This is the last day of this year so it seemed appropriate to stick the last video up from ‘Monopole’ today.
In December 2010, I filmed the first video for ‘Monopole,’ ‘Cut Out My Heart.’
Three years on and I’ve done what I set out to do, make a video for each of the eleven tracks on the album. It’s been a difficult process but I’ve learned loads through taking it on. Which is why I did it, of course.
When I look at the early vids, part of me imagines the better edit I could do now, the more consistent framing or cinematography. But each one was the best I could do at the time and like every album and every song I’ve ever written, I’m proud of them all.
‘Anywhere But Here’ is the last song on ‘Monopole’ as well as being the last to have a video made. I remember recording it one afternoon. I felt like my heart was freezing inside me, this dreadful coldness and weight. I imagined it like a great iceberg, calving into the sea.
So I set up one mic and sang this song. One mic, one take, one track. No autotune, no massaging, no fucking editing. My voice is my voice, my guitar is my guitar.
All I have left is my honesty, I don’t ever now if I even had the truth.
I’m glad this year is coming to an end. I’m hoping 2014 is better.
As ever, there are no losers here. Since I’ve cut this list down from around sixty albums, just to be on here means that I think the album will enrich your life, wherever it is on the list.
Each band name is a hyperlink to their page on Last.fm so go ahead and click away!
Also, Robbie has Spotified the entire list (apart from London Grammar) so you can listen here.
2013, thank you for all the great tunes! š
40. The Heights – Old Lies For Young Lives Raw, ripping. They are fucking amazing live, mesmerising.
39. Daniel Avery – Drone Logic Where this year’s Boards and Hopkins’ albums fell off the bottom of my list, Daniel Avery made it because this album is chocker with melody.
38. Thee Oh Sees – Thumb Buster Effortlessly poppy and grungeypsychweird. Thank you.
37. Russian Circles – Memorial Enormous, bludgeoning. If there was a soundtrack to get me up a mountain, this would be it.
36. The Story So Far – What You Don’t See TSSF steer a little too close to USAD on their follow up but it still has some marvellous tunes on it!
35. Samiyam – Wish You Were Here Loping, lolloping beats and the occasional laconic rap. Wish there were more.
34. Wonder Years – The Greatest Generation Catchy hooks, rites-of-passage lyrics, classic pop punk.
33. Pelican – Forever Becoming It’s that Pelican swagger I love. Pure rock, pure T-800 putting his motherfucking shades on.
32. Prodigy & Alchemist – Albert Einstein P, A and illustrious guests deliver brick-heavy hip hop.
31. Chunk! No, Captain Chunk! – Pardon My French Wherein the cheeky French chappies show the world of poppunk how to make an album that is both poppy *and* a progression from the previous one. Take note, connardzzz!
30. Dick Diver – Calendar Days There’s so much simple pop here: Richman, Herman Dune, Pastels but DD do their own twist. Instant indiepop disco love.
29. Knockout Kid – It Comes With The Job Description KK make stupidly catchy poppunk – riffs, choruses, the whole lovely, meaty mess. Mmmm…
28. Crystal Stilts – Nature Noir More reflective than their last album but still plenty of glowering, twangy grooves to do your best existentialist twist to.
27. London Grammar – If You Wait I got a little obsessed with LG earlier this year so you should read this.
26. Mixtapes – Ordinary Silence Genres are funny things, aren’t they? If Mixtapes were Brits, they’d probably be touring with Martha and playing Indietracks. As it is, they remain a cruelly-slept-on and wonderful poppunk beat combo.
25. Kid Tsunami – The Chase El Da Sensei, Kool G, Kool Keith… coupled with Tsunami’s frankly ridiculous beats, hip hop heaven?
24. Deafheaven – Sunbather Metalgaze may seem like a peculiar genre for me to embrace but all I know is that this album makes my head hurt in a quite beautiful way. I’m surprised it doesn’t give me nosebleeds.
23. The Pastels – Slow Summits How the fuck have The Pastels kept making sublime pop songs for over thirty years now? MOTHERFUCKERS!
22. Disclosure – Settle I first heard Disclosure out clubbing and having their beats shake my guts is the best way to experience them, I fell in love then. Thankfully, so did Radio One so you’ll know most of this album of hooky electropop already.
21. Kettel – Ibb & Obb I think this is the first ever time I’ve had a soundtrack album in a best of and one for a video game at that. I haven’t played the game but I can tell you that this one hour and fourteen minutes of Kettel is magical.
20. Rogue Wave – Nightingale Floors I can’t believe I’ve loved Rogue Wave for a decade now. Fuck. I also can’t believe they can still make pop songs as effervescently summery as ‘College.’ Looking forward to the next decade, peeps.
19. Moderat – II Apparat’s 2013 album was on my list but fell off the bottom but his second collab with Modeselektor makes it because it’s shitloads poppier. You know, for kids.
18. Black Milk – No Poison No Paradise Steady-footed, sureshot hip hop that is, like all the best hip hop, unafraid of fucking with you, your ears or your lyrical and sonic preconceptions. If you prefer your genres monolithic, best avoided.
17. Altars – Something More This is my top shouty album this year and it’s because I’ve listened to it the most, mostly on emowalks. I’ll skip through my iPhone, trying to find something heavy but also something that’ll involve me over the length of the album. An actual album rather than a collation of potential singles.
Altars have delivered that with ‘Something More.’ And, like all my fave albums this year, they wrongfoot me continually. On ‘Sent To Destroy,’ the song morphs into an almost DM bridge before the coda. Lovely!
16. Fuck Buttons – Slow Focus Maaaan, if I could see a gig with these, Deafheaven, Pelican and Russian Circles, I think I could easily die and be transported straight to the Valhalla of marvellously epic soundtracks to asteroid storms. FB’s synths peep out of their flight cases, longing to taste your vanilla marrow.
15. Factory Floor – Factory Floor Stark, naked electronics that eschew dreaminess for pounding icicles into your ears. Semiquavers all over the fucking shop, hardsynced arpeggios that enrich in their passing-note minimalism. I love the dancefloor imperative here, so often avoided by chin-stroking IDMers. Fuck that shit.
14. The Front Bottoms – Talon Of The Hawk Again, dunno where these bleeders would be if they were Brits, they’re so hard to pigeonhole. Of course punk, of course indie in the non-NME-haircut-band sense. Ultimately, it’s the narratives that draw one in, as voyeur and conspirator.
“I wanna be stronger than your Dad was for your Mom.”
Fuck.
13. Gesaffelstein – Aleph Listen to ‘Pursuit’ off ‘Aleph’ and it’s everything I love about electronic music: it’s robotic, funky, machined, precise, relentless, repetitive and undeniable. It’s the kind of track I avoid listening to when I’m driving on motorways because it makes me want to drive faster and faster, searching for some road/strobe synchronicity. ‘Hellifornia’ reminds me of Huroratron at his stupidest but even bleaker and even less human. Beautiful.
I seriously wish I had made this album.
12. Everything Everything – Arc I’ll admit, it took me a while to get into ‘Arc.’ I emowalked it a few times and nothing really clicked. But gradually, I found myself singing bits from it in my very awful fractured falsetto. It crept up on me like the NSA, rifled through my brain and left behind a series of pictures of cats and Manchurian Candidate trigger words.
“And that eureka moment hits you like a cop car.”
11. CHVRCHES – The Bones Of What You Believe Argh, this album makes me mad. Firstly, because I’m jealous that Chvrches have melded a beautiful, delicate female vocal with rich, melodic synthpop. I’ve been trying to find a female singer for over a decade now but one just can’t find the staff nowadays, donchaknow.
Secondly, Chvrches annoy me because they’re too good. I’ve never seen Mayberry’s bands but I saw Aereogramme live and they were also awesome at what they did, the fuckers. And The Twilight Sad are beautiful! How are Chvrches equally good? It really isn’t fair, is it?
Thirdly, and lastly, you may think you’ve heard all the popness from this album on the radio. You haven’t. It’s all fucking poppy. ‘We Sink’ is easily as catchy as any of the singles.
The fuckers.
10. Latyrx – The Second Album Wherein Lateef and Lyrics Born shit over their biters, detractors and debtors with a hippo-sized spray of ideas, any one of which most other artists would stretch out for a song rather than for a line.
‘Deliberate Gibberish’ is a masterclass in saying, ‘oh, you want to go there ~ sure, we can go there… huh, why?’ Contrast that with tracks actually about the non-rap world, less meta and more matter and that will give you the breadth of this album.
All of that would leave me interested but cold if it wasn’t laced up with some simply golden soundscapes. It all fits together, no gaps, no filler, no fucking about.
9. The State Champs – The Finer Things As you can tell, this has been a fine year for new poppunk. The State Champs album builds on their earlier super-catchiness with more riffs, cleaner, clearer dynamics and lyrics that bleed poppunk:
“I fell asleep in a city that doesn’t Thought I was special but you know I wasn’t.”
They sound more assured, more focussed and like their heads are up and they’re ready to take on the world.
8. Cloud Control – Dream Cave This album wraps me up, it’s kept me warm on cold walks. Cloud Control lazily brilliant in that these songs don’t sound written, they sound like they’ve been discovered. In the saucily-titled ‘Dojo Rising,’ the slamming car-door drums form a perfect anchor for the stacks of harmonies, guitar noodling and almost gospel piano figures.
But through the album, Cloud Control pull this magic trick again and again, directing the listener in one direction, making us think we know what’s going to happen but they they sneak all kinds of twinkling frippery in to the soundscape. It’s often harmonies but it might be a cheesy organ arpeggio or even a super-wibbly guitar solo.
Look, if you hate Cali harmonies and sunshine, you’re going to loathe this album. But if you’ve ever sung along to the ‘baa-baa-baaaaaa’ bit of any pop song ever, this album is pretty much an essential purchase.
7. Serengeti – Kenny Dennis LP Serengeti expands on the debut EP of his alter-ego Kenny Dennis with a whole album. When I first heard Kenny, I didn’t know who the fuck it was. I actually thought it was Carl from ATHF. Or maybe big moustache dude from The Lordz of Brooklyn But while there are undoubtedly similarities in the Fauvist declamations these characters make, this album takes KD’s character to a different place.
We get a lot more of Kenny’s story and a lot of it isn’t played for laughs. It’s a strange journey, I started listening to the album expecting more lols and by halfway through I was genuinely sad for the dude.
Even though he doesn’t exist.
6. Bastille – Bad Blood This is a vast, muscular steamroller of a pop album. Look, you’ll know all these songs from their breakthrough ‘Pompeii’ through ‘Laura Palmer’ and the other singles.
They are undeniably poppy. I’ve sung along to this album so many times in my car, trying to match singer dude trill for trill, serious face for serious face. Can’t do it. I can almost do it but… no…
And that’s where Bastille overtake their mainstream indie peers. The other bands nipping at their heels may have the looks and the quiffs and the pipe cleaner bodies de-rigeur for the genre but Bastille have better songs.
One thing, though ~ if they don’t release ‘Weight Of Living II’ as a single, they’re idiots. C’mon!
5. The Little Ones – The Dawn Sang Along The Little Ones take the US alt-indie-rock blueprint and stuff it as full of melody, twiddly bits and harmonies as Bastille do for the UK counterpart. Now, whether they over-egg the pudding is a matter of taste. For me, they’re spot on. Sounds like ‘Boy On Wheel’ are just the right side of smug to still be winsome. But then, I love indiepop, which is blatantly what this album is, albeit with different production values.
This is an album for picnics, road-trip singsongs and pretending your life is actually way more fun than it is. Often, as I’ve been walking, soaked by the rain and whipped by the wind, just hearing the synthbass of ‘Little Souls’ will cheer me up with its Sailor-like joy.
I guess the most obvious comparisons would be old MGMT or now Vampire Weekend but that’s only an approximation. I find The Little Ones to be way poppier and less arch than either of those acts. That’s both refreshing and liberating.
4. Real Friends – Put Yourself Back Together I guess I’m pretty fucking emo because I’m hooked on Real Friends’ brutally, despairingly honest lyrics. You can’t be this honest in mainstream indie because everything there is arch / ironic / a Duran Duran reference. What poppunk bands like Real Friends do is flense the flesh from their skinny mallrat bodies to provide some kind of zomboid emotional meat for us to swallow.
Sometimes… well, most of the time, that is disturbing. I find myself singing along to something like:
“Maybe I’ll run away from it all and fake my own death, see if you really care A week goes by and I doubt if you’ll be waiting at all… …because everything you said was a lie.”
..and I catch myself and think, what the fuck? I’m not a kid, why does this connect? But like their peers TSSF, Real Friends have a way of singing what you feel and making you deal with it, even though it’s often ugly, stupid and clumsy.
But at least it’s honest.
“I write songs about you all the time, I bet I don’t even run through your mind. …It’s been a lonely year…”
*sigh*
3. Ghettosocks – For You Pretty Things Very, very nearly my fave hip hop of 2013, Ghettosocks’ ‘FYPT’ is a solid monster, seventeen tracks of intricate beats, deft rhyming and IDEAS. It doesn’t matter if he’s over a Premier-style minimal jazz beat like ‘Youth In Asia’ or feelgood Ugly Duckling groove like ‘Human Sacrifice,’ Ghettosocks remains unflappable, unstoppable. And he’s also a great relationship counsellor:
“I’m down for trips to the zoo and boob touching, but ain’t you heard the old saying: fools rush in?”
The guests flesh out the album but always complement rather than dominate. Some albums suffer from acute guesteritis, hoping to cover over deficiencies with a list of known names. This isn’t one of them. Whether it’s El Da Sensei, Sadat X, Moka Only or whoever, the collab is always natural and fun. Less business, more smiles.
Hats off to the track ‘Poutine’ for combining the Canadian delicacy with delicious synth blarts. It’s these little jumps and skips, turning left instead of right that make ‘FYPT’ consistent, stupid fun.
2. Verb T – I Remain What the fuck? Verb T released ‘The Morning Process’ last year and it reached number three on my best albums of 2012. Now, here he is with a whole new album!
If you like UK hip hop, you’ve probably been listening to Verb for years, even if you didn’t know it. Whether it’s with Braintax, Food Records, Low Life or, now, High Focus, he’s been consistently brilliant. And on this new album, he’s even self-producing the beats, a fact he plays up nicely on the middle skit of ‘Toast Jazz.’
Just watch this vid for ‘Old And Grumpy’:
This is why I fucking love Verb T:
“Ooh, you getting fucked up? Cor, that’s exciting! Gang of weird kids on horse tranquillisers, False advertising, saying that it’s popping off, Dancing about dressed up like a proper knob, Wear what ya want, But i don’t see why your kid, Tuck his jeans in his socks, If he ain’t a cyclist Frame ain’t changed but you wear tighter shit Once XL, now you’re medium, why is this? Why is it relevant who your designer is? Oh I see! Cos there’s eager kids buying this.”
More than anything, I love Verb T because he is who he is. So many Brits sing in fake American accents, so many Brits rap with fake American twangs or drop slang no bugger who lives here uses. Verb T, on the other hand, drops ‘cor’ and ‘proper knob’ into his rhyme and I’m laughing as I’m listening as I’m loving as I am understanding.
He also pulls off the same trick Braintax managed with aplomb: he preaches truth whilst never, ever, for even a nanosecond claiming he’s better than the divs he’s criticising. That’s a move of some finesse, those are acrobatics most rappers flail at, flip-flopping from self-proclaimed messiah to proud fuck-up, all the while their eyes on the headlines.
I cannot believe he’s come out with this whole new album in a year. It makes me feel stupidly un-productive in that he can maintain this quality level and output. All I want now is a new Four Owls album. Maaaaaan.
If you buy only one hip hop album from 2013, make sure this is it.
1. Baths – Obsidian Okay, Iām a sucker for synthpop, electro, whatever you goddamn kids call it this week. Iām also a sucker for immaculate, perfect pop songs that are as unsettling as they are catchy. Thatās why Bathsā āObsidianā is my number one album of 2013. Will Weisenfeld, the genius behind Baths wraps the most painful of private confessions in the most perfect sugar coatings. If there is a modern-day heir to Goreās āBlack Celebrationā electro-goth noir, itās Baths. Look, if you really want a cookie-cutter, easy-sell handle about it, imagine a very depressed, maimingly honest Postal Service with 100% more lyrics about needy erections.
This is my top album partly because it’s been the key to my lock. When you’re walking around your suburb hoping you’ll be Regina Georged by a passing bus, you need lyrics in your ears that aren’t facile. You don’t care if they’re uncomfortable or scratchy, crawling into your head and tickling alive memories you thought you’d drowned, as long as they’re real. You need lyrics like this:
“You don’t do anything with your life Fascinating, terrible – your stupid idling mind I can prod your hurt all night Or resign and find Any other stupid thing to do with my time I was never poetic and never kind
Scared of how little I care for you Scared of how little I care for you Scared of how little I care for you I am elsewhere.”
Please check out āMiasma Skyā if nothing else from this album. I cannot believe any human who has ever loved pop music will be immune to its skittering, baleful charms.
Apart from that, I find it hard to single out what to recommend from an album of such riches. A lot of people have and will call this a depressing album. I don’t feel it to be. On the contrary, at my lowest ebb, this album has come to me at random times and punched me on the arm and made me feel a little less ridiculous and ugly.
“It gets all in the way, the pit in my throat This isn’t the adulthood I thought I wrote And I never see your face, but I just might be okay with that I have no eyes, I have no love, I have no hope
And it is not a matter of If you need it But it is only a matter of Come and fuck me And it is not a matter of If you love me But it is only a matter of My fix.”
Where does love come from? Who knows? It arrives on a breeze, as gentle as an egret and as heavy as a squirming walrus. Sometimes it arrives by Kik…
Stacie BARBOUR said I looked sexy. She said she was so turned on right now. She said her pussy was soaking wet right now.
My heart galloped. Could it be, finally, that I had met the new love of my life? She had seen my tiny Kik profile pic and had immediately become severely aroused, her very vulva becoming uncontrollably moist.
This boded well for me ~ if her passion was this strong before I had even uttered more than a couple of sentences to her, imagine her ardour when we actually met! Oh, the sweet explosions of joy that would ensue when our lips finally found each other, like hungry lampreys in the Sargasso sea.
Stacie wanted to see a picture of me. In my haste to reply, I said I was going to come my chest hair rather than comb it. But Stacie, angel in human form that she was, forbore my clumsy typings. She knew I was too excited to be accurate, we were both carried away by this tide of raw emotion and overflowing vaginal lubrication.
Stacie, the imp, told me how she wanted my manhood. She wanted it a lot. I sent her a seductive picture of myself imagining the honeyed glide of intromission.
But it was not to be. Stacie wanted to take our relationship to a whole new level with which I was uncomfortable. A level of webcams, credit cards, possible major hacking of my bank accounts and suchlike.
Is all love doomed?
I fear it might be.
Though our relationship lasted only a few minutes and was entirely fictional, it was deeper and sweeter than most couples I know. In those brief moments, our minds were as one, our bodies, though separated by time and space, were entwined in the grace of universal lovers.
My only regret is that I did not receive more pictures of her cunt.
Fifteen people on their way to a wedding in Yemen were killed in an air strike after their party was mistaken for an al-Qaida convoy, local security officials said on Thursday.
The officials did not identify the plane in the strike in central al-Bayda province, but tribal and local media sources said that it was a drone.
Human Rights Watch said in a detailed report in August that US missile strikes, including armed drone attacks, have killed dozens of civilians in Yemen.
(Source: The Guardian)
This was a top headline for me today, more terrorism from the greatest threat to peace in the world today: the USA.
Obama’s terror drones killed these innocent people and what will America do about it?
Nothing.
Nor will the UK or UN or any other organisation. Because, basically, they’re all in America’s pocket.
I’ve just done an interview with the lovely Sherryn from the Best Of Baltimore Blog. You can read it in full here. Here’s the intro which is lovely for an egomaniac like me to read:
“Is anyone else on the inter-webs excited about White Townās newest album? I know I am not the only one since I grew up with ALOT of White Town fans! White Townās newest album, Monopole, has multiple tracks drenched in ebullience, love and remorse and itās crafted so well that I assure you, it will stick closely inside your head for days. Yes, itās that good!”
Have a read of the rest of it, I ramble on about New York, being a musician, my usual blather. š
And here is the penultimate video for ‘Monopole.’ Yep, can’t believe I’ve made ten vids now, only one to go! :-O
This one isn’t as narrative-based as the previous vids and I’m pleased with how it’s come out. Obviously, I did my own riff on the vid for ‘Teenage Riot.’
I first fell in love when I was fiteen/sixteen and it was inevitably un-requited. This Friday, I was interviewed regarding my writing this song and I found myself talking about my first love. As I talked about her, I realised I remembered every detail about her. Her hair, her dimples, her enchanting lisp, the gorgeous shade of pink sheād go if she had to answer a question in school, her braces, and the tremendous strain her valiant blouse buttons underwent to contain what I thought, at that age, were surely the biggest breasts in the entire world.
I was a kid, we were both kids. Iām sure if I saw a picture of her now as she was then, sheād look likeā¦ a kid.
She was the first girl I wrote a song about.
Since then, Iāve fallen in love at least anotherā¦ eight times! Fuck! That seems like a huge number! But bear in mind that I am 47 now and that I was married for 11 years (together for 14) during that list of massive infarctions. Six of those times were over nineteen years ago so the rate of me drowning in someoneās eyes does seem to be slowing of late.
I guess my serial amory is part of who I am: Iām a songwriter who sings mostly about love. I seem to feel things more than the average person, I have higher highs and lower lows. Where others shake off lovers / relationships / pain / love, I canāt seem to. I stay stuck until I work through everything, usually through putting everything into songs and trying to invent a narrative for what is, in reality, the normal chaos of love. Even then, I donāt āmove onā like mature adults are meant to: if any of those girls/women turned up on my doorstep this evening, Iād gladly ask them in, hug them and love them as much as I did way back when. Weird, I know.
Out of those eight times, only four have been requited.
Oh, unrequited love! I could fill so many anguished diary pages with the will-it-blend? assault on my heart those loves brought. I could and I have: please make sure your burn those diaries when my body is found, they make Tumblr look sober.
This is how I know Iām in love:
Sheās the last thing I think about as Iām falling asleep.
Sheās the first thing I think about when I wake.
Every moment sheās not here, thereās a dull ache inside me, like Iāve left something somewhere but canāt remember what and where.
If I see someone with the same name as her on the telly or a film or Twitter, my heart leaps.
If I miss a call from her, I start panicking and my heart jumps like a skittish frog. Then, when I call her, sheās all chill and Iām yammering like Rainman.
When she texts me and I see her name come up on my phone, itās like the sun breaking through the grey after a rainstorm, nothing is bad any more.
When I see her, when I actually see her in the real, actual, atoms-of-her-body-bouncing-light-into-my-eyes way, it hurts because sheās so pretty. I canāt breathe, I canāt think, I want to crush her with hugs and never let her go.
When she says she loves me, I feel the universe unfold and flower, galaxies sparkling chrome in her steady gaze. Every blink seems to take a thousand years.
When she holds my hand, I am calm. We could be sailing into a black hole or about to be ravaged by rabid dogs, still I am calm. What could hurt us through this love?
When she kisses me, it is shocking. Iām blind, all I can feel are her lips on my skin and a wave of sudden heat passing over me, the splash of a firework on a velvet sky. Every when is now, the kiss will be everywhen.
I wouldnāt say Iām addicted to love but I would say that I welcome it into my life. It is the central engine of my life. Actually, I suspect it is for most humans but modern capitalism has made it a sin to say so: weāre programmed to spew the cant that whatever tasks we perform as wage slaves define who we are.
They donāt. Love is what makes you who you are.
Moreover, a loveless human cannot help but be alienated from their work because creation is an act of love. Sever the bond between love and work and you end up with anomie and reality TV: empty, inimical shite.
I am not in a romantic or sexual relationship now and I havenāt been for five years. So, in that sense, I am unloved. But I have love in my life because I am in love. Yes, sometimes that hurts terribly ~ when is wanting what you canāt have ever not painful? Nevertheless, I love love and I would not live without it, no matter how many times I may say that I would.
I know my love will read this and sheāll probably shake her head at my foolishness. In her eyes, sheās just a girl, ordinary and unremarkable. She canāt equate that with the hyperbole of the poems and songs Iāve written about her, the words and worlds that roll out of my mouth when I see her.
This is the best thing about love.
Love can show another human being aspects of themselves that they cannot see themselves due to propinquity or habitude. When I sing her something and she smiles, she understands. I know that apperception will melt away like a snowflakeās kiss. We are all such masses of debits and doubts, none of us truly believes we are worthy of love, which is why it shocks us so and why the belief in love evaporates so disastrously quickly.
But when Iām honest, when I let pure love pour out, too stupefied to barricade it, something happens. I know, for a second at least, love has shown her how extraordinarily, preternaturally wonderful she is.
