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.