2008 (a little late)

Best Album:
Portishead - Third
On its much anticipated release, this album was recognised for its excellence but also curiously criticised (or lauded, depending on which circles you move in) for being Portishead’s most inaccessible so far. True, this is a difficult album: difficult to write, difficult to make, even difficult listen to or understand, but to say it is inaccessible is to say more about us as listeners than it does about the band or album. Simply put, these songs are irresistible in a typically Portishead sirenesque way, attractive but always a tease: they wash around you, envelop you, but deny you access to their heart. Their restraint places a sheer glass wall between the listener and the performer, but it is in this restraint the genius and originality reside. To say it is inaccessible is to admit to our own inability to climb over this glass wall without the reassurance of easy hooks and footholds.

With Third, Portishead run the gamut between rock and dance/trance/rave, hitting all the spots in between, while still avoiding all the self-indulgence of hedonistic rock, the mindless adrenaline pushing of dance, even abandoning the emotional indulgence of their earlier ‘trip-hop’. They rock without ever rocking out, and rave without ever losing themselves. At all times, the central tenet of the decade-long-incubated creative thinking behind this album is control. Portishead exert complete control over every aspect of these tracks, making them smooth, confident and exceptionally original.

With this album, Portishead had to get over not only the long expectation built up from their ten-year long hiatus, but also the cult status albums like Dummy have gained in a new generation over those years. The result is an album that is inimitably Portishead, while being utterly different from any of their previous releases. Beth Gibbons has lost none of her raw emotional frailty, vocal strength, or ear for unexpected melodic twists and harmonic ideas. The stretched-out soundscapes, as well as Geoff Barrow’s abundant sampling, have been replaced with a new respect for guitar spacing, instrumental loops, doubling, echoing and creating an equally sparse but considerably more gritty and abrasive sound. They have mastered the diminishing and build-up of sound, consistency, aggressive bass hooks, depth and sparsity. Aggressive songs like 'Machine Gun', the exhausting 'Threads', the perpetual motion of 'The Rip', and the bizarre and unexplained throwback to Gibbons’ Out of Season, 'Deep Water' make up an album that is a new kind of unique, and Third, just like the other Portishead albums, will become an unassuming, unrealised classic.


Wolf Parade - At Mount Zoomer
Wolf Parade's second album deserves greater attention than it ever received. Like Portishead, they had to strive to follow their debut, and Apologies to Queen Mary is one hell of an album, definitely one of the best of the decade, if not the last twenty years.

At Mount Zoomer is different. Despite having slightly different production aim, they managed to retain their signature sounds without compromise. However, the album simply appears dull on first listen. The problem facing Wolf Parade is an unusual one: they are just too good a live band. Almost all the tracks on At Mount Zoomer, unlike those of Apologies... make astounding live events, throbbing with energy. If only they could have captured songs like 'Kissing the Beehive' or 'Call It A Ritual' the way they were meant to be heard, this would have blown a large Wolf Parade-shaped hole in the music world.


Honourable mentions:
1) Mogwai - The Hawk is Howling
To a certain extent, this album breaks the continuity of stylistic development of Mogwai's career. Just like Mr. Beast, it provides almost equal amounts of raucous anger and gentle swelling melody: in other words, more of everything that makes Mogwai Mogwai. While not their best or most inspired album to date, this is certainly an inevitable if not particularly forward-moving record. Beautiful and interesting, a danngerous mix.

2) Fight Like Apes - ...And the Mystery of the Golden Medallion
The most hyped album of the year, golden children FLA's debut album has yet to prove its longevity and whether it has made good on the band's warehouse-sized stores of potential. A good album yes, and a quirky one, but a remarkable one? Not quite.




3) Clinic - Do It







4) MGMT - Oracular Spectacular









5) Fleet Foxes - Fleet Foxes







6) Crayonsmith - White Wonder








7) Crystal Castles - Crystal Castles








8) Robotnik - Pleasant Square








9) The Duke Spirit - Neptune






10) Ham Sandwich - Carry the Meek




Who to Watch 2009:

1) Cuckoo Savante: have just released their debut album Lennonstown Lies, a storybook of almost vaudevillian blues and gothica. Outstanding musicians all.

2) Villagers: the new project from Conor O'Brien, formerly of The Immediate and Cathy Davey's touring band. All folky and sweet pop.

3) The Butterfly Explosion: despite being one of the most obviously talented hopes for Irish music over the last few years, the band have changed line-up and style so often they don't seem to know who they are anymore. Let's hope they figure out (and remember) what they're best at.

4) Le Galaxie: can only get stronger.

5) Alias Empire: Dry County have returned under their new name, a renewed attitude and sound closer to their original work.


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Currently listening to: Wolf Parade - Call It A Ritual

Review: Max Tundra and Clinic live at The Village 12/11/08

Now in its third year, Heineken Green Synergy is still a little confusing, if not confused. It's as if it's not quite sure if it's a genuine indoor (mini-HWCH-ish) festival, or just another BudRising-esque musical commercial. But who really cares, when they bring quality acts together (unlike BudRising, which usually opts for the high-selling but average) for reasonable prices. This year it really seemed focussed on the "synergy" aspect, bringing some really disparate artists together, like the unlikely pairing of Max Tundra and Clinic, the former being an appparent entity of pure distilled energy and good humour, the latter being weird, dour and brilliant.

That's not to say the gig as a whole didn't work. On the contrary. Max Tundra bounced and hit buttons and keys and blew into things and sang and jumped and danced and raved, producing an incredible amount of sound for one person, albeit one person surrounded by gadgets and instruments. His sound occupies that grey area between dance, electronica and even rock, defying the definitions of all three, and never being afraid to borrow (or take the piss out of) anything else. The music was good, it was interesting, it was loud (as things tend to be in the Village) but what Max Tundra is really bringing back to inhabitants of this grey area is performance. Performance of electronic-based music of any kind occupies its own shady area in the performance annals, confused as its entry is by the idea of pre-recorded tracks and samples. True Max Tundra used tracks, but it was his ability to create a full texture of sounds and ideas over them, while never losing his connection with the audience among his multitude of instruments.

Clinic on the other hand, are a truly dour bunch of Liverpudlians, but with some interesting ideas. This gig was accompanied by monochrome visual projections, which, though they had seemingly nothing to do with what was being played, contributed to Clinic's attempt at de-personalising their music, their masks creating an anonymity and rather than distracting, forcing attention onto their sound. And how to describe that sound? A contantly-changing drone: the kind of drone into which you get sucked, and once you're inside, begins to break up, showing you all its different elements of the whole in their individual glory. Clinic are deadpan on the surface, but broiling under the skin. Even the live show is a masterwork of production elements: an ideal balance between instruments and sounds, the ex-key movements and scale inflections which are unnerving because they soon start to sound normal. Clinic take something ordinary, warp it, make it strange and then make you believe that this was the 'ordinary' all along.

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Anna Murray