Accidentally swept away by the mainstream?

Some thoughts on the best music of 2008

I have long grown accustomed, when asked what kind of music I listen to (by the majority of casual askers), to muttering something about it being stuff they wouldn’t have heard of. This time every year, I read every single critics’ top-whatever list, in magazines, in newspapers and on-line, and usually find only one or two which I have in my own list, and often experiment by buying the commonly-agreed best album(s), if I did not already have them.



This year, however, much to my surprise, I discovered a startling overlap between every best-of list and my own list, and that in almost every case I owned at least half the relevant top ten. Either I have finally been carried from my own meandering tributaries into the mainstream, or the mighty Nile has altered its course to join my little stream. It’s a bit of a shock, and I am not sure whether to feel comforted in affirmation of my taste, or worried that my tastes are becoming populist (although I have never been a believer in obscurity for the sake of it).

Anyway, here are some thoughts on the top albums of 2008:

Glasvegas, discovered late and downloaded with the Christmas EP based on the reviews of the package, was album of the year without a doubt and led me to the shocking realisation that young guitar bands from my large neighbouring island, which I had ignored for most of the last decade, could make brilliant music occasionally. The combination of sweetness, noise, heavy accents, and beautifully-written words of tender love, sadness and hooliganistic vulgarity, sometimes in the same sentence, were completely new for me and blew my socks off.

TV on the Radio was another startling discovery, as almost everything written about them and ‘Dear Science’ raised my heckles – funk, art rock etc. However, this was simply great stuff, and songs like ‘Halfway Home’, ‘Family Tree’ and the wonderful ‘Dancing Choose’ had me re-evaluating my entire musical belief system, like an agnostic suddenly witnessing an undoubted miracle.

I also mostly loved Vampire Weekend, and ‘Walcott’, ‘M79’, ‘Campus’ and, in particular, the goofily mad ‘Mansard Roof’ never fail to bring a smile to my face when I hear them; it's a pity some of the rest of the album, despite the overall brevity, failed to excite me as much. I also tried hard with Elbow and a weird thing has happened; while, for me, the whole album has not yet lived up to its reputation, some individual songs, particularly ‘Weather to fly’ and ‘One day like this’ keep breaking out of various playlists and grabbing my by the throat, demanding to be worshipped and mostly succeeding. This one seems to be a slow grower, and I fully expect to have to reconsider the whole package from scratch in the future.

Closer to home, Cork’s own Mick Flannery established his own sound on ‘White Lies’ and moved away from his debut’s debt to Tom Waits and, while his noisier moments still do little for me, he wrote his first true pop song in ‘Tomorrow’s papers’ and produced three atmospheric late night classics in 'Safety rope', ‘California’ and ‘Arise now’.

I was less excited than most critics about Nick Cave’s ‘Dig Lazarus Dig’; there is no artist for me in such erratic touch with the better angels of his nature, and more capable of swinging between extremes of darkness and light, and so each album for me must be judged individually on whether he is Jeckel or Hyde on the days of recording. ‘The Boatman’s Call’ is surely one of the most beautiful albums by anyone anywhere, and is at one end of his spectrum; ‘Lazarus’ has arisen at the far end, barely visible from the warm heights of ‘Are you the one that I’ve been waiting for’ and ‘There is a kingdom’, and too far into his noisy place for me.

Fleet Foxes and Bon Iver, who between them hovered up a lot of high best-of chart placings, both brought out good debuts, each of which bore a different sound and a couple of really interesting songs, but would not have been at the top of my list. Interestingly, my one-off download of the year was Fleet Foxes and Wilco covering ‘I shall be released’, put out to encourage young voters to come out for Obama in the US Election; this directly or indirectly led to one of my two most emotional TV moments of the year when he was elected, the other being Glen and Marketa winning the Oscar for ‘Falling Slowly’.

Old reliables like REM, Lambchop, The Cure and American Music Club all produced albums which, while in every case comfortingly familiar and reminiscent of their finest hours (all of them having provided me with some particularly fine hours in years gone by), felt somewhat disappointing and not up to former peaks of glory. I did try hard with Portishead, but must admit it scared me more than wowed me. The Killers and Coldplay adhered to the '50% principle' and the 'single song syndrome', respectively, the former producing an album which was half brilliant pop songs, half forgettable filler, and the latter producing an overhyped album with one fantastic song only, the irresistably stirring orchestral pomp of the title track.

The year also produced my favourite line of music journalism in a long time, if not ever, when Brian Boyd of the Irish Times, in his end of year review, described Sigur Ros’ album (another thrilling discovery for me this year) as the music Tolkien would have heard in his head when he was writing The Lord of the Rings – an absolutely perfect description.

Finally, the song of the year has to be the bizarrely-named but utterly beautiful ‘Boobar come back to me’, from Tindersticks’ ‘The Hungry Saw’. The bit near the end where Stuart Staples begins to duet with himself just takes my breath away. The 'irresistibly addictive tune of the year award' goes to the magnificently titled ‘Sequestered in Memphis’ by The Hold Steady (the quiet bit with the horns and handclaps alone would make the most cynical smile).

All in all, a great year for music, and time will tell whether my taste has really changed for good – or just the rest of the world’s!

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Inbetween years

We all know about soulmates, people who are perfectly on one's wavelength in a way that no-one else can be, who just have that special place and connection, whether friend or spouse. I often wonder if a song can be a soulmate because, if it can, mine is 'Inbetween days' by The Cure. No other song in the 4,000 or so on my iPod comes even close to that kind of intimate relationship. Physicists talk of resonances between things or forces, when one can trigger under certain conditions effects and changes in another; there is undoubtedly a spooky resonance between this song, my heart, and my brain.



Call me a philistine (you wouldn't be the first) but I would actually claim that the first second of this song means more to me than the other thousands of hours of music I have at my fingertips: that rumbling tumbling, chaotic yet perfectly controlled avalanche of drums that kicks off and stands majestically alone until, just as a second appears on the song timer, the bass guitar kicks in. That kind of dramatic entrance, unequalled ever, sets a dizzying standard that is luckily almost matched by the stepwise ushering into place, in perfectly timed sequence, of acoustic guitar, cheesy synth, and finally Robert Smith's gloriously morose voice, all sounding more perfect in that three-minute symphony than they ever have for me in any other context (sort of like the way most of the actors in the Lord of the Rings films, on those three magical occasions, simply acted above and beyond anything they had done before, or might ever do again).

I have listened to that song at least once a week for fifteen years and it never fails to stir my spirits, to sound fresh and new and exciting. I have listened to other music, of course, falling as so many of my contemporaries did under the benign influence of Uncut magazine and spending the 1990s and beyond exploring a world of American music I would otherwise never have found. The Cure of the 1980s (very specifically), however, remain top of the heap as my favourite band ever, and have ingrained in me a soft spot for large bands of serious men, in dark suits worn casually, making superficially gloomy music shot through with wit and eccentricity (prime examples are Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, Tindersticks and, erm, Reservoir Dogs).

‘Inbetween days’ was released in 1985, which makes it 23 years old, which occasionally beings me close to a vertigo-like state of amazement at a generation gap which has opened up, like an earthquake tearing a gash in a road. Let’s, just for a moment, use 1985 as a fulcrum around which to pivot time, a tipping point in pop music’s admittedly short but occasionally glorious history. Pivot one way by 23 years and we land in 1962, not just the past but 7 years before I was born, in other words, when real time began. Years like 1962 just don’t even register on my musical radar – what the hell was anyone listening to? Doing a little archeological excavation on the Internet suggests that this was the year Bob Dylan released his first album, Elvis was balancing movies and music, and the year’s top songs were by Bobby Vinton, Ray Charles, Chubby Checker, Acker Bilk and the Four Seasons. That is old music, old old old, just incomprehensibly far back, to a 39-year-old as much as a 16-year-old. This terrifying sensation of a gaping generation chasm is even more dizzying when I wonder if the 16 year-olds of today view 1985 as being that far back, and might think that The Cure could have been sampling pounding dinosaur feet to catch that magical drum sound.

Even now, with my theoretically greater maturity, my iPod hasn't stretched back that far, and my sole dalliances with the 1960s remain early Leonard Cohen and frequent unsuccessful attempts to see what the point is about Bob Dylan. It really troubles me to contemplate that, to today's teenagers, my song could seem that old, that much of a whole different world, era, separated across an unbridgeable chasm of time from today. To me it is timeless, ageless, deathless, and will never get so old that I felt like it could die.

Jumping back to the present on our 23-year pivot, during the inbetween years, as I have implied, my relationship with the Cure was never monogamous, and as time goes on, I have flirted with other songs and artists thinking they might be a serious prospect for my soul, but it has never been serious. However, quite recently, one band has finally come close and may yet have it in them to produce a piece of music that could threaten the supremacy of ‘Inbetween days’. That band is The National, and last year's Boxer contained some moments of pure beauty, again led by astonishing drum performances; the passage around a minute into Fake Empire when Bryan Davendorf announces his presence by slowly cranking up as the piano takes a breather is simply astonishing and, lacking the proper terminology to explain technically what they are called, the drum patterns in Apartment Story just don’t sound like anything else I have ever heard. Drums have bridged the gap for me, and The National are battling for control of my musical soul; hopefully, peaceful cohabitation will be the solution.

Interestingly, one other common feature bridges the gap from Cure to National, and that is fantastic videos, from giant fluorescent socks chasing the band while a drunken camera swinging from a rope captures the action for Inbetween Days, to the National gradually winning over an indifferent wedding crowd in a beautifully shot piece for Apartment Story.

The circle is closed, the bridge is strong, but can the bridge bear another giant arching span backwards too to 1962 and finally swallow up the other generation gap? We will just have to see.

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