Alistair’s Best of 2008
Bit mainstream, a few of my choices here... but then, I always think pop works best when it has universal appeal, and what has more universal appeal than a storming great hit record?
1. Closer - Ne-Yo<
This is pop single of the year for me. No single element of it is original, but the precise combination of its ingredients had never been done before and the Robert Miles-meets-Jermaine-Jackson vibe proved to be a heady brew. You just knew it was going to be special when he rounded off that moody Euro-House intro with a great big, incongruous 'Wooooh!' (Which was, incidentally, the pop 'wooooh!' of the year also.) Chris Brown later attempted similar Eurodance/R&B fusions but none matched the majesty of Closer.
2. Mansard Roof - Vampire Weekend <
This is a highly literate, cosmopolitan Indie band (of the kind which the U.K. no longer seems able to produce) with a line in joyous, uplifting pop borrowing knowingly from Afrobeat. Worth approximately 5,000,000 Pigeon Detectives. 'The ground beneath my feet/ Is a nautically mapped sheet' is my favourite lyric in a popsong this year.
3. Green Light - John Legend feat. Andre 3000 <
'I've got you gigglin' like a piglet.' Even if this wasn't a head-spinningly fragrant 80s pop/ R&B/ hip-hop pot pourri, it would make the list for that line alone. John Legend continues to be, er, a legend. Notably a Kanye West production in a year where he's helmed at least a couple more fantastic singles: his own thundering Love Lockdown and the sublime American Boy for Estelle.
4. Black and Gold - Sam Sparro <
It’s not often you get an esoteric, jerky electro-ballad about agnosticism nearly topping the chart. So let's celebrate this one.
5. Another Way to Die - Jack White & Alicia Keys <
This is just so darn thrilling, especially the bit where she imitates his outré guitar squawks and then the bit where it goes slightly out of tune. My favourite Bond theme.
6. Big Moon - Arthur Russell<
Arthur Russell, being a sadly long-dead person who releases increasingly excellent recordings year on year, is kind of the artistic opposite of Tupac Shakur (whose rhymes are no longer underpinned by beats but rather by the sound of desperate barrel-scraping). This is a typically joyous song, and one of many highlights on his latest Rough Trade collection.
7. So What - P!nk<
You can tell you're in a classic year for pop (e.g. 1984) when the number ones are great almost without exception (note the 'almost' - hello, X Factor Heroes). What we have here is a noisy, painful, public divorce re-arranged as a kind of perversely triumphalistic, deranged sea-shanty. There's not another song like it. Amazing.
8. Ready for the Floor - Hot Chip<
This opens up strange and wonderful new vistas for electropop, so it makes the list, even though the vocals sound like Shakin' Stevens.
9. One Day Like This - Elbow <
Huge-hearted and optimistic, emotionally intelligent indie Mancunian maleness. (Clue: it's not gonna be Oasis). It's impossible not to be moved by this I think.
10. The Promise - Girls Aloud<
A marvellous 60's pastiche from a girl group who have, unusually, been allowed to mature. The new rule of Girls Aloud singles is that no 2 verses are allowed to have the same melody... wonder if Real PD songs will follow suit? In a year where lyrical 'creativity' has been getting the better of a number of the writers of popular song (e.g. 'Are we Human, or are we a collective anthropomorphic incarnation of Santa's second favourite reindeer?, and the one about the nice lady who chases the pavements, to name but two) I didn't bat an eyelid when I heard 'Here I am, a walking primrose, wondering when I'm gonna see you again.' It was some time later when I clocked that she wasn't in fact describing herself as some kind of perambulating bipedal Triffid, but was in fact merely recounting a stroll on London's famous Primrose Hill.
11. Chemtrails - Beck <
In which the ever-lovely Beck has a transcendental take on shoegazing. Like the best single Ride never made. Bliss.
12. Divine - Sebastien Tellier <
It's like Never Let Her Slip Away (ask your Gran) for the 21st Century. A lovely frothy milkshake of a song I can't get enough of.
13. Scratch the Surface - The Week That Was <
My Geordiepop fix in a fallow year for Maxïmo Park. The most commercial moment from an involving and musically engaging album, which takes off where Field Music's Tones of Town left off.
14. I'm A Fire (U.S. Single Version) - Donna Summer <
This mix places Summer's peerless vocals back where they belong at the heart of a disco drama, propelled by an delightfully insinuating bassline.
15. Timewarp - Headhunter & Ekelon <
Thrillingly esoteric waves of dubstep (from the latest Mary Ann Hobbs compilation 'Evangeline').
16. Stuck on Repeat - Little Boots <
Brittle yet durable, danceable yet deliciously ruminative, this single whets the appetite for 09's debut album.
17. I'm Not Gonna Teach Your Boyfriend How to Dance with You - Black Kids <
Exuberantly yelpy, chant-assisted bit of pop dynamite which sounds like it fell of the back of Robert Smith's barnet.
18. 220 - t.A.T.u. <
So far released in Russian only, this is a whipsmart electropop number wrapped in a deliciously subtle and intelligent pop production. Fantastic!
19. I Dream of Spring - k.d. lang <
Pure and beautiful, this song oozes life, love and eternal hope from every pore. k.d., unbelievably, gets better and better.
20. My Delirium - Ladyhawke <
Where she sets the controls for the heart of Kim Wilde. Good album too. I want to know which computer game it is she is playing in her smalls on the front cover, surrounded by a coterie of kittens.
And now for a handful of my non-favourites…Less than groovy – or ‘thanks, but no thanks’
Shockers of 2008!
1. Love in this Club - Usher feat. Young Jeezy =
'Well come here baby/ And let Daddy show you what it feel like.' Eeeeeewwww. Somebody call the police! Mind you, that's pretty classy compared to some of the stuff later on - 'It's going down on aisle three/ Gonna bag you like some groceries.' Er, nice.
2. Hallelujah - Alexandra Burke =
We don't really care for music, do we? (Actually, you're a good enough singer, love, it's just the whole X Factor-molesting-Leonard Cohen thing that I find a little hard to stomach).
3. Nine in the Afternoon - Panic at the Disco =
My eyes may not have been the size of the moon but something within me certainly popped on hearing this twee bit of bellybutton fluff whipped up out of faux Kinksiness. And that one they did a couple of years back about the wedding, where they wore the top hats was so good! Tellingly, a live album was rush-released just months after NITA's parent album bombed, with, like, their old songs and everything on it. Including the one from a couple of years back about the wedding with the top hats.
4. If I Were a Boy - Beyoncé =
Great big, tedious, patronising, moralistic ticking-off for the male of the species from the corporate face of a thousand ads. If this were to be covered by a male artist changing the lyric to 'If I Were a Girl', it would rightly be seen as misogynistic and nasty. So why is it ok the other way round? 'I've put everything you own in a box to the left. Don't go thinking you're irreplaceable. There'll be another one along in a minute.' Now which nasty, cheatin' playa of a man sang that? Oh, yeah.
5. Greatest Day - Take That=
It starts badly: 'Today this could be/ The Greatest Day of our lives.' That is clunky, Mr Barlow, Sir. It's either 'Today could be the greatest day' or 'This could be the greatest day.' But not 'today this'. This song is so smug that after less than a minute it takes off on some sort of victory lap of whizzes, bangs and exploding orchestras when really it simply hasn't earned it yet. In the video they dance in apparent ecstacy on the roof of a building as honey rains down from the sky, or something (one can only assume they were listening to something else during the filming), but nothing can disguise the fact this ain't no Back for Good. Nor it is even a Do Watchu Like.
6. Keane's lyrics=
It is with a heavy heart that I write this because musically Keane are currently achieving something approaching sheer brilliance. Single 'Spiralling' kicks off with 2008's second best 'woooh!' - which deceives the listener into thinking that it's time to party - before lurching into a fabulously wonky keyboard riff which propels a decidedly funky tune. No complaints in the music department then, but the soul-sucking bitterness of the lyrics to, yup, pretty much every single song in the Keane catalogue is starting to scare me. This nihilistic trend reaches its nadir in the spoken bit in the aforementioned 'Spiralling', where the tall, baby-faced one snarls incredulously at the listener, 'Did you wanna be a winner?...Did you wanna have a family?' etc. We stand trembling before him, the scales falling from our formerly happy eyes as it now dawns upon us, thanks to Keane's Gospel of Gloom, that the world is not a nice cheery place after all. 'Sorry, Mister Keane, Sir. It was wrong of us to harbour human ambitions, however modest. We can see that now. To nurture even a flickering candle of hope in our hearts was so very foolish and naïve.' I've listened to their new album, all the way through, just the once. Lyrically, it makes even the bleakest, most spirit-crushing works of Nine Inch Nails, Tindersticks and Nick Cave combined sound like Cascada. It makes Nico sound like Chico. (Are you getting the idea?)
7. All Summer Long - Kid Rock =
Is the apogee of wealth and material success really being able to hover over a fetid swamp wearing a ten-gallon hat and gleefully eviscerating poor old Sweet Home Alabama? Apparently so.
8. The Shock of the Lightning - Oasis =
There is indeed plenty to shock about this turgid comeback single. But perhaps 'lightning' is the wrong metaphor to convey it... Let's try 'The Shock of the Unpleasantly Mouldy Barm Cake', 'The Shock of the Pulverisingly Predictable' or 'The Shock of the Creatively Stunted Eyebrow Monsters.'
9. In This City - Iglu & Hartly
Not bad as such, but just baffling... What is this supposed to be? It sounds like some kind of Muppet hoedown on Fraggle Rock. And then there's the enigma wrapped in a riddle of the words: 'You walked in to my life/ You cannot separate yourself.' That's got to be a painful interlocking dental brace/ snog scenario, surely? 'And I've found that round here/ that I won't disappear.' Listen love, if disappearing's your problem, quit leaning against the anaglypta whilst wearing beige.