Various Artists, "Pop Ambient 2009" (2009, Kompakt)

It looks like being a good year for ambient music. New records from Tim Hecker and Mountains are on their way, and the latest from William Basinski is gently washing my brain as I type this. Also, if you haven't got a-hold of Metamorfrozen's Antarctica yet, do it! First, it's amazing, and second, it's free. No excuses.

I also spent much of January listening to Nah und Fern, the compilatory re-release boxset from Wolfgang Voight, a.k.a. Gas, who - when he wasn't creating some of the finest minimal/ambient soundscaping ever to flit ominously in the gaps between ghostly - co-founded Kompakt records. And Kompakt are responsible for the Pop Ambient compilation series, and here comes their very latest, neatly finishing up the paragraph.

Kompakt's artist roster is just ridiculously brilliant - current favourites are Pluxus and the mighty Field - and so Pop Ambient (the less techno-centric cousin of Kompakt's much-lauded Total series) is bursting with quality. It's literally all good, and if you've got any interest at all in ambience, or soundscaping, or avant-garde classical, or minimal techno, or microhouse, or, well, just really beautiful noises in really beautiful arrangements, then you need this record. And so I'm not going to go into the songs themselves.

What I am going to go into is just how much fun this record is. You don't normally associate ambient music with sheer fun: any genre that's oft-derided as 'not real music' will probably feel the need to turn something of a po-face to the non-believers. Add to that the oddity of an ambient compilation, in a genre that traditionally plays the long game, building atmosphere through gentle shifts in tone and texture.

And yet it works! It turns out you can write pop songs without verse, without chorus, without vocals, without anything except the wonderful world of ambience to play with. Utterly delicious.

Sylvain Chauveau, "Nuage III"

Klimek, "True Enemies and False Friends"

A Silver Mt. Zion, 'There's a River in the Valley Made of Melting Snow'

Download mp3 | Full lyrics

And the river never made it to the lake / So the lake surrendered to the mountain / And the mountain's heart did fucking break / At the sight of your nervous hands

Hazy melancholia unwinds over sparse chimes; This silver mountain reverie takes us to a hidden valley, away from the war (which war? Every war), peopled with the shades and the shadows of the noble and lost. 

Like all great sad political songs, it is elliptical in its politics, and all the more powerful for it. The song is simultaneously rueful reflection on and poetic celebration of the power of love: the love for the human ("your hips on mine make a choir") and the love for the vision ("to live our life without out leaders"). The struggle is not a matter of the need to blacken the sky with flags. It's the struggle to be human, to be free to live and love.

But that was then. "Where once we were some clumsy army / Now we are just lazy hens". The forces have been scattered and the cause, for now, is lost. But there is no escaping, for this is an instinct, a compulsion. The sight of the hands of his lover can cause the very mountain to cleave in two and shelter the convalescents while they lick their wounds; the power of the struggle will drag them back into the fray.

I think I'll quit to the valley / Until the light moves me again ... / So let's link arms / Brothers and sisters / And let's promise not to retreat

There are songs that will tell you that it is better to die on your feet than live on your knees; are those that assure you that it's better to have loved and lost than to never have loved at all. This song tell you that the very struggle for life is the struggle for love, and you can never lose while there is breath on your body. There will always be a valley in the mountains, and the cool grass and clean water will restore your spirit.

We all heart Gedge!

David Gedge is a man of many talents. There's the great song-titles: "Why Are You Being So Reasonable Now?"; "Everyone Thinks He Looks Daft"; "What Did Your Last Servant Die Of?". There's a delicate yet brutal turn of phrase when picking over the minutiae of a relationship: To see it all in some drunken kiss / A stranger's hand on my favourite dress.

Then there's the unerring ear for great guitar sounds is another: listen to the distortion crunching in on "Dalliance" (okay, there's Steve Albini on the mixing desk, but still), or the sweep of "Superman". The understated capacity for whimsy - a single a month for a year! An album of Ukrainian folk songs! - and the sheer devotion to a simple formula: that rock music should be a bloke with a guitar singing songs about women, and nothing else.

But he also has that happy knack of picking the right songs to cover. The Weddoes destroyed "(Come Up And See Me) Make Me Smile" by taking the overweening smugness of Steve Harley's original and shredding it with ludicrous guitars, unconfined joy, and comedy false endings. Cinerama's version of the Smiths' "London" is also amazing, though sadly I can't find a link.

And then there's mu current ALL-TIME FAVOURITE COVER EVER: The Wedding Present do Take That's "Back for Good". Utterly, utterly brilliant.

What the internet was designed for ...

Every location mentioned in a Half Man Half Biscuit song plotted on GoogleMaps. Marvellous.

Mary Hampton, "My Mother's Children" (2008, Navigator Records)

You are loved / Because you're young.

Mary Hampton is the perfect antidote to this ghastly wave of micro-Korg wielding fembots that have marched their wonky fringes and opportunity-shopped frames to the very gates of Jericho. A dark and raw anti-folkstress, the record is loaded with plaintive meditations on love and death, draped in an aura of shining menace. Her sweet, sharp voice - with that slightly awkward diction practically required in this post-Ys landscape - only makes the whole thing more affecting.

And oh, the 'cellos on "The Bell That They Gave You" are colossal and terrifying, and the violins on the bitter "Honey" squeal and shriek, and the accordion on "Exeunt" swells and swells until it fills your eyes. It takes courage and skill to be this bleak without lapsing into cynicism or cheap bitchery, and she's nailed that Newsomesque trick of sounding - lyrically - like centuries ago and the day after tomorrow: Oh if I had a faithful heart / It might get broke / But I can slip any lovers' yoke.

The standout track is the secret closer, a lo-fi torch song to some dear departed: This world is full of stiffs who need to laugh until they cry / And everyone's a critic 'cos they're too afraid to try. Like Nina Nastasia (whose benign presence hangs all over this record), Mary Hampton has mastered the knack of making the simplest of songs, of arrangements, of lyrical turns, overflow with a witchy beauty.

I drank the honey / To the very last drop / I was thirsty for love, my love / And I didn't stop.

Lists are my hot hot sex, part 2 // END OF YEAR REVIEW!

Aloha y'all.

So that was 2008. Musically, I had a great time. For me, this year was all about finding new stuff: while a couple of old favourites were a little disappointing (Mogwai and Okkervil River: must try harder), there was plenty of shiny virgin territory to conquer.

And in celebration, I geeked out. I thought: Make one list of all the albums you've heard properly; that is, have heard enough to form a valid critical judgement on. Then mark them out of 100. Three times. Then take an average, and you have your definitive year, hopefully free of such prejudice as comes from 'my mood right now' or 'what I just listened to' or 'I'm drunk' or whatever.

So without further ado, here is the definitive top ten of 2008, as decided by me.

01. Shearwater, Rook

02. Cut Copy, In Ghost Colours

03. Fleet Foxes, Fleet Foxes

04. TV on the Radio, Dear Science

05. HEALTH, HEALTH//DISCO

06. Fuck Buttons, Street Horrrsing

07. Why?, Alopecia

08. Pluxus, Solid State

09. 2562, Aerial

10. Elbow, The Seldom-Seen Kid

Other honourable mentions go to to the reissue of Otis Redding's Blue and the Gas boxset Nah und Fern: two titanic re-releases that still sound fresh and brilliant.

Disappointment of the year was Bon Iver's For Emma, Forever Ago. I'd love to love this record for the back-story alone: jilted lover retreats to woodland cabin armed with guitar and laptop and pain. But all the mythos in the world won't help if your songs are bobbins.

Gig of the year was Why? at Cargo. I cried and danced and laughed. 

Songs of the year: "The Healer" by Erykah Badu; "Poison Dart" by the Bug with Warrior Queen; "Hearts of Fire" by Cut Copy; "Dancing Choose" by TV on the Radio; "To Fix the Gash in your Head" by A Place to Bury Strangers; and "Cuffs" by Zeigeist.

And that's that! Roll on 2009 ...

x

Punk: Attitude

Watch this film.

Talking heads documentaries live or die by the quality of the chit-chat. You can have the best topic in the world, you can buy the rights to all manner of archive footage, but if you've got nothing to say, you're going to end up with Stuart Maconie. Nobody loves 1994 that much.

But when you get it right, ah: Punk: Attitude is bloody brilliant. It helps that the cast include Henry Rollins, Glenn Branca, Thurston Moore, Wayne Kramer, Siouxsie Sioux, three-fifths of the New York Dolls, Jim Jarmusch, Captain Sensible, Chrissie Hynde.... But what Don Letts does is picks and balances the commentary perfectly. I'm sure it would be tempting to include the faintly amusing ramblings of some people who - let's face it - are fucking heroes, but Letts keeps everyone short and sharp and on topic, and it's much the better for that.

The archive footage is great, obviously (though more than four seconds of Sonic Youth doing "Drunken Butterfly" would be nice). But the interesting thing is watching the conflicting versions of the punk narrative come together. It was fascinating to see the mixture of puzzlement and amusement that the lumiaries of the first wave of American punk had for Malcolm MacLaren and the fashion side of UK punk: guys, they rip their clothes on purpose! And seeing Chrissie Hynde suddenly rip into Nancy Spungen was a genuine 'did she just say that?' moment. 

But it's Henry Rollins who steals the show: angry and insightful and very, very funny, there's more "punk" in his East Coast chatter than in a thousand safety pins. That, I think, is why it's subtitled Attitude. I'm sure there's a film - probably an interesting one - waiting to be made about punk fashion, but this isn't it. This is about the music, and the attitude, and the way of life, which sounds cheesy and sort of is, in a cute way. It's not perfect and it's not comprehensive; I will accept that not every musical film has to have Nick Cave in it, but they could have found space for the Saints and the Australian scene in general. But no mind. What's there is by turns funny and interesting and just a little bit inspirational.