Anticipation: Our Day Will Come

It has undoubtedly been noted before how different to his father Romain Gavras is as a director. Costa-Gavras is best known for his political thrillers; the likes of the brilliant State of Siege, Missing and Z, all leftwing, politically engaged yet engrossing narratives with thriller elements. It says much about the contemporary global film industry that Romain's earliest notable work has been on music videos instead of low budget or independent films. After establishing a reputation in that area for boldness, stylistic fluency and an originality of vision, he has graduated to big time advertisements and his first feature.

That Feature, Notre Jour Viendra (Our Day Will Come) takes the central premise from his most famous work, the video for MIA's "Born Free" and takes it off in another direction. The setting is a world like our own, except in this world, redheads are subject to discrimination and abuse. In the "Born Free" video, we see a team of shock troops take a Ginger young man from his home by force, herd him onto a bus with a bunch of other Ginger men, drive them all out into the desert, and then force them at gunpoint to race across a minefield.
The money shot is the evisceration of a teenager into chunks of blood and bone in loving slow motion.
If that all sounds ridiculous, well it does serve as a sort of primitive satire, and is redeemed by Gavras' direction. He combines the slickness of a modern Hollywood director with a great eye, ruthlessly rhythmic editing to the song his images serve and a subtly European humorous artsiness (some might call it pretension) which you will either find amusing or infuriating. It combines to make a unique and unforgettable video:

M.I.A, Born Free from ROMAIN-GAVRAS on Vimeo.

For me his other great music video is for Justice's "Stress", a gritty, ultraviolet yet strangely haunting collision between La Haine and Gaspar Noe:

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Just from those two promos a couple of his quirks are evident: he has a slightly adolescent awe of violence, a nice way of incorporating homage into his work ("Born Free" plays to me like a big tip of the hat to Peter Watkins' great Punishment Park), exemplary technical control, and a well-balanced mix of European and American sensibilities. All of this then suggests that Our Day Will Come should be worth waiting for. It stars Vincent Cassel, and is set in a Ginger-prejudiced world, evolving into a road movie as Cassel and a young red-haired friend journey across France towards Ireland, reputedly safe haven for all Gingers. It looks bizarre, in an interesting way, and even from the trailer you can tell it was made by a real Director:

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It was released in France last year and already available on DVD there. Since then, Gavras' most high-profile work is the new Adidas spot, "Adidas Is In All" which showcases the new Justice track, "Civilisation", and is a pretty storming piece of brand iconography, filled with beautiful imagery. I love this longer version, much though I resent Lionel Messi having to share the screen with mere basketball players and skateboarders, and worse, Katy Perry:

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Gavras founded the collective Kourtrajme with Kim Chapiron in 1994 and they worked on shorts and around the outskirts of the Parisian music industry for years before finding success (Chapiron was the first to direct Cassel in Sheitan) . This background explains his longstanding relationship with Justice. As well as the Adidas spot and the "Stress" video, he directed their tour documentary, A Cross The Universe, which he edited into a great little trailer-cum-video for their song "Phantom II":

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A couple of his other more interesting Videos follow (for Simian Mobile Disco and DJ Medhi) together with an advert for Yves St Laurent which is quite different from the majority of his work in tone:

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Our Day Will Come is presently without a distributor in the UK. It would be a shame not to see the debut feature work of such a visually muscular director on the big screen here, but it's not too late...

Shuffle: For Real

Regular readers (insert mandatory "Hello, you two" type joke here) will know that I do a "Shuffle" piece every so often, all about one song I choose, sort of at random. But the point of an actual iTunes shuffle is the sequence, the juxtaposition of songs from different artists with different styles in different moods. So this is an actual shuffle, taken verbatim as it played, together with a few quick impressions and self-indulgent thoughts:

You and the Clouds Will Still Be Beautiful - XTC (From Wasp Star)
Ah, a good start - Andy Partridge combining a nervy, jerky pop-rock song with a lyric starry-eyed with ardent declarations of love and some nifty wordplay. Its chipper and bouncy the way some XTC is, and horns intrude late on - Partridge just couldn't help himself. Then the coda is different - a drift toward the end. Its all lovely. The record its on is the more traditional "rock" album of the two they released way back in the late 90s. Great title, I think.

Osalobua Rekpama - Sir Victor Uwaifo & His Melody Maestros
Off a Nigeria Special Compilation (the Afro-Beat and Nigerian Blues one) this has horns that sound like mariachi horns, wah wah guitar, a great singalong chorus, and shakes and swings throughout: it is awesome. Put it on anywhere, ever, and somebody would dance.

My Lover- Bert Jansch (from It Don't Bother Me)
It Don't Bother Me is the only Jansch record I own, but its pretty damn good, and this hypnotic raga-style folk-blues may well be the best thing on it. British folk isn't a favourite genre of mine, but this sounds like nothing else.

Washer - Slint (from Spiderland)
Slow brood. Guitars holding back, all the threat in the heavy, slow drums. What is a singer doing here?
The explosion, when it comes, is worthwhile..I got to this album late. Its a pivotal Post-Rock record, but by then I knew the next wave of that sub-genre (Mogwai, Explosions in the Sky etc) pretty well, so its originality and importance had been somewhat watered down. It is still powerful, however, and the songwriting is surprisingly classical in places.

Everybody Have Fun Tonight - Wang Chung
Any song that mentions the singer/band by name is a song for me. Wang Chung do that, turn it into a verb, and in teh chorus, no less. Proving to my mind that "Everybody Wang Chung tonight" is maybe the stupidest/cleverest lyric of the 80s. So it has that going for it. That and wall-loads of synths, which sound like strings. The 80s was full of odd sound combinations, which should be jarring but often work well. Here its hose synths with a sharp bass and spiky, plastic-sounding guitar. Anyway, its catchy and insistent and whenever it comes on I feel happy about it.

Boy With a Problem - Elvis Costello & the Attractions (from Imperial Bedroom)
My favourite Costello album, Imperial Bedroom is full of lush pop-songs and torch ballads, and this is a mixture of the two, with his usual great lyrics: "Came home drunk/Talking in circles/The spirit is willing/But I don't believe in miracles". Sometimes his oft-criticised voice is just perfect on his own songs because he understands his own range and even when to push it, and this is one such case - gentle and soft and flirty. The Attractions are always tight and sharp.

Boston Ball Game, 1967 - Jack Bruce (from Songs for a Tailor)
No surprise that this has such an amazing bassline, considering that Bruce is one of Rock's great bass players, but its the way it just builds and builds, riding that groove to nowhere: great song from a fantastic, and disappointingly little-known album. Cream aren't even all that listened to nowadays, are they? So what chance does Bruce solo have?

Blister In the Sun - Violent Femmes (from Violent Femmes)
You know this, right? Its a classic for a reason. Yet it still thrills, with that shuffle, the solos of the middle eight, the euphoric chorus. As classics should, it stays fresh. It was an every-week fixture at an Indie Club night I regularly attended back in the day and it always filled the dancefloor.

Pandora's Golden Heebie-Jeebies - The Association
Ah, the 60s. Much of the other Association material I own is dull and sickly-sweet as treacle. This is sublime, though. The delicate backing vocal harmonies alone would be enough, but the arrangement (Curt Boettcher?) is beautiful. The lyrics: a load of rubbish.

Mama Soul - Harold Alexander
From a David Holmes DJ compilation, so i must be good, and lo, it is. Pure vibe, a demonic bassline, doesn't linger any longer than necessary. I know nothing about Harold Alexander, though I've got another song of his off another compilation somewhere.

Radio King - Golden Smog (from Down By the Old Mainstream)
Golden Smog are an old-fashioned Super-Group, wherein members of other bands team up and donate the songs that weren't good enough for their day-jobs. Here its sort of an Americana collective, with members of Wilco and the Jayhawks, Soul Asylum and Big Star all together. Jeff Tweedy wrote and sings, so its basically a Wilco song with Gary Louris backng vocals. This is a good thing. Tweedy's songs for the next Golden Smog record, Weird Tales, are among the best he ever wrote, by the way.

Baby Its You - Smith (from Death Proof OST)
Best version of this very great song I've ever heard. Does what so few covers do: makes it sound fresh and exciting.

I Fell Back Alone - World Party (From Goodbye Jumbo)
Desolate, destroyed breakup ballad from Karl Wallinger. What happened to Karl Wallinger? He could write a Beatlesque popsong as well as anyone. Goodbye Jumbo and Bang, the second and third World Party records, are full of them, and enjoyed some chart success. This is beautiful, sparse for the most part - guitar, drums, piano, bass. Synths well up halfway, imitating a string section. But its his delivery of the lyrics that sell it. They sting with truth, with felt experience. The first lines say it all, after a sadly pretty little acoustic guitar figure: "If we walk through each other/As we leave the room/You don't have to tell me/Thats its over/Whoever you were then/I never really knew/And you've got no need to know me now." Altough these lines are worthy of Elvis Costello: "But how can two souls still eat together/When life has lost its taste/ How can we lie together/In bed and face to face/And not see anyone at all?"
Great song.

(You Caught Me) Smilin - Sly & the Family Stone
Effortless, with a chorus for a verse, an instrumental break for a chorus, seemingly improvised harmonies, amazing bass by Larry Graham, and yet it sounds like the smoothest piece of pop-soul imaginable. Sly Stone was a genius. I have this on an old Greatest Hits, which is, song-for-song, one of the best records I own.

Wear Your Seat Belt - Cliff Martinez (from Solaris OST)
One of my favourite modern soundtracks, this. Spooky and atmospheric, its been much-used in advertising and trailers in the years since: it supplies a mood in seconds; dislocation, angst, melancholy. It is lovely. Its what I want to hear walking through the dark streets on the way to the tube in the morning.

Wounded - The Cookies
The Cookies were a girl-group who eventually mutated into the Raelettes. They're probably best known for "Chains", later covered by the Beatles. But this song - which I've got on a Warner Vaults compilation - is two distinct songs stitched together, full of overlapping vocals, with about five hooks, a vaguely psychedelic backing track; and its great.

School - Nirvana (from From The Muddy Banks of the Wishkah)
"Wont you believe it/Just my luck/Wont you believe it/Just my luck/Wont you believe it/Just my luck/No Recess!No Recess! No Recess!/You were at school again/You were at school again/You were at school again/No Recess!No Recess!No Recess!"
...and thats it. But its the pulverising song beneath, squalls of feedback, a ridiculous guitar solo, caveman drums, Cobain screaming it all: this is rock music as primal therapy. My friends and I loved it in our teens - that version was on a 12" b-side, and if anything, it was even louder and rawer than this one. But live versions piss on the version on Bleach, which sounds insipid by comparison.

I Think I'm In Love - Spiritualized (from Ladies And Gentlemen We Are Floating In Space)
Eight minutes of bliss: a slow fade in, instruments falling into the song around Pierce's numbed drawl until the beat kicks in around 2.33, and then its a rock song, its danceable, its a rhapsody. I've never loved anything Spiritualized have done as much as this album, which is epic and moving, rocking and funky, and often astonishing. Though I've tried, and I like much of Pierce's subsequent output. But this is monumental.

Love Is Strong - The Rolling Stones (from Voodoo Lounge)
Yeah, from Voodoo Lounge, thats right, Voodoo Lounge. Every Stones album has at least one great song on it. Mick & Keef demand that much. This is Voodoo Lounge's great song. Its only good song, actually. Lots of harmonica.

Sacred Heart Hotel - the Stars of Heaven (from Sacred Heart Hotel)
First line: "We conduct our affairs/Like the gentlemen we are". Strummy, americana-esque Irish indie band from the 80s, who were culty in the UK at their peak, and wrote some great songs. I found this album in London, actually, after drawing a complete blank in Dublin.

Hayfever - Trashcan Sinatras (from I've Seen Everthing)
Late 80s/early 90s Scots band habitually compared to the Smiths in their time, but, to my ears, they're far more emotional, and not as musically inventive. This 1993 single is fantastic, however.

Curls - Girls (from Album)
This is a gentle little instrumental, much more mature and measured than much of their debut, which I still don't know fully despite owning it since release.


Theme de Camille - Georges Delerue (from Le Mepris OST)
Just beautiful: a keening wall of strings throughout, rising to a crescendo of sound and emotion then subsiding once again.

Love and Affection - Joan Armatrading (from Love and Affection)
Ah, an 80s FM Radio Classic. I basically learned about music in a few places: My Dad loves music and he played it throughout my childhood. He was (is) into 50s rock & roll and Easy Listening. I watched MTV obsessively from around 1986 onwards, which obviously skews ones tastes in a certain direction. In mine towards hard rock, heavy metal, and ultimately grunge. But parallel to that I was listening to FM radio, classic rock stations and late night DJs who played nothing but 70s and 80s chart stuff, which I loved. So much of my iPod is filled with people like Tom Robinson, Joe Jackson, Scritti Politti and Joan Armatrading I could probably run such a show for a few months with no repeat plays. Anyway, this weird mix of singer-songwriter ballad and soul is awesome, and has a really ugly sax solo in the middle. In a good way.

More News from Nowhere - Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds (from Dig! Lazarus! Dig!)
A casual but addictive, insistent low-slung blues beat and Cave just riffing verses over the top, tossing off amazing lyrics in every line ("I spent the next seven years between her legs/a pining for my wife") for seven minutes or so. And its absolutely ace. What a lyricist.

Katy Song - Red House Painters (from Rollercoaster)
One of my favourite songs ever.

Mojo Hannah - Tammi Lynn
Southern Soul funky goodness produced by Jerry Wexler, this has got a great vocal performance from Lynn and a real stomping band. Its on one of Warners excellent Right On! compilations.

Till I Get My Way - The Black Keys (from rubber Factory)
Still my favourite Black Keys song, due to that absolute beast of a riff which basically runs away with the song under its arm.
I love the clattering drums and Auerbach's vocals are always soulful, even when he has to holler to be heard over his own guitar.

Send In the Clowns - Judy Collins (from Judith)
This version of this song is devastating, I think. Perfectly judged production - the strings not too heavy, the piano weaving in and out in the right places. But above all theres Judy Collins, and her incredible voice. She caresses this song, never sells it too hard, allows it to breathe and lets it break our hearts. Beautiful.

Shuffle : Hearts and Bones

Paul Simon has never been hip. Will never be hip. Paul Simon and hip just aren’t meant to be.
He isn’t hip now, as an establishment relic of the 1960s and the 1980s who releases the odd, little-heard record to a muted response and plays on tours to ageing fans. He wasn’t hip in the 80s, despite the approval of MTV, when he was seen by some as piggy-backing on African musicians to massive commercial success with his Graceland album. He wasn’t even hip in the 60s, when he and Art Garfunkel were the safe folk duo you could bring home to your mother, all angelic ballads, smooth, catchy melodies and soulful gazes on album covers.
Never hip, then.
But what a songwriter.

I will contend that Simon has written as many stone cold Classic pop songs as any American songwriter of his gilded generation. More than most, even. His Simon & Garfunkel legacy is a bewilderingly brilliant body of work, from the haunting, lovely folk of their early work to the often Epic folk-rock of the last two records.
The early material – easily available on one of the many Best Ofs and compilations the duo have generated over the years – is best known for songs like “The Sound of Silence”, “I Am a Rock” and “Scarborough Fair”. But there is also Simon as morose balladeer, as on “For Emily, Wherever I may find Her”, a rapturous dream of love lost and sought anew with Garfunkel stretched to the very outer limits of his range on the last lines, and “Homeward Bound”, his lovely, elegiac tale of loneliness and anticipation on the road in England. Both these songs, alongside “Kathy’s Song” are best appreciated in live versions. The early albums are somewhat ill-served by their production, as if Simon had not quite discovered how best to treat his music when given a full band and a studio to play with. But just him, Garfunkel and a guitar on stage show the beauty and simplicity of his writing at that point, and some of this music is breathtaking. By the time they came to make their later albums, Simon had firmer ideas about how to use these new tools, and he implemented them. Those last two records are both brilliant. Bookends, a sort-of concept album, is ambitious and eclectic and all founded on Simon’s gift for melody and ear for an evocative, casually poetic lyric.

Its highpoints are among the greatest forgotten songs of the 60s: “America”, a sad and epic romantic road-movie in three and a half minutes that culminates in a couple of verses, which go from conversational and inescapably real to devastating and puzzled, then expand to an almost universal concern:
“Toss me a cigarette/I think there’s one in my raincoat/We smoked the last one an hour ago/So I looked at the scenery/she read her magazine/And the moon rose over an open field./ Cathy I’m lost, I said/Though I knew she was sleeping/I’m empty and aching and I don’t know why/ Counting the cars on the New Jersey turnpike/ They’ve all come to look for America/All come to look for America.”
Musically, this song begins as a gentle folk stroll founded on guitar, a fluid bassline, what sounds like a Hammond organ and some drums that suggest nothing so much as the Beatles’ incomparable “A Day In the Life”. It expands as it progresses, however, with some jazzy horn during the second verse, and a fuller sound as the song reaches its climax. The extraordinary power and purity of Art Garfunkel’s voice is subtly deployed throughout, only really registering during the final lines. Then there is “A Hazy Shade of Winter”, most famously covered by The Bangles, who made it softer and lighter than the driving rocker Simon founded on a fantastic riff and a dark, ominous lyric which seems to foresee the death of the 60s. And “At the Zoo”, a silly, unexpectedly funky piece of psychedelia by way of Charles Burns. And “Mrs Robinson”, not a bad song in its own right.

Bridge Over Troubled Water contains the title track, one of those songs which has somehow transcended itself, despite the singular majesty of Garfunkel’s performance on it, and also the epic shaggy dog tale, “The Boxer” with its insistent, singalong chorus, and the joyous “Cecilia”, a stomping love song unlike anything else they had done.
Then there is the ghostly melancholy of “The Only Living Boy In New York”, where Simon’s slow sad smile of a melody and the vague existential crises of his lyrics bespeak a sort of cultural ennui: “I get the news I need on a weather report/ I can gather all the news I need on the weather report/ Hey, I‘ve got nothing to do all day but smile” “Half of the time we’re gone/But we don’t know where/And we don’t know where”.
Garfunkel is so seldom used on much of the record a split was inevitable, and when it came Simon continued with the high quality songs. His Paul Simon record contained both the cod-reggae of “Mother & Child Reunion” and the latino folk-pop of “Me and Julio Down By the Schoolyard”, alongside the darker “Paranoia Blues”.



Through the 1970s he grew less vital, tossing out a couple of great songs per album, his sound becoming more middle of the road and less assured with each release. Even so, there are a few classics from this decade: “50 Ways To Leave Your Lover” and “Still Crazy After All These Years” (both from Still Crazy After All These Years) and “Something So Right” from There Goes Rhymin’ Simon.
He lost his way in the early 80s, when he wrote and starred in One Trick Pony (Robert M Young, 1980), a seemingly semi-autobiographical film about a washed-up folk rock star struggling with his label, his ex-wife and son. Simon, as his brief appearance in Woody Allen’s Annie Hall had suggested, is no actor, and the film flopped. The accompanying album was also a disappointment.

Simon would surge back to critical and commercial success in 1986 with the release of Graceland, a sort of tour through World Music, which exposed Ladysmith Black Mambazo and Okyrerema Asante to an International audience and included a controversial collaboration with Los Lobos (who accused Simon of stealing one of their songs) alongside some roots American styles. All of it at the service of some of Simon’s best writing, from the nagging, disposable soul-pop of “You Can Call Me Al” to the state-of-the-world snapshots of “Boy In the Bubble” (“These are the days of miracles and wonder/This is a long distance call/The way the camera follows us in slo mo/The way we look to us all”). Then there is “Graceland” itself, which Simon has called the best song he has written, and is another personal tour of American culture which yokes the intimate together with the universal in the manner of much of his best music and does contain some of the greatest lines he ever wrote: “The Mississippi delta was shining like a national guitar”, “She comes back to tell me shes gone/As if I didn’t know that/ As if I didn’t know my own bed/As if I’d never noticed/The way she brushes her hair from her forehead”.

But my choice for the greatest song Paul Simon ever wrote is “Hearts and Bones” from the 1983 album of the same name. That record was originally conceived as a Simon & Garfunkel collaboration on the back of a successful reunion tour. But the duo had problems in the studio and when the project was scrapped, Simon transformed the sessions into a solo record. This suited the autobiographical nature of the songs, which dealt with his divorce from his first wife and his recent relationship with Carrie Fisher. The title track is one of Simon's most muted productions, but it is also perfectly judged and arranged.
Delicate guitar in Simon's trademark finger-picked style - always casual, hiding its virtuosity - picks out a melody over what sounds like bongos, the occasional quiet bleed of organ and humming. The melody is sad and beautiful, the arrangement haunting and elegiac, and Simon's lyric is poetic in his singular way: he makes a love song based on his own experiences a more general and universal enquiry into the condition of love, with moving results.



The general assumption is that the song is entirely about his relationship with Fisher. But since the song chronicles "the arc of a love affair", including its demise, and it was written in 1982 (Simon and Fisher married in 1983), it seems likely that he fictionalised a relationship with some aspects of several actual affairs, which may serve to give the song some of its final universality. The early verses certainly refer to Fisher, and are founded on some breathtakingly evocative imagery:
"One and one-half wandering Jews/Free to wander wherever they choose/Are travelling together/In the Sangre de Cristo/The Blood of Christ Mountains/Of New Mexico/On the last leg of the journey/They started a long time ago/The arc of a love affair/Rainbows in the high desert air/Mountain passes slipping into stones/Hearts and bones."
This is Simon returning to the travelogue mode that had served him so well on "America" (and which he would re-use for "Graceland"). His ease with a vivid phrase is evident in the picture he paints of landscape in a few lines, and he sketches the couple in more telling detail in the next verse:
"Thinking back to the season before/Looking back through the cracks in the door/Two people were married/The act was outrageous/The bride was contagious/She burned like a bride/These events may have had some effect/On the man with the girl by his side/The arc of a love affair/His hands rolling down her hair/Love like lightning shaking till it moans/Hearts and bones."

Simon is, as much as anything else, a great storyteller. But its one thing to tell a story in a song, and another thing to make anyone care. The crux of the song comes in the middle eight, where a tiff becomes something deeper in a matter of lines and the girl asks "And tell me why/Why won't you love me/For who I am/Where I am?"
And here Simon lets all of the arrangement drop away save for a single soft repeated guitar chord and the barest hiss of keyboard, as if to underline the centrality of the next lines, where his voice is lent a quiet echo in the mix, emphasising the finality of the sentiment: "He said/'Cause that's not the way the world is baby/This is how I love you, baby/This is how I love you, baby."

This seems a devastating and bleak view of love, as always conditional, always somehow compromised. And yet this is a song written by a jaded, divorced man of the world and it is refreshing to hear such honesty. Love is complex, Simon is saying, and not always enough. The final verse confirms that the couple has split to "speculate who had been damaged the most" on their "natural coasts". And then Simon widens his gaze to comment on love itself, and on its binding power. His couple love one another with a passion like "lightning", yes, but that is not enough to keep them together, altough there is some measure of ambiguity in his last lines. Does he believe that their love survives, or just that they have been marked by it, and will always be a part of one another? "You take two bodies and you twirl them into one/Their hearts and their bones/And they won't come undone/Hearts and bones." The fact that this passage is the most upbeat in the song and that Simon's vocal is at its most passionate here gives it an optimistic tone, even if the lyric does not wholly support that.
But then there is something optimistic about the beauty of the song itself, its sympathy and warmth, the loveliness of the melody. This is one of Simon's greatest gifts as a writer; even at his bleakest he seems somehow hopeful. It may even be key to his popular success.

As for hipness, he has come as close as he ever will in the last decade with some retrospective hipster approval for his extensive back catalogue. Wes Anderson used "Me & Julio Down By the Schoolyard" in The Royal Tenenbaums while Zach Braff put "The Only Living Boy In New York" in Garden State alongside The Shins and Frou Frou. Meanwhile, Simon's songs have been covered by Grizzly Bear, Hot Chip, Conor Oberst and the Kings of Convenience over the last few years. Still, nobody seems to recognise the sublime brilliance of "Hearts and Bones", and it remains one of the least loved records he released.
Carrie Fisher? She and Simon divorced in July 1984, dated again for a while after that, then split. They had been together on and off since 1977. Shes more famous for some movies shes in.

Pointed List: Supergrass

It always looked like it would be fun to be in Supergrass. Like they enjoyed it, like they never took it too seriously. They made derivative dadrock music, sure, but it was also, generally, joyous and fun. You felt that they believed in its validity, and that gave it a truth that more original and innovative bands can miss. And, crucially, they had scope and range - they rocked when they wanted to, but they could swing a bit, throw in a ballad and some folk. Over time I think they were the (unlikely) survivors of the Britpop era: Oasis grew rotten and pathetic, Blur imploded, Pulp fell away and only Gaz Coombes and his cheeky-chappy mateys were left, all growned up and serious. Still releasing great - or at least very good - records. Until last week, when they announced their split after 17 years.

Of course, they had good record collections. Thats obvious from what their music sounds like. The Beach Boys, the Stooges, the Beatles, CSNY, T-Rex, Bowie, Dylan - they listened to classic rock and they filtered it through their own songwriting to good effect. I love their second and third albums in particular, but all of the others contain sublime moments, too. Here are five such moments, and some thoughts about them, in memorium, I suppose:

Richard III


A friend of mine always insists that this riff - one of the best of an era admittedly light on great riffs - is a rip-off of one of Black Sabbath's. He may be right, but I doubt that the Sabbath song has the same energy that Richard III has, the same combination of belligerent rock and unabashed pop, the same surfeit of hookiness.
Taken off their second album, In It For The Money, where Supergrass easily surpassed their debut, broadening their scope emotionally and musically without losing sight of why they were popular in teh first place, this was a single. At first, it seems like a newly serious band, those opening bars of riff so deadpan and determined, so grimly fixed on something unseen, something adult, perhaps. Then Gaz goes "Woooo!" to kick it all off, and it gets louder, but its still Supergrass, willing to compromise the hardman rock (Made plain by the menacing lyric: "I know you wanna try and get away/But it's the hardest thing you'll ever know/Tryna get at you, tryna get at you") of such a song to include some lovely falsetto backing vocals.
So while its as heavy and driving a rock song as any they ever did, its always a pop single, too. Which makes it Supergrass, and makes it fantastic.

St Petersberg


Road to Rouen, the fifth album, marked a real and decisive change of style for the band. If their third, Supergrass, had messed with their formula and been a commercial and critical disappointment, they pacified their record company with the more predictable Life On Other Planets. But even that didn't halt their commercial slide. Britpop was over and even something of an embarrassment in the eclectic mp3 era, and its survivors were all in trouble.
So Supergrass changed tack entirely. The new record was folkier, largely acoustic, ruminative, mellow. Its also frequently beautiful and the band's songwriting has clearly benefitted from their new direction. Where Life on Other Planets sounded tired and almost self-parodic, Road to Rouen is fresh and dynamic, the product of a band re-energised and excited by their music.
"St. Petersberg" was the lead-off single for the album. But it doesn't sound remotely like a single. Its subtle and gentle, slowly strummed guitars over tinkling piano and hushed, muted, gorgeous strings towing the melody along. The lyrics are impressionistic, with no obvious narrative or meaning, just some phrases emerging from the mix. The opening lines are "Before the time of the morning sandman/I can find my way around" and it continues in that vein for three minutes or so, going nowhere in particular. This could not be by those lovable scamps who recorded "Alright", could it? Well yes it could, not that anybody wanted to know anymore.

Eon


Supergrass, the band's third album, is probably their most "Rock" record. It is jammy, and musically their most complex and interesting release. There are fewer of the numbers that most people would think of back then if asked to think of a typical Supergrass song, and more where they expand and stretch out and let a big, muscular groove build. In that vein, as well as the superb "Eon", there are the equally impressive "Born Again" and "Faraway". But there are also two of their greatest pop singles, in the exhilarating "Moving" and the sleazy stomp of "Mary", and the lovely doodle of "Mama & Papa" to end the album. In short, if In It For The Money is their most obviously accessible, crowd-pleasing record, Supergrass is their best.
This song builds up patiently on long winding lines of electric guitar and a rhythm section that seeps in like cloud, and after it all breaks up into a wash of chiming arpeggios, its almost two minutes before the vocal starts. Then its a blissed out nursery rhyme concerned with astral bodies (I know you're out there/We saw a shooting star/We don't know what you done/You're nearer for a star") composed of three verses and no choruses. It is casually epic and feels longer than it actually is, some sort of tribute to the mastery of dynamics the band display here. The moment at 1:24 when the tempo changes is just breathtaking.

Lenny


I Should Coco came out in 1995, when Gaz Coombes was 19 years old, Danny Goffey was 21 and Mick Quinn was a prehistoric 26. The chirpy pop single "Alright" - the song the band will be remembered for - was a massive smash, but the album sold 900,000 copies too, making Supergrass one of the biggest bands in the UK just a few months after they had released their first single. "Lenny" was another single off that record. Its a punk-pop gem, cocky and breathless and insistently catchy. I love the first 25 seconds or so - that simple, hesitant drum pattern, then the guitar hammering a dumb one note riff, and then the way Goffey definitively kicks in on the offbeat, his drum fill jumpstarting that elastic bass and the song is suddenly rolling forward. Its a young man's song, all forward momentum, full of the thrill of being alive and young and in a band, the lyrics disposable and so meaningless they're run through three times and you barely notice: "I've been around and around/But I've got nowhere to go now/But the funny thing is/That when I'm gone, I'll kill you/When I tell you/I don't want you-hoo-hoo". And thats it.
In a way, it perfectly encapsulated what Supergrass were then. All energy, brio, and a cocksure stupidity that made them seem invincible. Musically too, with its fuzzy guitar, its simple rhythm, its big harmonies, its soaring vocals on the middle eight, its commitment to being a pop single.
It still sounds great.

The Evening of the Day



This sounds like one of those odds and ends songs the Beatles used to do, combining bits of three separate scraps masterfully into one coherent whole. It comes from Life On Other Planets, a comeback album of sorts which is my least favourite of their records apart from Diamond Hoo Ha, their uninspired final outing. This album is a bit too Supergrass-by-numbers for my liking, but it does contain a handful of great songs, like "Za" and "Brecon Beacons". This is better though. Sung in the main by Quinn, who had handled lead vocals on several numbers on Supergrass, its first section is a folksy shuffle, all energetic strummed acoustics and drawled vocal. Around the one minute mark it shifts gears, electric guitars and organ cut in, and a chorus from a different song emerges, complete with a lyrical reference to Spinal Tap's "All the Way Home" ("If shes not on that 3:15/ Then I'm gonna know what sorrow means"). It reverts for the rest of the verses, accumulating instrumentation as it progresses - horns, piano, more guitars - while the chorus remains shouty and raucous, before a final collapse and a delicate little coda, complete with bongos, lounge piano and whistling.

"I'm drivin alone, sad about you"

I saw Big Star live on their 2001 European Tour in Dublin. By Big Star, I mean the reconstituted modern version featuring two of the original members, Alex Chilton and Jody Stephens, alongside the two frontmen from modern power-pop underachievers the Posies, Ken Stringfellow and Jon Auer . I was pumped for the gig. Big Star had long been one of my favourite bands. In fact, when I rank the bands I like, the only one I love more than Big Star are the Beatles. So, as you can imagine, I was excited. The crowd was a strange mix of Dublin hipsters and musos, but there was a good atmosphere, eager and enthusiastic.
The gig was alright.
You could tell Chilton’s heart wasn’t really in it. He did what he had to do, but without any great enthusiasm. He was this little, slightly grumpy middle-aged guy in denim, singing these songs his voice couldn’t quite reach anymore, playing guitar. He came most alive during a cover of “Wouldn’t It Be Nice”. It was enough for most people there to hear those great Big Star songs sung by the man who had written them, played by a good, tight band. I was happy to have been there but somewhat disappointed, too. I’d read it in enough interviews, but seeing him live made me finally believe it – Alex Chilton hated Big Star. Go figure.

In the pre-download world of the early 90s, I started off with the wrong Big Star album. I’d read plenty about what kind of band they were, who they sounded like, who they had influenced etc. I found “3rd/Sister Lovers” in a second hand shop and bought it. On that first listen I was instantly surprised by the opening track (different editions feature different sequencing), in this case “Stroke It Noel”. It seemed improvised, with no evident structure, for all the beauty of its melodies and arrangements and the pin sharp crunch of the production. After that the remainder of the record was a long line of surprises – from the bizarre “Downs” to the instantly awesome “Thank You Friends”, “Big Black Car” and “For You” to the desolation of “Holocaust” and “Kanga Roo”. I wasn’t as blown away as I had expected to be. I knew “Kanga Roo” from Jeff Buckley’s cover version, but that version was cleaner and straighter (its rock out riffathon apart) than this tormented, fractured, even slightly disturbing rendition. But I stuck with it – I knew the Replacements’ “Alex Chilton” and a part of me reckoned that if it was alright for Paul Westerberg, then it was alright for me - and soon I loved the record in all its twisted, strange glory. Its moments of beauty, I could see, were incredible and hinted at another side to this band than the chaos much of the record seemed to have captured.
A little later, after a conversation about the band, a friend played me a few standout tracks off his copy of the twofer cd containing the other two Big Star albums – “Number 1 Record” and “Radio City”.



The songs he played were “The Ballad of El Goodo”, “Thirteen”, “September Gurls” and “I’m In Love With a Girl”. Right then, I was in love. Its one of the great musical memories of my life, being hit by the perfection and majesty of those songs in that little living room, knowing I had to have this cd as soon as possible.
I bought it, consumed it, and became a Big Star evangelist. Every compilation tape or cd I made after that had to feature a Big Star song. Because nobody seemed to know this band. Nobody I knew, at any rate.
I got the Chris Bell solo stuff, and a couple of Alex Chilton solo records. I got the ecords Chilton had made with the Box Tops before he and Bell had formed Big Star. I bought the two live cds, “Big Star Live” and “Nobody Can Dance” purely for the cover versions they contained (Loudon Wainwright’s “Motel Blues” and T-Rex’s “Baby Strange”). I was a fan of power-pop, the subgenre Big Star had helped to create and define, and I got into Badfinger and the Raspberries and Todd Rundgren and more modern acolytes like Teenage Fanclub and Jellyfish, all in an effort to recreate that thrilling feeling I got when I first heard that Big Star sound.

But heres what made Big Star and Alex Chilton special. For all that they were undeniably power-pop, with those Beatlesque melodies, and the Byrdsian harmonies and the punch of the Kinks all colliding in each song, they had an x factor. Badfinger, for all that they wrote and played some amazing songs, aren’t a patch on Big Star. There is a darkness floating somewhere under the surface in the music of Big Star, an ineffable quality that lifts it, enables it to transcend genre. Its almost queasy, this feeling, an edge to the bright and shining beauty of the songs. Maybe it is the anger in Chilton - the anger that made his solo career such a quixotic ramble of challenging records and self-destructive tendencies. Maybe it was Bell's struggle with his faith and his sexuality. I don't know, I just know its there, I can hear it in the music, and it is a big part of what makes Big Star a special band.



And they really are a special band. For my money, "Radio City" is their best record, and indeed one of the great rock albums, containing not a single weak song, brilliantly played and sequenced. From the surprisingly funky opener, "O My Soul", with its fluid structure, through the greatest Number One that never was, "September Gurls" to the moving simplicity of the closing "I'm In Love With a Girl", it covers a wide variety of moods and tempos but always sounds like this unique, distinctive band. They could play tough rock when it suited them, they could do soulful balladry, bright pop and - since they came from Memphis - a little bit of r'n'b is suggested, too. But Chilton always sounds like himself, like the young man he was, who had been a star in his teens but rejected it and gone to New York alone to be a singer-songwriter, sorta failed and retreated to Memphis where he had finally begun a band with a Beatles-obsessive that made music America wasn't quite ready for at that time. His later material is interesting, and sometimes even inspired, but its never great in the pure way Big Star was.

When I read that Alex Chilton had died a few nights ago - on Twitter, where I seem to hear all news these days -I felt a sharp sense of loss not really felt about a Musician since Elliott Smith died. But then I listened to some Big Star, and as usual, all I could feel was joy.

ALEX CHILTON
1950 - 2010

All three original records are must buys, as is the box set from last year, "Keep An Eye on the Sky", full of demos and covers and alternate takes and live numbers, and for a Big Star fan, absolutely orgasmic. Rob Jovanovic's book "Big Star: The Short Life, Painful Death, and Unexpected Resurrection of the Kings of Power Pop" is a great read for fans, too.

Below, "Daisy Glaze", my favourite Big Star song, with such a euphoric guitar moment at 1:54 it still catches my breath:



Kanga Roo:



O My Soul:



And the Replacements sublime "Alex Chilton":

2000 - 2010: Playlist

So, some songs I've loved over the last decade, some links to Youtube videos for those songs, and some words on why I love those songs. This list contains nothing I've written about previously on this blog. So, none of the songs from my lists over the last two years. I know this means that many fine songs I love very much aren't here, but I have my reasons. Don't want to repeat myself anymore than I already do, you see....
Enjoy, if you are so inclined:

Elbow - Station Approach
The perfect opening statement for Leaders of the Free World (2005) in the way it builds and builds, layering instruments as it goes. Beautifully, the train journey suggested by the title is subtly echoed by the chugging rhythm, trees and houses clipping by windows. And the lyrics have a rare universality: this is a song about the joy of homecoming, and Guy Garvey's emotional croon sings of the romanticism of anticipation, the knowledge that loved ones and familiarity await your arrival : "Coming home I feel like I/Designed these buildings I walk by/You know you drive me up the wall/I need to see your face thats all/You little sod I love your eyes/Be everything to me tonight". When the song finally explodes in a pounding bass drum beat, it is with the euphoria of reunion. Elbow at their considerable best.

Johnny Boy - Johnny Boy Theme
It starts with a quote from Scorsese's Mean Streets ("You don't make up for you sins in church. You do it in the streets. The rest is bullshit and you know it.") and then turns into a dense, repetitive, sample-heavy pop song with male and female vocal parts alternating over an almost Spector-esque backing track of huge drum sounds and disembodied voices. Johnny Boy followed it with the equally brilliant and more accomplished "You Are the Generation Who Bought More Shoes And You Get What You Deserve" before their album disappointed then disappeared. A shame, but what a couple of immortal singles they managed to sneak out before being swallowed by the Music industry.

The Rapture - House of Jealous Lovers
The most obviously canonical song here, but I can't help it, I loved it on first listen, and I love it now, because it is absolutely fucking awesome. For that cowbell, for the cutting, snide guitar, for the elastic bass powering it along, for the vocal riding the wave, for the way it rocks and makes you want to dance like nothing since the Sonics, for the breakdown when the guitar drops out and then they actually do a countdown to the climax. For all that it deserves another cry of Fucking Awesome. Really.

Outkast - The Rooster
What a surprise to me - rockist through and through - to find myself loving a track from Big Boi's Speakerboxx (2003) over anything from Andre's The Love Below (2003). But this is hilarious and funkier than anything on Andre's record (that great horn refrain!) with about four different hooks and a lyric detailing marital difficulties and family separation, Big Boi-style ("The cat got sold, the dog got old, the food got cold"), It should have been Number One for as long as "Hey Ya"...

The Avett Brothers - If Its the Beaches
"If it's the beaches
If it's the beaches' sands you want
Then you will have them
If it's the mountains' bending rivers
Then you will have them
If it's the wish to run away
Then I will grant it
Take whatever you think of
While I go gas up the truck
Pack the old love letters up
We will read them when we forget why we left here."
Just lovely. Fleet Foxes should listen to this and weep bitter salty tears. That first piano chord after two minutes of guitar and fiddle and banjo is devastating.

Stereolab - Captain Easychord
Stereolab's time had passed by the year 2000. They were a 90s band, doomed never to really make it big. But they released three albums in this decade, two of which (Sound-Dust (2001) and Chemical Chords (2008)) rank alongside their finest work. This song is perhaps the key song on Sound-Dust, and its really two songs fused together in the middle. The first is a funky little keyboard and horn-based shuffle with what sounds like Mazzy Star slide guitar reveries as choruses, the second an equally funky bubble of warm pop and a backing vocal that goes "Ba-Ba-Badda-Ba-Ba". Its a great example of what made Sterolab special - nobody else ever sounded quite like them, altough they sounded a little bit like lots of other interesting people. Jim O' Rourke produced , which basically guarantees quality. Whats she singing about? I can never tell. But it always sounds great.

Guillemots - Made Up Love Song No.43
Such a strange and magical love song, with its fluid structure, its exhilarating arrangement, its earnest vocal and that ardent, boyish lyric: "I love you through sparks and shining dragons, I do/Now there's majesty, in a burnt out caravan/You got me off the paper round, just sprang out of the air/The best things come from nowhere/I love you, I don't think you care."
I love how it starts off with what sounds like a sample from the Star Wars theme and the way it just runs out of steam like a wind-up toy and the way the backing vocals end by repeating "Yes I believe you" over and over as if in some effort at hypnotism. It does sound entirely improvised, explaining the title, but what an improvisation. It also sounds hopelessly in love, which many love songs don't.

Rhianna - Word Love
No, not Rihanna. Rhianna is from Leeds and she released one album, Get On, in 2002. The first single "Oh Baby" was a hit, but this follow-up; not so much. She's part of a band (Fleurona) now. No matter, this song recalls the kind of stuff Minnie Ripperton did with the Rotary Connection back in the day, with its sinuous rhythm part, wah-wah guitar solo and that cosmic echo on her fantastic vocal. Why wasn't it a hit? Why? Why? In a world of Pop Idol, why? If I ever get to DJ in a club, I will play it. And they will dance. Oh yes.

Brendan Benson - Metarie
The best thing Benson ever wrote, a pitch-perfect piece of power pop with clever, witty lyrics (" Met a girl, introduced myself/I asked her to go with me and no one else/She said: I'd really like to see you everyday/But I'm afraid of what my friends might say") and a triumphantly McCartneyesque quality in its purity of melody and simplicity of construction. It rises to a crunchy muscular chorus, then falls for some sighing verses. He re-recorded it for the single version but the original, on the album Lapalco (2003) is the best version.


Mercury Rev - In A Funny Way
Phil Spector beat, gossamer guitar. The first line is "On a Summer Day", almost whispered. Strings.
Then it takes off. Images of nature and travel, nostalgic lines. A band playing hard to make a song sound light and almost weightless. The vocal acrobatics of the middle eight instead of a guitar solo. Blissful.

Alice Smith - Dream
What a voice she has. Smooth and powerful and effortlessly gliding over octaves, she makes singing this song sound stupidly easy. But this starts with just a piano, bass, high hat and her soft, sensual voice, then builds and shifts as horns and strings and guitars float in and out, and seeming choirs of backing singers try to compete and it ends up sounding like something off Broadway. But she holds it together and at the end when she gets to unleash some power after teasing for a few lines, its a goosebumps moment. I first heard this over the closing credits of an episode of Entourage, of all places, and within 30 seconds I knew I had to have it. Its criminal she isn't a Superstar.

The Black Keys - Til I Get My Way
This perpetually underrated duo can really rock when they want to, and this knocks spots off anything the White Stripes did this decade. Starting with a squall of dirty feedback it is built around a fuzzy riff and bluesy vocal - as most of their songs are - but here the melody is compulsive and the rhythm just drives the song onward, reflecting the frustrated desire and determination of the lyric. They eventually resorted to hiring Dangermouse as a producer in an attempt to cross over and lost something of their danger and energy in the process. But their first few records have an honesty and rawness which is really appealing.

The Bees - Left Foot Stepdown
They come from the Isle of Wight and in America they're called "A Band of Bees", unfortunately. And they've released three albums of superior dadrock this decade. Superior because their influences are obviously far more eclectic than most of their peers - they inject small doses of rock, country, music hall, reggae, funk, mariachi, chill out, glam and folk into their music, and they write ace songs. I've definitely missed out a genre or two there, by the way. They're like Supergrass crossed with the Beta Band. This song - off their best record, Octopus (2007) combines a ska off-beat, swirling psychedlic hammond organ, Tennesse-sounding horns, CSN&Y harmonies and a simple little tune to fine effect.

Jamie T -Calm Down Dearest
Beyond his annoying schtick at the time of this record's release, Jamie T. came up with a couple of great songs. Here, the often baffling verses with their thickly accented street slang and personal references give way to a lovely, soulfully consoling chorus over a simple backing track.

Mull Historical Society - Barcode Bypass
An elegiac epic about (I think) the effect upon the elderly of the demise of local communities forced by globalisation and modern Supermarkets, Colin MacIntyre's beautiful song centres around his falsetto chorus and a chiming keyboard figure like something from a nursery rhyme. That is before it powers up around the five minute mark and offers a darker coda, all ominous wordless vocals, melancholic melodies and crashing cymbals.

My Morning Jacket - Where to Begin
I knew I had to include My Morning Jacket, one of my favourite bands, in this playlist somewhere. And when I listened to some of their stuff, it was this cut, from the soundtrack to Cameron Crowe's awful Elizabethtown, that really struck me. That singular slide guitar sound, absolutely haunting the song. Jim James' keening yet delicate, and perfect vocal. The band performance, so subtle and sympathetic. That middle eight of purest prettiness: "How can I await the day?/And last the night I'm here to see?/How do I await the mother lode?/It's the art of feeling naked in your clothes." The lyric about self-discovery, persistence, the joys and troubles of life: what more is there to say?

Desert Sessions - Crawl Home
The kind of dirty, bass-rich riff Josh Homme specialises in, with PJ Harvey hollering over the top? If you've read my albums List you know that this combination ticks a few of my boxes straightaway. Homme's frantic high-pitched voice on the chorus doesn't hurt either. The end, when Harvey lets loose a series of orgasmic howls, seals the deal. This is fabulous.

Common - Come Close
So, yeah, I'm not a big hip hop fan, as this list makes quite evident. But I do like some stuff. I only became interested in Common because he used Laetitia Sadlier from Stereolab as a guest vocalist on Electric Circus (2002), the album from which this track originates. Its a fascinating, flawed record - very eclectic, and psychedelic in an awkward, contrived way. But it contains a few stunning songs, of which this utterly beguiling love letter is the best. A simple handclaps, drums, bass and organ backing track is beefed up by the mighty Mary J. Blige singing each chorus. Common's verses are unashamedly romantic: "I wanna build a tribe with you/ Protect and provide for you/Truth is, I can't hide from you/ The pimp in me, may have to die with you" and his flow is Luther Vandross-smooth. Or as he puts it over the stuttering intro: "Its just a fly love song."

Super Furry Animals - Juxtaposed With U
SFA do a sort of Philly-soul pastiche with a vocoder on the verses and some ridiculously lush strings, and they make it work. More than that, its probably their best single, aside from "The Man Don't Give a Fuck". It has lyrics dealing with social injustice, changing methods of communication, and was originally conceived as a duet with Brian Harvey or Bobby Brown in the vein of "Ebony & Ivory". Its meant as a plea for tolerance: "You've got to tolerate all those people that you hate/I'm not in love with you but I won't hold that against you" runs the chorus. I love them for their crazy ambition and their ability to pull it all off.

Gemma Hayes - Back On My Hand
Her best pop song, from her first, Mercury Prize nominated album, has a windswept, desolate feel. She sounds on the edge of tears throughout, especially on lines like : "Well we never really said goodbye/Kinda left it in the air/And as the train pulled off I knew you loved her more," and the lyric is a hopeless, brave farewell to a departed lover, backed by a sad guitar melody, some ambient feedback rising through the mix, and quite a tough band performance.

Wilco - Spiders (Kidsmoke)
I love Wilco. They're one of my favourite bands still working, and I loved each of the three albums (plus one live album) they released this decade. But I didn't love any of them enough to include it on my albums list, even the much praised Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. For me their best records remain the one-two punch of Being There and Summerteeth in the late 90s, when they found high gear and joined a classic rock pantheon. Everything since then has been great, but not quite as great. But their albums each contain at least 5 absolute corkers. This is the corker-in-chief on A Ghost Is Born. That obvious motorik Krautrock beat that clicks away throughout anchors the whole song - all Tweedy's surreal cut-up poetry, all the meandering guitar lines, and then gives way to that almighty guitar breakdown that stands in place of a chorus, and raises the whole thing to the sky, triumphantly, propulsively, euphorically. I want to live in that moment.

Tindersticks - People Keep Comin Around
I like that Tindersticks got a little funkier this decade. They branched out, doing more soundtracks, solo work etc, and they refined their trademark sound. But they also got a little more deep soul on us, without losing any of what made them so great in the first place. The way this starts - a surprised burst of horn which fades down until the lazy groove locks in - is brilliant, as is the decision to hold back Stuart Staples' distinctive croon until the second verse. It gives the whole song an air of improvised peril. Anything can happen here. Instruments wander in, backing vocals and call-and-response passages shimmer into life and die away, all of it against that groove and an infectious chorus. The jagged strings and the bursts of bluesey electric guitar are the cherry on top...

HAL - What a Lovely Dance
Remember the Thrills? No, I didn't think so. They had that one album with three hit singles, they seemed to be everywhere with their Eagles/Bacharach/Beach Boys karaoke stylings, but they screwed the pooch with their second record, and more or less buried it too with their third. Pop is fickle. By then, Hal had come along. Fellow South Dublin Posh-Boys with similar fixations on the more melodic side of 60s pop, they were instantly granted more cool and hipster cred by virtue of signing with Rough Trade. But crucially they wrote better songs than the Thrills, and sang and played them better too. Not that it helped them commercially - their eponymous record didn't match the instant success of the Thrills' debut. But this single is fantastic - a slightly countryish slice of honeyed MOR with honkytonk piano and hammond organ and what sounds like moog for the majority of the song, with the usual Hal harmonies and hooks ("Feels like I lost my gloves/And my hat has blown away"), before a bell (literally) rings and the coda is even better: heavenly backing vocals against a sort of piano-led jive. It is, in fact, a quite lovely dance.
They've basically disappeared since, presumably working on a second record.

Ryan Adams - English Girls Approximately
This was meant to be Ryan Adams' decade, wasn't it? He released Heartbreaker in 2000 (I only realised that after looking it up, otherwise it would certainly have been on my list of albums) and followed it with the sprawling plea for pantheon entry that was Gold (2001), with its echoes of the Stones and Springsteen and Dylan and all sorts of other people. And then he messed it up. He had disputes with his label, public tantrums, crazy onstage accidents, released sub-par albums, changed styles a few times (80s rock, alt-Country, quasi-bluegrass), retired, won and lost several famous girlfriends, published two volumes of poetry and generally sold his obvious and remarkable talent short. In all, he released 11 albums in the 00s, or 12 if you count the two volumes of Love Is Hell (2004) as separate records. Thats a hell of a lot of songs. And theres more - Adams has several records worth of unreleased demos and there are hundreds of bootlegs online of unreleased songs hes performed live. That he manages any quality control at all is miraculous. But he does to such an extent that not one of those many records is a complete disaster. Adams always sneaks in a few great songs, a folky ballad here, a U2-esque rocker there. If Heartbreaker remains his finest album, you could put togther four albums of equal quality from all the records hes released since, which is more than most artists have managed this decade.
This song is a beautiful mid-tempo account of losing an English girl (Beth Orton, in fact), with stately piano and beautifully crisp guitar and some of his best ever lyrics and Marianne Faithfull on backing vocals and a devastating climax as a guitar moans and Adams sings: "Kiss me on the lips when my heart just laughed it off/Words may move, but there never moving fast enough/Celebrate the differences, I celebrate the songs you sing/ Just three words, my love: you meant everything".
Maybe the teens will be Adams' decade...

Primal Scream - Kill All Hippies
Screamadelica (1991) seems like a long long time ago when you listen to the awesome Xtrmtr (2000), with its politics front-and-centre, its obvious anger replacing the hedonism of the earlier record, its aggressive production, its stylistic eclecticism even broader than the band had managed years before. This piece of sleazy funk features one of Mani's greatest bass parts, a falsetto Gillsepie vocal, lots of Kevin Shields-esque feedback, and samples from Dennis Hopper's Out of the Blue (1980). Its better than anything on Screamadelica.

David Holmes - 69 Police
This absolutely lovely instrumental is the highlight of Holmes' uneven Bow Down to the Exit Sign (2000) but more famously used, perhaps, over the close of Oceans 11 (2001) where it proves both elegiac and feelgood. Its built around a sample from the Italian psychedelic band Le Orme (Holmes would further promote European psychedelic rock with his Oceans 12 soundtrack) and its got a sort of fairground warmth to it, an almost childish feeling of light and colour, while also bustling along to a tight, sweet little groove. Its a great way to end a movie or a playlist.

Some Albums of the 00s

I like lists. Not just writing them - thats just an excuse to mention as much stuff I love in one post as I can - but reading them. End of year lists are compulsive, whether you agree with their contents or not. End of Decade lists even more so. But all the music lists I read over the last few weeks I more or less hated. Such conformity, so little originality! Every list mentioning the same stuff, over and over - the Strokes, Radiohead, the White Stripes, Outkast, Kanye West, LCD Soundsystem, Animal Collective, Arcade Fire, Wilco, Daft Punk, the Arctic Monkeys, Jay-Z, the Streets, etc etc blah blah blah. I understand that with cinema, where there is less material released, less stylistic variety, and a critical consensus is often quick to form. And I have almost all of these albums and like them all, I'm not saying they aren't good records. But music seems the most subjective of artforms, to me. I have friends who I more or less see eye-to-eye with about cinema and fiction, tv and comics. But music is always where there is a disconnect. All of my friends who are a few years younger than me have radically different taste to me. As it should be, I think. And they would probably be as horrified by the uniformity of the best album lists I'm talking about as I am.

Anyway, my list is personal. Its the albums I have loved, the ones that have stayed with me through this decade, the ones that have meant most and that I still listen to. Most of them got nowhere near the lists. So hopefully I can do some justice here. Here are ten records, in no order of preference:



Kings of Convenience - Riot on an Empty Street (2004)
Does anybody I know like Kings of Convenience? I bought their first album when it came out based on reviews, I think, and thought it rather average, with a few really good songs. But when I came to load up my iMac with songs with which to fill my very first iPod, I listened to a lot of my cds all the way through for the first time in ages. I had to pick and choose because that iPod had a limited capacity and only the finest albums went on complete. I was surprised by how many songs off that first album made the cut. Then came the (even better) second album. The third, released this year, is of the same high standard.
Something about that distinctive KoC mood is compulsive, addictive, even. Those sometime-whispered lyrics, the close, quiet harmonies, the perfect guitar sound, both melody and rhythm at once in chopped hard chords or finger-picked arpeggios, always acoustic, and the frequently inspired arrangements all combine to make some lovely, sensitively poetic music. Some of it sounds loungey, with touches of bossa nova here and there, and there are obvious alternative influences. But the real key is the songwriting - tuneful, melancholic and full of subtle beauty. The lyrics are generally mournful, articulate dissections of love and relationships, full of acute detail. I think these songs speak to the lovelorn, self-dramatizing teenager in me. "Know-How", from this album, featuring a breathtaking moment when the guest vocal from Feist kicks in about halfway through, is a great example of what they do and one of my favourite songs of the decade.



Pernice Brothers - Yours Mine & Ours (2003)
I love Joe Pernice as a songwriter. He writes beautiful pop songs and then arranges them as chiming guitar-rock jewels, full of hooks and thrilling, if never revolutionary, musical detail. He writes everyday poetry of failed love and struggling relationships, of nostalgic recollection and quiet passion, and has an ear for an arresting line, always refusing cliche ("I'm lonely as the Irish sea") but finding the right line to emotion. He coos these words over his own often lush melodies. He makes me love pop music. This album, his band's third, is full of great songs, the right words put together in surprising order, and often lovely arrangements. It breaks my heart that he has never received the acclaim he deserves. He should be at least as well-regarded and successful as Elliott Smith was and his band should be as big as the Shins. Songs like "Baby In Two", "Judy", "Number Two" ("Little power monger, sleep tonight/The city lights up like a dirty dime/I hope that this letter finds you crying/It would feel so good to see you cry") and "Sometimes I Remember" should be immortal. But they're not, unfortunately. Such is life and the music business.



Sun Kil Moon - Ghosts of the Great Highway (2003)
I've written about this incredible record before. I think its the best thing Mark Kozelek has ever done, and it's probably my favourite album of the last decade. I never grow tired of it. I love its density and variety, from the fragile folk of "Floating" and "Glenn Tipton" to the riff-rock of "Salvador Sanchez" and "Lily and Parrots". I love Kozelek's defiantly personal, sometimes baffling lyrics, wrestling with time and loss and ageing and his pop culture obsessions (boxing and Judas Priest). I love the new dimensions to his musical palette - the mandolins and mariachi guitars and the strings. What remains, as always, are his songwriting and that deep soulful voice. He can write a devastating 14 minute psych-rock Epic like nobody else and make it sad and euphoric and lovely ("Duk Koo Kim"), but then many of his songs are sad and euphoric and lovely and this record is full of such little miracles.



Queens of the Stone Age - Rated R (2000)
Their next record, Songs for the Deaf, was probably their most acclaimed of the decade, but this remains my favourite. And it was a decade owned in part by Josh Homme, who seemed to be everywhere, either with this band or in his Desert Sessions side-project or Them Crooked Vultures or the Eagles of Death Metal or producing for the Arctic Monkeys. It rocks, obviously, and Homme has a way of making his guitars sound that I love - they are loud and crunchy but also, crucially, fuzzy and occasionally mellow, snake-hipped and always bringing the funk. Lots of bass, little treble. This band is awesomely tight, too, storming through these songs so that the record feels shorter than its 42 minutes. There is wit - Feelgood Hit of the Summer and Quick and to the Pointless - and lots of nous with a pop tune, but Homme generally deals in a sort of bruised widescreen desert romanticism and an Epic groove rock, one step removed from his work with Kyuss, always borne upon those big guitars, and this album soars when it does what he does best, as in the awesome Better Living Through Chemistry.



The Avalanches - Since I Left You (2000)
This one made some lists, and well it might, containing as it does what I reckon is the greatest single of the decade - the purist aural sunshine of that title track. But the whole album bristles with wit and invention, and there is a hook - sampled from another song and looped, of course - along every ten seconds or so. Its also funny ("Frontier Psychiatrist") and exciting and hyperactive. If you heard it without any knowledge of the band whatsoever, you would know they were from somewhere sunny. Its just an optimistic record, a blissed out record. It sounds like it doesn't know Winter even exists. It is also fantastic from beginning to end.



Radiohead - Hail to the Thief (2003)
I know, I know - Kid A is more important, In Rainbows is poppier and more accessible, but I fell for Radiohead back when they were basically an Indie-Arena rock Band, and I like them best either with Guitars, Guitars, dammit, making a racket, or on those massive swooning string-based ballads Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood turn out every so often ("Harry Patch" or "Pyramid Song", say). Hail to the Thief is the last true Rock record they made, and probably, based on what they've said, the last they'll ever make. It was a struggle which nearly broke the band, and you can almost hear that in the music - its an angry, bitter record. But I love it's textures - from the fluffed moment of feedback that kicks off "2 + 2 = 5" ("Thats a good start, Jonny" says Yorke) through all the spiky arpeggios and ragged riffs of "Go To Sleep", and the epic conclusion of "There There" (these songs recall Pablo Honey and The Bends more than their later records) to the electro-queasiness of "Backdrifts" and "The Gloaming" and the lovely forlorn keening of "Sail to the Moon" and "I Will" to the jittery shufflings of "Myxamatosis" and "Wolf at the Door". My favourite though is the slow, piano-based groove of "Punchup at a Wedding" which goes nowhere rather beautifully.



Beck - Sea Change (2002)
I'd always liked Beck but never loved him until this record. His previous stuff - with the exception of some of the early country blues and one or two moments on Mutations ("Nobody's Fault But My Own" in particular) - had been funny and inventive and clever, but it always left me a little cold. No emotion or feeling in it, and just the suggestion that beneath all those brains there was nothing at all to say. But then his longtime, live-in girlfriend dumped him for somebody else, and suddenly Beck had something to say, and more importantly some pain to impart.
Sea Change may just be the greatest break-up record of the decade. It cribs arrangements and even hints of melody from Serge Gainsbourg and Nick Drake, but Beck uses what he steals just beautifully with a series of tremendous songs of heartbreak and emotional desolation with very telling titles: "Lost Cause", "End of the Day", "Already Dead" and "Guess I'm Doing Fine". His voice seems altered by grief and the instrumentation is often lush and even overwrought, but it all adds up to a rare emotional intensity: he means it, maan. That girl really screwed our boy up. This record makes that experience seem worthwhile, for listeners at least. "Lonesome Tears" is, for me, its mesmeric highlight.



Elliott Smith - Figure 8 (2000)
It's a slight step down from Smith's two preceding records, Either/Or (1997) and XO (1998), but that just means that instead of being breathtakingly incredible, its just amazingly brilliant. And it is - a great demonstration of the breadth of his talent as a songwriter, arranger, musician and singer. It contains a smattering of Beatlesque pop-rock songs ("Son of Sam", "Pretty Mary K", "LA") and a couple of folky numbers as good as any he wrote ("I Better Be Quiet Now", "Everything Reminds Me of Her") plus some songs which suggested he might be moving off in other directions ("Stupidity Tries", "Everything Means Nothing To Me"). As ever with his records, its the unusual, nagging, melancholic melodies and the layered, inventive production which really impresses. Topped off with Smith's dense, often dark, sometimes embittered lyrics. The record released after his death isn't a patch on it, and I saw him when he toured it. He was awesome that night, but then, he was just awesome.



PJ Harvey - Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea (2000)
Winning the Mercury Music prize seemed to seal this record's fate, critically-speaking, at least. It is Harvey's most commercially successful album, and for me its easily her best - a classic rock record full of big, bold songs and anthemic arrangements, singalong choruses and streamlined guitars. Its the most accessible, mainstream record of her career, and that has obviously led to some sort of snobbish re-evaluation of its merits in the decade since its release. But no such re-evaluation is needed - its a great album, made all the greater by the sense that it was written by a woman clearly falling in love. So many of her songs - often glum and dark - are here rocket-fuelled by a passion for a man, and an interlinked passion for New York City. She embraces her populist side, something she hasn't done since, and reveals an ability to write pop songs. Hard to pick a favourite track, though the nicely-judged duet with Thom Yorke ("This Mess We're In") is just shaded by "We Float", "This Is Love" and "Good Fortune."



Explosions In the Sky - The Earth Is Not A Cold Dead Place (2003)
Post Rock is a pretty meaningless label, especially when its applied to music as beautiful as this. Explosions In the Sky- which may be the greatest name any band has ever had, since it usefully describes their sound - craft immense, crystalline, thunderous mega-symphonies in which the dominate sound is that of electric guitars. Their songs build to emotionally charged climaxes that generally make Mogwai seem restrained. They have been put to great use in Friday Night Lights - both film and TV series - but are best experienced loud, over big speakers.
This album is just about perfect, composed of five long songs (the shortest, the awesome, epic "Your Hand In Mine" runs 8:17) which flow together to make for one long tremendously moving experience.