An other extract from the Opin­ion­ated Diner archives..this time the 7″ list from March, 2006. I’ve tweaked it a lit­tle, mostly just typos and illit­er­ate half fin­ished sen­tences that crept through. Look­ing at the orig­i­nal I must’ve writ­ten the last half in some sort of bour­bon induced haze (although I’ve never liked the stuff, but if I apply Occam’s Razor to it, I can come up with no other expla­na­tion) and the proof­ing was worse..I have this shock­ing habit of typ­ing and post­ing, and notic­ing some glar­ing error weeks or months later.

Any­way, read it if you want, laugh at my inclu­sion of a Wings sin­gle if you must, but I make no apolo­gies for any of it:

There is some­thing about the mag­i­cal seven inch vinyl sin­gle, some­thing that the CD sin­gle, and the cass­in­gle (which must be the sil­li­est, most use­less for­mat ever…at least the CD is con­ve­nient and usu­ally works as its designed to) could and can never aspire too. Both are unap­peal­ingly soul­less. The small round, iconic seven inch how­ever, as rough as it sounds some­times (and that is a part of its soul, the audio shit­ti­ness bought on by its intended dis­pos­abil­ity) defines the pop song and is the philo­soph­i­cal par­ent of the mp3 in its dis­pos­abil­ity. Some­thing the record com­pa­nies still don’t get.…

[From Simon­grig­gdot­info | The Opin­ion­ated Diner: The 7″ Sin­gles]

Back in Jan­u­ary 2006, on this blog, I posted a list of my favourite 12″ sin­gles. It was picked up by quite a few other sites, not least of which was the god­fa­ther of all house and dance music sites, Jah­sonic, and it kinda went around the world, which was a buzz. I them fol­lowed it with a list of 7″ sin­gles and albums.

The list dis­ap­peared into the blog archives and when I changed the URL to my own (from a blog­ger one) it, along with all the ear­lier posts, lost all their images..and I was too lazy to spend days or weeks fix­ing it so I decided to pull this list from the archives and put it more per­ma­nently on my site. It can be found here.

I fixed a cou­ple of typos and an mis­take or two but it’s really as it was, with new images. Enjoy or crit­i­cise, whichever turns you on…

The albums and sin­gles will fol­low at some future stage.

Time for a list.

I hate lists mostly..reading them that is. But rather enjoy putting the things together, so if lists are your thing, please read on.

Okay, as usual I can divide my new music this year into a fairly clear divide between the new and the reis­sued. But the divide is even stronger this time around as there is a very clear delin­eation between the phys­i­cal and the dig­i­tal. And the line is fairly much the same. My old music is mostly phys­i­cal and the new music was almost exclu­sively dig­i­tal. In other words, I bought old music on CD or vinyl and new music on mp3. If I own a CD of a new record, it’s mostly because I was given a copy by the label or for review purposes.

And here’s another clear divide: the new music is almost, with one or two excep­tions, all on indie labels, big and small, and the old stuff is on majors. Which under­lines the com­monly held per­cep­tion that the big record com­pa­nies have long since lost touch with what their poten­tial cus­tomers want to buy, assum­ing that I’m not com­pletely divorced from the mainstream.

I’m not list­ing sin­gles or one off tracks from acts as they are both too numer­ous and I’ve lost track in what I con­sider a throughly vin­tage year for pop music in all it’s main­stream and, mostly, alter­na­tive forms.

But it’s worth men­tion­ing that miss­ing in action at the end of 2009 are the two for­mats devised and briefly touted by both Apple and the labels to revive the album as a format…this year’s DCC.

Indeed, the way things are head­ing, the album as a for­mat may be more and more mar­gin­al­ized as we gen­er­a­tions who grew up on the 40 minute LP and 70 minute com­pact disc become increas­ingly irrel­e­vant to the record­ing indus­try. My teenage daugh­ter shows lit­tle inter­est the format.

How­ever all that sits some­where in the next decade and in the interim, I’ll toss together, if any­one cares, my favourite records this year, start­ing with the new stuff, or the com­pil­ing of the new stuff (and some may be from 2008 or before..yes a sin in these instant times, but I’m sim­ply not that on to it…)

Diplo : Decent Work For Decent Pay

A sound track to the first few months of 2009. This was in the car stereo through­out big parts of Feb­ru­ary and March and seemed very Bali road-chaos appro­pri­ate with it’s block party humour and sin­ga­long hand slap­ping the steer­ing wheel-ness. Purists hated it. Fuck ‘em, I loved it and had a ball when I saw him bang­ing it out in sim­i­lar style at 808 in Sep­tem­ber. I hate purists…

Architeq : Green + Gold

All won­der­fully dubby, noisy and swoon­ing like. The spir­i­tual child of Roy Budd mashed with Bris­tol styled wonk­i­ness. Speak­ing of which…

RSD : Good Energy

…the god­fa­ther of the Bris­tol scene (per­ti­nent ques­tion surely after all these years: water / ingre­di­ents / Bris­tol? There must be a rea­son?) col­lects his cin­e­matic dub sin­gles from recent times with some majesty. I never tire of Koto, King­fisher, or those god-given basslines that’ve rum­bled through his work since the much loved (and rightly so..where is my Carl­ton album when I need it?) Smith & Mighty days

Mar­tyn : Great Lengths

Every­one knows this right? You’d have to be have been liv­ing under a big immov­able block of rein­forced con­crete (or in Bali where things like this really didn’t creep through unless you you made a real effort…I guess I did) to have missed the most all-pervasive release of the first part of 2009. Do I need to hear it again? My last.fm stats say yes..this is the third most played album in my totals ever (or at least since I signed up a cou­ple of years back). The best pop album of 2009, or more real­is­ti­cally, as dark and melod­i­cally adven­tur­ous as I’d like pop to sound like, but rarely does.

DJ Hell : Teufel­swerk

Old fash­ioned big room house music, or is it techno? I guess it really is, but the bound­aries have always been so blurred it’s a silly argu­ment. Mag­nif­i­cent what­ever you may wish to call it, despite the, I think, cheesy opener with Bryan Ferry. See, now I’m kick­ing myself for call­ing it old fash­ioned, as the sec­ond half slips effort­lessly into a wide rang­ing mod­ernistic cin­e­matic sprawl that Fritz Lang would have crawled across bro­ken shards to use. Epic and, using the word that should never be used, genius.

Bad Lieu­tenant: Never Cry Another Tear

Yeah, I know, it’s hardly an adven­tur­ous choice (see my reis­sues too) but after four decades of music acqui­si­tion at a silly rate, I’m allowed a moment of happy reflec­tion and indul­gent nos­tal­gia. The new New Order album with­out some of the bits that made New Order, New Order, if you will, but it’s rather fine and safely spine tin­gling for all that (and I did, after all, love the last two, much slighted, gui­tar based New Order albums so much, so there).

Andrew Weather­all : A Pox on The Pioneers

Yeah, and Andy, no slouch in the pio­neer stakes him­self, is indulging some­what him­self in an album that ref­er­ences the early post-punk 1980s, and, if I had to point a fin­ger even more, Mick Jones’ mag­nif­i­cent Big Audio Dyna­mite (who are wor­thy of a bit of rev­er­en­tial ref­er­enc­ing), and in the process takes a few equally rev­er­en­tial jabs, if that’s the cor­rect word, maybe not but it’s bet­ter than say­ing poxes, at King Tubby, Terry Hall, his own Sabres of Par­adise and so much more. And includes what may be 2009’s best lyri­cal lines, when when talk­ing about responses to his music: “‘As a teenage girl, your music made me bad’”. A glo­ri­ous doc­u­ment of a career as a musi­cal deviant, and, yes, one of the very great pio­neers. Oh, and quickly grab your­self a copy of his Fact Mix. It says it’s only up for 3 weeks (it dates from Sep­tem­ber) but at the time of typ­ing, it’s still avail­able; and, if you’ve not had the pleasure.…

Fuck But­tons: Tarot Sport

Pro­duced by Mr. Weather­all, for our lis­ten­ing plea­sure, and to my likely con­ser­v­a­tive ears, quite an improve­ment over their debut. The idea of wall of aural tex­tures for plea­sur­able lis­ten­ing is a tough one to pull off. Mostly it fails after it passes the clever hur­dle, and tries to jump the plea­sure hur­dle. The Bat­tles were very much like that for me…yes throughly clever, but hor­ri­ble to spend any time with. And so it was with Fuck But­tons’ debut. I played it and loved what they were try­ing to pull off, but hated the end result. So, thank you Mis­ter Rot­ter, you’ve taken the ideas, sanded off the the ugly bits and added a splash of uber-epic. And it may well be, this week at least, my favourite album of 2009. If only I could let rid of the under­ly­ing, and uneasy feel­ing that I may have inad­ver­tently suc­cumbed to a mutant child of prog-rock…

Terry Lynn: Kingston­Logic 2.0

I dunno where I found this…an email from some­one I think. A touch of 80’s Gussie Clarke dig­i­tal stylings, albeit much tough­ened, a smat­ter­ing of hard stac­cato ragga pop, a swing towards MIA here and there, and an album that veers towards the har­row­ing lyri­cally but with a sugar coat­ing. Kingston via Canada. Love it.

New (non album) video:

Damian Lazarus : Smoke The Mon­ster Out

Thor­oughly bliss­ful elec­tronic sound­scape that sounds like the sort of thing that Lennon may well have made if he’d been around today (assum­ing of course that he’d had the ben­e­fit of him­self a gen­er­a­tion or two ear­lier, break­ing down the walls that makes albums like this pos­si­ble). If you’d asked me in June what my favourite album of 2009 was, I’d have pointed to this with­out a moment’s pause. I love the humour of this record, and the unpred­i­ca­ble swings that still, after months, take me by sur­prise. A won­der­ful, won­der­ful mish-mash taken from twisted jour­neys through the mind of one of this decade’s most adven­tur­ous creators.

2562 : Unbal­ance

God, this is glo­ri­ous. It a record to make you writhe with the beauty of it all. Throb­bing drums, tug­ging basslines and majes­tic swirls of synth. And that’s just Escape Veloc­ity, the last track. The rest of this album leaves you weak long before you get to it, so much so, that the wash of the track is almost too much to deal with after al that. That may all sound thor­oughly ver­bose and pre­ten­tious, and yes, I guess it is, but really, try putting an album like this into words. I can’t.

Jamie Jones : Don’t You Remem­ber The Future

A rather fetch­ing meet­ing point between old school elec­tro (Egypt­ian Lover guests on the album for heav­ens sake), and club friendly tech-house, which really slipped through the cracks this year but kinda hit a nerve with my, oft self-denied 80s elec­tro fetish…oh and the sort of Prince record that Prince might be mak­ing if he wasn’t so dull now, in the minor club hit, Sum­mer­time.

Elvis Costello : Secret, Pro­fane and Sugarcane

Yeah, I love Elvis Costello, and I’m one of a shrink­ing num­ber who buy every­thing he does. And I love it when he goes all plas­tic like…and this is his plas­tic blue­grass album. He tries to be authen­tic, as he does when he does the silly clas­si­cal thing, and back in the day when he first went to Nashville and made the com­pletely plas­tic and com­pletely engag­ing Almost Blue. And yes, his voice on these tracks, espe­cially the slow ones, is absolutely gor­geous. The last track, a sitting-on-the-front-porch remake of Lou Reed’s Femme Fatale, is just a wonder.

Sally Shapiro : My Guilty Pleasure

Oh, this is lovely. I’m a sucker for this sort of slight indie euro-pop, so called italo-disco in some sort of odd nos­tal­gia for a sound that never really existed, at least as it’s pined for in the 21st Cen­tury. That doesn’t make this record any less appeal­ing, and the fact that Sally (Swedish I believe..hence the engag­ing steril­ity that is such a trade­mark of every Swedish band from ABBA onwards) is so detached from both a pub­lic per­sona and the under­ly­ing pretty synths that make up the musi­cal bed of this album makes me like it even more. What does all that mean? Not very much I guess, but if you really want an eight­ies ref­er­ence point for this record I’d point you in the direc­tion of the pre–KLF genius that was Lori and The Chameleons .

Carl Craig & Moritz Von Oswald : Recom­posed Vol. 3

This, which got mixed reviews rang­ing from con­fused to ecsta­tic, was both gor­geous and exhaust­ing. Two pio­neers of elec­tronic com­po­si­tion rework­ing, and remak­ing using both ana­logue and dig­i­tal machines, orches­tral per­for­mances of Mau­rice Ravel and Mod­est Mus­sorgsky, taken from the Deutsche Gram­mophon cat­a­logue (Berlin Phil­har­monic Orches­tra to be exact), with­out ever feel­ing the need to resort to the obvi­ous or the cliched. The end result was hyp­notic. Killer remixes from Ricardo Vil­lalo­bos and Craig came shortly later as a single.

Omar-S : Fab­ric 45: Detroit

The guy who works at the Ford Motor Com­pany by day (putting marks on things with a felt pen I believe) and turns out this sort of deep urban techno by night. I guess things must go around and around that head all day, demand­ing expres­sion after hours. What­ever, this was one mighty Fab­ric mix, fea­tur­ing all orig­i­nal tracks, some new, some not so new, but all ruggedly meshed together in a raw and indi­vid­ual way that extends the soul of his city (Flo­rence Bal­lard is his aunt, after all).

Var­i­ous: Stroke — Songs For Chris Knox Well, yes, of course it’s on the list, even if it’s less than a week old. I’ve known Chris since 1978, we’re mates, but not really close. I released the first Tall Dwarfs’ record in 1981, before his nat­ural home, Fly­ing Nun (and the day Chris left, it really stopped being Fly­ing Nun) existed. Whilst the true pain is his and his family’s, his stroke hit me, as it did many oth­ers, pretty hard. I had a swathe of mes­sages and emails from peo­ple, includ­ing ex-Toy Love mem­bers, who felt like they too were help­less to help, being nowhere near. It was a day or two before the news became clearer, and it was an unset­tling few days or more.

So, this record mat­ters to me. Chris was a big part of my life and I felt rather hol­low the night of the gig in Auck­land. You kinda sit in Bangkok think­ing that you really need to be some­where else, but are unable to be. So I played this over and over.

It’s quite a record, and the heart­felt love and sin­cere affec­tion comes through on so many of the tracks. Myself, I have a lit­tle trou­ble with two or three of the tracks, but when it hits, it just floors you. My friend Rus­sell Brown said that one track on here, Will Old­hams’ cover of My Only Friend, bought him to tears, and oth­ers here have almost done that to me, includ­ing The Cry­ing Wolfs take on All My Hol­low­ness to You. Indeed I was rather taken that all three songs from that orig­i­nal TD EP from 1981 all made it on to the album and all sound quite marvelous.

You are gonna buy it, right?

and so to the reissues:

I liked the Dim­itri Night­dub­bin’ col­lec­tion of 80s B-sides a lot. The B-sides of so many funk and proto-house 12“s across that decade con­tained the real gold on the release, and most have never been com­piled. I have about 80% of these, and many many more from the era, but it’s nice to see so many of them in one place dig­i­tally. Just a ques­tion: why do the likes of Dim­itri and Dave Lee so often feel the need to ‘edit’ what was often per­fec­tion? I had this con­ver­sa­tion mid year with Nor­man Jay and we both agreed it was sim­ply ego. Shame, as it tar­nishes some­thing that was bet­ter left alone.

The first 3 Buz­zcocks albums have seen reis­sue sev­eral times, but none as well as the two pack EMI issues ear­lier this year, which sound almost as good as the vinyl did the first time around. 30 years on, they still sound like the pop mas­ter­pieces they did the first time around.

Oh, and then there was the lim­ited (yes I’m bloody biased) dig­i­tal re-release of the remas­tered (by Alan Jans­son) album from The Scream­ing Meemees , with bonus tracks. I’m hop­ing that 2010 will see the dou­ble CD com­plete with 20 min­utes of unseen live mate­r­ial that’s sit­ting on my desk.

The Beastie Boys ’ mas­ter­piece, Paul’s Bou­tique found its way back onto my playlist this year. The pack­age was superb, with the orig­i­nal album gate­fold beau­ti­fully recre­ated. It’s just a shame that the ram­pant copy­right infringe­ment that is this album, and the sub­se­quent set­tle­ment of claims, meant that no bonus tracks made it on to the reissue..the asso­ci­ated 12″ tracks for exam­ple, many of which have never made CD.

But, 2009’s reis­sues / remas­ters were dom­i­nated by The Bea­t­les, of course, and in mono, stereo, 8 track, quad, or any other for­mat you can think of they still sound fan­tas­tic, and the new boxed sets / remas­ter (and most espe­cially the mono box) take them to another level. And of course, with­out these records the first time around, likely noth­ing in this post would’ve existed anyway…

Still wait­ing on the Kraftwerk, but this’ll do for now…

Late addon:

A Decem­ber arrival, but a week in the King Midas Sound album, Wait­ing For You, has been stuck on my stereo and iPod. The bas­tard child of Mas­sive Attack and decades of pirate radio, like so many of the records on this post, it could only be British. The bizarre thing is, the British are fairly use­less at mak­ing just about anything..with the glar­ing excep­tions of tele­vi­sion and pop­u­lar music, in which, in both cases they not only lead but drag an often unwit­ting (or the in case of the US, unaware) planet after them. Won­der­ful, sen­sual, gor­geous and utterly of its time.