Twenty Songs - 2008 ii
Over on YouSendIt is the second half of that list of my twenty songs of 2008. For those of you who enjoyed, derided or simply ignored the last batch, get this lot before apathy gets you.
My often off-base reasonings are, predictably enough, below the cut.
Mumford and Sons - White Blank Page
Marcus Mumford plays drums for Laura Marling (of whom more anon), and his own band knocks around with the expected Young and Lost crowd. We caught them supporting A Hawk and A Hacksaw at the Glee club, whom they very almost upstaged - no mean feat. I had to cheekily rip this from my stereo mixer whilst playing it on their non-downloadable MySpace player, so ignore the couple of skips in it - live it was a thing of beauty, and it's not bad here, either. (Go listen to it properly here.) For my own music, this was the most inspiring set I saw all year.
Vampire Weekend - Oxford Comma
Over-hyped hipster Strokes, Vampire Weekend's debut album wasn't the reinvention of popular music some reviewers wanted it to be, but it was the source of a few good singles and the year's best song referencing punctuation. 'Mansard Roof' was good, too.
British Sea Power - Lights Out For Darkier Skies
Earlier in the year, veggiesu remained unmoved by this rather splendid slice of indie pop from maybe the best British LP of the year, thus revealing her total lack of soul. Feel the fusion of rhythm, melody and lyric in this song and, verily, stand amazed. BSP got a bit of stick for being this accessible after previous, more confuzzling efforts, but that missed the point entirely: who cares if it's hummable when it's this clever?
Bon Iver - Skinny Love
Indie purists would have it that this was actually (self-)released in 2007, and though they'd be right they'd also be self-righteous fucks. 'For Emma, Forever Ago' received wider release on the thank-God-for-it Jagjaguwar label (also Okkervil River's stable) and then finally 4AD over here, and Skinny Love is the song from it which hooks into the heart and doesn't let go. Recorded in an isolated shack in northwestern Wisconsin, this fragile record is like a pinned butterfly: poignant, beautiful and untouchable.
Laura Marling - Ghosts
Laura Marling could have done without the hype - she and her songs are too unprepossessing to shoulder them well - but it's her own fault for crafting so fabulously old-fashioned a record which somehow manages also to be contemporary. This is mostly a trick achieved by teenagerly angst allied with tried and tested song structures and the sensitive but rich production of Noah and the Whale's Charlie Fink. It worked a treat, although 'Ghosts' remains the only song from the album I can remember without a relisten. Make of that what you will.
Elbow - Grounds for Divorce
After years of knocking around at the edges, this was Elbow's year to take centrestage, all Mercury Music Prizes and sunny Glastonbury singalongs. When I saw them in Oxford in spring, I actually found them disappointing live, and for me they remain at their best when they can fiddle around with machines in the studio. Didn't stop me listening an awful lot to this one, though - and it's another tune to sing to yourself in a train station.
Get Well Soon - If This Is Hat Is Missing I've Gone Hunting
This is all getting a bit emo for me, and Konstantin Gropper's sub-Arcade Fire musings admittedly at times get more self-important than entertaining. (The lyric "Wanted more than the world could give and bear a child inside that's dead already" sounds like an off-cut from The Holy Bible.) But when they supported Calexico this year, 'Shoot, baby, shoot, baby!' was one of the hooks that left the hall with you, like The Go Team in make-up.
Ryan Adams and the Cardinals - Let Us Down Easy
I didn't expect Adams to do this to me again. By which I mean, sure, I was hoping he'd make a good album and, yes, once again - as with last year's Easy Tiger - he managed to make a syrupy, over-done affair perfect as background music in Starbucks. More to the point, though, I didn't expect him still to manage to grab me. The bastard did, though, with this cut from the woefully titled Cardinology. I managed to resist the lure of seeing him live, but here I am listing him in the year's top 20. Thinking of it, perhaps the song is about our relationship.
Old Crow Medicine Show - Motel in Memphis
OCMS's brand of take-no-prisoners old time string banding has been known to make coalescent squeal, 'Why has Dan broken the music?' (This was admittedly in the entirely incongruous surroundings of tranquil Tuscany.) Their third LP might be an answer to that - whilst it far from abandons their roots, it's still a bit smoother than in the past. It doesn't feel as visceral, then, and it's certainly more forgettable than past efforts - but the musicians, and Ketch Secor on vocals, remain as pitch perfect as ever. Here's a downhome ballad where they sing about the assassination of MLK. It's finger-picking good.
Jenny Lewis - Acid Tongue
She sold herself short this year, failing to recapture the luminescence of Rabbit Furcoat, but Jenny Lewis did at least not make Under The Blacklight, 2007's decidedly rubbish LP from her band Rilo Kiley. There's a great duet with Elvis Costello on 'Carpetbaggers', but 'Trying My Best To Love You' was yet another song from a so-so album which made me keep returning to it. It's been a funny old year.
My often off-base reasonings are, predictably enough, below the cut.
Mumford and Sons - White Blank Page
Marcus Mumford plays drums for Laura Marling (of whom more anon), and his own band knocks around with the expected Young and Lost crowd. We caught them supporting A Hawk and A Hacksaw at the Glee club, whom they very almost upstaged - no mean feat. I had to cheekily rip this from my stereo mixer whilst playing it on their non-downloadable MySpace player, so ignore the couple of skips in it - live it was a thing of beauty, and it's not bad here, either. (Go listen to it properly here.) For my own music, this was the most inspiring set I saw all year.
Vampire Weekend - Oxford Comma
Over-hyped hipster Strokes, Vampire Weekend's debut album wasn't the reinvention of popular music some reviewers wanted it to be, but it was the source of a few good singles and the year's best song referencing punctuation. 'Mansard Roof' was good, too.
British Sea Power - Lights Out For Darkier Skies
Earlier in the year, veggiesu remained unmoved by this rather splendid slice of indie pop from maybe the best British LP of the year, thus revealing her total lack of soul. Feel the fusion of rhythm, melody and lyric in this song and, verily, stand amazed. BSP got a bit of stick for being this accessible after previous, more confuzzling efforts, but that missed the point entirely: who cares if it's hummable when it's this clever?
Bon Iver - Skinny Love
Indie purists would have it that this was actually (self-)released in 2007, and though they'd be right they'd also be self-righteous fucks. 'For Emma, Forever Ago' received wider release on the thank-God-for-it Jagjaguwar label (also Okkervil River's stable) and then finally 4AD over here, and Skinny Love is the song from it which hooks into the heart and doesn't let go. Recorded in an isolated shack in northwestern Wisconsin, this fragile record is like a pinned butterfly: poignant, beautiful and untouchable.
Laura Marling - Ghosts
Laura Marling could have done without the hype - she and her songs are too unprepossessing to shoulder them well - but it's her own fault for crafting so fabulously old-fashioned a record which somehow manages also to be contemporary. This is mostly a trick achieved by teenagerly angst allied with tried and tested song structures and the sensitive but rich production of Noah and the Whale's Charlie Fink. It worked a treat, although 'Ghosts' remains the only song from the album I can remember without a relisten. Make of that what you will.
Elbow - Grounds for Divorce
After years of knocking around at the edges, this was Elbow's year to take centrestage, all Mercury Music Prizes and sunny Glastonbury singalongs. When I saw them in Oxford in spring, I actually found them disappointing live, and for me they remain at their best when they can fiddle around with machines in the studio. Didn't stop me listening an awful lot to this one, though - and it's another tune to sing to yourself in a train station.
Get Well Soon - If This Is Hat Is Missing I've Gone Hunting
This is all getting a bit emo for me, and Konstantin Gropper's sub-Arcade Fire musings admittedly at times get more self-important than entertaining. (The lyric "Wanted more than the world could give and bear a child inside that's dead already" sounds like an off-cut from The Holy Bible.) But when they supported Calexico this year, 'Shoot, baby, shoot, baby!' was one of the hooks that left the hall with you, like The Go Team in make-up.
Ryan Adams and the Cardinals - Let Us Down Easy
I didn't expect Adams to do this to me again. By which I mean, sure, I was hoping he'd make a good album and, yes, once again - as with last year's Easy Tiger - he managed to make a syrupy, over-done affair perfect as background music in Starbucks. More to the point, though, I didn't expect him still to manage to grab me. The bastard did, though, with this cut from the woefully titled Cardinology. I managed to resist the lure of seeing him live, but here I am listing him in the year's top 20. Thinking of it, perhaps the song is about our relationship.
Old Crow Medicine Show - Motel in Memphis
OCMS's brand of take-no-prisoners old time string banding has been known to make coalescent squeal, 'Why has Dan broken the music?' (This was admittedly in the entirely incongruous surroundings of tranquil Tuscany.) Their third LP might be an answer to that - whilst it far from abandons their roots, it's still a bit smoother than in the past. It doesn't feel as visceral, then, and it's certainly more forgettable than past efforts - but the musicians, and Ketch Secor on vocals, remain as pitch perfect as ever. Here's a downhome ballad where they sing about the assassination of MLK. It's finger-picking good.
Jenny Lewis - Acid Tongue
She sold herself short this year, failing to recapture the luminescence of Rabbit Furcoat, but Jenny Lewis did at least not make Under The Blacklight, 2007's decidedly rubbish LP from her band Rilo Kiley. There's a great duet with Elvis Costello on 'Carpetbaggers', but 'Trying My Best To Love You' was yet another song from a so-so album which made me keep returning to it. It's been a funny old year.