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.
