| Features | The Top 10 Albums of this year? |
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Are you on Rawrip and playing a festival? Let us know here in time and we'll get your name up in this feature. |
Words by Tom Hannan
It was only a matter of time before Nick Cave got round to singing about Lazarus, the greatest comeback kid of all time, that is, until Cave himself returned with this startlingly brilliant piece of rock and roll. Now three billion albums in to a career that doesn’t actually contain a bad record, ‘Dig!!!...’ might actually be one of his finest, with songs like ‘More News From Nowhere’, the title track and utterly compelling ‘We Call Upon The Author’ each bona fide Bad Seeds classics. That he can still make new fans this far in to a career is a wonderful achievement – quite simply, this is how to grow old disgracefully well.
2. Portishead – ‘Third’ Perhaps the only band ever to take a whole decade off and return with a record that not only does not suck but actually betters all of their previous work, Portishead’s Third is a triumph of an album. The thought of middle aged, middle class trip hop fans who loved the likes of Morcheeba or Zero 7 picking up this record and being horrified at the lack of their old sound, instead finding it replaced with some Sunn O))) and Silver Apples-inspired drone of the highest calibre, makes me very happy indeed. Rest assured, there’s nothing Tom Jones could cover on this Portishead LP.
This is the sound of Stephen Merritt, for the first time in his career, choosing one sound for a whole album and sticking to it. That sound is referenced in the title, with each one of these Beach Boys esque tunes soaked in white noise, yet still shining through most brilliantly. It’s a concept record of sorts, with every instrument on it having to feed back in some way (even the organ), but Merritt just such a talented songwriter that even when he’s trying to bury these melodies, they remain the thing you gleefully take away from the album, above the squall.
You can sum up why British music is in a good state at the minute with one word that begins with ‘F’ and ends with ‘oals’. Young and frighteningly talented, these are they / aren’t they math rockers with a beating pop heart seem to have made the rest of the country up their game, battering boring garage rock to death with these twitching guitars and ever mutating beats. The list of things that aren’t wonderful about Foals is very short indeed.
5. Vampire Weekend – ‘Vampire Weekend’ Coming from nowhere direct to your heart, this Cape Cod collective have taken the unfashionable – The Police, Paul Simon, wearing a scarf indoors – and turned it in to possibly the coolest record of the year. Catchier than the plague and constructed out of pure happiness, these tunes will reside in your brain long after everyone’s got bored of taking part in the inevitable, cooler than thou backlash this will receive. Vampire Weekend will survive when everyone realises they were never particularly trendy – they’re just better than most bands, is all.
6. Hot Chip – ‘Made In The Dark’ Hot Chip could have given people what they wanted – ‘The Warning’ part two, basically – but we commend them for their bravery, making a record full of hip hop experiments and gentle piano ballads instead of a big club banger of an LP. That it succeeds isn’t in doubt, and though we haven’t figured out quite exactly what ‘Made In The Dark’ actually is yet, we look forward to spending the rest of our lives with it, grappling with that dilemma whilst tapping our feet incessantly.
Odd that a concept album about how being in love as a youngster is incredibly difficult should actually be one of the easiest, most accessible and life affirming LPs in our collection. Though they’ve ditched the dad on their second record, they’ve lost none of what made them exciting in the first place, and if anything, hearing that Blaine Harrison has become one of the strongest pop songwriters of his generation (‘Two Doors Down’ is this generation’s ‘Friday I’m In Love’ – a gigantic tune) just makes us love them even more.
The brothers Dartnall’s second LP is exactly what it should have been – a development on from their fine debut, all the loose ends tied up, the poppy bits poppier (‘Turn Tail’, ‘Dyed in the Wool’) and the weird bits now just completely terrifying (‘I Can Hardly See Them’ – bloody hell eh?). With this, they ascend to a similar level as Albarn, Partridge and Barrett, namely classic British songwriters who know that humour and darkness are best when they exist side by side.
Born Ruffians are my find of the year so far, and the best thing Warp records have been involved with in aeons. They’re rhythmically fascinating but not at the expense of huge, anthemic choruses that should be being played on all radios at all times the world over, for the good of the planet. We defy someone to listen to ‘Hummingbird’ or ‘Badonkadonkey’, or heck, any of it, without a big cheesy grin on their face at all times.
Young, devilishly good looking, incredibly talented, wise beyond his years, one of the nicest people I’ve ever had the pleasure to meet, possessor of one of the strongest debut albums to enter the realm of UK folk in years, singer of songs that will both break and mend hearts, backed by the meanest of bands and completely oblivious to his own glaring brilliance – I hate Johnny Flynn.
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Artist reviews Editorial features "Why no one is going to Glastonbury - The rise of the small festival" ------------------------------ Johnny Foreigner release their debut album - "Waited Up 'Til It Was light" - RAWRIP get an exclusive. ------------------------------ ------------------------------ Ox.Eagle.Lion.Man release their debut ep "The Lay Of The Land, The Turn Of The Tide" ------------------------------ The Great Escape Festival round up ------------------------------ Our writer's top 10 gigs of 2008 so far ------------------------------ |
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