The Kiss Me, I've Quit Smoking Festive Fifty!

Shitting crikey, it's...

THE KISS ME, I'VE QUIT SMOKING FESTIVE FIFTY!

This has been a pretty good year for music, all told, and given that I'm the neurotic, compulsive-listmaker type, what better way to see it out than to attempt to channel all of that good music into a handy top 50. The rules are simple - no more than one song per band, singles from 2007 albums are alright, but nothing from reissues.

As for how long it took to get everything into order...well...iTunes helped remind me just how much good stuff came out this year, then it just took a bit of rearranging ("Well I know I don't like that song more than that one..."), so it's worryingly accurate. There are a few things that would have made the final cut, had I had enough time with them (I'm looking at you, Kanye West and Parts & Labor and Chinese Democracy...), but I'd call this a pretty representative...er...representation of my 2008 via the medium of pop music.

Oh, and I really wanted to put "49:00" by Paul Westerberg in there, but it's like...one 45-minute track made up of bits of shorter songs (a bit like a one-track version of Alien Lanes), so it doesn't really fit in here. Suffice to say it's one of the best things I've heard all year, and you'd just be depriving yourself if you don't track it down.

So...yeah, here goes nothing...and if you want a zip file of this nothing, click here. (They aren't going to be in order in the zip file, mind)

1. Los Campesinos! "We Are Beautiful, We Are Doomed"
2. British Sea Power "No Lucifer"
3. Deerhunter "Nothing Ever Happened"
4. Frank Turner "I Knew Prufrock Before He Got Famous"
5. The Lodger "The Good Old Days"
6. The Hold Steady "Constructive Summer"
7. Weezer "The Greatest Man That Ever Lived (Variations on a Shaker Hymn)"
8. Elbow "Grounds for Divorce"
9. Johnny Foreigner "DJs Get Doubts"
10. The Wave Pictures "Strange Fruit for David"
11. Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds "We Call Upon the Author"
12. Frightened Rabbit "Old Old Fashioned"
13. The Long Blondes "The Couples"
14. R.E.M. "Living Well is the Best Revenge"
15. She & Him "Why Do You Let Me Stay Here?"
16. Silver Jews "Strange Victory, Strange Defeat"
17. The Mountain Goats "Lovecraft in Brooklyn"
18. Fosca "Confused and Proud"
19. Juliana Hatfield "The Fact Remains"
20. The Pains of Being Pure at Heart "Everything With You"
21. Marnie Stern "Ruler"
22. Stephen Malkmus and the Jicks "Out of Reaches"
23. Amanda Palmer "The Point of it All"
24. of Montreal "Nonpareil of Favor"
25. Ben Folds "You Don't Know Me (featuring Regina Spektor)"
26. M83 "Graveyard Girl"
27. Ten City Nation "Everyone's a Tourist"
28. Laura Hocking "Loves of a Girl Wrestler"
29. Be Your Own Pet "Becky"
30. Why? "Fatalist Palmistry"
31. Black Mountain "Stay Free"
32. Future of the Left "The Hope That House Built"
33. Hercules and Love Affair "Blind"
34. Wild Beats "The Devil's Crayon"
35. Duffy "Warwick Avenue"
36. Times New Viking "(My Head)"
37. Robert Forster "Pandanus"
38. Dexy "Dying Breed"
39. The Understudies "Flicknives"
40. The Magnetic Fields "California Girls"
41. Kristoffer Ragnstam "Swing That Tambourine"
42. Spiritualized "Death Take Your Fiddle"
43. Girls "Lust for Life"
44. Goldfrapp "A&E"
45. Mark Kozelek "Celebrated Summer"
46. Alphabeat "Fantastic Six"
47. Glasvegas "It's My Own Cheating Heart That Makes Me Cry"
48. Islands "Creeper"
49. Ballboy "Songs for Kylie"
50. Headless Heroes "See My Love"

I think I was overcome by a spontaneous emotion...

Weezer "Miss Sweeney" [taken from the deluxe edition of Weezer (aka: the Red album) - Geffen, 2008]



It's no secret that I think Weezer are one of the best bands in the entire world; yes, their output since 1996 has been patchy, but each album has had its charms. 2001's Weezer (aka: the Green album) was allegedly an attempt to write ten perfect pop songs, none longer than three and a half minutes, all following the same structure. Maladroit, which landed the following year, was less considered, but did feature 'Keep Fishin'', the freshest sounding Weez single since the nineties. The only real dud in their catalogue was the clunky Make Believe, which replaced Rivers Cuomo's idiosyncratic observations and witticisms with catch-all platitudes which, when coupled with Rick Rubin's bland, shiny production, fell flat on its arse.

The band's newest album, another self-titled effort, ranks comfortably with their best; throwing any rules out the window (aside from the catty singles 'Pork & Beans' and 'Troublemaker', written on demand to keep the label happy), there are power-pop sonatas ('Dreamin''), multi-part epics ('The Greatest Man That Ever Lived', as I very briefly blogged about for Young Turks here) and even tracks by other members of the band, the highlight being drummer Pat Wilson's piledriving 'Automatic'.

Miss Sweeney' crops up on the deluxe edition of the album, which contains four extra songs, all of which have some of the most interesting lyrics in the Weezer canon. The song starts off as a minor-key "rap" (in the style of R. Kelly's era-defining Trapped in the Closet), before diving headlong into a classic, crunchy and, above all, cuntstruck Weezer chorus. A paean to unrequited office romance - the boss slipping the secretary declarations of love in between memos - it happens to be the best of any of the tracks released for Weezer. Lord knows why this was left off the album - apparently at the insistence of every member of the band aside from guitarist Brian Bell (who always was the coolest member of the band...).

The abundance of extra tracks scattered across various formats of the record will no doubt have Weezer obsessives creating their own ideal ten-song running orders, but 'Miss Sweeney' is almost certainly one that fans will unite over.

This is shit, that is shit and being shit is great...

Malcolm Middleton - Total Belief
Ignoring all of the hype surrounding his bid for chart glory (last I heard in the midweeks, a disappointing number 26, with a bullet EDIT: a respectable 31), it's easy to forget that Malcolm Middleton is one of the most underrated songwriters of the past few years. The new mini-album Sleight of Heart is a much lower-key affair than the massive-sounding A Brighter Beat, which is a damn good thing; although it was interesting to hear him go that way, it didn't really suit him. Sleight is closer in sound to 2005's Into The Woods, which did the pop thing without being exhausting.

'Total Belief' has been a fixture of Middleton's solo shows for the whole year, and apparently wasn't good enough to make it onto A Brighter Beat (though he probably just couldn't find a way to make it a full band extravaganza with whistles, bells and a children's choir). It's far jauntier than his usual efforts, while the lyrics, as usual, straddle the fine line between candid and stupid. The track's pulled off with too much charm for it to ever lapse into self-parody, which seems to be a talent Malcolm Middleton is extremely good at. How the album will fare following the 'We're All Going To Die' pallava remains to be seen, but this is certainly not going to disappoint the faithful.


The Mountain Goats - Lovecraft In Brooklyn
The Mountain Goats - Source Decay

On top of the Middleton album, I managed to find a promo of the new Mountain Goats album. My theory on the Mountain Goats, at least as far as the newer, 4AD material is concerned, is that they alternate in quality. Tallahassee - great. We Shall All Be Healed - meh. The Sunset Tree - amazing. Get Lonely - alright. They were due another near-classic, and good Christ have they delivered. With Heretic Pride, John Darnielle may have just written his best batch of tunes since All Hail West Texas.

Lovecraft In Brooklyn is the heaviest thing on the album, and probably the heaviest track he's ever penned. It was also the one that struck me the most when I gave the album a cursory listen on the way back from work - the first Mountain Goats song you can dance to...if you aren't too busy listening to the lyrics, that is. Purists may be appalled at how much more produced it is, even than the rest of Darnielle's recent output, but it's nice to hear JD going in a slightly different direction from the introspective musings of Get Lonely. YET another of the first great albums of 2008.

Oh and Malcolm, seeing as you say you still can't get your head around them, let's see if the other track can change your mind. Source Decay is an older track from the boombox days of 2002's album 'All Hail West Texas'.


British Sea Power - No Lucifer
Aside from the absolutely glorious production, the best thing about Do You Like Rock Music?, the album this comes from, is hearing Hamilton (whose shaky, almost-twee delivery underpinned earlier tracks like 'Blackout' and 'The Land Beyond') come completely into his own with his songwriting and vocals; the three best tracks on the album are his, and he sounds far less scared of the microphone than he ever did before.

The whole LP is an epic pop monster - it merges The Decline Of...'s spiky punk temperament with Open Season's pastoral grandeur, and emerges as the most confident collection of songs the band have written yet. While Yan's songs veer into more epic territory (witness new single 'Waving Flags' or the multi-part epic 'Lights Out for Darker Skies'), Hamilton is writing the (relatively) straightforward anthems that cry out to be heard by more people. This is probably the best of the lot - hell, it's probably the best track BSP have ever done. If they don't release this as a single, they're even barmier than I thought...


Rivers Cuomo - Wanda (You're My Only Love)
It's common knowledge that Rivers Cuomo wrote at least 25 of the best songs of the 90s. His new collection of old demos, Alone, is essential for hardcore Weezer fans and innocent bystanders alike, and shows that there are plenty more waiting in the wings. This, originally intended for the soundtrack of the film Angus (no, me neither...) but pulled at the last minute), crops up on the album in the middle of the much-coveted run of demos from the aborted Songs From The Black Hole album, which appears to take attention away from the fact this song exists at all. A heartfelt countryish lament for lost love, 'Wanda' seems a little out of step with the rest of the demos on the album, which mostly sound like classic Weezer fare (aside from This Is The Way's dire excursion into synthpop and Crazy One's Elliott Smith-esque chug), but deserves a place in the hearts of any Weezer fans who didn't give it a chance the first few times they spun the record.


Longpigs - Jesus Christ
This one's really just a personal indulgence. The past few months of my life have been soundtracked by very little else but the first Longpigs album The Sun Is Often Out, and this has fast become one of my all-time favourite songs, and a compilation tape staple. It's got thrash, bite, guitars that sound like dying pigs and most importantly, a fucking fantastic chorus. TSIOO is easily one of the finest records of the 90's, and one that most bands nowadays could do with listening to before deciding whether or not they should even bother.

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