#14: Perfume Genius - Too Bright

If the music video for 2012's 'Hood' (drag-glamour playtime meets crippling insecurity) was the document that revealed a feisty side to Mike Hadreas, then Too Bright was, in spells, positively sassy. Opening track 'I Decline' gently ushers listeners in with the stripped-back, major key sadness of his previous two records, only for 'Queen' to storm in, kiss the prettiest boy in the room, tell everyone to fuck off, and leave again. Elsewhere, there were new adventures in finger-clicking soul ('Fool') to synth-backed screams ('My Body', 'Grid') jostling among the more traditional whispered sadness. These leaps between styles are a little jarring in places, and there's nothing here to match the masterpiece that was Put Your Back N 2 It, but Perfume Genius in experimental mode is still miles ahead of almost everyone.

The sound of your own heart

Los Campesinos! have released a new track, 'The Sea Is A Good Place To Think Of The Future'.

The group are audibly maturing into the kind of band I always thought they were capable of being. Not that I don't adore the yelping, sugar-rush pop of their first record, but it sounded a lot more refined on We Are Beautiful, We Are Doomed, with hints of darker sounds as well as a greater focus on Tom and Harriet's songwriting and arrangements. It also started to align with the more complex sounds of some of their primary stated influences.

This is certainly the darkest thing they've done, and possibly the best. I'll be going back to my seaside hometown this weekend, and this shall certainly be on heavy rotation. Download from their equally brilliant website.

Slow it down, the song is sacred

When I saw that Yoni Wolf had covered a Pavement song, my initial reaction was that it was going to be a horrible fucking racket. Don't get me wrong: I love Pavement, and I've got a lot of time for WHY?, Yoni's main musical project. But what can you do with a Pavement song, really? WHY?'s recent single 'This Blackest Purse' should have been a clue, but I never could have imagined that kind of treatment working so well on a Malkmus number. It does though, and transforms 'Shoot The Singer (1 Sick Verse)' from a fairly Pavement-by-numbers EP track into a tremulous piano ballad. Sounds terrible on paper, but I've had it on repeat since I heard it a few hours ago.

MP3: Yoni Wolf - 'Shoot The Singer (1 Sick Verse)'
(via Stereogum, right click & save as)

2009: The Pains of Being Pure at Heart

There's still a good sixteen weeks of the year left, I know. Then again, this came out at the start of February, and nothing's quite managed to surpass it since: not Animal Collective's critically adorned breakthrough, not Jeffrey Lewis' most brilliant album to date, and certainly not the overrated Veckatimest. Many will be inclined to disagree, not least because all of those albums are a great deal more inventive and sophisticated than The Pains of Being Pure at Heart. But none of them are as good.

I've already waxed lyrical about this lot a fair bit. Original, they ain't, but to adapt a quote from someone else: 'How are you supposed to know it's a Pastels rip-off if you've never heard the Pastels?' Call it faux-naiveté on their part if you like, but that wall of distorted, powerchord-driven indie-pop remains the perfect template for the lyrical narratives of awkward youth. 'Come Saturday' is, in this respect, the album in miniature: feedback, fuzzy guitars, cooing backing vocals, and a tale of summer love that cares for nothing but the moment: 'I can't see into the sunset / All I know is that you're perfect right now.' Absolutely wonderful.

2008: Saturdays = Youth

This was the hardest pick by far. Maybe I'd started paying closer attention, but I like to think that 2008 was just a great year for releases. Deerhunter's Microcastle / Weird Era Cont., Wild Beasts' Limbo, Panto and Johnny Foreigner's Waited Up 'Til It Was Light were all serious contenders; there were also corkers from British Sea Power, Okkervil River, Cut Copy, Bon Iver, Elbow and No Age; and two excellent records from my old pals Los Campesinos! saw them rapidly promoted to the indie-pop A-list.

One album captivated me more than any other that year though. If Daft Punk mined a euphoric nostalgia for a lost childhood, their compatriot Anthony Gonzalez casts a more wistful, melancholic glance back at juvenile days, to no less dazzling effect. Torch song 'Kim & Jessie' sounds like a joyous tribute to the 80s film soundtrack - insert your own John Hughes reference here - singing of 'kids outside worlds' who are 'crazy 'bout romance and illusion,' but the chorus evokes a much darker scene: 'Somebody lurks in the shadows, somebody whispers.' It's all the gusto of youth, infused with the accompanying bouts of paranoia, self-doubt, and confusion as to one's place in the world.

It is this classic pop juxtaposition, which characterised the 80s of Gonzalez's youth, of lyrical anxiety set to glorious, often upbeat electronic music, that is realised so perfectly on Saturdays = Youth, and which makes it such a success. 'Graveyard Girl' is another fine example, the guitar-led rush of the chorus breaking for a spoken word part, heralded by a ringing schoolbell: 'I'm gonna jump the walls and run. I wonder if they'll miss me? I won't miss them... I'm fifteen years old, and I already feel like it's too late to live. Don't you?'

2007: Sound of Silver

That's how it starts.
We go back to your house.

We check the charts
And start to figure it out.







And if it's crowded, all the better,
because we know we're gonna be up late.
But if you're worried about the weather
then you picked the wrong place to stay.
That's how it starts.

And so it starts.
You switch the engine on.
We set controls for the heart of the sun,
one of the ways we show our age.

And if the sun comes up, if the sun comes up, if the sun comes up
and I still don't wanna stagger home
Then it's the memory of our betters
that are keeping us on our feet.

You spent the first five years trying to get with the plan,
and the next five years trying to be with your friends again.

You're talking 45 turns just as fast as you can,
yeah, I know it gets tired, but it's better when we pretend.

It comes apart,
the way it does in bad films
Except in parts,
when the moral kicks in.

Though when we're running out of the drugs
and the conversation's winding away
I wouldn't trade one stupid decision
for another five years of life.

You drop the first ten years just as fast as you can,
and the next ten people who are trying to be polite.
When you're blowing 85 days in the middle of France,
Yeah, I know it gets tired only where are your friends tonight?

And to tell the truth.
Oh, this could be the last time.
So here we go,
like a sail's force into the night.

And if I made a fool, if I made a fool, if I made a fool
on the road, there's always this.
And if I'm sued into submission,
I can still come home to this.

And with a face like a dad and a laughable stand,
you can sleep on the plane or review what you said.
When you're drunk and the kids look impossibly tanned
you think over and over, "hey, I'm finally dead."

Oh, if the trip and the plan come apart in your hand,
you can turn it on yourself, your ridiculous prop
You forgot what you meant when you read what you said,
and you always knew you were tired, but then,
where are your friends tonight?

Where are your friends tonight?
Where are your friends tonight?

If I could see all my friends tonight,
If I could see all my friends tonight,
If I could see all my friends tonight,
If I could see all my friends tonight.



Pitchfork voted this the second best song of the decade. I think they were one place out.

2006: Atlantis: Hymns for Disco

Being the first hip-hop album I really loved. I was introduced to this not long after it came out by my friend Omid, who lived in a student house with myself and four other young men at the time, each of distinctly questionable hygiene and industriousness. Omid and I were the two big music geeks in the house, and regularly took turns to burst into each other's rooms waxing lyrical about the latest thing we were all excited about (before settling down to the number one pastime of the modern undergraduate, Pro Evolution Soccer). Usually we liked what the other had to share. Tougher was finding something we could play communally that all six of us enjoyed, a goal that would have been reached much sooner if I hadn't been the stick-in-the-mud who insisted that Jamiroquai was, in fact, crap.

In the end it was Canadian rapper k-os' third long player, Atlantis: Hymns for Disco, that was the first to be met with unanimous praise. In a genre commercially saturated by hyper-produced superstars, regurgitating the same tired clichés of guns, bitches and bling over Timbaland's ever-thinning beats, what appeals about Atlantis is its organic feel. There are few if any samples, most of the tracks are built around guitar riffs, and the whole thing is blessedly autotune-free. Best of all is that the album rewards repeated listenings, which seems contrary for such an instantly accessible album. For all this, and a man of Kevin Brereton's lyrical flow, skill, verbosity and intelligence, it is a continuing source of puzzlement that he remains relatively unknown outside of his native Canada.