List for life.

It's the most wonderful time of the year. A time when all the music magazines are full of lovely Top 10 / 100 / 394,860 albums of the year, largely meaningless cultural analysis of the past year, and woefully inaccurate predictions about the coming one.

So I thought I'd have a go myself.

Here, then, are my Top Ten albums (in order, naturally) of 2009. Hup!

10. Trembling Bells - Carbeth

An unashamed throwback to late 60's folk-rock, 'Carbeth' was nevertheless a thoroughly enjoyable exercise in nostalgia. Fairport are the clear influence here, but what marks this album out as more than a straight tribute is the vein of strange experimentation that runs throughout; the band are unafraid to wander in new sonic directions, a technique that works to occasionally stunning effect.

Standout - 'Willows of Carbeth'

9. Cass McCombs - Catacombs

...In which our young hero stumbles into the middle of the road. Well, not entirely of course. 'Catacombs' sees McCombs paring back his sound to create a largely acoustic album of easygoing - if not always engaging - songs about love and lion-killing. It is a marked departure from his previous work, and the gamble does not always pay off; but when it does, the result is gorgeous.

Standout - 'You Saved My Life'

8. Yo La Tengo - Popular Songs

Now firmly established as an indie institution, Yo La Tengo surely have no need to further cement their reputation. Yet cement it they have, with an album that continues in predecessor 'I Know You And I Will Beat Your Ass's eclectic, playful approach. This time they add swooning soul strings to 'Here To Fall', and languid funk on 'Periodically Double Or Triple'. There is a sense that, even after 20 years, this band is capable of anything.
Standout - 'Avalon Or Someone Very Similar'

7. Mos Def - The Ecstatic

It's become something of a journalistic cliche to say 'it's been a barren year for hip-hop', but - again - it has. Surprising, then, that the best hip-hop album by a country mile (with honourable mentions to Q-Tip and Raekwon) should come from a man who has spent more of this decade on film sets than in recording studios. 'The Ecstatic' fully lives up to its title - it is a wonder to behold; no two tracks sound even remotely the same. More hip-hop like this 2010, please.

Standout - 'Auditorium'

6. Pastels / Tenniscoats - Two Sunsets

Simply put, this is a beautiful, beautiful album. Yet it seems to have had a rather complex genesis: a collaboration between jangle-rock stalwarts and Japanese folkies, 'Two Sunsets' is the result of a year's pinging back and forth between Glasgow and Tokyo. As you'd expect from the contributing factors, the pace is sleepy and the vocals are, um, charming. But the real strength lies in the songwriting - melodic and honest, this is an album that will steal your heart.

Standout - 'Song For A Friend'

5. A.A. Bondy - When The Devil's Loose

Sometimes, though it pains me to say it, the best albums aren't steeped in originality or wild invention; they are founded on familiarity. Such is the case with 'When The Devil's Loose' which treads carefully in the well-worn footsteps of Dylan, Nick Cave and Conor Oberst. Both joyful ('I Can See The Pines Are Dancing') and desolate ('A Slow Parade'), Bondy gives us what we want - and though it may not be original, it is deeply satisfying.

Standout - 'I Can See The Pines Are Dancing'

4. Animal Collective - Merriweather Post Pavilion

The critic's album the year, hands down, 'Merriweather...' is a strange, mythical beast indeed. Representing a natural progression from, and consolidation of, the band's earlier incarnations, it is both gloopy and transcendent; propulsive and spacey; intense and playful. 'Also Frightened' and 'No More Runnin'' provide the enormous emotional peaks, and 'My Girls' is simply an astounding pop classic. Who'd have thought?

Standout - 'My Girls'

3. The xx - xx

A remarkable debut, which prompted up-and-coming bands across the country to ask 'Why didn't WE think of that?' Because what makes 'xx' so instantly accessible is its simplicity - bass, guitar, drums, boy, girl, little else. The production, arguably the band's main instrument, is impeccable. Influenced in equal measure by the Jesus and Mary Chain and the Sugababes, The xx perfectly depict a relationship at odds with itself - nervy but heartfelt, strident yet sedate. Stunning.

Standout - 'Shelter'

2. The Low Anthem - Oh My God, Charlie Darwin

Faintly ridiculous title aside, this record is a serious statement of intent from a band who seem to be hitting their stride - and how. 'Oh My God...' riffs on the themes of evolution, apocalypse, lost loves and seafaring, but never feels overplayed. The songs themselves veer between intimate, hushed hymnals and all-out Springsteen-esque rockers, such as the frankly jaw-dropping 'Champion Angel'. This record marks the beginning of a new, scared, Americana.

Standout - 'To Ohio'

1. Wild Beasts - Two Dancers

Last year's 'Limbo, Panto' had plenty of the latter, to put it politely. But no-one could have predicted that, less than a year later, this band would come up with something so - astonishing. 'Two Dancers' is immaculately played, lyrically intriguing and very, very listenable. The band describe their sound on this album as 'downbeat erotic music', and I guess that's fair, but there is so much more here. The two-part title track sums up the bands duality: falsetto and growl, fever and comedown, all played out in a kind of languid suburban wet dream. There is a mesmerising fluidity to this album; one can only wonder what they will come up with next. On the basis of 'Two Dancers' though, it could be that Wild Beasts become the best English band since The Smiths. They certainly have the means.

Standout - 'We Still Got The Taste Dancin' On Our Tongues'

Read, sleep.

...Has been my lifestyle recently - which would explain the lack of posts. In the last two months I've read:

'Pet Sematary', 'Dan Leno & The Limehouse Golem', 'The Comedians', 'To The Lighthouse', 'The Island of Doctor Moreau', 'The Wild Duck', 'The Deep Blue Goodbye' ... and 'Sophie's Choice'.

Exhausting.

Re-up.

I am still here - just. Lots of new posts coming soon. This is all 'a bit Twitter' (bitter?), sorry about that.

Moving.

I am moving out next week, September the first. On September the first, 2008, I moved out as well. Coincidence? I think so. Both me and Rosie are flying - or at least fleeing - the nest within the next month - Rosie's got a place at Portsmouth Uni; we're going down there on Thursday to check it out. Personally I'm really looking forward to living with Karim, Jay and Julie, should be miles of smiles. Don't know whether Rosie's so keen on moving so far away though.

Am also putting together a scrapbook of all my recent travels, it's amazing how much you forget, and how much it meant at the time - a lifetime of temporary relief...

Gigging lots recently too; it is good, creativity is in full swing. I keep breaking strings.

Review of Mos Def's 'The Ecstatic' to follow shortly.

Summer slumber.

I wish Autumn would bloody well hurry up. There, I said it. I want days on end of cold, rain, mist, or any form of precipitation really. Bring it on, please. I have a big new coat to wear. I want to hibernate til it hurts.

Anything is better than this bright warm greyness we are currently 'enjoying'. I can't sleep in the Summer; hence why I am wide awake and writing at 7.35am. That strange acidic tiredness that happens when you sleep out of time? When your ribs feel like glass tubes and your eyes sting? That's my Summer.

Don't get me wrong, it's been good, if strangely stillborn: I haven't actually done an awful lot, apart from writing. Which I guess is a good thing. Yesterday I went to Bradford-on-Avon by myself and drank loads of coffee and finished 'Love In The Time Of Cholera', and took pictures of this beautiful old barn (see above).

I suppose the main feature of my Summer has been loneliness. No, that's the wrong word. Alone-ness? At least, nobody's been there to share it with me; I wish somebody had been. Most of my friends have paired off with someone by now. I can't see how that's going to happen for me anytime soon.

Review: The xx - 'xx' (Young Turks)

....You know you’re getting older when a new band cites The Sugababes and Aaliyah as two of their key influences.

Based on that, you might expect The xx - yes, it is a very silly name - to be standard chart-fodder, that everyone will have forgotten in about a week’s time (I would name some bands at this point, but I have forgotten their names. You see?). However, there is much more to them than an off-the-cuff Mariah Carey reference on their Myspace page. As other reviewers have cleverly pointed out, they’ve clearly been listening to The Cure circa ‘Seventeen Seconds’; The Jesus And Mary Chain circa ‘Darklands’; and whole a lotta Burial. And it shows. So what have they created here? Doom-pop? Goth-step?

With such a diverse range of influences, you might expect their debut to be a little over-fussy. In fact, they’ve gone in the other direction, creating a skeletal, barely-there sound which is nonetheless thoroughly immersive, and frequently verges on being very special indeed. Actually I’d go so far as to argue that the middle triumvirate here – ‘Heart Skipped A Beat’, ‘Fantasy’ and ‘Shelter’ – are flawless. And the rest of the album comes eye-wateringly close too. The singles ‘Basic Space’ and ‘Crystalised’ combine tired boy-girl vocals and minimal guitar lines beautifully; the former sounding like ‘Close To Me’ on a double-strength dose of Nytol. Most of the songs on this album come across as half-finished, like demos, and they stop unexpectedly with little fanfare. Yet there is a real freshness about this sound – it’s bleak, yes, but it’s pop music, when all is said and done, and it’s pulled off with considerable panache.

Very rarely is a debut album perfect though, and this collection has a couple of flaws. Firstly, some of the lyrics are rather simple, verging on the banal; noticeably average. Sure, I guess you could argue that creating atmosphere is more important here, but I’d still prefer something to get my teeth into. And occasionally the vocals veer into show-off territory – I’d much prefer a ‘high’ than a ‘high-ee-i-ee-iiigh..’, for example. It just doesn’t fit with the band’s less-is-more aesthetic, and it grates; at their worst, The xx sound like a heavily-sedated Subways. However, on the vast majority of ‘xx’, they sound an awful lot like that darned elusive Future Of British Pop – slinky, nervy and extremely damn tuneful to boot. This is an excellent debut, but it's an album to build on rather than rest on. The future is bright for this band - even if they don’t seem to think so.

(8/10)

Review: 'Moon'

I have never been fascinated by space travel. Sure, I wanted to be an astronaut when I was younger - but only because everyone else did. I imagined it to be similar to a pilot's job - hours upon hour of gnawing, grey tedium, suddenly and briefly punctuated by snippets of visceral, pant-wetting terror. All accompanied by vacuum-sealed beef bourgignon. The idea of being blasted in a tiny fire-farting rocket with two massive (and eminently flammable) fuel containers lashed to either side, towards a frozen airless sphere of rock, whilst wearing a Michelen Man suit, did not exactly fill me with awe and wonder. Plus, what would you do when you got up there? Wander about, play a bit of golf, collect some rocks, go for a dip in the Sea of Tranquility? That's not even enough activities to fill a sunny Bank Holiday, let alone a Massive Space Mission. Anyway, the long and short (though mostly long) of this preamble is that 'Moon' (dir. Duncan Jones, a.k.a. Zowie Bowie...) comes closer than any other film to portraying what I picture space to be like.

Filthy, bored and alone on a far-flung base on the dark side of the Moon, Sam Bell (Sam Rockwell) is coasting towards the end of his three-year contract with an enormo-profit energy company, who are somehow harvesting and using lunar minerals to generate power. With only a helper robot - GERTY (voiced by Kevin Spacey and given facial expressions by a series of emoticons) - for company, Sam is finding the last fortnight a little tedious to say the least. He also suspects he may be going slightly crackers - and who wouldn't, being stuck in a white box with Kevin Spacey for three years - or indeed any length of time? He begins to see things - figures on screens, girls in chairs, that sort of thing. Then, on a routine repair mission, Sam crashes his lunar rover and loses consciousness. GERTY wakes him up back on the station, but it quickly becomes apparent that all is not what it seems. And indeed, when Sam breaks orders to investigate the crash site, he finds a body inside the vehicle - it, too, is Sam Bell.

What follows is, well, hard to follow. The two clones form an uneasy comradeship, neither entirely sure who the 'real' Sam Bell is, and both detremined to find out. Over the course of the film, one Sam deteriorates dramatically; it is implied that he is suffering brain damage; whilst the other walks around in new uniform, boxing, skipping etc. Their relationship is built nicely, with both men gradually coming to accept a truth which is unfurled plausibly (well...) towards the end; though much is still left to the viewer's discretion.

'Moon' owes an obvious debt to '2001: A Space Odyssey'. GERTY is the vocal spit of HAL, albeit slightly less mechanically malevolent, and the visuals are pleasingly lo-fi and CGI-free. However, unlike '2001...', there is no gosh-wow-isn't-space-big moment here: everything unfolds on a deliberately small scale; the drama, although it occurs in space, is intensely human. The only place Sam wants to boldly go is home to his family. The simple visual style makes a refreshing change from recent sc-fi thrillers (the recent 'Star Trek' relying far too heavily on computer effects, ironically enough), and the storyline is absorbing without tipping over into ridiculousness. Rockwell is fantastic as both Sam Bells, and whilst the film may be lacking an iconic moment to remember it by, it deserves a high placing in the end-of-year lists. A space oddity, in a very good way.

(9/10)