BBO’s Top Four of 2009

So here’s what you’ve all been waiting for – our top four albums of the year. Produced through complicated Venn diagrams and extended algorithms.

1- Fuck Buttons – Tarot Sport

Sublime. What more can we say?

Rough Steez

Flight Of The Feathered Serpent

2 – Brakes – Touchdown

Another of those bands we love to bits – we both saw them live this year and are still grinning about it.

Why Tell the Truth (When It’s Easier To Lie)

3-  Teeth of the Sea – Orphaned by the Ocean

We’ve been playing this droney, spacey lot all year long and haven’t tired of them yet.

Latin Inches

4 – British Sea Power – Man of Aran

What do you do after producing BBO’s number one record of 2008, Do You Like Rock Music? You work some of your instrumentals (and instrumental versions of other songs) up into the soundtrack for a 1934 documentary about life on the Aran Islands. It’s as atmospheric, evocative and affecting as you’d expect from a band at the peak of their powers, with special help from the London Bulgarian Choir. Glorious.

The South Sound

So, you have a few hours to pick up this little lot as late xmas presents – just imagine all those smiling faces as friends and family open their post-rock, droning, screeching, rocktastic gifts! We recommend Piccadilly Records in the North, Sister Ray in London (though you’ll have to pop into the shop), but any decent independent record shop would do. There are links to Cargo Records sales pages on the Teeth of the Sea review.

Merry xmas and we’ll see you soon!

jkneale and angrybonbon

jkneale’s Top Ten of 2009

Mr abb is right, this has been tougher than usual. I’m pleased we worked it out and even more pleased we’ve hit on a top four after extended negotiations more convoluted than the US healthcare wrangles and Copenhagen put together. Finally we can walk out to the armoured car in our blue UN flak jackets, shake hands, and pronounce the Big Four. A roadmap to tinnitus, essentially.

But before that, my other top records, following angrybonbon’s tremendous ten…

1 – Sweet Billy Pilgrim – Twice Born Men

I promised a review of this back in January, describing them as “one of the most interesting and completely underrated bands around”. I got a copy early, seemingly hand-posted from California by David Sylvian. Cue Mercury nomination, baffled reactions from all and sundry, etc. Did I review it? Did I hell. Anyway, it’s a superb album, developing the subtle craft of the first album into something much more expansive – especially the widescreen soundtrack of ‘Here It Begins’ – while still retaining the intimacy you get from recording in a shed. Still highly recommended.

Truth Only Smiles

There Will It End

2 – Fanfarlo – Reservoir

In the same post, I bade you all watch the glorious ascent of Fanfarlo. And didn’t review that album either, partly because it got released three times (I think). But it’s another surefire winner – the production does, as everyone noticed, conjure the Arcade Fire, but that just gives Fanfarlo another set of choices, a beefier sound to set against Simon’s voice and the spot-on instrumentation. This is great pop music and Fanfarlo’s hard work is surely winning them friends.

The Walls Are Coming Down

Finish Line

3 – Micah P. Hinson – All Dressed Up And Smelling Of Strangers

I’m a sucker for covers, and to be honest MPH could cover the oeuvre of Nickelback and I would have to consider buying it… but this goes beyond by-the-numbers stuff. Exhibit A:

In The Pines

4 – Bob Mould – Life And Times

Bob is a bit of a fixture here, but if your teenage heroes continue to make fantastic records, what can you do? Writing his autobiography is clearly making Bob go back to the different stages of his career – Husker Du, solo work, Sugar, it all seems to inform this album. Apart from the superb ‘I’m Sorry, Baby, But You Can’t Stand In My Light Any More’ this is a stand-out, a song for Bob’s gay punk band:

Argos

5 – Super Furry Animals – Dark Days/Light Years

There was stiff competition for the coveted 5th placing but I ended up going back to this. SFA have been around so long they might seem in danger of going stale but this is a cracking album. One of the Welsh ones:

Lliwiau Llachar

6 – Lightning Bolt – Earthly Delights

7 – Circulus – Thought Becomes Reality

8 – The Flowers of Hell – Come Hell Or High Water

9 – Art Brut – Art Brut vs Satan

10 – The Joy Formidable – A Balloon Called Moaning

Thanks everyone who visited or emailed us this year, and apologies if we haven’t replied to you – we’re a bit snowed under with other stuff. Anyway, cheers!

JKneale

angrybonbon’s Top Ten of 2009

It has proved too difficult for me colleague and I to decide on a joint BBO Top Ten for 2009. It just got too complicated, we’re too polite to stamp on each other’s favourites and our brains are too small. So in a not-so-time-honoured tradition we’re going for individual top tens and then a joint top four. Yes, four. Obviously.

1 – Manic Street Preachers – Journal for Plague Lovers.

When I heard about this album I thought it impossible to achieve; sometimes it’s great to be totally and ridiculously wrong. Quite where MSP found the emotional resources to use Richey’s words and put them to a staggeringly brilliant rock album is beyond me. Quite how Mr. Bradfield manages to make the lyrics scan is also beyond me. Plus any album that mentions Situationism is always going to be a winner round these parts.

Jackie Collins Existential Question Time

All is Vanity

2 – Brakes – Rock is Dodelijk

I have a deep love for live albums. When you get (in effect) two gigs on one album (with tracks repeated) that amounts to, but far exceeds, a ‘best of’ from the best in the country, I’m starry eyed infatuated. My newest favourite band and an album that has jolted me awake many a morning. Just incredible.

Hi How Are You

Cease and Desist

3 – Ben Frost – By the Throat.

Out of the leftfield this enchanted and disturbed like little has before. Digital growls and icy atmospherics make for a taxing listen, but one exceedingly worth the effort. Properly worthy of the term ‘groundbreaking.’

Killshot

4 – Saturation Point – Mechanisms

The best of the wave of Kraut inspired outfits that have taken hold of my playlists in 2009, this lot manage to sound new as much as Neu. Add some deep space moods and sunrise tinted psychedelics and this is an album that I keep coming back to.

*Untitled 6*

5 – Spokes – People Like People Like You

A surprise find. Taking the seemingly tired post-rock formula and giving it a sharp pinch, Spokes deserve much more coverage and adulation. To repeat: one to follow.

End Credits/Loveletter

And the other five:

6 – Cave – Psychic Summer

7 -  Let our Enemies Beware – Against Karate

8 – Julian Cope – The Unruly Imagination

9 – Harmonic 313 – When Machines Exceed Human Intelligence

10 – The Duckworth Lewis Method – The Duckworth Lewis Method

And bubbling under are:

Fennesz – Black Sea

Jonsi and Alex – Riceboy Sleeps

The Horrors – Primary Colours

Black Sheep – Kiss My Sweet Apocalypse

Moebius – Kram

Beak> – Beak>

Health – Get Color

And thank fuck for music this year – everything else has been pretty shite. Biggest cheers to those I’ve enjoyed a gig with on a regular basis. You know who you are.

angrybonbon

Ben Frost: By the Throat

The scene: a blizzard whites out the darkest of nights and wolves gather in packs to howl at the moon. Surely, you would have thought, some sort of rock cliché with any sense of terror emasculated by Ozzy and a thousand low budget horror flicks? Well not when the sound of these herding beasts are given over to Ben Frost. In his hands, they become, as they rightfully should be, truly horrific, chilling and full of dread: ‘The Carpathians’, the track from By the Throat wherein these creatures make their fearful appearance, should have been my Halloween offering rather than the comic Goth I served up.

I hesitate saying such things, but By the Throat is like nothing else I have ever heard. It’s practically impossible to classify and to make comparisons to other artists would be both tough and unhelpful. The closest musically, in terms of sensitivity to expansive orchestrations and feeling, are Teeth of the Sea. The only adjective that comes back again and again is cinematic. Despite being a tired and over-used term, it’s the best I can do. By the Throat is the soundtrack to a film of unspeakable and life-altering horror, watched in a hut in a snow-storm with only a single candle for warmth and light, with a pack of carnivores baying in the near distance. It’s fucking scary, ok?

The sounds assembled herein vary from the ghostly choral, to soothing brass, to the deepest of sub-bass, frozen keys and a variety of searing ice-burnt and monstrous electronic distortions. And it’s the latter, on tracks such as ‘Hibakúsja’, which really disturb and leave the most lasting of impressions. Here some machinic beast, ready to rip your gizzards out just for the fun of it, stalks, growls and devours.

In every imaginable way this is a breathtaking and awe-inspiring album.

The Carpathians

Hibakúsja

Acquire it here.

angrybonbon

Lightning Bolt: Earthly Delights

Welcome back to my favourite noise-something bass/drums duo, Lightning Bolt. Listening to this is an extraordinary experience – how can it be so simple and so complicated? Jaw-dropping drumming, super-heavy riffs, vocal melodies a plumber could whistle… It’s perhaps a bit more metal, if that’s the word, than Hypermagic Mountain in places (‘Nation of Boar’, bloody hell) but it also feels like a more varied album – along with the ecstatic/primal 12 minute speaker-knackering freakouts (‘Transmissionary’) there’s the beautiful tweetery snippet ‘Rain On Lake I’m Swimming In’.

I’m listening now and I’m not sure whether I’m hearing sounds I’ve never heard before, or if that’s just my ears giving up. This is my commuting music at the moment, and I imagine it’s what the inside of my head looks like right now. Highly recommended.

‘Colossus‘ – Lightning Bolt – Earthly Delights

‘Rain On Lake I’m Swimming In‘ – Lightning Bolt – Earthly Delights

Go and see them at ATP or on the dates here. And have a look at this. And buy it from Fopp – I did and I discovered a fellow Lightning Bolt fan.

JKneale