Arcade Fire - The Neon Bible
2008 Los Campesinos - Hold on Now, Youngster
2009 The Rural Alberta Advantage - Hometowns ****
* while Bright Eyes is actually a 2000 release, I received my copy in autumn 1999.
** best of a generally bad bunch. Regardless, miles better than the Strokes
*** I did not hear this album until late 2006 if not 2007. I had not awarded an album of the year in 2006 as no one really knocked it out of the park - lots of good albums, no great ones to my ears. Until I heard this one. So, just as Spin Magazine once famously took back its 1991 album of the year award from Teenage Fanclub and gave it to Nirvana well after the fact, I maintain that I can award this album of the year whenever I damn well please.
**** 2008 original release, 2009 wide release
So there you go. A few ties, but that's ok. I must add that these are my Albums of the Year. They aren't the best, they aren't the greatest, but they are the records that ment the most to be in those years, the albums that said the most to me about my life, in whichever way I wanted to hear it. And I love them all.
Doctor Who: What if?
I know its unlike me, but I've been thinking about Doctor Who. Particularly, what could have been done with the series over the last year rather than the four specials.
My thinking started this way: total running time, four specials: 255 minutes. Total running time, six normal episodes: 270 minutes. A difference of fifteen minutes. What if instead of those four specials, we had a small, six episode season. But not a regular season, instead something more like Torchwood: Children of Earth, a tight six part serial. Take the themes of the past year and develop them: the Doctor becoming "Time Lord victorious," but instead of comeuppance occurring immediately, the Doctor moves closer and closer to being the Master. And then the Master shows up, or he's been lurking behind the scenes, and the Doctor's regeneration is the price for his hubris.
I obviously haven't plotted the whole thing out, because that would be silly. But just the idea of it, bringing back the themes of responsibility and morality, played out over six weeks, could have been something far more resonant than Davies' first draft bonanza of set piece/unrelated emotional moment/unrelated set piece/unrelated emotional moment. Davies at the top of his game (the best of his Who work, Casanova, T:CoE, all the things I haven't seen) is an amazing writer. He's just such a frustrating one, particularly as Who went on and there seemed to be less and less editorial interference (from the BBC in London or in Wales) and was allowed to get away with ideas that were undeserving of the show. He and JK Rowling should get together to have a good cackle about how awesome it is to not have anyone tell them what not to do.
But I suppose it is better than the Doctor spending two hours camping and hiding from the Master.
2.1.10
Do you hate shirts?
Chris Cornell tweeted:
"The 12 year break is over & school is back in session. Knights of the Soundtable ride again!"
So in under 144 characters Cornell mixed his metaphors to include school, Arthurian myths, cowboys and getting his old band back together. Wow. I never liked Soundgarden before, and now I just think Cornell is kind of dumb. I mean, even more so after his last Timberland produced solo album.
Hey Chris, do you hate shirts?
Pitchfork 500: 1. David Bowie – Heroes
This is a difficult song to start with because it is hard to have a fresh take on. I've loved this song for years; it is far and away David Bowie's best song, and might very well be in my Top Ten of all time.But despite my love for the song, I've never really been able to get any love for Bowie or get into his albums, I've always been a Bowie greatest hits kid. But when I starting to put this Pitchfork thing together, I realised for the very first time that I had never heard the album version of "Heroes".
The single version runs a perfect 3:37, but the album version runs a whole two and a half minutes longer, a completely unnecessary two and a half minutes. The length of the album version really emphasises how tight the single is, how dramatic it is. The build and tug of the song, the momentum of Eno's juddering keyboards and Robert Fripp's guitar riff work terrifically well in the short version, it is triumphantly punchy (to use a phrase I hate), but the album just keeps going. The drama of the single is deflated. It's not even a case of a "get to the working overtime part" because the song isn't a great hook and the bits waiting for it, "Heroes" is a whole package, a beginning to end of triumph and tragedy, and part of the perfection of the single version is the tightness, a dangerous spring coiled tight ever waiting to go off.
Single version:
Album version:
1.1.10
Listening to The Pitchfork 500
A couple of years ago, music website Pitchfork released The Pitchfork 500, a book about what they feel are the 500 greatest/best/most important/etc songs released between 1977 and 2006. The book isn't a best-of countdown thing, it's chronological list starting from the October 1977 release of David Bowie's "Heroes" and leading up to the December 2006 release of Panda Bear's "Bro's". Last year I reckoned I should give these tracks a listen, and see what I thought. Pitchfork is a music site I generally quite respect. Pitchfork, as a website, is a very polarising one, easy to hate on with cries of "hipster douchebags! Trustafarians! Brooklynites!", but like it or not, it is very much the loudest voice in the underground, and while its writers may talk shit, they know the shit they are talking about. It can often disappear up its own ass (more so in the past than today) but the quality of the writing and music journalism on the site are top notch. Its sensibilities are independent; not just indie (as we call it in Britain) but other genres and mircogenres from across the musical spectrum. It generally doesn't go in for major label stuff unless the artist has risen out of the underground, artistically part of the underground, or is a hip-hop artist. Its heart is in indie rock (in the American sense, rather than the British way of saying "the new stadium rock", and while I honestly don't understand its love affair with Animal Collective, most of the time what it has to say is well worth reading and investigating. They might be wrong in the end, but things they like are usually worth at least a listen. And judging by the list, so is the Pitchfork 500, their attempt at establishing an indie canon. So I'm going to listen.
I started typing this up last spring, but I lost momentum, as I thought I wasn't doing justice to the songs, but then on my last trip back to North America, I actually saw the book for the first time: it was wee. What I was writing was sometimes more than was actually in the book. Re-emboldened, I decided that Listening to the Pitchfork 500 was back on. And New Year's Day seems as good a day as any to start posting; this weekend aside I'm only going to post on weekdays, so this very well could last two years.
And no, I haven't read the book. I want to do this clean. My responses, uncoloured by what the book had to say.
Doctor Who: the End of Sense Part 2
And so, after months of hand wringing, we see how the Tenth Doctor ends his adventures: with a lot of bangs, and then a lot of wimpering.
First, this episode was a game of two halves, the first resolving last week's episode, the second, the Doctor's final, dying voyage. The first half was a triumphant improvement over the mess of last week's car crash. Tight and emotional, it really made much of Part 1 pretty irrelevant, which is probably a good thing. The return of the Time Lords, led by Rassilon (!), was exciting if not needing a few more, "What's going on, Doctor?"s. The ongoing confrontations with the Master and then with Rassilon were mile ahead of last week. But then the Doctor had to jump out of a space ship some distance above the earth and fall through a skylight and survive. That was, easily, the dumbest thing in forty-seven years of Doctor Who. Since we are playing the Regeneration Game tonight, a much shorter fall from a radio telescope killed the Forth Doctor. And that was the Master's fault as well.
But the Master didn't get the Doctor this time. Instead, it was the Doctor's greatest nemesis, the thing that already killed Doctors One and Three: radiation. And here the Doctor died a slow death, wimpering and bemoaning his fate all the while. No heroic death or sacrifice, just the realisation that he has to die for Wilf. This didn't come across as particularly emotional, it was just kind of sad. Not emotionally sad, just sad like a kid who always gets picked last. Kind of.
And then the Doctor makes his final voyage, to see his "rewards": he goes and sees his old companions. Mickey and Martha are now Smith and Jones, married adventures. Donna gets married at last. Jack, apparently in Mos Eisley, meets Alonso and sexiness ensues. But the most emotional visits were to see the Granddaughter of Joan from "Human Nature" to find out if Joan had a good life. And then he sees Rose.
I know Rose is played out. I know bringing her back for the end of series four was a bit much and damaged her story. But seeing her and Jackie again, back on the Powell Estate, before she even met the Doctor, taking the series back five years, back to the beginning, and seeing Rose before it all happens for her, in the Doctor's death, Rose's beginning, and his beginning too. That was the most powerful moment for me, seeing an innocent Rose on the verge of "the trip of a lifetime".
I was disappointed Tennant didn't get to end with a big heroic moment rather than being crushed between the weights of prophecy and predestination. It was a rather "off" end for the Doctor, a moment of powerlessness that sits poorly next to the Tenth Doctor's adventures. This was a Doctor that made things happen around him, but here he doesn't cause things to happen so much as they just happen to him. It's implied that that has been Wilf's role in the universe all along, to cause this to happen, but that just seems so wrong.
But then comes the regeneration and the Eleventh Doctor's adventures begin with a damaged TARDIS and an impending crash landing. And a catch phrase: "Geronimo!" Oh dear.
So, to sum up: I really enjoyed tonight's episode, even as I was disappointed by it. Good-bye, Tenth Doctor. I'll miss you.
2009 - The Year in Review
Album of the Year: The Rural Alberta Advantage - Hometowns
There really wasn't too much I particularly loved this year; nothing set the world on fire for me, and a lot of what I listened to was a 2008 release. In fact, my album of the year was initially released independently in 2008 but got a proper release in 2009 - though it hans't made it to Europe yet. The Rural Alberta Advantage are a Toronto based band led by an Alberta ex-pat. The songs are generally built around overdriven acoustic guitar, drums and keyboards, though some tracks have the full cello accompaniment. A lot of the songs are about being away from where you thought you belonged. It is an album of things you have (or thought you had) lost. And I like that a lot.
TV Show of the Year - The Wire
I don't care that it actually ended in 2008, it finally got a terrestrial broadcast in Britain on the BBC just this year. And it was my show of the year; I became obsessed with it. An increasingly complex story of crime in Baltimore, over sixty episodes The Wire was everything television should be: rich, engrossing, intelligent. Every season has a lot to recommend in it, but the very first season might just be perfect television.
I am barely capable of watching an entire one hour programme from beginning to end, but I could just "go to Baltimore" for hours at a time. I've never had a show that was so compelling that I couldn't stop watching it (I can also watch 30 Rock for hours at a time, but I can walk away from it at any time). Five seasons, sixty episodes, fantastic.
Film of the Year: Moon
I don't see nearly as many films as I used to. I barely make it to the cinema once a month anymore - maybe even once every two months. I think I made it to about nine this year. Last year, I went to the theatre more often than the cinema (I saw seven plays or musicals that year. That was pretty awesome). But the amount I am seeing doesn't change the fact that Moon was a great piece of cinema. I am sceptical about how much rewatching it will hold up, it might be a one view masterpiece, but less rewarding once you know all the twists. I actually chose not to buy a blu-ray of it yesterday as part of a two for £25 dealie. I was getting Inglourious Basterds and needed a second. I went with Gladiator because I hadn't seen it since it was in the cinema and I really liked it. But I still chose Moon over Tarantino's film because with Basterds is going to be highly rewatchable in most any mood, Moon is a much smarter, more fully realised character study. It might not hold up to scrutiny over and over again, but for those two hours in the cinema, it was mesmerising, and that is what film is supposed to do.
Video Game of the Year: Rock Band, and Beatles Rock Band in particular
We got Rock Band and the full drum and guitars kit for Christmas last year, and it far and away has been the game in the house. Social games are a relatively new phenomena, but the Rock Band series have just been fantastic for having like minded mates around to listen to great songs and sing and press buttons together. The career building aspect, and the customisable avatars are surprisingly engaging as well.
And as for Beatles Rock Band, with the new downloadable content, the game has changed dramatically. While playing through the Beatles career as an evenings endeavour is fun (as is setting up mic stands and having three vocalists - the two playing instruments are just singing background and if you know all the songs - like we do - you don't need to look up from your instrument), sitting down and taking forty minutes to play an entire album from beginning to end is also a blast. Right now, Abbey Road, Sgt Pepper and Rubber Soul are available and all are great fun. Even Abbey Road. That is my least favourite Beatles album, but having to play through the whole thing has made me more cognisant of the intricacies of the music and has made me hear the album in a whole new way and actually like quite a bit better.
Gig of the Year: Blur - Southend-On-Sea
This was a hard one to choose, as J. Tillman, Bon Iver, and the first time I saw the Pains of Being Pure at Heart were all very special gigs. This might be the year with the highest level of gig quality of any in recent memory. But seeing Blur in a relatively small venue, standing right at the front - wow. I was young again.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
