A Year Of Songs

Albums of 2015, then? Too many to leave out, too many left unheared. And so it goes. But these ones were pretty brill. No prizes for guessing what's at the top.

30. <insert album here>

Because I'll always miss one brilliant album.

29. Malted Milk And Toni Green - Milk And Green

Fab and bouncy rhythm and soul blues.

28. Godsticks - Emergence

HEAVY, man! Like a concrete boot to the groin.

27. Mew - + -

Blissful euphoric rock from Denmark.

26. Modest Mouse - Strangers To Ourselves

More great tunage from the other Mouse, featuring the greatest song title of the year in God Is An Indian And You're An Asshole. Get on your horse and ride!

25. Blur - The Magic Whip

New Blur is better than good - it's decidedly odd and great.

24. Leon Bridges - Coming Home

Vintage soul to make you bop along.

23. The Decemberists - What A Terrible World, What A Beautiful World

Americana-rama!

22. Troyka - Ornithophobia

Weird funk jazz from the suburbs as people turn into animals.

21. Ozric Tentacles - Technicians Of The Sacred

Space Ibiza is a blast by the sounds of it.

20. Steven Wilson - Hand. Cannot. Erase.

The strongest album of his career so far.

19. Snowapple - Illusion

Bohemian trippy folk vocals. Beautiful and strange.

18. Lianne La Havas - Blood

A properly soulful voice meets trip-hop sounds. Funky.

17. Legendary Shack Shakers - The Southern Surreal

YEEEEEEEEEAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH

16. Wilco - Star Wars

And the awards for most surprising release, nonsensical title choice, and terrible artwork go to...

15. Punch Brothers - The Phosphorescent Blues

The Beach Boys sing in an acoustic bluegrass band conducted by Robert Fripp. Or so.

14. Public Service Broadcasting - The Race For Space

Smell the tweed and corduroy. Two of the group's best songs materialised in Gagarin and Go!.

13. Caravan Palace - <|*_*|>

If The Avalanches remixed 1940s New Orleans. Brilliant.

12. Jaga Jazzist - Starfire

Someone weaponised the music from the Quest channel and it is awesome.

11. Dutch Uncles - O Shudder

Creamy sounds and odd compositions. Like a new wave Oreo.

10. Slug - Ripe

Field Music's bassist let loose. Enough said.

9. Bill Laurance - Swift

Snarky Puppy allumni eclipses actual Snarky Puppy with beaty piano tunes.

8. Benjamine Clementine - At Least For Now

The winner of the Mercury Prize weaves a tapestry of intrigue and compelling piano-based threads. Sounds like London.

7. Destroyer - Poison Season

Beautiful songs, beautiful strings and horns, beautiful.

6. Laura Marling - Short Movie

The best acoustic sounds of the year behind a voice of pure character.

5. Father John Misty - I Love You, Honeybear

Frighteningly personal, heartbreaking, and darkly humorous.

4. Susanne Sundfor - Ten Love Songs

Exquisite and intelligent electro carry magnificent melodies. I'm in love.

3. Guy Garvey - Courting The Squall

The greatest lyricist of our time invites you in.

2. Sweet Billy Pilgrim - Motorcade Amnesiacs

Magnificent shape-shifting works of brilliance.

1. David Gilmour - Rattle That Lock

Gilmour.

Moving Pictures

Source: Google

It's Mouse's favourite films of 2015! Ooh, the excitement builds! I'll bet you're positively quivering with anticipation... or maybe food poisoning. Either way, here's a list. And everybody loves a list.

10. Inside Out

Pixar prise open your conciousness and dissect what it is to be human and to live life with love and loss, all the while showcasing incredibly complex psychological principles with brightly coloured balls.

9. Ex Machina

A computer programmer stays with a Zuckerberg-esque engineer and his breakthrough in artificial intelligence, taking the form of a robotic woman. Disturbing, manipulative hijinks ensue.

8. It Follows

The most original horror film of recent times, it's beautifully directed with patience and enjoyable suspense. And then there's the soundtrack... oh, the soundtrack...

7. Crimson Peak

Victorian business ideals collide with Edgar Allen Poe as Guillermo Del Toro makes every shot a perfect thing of beauty. Also, Tom Hiddleston's bum.

6. The Peanuts Movie

Wonderful, wonderful, wonderful.

5. Star Wars (Episode VII: The Force Awakens)

NEW STAR WARS IS GREAT!

4. Mad Max: Fury Road

Insane on vast levels of ecstasy. Features the best original character of the last decade of cinema in Furiosa. SHINY AND CHROME!

3. Nightcrawler

A thoroughly gripping, reckless swipe at modern mainstream media's borderline inhuman obsession with disaster, fear, and death.

2. Whiplash

When jazz attacks! The snarling hatred between old and new guards shot with the furious pace of a machine gun. Relentless.

1. Birdman Or (The Unexpected Virtue Of Ignorance)

Like watching exceptionally beautiful machinery perform as clockwork. Technically perfect, mesmerising, and so much fun.

Oogie Boogie's Song

Haverbrook attempt Christmas! Hope you all had a wonderful time. I work in retail, so I'm still working.

In other news, every track for the album has now been demoed. Work shall begin in earnest (now that we know what the hell we're doing) once the festive season stops being so damn festive.

The Cham Cham

Source: Google

Today is the 50th Anniversary of Thunderbirds. Happy Anniverstime, Birds! When I was a wee little thing being about 30cm tall, it was my favourite programme to watch. When you're that age, massive rockets and big explosions are the most exciting thing ever. ...Wait a minute, they still are. And a bald puppet with eyes that lit up when he was angry was the scariest thing in the world. And he was always angry.

To a lot of people, it will forever be that show where the puppets couldn't walk properly and you could see the strings. For a great many others, though, it was inspiration to become designers, engineers, rocketeers, and scientists. Someone even became an astronaut. The special effects crew went on to work in Hollywood, bringing the craft they developed in a studio in Slough to a worldwide industry. For me, one of its biggest influences was the music. Barry Gray's score commands character and evokes drama in a way no-one else managed in television at the time. The short themes, ranging from sombre, melodramatic, energetic, and humorous, taught me very early on how to use music to identify elements of continuity, story, and character within a piece.

I so want that fast music to be the North Haverbrook live intro tape...

One of the things that I find fascinating now is that Thunderbirds portrays a dystopian future, where a world, albeit united internationally, is plagued by constant terrorist actions, natural resources have surrendered to industry and development, everyone carries weapons, and a car park is manned by a watchtower armed with submachine guns to shoot whoever doesn't pay upon leaving. It's a cold view of the 1960s' technological ambition, wreckless and gutsy, knowing that the risks of human endeavour can come at the cost of great disaster.

It's a brilliant concept, proven by its successful return in two forms this year, with a new series combining the traditional model works with CGI animation, and three episodes being made in the original 1965 style. Its legacy has been assured and it's still bloody good fun, whether you appreciate the technical details and style, or just giggle at the wobbly heads. Also, Team America - 'nuff said.

And if Richard Branson isn't establishing International Rescue with his spaceships and his private islands and millions of wealth, I'm going to be a very disappointed boy indeed.

English Electric

Moray and I attended the Sunday afternoon performance by Big Big Train, a band rarely seen in the wild, on the 16th. Well, Moray did. Muggins here was stationed strategically behind tables full of lovely, lovely merchandise, not only so people could not get close enough to experience his horrifying ugliness, but as additional retail whirligig of The Merch Desk. But I'd been there all weekend, so nyah.

Yeah, so the gigs themselves were excellent, but we hijacked the occassion for our first, official photoshoot!

...OK, so we were enthusiastic. A second attempt was slightly more respectable...

Makes you think we should get a move on and make some more crazy-ass music., eh.

Release, Release

 

Subject To Availability and Diatryma And The Terror Birds are released! Sort of. While we wait to figure out a deal with someone, we figured you might as well hear what these two at least sound like. So, they are streaming over on beloved Bandcamp. Stay tuned for actual release info!

Happy Birthtime, North Haversham! What In The Hell!

Radio Waves

There is nothing to make the bile rise more furiously up my gullet than the phrase 'Steve Wright In The Afternoon'. A DJ whose playlist consists of collections of Father's Day 'Dad Rocks' albums and 'Now That's What I Call Bobbins 11,003'. The dated vibe has all the dignity of a primary school disco hosted by the maths department. What kind of ego-fuelled cockswabble has canned audience applause in their own theme tune? And a horn melody that sounds like a weak fart in a jacuzzi.

Good God almighty, I hate Radio 2.