Albums Of The Year

[alexsarll]

I can't be faffed with all these lists of the decade which are doing the rounds - not least because I haven't been keeping an ongoing list through the decade, so I'd end up with some sort of half-remembered mess I'd be regretting within the week. But this I do every year, and keep a running tally for, and justify because I know it's got a couple of friends into a few great records over the years and really, how much more than that can any of us hope to accomplish with our LJs?

1. The Liberty of Norton Folgate - Madness
2. Wonders Never Cease - Mr Solo
3. It's Not Me, It's You - Lily Allen
4. Truelove's Gutter - Richard Hawley
5. London - Philip Jeays
6. You've Created A Monster - Brontosaurus Chorus
7. Art Brut vs Satan
8. Dark Young Hearts - frYars
9. Let's Change The World With Music - Prefab Sprout
10. Found Wanting - Rob Britton
11. The Bachelor - Patrick Wolf
12. Primary Colours - The Horrors
13. The Sound-Board Breathes - Gyratory System
14. The Seduction of Ingmar Bergman - Sparks
15. Someday All This Could Be Yours (Pt 1) - The Paper Chase
16. The Glare - McAlmont & Nyman
17. God Help The Girl - Stuart Murdoch et al
18. The Duckworth Lewis Method
19. Liebe Ist Fur Alle Da - Rammstein
20. The Fame Monster - Lady Gaga
21. Islands - The Mary Onettes
22. Journal For Plague Lovers - Manic Street Preachers
23. Through The Devil Softly - Hope Sandoval & the Warm Inventions
24. Until The Earth Begins To Part - Broken Records
25. Forget The Night Ahead - The Twilight Sad
26. Hombre Lobo - Eels
27. Slow Attack - Brett Anderson
28. The Life Of The World To Come - The Mountain Goats
29. 21st Century Man/Achtung Mutha - Luke Haines
30. The Hazards of Love - The Decemberists
31. Fight My Battles For Me - Pagan Wanderer Lu
32. Twitter Tracks - The Streets
33. The Yellow Mini - Jonny Cola & the A-Grades
34. Kicks - 1990s
35. We Used To Think The Freeway Sounded Like A River - Richmond Fontaine
36. Pram Town - Darren Hayman & the Secondary Modern
37. The Performance - Shirley Bassey
38. The Resistance - Muse
39. Begone Dull Care - Junior Boys
40. Sometimes I Wish We Were An Eagle - Bill Callahan

But blazes, haven't there been a lot of disappointments? Franz Ferdinand, Pet Shop Boys and Jarvis were among those who made a brave effort to work with new production teams who ought to have produced the goods, but they all came a cropper by so doing, Morrissey, Depeche Mode, Eminem and Marilyn Manson, meanwhile, were among those content to churn out more of the same old same old - especially disappointing in Manson's case, when the preceding Eat Me Drink Me had been the first sign of any new direction in his work for years. And Springsteen...well, for someone so blue collar he's never really been reliable, but this year's album was still one of his more leaden efforts, and in the theme from The Wrestler contained quite possibly his worst song ever. I don't think he's lost it, you understand - there have been bad albums from him before, and will be again, but always interspersed with greatness.
Nor, I thought, was there really a Song Of The Year, something ubiquitous and inarguable, not even a covert Johnny Boy-style one within certain circles. I would ask whether I missed it, but the nature of a 'Get Ur Freak On' or 'Can't Get You Out Of My Head' or 'Umbrella' is that it's unmissable right through at least the summer, and then as the nights close in, as nostalgia for summer, however bad that summer was. I suppose the closest this year came would be the offerings from Cheryl Cole, Lady Gaga and La Roux - but I stumble on not having actually liked any of them, in spite of the first two at least being things which on paper should have been right up my street. Or at least, that was how I felt until Gaga's deluxe reissue of the album which had failed to impress me turned out in fact to be another, better album, trailed with 'Bad Romance', and suddenly she had the material to match the concept, and just as the year stuttered to a close, suddenly it had its anthem. It doesn't normally work this way but then, isn't it a song about precisely that?

Comments

[p-dan-tic.livejournal.com]

well it's not an album per se, it's the songs from a musical, which loose something without a visual accompinyment, but apparently this doesn't affect barry's decisions........

oh wait.....

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

Haven't seen the opera. Was initially exposed to The Lonely Island track, as with most other tracks of theirs, via Youtube. Like I already said, it's subjective. One's experience of a song has a lot to do with how you first encounter it, something I know you appreciate given the biographical vignettes which accompany a lot of your December MP3 posts.

[p-dan-tic.livejournal.com]

one's experience of a song, yes.... but that's like saying "the best food I ever tasted was at that kebab shop, because that is when I first saw my one true love"

i.e. the experience is the best, but that doesn't mean the food is..... you need to be able to separate your experience from your opinions, or else your top 40 albums of the year will be complete rubbish made by a man who's devalues his own opinion...... oh wait.....

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

Human interaction with art is necessarily subjective and sometimes defined by coincidences. It is not the unmediated reaction of a tabula rasa to a work with one definitive meaning and value. I'd rather produce - or read - a list which acknowledges this than one which loudly (and necessarily falsely) proclaims itself to be OBJECTIVE SCIENCE FACT.

[p-dan-tic.livejournal.com]

so it's the best 40 musical experiences of your year, rather than the best 40 albums of the year...

that's fine, but give it it's proper title

the best art, and therefore the best music, is the one which touches the most people to the biggest degree - see atmophere by joy division for example..... or even hey ya..... or even (to a MUCH lesser degree) on a boat......... if you belive that the best art is the stuff that gets you when you're in the best mood, then I can see why you rate pram town

[p-dan-tic.livejournal.com]

(oh and obviously I'm assuming all art gets exposed to the same amount of people, which it obviously doesn't, but that's not the point I'm trying to make)

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

Even with that addendum, you're assuming that everyone - or a working majority - has 'good taste' (ie, the same tastes as you). Not so. You can play plenty of people Joy Division and be met with boredom or annoyance.

[p-dan-tic.livejournal.com]

yes, but those who do get touched, get touched to such an extent that it rates amoung the best music ever.....

do you see?

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

So people who like the same music as you are by definition assumed to have a greater depth of emotional response? A very handy way to cook the books, and one which been popular from Plato through the Utilitarians to Roger bloody Scruton. But to me it still looks like self-justifying special pleading in a last doomed effort to establish an objectivity which cannot otherwise be shown to exist.

[p-dan-tic.livejournal.com]

errrr no

but atmosphere does something special to people

if you want to avoid accusing me of cooking to books, then use hey ya as an example rather than atmosphere, the point still stands....

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

I've seen people in unashamed public floods of tears to Celine Dion songs. Not people I necessarily want to spend much time with, but I can still see that it's doing to them something very much like what 'Atmosphere' does to my friends. Hence: subjectivity as sine qua non.

[p-dan-tic.livejournal.com]

one song effects one person

one song effects many people

spot the difference

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

These are both cases of one song affecting multiple people.

And, even if someone is the only person on Earth moved by a song, that doesn't make their reaction any less real or valid.

[p-dan-tic.livejournal.com]

if they like pram town by darren hayman and the secondary modern, it really does.......

otherwise you are saying that someone making money noises at emile heskey during a football match, is equally valid as someone ripping the piss out of him for being shit at football.....

your argument is the sort of thing david mantell used to justify his own existance.....

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

Well, no, because 'musical experiences' would also have to cover individual tracks, live moments, instants in a club, particularly good segues by the MP3 player.

"the best art, and therefore the best music, is the one which touches the most people to the biggest degree - see atmophere by joy division for example"
I think by those criteria, a better example would be 'Angels' by Robbie Williams. Certainly it keeps doing well in that sort of poll; I'd wager that more people cry to it in any given year than do to 'Atmosphere'. Even with being so much newer, I bet it's already more than caught up.

[p-dan-tic.livejournal.com]

see my point about the number of people art reaches.... otherwise your thing about human interaction is unweldy

anyway here's the thing..... if you were doing a list of over produced pop songs written by reasonably tallenless wankers released in the 90s, then angels would honestly be pretty near my number one, maybe actually at my number one.... it is actually a very good song.... which kinda proves my point

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

Clearly I wrote that before you added the PS.

I like some Robbie Williams, and even so, I never had that much time for 'Angels'. It's one of those songs which feels overplayed from the first time you hear it.

[p-dan-tic.livejournal.com]

well it was never going to get *everybody* to like it, now was it......