Afterglow at Reading Festival. Just watch the boy Bevan on drums.
The soundtrack to your next lucid dream? The first Foals album was one of the best things I have heard in recent years. Guitars that flirt rather than duel, bass lines that investigate the areas around the song before wandering into it and the best examples of expansive, expressive drumming since Damon Che. Even with their somewhat awkward decision to leave off Hummer and Mathletics, the Foals debut was about as good as you are going to get from an opening album.
How to improve on that? Create something that sounds and feels like a lucid dream. It is what Bloc Party could have done if they had retained their early focus instead of dabbling in Europop. Rarely has any act in recent memory created something that sounded so sparse and cold, but so enveloping at the same time. Even more rare is finding an album that works for the head, the heart and the feet in equal measure. Technology is never used as a crutch, guitars never sound like guitars, and the vocals are part of the music rather than being the driving force behind it.
In Miami the band created one of their most commercial moments to date, but still opted for the sombre Spanish Sahara as a lead single because it was more in keeping with the overall mood of the record. The real highlight though is After Glow; a six minute slow burn that sounds like Low making trance music, or late 80's Robert Smith playing with Battles and has a middle section that is equal parts Radiohead and The Rapture. It might not be the most immediate album you will hear this year, but you will be hard pushed to find a better one.
The Black Keys - Brothers
"Next Girl" by The Black Keys. One of the best videos of the year as well.
Legitimacy has plagued the best artists around. Tom Waits and Led Zeppelin struggled to claim their own ground because of the how blatantly they displayed their roots influences. So too, The Black Keys, who have struggled to be fully been accepted as genuine bluesmen despite (or perhaps because of) their affinities for Robert Nighthawk, RL Burnside and T Model Ford.
Brothers should start to change all of that. This is legitimate modern blues that swings and bounces like it was written on the railroad, but sounds equally modern. A decade ago Jack White kicked the mass audice door open for blues-rock hybrids, and the Black Keys have run through and ahead of most. How many other albums made a harpsichord sound as cool as The Black Keys?
Dangermouse & Sparklehorse - Dark Night of the Soul
Dangermouse, Sparklehorse and Mr Gruff Rhys.
Any album featuring Gruff Rhys, in any given year, is going to feature heavily in my top ten. Factor in that this album also stars Iggy Pop, Wayne Coyne, Frank Black, Jason Lyttle and David Lynch and my interest is piqued.
What is most impressive in this work is that it doesn't ever feel like a compilation or a vanity project. There are slight problems - Frank Black's Angel's Harp sounds like a great Black Francis song, and Lyttle's Jakob is indistinguishable from Grandaddy - but overall this is as cohesive an album as you are likely to hear. The array of vocalists act like guests, rather than homeowners; adding to the pieces rather than surrounding themselves with them.
As epitaphs for Mark Linkous go, there couldn't be many better.
Grinderman - Grinderman 2
The John Hillcoat directed Heathen Child.
The Side Project is an interest subject. Do they act as a vessel for creative energies that cannot be channelled into a current work? Are they a means to explore alternative areas of music? Can they be an excuse to get together with friends just to make a noise? Grinderman is all three.
The often repeated cliche is that this is Cave's "mid-life crisis" work, given his decision to return to more Birthday Party-esque terratory at a time when most musicians discover the lute. This would ring true if it weren't for the fact that Grinderman bigger and better than almost all of their contemporaries. If this is his replacement for a shiny sportscar, then it is the fastest, most powerful sportscar around.
The first Grinderman album was a solid and exciting re-introduction to noise, but often lacked structure or anything approaching a conventional song. The sequel cuts some of the preamble, and relies as much on Cave's ear for a song as it does on the power and weight of the players. Heathen Child is Abbatoir Blues turned black, When My Baby Comes ends with a riff that could almost be a gospel Rage Against The Machine. There are metal albums that have been released this year that aren't as brutally heavy as Grinderman 2 can be. It also has quite possibly the best lyric of the year in Worm Tamer: "My baby calls me the Loch Ness Monster. Two big humps and then I'm gone".
Pulled Apart by Horses - Pulled Apart by Horses
High Five, Swan Dive, Nose Dive
Pulled Apart by Horses emerged as a fully formed rock beast, complete with high-fiving titles that would make Half Man Half Biscuit proud (I've Got Guestlist to Rory O'Hara's Suicide, I Punched A Lion in the Throat). It's not big, it's not clever, but it's very good when it is played loud. This is not a band that will lead you to new literary heroes or write the soundtrack to political protest, but they can make a three note chorus sound louder than war.
Deftones - Diamond Eyes
Stick with me on this...
Of all of the "metal" bands that emerged from the mid to late 90's, very few remained untainted by the meat-headed jock-rock that sold millions of albums for a few months at the start of the 00's. Limp Bizkit, Papa Roach, Good Charlotte and a multitude of others did horrible, horrible things to the genre, not least because a number of very good bands were tarred with their same brush.
While the likes of Korn got (metaphorically and physically) bloated, the Deftones reinvented themselves as a math-metal force. Too awkward for knuckle draggers to get their heads around, too slow and heavy for MTV and in time signatures that were never going to make them easy to bang your head too. On Diamond Eyes the band produced an album that is as heavy as it is obtuse. The key to the renewed appeal has been the pivotal position of Abe Cunningham; the best American rock drummer of the past decade. Not only does he keep the most cliched of riffs from convention, but his rhythm playing gives everything (even songs in 7/4) a bounce.
Isobel Campbell and Mark Lanegan - Hawk
You Won't Let Me Down Again
Scotland has always looked West in musical inspiration. Most likely this is because so much of the heartland music of America is based rooted in traditional Scottish folk tunes. Hawk sounds like the frontier between the two. It sounds like a storm brewing over the Atlantic. Like all the best American things, it shows it's roots as much as it's progress.
This third album from the Odd Couple is arguably the best work that they have completed, and certainly the most confident sounding. Closer in musical relation to Lanegan's Gutter Twins project than any of the other previous works by either artist, Hawk is dark country music. It sounds exactly like the sort of music that should have been used on the much missed Carnivale; apocalyptic, lonely and yet overwhelmingly positive.
It is great credit to the magic between the pair that when Campbell is joined by Willie Mason (on two very good songs) instead of Lanegan, the effect is not the same.
Errors - Come Down With Me
Supertribe. Best track on the album?
I still haven't made my mind up if the second album from Rock Action proteges is as good as 2008's debut, but there isn't much between them. Certainly, this year's work is more expansive and challenging than earlier efforts. There is now more in common with Four Tet and Fuck Buttons than stable-mates Mogwai, but Errors remain more immediate than the vast majority of their contemporaries. Come Down With Me has less pieces capable of starting the more discerning indie-disco, but more thoughtful arrangements, and far more... everything else.
These New Puritans - Hidden
If you are writing an album for oboe, drum machine and voice choir, there has to be an awareness that you are not going to be competing with Katy Perry for sales figures. This is a good thing.
There are few contemporary acts that are comparible to These New Puritans. Hidden owes more to Elgar, the Wu Tang Clan and Japanese avant garde composers Chu Ishikawa and Kenji Yamamoto than it does to anything easily recognisable as a cornerstone for popular music. It sounds like the sort of music that a futuristic army would play outside the walls of a medievel castle they had travelled back in time to invade.
Dan Sartain - Dan Sartain Lives
Swamii records is one of the finest Rock and Roll labels in the world. Home of Hot Snakes, Beehive and the Baracudas, The Sultans, Testors, The Nightmarchers and Birmingham, Alabama native Dan Sartain. It has not been difficult to track down modern garage-rockers, but few move so easily between all forms of great American music as Sartain. Dan Sartain Lives is a great album for the opposite reasons that Hidden is a great record. Nothing on here is musically groundbreaking, but it is familiar ground studied to such detail that you can remember why you loved it in the first place.
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