Live Music News & Reviews

It’s been a reasonable year for albums, although there hasn’t been one album which has towered above the rest. We missed releases from top British bands Arctic Monkeys and Doves and what we got instead was the American invasion, with MGMT, TV On The Radio, Vampire Weekend and Kings of Leon all dominating. How long this US dominance of the indie charts will last is unsure but there is no doubting the fact that most of 2008’s best music came from America. 

1. The Walkmen: You and Me; The album begins with one of the best lines heard in a song this year - “There, is still sand, in my suitcase, there is still salt in my teeth” from Donde Esta La Playa. This is the Walkmen’s finest album so far. Melancholy and ramshackle, the musicianship is superb, with rolling drums and their trademark echoey guitars. Hamilton Leithauser’s raw drunken vocals and superb lyrics make this a late night treat.

2. Neon Neon : Stainless Style - The concept album based on the life of John Delorean from Gruff Rhys and Boom Bip. Very retro with its 80s synths but the tunes stand out, in particular Raquel, Dream Cars, and the wonderful Michael Douglas (three words which don’t usually go together).

3. TV On the Radio: Dear Science; No two songs on this album sound the same. Dear Science has real strength in depth and influences range from Roxy Music to Prince and Bowie, Talking Heads and (gulp) Peter Gabriel. The superb Family Tree is an epic of strings and brass. Indie funk, I suppose you could call this. There isn’t one filler on this album - a rarity, especially this year (see Oracular Spectacular).

4. Last Shadow Puppets: The Age of the Understatement - many criticised this for being too much of a homage to Scott Walker. Who cares when the tunes are this good? It’s often difficult to tell who is singing on this, so well do Miles Kane and Alex Turner’s voices dovetail (although live, strangely enough, Kane’s voice sounds stronger). Full kudos to Turner for doing something ambitiously different. Highlights include superbly orchestrated strings on the likes of In My Room, a simple three chord pop song in the form of Standing Next to Me, the French-style romp of Meeting Place (best song on the album) and the delicate My Mistakes Were Made For You.

5. Steniski: What Does it all Mean? 1986 - 2008; I came to this retrospective knowing very little about Steinski but am now convinced he is a hip hop genius. The first cuts from this album are taken from 1986, early days indeed in the art of mixing as we know it today, but you really wouldn’t know. This was ground-breaking stuff, mixing genres and including unlikely spoken word samples for the first time. The reason you’ve probably never heard of Steniski is down to copyright - none of these recordings were ever commercially available, existing only in the hands of DJs. This is vital stuff, at times simply great party music, at others desolate, such as “The Motorcade Sped On” which includes a sample from a news bulletin of JFK’s assassination, and “Number Three on Flight 11″ which includes a sample from a call made from one of the doomed planes in the September 11 attacks.

6. Vampire Weekend: Vampire Weekend - The idea of well-to-do graduates from current place-to-be Brooklyn mixing Indie and World Music sounds appaling, but the results are great. Oxford Comma is one of the singles of the year. Live they had a good year, with a daytime performance at Glastonbury making perfect sense and a superb three nights at Kentish Town Forum. This album is great for the first few listens but it is hard to say how it will stand the test of time.

7. Girltalk - not to everyone’s tastes this - I’ve read some people describe it as sub-standard Jive Bunny - but the mixing is superb, featuring over 200 samples ranging from Radiohead to Lil’Wayne and Fleetwood Mac to Queen, most lasting little over 10 seconds and merging into one, 57-minute long track.

8. MGMT: Oracular Spectacular - The album as a whole has its ups and downs but there is no doubting the quality of the singles. This scored highly in most end of year charts although we felt it too patchy to finish top five. Still, in addition to Kids, Time to Pretend and Electric Feel we get the superb Weekend Wars, and the styles are nicely varied.

9. Los Campesinos: Hold on Now Youngster - This debut from the Welsh band is full of energy. The combination of girl/boy vocals over loud spiky guitars may be nothing new but it is rarely done as well as this, and the lyrics are wittier and smarter than your average punk lyrics. It fails to keep up the momentum throughout but this is a superb debut, and in You, Me, Dancing has one of the singles of the year.

10. Hercules and Love Affair: Hercules and Love Affair - This gay soulful disco album is a real throwback to a pre-AIDS era when all that mattered was music to dance to. A concept album centred around a night on the town, this excellently-produced album is a delight.

It’s the time of year when critics get to indulge their love of lists by compiling their top albums and singles of the year. We’re going to join in by listing our top 10 songs of the year, followed shortly by our top ten albums of the year and a summary of the critics’ choice. First, singles:

10. Hercules and Love Affair: Blind. guest vocals from Antony Hegarty and a great trumpet hook, this song stays just the right side of catchy/cheesy.

9. TV On The Radio: Golden Age. Not even the best song on the superb Dear Science album, but still a stunning piece of Prince-esque funk complete with strings and brass.

8. Radiohead: Jigsaw Falling Into Place. In Rainbows is a superb album and this track stands out as being more uptempo than its surrounding tracks. Great acoustic guitar intro.

7. Last Shadow Puppets: Standing Next To Me. Great acoustic guitar rhythm with a superb violin hook on this simple but very catchy song with great vocals. Some criticized The Last Shadow Puppets for being just too similar to Scott Walker, but they have never hidden their respect for Walker, and who cares anyway when the tunes are this good? Taken from the equally excellent Age of the Understatement album, the video is as rooted in the 60s as the song. Favourite Worst Nightmare bettered Whatever People Say I am That’s What I’m not, and now Alex Turner goes and does this. He gets better and better.

6. Oasis: I’m Outta Time. Oasis with a single of the year? In 2008? Whilst Dig Out Your Soul was hailed as a major return to form for Oasis, the album soon ran out of steam about five songs in. Pretty much after this song actually - a lovely Liam-penned ballad. Ok it sounds a bit like Real Life, the long lost Beatles song that was dug out for the Anthology series in the 90s (and which The Beatles didn’t even consider good enough to finish at the time), but to hear Liam actually recognise his own mortality is quite startling, and this song has something about it that makes listening to it very satisfying. It’s a groove.

5. Soul on Fire: Spiritualized. A great chorus combined with fragile vocals make this one of the most shameless heartstring-tugging songs of the year. This is the kind of song only Spiritualized can get away with (although Blur’s Tender was a good effort) and they do it brilliantly here, complete with Gospel choir. Singing along to this at Green Man was one of our highlights of the year.

4. Hot Chip: Ready for the Floor. A fine single from the slightly underwhelming Made in the Dark LP, which surpasses even Over and Over as a tune. Played live the song was beefed up but the studio version is nicely understated.  

3. MGMT: Time To Pretend: 2008 will go down as belonging to Brooklyn’s MGMT. From two triumphant shows at Glastonbury to the year’s most memorable singles in Kids, Electric Feel and Time To Pretend, to one of the most talked about albums in Oracular Spectacular and a unique double in best album and best single in the NME’s review of the year. This is the pick of their singles for me - the hook was at first annoying but it gets stuck in your head and becomes impossible to remove - luckily the lyrics actually mean something and what’s more they’re optimistic.

2. Neon Neon featuring Cate Le Bon: I Lust You. This single announced Neon Neon as a worthy side project. It sounds so 80’s you almost expect Roland Rat to pop up with a guest rap, so few points for originality, although the fact it came from a concept album based on the life of John DeLorean makes up for that. That and the fact it’s a great tune.

1. American Boy: Estelle featuring Kanye West. This year’s Hey Ya! This year’s Crazy. We couldn’t stop listening to this song. Cheesy lyrics maybe but a superb tune and a great rap break from Kanye “Dressed smart like a London bloke”. Guaranteed to make people get up and dance.

Mobile phone giants O2 have taken over Carling’s sponsorship of many of the nation’s major live music venues.

O2 add sponsorship and naming rights of the Carling Academy Brixton (set to become the O2 Academy Brixton Academy - no, we don’t think it sounds right either), and other Carling venues in Birmingham, Bristol, Oxford, Liverpool, Glasgow, Sheffield and Leeds to the O2 Dome, which they have sponsored since its latest incarnation as a music venue.

O2 customers are likely to get benefits such as priorty ordering of tickets, which is good news for them and perhaps not so good news for the rest of us.

Lancashire’s Maupa sound great. The singer has an excellent voice and they have very good tunes. The songs tonight are a little all over the place though, with the first few sounding like The Strokes and the last few sounding like Spiritualized wig-outs. Not a major complaint however, as they do both well. I’ll be checking their album out, The Minor Highs and the Major Lows.

Iceland’s Skatar appear onstage wearing skimpy gold hotpants, silver spandex leggings, bad haircuts and facial hair. They make a beautiful, chaotic racket and leave the crowd completely bemused. A drummer, two guitarists and a keyboard player, the sound they make is hard to describe, but if you get a chance, see them. In between songs they joke about Iceland’s economy and are genuinely entertaining.