I probably won’t scrobble my iPod again today, so here we go - what I listened to during 2010, according to 2010. This isn’t 100% accurate as it ignores the various periods when “shit happened” which rendered my Last.fm useless. Here’s a screen grab, with some notes and the top 100 after the jump:
me and you and everyone we know
i dont know why i added wikipedia links
Hello, hope everyone that observes it enjoyed Christmas and everyone who doesn’t have a good time too.
For the past few years I’ve tended to only spend a year on blogging platforms such as Tumblr (the exception being Twitter) and started afresh every January. In 2008 I stuck to Myspace, just as everyone started to flow away from Myspace, and then last year I maintained a Wordpress blog for the year. No-body read that Wordpress blog; I know because it gives you the figures.
As you know because you’re, er, reading this, 2010 has been the Year of Me Using Tumblr. To be honest, I’m still not 100% sure I’m getting everything out of it that I want to/can do, and not just in the terms of followers. There’s enough people writing about Tumblr and what Tumblr is “for” so I won’t go into detail, just surfice to say I really want to do something more than just random photographs of indie bands and I think Tumblr can help me. (You might remember I tried to do a review blog-y thing using Tumblr in the summer, which has since been deleted because I really didn’t want to become “that” guy. Its failure was to do with me, not Tumblr as a platform.)
For that reason I’m not quitting Tumblr in 2011. I’ve given my page a brief re-design, which just means a new theme and a change in font. I’ve also given the page my actual name, at risk of being found by, er, anyone who Googles my name because, well, it’s my name. Indeed, you’ll notice on the new page I’ve given space for the “life” tag I’ve been posting more and more stuff under lately. Ideally I’ll be posting more stuff under that next year, but it all depends whether my life remains as eventful and exciting as it is now.
So, yeah, I’ve just written 300+ words on how I’m going to keep on making posts you can ignore. Speak soon! xxx
Here’s another 8Tracks mix, but 15 instead of 8 tracks.
These aren’t my “favourite songs of the year” nor “the best”, just 15 songs I observed when browsing through my iTunes playlist for 2010 and thought “Yeah, that song is great”.
As the title suggests, I haven’t included “Whip My Hair” on the list, because that would just make the rest look shabby.
Please note: I made no attempt to mix this in any way shape or form.
“Cocktails give me ESP”
In an effort to essentially turn into my father, lately I’ve been listening to a lot of Ryan Adams.
Its weird - my dad is a big music fan, more so than pretty much any other parent I know. He’s been to some legendary gigs in his time; the one that makes me most jealous is seeing The Ramones supported by Talking Heads (I mean, come the fuck on!). However, I rarely remember hearing any music when I was younger aside from, like, generic radio pop they put on to keep me and my sister entertained. However, when me and sister got a little older he started amassing his own little record collection, initially just building up stuff he’d probably lost in the years, such as Marquee Moon. Then, at some point, my dad suddenly started listening to a lot of alt-country. I have no idea why; one day he and my mum can back from a trip they had made and my dad had bought a few Ryan Adams albums at a service station. I know he’s a fan of Gram Parsons, so maybe there’s something in that. Point being, when you’re 14 country music is pretty much the worst thing in the world, whether it has “alt-” before it or not. Now, I’m 20 and I’m listening to Ryan Adams and my dad has Animal Collective on his iPod. Brings a smile to my face.
Anyway, this track is “Tonight”, a bonus track of Adams’ 2005 album Cold Roses. I can’t understand why its only a bonus track; it’s really great and incredibly addictive.
Last night I went into Manchester to watch my friends Jack and Mike in their band “Ghost Outfit”. They were playing a club night where a ping pong table had been set up in the centre of the room, so people would play ping pong whilst the bands played. I thought it was odd there was only one ping pong table because it meant there could only be one game at a time, but at the same time those things are quite big so I guess they needed to keep some room for people to dance and stuff.
At one point me and Jack went to a Subway so he could grab something to eat.
Whilst he was in the queue a homeless man who was at a table nursing a SubWay coffee and a carton of goat’s milk started talking to me. I was surprised to find the man was quite well spoken and, after a brief chat about the weather, he asked me if I went to university. I told him I did and he said he had a degree, which really surprised me and I could tell he registered my surprise. I told him about the problems I’d had at university and he seemed to know a lot about the recent changes to tuition fees.
Jack joined us and the man went on to display his knowledge on a wide range of topics, from music (he was a busker) to science fiction to, finally, the solar system.
I was quite surprised my friend Jack knew so much about Jupiter’s moons but he later told me it was only because his girlfriend had been talking about it the day before.
So we spoke to this well-spoken and obviously intelligent man and then we had to leave because Jack had to go play and the man was probably going to sit in SubWay until he got kicked out and then go find somewhere else he could stay.
Later on I went back to my parent’s house and eat some left over salad at the kitchen table and didn’t know how to feel about a obviously intelligent, well-spoken and university educated man being homeless and having to pay a tin whistle to afford a cup of coffee and a carton of goat’s milk.
I didn’t know whether to be angry about the injustice of the universe or sad for the man or scared I could end up like him.
After we left the SubWay I said to Jack that I know nothing about the solar system and barely understand this planet.
Please observe:
But, yeah, fuck off Myspace; I don’t even know who you are anymore. My_____? What the fuck is this My_____ shit?
You changed, MySpace.
You changed.
Great piece by Haruki Murakami, “Reality A and Reality B”
So can’t wait for the translation of 1Q84
Its 5am but there’s not fucking way I’ll sleep so thought I’d fill you in on tonight’s dramatic events.
Background - I love in a flat with seven other people, two of whom share a room together and are a couple, at least for the time being (read on!). Tonight, this couple had a massive fight, one which began at around 7pm before they headed out for the evening and kicked into high gear when they returned, both obviously quite drunk and emotional.
For the first round of their screaming match, which consisted of lots of “I HATE YOU!”s and “WHY WON’T YOU LET ME LEAVE?!”s I stayed out of it, because that is the sensible option. At one point the guy managed to leave so I thought “Over for now”.
About an hour later - if that - the phone rings and he’s returned. I get up to answer it but his girlfriend gets the door. I stay in my room only to hear the mother of all fights. At one point I suspect it’s getting violent (on both sides) so head out into the corridor.
Somehow I managed to lock the guy in their room but when the girl hears him screaming at someone on the phone, I go in to get the phone off him. This turns into me locking the door from the inside, so I have the drunk guy in the room with me going on about everything and his girl on the other side of the room screaming to come in, which eventually descends into her insulting me, but whatever.
I explain that all I want is for the two of them to be separate, so to ensure there’s no more fights this evening. The guy wants to go to his friends, but the girl doesn’t want him to because she thinks he’s going to go off and sleep with someone else. Eventually the guy gets into bed to try to sleep but the girl is still screaming to get in (I’m pacing around thinking “How the fuck did this happen?”).
The girl then calls the porter, claiming that I’ve barricaded myself in her room, which is true, I guess, but she neglects to tell them it’s because her and her boyfriend have been fighting all evening. Indeed, she misses out her boyfriend entirely, so when the security turn up they assume they’re just dealing with me.
I’m then forced out of the room and marched me to the kitchen where the porter takes my name and tells me I’ve broken the rules of my contract by being in someone’s room without their permission. I try to explain my reasoning - and stress how bad I think it’ll be if they’re put in the room together - but she’s having none of it, and them I’m marched to my room where upon the porter locks the door behind me.
I have no idea if the boy and girl are back in their room together. I can’t hear any screaming so possibly not, or maybe they are but he’s asleep and she’s calmed down. By the end she seems substantially more angry at me than him, for what its worth.
The moral of this stuff is pretty simple: if you try to do the right thing in an effort to help two people not destroy their relationship/love, you’ll end up getting punished.
tumblr is doing that thing it does where it says over on the right of the dash i have x number of followers, but then when i click on it it says i have x + 1, but this time I actually bothered to count it and it lists x - 3 so i don’t know anymore
It is that time of the year where everyone from well-respected publications to try hard bloggers to the NME publish a list of what albums and songs they enjoyed over the preceding 12 months (or, in reality, ten because they make those lists real early).
In the past few years I’ve tended to go all out in doing my own list, last year going as far to writing something like 50,000 words about my top 29 albums and top 29 songs (no, really). This year I have neither the time nor the volition to do anything nearly as substantial, so instead here’s a list of top 25 albums and some other bits, so people can ignore one post I write and not thirty!
First off, it is only fair to say I came up with this list in mid-November with only one major change in terms of an album getting on at the last-minute, with the obvious tweaks in order after that. However, since writing the list I’ve come across a good few albums I’ve really enjoyed and would most likely play a role in the list if I’d heard them sooner. I didn’t want this to become one of these lists which focuses on only the past four months of releases, so I didn’t add any of them.
So, first of all, a list of those which did not make the cut which is nearly as long as the one for those which did: Public Strain by Women, Autre Ne Veut’s self-titled album, Emeralds’ Does It Look Like I’m Here?, Hot Chip’s One Life Stand, Liar’s Sisterworld, Cerulean by Baths, Meet Me At The Muster Station by PS I Love You, Dagger Paths by Forest Swords, Sports by Weekend, all of Atlas Sound’s excellent Bedroom Datalogs and albums from MGMT, Oneohtrix Point Never, Sleep In, The Roots, These New Puritans, Toro Y Moi, Besnard Lakes and a whole slew of others.
I’ve not included EPs in my main list because a) EPs aren’t albums, duh and b) I’ve not listened to a lot of them. Zola Jesus, who made my favourite LP of last year with The Spoils put out a truely excellent EP called Stridulum as well as a great mini album in collaboration with LA Vampires. James Blake’s two EPs - CMYK and Klavierwerke - both mark him as a guy to watch next year. Of course, this year’s much maligned genre was Witch House, and for all the shitty triangle jokes it caused, it did lead to some great music from Balam Acab’s See Birds EP and oOoOO’s self-titled EP.
I’ve also not included compilations or rereleases, but some I’ve enjoyed include Tropicalia In Furs’ Brazilian Guitar Fuzz Bananas collection, Soul Jazz’s Can You Dig It? The Music And Politics Of Black Action Films 1968-75 and Stone Throw’s The Minimal Wave Tapes: Volume One.
And now I present my incredibly predictable Top 25 Albums of 2010:
So, yay for Titus Andronicus!
And yay for good music!
