10 Songs I Love Right Now - 6/07/09

Blur - Caravan

Caravan wasn't the standout song when I first heard Think Tank: Crazy Beat and Brothers and Sisters were my instant favourites, but Caravan is a grower and I've had it on repeat lately. Beautiful simplistic melodies gently chug along over sprinklings of keyboard, and typically eloquent Damon Albarn lyrics sung in a heavy, faraway voice make this song perfect for drifting away into.

Sucioperro - Liquids

The recent Sucioperro album, Pain Agency, is a proper experimental rock album, pulling out the stops on instrumental skill and raw emotion. Liquids is the opener and it has it all: riffs that Sucioperro will be offered serious money for by whoever makes Guitar Hero, angsty lyrics, little quiet sections with really weird guitar runs in, a melodic section at the end, aggressive drumming. Played back to back with Conception Territory's strange cowbell solos, you're going to go on some serious trip.

Ali M Forbes - Under Her Sails

So, Envy & Other Sins split up this week, to the great disappointment of their fans, who are a lot more sympathetic than their ex-record company. Ali's first demo is this song, as yet unreleased, but a lovely ditty with xylophone and acoustic instruments. It's pretty. Hear it here.

Sonic Youth - Walking Blue

I was always a fan of Lee Ranaldo from Sonic Youth, and I tend to love his songs best on their recent albums. He writes intense lyrics and sings them in rich, deep tones. This song is the same, with gorgeous percussion (I think it's a metal thing you scrape?) and nice chord progressions. Also a fan of What We Know, similar, but driven more by bass.

Stiff Little Fingers - Doesn't Make it All Right

Laid-back punk-ska track, made good by the fiddly bass part and the vocals - anti-prejudice lyrics are sung with a mixture of anger, disdain and exasperation, until it builds up into a percussion-and-mantra-powered punk song at the end.

Dirty Pretty Things - The Weekenders

A Dirty Pretty Things B-side, this track is just a daft Didz Hammond-ish retelling of the end of a relationship ("I showed you nearly all my heart and you showed me the door"), but it's done with nice guitar parts and upbeat chords. And Carl Barât's voice in the chorus is delicious. But that's just a given.

Blur - Popscene

It's deservedly on their new getting-back-together-and-making-a-lot-of-cash CD, Midlife, deservedly because it's a fantastically mad track, padded out with a brass section. This track is credited with giving birth to Britpop. It's certainly a lot of fun, I'll give it that.

The Coral - Who's Gonna Find Me

The Coral are fantastic at vocal harmonies, and that's what I love about this track: that and the slightly Hawaiian slides on the guitar. Pretty simple in structure and lyrics, this track is nothing to get excited about, really, but it's the sound of (a slightly angsty) summer and I'm temporarily addicted to it.

Yeti - Till The Weekend Comes

My favourite from 2008 album The Legend Of Yeti Gonzales so far, Till the Weekend Comes is a relaxed and slightly melancholy pop tune. Four-part harmonies and a day off: it's about as free as I ever feel these days. Don't Go Back To The One You Love is my second favourite, with cinematic lyrics describing some kind of thrilling escapade through the wilds of America, as well as containing Yeti's usual precise harmonies. There's a nomad in his mustang and everything.

The Specials - Ghost Town

The Specials are back together! The Specials! Despite a patchy Glastonbury performance, The Specials are back in full force, most still jumping round that stage, Terry Hall still staring intently into the crowd with an intimidating expression on his face. This song doesn't need justifying. It's fucking ace.

Leave me a comment if you'd like, if you agree or disagree with the above. Always open to debate.

'Duke Pandemonium', Marmaduke Duke

Marmaduke Duke is the side project of Simon Neil from Biffy Clyro (The Atmosphere) and J P Reid from Sucioperro (The Dragon), and their first album The Magnificent Duke was a mad conceptual screamo-meets-noise-rock 18-track explosion of sound. Even if you decided to give up trying to dissect the album for its various 'concepts', it was a musical masterpiece which left you feeling bemused, emotionally tired and mildly enlightened.

On first listening, Duke Pandemonium could have been made by a different band to The Magnificent Duke. It is electronic synth-and-drum-machine-based pop, but it's amazing. I listened to it first on the bus, finding it hard to control my shocked facial expressions, especially in the breathtaking, muted soaring guitars in Erotic Robotic, and during the very weird Skin The Mofo Alive, in which there is every type of percussion you can dream of, including tropical drums and...spoons? I can definitely hear pots and pans being hit elsewhere. Tracks like Skin The Mofo Alive border on parody, though what it would be a parody of, I do not know; this is by no means a bad thing. In fact, it's genius.

This is what side projects should be like. In Plato's world of ideals, this would be the archetypal side project. It's exciting, always changing; all of the Biffy and Sucioperro ideas that were just too daft or mad to use have been rolled together to make this, and skilfully. Highlights include the seven minute extravaganza Pandemonium, sexy and lyrically amusing Erotic Robotic, and the ridiculous but sublime Je Suis Un Funky Homme. Anything here could be a dancefloor classic, but each track deserves more listening to that.

Have I ever heard anything like it before? No way. Is it too daft? Maybe for some. Do I like daft music? Hell yeah. Marmaduke put the 'mental' back into experimental.

9/10

10 Songs I Love Right Now - 3/02/09

Franz Ferdinand - The Fallen

This is a great one to kick off with. The riffs in this song are turbo-charged, and there are loads of them. Besides this, the great lyrics: "So they say you're a troubled boy, just because you like to destroy all the things that bring the idiots joy, but what's wrong with a little destruction?" And it has a la la section! No pop rock song can be complete without a la la hook. Oh, this song - how can it not give you an angry high?

Sonic Youth - Dirty Boots

This song takes a while to get going, starting with those sultry chords and characteristic raw guitar noise, and then the brittle vocals, atmospheric and unsettling. It's repetitive and absolutely mesmerising. It builds up half way through, until suddenly it rocks out into this maddeningly irresistable chant of "You got your dirty boots!" over the backing and then fades out into soft, gentle strumming. Heaven.

The Clash - The Guns of Brixton

I couldn't decide whether to include this or London Calling, but everyone knows London Calling, so I decided to put this in instead. It's dark and it was so new when they released it - this fusion of reggae and rock, with those almost comic sound effects and samples. It captures a moment in time so perfectly; seventies London, down and outs being hunted down by the racist police, taking sides to survive.

Babyshambles - Fuck Forever

Of course, the Babyshambles versus Dirty Pretty Things debate...I'll just add my two pence. Pete had the talent and the poetry, while Carl had the passion and the technical skill, in my opinion, although of course it's more complex than that. Neither follow-up band is good as The Libertines, but Babyshambles are better than Dirty Pretty Things. It's sad to think that the latter are gone now, as they did have something, but not quite the something that Babyshambles have. Take this track, Fuck Forever. He is just a master of choruses, no? This is not to be mistaken for background music; asymmetrical bar layouts, out-of-tune shouting and most of all, great great lyrics.

Blur - London Loves

Parklife gained Blur their fame, though it is a little clean for me. This song is a standout though. The slightly on-edge synths and Damon's mocking, neutral tone. The chorus I especially love about it. The harmonies just work so well, and the way he puns on misery and mystery, and the last line which always trails so poignantly into the next chord sequence...

Sucioperro - The Drop

The Drop is not the best on the album Random Acts of Intimacy in my opinion, but it seems to be the one I'm listening to most. The beautiful guitar playing throughout, and the lovely lyric "The days fall slow, like summer rain" I just want to listen to over and over again. When it breaks down at 2:50 as well, into a softer quieter bit - that's pretty. Very pretty.

Babyshambles - A'Rebours

A'Rebours is a deliciously upbeat track, especially that bassline which comes in at the very start and dominates the rest. I love bands who make liberal use of tambourine. Also here, I know this is cheating, but I'd like to say 8 Dead Boys is worth a nod. It's Hellishly angry, clearly a jibe at former bandmates of Peter Doherty, but the guitar licks are very well-played and the emotion in it is so wonderfully breakable.

The Stranglers - No More Heroes

Yes I've been raiding my mum's CDs again, and yes I liked it. No More Heroes is a synth-punk masterpiece damning idolisation - or is it the words of a dissolute young man who has found all his heroes to be fools? A young man whose heroes have failed him? Of course it is told from a disdainful third person view, making it even more sneeringly great.

The Libertines - Never Never

Is there anything happier than a ditty driven along by typical chords and a metronome? It's one of the little things I can never pin down, why a happy song like this sounds so happy - is it the major chords, the lyrics about friendship, the unusually great singing for Pete Doherty, or the little drum solo at the end? I don't know, but it really is so uplifting, and if you like the Don't Look Back Into the Sun side of the Libs, really check this out. "I'm still lining them up and knocking them down with you." ♥

Levellers - Three Friends

This is my soothing choice - a soft, eerie folk song with a twist, it starts calmly, slowly, with instruments humming and an inverted dialogue of whispering in the background. It's the bass and the fiddle which do it for me: they are at odds, spooky, and give the relatively regular melody of the song a real edge. Looking for a more upbeat, political Levellers song? No? Well I s'pose you should be. See Social Insecurity.

I had the audacity to put way more than 10 song references in there. Oh well. I love all of them. Take a look, as ever, they are all worth a listen or ten. Hope you're having a good 2009 so far, wherever you are.