Christopher Miles
Words and designs for the world wide web

An obligatory ‘best of’ before the year ends

30/12/2007

I recently used a smart playlist on iTunes to figure out which songs I listened to most during the year, and since it’s the time of year for best of lists, I thought I’d share the results.

1. Around Easter I discovered the album Boyhood by Paper Airplanes. The fourth track, ‘Julius’, always reminds me of being awake at about 4am, wasting time doing another redesign of my website. Anyway, it’s a proggy little gem full of minor key melodies, swooning violins and thumping breaks with weird time signatures. Only two things mar its majesty: dreadful engineering and the fact that most of the band members were younger than 20 when they recorded it. It really bugs me when people far younger than me are far more talented than me. It’s something that’s bothering me with increasing frequency as I a) get older and b) realise how talentless I am.

2. It’s a good thing that Radiohead offered In Rainbows as a digital download and that MP3s don’t wear out through repeated playing, ‘cos I’ve been spinning the absolute shit out of the opening track ‘15 Step’. It’s a three chord R&B-styled fun-fest with more twists and turns than the much longer and arguably more famous ‘Paranoid Android’. (And yes, I did just use the words ‘R&B’ and ‘fun-fest’ in connection with Radiohead.)

3. of Montreal’s Hissing Fauna, Are You The Destroyer? is another album that reminds me of a very specific time and place. In this case, February, when we moved house, and Ikea, where we bought stuff to put in it. My personal favourite is one of the album’s latter and less celebrated tracks, ‘Faberge Falls For Shuggie’, which sounds like the Scissor Sisters marooned in a crossover episode of H. R. Pufnstuf and The Prisoner. The whole first half of the album is delicious, though. Check it the fuck out.

4. Jens Lekman’s ‘It Was A Strange Time In My Life’ from the Night Falls On Kortedala album features the brilliant lyric “Most people seem to think a shy personality / equals gifted / But if they would get to know one I’m sure that idea / would have shifted / Most shy people I know / are extremely boring / Either that or they are miserable from all the shit / they’ve been storing”. It also features backup vocals from the rather awesome Fryda Hyvonen. Easily my favourite track on the album.

5. One of the albums we listened to a lot around the time that our daughter was born was St. Vincent’s Marry Me. The title track is beautiful, but it’s opening track ‘Your Lips Are Red’ that reveals just what St. Vincent (aka Annie Clark) is on about. When I say ‘reveals’, I mean ‘hints at’, ‘cos she’s kind of kooky and inscrutable. It’s probably as much of a cop out to say that she sounds like Tori Amos as it is to say that Tori Amos sounds like Kate Bush, but there you go. Some of the tracks feature piano work that sounds very much like that of Bowie collaborator Mike Garson. That’s because the pianist on those tracks is, in fact, Mike Garson.

6. ‘Armchairs’ by Andrew Bird (from his Armchair Apocrypha album) is like Jeff Buckley without the posthumous hyperbole. We went to see Andrew Bird in 2006, but I must have been in a bad mood, ‘cos I hated the gig but later found I loved the album. It must have been all that whistling he did. Oh, and his good looks and air of sophistication. That tends to make me angry when it occurs in people who aren’t me.

7. I should probably mention ‘Doomsday Clock’ from the Smashing Pumpkins album Zeitgeist, mainly because it’s one of the few tracks I can listen to from the album without wanting to completely renounce my adolescent adulation of Billy Corgan and set fire to my ‘Starla’ / spaceboy t-shirt (if I still had it). This track, the opener, does add a new sonic dimension to the usual Pumpkins bombast. The first single ‘Tarantula’ was an interesting curio, but otherwise the album seemed meaningless and, well, kind of irrelevant. I do hope it attracts a new generation of Pumpkins fans: that’s clearly the intention. (Siamese Dream, played loud, still kicks several varieties of bottom.)

8. The new Spoon album Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga wasn’t the balltearer I was hoping it’d be. ‘Don’t You Evah’ is probably the most successful track; it has a ‘You Can’t Touch This’ / ‘Superfreak’ bassline and cheesy handclaps, yet it sounds as cool as anything else Spoon have ever done. When I do the sums, though, I think I still prefer Gimme Fiction. (Oh, and I may have forgotten a Ga or two.)

9. ‘They Call it Love?’ by Pikelet, from her eponymous debut, is just really really cute. And Australian. I haven’t heard a lot of new Australian stuff this year, mainly because I haven’t listened to the radio much or gone to gigs. The whole album is great.

10. Finally, the new Ween album, La Cucaracha, while not in the same league as Chocolate & Cheese or The Mollusc, still has some of the ol’ Ween magic. ‘Blue Balloon’ is cute and catchy, and could be the theme to a children’s TV series about, um, a blue balloon. ‘My Own Bare Hands’, however, would be in no way suitable as the theme for a children’s TV series — unless you consider a hard rock, point by point description of an adolescent, masturbatory fantasy to be appropriate children’s televisual fare. Ween often parody cock-rock misogyny; ‘My Own Bare Hands’ has Gene Ween screaming that he’s going to give the object of his lust ‘a Masters degree in FUCKIN’ ME’. It rhymes, and it’s funny (though I suspect those who don’t appreciate the parody may agree only that it rhymes).

As an aside, in the absence of a full series of the Ricky Gervais podcast this year, I spent many many hours listening to Tony Martin, Ed Kavalee and Richard Marsland’s ‘Get This’ podcast, compiled from segments of their afternoon show on the Nickleback Network Triple M. Normally I wouldn’t touch MMM with multiple, lashed-together bargepoles, but I quickly became addicted to ‘Get This’, if only to get the latest on Rex ‘This is dizzy stuff, folks’ Hunt and his ongoing battle with the thugs from the scallop industry. ‘Get This’ — which was apparently one of MMM’s highest rating shows (certainly its geekiest) — was axed toward the end of the year for not being mediocre enough.