A veritable plethora of tunes to pick through this week – tunes that, by rights, you should already have been spinning…
1. Lower Dens – To Die In L.A.
2. Isobel Campbell – How Deep Is Your Love (Bee Gees cover)
3. Akron/Family – Everyone Is Guilty
4. Los Angeles Police Department – Insecurity
5. Gal Pals – Here’s To The Gals
6. Rye Pines – Pessimist
7. Seratones – Chokin’ On Your Spit
8. Evans The Death – Enabler
9. Colleen Green – TV
10. Drenge – We Can Do What We Want
Plenty to enjoy today as our videos come from boisterous up and coming indie-rockers Catfish & The Bottlemen, the punked-up raw country of Shovels & Rope, and the fuzzed up psychedelia and krautrock from Brilliant Beast.
We also have the refined, vintage pop of Sweet Gum Tree featuring MM fave Isobel Campbell, and lastly the dark pop and grandiose hooks of Dinosaur Bones.
So we have 200+ songs marked for potential posting sat patiently waiting in our in-box, and a whole host more diligently collected from the nooks and crannies of the web. Time then for a round-up of some of the most deserving of your ears.
Without further ado, lets set out our stall with Aussie troubadour Owls of the Swamp’s beautiful and sweetly sorrowful Happiness Is A Sad Song.
.
Aisha Burns, is the violinist for the Austin band Balmorhea, but on her debut full-length Life In The Midwater (the deep, dark layer of the ocean that flows far below the surface, just above what we call the deep sea) she reveals herself to possess a voice of pure, crystalline beauty and power that grips from the very first note. Listen to Sold.
[Click through for free download]
.
Miesha & The Spanks are altogether more primal, Please Don’t Blow comes from forthcoming album Girls Like Wolves and sounds like the bastard lovechild of Joan Jett and L7.
.
Troubadour Devon Sproule returns with a new body of collaborative work with Mike O’ Neill of Canadian indie band, Inbreds. They will release their new album Colours via Tin Angel Records on 23th September. This is the easy going, country tinged You Can’t Help It.
.
Reuben Hollebon’s new single Faces is available for free download, and mixes quivering, falsetto vocals with delicate, but tense guitar – file somewhere between Bon Iver and The Savages!
.
Frankie Rose returns with a new album Herein Wild next month, but in advance of that here she is giving an icy, 80s new-wavish treatment to cartoon punk rockers The Damned’sStreet Of Dreams.
.
The Eversons effervescent indie-pop is at full throttle on the irreverent and summery Creepy from their new three track single of the same name.
.
Classic college-rockers Throwing Muses are back with a new album – their first in ten years, and Sleepwalking 1 sounds like they’ve never been away.
.
Cate Le Bon is one of the more interesting and individual singer songwriters around, and this duet titled I Think I Knew with Perfume Genius from her new album Mug Museum is unusually fragile and undeniably lovely.
.
And sticking with duets, Brooklyn based Kevin Devine will shortly release not one, but two albums Bubblegum and Bulldozer (both out on 14th October). From Bulldozer comes this track For Eugene also featuring none other than longstanding MM fave Isobel Campbell on vocal duties.
.
Yoofs have a new single For Her, a note perfect exercise in beguiling, jangly indie that is tinged with just the right amount of sorrowful resignation.
.
And lastly (for now) we have the brilliant first single, After The Flood, from Lil Daggers’ new EP No Pizza No Peace – reverby guitars sprawl under an umbrella of barely restrained menace.
After another clumsy week in which thankfully no animals or children were hurt in the making of, I have managed to emerge unscathed physically, but sadly not so the bank balance…
A lovely visit from nephew Harry is restorative and exhausting in equal measures. Exhausting managing four sprats, an over-affectionate hound, two cats (one that should be six feet under and not still crapping in my vegetables), three snakes (easy peasy), a rabbit seemingly made from Kryptonite, and work, dammit. Dammit, I’m going to be in trouble… late, late, late.
H, daughter sprat and I took a trip to the local market town so that H could make a memories box. I can’t imagine having anything so huge to process emotionally at the tender age of 12 than losing a parent. To watch him painstakingly make this box, and ask me how to make sure he could write Dad perfectly straight, and that the heart he wrote underneath Dad would be good enough was well… and yes sweetie, it’s absolutely perfect, just like you.
I have a memories box of my own, filled with almost all the ticket stubs of gigs I’ve been to over the years, special cards, trinkets, photos – you know the score. Some things become more special with time. But I know what this week has made me realise: even when your heart feels worn out, worn down, and emptied, someone else can just fill it up with a look, a gesture, a few well chosen words, or like Harry, a need. And I remember what my own Dad said to me many years ago, in a household where praise of any kind was hard won, and finally, I think I can accept the compliment.
Age has not yet withered this fragile heart.
Mrs Mackerel x
Music for the soul: the sublime vocals of Alynda Lee Segarra with Hurray For the Riff Raff and I Know You. And another favourite: Isobel Campbell and Mark Lanegan (Mackerel royalty) Honey Child What Can I Do?
Download Hurray For The Riff Raff – I Know You mp3 (from Young Blood Blues)
So after much deliberation, head scratching, discussion, and more head scratching, we have MM’s favourite albums of 2010. And we choose our words very carefully here, because we would not presume them to be the best, only those that have given us the most pleasure and enjoyment, records that we have returned to again and again, and for whatever reason have captured a moment or special place in our hearts.
And while we have limited our selection to 25 albums there were many, many more that could have, and maybe should have, featured. But there that’s the beauty of music, entirely subjective and based on individual opinions not fact.
So without further ado, here are our 25 favourite albums of 2010.
25 Sharon Van Etten – Epic
Haunting, ethereal and stunning album from a modern day siren. Sad prairie folk music indeed.
The son of the peerless Steve Earle comes of age with a perfectly judged set of tales that in their honesty and unashamed frankness are worthy of Townes himself.
Listen to Harlem River Blues.
a
21 Titus Andronicus – The Monitor
With repeated listens the sheer power and passion of The Monitor becomes overwhelming. So what if it is a concept album about the American Civil War, its ambitious, rebellious, and rousing. Just play it loud!
Another perfectly judged record from the perfectly matched duo. Campbell’s lovely whispering tones offset by Mr Lanagan’s threatening growl.
Listen to Snake Song.
a
19 Lower Dens – Twin Hand Movement
An album of dreamy, unsettling rock melded with freak-folk to provide one of the year’s most unusual and most rewarding listens. At times it sounds like an evil Beach House and at others spare and caustic where hope is slowly, but firmly drowned in a swirling, atmospheric mix of twinkling guitars and alluring voices.
In the vein of the much lauded and genuinely good Tame Impala, Tweak Bird were louder, faster, and simply rocked harder. A superb mix of motorcycle rock riffs with dirty fingernail blues and even a hint of jazz. This was stoner rock for the 21st century and it was brilliant.
In Christ Jesus from the Black Dirt Sessions, Deer Tick delivered one of the truly primal and affecting moments of musical recording in 2010, and the rest of the album wasn’t half bad either.
Indie rock with a country inflection, Delta Spirit packed History From Below full of dusty, rural Americana and bar room blues boogie. With the impassioned and distinctive voice of Matt Vasquez backed by a rumbling juggernaut of percussion and rhythms, the album was a welcome addition to the long tradition of classic American rock.
Indie gods manage to live up to, and then surpass the hype with The Suburbs, an album full of outstanding tracks that demand they be listened to as a whole – a proper music album.
Watch Ready To Start.
12 Band Of Horses – Infinite Arms
Despite some occasional iffy AOR moments, Infinite Arms was like the girl with the curl, and when it was good (which it mostly was), it was brilliant.
Watch Laredo.
11 Black Keys – Brothers
Authentic blues duo cranked out their best yet and in tracks like Sinister Kid and Howlin’ For You added some more classic cuts to their catalogue.
Watch Tighten Up.
10 Laura Marling – I Speak Because I Can
Showcasing her incredible natural talent despite such tender years, I Speak Because I Can truly marked Laura Marling out as a worthy heiress to Joni, Emmy Lou and the like. Darker, stronger, and more confident than her debut, she is surely poised for great things.
Watch Rambling Man.
9 Liars – Sisterworld
A brilliant collection of crushing guitars, machine gun percussion and soaring vocals that retained its experimental art-noise edge but became much more accessible and much more listenable – welcome to the big league time?
Listen to the superb Proud Evolution.
a
8 The National – High Violet
Overcoming the music blogger’s ‘big band’ prejudice with ease, High Violet was bigger, better and more affecting than anything the National have done to date.
Listen to Conversation 16.
a
7 Strand Of Oaks – Pope Killdragon
Having caught our attention with their wonderful Springsteen cover on Hear Ya, Strand of Oaks more than lived up to our expectations with Pope Killdragon. Sparse folk tunes mixed with occasional and abstract guitar wigouts and also showcased Tim Showalter’s ability to grab the attention with some of the best lyrical couplets of the year. Stand out track Alex Kona a case in point, starting “Alex Kona was twelve feet tall, his mother was killed by a bowling ball” – what’s not to like?
Spare, beautiful, mournful and melancholic, the fragile folk of Mathew Sawyer hid whiplash lyrics and biting black humour that revealed and revelled in a bittersweet world where daydreams and nightmares fought to the death for supremacy.
Backwards-looking it maybe, but that’s to miss the point of Black Mountain. This was an album bursting with rock riffs that were so good you thought they must have been invented in the classic age of rock, and in Let Spirits Ride, the band provided the headbanging anthem of the year.
Another wonderful record of rousing, country infused tunes. Each listen revealed more of its anthemic charms and spirited, rugged rock on an album full of top notch tunes from start to finish.
Watch Shadow People.
3 Blitzen Trapper – Destroyer Of The Void
A brilliant and worthy follow-up to the exceptional Furr, and in songs like The Man Who Would Speak True, Blitzen Trapper showed they had worthy successors to classics like Black River Killer and the like. Full of prog-folk, dusty rural ballads, sci-fi synths and more, Destroyer of the Void was a stunning record.
After the sublime To Willie tribute last year came the originals. From the loose, ramshackle rock of It’s Hard to Be Humble (When You’re From Alabama) to cowboy ballads, transcendental homages, and the climactic, Neil Young like, epic album closer L.A.
Despite Wither Thous Goest, Cretin only receiving an initially limited release, and despite it being overshadowed by the subsequent release of (the also excellent) The Death Seat on Michael Gira’s label, Wooden Wand delivered an album of stunning simplicity, in equal parts poignant, heartbreaking, and redemptive.
With lyrics that are the match of any songwriter we know (“He had just enough rope in his trunk to make her nervous”) allied to sparse, plucked folk on the one hand and footstomping barnyard rhythms on the other, there is not a wasted moment, nor a false step on the entire album.
