Merry Christmas

Best underdog love song I've heard today. Happy Christmas, mélomen!

Some more samplers

So! I'm finally back from university - I was not as distracted from music as I expected (in fact, music distracted me from the prolonged suffering of essay-writing) but I've not really had the chance to blog it much, so here goes. I've been listening to:

1) Belle and Sebastian

I finally got round to buying The Boy with the Arab Strap, an album which was conspicuously missing from my B&S collection, and yes, it does deserve the acclaim. It's as subtle as Tigermilk but the songs are possibly a bit catchier. 'Simple Things' is the song that really stands out for me for now - it's a disappointingly short track, but for its grand 1 minute 46, it's dreamy. The simple melody can pass you by on first listen, but there's an undercurrent (or overtone, haven't worked out which) of incredible melancholy, hinted at in the slightly off-kilter strum at exactly 0:56 on the video below, and in the lines

If you want me, I'll be there

A boy to deal with all your problems,

But part of the deal

Is for you to feel something.

The way the melody and timing hit that 'feel something' suggests a bitterness, a darkness below the sweet melody that Belle and Sebastian are so perfect at capturing. I've loved this song, along with the album's title track, for weeks, and as I expected, the whole album hasn't stopped improving, even though it wasn't as invigorating as The Life Pursuit on first play.

2) PJ Harvey

Another icon that I've found late in the game. A few years ago, I borrowed White Chalk from a library, which I still revive sometimes when I'm a little sad or tired, but I'd never happened across her slightly harder rock before. I found Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea in HMV for £3, almost as much of a success as finding Conor Oberst's new release in the same sale. It's a great album, if you haven't found it yet. Highlights for me are 'Big Exit', the opener (on which Harvey sometimes sounds so like Kim Gordon that I forget who I'm listening to), 'This Wicked Tongue' and the atmospheric 'Beautiful Feeling'. The opening line of 'Beautiful Feeling' and Thom Yorke's ghostly moans kept me company on a late-night train ride - "sometimes I can see for miles" - chasing me into a lovely warm feeling of significance. Occasionally her lyrics let her down, in my opinion - 'This is Love' would be great, for instance, if it weren't for the stilted "I can't believe life's so complex, when I just wanna sit here and watch you undress!" that begins it, which really isn't powerful enough to be yell-sung the way it is. Still, I know you wanna see her doing her best Rolling Stones strut.

3) Mother Mother

Why? You're asking. Why do you only give us music we've heard before? Well, I'm sorry. I write this as I find things, not as they come out. I always think it's really disappointing that most blogs and sites are always about new music, or old classics - it leaves gems buried, where they don't deserve to be, and airs all today's decaying carbon. However, sometimes, I do post about something new - and this is one band around at the moment that I love. Mother Mother have a new album out this year, their fourth studio production, and it is a natural progression from the last, Eureka!, one of the two albums I ever gave 9/10 on The 405. Whilst it hasn't quite grabbed me like Eureka! did, The Sticks is still great - I just had sky-high expectations. It's still rock-pop, still less insightful than anything self-proclaimed 'artists' would like to put out, but it's also catchy and stylish, perfectly constructed to get you dancing and grinning. If you don't like the song below, I encourage you to listen to 'Dread in my Heart', which is very different, a lot less pop-rocky, but also characteristic Mother Mother. 'The Sticks' is a good example of their darker tracks, more along the lines of 'Oleander' or 'Born in a Flash' on their last album. I hope they tour in the UK at some point.

4) Rodrigo y Gabriela

And now for something completely different! My lovely partner sent me some albums in the post from Aberdeen, one of which was a gorgeous recent record by Rodrigo y Gabriela and C.U.B.A. - it's a stunningly-played album on which the virtuoso musicians try their hand at a ridiculous range of genres. Semi-Latin piece 'Logos' is goddamn beautiful, but for a more intense listen, try album-opener 'Santo Domingo' with its crazy catch-me-if-you-can guitar. For a taste of the Cuban in C.U.B.A., however, I'm going to post wonderful 'Juan Loco', which sounds like some magical clash between James Bond and the PC game 'Tropico'.

That's all for now, folks. Keep tuned in though. This year's been great for music, for me and for the wider world.

More Conor Oberst

Just an update - I am now writing for the music section of the Oxford Student newspaper, so if you ever manage to get your hands on a copy, or fancy clicking here, you can see me in 'print'! It's almost certainly irrelevant to you because you've probably happened across this page by unfortunate accident... however, the topic's quite fun: are music awards still relevant? Do music awards have any legitimate gravity in the indie and rock world? Hear me thrash my editor at the link above. Plug over.

I didn't only start this post purely to link you to more of me - I intended only to post this awesome video. I found this album for £3 in the HMV sale in Oxford today. Pretty cool.

Desaparecidos are back!

10 years ago, Conor Oberst and pals formed a band called Desaparecidos for one passionate, political album. They then gracefully retired into their respective projects, Oberst having said all he had to say at the time about the ridiculousness of fashion, destructive 'progress', materialism and the lie of the American dream. Oberst has always been fairly political, standing up for the rights of Mexicans in the southern states recently, and publicly supporting Obama in the last election.

Now, the band affectionately termed Desa are back, because let's face it, things haven't got much better. New track 'MariKKKopa' was inspired by the comments of Sheriff Joe Arpaio, who recently said it was 'an honour' to be compared to the KKK because it 'means you're doing something'. I have to say, if anything were to inspire me to get a political band together, ridiculous comments like that in my home nation would definitely help. The song, below, is a return to form - straight back in with the angry vocals, speaking through the voice of an all-American racist.

They've also released another track, 'Backsell', which has more ambiguous lyrics but seems to be about the shallowness and cruelty of the fame industries in the US. It's a great reinvigoration - good political music is quite difficult to find at the moment; there's been no great political musical movement in a while. Indie folk mostly wants to tell us about itself, pop wants to tell us about its lovers, rap wants to tell us about its sex life, emo and post-punk want to tell us about their break-ups and kick-ass parties, and screamo... who the Hell knows what that wants to tell us? Hearing new and revived bands making a stand will always be heart-warming to anyone with a revolutionary bone in them.

Lee Ranaldo Free Downloads and Streaming

A while ago, I think I posted the video for 'Off the Wall', Lee Ranaldo's new single. The former Sonic Youth 'super-cool' guitarist has released a show on good quality MP3 files, recorded live from New York recently. I downloaded it speculatively and after a couple of listens, immediately went out and bought the album - though in retrospect, while both are insanely good, the live show has captured the atmosphere perfectly, and so some of the tracks (particularly 'Hammer Blows') are enriched by the gig feel, and are possibly even better than the album versions. Have a look, it's free!

Download the MP3s here

Glitters Like Gold

Ah, The Cribs. Anyone who's ever been a few pages back on this blog knows of my obsession with the Wakefield punk rockers, and I have to say, unlike some of my other musical passions, my love for this band has remained constant for years. The Cribs are brothers who've been playing under that name since 2001 - their 11-year career has spawned 5 albums so far, each different to the one before, but all sharing the common features that their cult following loves - an underlying punk ethos, idiosyncratic guitars and the edgy, slightly off-key vocals of the twin Jarmans, Ryan and Gary.

The Cribs haven't made many concessions to the modern music industry. There have been no American accents, no fashion labels giving out lanyards at gigs, no abandonment of the bands they professed to love in their teens. Thanks to The Libertines and The Strokes, the early noughties was a good time for The Cribs to launch, as that wave of indie was decidedly in vogue - but they rejected the scene that had adopted them, denouncing the sexism in the lad-rock around them and writing the cutting tracks 'Hey Scenesters' and 'Mirror Kissers' to slate the very people that shouted their lyrics at gigs.

The slightly derisive edge didn't seem to hurt the fans' feelings though - the hipsters probably didn't regard themselves as such anyway. The Cribs were gathering momentum just as that indie scene melted away in around 2008 to make way for singer-songwriters and electro-indie of the sort peddled by Friendly Fires, White Lies and their compatriots. The Cribs released what was probably their most well-known album, Men's Needs, Women's Needs, Whatever during the final throes of this scene, making an unexpected splash with the track 'Men's Needs', an enigmatic attack on misogyny. They'd signed to a bigger label and got Franz Ferdinand's Alex Kapranos in to do the production, but their third album still didn't concede much to pop - the uncompromisingly angry 'Our Bovine Public' is as seething as anything on The New Fellas, and the musicianship was getting increasingly adept, Ryan's lead guitar in particular (though it had been incredibly raw in the first two albums, admittedly).

After this success, The Cribs took on another member - Johnny Marr of The Smiths, one of their principal influences. I still think this was a match made in heaven, though they got some inevitable stick from some of the fans; I saw them live for the first, second and third time during Marr's tours with the band, and enjoyed every performance - he fit right in. I felt that the addition of a second guitar enriched the atmosphere of Ignore the Ignorant too. Though the anti-Marr feeling was oddly strong, I think they came through it unscathed. Tracks like 'We Share the Same Skies', 'Emasculate Me' and 'Save Your Secrets' are as worth listening to as anything of theirs, and much more skilful than early tracks like 'The Watch Trick', which have a certain raw appeal but sound like a load of teenagers messing about with a 4-track by comparison. That's almost certainly what they were.

In the Belly of the Brazen Bull, their newest album, is the one they always wanted to make - through the thick feedback and fuzziness, you can hear Comet Gain, Sonic Youth, The Smiths - all those bands they've loved throughout their career. It may have a Smithsy touch, but Marr departed from the band this year, because - well, who knows? Marr's a musical nomad at the moment anyway, probably scared of commitment after his embittered marriage to Morrissey. The Cribs are a trio once more, and album number five gives two fingers to expectation, in that it's managed to keep the ground-roots style, but it's also got technique and cryptic but profound lyrics, and it still made it into the top ten, even without Marr.

Here's a video of them performing 'Glitters Like Gold', their new single, for Radio 1. I like this version because the vocals are more pronounced than on the recording, and it's organic - they were made to be a live band.

Beautiful Voices

So far this summer, it's been all about beautiful voices. Beautiful for different reasons, but beautiful all the same. I happened across the tunes I am about to recommend for different reasons - the first at several clubs, the second during an iconic romcom I am too ashamed to name, not being a romcom girl, and the third by random chance in the HMV sale.

Arctic Monkeys

There's something compellingly naughty about Arctic Monkeys, even when they're not talking about little books of sex tips - something disobedient and free, even when they're being musically tame. It's got something to do with Alex Turner's voice. The richness of it against the unrelentingly Northern dialect is appealing - he can play with how much of his accent goes into his vocal line, and unlike most indie artists of the same sort, he has the technical skill to mess with the melody. 'R U Mine', Arctic Monkeys' most recent single, is a return to form for the lads. At clubs, it stands out as miles ahead of most other new tracks in that it balances simplicity with perfect production and well-judged instrumentation; it has the raw energy of their first album, but they've grown into a wilder beast since then. The video is laddish but entertaining - they're still arrogant teenagers at heart, and I suppose that's how people love them.

Marvin Gaye

He's quite a jump from Alex Turner, but variety is the spice of life - Marvin Gaye has also been making many an appearance on my iPod playlists recently. Alright, I'll tell you, it was Bridget Jones - the placement of 'Ain't No Mountain High Enough' in that film is epic, in spite of the... y'know, the rest of that film. Gaye's voice alongside that of Tammy Terrell is perfect; it's a real summer song, empowering and perfected by their lovely, smooth vocals. The video for this always cheers me up - they look so content, so relaxed. Voices like these don't need fancy footage to rack up 21,000,000 views.

On the widget below, I've also added 'I Heard It Through the Grapevine' - the Slits cover is brilliant in its own way, but this surpasses it - and 'Sunny', a song my mum used to listen to when I was a child. I heard it again at a cinema, in the pre-show music, and it was so eerily familiar that I had to look it up. Turns out it's a great upbeat song.

Joan Armatrading

The last of my artists is Joan Armatrading - the wonderful 20th century star whose CD I happened upon by chance in HMV the other day. I knew of her so I thought I'd give it a try, and I struck gold. She has moments of brilliance, dipping in and out of genres. The first on the widget below is 'Opportunity', my current favourite, a bluesy number about underhanded dealing. A lot faster and funkier is 'Show Some Emotion', with which Armatrading had a hit a few decades ago. 'Like Fire' showcases some of her raw talent on the guitar - she plays with rhythmic techniques and still manages to sing over the top. As a struggling beginner, I have respect for anyone that can do that. Finally, I've put one of her slower numbers on, 'Tall in the Saddle', mostly for its first lines, and how insanely gorgeous they are against their syrupy backdrop. It breaks down a bit when she starts singing "We had fun fun fun fun", I always think the word 'fun' makes things more S Club than jazz club, but hey, she didn't know about the 90s when she wrote that line.