Best of 2008 according to me! part one
Here's part of a list of my favourites of the songs that were released and caught my eye this year. I missed a lot of great 2008 music, no doubt... do comment and let me know what I should check out - I'm informed by usually-reliable sources that Fleet Foxes and Erykah Badu both put out really great albums this year, amongst others that I haven't gotten to just yet.
Ohana - One On Four
('Dead Beat', Imperative Residence Records)
Click to viewwww.myspace.com/ohanamusic
When I wrote my review for music & pop culture (or spoke to anyone about new music) I said: "Ohana’s music is composed of angular, precise rhythms. Not a note is wasted. In fact, it’s only about a third of the time that all four musicians are playing at once. Individual parts are repetitive and simple, but together the songs are compulsively danceable, in no small part due to drummer Kino’s brilliantly inventive ostinatos. This is music that is more than the sum of its parts. One On Four is an example. A sparkling, arpeggiated guitar line runs throughout the song, sounding somehow distant. It’s joined at intervals by a complementary, mumbling bassline and a cascading second guitar melting over the first. Before you realise, the subtle climax of the song is upon you and Farrier is screaming that “some things are irreplaceable! Some things are better off not lost!”"
One On Four was, for me, the best song of the year. I was obsessed with it and it still sounds somehow perfect to me.
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Foals - Balloons
('Antidotes', Transgressive Records)
This song instantly appealed to me.
At the time, I said: "I have a new favourite band which I painstakingly tracked down from a ten second clip on rage at 1am on Good Friday. The sound: math-y new-rave. i.e. fucking awesome. Foals are like Battles, Four Tet and Damn Arms fighting each other. In a lift. With lightsabers. So you know, scifi-snotty-art-school-drop-out music. I'm very into it though. I would very much love to make music like this and have an angular haircut. And perhaps a thin tie. Is that bad?"
Introducing awesome polyrhythmic math-rock guitars to a new-rave rhythm section that seemed particularly influenced by 1980s English ska was, for my money at least, a brilliant evolution in the wake of Bloc Party's demise into mediocrity. This tempered Foals' tendency to repeat themselves and occasionally look/sound like total wankers.
other points in their favour:
-Foals' frontman Yannis was arrested by Spanish police aftergetting involved in a brawl with Johnny Rotten's hangers-on when they started a racist attack on Kele Okereke of Bloc Party.
-they used to play house parties.
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Ghosts Of Television - Furthest Village From The Sun
('Furthest Village From The Sun', Chatterbox Records)
www.myspace.com/ghostsoftelevision
Ghosts Of Television broke through more significantly this year in the Sydney indie scene, with an infamous and brutal last-band-on performance at the underground Goodbye Sunshine Festival, a praise-filled feature in Mess+Noise and a righteously angry hipster-baiting single, City Of Painless Childbirth, flogged for months on FBi Radio. But the enigmatic opening track of their debut EP for Chatterbox Records was probably the best thing they released this year. The guitars stutter with restrained menace whilst vocalist Nic de Jong plays the part of a disgraced fascist leader trudging through the scenes of his crimes ("Here is the door I kicked in / And here are the books that I burned / Here is the champagne that I drank / As the streets looked on horrified"). Ostensibly he's a broken, shamed man, but the wistfulness of de Jong's multi-tracked falsetto and the soaring space-rock climax the band builds hint at the character's unrepentance.
Sydney DJ Mailer Daemon completed a vaguely dubstep-ish remix of Furthest Village From The Sun that you can stream here.
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Cut Copy - Hearts On Fire
('In Ghost Colours')
Hearts On Fire sounds like it could have been created anytime in the last 25 years, in a good way - witness the New Order guitar line, the early 90s house vocal samples, and the buildup to that sax solo. Dan Whitford's lyrics stir up a sweet anticipation but could be about almost anything - blanks that you fill in yourself. This is perfectly constructed, floor-filling dance pop - if there's any doubts in your head about that, listen to the last minute of this song and observe how everything just fits together.
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more to come.