tommo

Two updates in one day! You lucky people! :)

---#35---

Mirah - You Think it's Like This but Really it's Like This
(singer/songwriter, lo-fi, indie-pop)



Incredibly sweet singer/songwriter fare from the whispy-vocalled Microphones collaborator. Mirah's music sounds wistful and utterly romantic (a bit Frente-like, I thought), and it's a wonder how easily she manages to insert playful, overtly sexual lyrics into the mix (singing about "wanting to mess up my sheets with you" doesn't take much to decipher) without her songs ever sounding anything less than innocently affectionate. With the instrumentation being typically bare, primarily made up of lone-guitar or ukulele accompaniament, the focus remains purely on Mirah's vocal for the duration of the album, which is a good thing given how whisper quiet her vocals can get. You Think it's Like This but Really it's Like This is a wonderful little debut - there's certainly room to go up from here, but it stands as a really great first effort.

---#34---

Yo La Tengo - And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside-Out
(indie-rock, dream-pop)



Cool, smooth, kinda Sonic Youth flavoured dream-pop, with a generous runtime that suggests a lot of patience will be required to get through it. It's a surprisingly easy listen, though, and it certainly doesn't feel like 80 minutes has passed when it ends. There's rewards a-plenty to be had on And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside-Out, as its songwriting rates amongst some of the sharpest to take shelter under the "indie" umbrella. There's a bit of a melancholy streak evident in the tunes on the first half of the album, but it's nicely offset by some well-placed rock-out gems ("Cherry Chapstick") and breezy guitar pop ("Madeline") later in the tracklisting, not to mention the near-20-minute space out of closer "Night Falls on Hoboken". The whispered vocals also mean this is significantly better on headphones.

---#33---

Sleater-Kinney - All Hands on the Bad One
(indie-rock, riot grrl)



All Hands on the Bad One is admittedly one of the weaker Sleater-Kinney albums, which just makes it "merely" awesome (as opposed to really, really awesome, although I fear my personal bias towards one of my very favourite bands is starting to show). The guitars are wicked, the melodies are killer and Corin Tucker's vocals are absolutely massive as always. If "You're No Rock n' Roll Fun" doesn't get yer ass a-shakin', there's simply no hope for you.

---#32---

The Fall - The Unutterable
(post-punk, electro-rock, experimental-rock)



This relatively little-heard Fall album is a great collection of stompy electro-rock, loaded with Smith's usual unique brand of lyrical madman headfuckery. The tracks come in predominantly short and snappy, making The Unutterable one of The Fall's more economically minded and accessible efforts, and arguably a fairly good jumping-on point for newcomers to the group's rather intimidating discography. It's a very even and consistent effort, but there's a definite major highlight in the brilliantly ranty "Dr Buck's Letter".

---#31---

Blonde Redhead - Melody of Certain Damaged Lemons
(indie-rock, experimental-rock)



Blonde Redhead's fifth studio album is a gauzy, bohemian indie-rock effort, saturated with gothic vobes and showcasing a creative edge that places it highly within its somewhat overcrowded genre. The superb one-two combo of "In Particular" and the notably punchy "Melody of Certain Three" makes for one hell of an opening, while the remainder of the album retains a similarly high quality throughout. Kazu Makino and Amedeo Pace alternate on vocals from song to song, with Makino sounding fragile, distant, and trance-like, which makes for an engaging performance, while Pace delivers in a more straightforward manner during his turns, with his vocals often acting as a palate-cleansing counterpoint to Makino's. Cohesive, short and experimental enough to keep things interesting, Melody of Certain Damaged Lemons is an indie-rock highpoint.

---#45---

Zoobombs - Dirty Bomb
(Japanese rock)



By specialising in hyperactive, spazzy rock, with bursts of electronica, noise and J-pop liberally scattered throughout, Japan's Zoobombs have created a handful of incredibly exuberant, funky and unusual albums that are just a joy to rock out to, and Dirty Bomb would be my pick for their finest work. Like all their albums, this one is criminally underexposed, and fans of wild 'n' weird Japanese pop/rock groups like Polysics and Pizicato Five are likely to enjoy it. Favourite tracks on this release are "Born Wild Girl", "Some Gangs", "Winner's Ballad" and - one of my all-time favourite songs - "Doo Bee".

---#44---

Jurassic 5 - Quality Control
(hip-hop)



Fantastic collective hip-hop that has that wonderful old-school party vibe running through it. The rapping is top-notch, although out of Jurassic 5's four emcees Chali 2na steals the show every time he shows up, thanks to his transfixing baritone delivery. Just check out his awesome first verse on the title track. The beats are tight and consistently attention-grabbing, and some playful sampling rounds the whole package out. Confident, never entirely serious and an absolute blast to listen to, Quality Control is one of those great albums that knows what it wants to be and then succeeds spectacularly in achieving that goal.

---#43---

Cerberus Shoal - Crash My Moon Yacht
(experimental, post-rock, minimalist prog)



Cerberus Shoal's music is a mutation of post-rock which incorporates avant-garde minimalism, jazz, ambient and progressive-rock, a version of the genre that relies more on eerie, alien sound textures and moody atmospherics than the overwrought gravitas and crescendos for which it has become known. Creative, pretty and occasionally just a little unsettling, Crash My Moon Yacht is an otherworldly lullaby.

---#42---

Badly Drawn Boy - The Hour of Bewilderbeast
(singer/songwriter, folk-pop)



An exciting, lively and earnest collection of pop-tinged singer-songwriter tunes, combining to form an excellent debut that's full of (as it turned out, unfulfilled) promise. Damon Gough treads through a lot of stylistic ground on The Hour of Bewilderbeast, touching on unexpected genres, utilising creative instrumentation and playing around with song structures, and as a result the album has a really appealing, shambolic streak running through it. There's plenty of highlights, but "Once Around the Block", with its wah-wah guitar and jangly melodies, is a personal favourite.

---#41---

Jedi Mind Tricks - Violent by Design
(hip-hop)



Jedi Mind Tricks are an unusual little outfit. True to its name, Violent by Design features some abrasive, guttural delivery and content which detours into the offensive with fair regularity, but combines these aspects with crisp beats, noirish production and a flair for surprisingly geeky sampling, pulling snippets from Pi, Stephen Hawking, Hulk Hogan, Latin music, cult film dialogue and old soundtracks (to name just a few sources of many). It's a strange fit, slightly reminiscent of Wu-Tang's combo of aggressive raps, kung-fu references and Eastern mysticism, but it does work, provided the album's more overtly disturbing moments don't bother you too much. I really didn't expect to like this album, but it won me over with surprising ease.

So, I've been finishing up this whole "Best Albums of 2000" thing, and it's gone really, really well. One of the benefits of selecting albums from almost a decade ago is that there's been time for the hidden gems to make themselves more visible, and as such I've ended up with a much better hit:miss ratio that I get listening to albums during the year of their release.

What all this means is that when I do my inevitable "Best of 2000" list thingy (which is currently shaping up nicely), I'm going to want to include a LOT of albums. Probably about 50. The question I'd like to throw out there is - how much do you want to see, and how would you like to see it? I could do a big post of 50 albums, all text, no images, super-short synopses. Or I could cut it up into 5 lots of 10, with images, slightly-longer synopses. Or some combination thereof. Do people like having the album covers in with the lists, like how I did for my Top of 2008 list recently?

Tell me what you want!

This year was the first time in ages that I didn't sit at home all through Australia Day listening to the Hottest 100. I heard bits and pieces during the morning, and then listened from around #45 through to the end in full.

After looking at the full list to see what I missed in the morning, I gotta say - that's probably the crappest, most utterly uninteresting Hottest 100 ever. And I think it's been slowly improving over the past 2-3 years after a serious slump for the year or two before that.

Random thoughts:

The Kings of Leon are one of the most unbelievably dull bands I've ever heard. "Sex on Fire" is the least interesting #1 since "My Happiness", perhaps even since "Pretty Fly for a White Guy". It seems that Kings of Leon are standing on the very edge of mainstream superstardom at the moment, so I predict their next album will be hugely popular on commercial radio and JJJ will subsequently go into denial that they ever supported them. Like when Coldplay made the Top 5. Twice. Or when Linkin Park got in.

In the portion of the countdown that I heard, the only songs that got me interested were the entries by Emiliana Torrini, Architecture in Helsinki, Bon Iver, Flight of the Conchords and The Ting Tings (yeah, I absolutely fucking love "That's Not My Name"). Upon checking out the rest of the list, there were also some decent songs by Fleet Foxes, Tame Impala and maybe one or two others. That's it. There was some stuff in the bottom half I didn't recognise, but the rest of the list (probably about 50-60 songs all up) ranged from innofensively meh (stuff like Vampire Weekend and MGMT) to complete shit. The Top 40 portion I heard was certainly a pretty major suckfest.

What the fuck is up with three bands (MGMT, KoL and Presets) all getting two songs a piece in the Top 10? Woo for variety. On a related note, I think it'd be really interesting to see a Hottest 100 list with a one-song-per-artist limit.

Australian hip-hop still sucks almost without exception.

Triple J has fewer likeable announcers every year.

Random song-hate bitching - I hate that Empire of the Sun song so fucking much. Oh, and that Cut Copy song. I still don't understand why everyone loves Cut Copy so much. And did I mention that I hate Australian hip-hop?

Disappointed that listed-on-the-voting-list-and-popular-enough-that-they-could-conceivably-make-the-overall-list artists like TV on the Radio, Beck, The Drones, Deerhunter, etc didn't manage to place.

Apparently everyone was expecting me to have a party again. I suppose I've done it for enough consecutive years that it's become kind of a standard tradition. Sorry to disappoint! Maybe I'll put one on again next year.

Supposedly they're doing another Hottest 100 of All Time in July. I really wish they'd impose a "must have been out 3+ years" rule, or something to that effect. The last one was dominated by random popular stuff from the last few years. Should be interesting, though. I wonder if "Smells Like Teen Spirit" will still be #1?

So, what did everyone else think of the countdown?

So, here's a big list of pretty much everything from 2000 that I've heard, either as part of my "listening to music from 2000 during January" thingy or before that. I've included genres in brackets, and have bolded some of my favourites.

( Read more... )

There's more stuff I was hoping to check out, but I can only fit so many albums into a month and actually give them a few proper listens. I'm going to try to post a few little reviews over the next couple of weeks, so if there's anything there that you'd like me to review, please leave a comment and let me know.

The first controller port on my PS2 seems to have stopped working. It doesn't register that anything is plugged in, and I've tried with both controllers and both GH guitars. Does anyone know if this is the sort of thing that can be fixed without costing a stack of money? Or is it a better idea to just write it off and buy a new one?

Continued...

---#5---

Karl Hector and the Malcouns - Sahara Swing
(funk, afrobeat)



What do you get when a funk band decide to take on afrobeat? I think you know the answer already, don't you? Sahara Swing is an absolute blast, a spiced-up fusion of funk's groovy melodies and silky basslines with afrobeat's kinetic percussion and tribal chants. The number of layers in the instrumentation is just awesome, with trumpets, keyboards, funky guitar lines, a sea of click-clacks, shakers and other percussive bits and pieces, sax, flutes, clarinets and more besides all bubbling around together in a mix that's just breathtaking. Perhaps the most interesting thing about the album is that it manages to sit halfway between its two reference genres - this isn't a funk album with minor touches of afrobeat or vice-versa, it's a 50/50 blend of the two, which gives it a really fresh, vital sound. On top of the admirably creative concept, though, Karl Hector and the Malcouns deserve huge props for making one of the year's most incredibly catchy releases, as Sahara Swing is a highly-addictive foot-tapper that's played to absolute perfection.

Highlight Tracks: "Nyx", "Sahara Swing"

---#4---

Beck - Modern Guilt
(pop/rock, psychedelic-pop)



It's so nice to have another album by my favourite artist that I can unreservedly say is just all-around great. I definitely enjoyed Sea Change, Guero and The Information, but there were always little nitpicky things I wanted to change about them. Not so on Modern Guilt. This is Beck's most consistent, well-structured, infectious and replayable album since the 90s, and boy have I gotten a lot of mileage out of it. "Replayable" is the keyword, there - Beck, along with producer Danger Mouse, whose contributions are invaluable, is so to-the-point and economical in the way he delivers Modern Guilt's gauzy retro-pop that it's often hard to resist restarting it right after it concludes. I've probably listened to it 2-3 times as much as any other album released this year, and I haven't tired of it in the slightest. Whether it's the blissful psychedelia of "Chemtrails", the chugging guitar lines of "Gamma Ray", the blasting energy of "Profanity Prayers" or the mellow finale of "Volcano", Modern Guilt delivers again and again. After a few minor stumbles (but, I must say, no falls), it's the shot in the arm Beck's career has been waiting for.

Highlight Tracks: "Chemtrails", "Profanity Prayers"

---#3---

The Fall - Imperial Wax Solvent
(post-punk, experimental-rock)



It's almost impossible to talk about Imperial Wax Solvent without focusing on its 11-minute highlight "50 Year Old Man", Mark E. Smith's snarling, acidic ode to being exactly that. With its ferocious guitar assault, sneering lyrical challenges ("I'm a 50 year old man / What you gonna do about it?") and surprise banjo-solo interlude, it's an incredible centrepiece and an undeniable contender for Song of the Year honours. Pleasingly, the rest of the album quite effortlessly measures up, trading in lean runtimes and snappy hooks which perfectly offset "50 Year Old Man's" excesses. Plenty of stylistic ground is covered: "Alton Towers" sounds like The Fall in a haunted house, and opens the album in a cool and arty way; "Wolf Kidult Man", "I've Been Duped" (featuring Smith's wife Eleni Polou on lead vocals) and "Tommy Shooter" all veer into boozy-but-tempered post-punk; "Strange Town", "Can Can Summer" and "Is This New" are closer to rumbling garage-rock; and "Tourig" springs up out of nowhere with a detour into thumpy electronica. In the end, though, it comes back to "50 Year Old Man's" themes of age and experience, as "Exploding Chimney" winds up the album with Smith coolly claiming "Believe me kids, I've been through it all." By all accounts, he has, and to still be making albums as brilliant as Imperial Wax Solvent is damn impressive.

Highlight Tracks: "50 Year Old Man", "Is This New"

---#2---

Erykah Badu - New Amerykah Part One (Fourth World War)
(soul, hip-hop)



Musically complex and ignited with fiery social and political commentary, New Amerykah Part One (Fourth World War) takes elements from neo-soul (via the vocals) and hop-hop (via the beats and production) and merges them in a way that seems at first challengingly unfamiliar but eventually strikes you as a totally natural fit. Sounding confident and righteously motivated, Badu doesn't hold back for a moment, delving fearlessly into heated topics such as politics, war, drugs, violence, race-relations, religion, health, education, law and death, and her lyricism is razor-sharp throughout. So much of Badu's vocal performance and the album's subject matter will leave a mark on the listener: first track "Amerykahn Promise" grabs your attention with the love-meets-violence catch-cry of "Promise to you baby, I'll love you tooth for tooth and eye for eye", while "The Healer" sees Badu claiming that hip-hop is "bigger than religion ... bigger than the government", set atop funky beats and dreamy chime samples. "The Cell" reflects on the tragedy of addiction within the family ("Momma hopped up on cocaine / Daddy on space ships with no brain / Sister gone numb the pain the same / Why same DNA cell?") and recently-deceased producer Jay Dee (J Dilla) is eulogised in the serene "Telephone", which features a soaring coda that makes for one of the albums greatest highlights. New Amerykah Part One is saturated with this sort of powerful content, and it's incredibly moving stuff. The album concludes with Badu previewing the arrival of Part Two (Return of the Ankh). I can't wait.

Highlight Tracks: "The Healer", "Telephone"

---#1---

The Drones - Havilah
(garage-rock, blues, punk)



Take that world! The best album of 2008 is by an Australian group! The Drones' fifth album Havilah is so good it's almost scary. A work of dirgy, muscular punk-blues with grimy, raw production, it's a sprawling work of art that's emotionally charged and very fiercely delivered. Backed by bluesy percussion and guitar that alternates between punchy and sparse, Gareth Liddiard's incredible lyrics and vocals are a wonder to behold, coupling formidable songwriting talent with a gravel-lined, croak-&-roar delivery that makes every emotion he expresses sound like it's been amplified a hundred times over. The Drones show incredible discipline on Havilah, knowing exactly when to reign in their fury and when to push it into overdrive, making for an intense, gripping and dynamic performance. Highlight tracks are in abundant supply here, be it the lonely melancholy of "Cold and Sober", the measured storytelling of "The Distant Housewife", the blistering and anthemic "Oh My", the uplifting finale "Your Acting's Like the End of the World" or the album's thrilling mini-epics "Lay it Down", "I Am the Supercargo" and "Luck in Odd Numbers". However, "The Minotaur" is probably Havilah's most immediately attention-grabbing piece - its clunky, unconventional guitar lines punctured by amazing drum work and Liddiard's revelatory, off-kilter vocals. It's probably the album's most "straightforward" rock song (although that isn't saying much), and takes the expected place as its first single. If it sounds like I'm mentioning far too many tracks with the enthusiasm that I'd reserve for the very best songs of the year, it's only because Havilah really is that consistently amazing. From what I've managed to check out this year, it might well be 2008's singular true masterpiece. Hearing it leaves me in a state of pure awe. Get it. Now.

Highlight Tracks: "The Drifting Housewife", "Oh My"



That's it! Thanks for reading :)

Continued...

---#10---

The Oh Sees - The Master's Bedroom is Worth Spending a Night In
(garage-rock, noise-rock, psychedelic-rock)



The Oh Sees deliver fifteen slices of fuzzed-out, druggy garage-rock on The Master's Bedroom is Worth Spending a Night In, without a piece of filler in sight. Choruses of filtered, ghostly vocals echo their way around the snappy percussion and dense layers of dirty, jagged guitar riffs, touching reference points as diverse as Southern-Rock, punk, The Beatles, The B52s and The Mamas and the Papas. The songs here are about 3/4 riotous rockers and 1/4 hazy, trippy detours, and the album is sequenced quite perfectly to space the latter out amongst the former in a very pleasing manner. It's also the sort of album so consistently great that picking highlights becomes a near-impossible task. The Master's Bedroom... is a shining example of top-shelf garage-rock, not to mention a clear winner for best album title of the year.

Highlight Tracks: "Block of Ice", "The Coconut"

---#9---

Johnny Dowd - A Drunkard's Masterpiece
(gothic country, folk, singer-songwriter, rock)



A Drunkard's Masterpiece is a brilliant work of jumbled gothic-country, a trilogy of opuses with a loose focus on the battle of the sexes, which blend traditional country instrumentation with lashings of synthesiser, touching on numerous moods and genres along the way. Dowd's crackly speak-singing is full of personality - he readily bears comparison to wild-eyed storytellers like Tom Waits or Nick Cave - and he's offset beautifully by vocal collaborator Kim Sherwood-Caso. One of the most striking things about the album, however, is how deftly Dowd manages to litter his songs with wry, sometimes absurbist humour. "Danger/Blind Painter Paints Black" is as heavy on gravitas as they come, but finishes with Dowd chuckling "I need a martini!", while "Union of Idiots" catches you off-guard with a none-too-subtle and totally unapologetic theft of the riff from "Smoke on the Water", and "Johnny's Got the Mic" (my personal favourite track on the album) sees Dowd try his hand at the lyrical self-aggrandisement of hip-hop (sort of), with much better results than you'd ever expect. And then there's "Caboose", an ode to, well, you know. As far as I can tell, A Drunkard's Masterpiece is simply one of a kind. Not bad for a guy who just turned sixty.

Highlight Tracks: "Danger/Blind Painter Paints Black", "Johnny's Got the Mic"

---#8---

Boredoms - 77 Boadrum
(experimental-rock, live album)



I don't usually rank live albums on end-of-year lists like this, but Boredom's live performance of 77 Boadrum (which was actually played on 7/7/07) is just too special to ignore. If you don't know the concept, let me paint you a picture: imagine the four Boredoms members positioned at the centre of a circular stage, each of them set up with a full drumkit, with head-Boredom Yamatsuka Eye handling synth effects as well. Four drummers, that's pretty crazy, isn't it? Now imagine a further seventy three drummers distributed in a spiral formation around the group. That's right. Seventy seven drummers, all on full kits, all playing at once, accompanied by Boredom's trademark psychedelic noise-rock stylings. The performance contains just two songs, each lasting approximately 45 minutes, the first a tribal rocker that builds to incredible heights and the second a lengthy wash of cymbal shimmers that fractures into a giddy burst of energy. It's an absolutely staggering event. Once you've heard 77 Boadrum you'll need to re-evaluate every time you've ever referred to something else as "epic".

Highlight Tracks: Both of them :)

---#7---

Deerhunter - Microcastle/Weird Era Cont.
(shoegaze, indie-rock, psychedelic-rock)



Microcastle leaked onto the net about five months before it was released, so by the time it finally hit the shelves everyone thought they had a pretty good idea what was in store. What a great surprise it was to find that Deerhunter were including an entire extra album, Weird Era Cont., with the release! It's not just the generous two-for-the-price-of-one factor that lands them in the top ten, though. Both albums take impressive leaps forward from Deerhunter's great 2006 album Cryptograms, channeling the distorted fuzz-rock of their Fluorescent Grey EP (a 2007 stop-gap) and fleshing it out into a dense, challenging work that's equal parts shoegazer, ambient and straight indie-rock, at times highly reminiscent of Sonic Youth. They tread the line between ethereal textures and accessible pop brilliantly, and it's a delight to hear the sprawling, foggy guitar-soup that characterises the album randomly explode into bursts of infectious melody, most notably on "Nothing Ever Happened", "Saved by Old Times" and "Dot Gain". Weird Era Cont. was the biggest surprise of all, though - it was startling to discover that this supposedly "tacked on" extra actually wound up being better than the main album.

Highlight Tracks: (from Microcastle) "Nothing Ever Happened", "Saved By Old Times", (from Weird Era Cont.) "Dot Gain", "Slow Swords"

---#6---

Boris - Smile
(stoner-metal, psychedelic-rock, Japanese rock)



The beginning of Smile is one of the coolest openings to an album I've heard in my entire life. Rumbling, distorted bass shakes the floor while a colossal kick-drum proceeds to pound you into it, and they've got the audacity to cheerfully sing "Hoo hoooo!" over and over while they do this for a solid two minutes. Just when you think you can't take it anymore, the squally guitar shreds overhead, and the good times really begin. Smile is simply a behemoth of an album, a fifty foot titan of psychedelic metal that takes no prisoners, and listening to it is just so much fun. There's some stripped back passages mixed in with all the thunder, where the stoned-out metal gives way to emotional, melodic vocals and tender instrumentation, which makes for some interesting variation, not to mention some welcome moments of calm throughout the storm. Throughout the brutal and gentle moments alike, though, Smile is absolutely thrilling music, moving and supercharged and visceral. It'll spend the better part of an hour pummeling you into the dirt, and when it's had its way with you, you'll pick yourself up and ask for a second helping.

Highlight Tracks: "メッセージ", "となりのサターン"

And now, we move on to the actual list...

---#20---

TV on the Radio - Dear Science
(experimental-pop/rock)



The first five tracks on Dear Science make for one of the best first-half runs of any album released in 2008. "Halfway Home", "Crying" and "Stork & Owl" would definitely hold up against any of the better songs in the group's catalogue, while the infectious "Dancing Choose" and "Golden Age" - the album's first two singles - rank amongst their finest work and the year's very best tracks. TV on the Radio are yet to better their amazing Young Liars EP, but by injecting their trademark, densely produced sound with a lively new edge (put simply, "less gravitas, more pop"), this album winds up being the closest they've ever managed to get to that lofty benchmark. The second half lags a tiny bit (although "Shout Me Out" is great, and "Lover's Day" closes the album on a high note), but the looser, brighter, more streamlined approach really suits them, and gives the entire package a vibrancy and sense of playfulness that was sorely lacking from both of their previous albums.

Highlight Tracks: "Dancing Choose", "Golden Age"

---#19---

Pocahaunted - Island Diamonds
(psychedelic-folk, drone)



Island Diamonds was my first and, thus far, only experience with Californian drone duo Pocahaunted. They're certainly a prolific little unit, having churned out an album in 2006, two in 2007 and a whopping seven in the past year. As far as I can tell, this release seems to come the most highly recommended, and it makes for a really beautiful, almost hypnotic listening experience. The album contains only four tracks, all around 7-9 minutes long, of spacey guitar drone, mellow chanting and atmospheric backing instrumentation. The first couple of minutes of each track are spent settling into a consistent groove, and once they hit their mark they can become downright mesmerising. Island Diamonds can be quite a haunting listen, and is also one of 2008's best headphone albums.

Highlight Tracks: "Ashes is White", "Riddim Queen"

---#18---

Thomas Function - Celebration
(power-pop, indie-rock)



Celebration, the debut from Alabama quintet Thomas Function, is filled with the sort of infectious, highly energetic indie-rock songs that get under your skin and stuck in your head with incredible ease. Fans of Clap Your Hands Say Yeah should adore these guys, as they trade in the same sort of exuberant rhythms, dizzy melodies and intelligent songwriting, not to mention that vocalist Joshua Macero happens to sound an awful lot like Alec Ounsworth. There's a distinct southern twang running throughout the record as well, with strands of country and bluegrass winding their way through the tunes, yet never saturating them enough to threaten pigeonholing the group. Like many debut albums, it's a little uneven, but when Thomas Function hit the mark and come together perfectly ("Can't Say No", "Snake in the Grass", "Swimming Through a Sea of Broken Glass") the results are some of the catchiest I've heard all year.

Highlight Tracks: "Can't Say No", "Snake in the Grass"

---#17---

Mount Eerie (featuring Julie Doiron) - Lost Wisdom
(singer/songwriter, lo-fi)



This is the most straightforward music Phil Elverum has created since 2000's It Was Hot We Stayed in the Water (if not earlier), far from the tangled, obscure introspection of No Flashlight and the thematic enormity of (the Microphones album) Mount Eerie. Lost Wisdom is personal, subtle and lyrically-direct, full of warmth and humanity, and is made utterly exquisite through the chemistry of Elverum and Doiron's delicate alternating vocals and the perfect backing provided by Fred Squire's sparsely played guitar. Admittedly, the album is insanely short (it's all over in 22 minutes), but I'm willing to forgive that simply because Lost Wisdom contains more beautiful, affecting music than most albums twice that length.

Highlight Tracks: "Lost Wisdom", "What?"

---#16---

Fleet Foxes - Fleet Foxes
(americana, baroque indie-pop)



Some albums just melt your cynicism away. Despite being a debut album by a trendy new band of critical darlings, accompanied by the obligatory levels of hysterical hype, Fleet Foxes self-titled debut is one such album. You tell yourself it can't possibly be as good as it's made out to be by the bloggers and the online music press, but then you give it a listen and it's just So. Damn. Pretty. There's nothing here but note-perfect, sun-soaked Americana with gorgeous Beach Boys vocal harmonies and wonderfully lush production that simply hits all the right spots, all the time. It's the perfect soundtrack to a sleepy summer afternoon, relaxing on the porch with a glass of lemonade (or feel free to insert your own set of cliched listening circumstances). Fleet Foxes have shown themselves to be a band of immense promise, and I for one can't wait to see what they do next.

Highlight Tracks: "Sun It Rises", "White Winter Hymnal"




Stay tuned for #15 - #11, which should hopefully be appearing sometime tomorrow :)

Last night Tina and I bought a delicious new lounge suite. It's almost obscenely comfortable, and we're eagerly anticipating its delivery (8 days to go).

Anyway, this means we have an old lounge suite (3 seater and an armchair) which we no longer require. It's been through about 4 or 5 different households, but it's still 90% intact and quite comfy.

So, does anyone need a lounge suite? Ideally we'd want someone to collect it on or close to Saturday 13th December.

(this isn't first-come-first-served, btw. We're more likely to give it to a close friend or starving student, if there's multiple people asking for it)