Extreme Listening Mode!

So, you’ll be getting gift vouchers soon, and you are going to want to spend them before the chain goes into administration or the pound is rendered virtually worthless. That seems fair. But what to buy? You have commentators actually telling you to buy Kasabian’s album in end-of-year polls. Has 2009 really been so bad? No, of course not. Here are 10 albums which will improve your life.

Girls – Album

You want a little backstory with your bands? Girls frontman Christopher Owens grew up in the Children of God cult. His older brother died as a baby because the cult didn’t believe in medical attention. His dad walked out. He and his mother lived around the world, and the cult sometimes forced his mother to prostitute herself.

So how is this album? It’s utterly fucked in the head, of course.

It’s an album about girls, about how they break your heart and how they always will, because even if they are not already bitches, men are mostly bastards and turn them that way. On songs such as ‘Laura’, Owens voice – a thing possessed of an almost wretched beauty, in a nasally way – scatters heartbreak and black soul all over the place. If the Jesus and Mary Chain were the Velvet Underground playing Beach Boys songs, then this is the surf boys trying ‘Sweet Jane’. And it’s a stormer.

Yeah Yeah Yeahs – It’s Blitz

Some things are so consistently brilliant that you begin to take them for granted. And in the case of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, it seems people greet their releases with a salutary ‘ah well, another great Yeah Yeah Yeahs album’ while lauding less reliable artists for occasionally coming up with something worth a listen.

It’s Blitz is another thumpingly good collection of sewer-disco, violent art-rock and is so sexy it’s like being waterboarded by 60s Bardot. ‘Heads Will Roll’ and ‘Zero’ are the picks, but there really isn’t much here you wouldn’t want to take home for a fiddle. A hugely underrated band.

Slow Club – Yeah So?

Sometimes quiet little gems slip out unnoticed. Such it was with Sheffield boy/girl combo Slow Club and their debut Yeah So? Unlike many a young British band, they appear to have a bit of respect for more than one period of music history, so we saw touches of soul, blues, rockabilly combine with their folk roots for a sweet marriage of honeyed vocals and cute-if-twee lyrics.

Obvious comparisons were made with Belle & Sebastian, but Slow Club seem less ponderous and much more prepared to barge a tune into the room head-first. ‘It Doesn’t Have to Be Beautiful’ tells you all you need to know – lovely, hummable and insistent, it’s a good benchmark of a promising start. Oh, and it pisses all over Mumford and Sons.

Fanfarlo – Reservoir

Amongst the things from the 80s which have recently been appropriated by a new generation – okay then, pinched – Mike Scott’s ‘big music’ has been one of the most welcome things to visit (or re-visit, depending on your age.) Sure, the Arcade Fire may be seen as creating it entirely from scratch, but adding a violin and a big drum to rock music…well, there’s a template.

One always seems to mention someone else when talking about Fanfarlo, which is always a danger with Swedish bands. But fair play, Reservoir is a corker. ‘The Walls are Coming Down’ is a good place to start – dreamy, large and lovely, it creates a wonderful, twinkly background. Try charging down a winter street with ‘Harold T Wilkins’ in your ear…you’ll think you are in a Tim Burton movie. It’s big and it’s beautiful.

Port O’Brien – Threadbare

Port O’Brien had threatened a really fine album over the course of their early work and duly delivered with Threadbare. Folksy has become the catch-all word for anything with an acoustic guitar these days, but there is something a million miles away from Slow Club here. Dreamy, elegiac yet often punchy, it was the album which should have garnered the attention the Low Anthem’s ‘Oh, Charlie Darwin…’ did.

‘Love Me Through’ was the closest it came to a single, but there is a lot to love in the layered intelligence of tracks such as ‘High Without Hope’. Like the best American music, it wasn’t scared to open its heart without 15 types of ironic detachment. Lovely.

Jeffrey Lewis and the Junkyard – ‘Em Are I

He’s mental! Yes, but he’s also brilliant. The most eclectic rock album of the year, Lewis and band swung from the 1977 Ramones-pop of ‘Slogans’ to the psychedelic-jazz wigout of ‘The Upside-Down Cross’ without sounding like it was all a willful attempt at gaining style points.

Lewis live shows remain awesome, and the suspicion lingers that if he flukes onto that one hit soundtrack he’ll start gaining the audience numbers to give him a chance to really fuck with the mainstream. Let’s hope so. In the meantime, keeping the quality this high marks him out as one of the genuinely left-field artists you can never miss.

Phantom Band – Checkmate Savage

Scotland is a land which lives on a strange tension. Nasty and nice always seem to be in perpetual argument without either winning. It’s a friendly place where people will happily punch a stranger because they happen to be wearing the wrong colour of football top. Scottish bands have always had the happy knack of making the difficult beautiful. We invented whisky yet lead the world in Buckfast sales. Our architecture is stunning yet we seem intent on building a modern housing landscape out of Lego.

So it is with the Phantom Band, whose headfucking mix of Krautrock, space-rock and melancholia should have resulted in something virtually unlistenable. It didn’t though. In another world ‘The Howling’ would be as much an indie disco classic as ‘Parklife’. ‘Islands’ was a wonderful thing, lilting and beautiful and, yes, haunting. The Phantom Band are your favourite new band; you just don’t know it yet.

Voluntary Butler Scheme –At Breakfast, Lunch and Dinner

A charming one-man band, Rob Jones distils the pastoral beauty of songwriters such as Robyn Hitchcock then mixes it with the sublime pop skills of Girls Aloud to produce something so English you want to offer it a cup of tea and a spanking.
This album came in two parts – the wonderful 45s of ‘Tabasco Sole’ and ‘Multiplayer’ and something more dreamy and ambitious, like the nursery rhyme-like ‘Night Driver’. Jones hasn’t found a market yet; he will. And he really has to be seen to be believed live.

Phoenix – Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix

There’s a condition called synesthesia where senses get mixed up. It primarily manifests itself in seeing colours when you hear music. I’m sure having it is simply awful, but I’d still love a shot. Until then, the nearest I am going to get will be Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix.

This is a bright, orgasmic rush of colours. From opener ‘Lisztomania’ its clear all bets are off when it comes to rules. Everything goes, and the result is a head-spinning mélange of tunes which seem to arrive from all angles at you. You’ll have heard ‘1901’ by now – the BBC have Hoppipolla’d it – but tracks like ‘Countdown’ will show you there is more to Phoenix than one classic single.

Richmond Fontaine – We Used to Think the Freeway Sounded Like A River

It’s been a slow couple of years in alt.country. The middle of the decade had seen a high water mark in terms of interest and albums seemed to abound. But Americana seemed to be going more towards folk as in Seeger than Sweetheart of the Rodeo. How nice to be reminded how great it can be with this from the mighty Richmond Fontaine.

Lyrically, this album is brutal – at one point, a protagonist drunkenly fucks a single mum with her children in the room – but musically it added several welcome shades of colour to the previously monochrome Fontaine palette. ‘You Can Move Back Here’ will remind you whey you love odd men with guitars.

So, was 2009 a vintage year? History will judge. But those ten won’t be out of date in 2019.