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.

10 Songs I Love Right Now - 23/12/08

The Cribs - Fairer Sex

This song is a Cribs B-side, and though I might be hearing the uninitiated screaming, how could the B-sides be any more underproduced than the albums?!, they manage it and it makes them even better. The raw, well-played guitar, especially in the soft chorus section, just knocks me out. On top of this, could Gary sound any more vulnerable with those lyrics and that voice?

Dirty Pretty Things - Deadwood

The little guitar solo that appears a few times in this song is an absolutely perfect thing to wake you up and cheer you up. With Dirty Pretty Things playing their last ever gig a few days ago in London, I felt it necessary to put a DPT track in here, and Hell, this is a VERY good track. It's hyper, well-written and you can't tell me it's not about a certain Mr Doherty in concept at least.

Sonic Youth - Reena

From the most recent of twenty albums (!), Rather Ripped, Reena floats along, carried by a brilliant dizzy riff and ambiguous lyrics about a new 'friend' who showed the breathy singer how to 'live in the end'. It's very beautiful, and it hits a chord with the dreamer in me. It is a very pretty, uplifting track.

Idlewild - No Emotion

No Emotion is a gorgeously melancholy and melodic track which you can play when you're happy or sad, because it spans such a huge range of emotions. The lyrics and some of the melodies are quite sad, but the playing is exuberant and aggressive and the vocals are often quite uplifting. Competing to get in here as well was In Competition for the Worst Time which is a brilliant song containing the lyric "In competition for the worst first line I could use in conversation for the first time". The internal rhymes in there are genius. ;)

Janis Joplin - Down on Me

This has to be one of the most uplifting of Janis Joplin's tracks. The version I've got is a live one, and that she could pull off that skill in her singing live quite bemuses me. It helps that the pretty conventional 60's backing with raucous guitars and jazzy bass is brilliantly played too.

Radiohead - Subterranean Homesick Alien

While the progressive giddiness of Paranoid Android is the most startlingly enthralling on OK Computer, I have recently been very impressed with this track. It's soft guitar entrance is just the most wonderful thing, and is followed by a witty but rather sad description of what humans would be like from the opinion of an alien (Think the Savage from Brave New World seeing humanity after he's let loose).

Robin Williamson - Black is the Colour

Suddenly this harp-endowed love song holds more meaning for me. I think you have to relate to love songs, but even if you don't, this masterpiece of harp playing and beautiful story about a lost love makes lovely listening. He was in The Incredible String Band...remember? Hmmm, maybe not.

Sonic Youth - Rats

I have been obsessed with this song for about 2 weeks. It's dark, sultry intro with cross-rhythms and raw guitar distortion sends a shiver down my spine. Then when the vocals enter, deep, angry and saying the most wonderfully paradoxical lyrics, I am just lost. I showed my friend and she said it was amazing how he managed to sound so hurt. "If you're ever feeling low down in the fractured sunshine, I'll help you feel the noise" is a very very atmospheric lyric indeed. In fact, 'atmospheric' sums up the song.

The Specials - Little Bitch

Ska passed me by a bit, probably because I wasn't born. This track sums up The Specials so simply - you can hear rock in the intro and then it breaks into goodtime reggae. It's also a great angry and mocking track; the chords in the intro are great, and then the nasty lyrics and shouting of 'ONE TWO!' and of course 'I know you know you're just a little bitch!' make the song.

Suede - Can't Get Enough

This sounds like a lost Britney track: you know, the one which all the rockers secretly like but won't admit to it, dance around the bedroom to but turn it off when their parents come up the stairs. The best thing is that you don't have to turn it off because it's under the guise of being a nineties Britpop track. Get that hairbrush and start spinning round that room.

Thanks for reading...and please do have a little look at the songs, they are all very good. Have a great Christmas if you celebrate it, a great New Year too. Consume too much alcohol and listen to too much music - too loud. ;)

10 Songs I Love Right Now - 1/11/08

The Animals - I'm Gonna Change the World

This track was very ahead of its time in the late 60s with the lyrics "No more black or white, no more left or right". It is all most identical in tune to It's My Life, though the sentiment is slightly different. The main idea is 'I have a thinking mind, I know how to make the world better, I'm going to change it.' and it's very uplifting even if it was written in a different society to today's. It's My Life is just as uplifting, if a little more teenage and angry.

Babyshambles - Carry On Up The Morning

Perhaps Pete Doherty has had a hard time of it recently in that he is persistently getting judged for his extra activities outside of his job as Britain's most poetic songwriter of the present day. Listening to this song, you stop caring what he does in his free time, it is such a good song. Containing the immortal line "In the morning where does all the pain go? Same place the fame goes - straight to your head", and other great lines, it is an enthralling song with a truly moving melody.

Biffy Clyro - Muckquaikerjawbreaker

Oh the glory of this track. Half of it is just experimental guitar work, but it has some bits in it which are very powerful. The lyrics are the usual Biffy-type lyrics - abstract and linked to some relationship somewhere, but they are nice and the melodies are lovely. I thank thekillingspree very much for sending me this free. Thank you.

Franz Ferdinand - 40'

This song has a great catchy riff as an intro, which immediately gets your foot tapping, and then it launches into edgy, quirky Franz brilliance. My interpretation of the lyrics is that someone is standing at the top of a cliff deciding whether to jump or not ("looking down, looking down, down down again, oh 40 feet remain"). It's melancholy, the words and the harmonies, but I think it's rather endearing.

Larrikin Love - On Sussex Downs

The lyrics to this song are all about some strange trip to Sussex where the singer took off all his clothes and played in the long grass of the fields joyfully. It's postively pagan, I love it. The idea of being a wild creature one day and then tied to routine the next is both uplifting and miserable. The best thing about the track is its sheer energy and ability to get you smiling; also found in the song about frustrated transexuals - Six Queens.

Kaiser Chiefs - Half The Truth

Half The Truth is so fun. I have gone off Chiefs a little recently, and although there is still a little bit of my heart wedged firmly between the steps of Billy's Bar's front porch (Elland Road) and thinking of February 2007 makes me smile, I'm not a huge fan of the new album. But this track is so so energetic, and it reminds me of Elland Road so much that I had to like it.

The Libertines - Vertigo

Piercing through the over-produced manufactured indie which was topping charts at the time, the first track from the first Libertines album was a great introduction to the amazement to come. Starting with a slightly unsettling guitar riff with absolutely no polish on it, it builds into a really down-to-Earth nearly-love song with out-of-tune vocal harmonies and almost-sexual lyrics. Hell, it deserves all those dashes.

Muse - Sober

There always has to be room for a Muse track in favourite track lists. Muse tracks are life-affirming. This one is a slightly angry and miserable personal attack on the one remaining person the singer loves, and how they 'turn on' him. It's all a bit dramatic, but hey, that's what we love about Muse, isn't it? And it's just brilliant musically, which helps.

The Specials - Enjoy Yourself (It's Later Than You Think)

This is amazing. It's old, yes, it's a bit cheesy, yes, but how uplifting is it? It contains the title line 'Enjoy Yourself, It's Later Than You Think' which has to be one of the most fun and irresponsible statements they could have made, and the ska backing music with all the instruments and voices is so entertaining, so fun. Surrender, you know you want to.

The Libertines - The Good Old Days

I'm a sucker for a good romantic story, and this, along with Can't Stand Me Now and What Became Of The Likely Lads? soundtracks the very romantic tale of the Libs' ups and downs. The chorus has some very poetic lyrics and it all sounds a bit melancholy, an emotion I relate to very much; I like it a lot.

It's funny how many more I could find in just over a month. I listen to too much music.