CURRENTLY…

I’m a bad blogger, please forgive me.

LISTENING TO:

CURRENTLY…

CURRENTLY LISTENING TO:

EUREKA!

I’ve found it.

It’s the middle of May and more than a little premature to be making declarations of this sort, but it’s going to take something extremely special to dislodge Wild Beasts‘ new album ‘Smother‘ from its current position at the top of my 2011 pops.

MINCE PIE-D AND GOGGLE-EYED

So it’s nose to the grindstone for most people today (for me, yesterday – nothing like waking up to an email wondering where a feature that you should have filed a week ago is), but most of my Christmas – the part that wasn’t spent eating too much and drinking too much – was spent in a lovely lazy bubble of film- and TV series-watching. In general, most of my spare time is eaten up by music, so it was good to get some quality screen time in.

ALBUM OF THE YEAR 2010

There’s no way to express this sentiment without sounding slightly cheesy, but really, the power of music never fails to astound me. About a month ago, I, like many other music hacks, was asked to start thinking about my top 10 albums of the year. It’s been an excellent year for music in general, but the problem with that – if you can call it a problem – is trying to decide which excellent album is a little bit more excellent than the others. I hummed-and-hawed for a few weeks about what to make my number one, but even after hours and hours of re-listening, I was struggling to make a decision.

ALBUMS OF THE NOUGHTIES: #5 – 1

Here it is, finally: the last five titles in the unintentionally protracted ‘Albums of the Noughties’ countdown. It can only be anti-climactic after this wait, right? You can see #20 – 15 here, #14 – 11 here, and #10 – 6 here.

ALBUMS OF THE NOUGHTIES: #10 – 6

Numbers #20 – 15 here, and #14 – 11 here.

Here are numbers 10 – 6…

THE 50 BEST BRITISH ACTS RIGHT NOW

IF YOU’VE been a semi-regular reader of this blog for the past few weeks, you’ll be aware of the fact that I love an ‘oul list now and again. Well, myself and Jim Carroll have devised one of the 50 Best British Acts Right Now for today’s Ticket. G’wan, fume away after reading this. Enjoy! I certainly did.

WHAT’S IN A NAME?

MY RECENT tirade against C*****g C****s (I can’t even bring myself to say it anymore) got me thinking about band names in general. I know this topic has been done to death before, but indulge me. There are some great bands with some godawful names out there. Then again, there are a lot of average bands with great names. Of course, this is an entirely subjective exercise, and I’m sure many of the bands I’m scoffing at have some deep literary-related in-joke related to their monikers – but I had a quick scroll through my iPod and came up with the following lists. Am I missing any obvious ones here? Alternatively, feel free to tell me how ill-informed I am.

ALBUMS OF THE NOUGHTIES: #14 – 11

Oops, I realised that I wrote about six albums in my first post, instead of five – so here are the next four.