I absorbed more music this year than in any year since, let me think, probably the golden years of 1987-1988, the time before Punk Broke, before Adrienne appeared, before my father died and a lot of things went pear-shaped for a long, long time. Those were the days when I was young, single, earning money, and thanks to Maria, Bart, Darren, Doctor Jim, and others I was able to furiously indulge a passion for seven-inch singles, fanzines, and mail-order catalogues from the USA.
[sigh]
Now, of course, thanks to the miracles of the Internet, one no longer needs huge amounts of money to spread one’s musical wings far and wide. We are living in a geek’s paradise. Which is, as a geek might say, Way Cool. The interesting thing, though, is that contrary to what the music “industry” would have you believe, those of us who actually care about music are not in any way transferring our acquisition programme from the legal to the free and illicit. If I am any guide to anything, the situation is actually quite the reverse: not only am I listening to more music than I have in a long while, I am also expanding my collection of actual, bought CDs at a somewhat alarming rate. (There is, obviously, a wider and more significant debate to be had in this area of discourse, but this is not the place to have it. I am one, possibly not representative, case study. Heck, I’m just this guy. But: example: downloaded Kate Bush’s “Aerial”; listened, twice, astounded; bought it within a week. If not for having downloaded it first, I can’t imagine that I would have bought it at all. Which would have been both my loss and EMI’s. Have I done something wrong here? Not unequivocally no, but also not unequivocally yes, either.)
But I digress. Again.
What music pushed the right buttons this year?
Not all of it came out in 2005, but most of the following is at least fairly recent. Without doubt, the most important release of 2005, and surely the one that I will still be listening to when I’m 61, is “Aerial”. Like “Tour De France Soundtracks” a couple of years back, it is the record we didn’t dare imagine we would ever see, much less hope that it would be as good as it is. I haven’t followed Kate closely since “Hounds of Love”. There is much about the new record that situates it as that one’s spiritual successor. Anyone who carries “Hounds” close to their heart has a duty to immediately acquire “Aerial”.
Beyond that, there has been much goodness floating around. Records by The Juan Maclean, Lindstrom & Prins Thomas, Vitalic, and Superpitcher have all rekindled my long dormant interest in electronic music, last seen in 1982. This year’s Black Dice record demonstrates the usefulness of noise. Tom Waits’s “Real Gone” is getting under my skin the way every Tom Waits record does: slowly but inexorably. “Margarine Eclipse”, atypically for a Stereolab album, has taken a while to work its charms, but work them it has. (Thanks are due to Jon Dale - link at right - for his perceptive write-up of this record in his belated 2004 roundup, without which it may still be in the too-hard basket.) Whereas the ’Lab’s “Oscillons of the Anti-Sun” and “ABC Music” collections adequately satisfy a Stereolab obsessive’s obsession. Meanwhile there is much beauty in Antony and the Johnsons’ “I Am A Bird Now” and The Arcade Fire’s “Funeral”. Also, I finally stumbled upon “Frozen Orange” by David Kilgour, and the unexpected "Stand By" EP from Martin Phillipps’s reconstituted Chills. (And if I had found the new discs by the Bats and Cakekitchen (if the latter even exists) I have no doubt they would be mentioned herein, too.) Not to mention Beck’s “Guero”, which was treated with inexplicable indifference by the press, The Fall’s mammoth Peel Sessions collection, and of course the double live Kraftwerk set, “Minimum/Maximum”, which I don’t play as much as I should but which is an indispensible artifact of an indispensible group.
Well, that’s quite a lot, really, when you think about it.
But the Record of the Year? Without doubt [drumroll] it has to be “Tender Buttons” by Broadcast. Where “The Ha Ha Sound” was cold and distant [editor’s note - this is not for a minute to suggest that “The Ha Ha Sound” is not a work of greatness], “Tender Buttons” is warm and welcoming. Everything about it shows a pair of musicians in full creative flight. The use of a drum machine, forced on them by no longer having a real drummer, is actually an inspired touch. “Michael A Grammar” features a gorgeous four-note descending guitar line that would not have been out of place on either of the last two Sonic Youth albums, while the title song carries the distinction of giving Adrienne the opportunity, for only the second time in her life, to say the words “this sounds like the Velvet Underground”. (And on both occasions she was spot on.)
I can’t really say why I would choose “Tender Buttons” ahead of “Aerial”, given that the latter is the more important release (and probably even the best record of the last 12 years). But it’s my party, and I won’t cry if I don’t want to.
