And the winner isn't...

Its with a crushing sense of inevitability that I write the following: here are my albums of the year. You've gotta though, haven't you? Now I should really provide you with links and mp3 samples etc, but I liked a lot of albums and it's too much effort, so I instead I am just going to suggest that you seek out any you haven't heard. Overall I think it's been a pretty excellent year, and next year looks good with forthcoming releases from LCD Soundsystem, Gruf Rhys, !!!, Dizzee Rascal, and Guns 'n' Roses of course.

1) Joanna Newsom - Ys
2) MSTRKRFT - The Looks
3) TV On The Radio - Return To Cookie Mountain
4) Various - Tropicalia: A Brasilian Revolution In Sound
5) Knife - Silent Shout
6) Spank Rock - Yoyoyoyo
7) Hot Chip - The Warning
8) Tom Waits - Orphans
9) Blow - Paper Television
10) Sonic Youth - Rather Ripped

And some other favourites in no particular order:
Beirut - Gulag Orkestra
Scott Walker - The Drift
Cansei De Ser Sexy - Cansei De Ser Sexy
Ghostface - Fishscale
Clipse - Hell Hath No Fury
Sufjan Stevens - Hark! Songs For Christmas
Sufjan Stevens - The Avalanche
Kelis - Kelis Was Here
Pharrell - In My Mind
Final Fantasy - He Poos Clouds
Lupe Fiasco - Food & Liquor
Nellie Mackay - Pretty Little Head
Girl Talk - Night Ripper
Rogers Sisters - Invisible Deck
Thom Yorke - The Eraser
Tiga - Sexor
Sparks - Hello Young Lovers
Jim Noir - Tower Of Love
Yeah Yeah Yeahs - Show Your Bones
Flaming Lips - At War With The Mystics
Jenny Lewis & The Watson Twins - Rabbit Fur Coat
Cat Power - The Greatest
Beck - The Information
Belle & Sebastian - The Life Pursuit
Grizzly Bear - Yellow House
Isobell Campbell And Mark Lanegan - Ballad Of The Broken Seas
Clap Your Hands Say Yeah! - Clap Your Hands Say Yeah!
Adem - Love And Other Planets
The Spinto Band - Nice And Nicely Done
Prince - 3121
Justin Timberlake - Future Sex/Love Sounds
Gwen Stefani - The Sweet Escape
Cornelius - Sensuous
Broken Social Scene - Broken Social Scene
Johnny Cash - American V: A Hundred Highways
Gnarls Barkley - Gnarls Barkley
Tapes 'n' Tapes - The Loon
Xiu Xiu - The Air Force
LCD Soundsystem - 45:33


It would be tremendous if you left your own personal top 10/12/54 in the comments section, and you can tell me how wrong I am. And I am not really looking forward to Guns n' Roses, it's going to be rubbish.

Happy New Year

I hope you enjoyed the mammoth christmas posting as much I enjoyed compiling it. The footnote is this collecion of new year music which, mercifully, is much smaller:

The predictable one: Death Cab For Cutie - The New Year

The old one that you've probably forgotten how good it is: Breeders - New Year

The one that applies to both Christmas and new year: O' Jays - Christmas Ain't Christmas, New Years Ain't New Years Without The One You Love

The one by a band that I don't know anything about but may have seen live at some point: The New Year - Reconstruction

The one for the day after: Goldenboy - Second Day Of The Year

The factually incorrect one: Clipse - Chinese New Year

More Christmas Music? Seriously It's Getting A Bit Much Now

Christmas mix part three (download half here and half here)

Christmas mix part four (download half here and half here)

Have a great christmas.


Like dogs wearing clothes? Then go here

Christmas Present

Over the last couple of weeks I been compiling the ultimate Christmas album, and now I am going to share the first two parts with you. Now there's going to be a lot of music here, in fact there's far too much. But that's the idea, you can go through and cherry pick out the ones you don't like. Look forward to such delights as Arcade Fire not being very good for once, Fats Domino sounding uncannily like Wesley Willis, the connection between Belle & Sebastian, Snoop Dogg and James Brown, some dubious cover versions, and some even more dubious Christmas themed song title puns. And some actually quite good music. Feliz natal!

Christmas Part One (Download from here and here)

Christmas Part Two (Download from here and here)

Forró

In my final lesson before my Portuguese tests, my teacher decided to offer us an unusual form of revision. Instead of going over those conjugations one more time, she decided to show us how to dance to forró. This is one of the many types of traditional Brazilian popular music that exist independently from the pop mainstream, but manage to maintain equal levels of popularity. Personally, all the forró I have heard up to now has been just as mediocre as the stuff in the pop charts. Apart from this one:

Forró In The Dark feat. David Byrne - Asa Branca (download from here)

See the hat in action:

Forró In The Dark are based in New York, and have decided to take classic forró tunes and update them, with mixed results from what I have heard. The track with Bebel Gilberto is as dull as you would expect from a track with Bebel Gilberto. But the above track with David Byrne is, unsurprisingly, ace (read about it on his fantastic blog). This track with Miho Hatori (once of Cibo Matto) is also pretty cool:

Forró In The Dark feat Miho Hatori - Paraiba (download from here)

So now I know how to do the most basic forró dance (despite my my English embarrassment) and I passed my course. Result!

This Is Why YouTube Was Invented

Prince debuts the Purple Rain album in 1983:

Keep It Simple

At the moment I am finding that the music I most enjoy is the simplest. Crunk, baile funk, reggaeton, rap, straightforward indie rock and old favourites are doing it for me right now. Generally, these all tend to create two reactions: the desire to dance or to sing along, the two primary jobs of pop music. I'm just not in the mood for the more challenging end of my taste spectrum. The noisy, the experimental, the avant-garde, the post-rocking, the miserable, the droning, the jazzy, I'm just not going there. I think this is because I am learning Portuguese, and trying to get my head around the language (especially the blinking verbs) is tiring and is making my brain work harder than it has since, errr, ever. I am using music as my comfort blanket, giving my brain a breather after a busy lesson of conjugating. And if that's not the best reason ever for listening to these songs, than I don't know what is:


Diplo - Shhake It Up! (download from a seperate window)

Matt & Kim - Yea Yeah (download from a seperate window)

New LCD

Yes yes yes.

LCD Soundsystem - Someone Great (removed - see comments for the full story)

The new album is out March 20th and if it sounds this good, then we are fortunate people indeed. Lots have other blogs have posted tracks, and then had to remove them. I managed to grab this one before DFA's swat team of lawyers swept down on them. Let's see how good they are, because if they find my blog here in the deepest darkest recesses of the internet, then they are very impressive indeed (clue: they are impressive).


The photo is from here

Zaireeka

In 1997, the Flaming Lips released the album Zaireeka. Released on four cd's, the concept of the album was that you played all four cds simultaneously on different cd players. Apart from the count in, which enables you to line them up, you were free to play them however you wanted, in four different rooms, in four cars, whatever. The one thing they didn't want was for people to turn them into one track, they had to be played seperately. Well, sorry chaps, but I have done just that. It's a lovely theory, and while I don't want to mess with your artistic vision, I do want to experience it, something that is currently impossible to arrange without combining the tracks.

Zaireeka is the album that they released before the breakthrough Soft Bulletin, and while it retains some of the acid-fried nature of their previous albums, you can hear the beginnngs of a move towards the pop direction that would enable them to hit the big time. It reminds me of In The Morning Of The Magicians from Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots, that kind of sound.

Flaming Lips - Zaireeka (download the whole album by opening a new window)

New DFA

Two new DFA remixes for your pleasure:

Justin Timberlake - My Love (DFA Remix) (Open in a new window)

Captain - Frontline (DFA Remix) (Open in a new window)

and one track from new DFA records signing:



Prinzhorn Dance School - Eat Sleep (demo version) (Open in a new window)

More Heads

Six months ago when I left the UK to come and live here, I was given two of the finest gifts I have ever received. The first was an ipod nano, a device I now cannot live without. The second was the Talking Heads Brick, containing every album as a CD and DVD, with unreleased tracks and videos. So by way of thanks, albeit somewhat belated, to you (as there is a high probability that if you are reading this you contributed to one of those gifts) I will post all of the bonus tracks from the Brick here over the next couple of months. Starting today with 77:



I Feel It In My Heart (Alternative Version) - Talking Heads (Open a new window to download)

I Wish You Wouldn't Say That (Alternative Version) - Talking Heads (Open a new window to download)

Love -> Building On Fire (Alternative Version) - Talking Heads (Open a new window to download)

Psycho Killer (Acoustic) - Talking Heads (Open a new window to download)

Sugar On My Tongue (Alternative Version) - Talking Heads (Open a new window to download)

Podcasts

Since coming to Brazil, I have become addicted to podcasts. For the unitiated, they are (almost always) free radio programs that you can download through Itunes, and listen to at your leisure. There are thousands available on every subject, but predictably my favourites are all music ones. Although actually it started with a news podcast, the Guardians excellent daily summary program, which I started to listening just to keep in touch with UK news, although it is a very international program. But you don't need that, you can just pop to the newsagents. From there I started on grabbing whatever music pocasts I could get my hands on. The only problem is keeping up with them, what with all the million albums I also have to listen to.

I have mentioned Diplo's (best DJ in the world) maddecent podcast and Mr Phipson here, but let me recommend them again. Extremely hard to find global beats, with an accent on baile funk and reggaeton.

Beats In Space is a New York radio show hosted weekly by Tim Sweeney, one half of DFA. It's extremely eclectic, you can hear anything from post-punk to baeleric beats, techno to 60's psych pop. It's a bit like listening to a radio show themed around the artists listed in Losing My Edge. Previous guests have included Erol Alkan, Headman, Hot Chip, and James Murphy, of course.

Talking of Erol Alkan, the worlds finest DJ part 2, has a load of his mixes available here. Because there are mixes going back years, you can hear how he has developed into such a fine DJ.

I love the National Geographics afropop worldwide podcast. It defines afropop as music of African origin, so that includes South America and the Carribean. It looks at the music in a political and historical context, but doesn't get too heavy. Previous programs have been about Zambia, Angola, and new Brazilian tropicalia.

More Brazilian stuff. Go here to get a video podcast about tropicalia geniuses Os Mutantes 2006 reunion tour, and see footage of them performing their mental 60's pop masterpieces.

Ghostlycast is from record label Ghostly International, the home of Christopher Willits, Daniel Wang, Matthew Dear/Audion, and other high quality techno musics. Sometimes they through in a hip hop mix, seemingly just for the fun of it. Otherwise its quality techno all the way.

WFMU is one of the finest radio stations in the world, or at least that what I read, a lot. Coming from New Jersey, they seem to be a very eclectic bunch (check out their excellent blog), similar to London's Resonance FM. They do a host of podcasts, and I have just started listening to Raw Sewage, a mixture of weird music and, errr, strange music.

Okay, the last recommendation is about the about the finest album of all time, the Beach Boys Pet Sounds (predictable but true). To celebrate the 40th anniversary, Capitol have created a short audio documentary for each track. Hear Brian Wilson explain how he created it, and hear Mike Love try to take credit for it. He's such a swine.

These are my current favourites, hope you enjoy exploring them. If anybody has any other recommendations, then I'd love to know. Leave them in the comments below.

Mu Mu

I've got the lurgey, so what better thing to do you do when you feel rubbish then watch obscure KLF videos on youtube? The KLF were one of the greatest bands of all time, making ridiculously unashamed pop music that managed to combine hype, spectacle, art and some pretty damn fine songs. As an semi-obsessed collector of all things KLF related, the other day I downloaded an unreleased album called Waiting For The Rites Of Mu. It consists of 2 tracks, Waiting and For The Rites Of Mu, both soundtracks to short films made by the KLF, and never released, like so much of their recorded material. Here is the movie of Rites Of Mu:



and here is the audio track:

KLF (Kopyright Liberation Front) - The Rites Of Mu (download in a new window)

The audio is the better one, a half an hour long ambient film noir road movie soundtrack, with a Japanese childrens choir, and religious and Indian elements. It's a deranged piece of genius.

Ys Please

There are two important events this week. The first is the expiration of my tourist visa, which means I may be here illegally depending on the varacity of the federal police officer that I spoke to (it's likely to be fine though, don't worry yourselves). The second is the release of Joanna Newsom's new album Ys, which I beseech you to buy. It's absolutely amazing. I'm not going to go on about it, because it's all over the internet (read the Guardian review and the Pitchfork one), and I'm not going to post any songs because a million blogs have. So I suggest that if you want to check it out you go here, here and here. This is the best album of the year, no doubt.

I Love, You Love, We Love Talking Heads

We all love Talking Heads. We have to. They were the perfect combination of intelligence, fun, dance, art, rhythm, punk, funk, and pop. My perfect band. I have loads of rarities to post in the coming weeks. Here's the first:

Talking Heads - Love Is All Around (live at Jabberwocky, Syracuse, 26/01/77) (Open in a new window to download)

Better than the Wet Wet Wet version?