Top 10 Albums 19032014

Becoming X - Sneaker Pimps: It had to happen. As the Bristol crews who innovated trip hop into existence took their places at the top of the non-rock non-dance pyramids smaller outfits jumped up for attention, appropriating the new synthesis into what were otherwise good but generic rock songs. The best of these was Sneaker Pimps, a Hartlepool duo who realised that the fastest way of getting noticed with all that great cinematica they were cooking up was to get a sassy femme fatale in front of the mic. Kelli Dayton was all smirk and smoulder giving the earnestness of the Year 12 sex of the lyrics a real sense of autobiography. By turns shrewish (Spin Spin Sugar) girlish (6 Underground) or late night beautiful like Neneh Cherry (Post Modern Sleaze) Dayton played all the characters but remained recognisably herself. The musical set dressing remains impressive. Procressed beats blend with raw ones, guitar through tap dances of pedals play over double bass and a city's worth of murmurs, car screeches and atmosphere lays the ground on the street and in the gushing filth below it. And it goes down like dessert. They fired her after the first album, prefering the wobbly vocal stylings of one of the duo. No, I've never heard anything after the debut all the way through either.

The Great Annihilator - Swans: After the debacle of Bill Laswell turning them into icecream Swans recovered with two of their most convincing post brut era pieces yet. Great Annihilator stretched the new textures of Love of Life and White Light into the great cinema of what would be two more studio albums and a swag of pulverising live sets. The brutality has been sculpted into real music noir. After an exuberant intrumental fades with a loop of children laughing which grows odd with repetition I Am the Sun seems to lunge from a vaccuum only to be sucked violently back in, eventually featuring what almost sounds like a gang of schoolkids repeating Gira's chaotic manifesto.
Elsewhere the delicate and eerie Blood Promise tells of something we probably don't want to know about in the kind of epic background I imagine Roy Batty heard when he was at the Orion Gate. Celebrity Lifestyle drives like the hit single it wasn't allowed to be. My Buried Child pits a breathy horny 6/8 ryhthm against a terrifying description of the sexual act. Killing for Company is a dirge in horror and understanding of serial killer Dennis Nilsen which takes on one of the saddest and scariest choral passages I've heard in a rock song. This is a long album and I usually take a break after the uplifting instrumental Warm with its insistent fourths and girlish la-la vocal from Jarboe. Even with an intermission this is a long and varied album that feels all of a piece and it's one of Swans' most accomplished and accessible.

Nouvelle Vague: Mid-noughties and the listening was stale as last year's hot cross buns. Rock was cut by the metre and poured out in a huge textureless mass from the likes of JJJ all day and everyday. Bands sped down increasingly silly vortices of self definition and created ever more meaningless categories. The thing was to throw your hands up like you were hailing a taxi and just call the lot post-modern and get some more coronas from the bar. Then came Nouvelle Vague. They were French which made the name funnier still. Nouvelle Vague was the term applied to the iconoclastic young directors emerging in France in the late fifties who created new aesthetics from a field of broken rules. In English it means New Wave which was the term appropriated from the above application and applied to the music emerging from the British punk movement which not only challenged the same dinosaurs that punk did but punk itself. New Wave in Portugese is Bossa Nova, the dance craze of the fifties which tore up the floors of the world's clubs with its easy mood and heavy suggestion. So, why not find the musicality in 70s/80s British New Wave classics and do them Bossa Nova style. The French aspect is already there a couple of times over. Two middle aged Parisian clubbers amassed a choir's worth of comely filles de croogne to handle the likes of Joy Division and the Dead Kennedys and guess what? It works a treat. Apart from a smattering of jokey takes the experiment reveals not just the musical nature of the old Brit songs but adds a cool cinema to them, creating a set of cover versions that outdo the entire back catalogue of 90s tribute albums by daring to respect the music through reinvention. This beautiful album was scorned by a lot of people of my vintage who remembered the originals and thought it was a long pisstake. Nothing of the sort. It's just music. Don't believe me? Listen to the original and the NV versions of In a Manner of Speaking. Both carry their beauty and sadness to different effect, like two differently staged Shakespeare plays neither needs to be definitive. A masterpiece.

Twilight - Handsome Family: From the thick rock of Snow White Diner and its view of heart rending murder suicide from a clacking cafe to the eerie lilt about atrocity of Passenger Pigeons the jaunt of All the TV's in Town with its psychotics in the park and planes streaming silently above the genuinely chilling ghost story of Cold Cold Cold the weird hymn of I Know You Are There to .. well to all the rest of it Brett Sparks' haunting croon and Texan twang intoning Rennie Sparks' extraordinary lyrics (which can go from laugh out loud funny to heartstopping in the same song) take us to the America of Diane Arbus and Cormack McCarthy and whatever alarming thing Rennie made of seeing a catepillar that morning. There is no contemporary country music like the Handsome Family. It has an address but no nation, mental states but no sentimental ones, the warmth of church singing and the breathless despair of abandonment. Never have steel guitars, banjos or Lone Star voices made my hair stand on end like this.

The Suburbs - Arcade Fire: I resisted this when it came out but the more I heard of it the more I wanted it. A set of songs from amiable to serious and affecting tell the tale of a war in the west. The good part about that is that you never need to know that but if you do you'll be glad you found out. the mood is a kind of Alan Parsons Project without the drivel. You have heard all of these textures before but unlike most post 80s rock bands here the derivation is defeated by the style and invention applied to it.



big hits. [high tide and green grass] - The Rolling Stones: The overhang of Fabs vs Stones favoured the former in my household growing up. Both bands were absent from my primary memory, turning up only in the hits and memories moments of local radio and the memories of elder siblings. One day I got home from school and bummed around as usual with the radio on when an incredible rock song burst out of the afterschool dross. It drove with a constant engine, howled and groaned, noisy but compelling. My only thought was that I was ever in a rock band we would have to sound like that. Luckily it was back announced as 19th Nervous Breakdown. Cut to the week of my birthday that year. My sister Anita took me to Ken Hurfords Imports around the corner where I found this compilation in US quality deep dish vinyl. Nita asked gravely if I really wanted that one and I insisted. I got it home, put it on and blissed out.

From the mid 60s this compilation pushes the band as prime rockers growing out of their roots, alternating the roar of a Paint it Black with the Beatley strings of As Tears Go By. But most of what's on show is big driving harder pop, huge guitar tone, tireless lead voice from the young Jagger whose contempt for the world around him is only challenged by his desire for its affection. For the first time on a proper stereo (ie not the transistor radio in my room) I heard Satisfaction, Get Off Of My Cloud, The Last Time and the mighty 19th Nervous Breakdown in full force. It seems strange now to think of the Stones reputation prior to the big four albums as that of Beatle copyists. Yes there are exotic instruments here and there and an adherence to pop song craft but the sitar of Paint it Black is nothing like the one in Norwegian Wood, the Fabs didn't appropriate Dylan the way the Stones do with Satisfaction and they would never have allowed something like Have You Seen Your Mother, Baby to fall into such beautiful chaos as it does. Before they were the greatest rock band in the world they a tight, clever and essential one with only the biggest band in the world keeping them from the top. If you only ever get one compilation of the Rolling Stones, try this. It will keep coming back and never outstay its welcome.

Wilder - The Teardrop Explodes: While I found most of what I heard of this Liverpool outfit uninteresting this album brought what I did like about them to the fore and provided not tracks I'd like with a begrudging favour but ones that stopped me in my tracks. The best thing I noticed was the abandonment of the white boy funk in the rhythm section and short repetitive vocal melodies that made them barely distinguishable from Echo and the Bunnymen (who did that better). The retention of Julian Cope's whimsical melancholy also serves and what we get is a mix of glorious Summer of Love joy and expansion in Passionate Friend, Syd Barrett in quiet post shock lucidity in Tiny Children or the epic Copey in full magnificence with The Great Dominions which begins with a heartbeat which surrenders to a looped synth and distant clean guitar and emphatic tympani and Cope singing at the top of his game about something very serious and hopeless: Mummy I've been fighting again.... Great psychedelia nods to the 60s rather than stealing from it and sounds necessary to its own time. Well, this did but stretches to this one and well beyond.

Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band - The Beatles: This one used to be the Citizen Kane of rock albums, topping best-of lists without apparent examination. Eventually the title vanished from critics' lists and listeners' polls and common taste shifted from it to its predecessor, Revolver. Proportionally, Revolver is a bigger leap from what came before it than Sgt. Pepper.

Nevertheless what Revolver doesn't have to the same degree is Pepper's sense of moment. Even the opening of the sounds of a big important gig at the Albert Hall. The audience fades up. The orchestra tunes. Suddenly the band, sounding more epic than ever before with a guitar onslaught hammering a big progression with just enough breakup to sound unmistakably rocky but too gigantic to just be another pop outfit. Paul's vocal soars over a tide of screaming audience (lifted from one of the Hollywood Bowl gigs recorded a few years before). The chorus blares out like a fanfare over a big brass arrangment which sound both fustian and archly contemporary. Paul comes back to announce the next song and it starts without a gap.

Everything sounds bigger and more colourful than ever before. If they'd been heading towards albums being more important to them and concentrating on the possibilities of the recording studio as a compositional aid they made it here. It just sounds so mighty that the more modest pop of the band before it seems to dissolve. I can't quite imagine how it would have sounded to anyone who got hooked on She Loves You only four years before having this majesty coming out of the speakers.

And it doesn't stop. Some of the best lead and ensemble vocals they ever did finish the complexities of the recordings like gold leaf. Beneath them is a world of texture and colour that is not always easy to identify but always intriguing. Holding all of it up like marble columns is McCartney's bass that favours clear lines that are both thumping and sprightly. They keep the sense of the band through the most adventurous arrangements and add an odd stateliness to the album.

The other sense not forgotten here but heightened is that of fun. This platter moves. Where all the major UK psychedelia outings got bogged down here and there with directionless experimentation you get singalongs and a whole new world of invention. Best album ever? Who cares? This works. And keeps working.

Diamond Dogs - David Bowie: Alan Yentob's unwittingly effective documentary about Bowie, Cracked Actor was done at the time where the Ziggy block was dismantling into the Young Americans/Thin White Duke block and we got to see a transitional form (also it led to the casting of Div in The Man Who Fell to Earth). Here was discussed a very little of the pre-Ziggy time and concentrated on the new metamorphosis (scenes of the recording of Young Americans are pretty exciting in retrospect). The one album that seemed only represented by a few screenshots and a demonstration of cut-up method (after the fact) was this one and to this day it's the 70s original Bowie work that people need reminding of, one step above Pinups. But I was intrigued as I found the cover frightening and heard that it was a real move on from Ziggyworld, however much it still looked like Zig. There were two of its tracks on the magnificent changesonebowie compilation which nailed it. I needed the whole thing.

Late 1977 I took the gatefold sleeve home from Chandlers and shivered a little at the opening wolf wail and the scary phased voice telling us about the devastated city in the year of the Diamond Dogs. Title track with the audience sound and the yelled intro: "This ain't rock and roll, this is genocide" which I always heard as "this is David Bowie" (Bow rhyming with Now). But instead of the sharp bright riff of Rebel Rebel coming off that song everything sank beneath the sleazy rock of the title track to a decadance so present you can feel it stick to the soles of your shoes. The Sweet Thing mini-cycle takes us into some nihilistic hedonism and some of Bowie's most impressive vocals, going from a subterranean rumble in the opening couplet to the anguished Vegas tenor of the verse before it all freezes back down to the shivering chorus. A brief change of pace different enough to get its own name (Candidate) speaks of deals more fevered and troublingly organised sexual community before collapsing back down to the sleaze of the opening passages with some diseased sax notes and a pulsing beat on the piano, taken up by the bass and drums and smeared with delicious guitar distortion and THAT'S where the Rebel Rebel riff comes in, shining like sunshine after a nuclear winter, pur bright teenage trash with a two note riff that you just have to keep licking and a vocal of troubled young ones. Sixteen year olds can live in this song without coming out for days.

Side 2 on the vinyl starts the cycle of what remained of Bowie's project of making a musical version of George Orwell's 1984 (the album was recorded in 1974). It's fragmented but it works. Rock and Roll With Me is like a celebration of Winston and Julia abandoning themselves to each other away from the constant surveillance. We Are the Dead directly quotes the novel and tells in whimpers and whispers about the love that if uttered resulted in torture. 1984 comes on like the theme from Shaft and recalls the excitement of the revolution that led to the boot on the human face world of O'Brien and Room 101. Big Brother begins like totalitarian architecture but after the slogans freezes into a hate week chant that can only end in a repetition to a fade.

Unlike concept albums from the time like Genesis' Lamb Lies Down on Broadway, Lou Reed's Berlin or the later War of the Worlds, Diamond Dogs brought to its tales of devastation, decadance and despair under opression a kind of British realism that felt cinematic and experienced. That's it, unlike Gabriel crooning about the slipper men or Lou snarling (or the completely bloody awful Jeff Wayne effort) Diamond Dogs sounds lived in and unlike all those others you can listen to all of it at once without skipping. Given the material I can think of no higher accolade.

 The Serpent's Egg - Dead Can Dance: Before I heard this album in the 80s I thought the only music that ever approached this was thrown at the screens of the then fashionable sword and sorcery film genre. This came from landscapes darker than Tolkein and more gloriously luminous than the first chapter of a sci-fi dytopia, The Serpent's Egg arrests the ear from its first seconds and leaves the listener both exhausted and craving more. Brendan Perry's strongly masculine vocals can be let down by his attempt to impress intellectually which is why Lisa Gerrard's Amazonian warrior singing works better in the setting for its glossolalian sonority which allows you to more fully imagine what delights or nightmares have inspired this powerful and seductive music. Never gets old and won't sound old in hundreds of years.