Music Banter

So the moment finally arrives. Throngs gather. The clamour of nations grows silent. And across the land all music-loving folk wait.

But unfortunately, they’ll have to wait for a new Radiohead album a little bit longer. In the mean time, here’s my top album of the Noughties. Once again, it’s a choice which I’m sure will astound and repulse in equal measure, and leave most people who read this scratching their heads and going ‘who?’

So, my top album of the years 2000-2009 is Tom Mcrae’s ‘Just Like Blood.’

It’s the second album from the acoustic singer-songwriter, and is a marked progression from the pared-down grace of the first. Mcrae started off as your bog-standard one-man-and-his-guitar outfit, and whilst his debut had been remarkable, dark, and intimate, ‘Just like Blood’ was a step forward. The first song, ‘A Day Like Today’ starts with what sounds like a marimba or a thumb-piano, picking out a repeating melody that switches round as the drums kick in, and a strange, eerie sound that I think is a guitar starts to resound like an unhappy ghost before Tom whispers ‘Welcome back/says the voice on the radio/but I never left/I was always right here,’ which is one of my favourite lyrics of all time. It’s a good illustration of what he does well lyrically, addressing his audience directly, and noting the strangeness of life, and the things people do. You can tell it’s part of his plan- this is the first song on the album, deliberately so. The song stands up in its own right- a desparate, wailing hymn to obsessive love- but it’s also a very deliberate entrance point to the album.

In the same way, the last song, ‘Human remains’ is directly addressing the listener. ‘You’re looking away/looking for what’s next’ which is exactly what the average listener is looking- going through their CD collection, wondering what to listen to next. As a way of directly addressing the listener, it’s remarkably effective. This song about wading through the ashes of a relationship is suddenly being sung directly to you, involving you, making you feel like you’re the target of his anguish.

The rest of the album is fantastic, too- ‘Stronger than Dirt’ is a fantastic account of that feeling you have when you’re walking through tragedy, concentrating on just putting one foot in front of the other, knowing that somehow you’ll survive. ‘When the dust has cleared/I will still be here/will you?’ he sings, and as he does so, the song resolves into a blissed-out peace, the kind of zen acceptance that comes over you when you know that you’re about to split up with someone and soon things will be easier. The album is full of little touches like this, where the music and the theme reflect each other perfectly, and augment each other.

It’s ‘Stronger than Dirt’ which is emblematic of the whole album- the rest is about dreams dying, crumbling expectations and the terrible sad knowledge that love is slipping away. On that one song (and perhaps to a lesser extent on another, ‘Ghost of a Shark’) you see the way out, and the way onward.

Tom Mcrae went on. He’s made other, slightly happier albums since, but none which quite hit the mark in the way this one did. It may be a classic heartbreak album, and he’s certainly not the first person to plough this lyrical furrow, but on this album, he does it with a steely-eyed grace and unique artistry which is all his own.

So onwards we trot, merrily chuntering along into the cold and the snow. Nippy out, eh?

Never mind, there’s always number two of my lists of the best albums of the Noughties. I should say that most people probably won’t agree with this choice. It might be said I’m being wilfully obscurist, or trying to seem cool by picking something alternative and weird. Well, screw you. This is a personal list, and sometimes that’s just the way it is.

My second album is M83′s ‘Before the Dawn Heals Us’

Some albums are uniquely tied to a certain time of life, a certain mood and a certain place. To listen to them after a long time has passed can take you back there, can make you feel like you once did, for better or worse.

When I hear this album, I remember walking into an HMV one day, and hearing a sound like galaxies unfolding playing over the tannoy. I was in the throes of a long and not particularly pleasant battle with insomnia, where my days were often spent in a sort of half-asleep fugue, and my nights were long, solitary stretches of exhaustion and restless thoughts. I lived in the middle of a city, but right next to a park and late at night sometimes I would go there, and walk through the trees, staring at the lights of towerblocks, feeling like the only person alive in the world, but knowing that in each of those glowing, sparkling towers slept a thousand people or more, so many lives all unfolding together, all across the city, all across the world. I felt a curious stillness, and a sense of the great stifling weight of humanity, in all its bustle and energy. I felt apart from all of life, an observer of the world rather than a participant.

And when I heard this album, I found music that sounded like that feeling.

That’s all you need to know. No descriptions of the music are necessary or indeed possible. Go get hold of this album now. Listen to it in the darkness, when sleep no longer comes. Then you’ll understand.

My god, it’s cold out there. It’s like the norse Fimbulwinter, the legendary time when three winters came at once, and the Gods died. Ice covered everything, and even the trees themselves withered and died, leaving nought but a basted and empty wilderness, cold, barren and dead.

Still, never mind, eh? Chin up. Stop snivelling, you’re not out in the cold, you’re inside looking at a computer, the reassuring hum of central heating chuntering onwards, keeping you from having to do any REAL work to keep warm.

Now, sit back, and pop this album on. This is an album which changed the game, showed that bands really didn’t need a record company, promotion and all of that bullshit. If they were famous already, that is.

This album is Radiohead’s ‘In Rainbows.’

Yes, yes, I know, the last one I did was a Radiohead album, but you know what? Get to fuck. This is how the list turned out, and it was compiled through a highly scientific process whereby I scribbled down the best albums I could definitively remember as having come from the Noughties (a distressingly hard task, for a thirty-one year-old with all his faculties still supposedly intact) and then agonised pointlessly for what felt like an eternity over the order I should rank them. And this is just about right.

First off, ‘In Rainbows’ was an Event, not just an album. It was announced that not only did Radiohead have a new album out, you weren’t going to be able to buy it in shops, which is fine because no-one buys music in shops any more, except the confused, the old, and the mentally ill. What was especially exciting, however, was that there wasn’t a set price. You could pay what you want for it. It became a talking point- how much do you think this album’s worth? Me, I was busy experiencing an intensely traumatic breakup with a psychotic Courtney-Love-a-like, and was a bit distracted, so I just got a mate to burn me a CD. HA! In your face, Thom Yorke! I WIN! I WIN!

Anyway, I could talk about the ramifications of this for the music industry, but frankly life’s too short and everyone else has done that already. What matters in the end is the music, always has done.

And ‘In Rainbows’ is a wonderful album. It’s also Radiohead’s most upbeat. Thom Yorke sounds almost content. Almost. On ‘Nude’ he warns you ‘Don’t get any big ideas/they’re not going to happen/you’ll go to hell for what your dirty mind is thinking.’

My fiancé tells me that it’s about the point in your relationship where you get bored and consider adultery, but I think she’s just trying keep me in my place. Relationship politics aside, ‘Nude’ is a wonderful song, possessed of a sort of medicated, drifting grace that recalls ‘No Surprises’ but is somehow more at peace with himself. It’s almost as if Thom’s found that a Pretty House with a Pretty Garden is actually quite a comfortable place to live, and has reined his expectations for life in a bit. Taken together, those two Radiohead songs are a demonstration of the maturation process that every over-sensitive and ambitious young adult goes through, from wanting the world, to accepting that if you just have a piece of it, and that you can make you and your loved ones happy within it, you’ll be a lot happier.

‘All I need’ is the same thing- a slow, calm meditation on contentment, an acceptance of one’s own turbulent nature, and the fact that sometimes you settle for what is enough. ‘I only stick with you/because there are no others’ is delivered as a romantic line, but god knows what Yorke’s girlfriend thinks of it. Still, never mind, next second he’s telling her ‘You’re all I need/I’m in the middle of your picture.’ He also describes himself as ‘a moth/who wants to share your light/just an insect trying to get out of the night.’ It’s a little clingy, a little frantic, but somehow, it’s all calm. The song ends with the alternating chant of ‘It’s all wrong/it’s all right’ which, for Thom Yorke, is as close to ‘Shiny Happy People’ as I suspect he’ll ever get.

Still, Valentine’s day must be a hoot round the Yorke household. I picture an endless sequence, year after year, of his girflriend opening Valentines cards with endlessly disturbing protestations of frantic, angst-tinged love which reassure and disturb in equal measure, occasionally daubed in blood. Woman must have the patience of a saint.

Imagine that, actually, a range of mass-produced cards using the lyrics of Thom Yorke’s songs as their special romantic message. Ironic hipsters would disembowel each other to get hold of those. Finally, I shall be rich with this scheme!

Lyrics aside, the band as a whole are playing fantastically well on this record. Radiohead have loosened up in recent years, playing faster, more groove-led songs. Witness the wonderful shimmering arpeggios of ‘Weird Fishes’ which sounds like the waves, like water flowing, and the musicians are prefectly in sync, crafting mood as much as song.

My favourite on this album for that is ‘Reckoner,’ a sweeping, orchestral kind of take on Massive Attack’s ‘Unfinished Sympathy.’ It’s lovely, sweeping, and delicious, and Phil Selway’s playing is fantastic, echoey and full of bounce and atmosphere. Anyone who doesn’t think drums are a proper instrument should listen to that song and think again. Over it all, Thom croons- yes, croons!- ‘you are not to blame’ like he’s absolving you of all your sins.

The whole album is like this, and I think that’s the reason for the muted reception it got critically- people don’t really expect Radiohead to sound so blissed out. Well, they are and they were, and this is lovely. So there.