Daddy or Chips Top 40 Tracks of 2006! The Top 5!

Here they come! Happy Christmas and thanks to everyone who has left comments and nice mesages all year. Here’s to 2007! (I’ve aleady found a track to put in next year’s countdown: Kleerup feat. Robyn’s With Every Heartbeat!)

05. The Zookeeper’s Boy - Mew

“Are you my lady? Are you? My lady? Arrrrrrrrrrrrre you? Are you?”

It’s a bit Sigur Rós. It’s more than a little big prog. It’s also, crucially, a little bit pop. Mew are a Danish band whom I came across for the first time via this track being offered on Pitchfork or Stylus or one of those American tastemaking sites. Here was this huge thing, full of bombast and power chords and falsetto and lyrics about ostriches - and it was truly fantastic!

As I get older, I notice how acts such as M. Ward, Bic Runga, Lambchop and other tasteful purveyors of adult angst are finding themselves on my iPod. These acts seem to effortlessly craft melodic and well-produced music without bothering Top 40 radio all that much (except in New Zealand where Lady Bic of Runga is somewhat of a chart-botherer). So, with all this accomplished stuff, does it mean that I’m getting older and wiser and identifying M.O.R.e with A.O.R? I don’t read NME anymore, but I never miss Word. I have abandoned Q but can’t quite take on Mojo.

Then I google Mew and begin to realise that the people who really love them are teens in Arkansas and Georgia. Kinda gothy, literary misfit kids who read and don’t play sport. Who frequently have astonishingly well written blogs and gravitate towards like minds via Web 2.0.

And I can see whey Mew appeal. Hugely ambitious and convoluted. Aspirational and passionate. Complex and literary. But with proper choruses and about seven different heartbreaking choruses in every song (a bit like if Girls Aloud were boys with a sensitive bent. And any good). And humour - you can accuse Mew of being prog (gasp!) and they’ll point to a track called, yes, ‘Saviors Of Jazz Ballet (Fear Me, December)’ and that makes me want to punch the air with joy!

As does this particularly widescreen opus. Buy their album And The Glass Handed Kites; it’s extraordinary.

(Alas, it’s got extraordinarily, ahem, brave album art; at first I thought they were butch women!)

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04. Say After Me - Bic Runga

It’s New Zealand’s favourite music-making daughter and this time she’s a bit fed up. I first heard Bic Runga’s track ‘Get Some Sleep’ as I drove the two hour journey home to visit the parents. It was a beautiful summery Saturday morning and the track perfectly captured that sort of carefree abandon one feels on an open road, surrounded by greenery and with no great hurry. So I got her album and it was filled with similarly summery tracks. Even the sad ones were sprightly.

Then this, her third album, was released and it seemed that things had changed for Ms Runga. The darkness had crept in. Sample titles: ‘If I Had You’, ‘Blue Blue Heart’, ‘It’s Over’. There’s a song called ‘No Crying No More’ which, I think, is trying to pass itself off as a radio-friendly singalong. No one is, however, fooled.

‘Say After Me’ is a big dramatic widescreen exercise in misery. I kinda half hope that she doesn’t cheer up.

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03. The Boom Boom Bap - Scritti Politti

Live at Shepherd’s Bush, London 11/06.

I’ve written a disproportionate amount about Scritti this year. THey’ve been good to me. Not only did Green surprise me by putting out another truly excellent album, but he also played Dublin, shook my hand, gave me his autograph AND posed for a picture. It’s all too much.

Except in terms of production, Green made the whole album at home, and when I first heard it, I thought it lacked a bit of polish (unlike the previous three albums which were ridiculously glossy).

But it grew and grew, and this track, the single, provided the most Scritti-like flavour: slightly obtuse lyrics, questioning chords, references to Green’s love of hip hop, unpredictable structure and Deanna Durbin vocals.

And (and I never thought I would saw this) Scritti totally rocked live.

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02. Chinese Translation - M. Ward

As a kid, I would listen to my Dad singing snippets of Johnny Cash songs as he drove the car or before dinner. He would tune the radio to whatever station was baging out the sounds of dusty highways by not-quite-handsome but very masculine singers. That kind of country music was a fusion of rollicking guitars and experienced men singing about drinking, women and shooting. Life, it seemed.

And thirty years later, M Ward, manages to do the same thing; deliberately evoking the past. But where C&W educated us about the grittiness of life and how we must accept the hand we’re dealt, Ward gets all Zen on our asses and seeks answers: ‘What do you do with the pieces of a broken heart?” he asks. “And how can a man like me remain in the light?”. “And if life is really as short as they say, then why is the night so long?”
Does he get answers? Of course not. But as Johnny Cash might say, he keeps his eyes wide open all the time/he finds it very very easy to be true.

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01. Crazy - Gnarls Barkley

Gnarls Barkley performing live on Top Of The Pops (RIP).

It leaped off the radio and pop kids loved it. It turned up in the tastemaking blogs and the cool kids approved. It touched emotions and the soul boys and girls endorsed it. It’s quirky, soulful, intellectual, hip, accomplished, melodic and brief. It will be heard from now until the end of the world.

To quote Garry Mulholland describing Dead or Alive’s ‘You Spin Me Round (Like A Record)’, there is nothing wrong with this record.

Daddy or Chips Top 40 Tracks of 2006! 10-6!

Ok, I lied about having the Top 10 ready, so it’s 10-6 this evening pop pickers, and I promise to conclude tomorrow. But now, in all their YouTube glory, it’s the Daddy or Chips 10 -9 - 8 - 7 - 6 of 2006!

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10. Mecklenburg - Audrey

Describing Audrey’s music is no easy task. If the group has succeeded in finding a central theme, it’s a balance in the melodies - shimmering, beautiful moments of pop meet dark sadness.

So says Audrey’s bio on their webpage. Like so many other deliciously ‘misery guts’ acts this year, they are from Sweden. I attempted this year to get Andrew into some newer music other than funky house. All was going well; he liked Adem, Divine Comedy and M Ward, but ‘Mecklenburg’ was a step too far. This is music that doesn’t fade unobtrusively into the background. It mopes away for a bit before really letting go in a full-on wallow. And by then it has your utmost attention.

Therefore, it is rather crap make-out music.

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09. The Beeching Report - iLIKETRAiNS

And yet more misery. iLIKETRAiNS are an English band who were described by The Guardian as “grand and slightly unapproachable civic music, less to be listened to and more to be visited like a museum or war memorial, and all the more interesting because of it.”

This track chastises Dr Richard Beeching and his colleagues whose controversial reports led to the reducing by a third the national rail’s capacity in the UK in the 1960s. Cue lots of people out of a job and a continuation of the increasing unpopularity of rail as a viable mode of transport in UK.

I think we’ve all learning something today. Hey, this group truly are ‘library rock’.

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08. Fugitive (Richard X Extended Mix) - Pet Shop Boys

Ooh, this one got the Petheads in a steam on the forums. Were PSB romanticising terrorists? The lyrics do seem to describe a couple of people about to do something extraordinary and the track itself has a wooshing plane noise once or twice.

Here is Dr Wayne Studer on the track:

Heaven is very much on the mind of the narrator, who utters such lines as “There’s always a new way to heaven,” “It’s always forever in heaven,” and “We’ll all be together in heaven.” He and the person to whom he’s singing stand apart from society as a whole, each of them a “fugitive” of the title. His words indicate both questioning uncertainty and some measure of confidence gained from careful preparation for what lies ahead. (It’s an established fact that Mohamed Ata [sic] and other 9/11 terrorists engaged in ritual cleansing and body-shaving before departing on their fateful mission.)

Where do we stand in this land?
We’re invisible now
Clean and prepared to be led
Indivisible

The narrator is saying goodbye to his “brother” (”I’m really gonna miss you”) while expressing anticipation for the impending event:

I know that it won’t be that long until the hour
Free and released from the world
It feels like power

Going too far? The rest of the Fundamental album (on which this appears on an extra disc entitled Fundamentalism) tackles topics such as identity cards and immigration (Integral) and Bush & Blair’s relationship (I’m With Stupid), so religious fundamentalism is not a huge leap.

That they and Richard X manage it so stylishly and poignantly is a credit to the ability of pop music to reflect really quite complex contemporary issues.

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07. A Lady Of A Certain Age - The Divine Comedy

Having gone a bit rock with the previous album, Neil Hannon once again found vehicles to better express his wordplay, gift for observation and ear for melody. A Lady Of A Certain Age tells the tale of an aging It Girl whose physical charms have faded and whose other charms remain undernourished. It’s a sad story, as we follow her from her youth as a cracker to middle age when the wealthy husband traded up for a younger model and the kids are misfits to her twilight years where she is alone and still depending on the kindness of strangers.

There is an ambiguity here in that I cannot tell if the song is meant to provoke pity (which it does) or ridicule; I sometimes get a nasty vibe from it. But it is keenly observed, and the melody and structure are so utterly sublime that I feel it must already be a classic from the 70s in some alternate universe where an aging Hannon puffs on a Gauloise and lechs over Whitney Houston wanting to ‘ferk’ her.

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06. Hold On, Hold On - Neko Case

Somtimes it takes a while for the lyrics to catch up with the music.

The music here is a brief whirl of rolling guitars and country touched sadness, reinforced by that hugely expressive voice. But, like the rest of the album, Fox Confessor Brings The Flood, the lyrics are oblique, suggestive and poetic. One is tempted to think of them as mere string together sounds, an additional instrument, but there’s something else going on, and that degree in English literature I have is prompting me to not let Ms Case away without a rigourous assessment.

But this is pop music, not poetry, and I’m not writing a paper on her, so I’m not all that pushed. I’m curious enough to read others’ interpretation though. I love the enthusiasm with which people throw themselves into these things. Popular music matters to them. And me.

Daddy or Chips Top 40 Tracks of 2006! 20-11

Ok, the staff party went on a bit, then the bloody neighbours had a house party until 5 a.m., I woke up at 4:30 and couldn’t sleep til 7 and blah blah blah…..

But the music plays forever, so let’s saucily reveal a little more musical ankle, shall we? Oooh!

20. Mumbai After Dark (Bootleg) - Jay Dabhi

No 1 on BBC Asian Network for weeks, this storming potential crossover is still unreleased officially.

19. Valentine - The Delays

I do like it when indie goes Moroder on my ass. Soaring!

18. Everybody’s Gone To War - Nerina Pallot

It’s a proper pop song by a grown up and some of those hooks have gotten caught in my eye.

17. We’re Here - Guillemots

Preposterous, swirling, kitchen-sink stuff. Think ‘Yes’ by McAlmont & Butler redone by naive romantics.

16. Washing Up (Tiga Mix) - Tomas Andersson

Yes, that Dyson-fucking-iMac track again. Disorientating and provoking mindless abandonment.

15. Rehab - Amy Winehouse

No. No. No.

14. Love Will Tear Us Apart - Susanna & The Magical Orchestra

I’ll see your bleak melancholy, Joy Division, and raise you a Scandinavian fuckload more.

13. I’ll Be By Your Side - Sally Shapiro

And Scandinavians even make cheesy Italo-Disco sound sad.

12. Razzle Dazzle Rose - Camera Obscura

Wall of Sound echo chamber & violins and perhaps the longest, most epic, outro committed to tape.

11. Numb - Pet Shop Boys

Diane Warren penned Big Ballard makes England cry during the World Cup (arf!).

The Top 10 tomorrow!!!!!

Who is left? Five acts I had not heard of this time last year and five who can’t seem to be able to put a foot wrong, as you’ll see.

I’m so excited (I could vomit).

Daddy or Chips Top 40 Tracks of 2006! 30-21

  

More loveliness from 2006. I notice that Pitchfork put their Top 100 up today too, and just to show off they provided mp3s for lots of them (so head over there and nick ‘em!).

Back to the countdown…

30. Fee Fie - The Hidden Cameras

Joel’s mannered style isn’t to everyone’s taste, but the melodies and violins are killer. Ace live too!

29. The Resurrectionist - Pet Shop Boys

Few enough acts save their really good stuff for b-sides. Electronic stormer about Victorian gravediggers. But of course!

28. To Be Loved - Bent

Former come-down kings lose BJ Cole and go ‘a bit spiky’. Standard song structure dispensed with to go glorious at 2:17 in.

27. Star Witness - Neko Case

Never has a car accident sounded so beatific.

26. Changes - Chris Lake

HappySad house later ruined by stapled on banal vocals (”Let it lie, Enda”).

25. One More Try - My Robot Friend feat. Antony

Anto escapes the Johnsons and goes to the disco. Wheeeeeeeeeeeeee!

24. Stolen Hill - Anika Moa

Bic Runga’s barefoot pal turns up the quiet storm misery. Must be something in the NZ waters.

23. Find Yourself A Friend (Seamus Haji Big Love Vocal) - Paul Harris

I do hope SH is an Irish-Japanese person, cos he’s got the funk on this ode to going clubbing to find a shag.

22. Young Folks - Peter Bjorn and John feat. Victoria Bergsman

Ok, all together now; “phwee, phwee, pwee, pwee, pwee, pwee, pweeeee” (Ok, it’s hard to transcribe whistling).

21. Steady, As She Goes - The Raconteurs

Jack White’s ’supergroup’ make a storming track - with unexpected punctuation!

20-11 tomorrow (if the staff party doesn’t kill me. If not, Wednesday!)

Daddy or Chips Top 40 Tracks of 2006!

What a fabulous year it’s been musically and otherwise! Thanks to the Interweb and the whole Web 2.0 business, I’ve discovered and sampled  a huge range of artists that I otherwise would not have heard at all.

And, Mr Record Company, I went out an bought loads of them too. Sure, I grabbed mp3s here and there from other bloggers or wherever they had been placed legitimately. And yes, I occasionally had some magically appear in my inbox or hard drive where the torrents do fall.

But if I love it, I buy it. If it’s mediocre or worse, I delete it. But when I spend money now (and I have spent more on music this year than any other year before), I spend it on quality.

More of the recipients of my wealth later, this week, we’re counting down the Daddy or Chips Top Tracks of 2006!

Starting with 40-31!

Here!

Now!

40. Song for Sunshine / Belle and Sebastian

Former fey indie kids discover they can make super funky pop with aplomb.

39. Discopolis (Original) / Lifelike & Kris Menace

Ten-minute epic dance track which you can lie down to.

38. Speechless (Extended Mix) / Mish Mash feat. Lois

Andrew’s ringtone, a delicious slice of what I call Wendy House.

37. God Knows (You Gotta Give To Get) / El Perro Del Mar

Miserable Scandinavian with Phil Spector-like production teeters perilously close to high camp.

36. I’ll Be Ready / Sunblock

If you must have one slice of cheese, then this Baywatch theme sampling will fill you up!

35. You Got the Love (New Voyager Mix) / The Source feat. Candi Staton

Because sometimes you feel like putting your hands up in the air.

34. Paperback Bible / Lambchop

If Lambchop get any slower, they may halt completely. And then we’d not get beautiful things like this.

33. Angel Eyes / The Czars

Supercharging the oblique misery of Abba’s original and presenting it as a same-sex alt-country wallow.

32. Set The Fire To The Third Bar / Snow Patrol feat. Martha Wainwright

The new Travis joined by a Wainwright on a most oddly-affecting duet. And what the hell does it all mean?

31. God Lead Your Soul / The Sleepy Jackson

Aussie megalomaniacal indie kid channels Brian Wilson  and makes ace album.

30-21 tomorrow, pop-pickers! Will (Let Me Be Your) Dirty Fucking Whore make it? (Hint: It won’t)

Best Thread Closer 2006!

Taken from the Mac Subforum on boards.ie.

Ok, we had the Best Comment Left on a Blog Award, now here is the Best Thread Closer in a Forum 2006.

Words cannot express…..

I am completely surprised and quite, quite overwhelmed to be named Time magazine’s Person of the Year 2006. This is a great honour for me and I thank everyone who has helped me along the way.

Thank you, Time magazine!

While we’re at lists….

Looky, there’s another social networking/web 2.0 thingie for music! ilike.com is new and it looks at what you like and then compares it to others etc - like last.fm. You can also preview a lot of tracks that you find in there, which is nifty. When you first sign up (free), it scans your iTunes metadata and builds your profile, unlke last.fm, which builds your listening profile from the moment you download the plugin only.

However, while last.fm spots your iPod and takes that into account, ilike.com doesn’t seem to be able to do that (yet).

Anyway, as I love a) music, b) lists and c) myself, how could I not love a site that makes lists of my favourite music. Look at how fascinating it is to see that Lady Bic of Runga has just slipped in there! The wily little minx.

Best comment left in a blog 2006

This cheered me up no end…..

from The Daily Dish.

A Gift.

The image above comes from sud73’s beautiful photographs of wrestlers.

Andrew says that the music I like is Miserable Git Music, and it is true that I have a penchant for the melancholy, but this propensity is totally at odds with my love for dance. And I don’t mean ‘dance’ as in Chris de Burgh’s bizarre pronunciation in The Lady in Red, but fierce, joyful, euphoric, four-to-the-floor, thumping dance. And that’s my Xmas gift to you!

Until I met Andrew, I preferred radio edits to extended club mixes, but that was because I listened to the radio rather than danced in clubs. Logical, non?

Then he introduced me to the club scene in London and it was a revelation. Meeting at some friend’s place for the pre-event to get ready, talking nonsense and sipping white wine, hailing taxis, chatting in the queue with random hopefuls, ogling buff boys with their tops off, eventually taking one’s top off (now that has been quite an achievement!) and being ogled, dancing en masse, necking bottles of water, watching mating rituals on the dancefloor and beyond, slipping away from the herd when no one is looking to sneak home and make out, negotiating with cab drivers at 7am while out of it, arranging the chill out next day at someone’s place but most of all, dancing like a gleeful nutter to the relentless, funky, manipulative dance music telling me to ‘get high’ and ‘never stop’ and ‘feel free’ and ‘find yourself a friend’. And it is so, so manipulative…

Some say that a bod cannot fully ‘get’ dance music unless one has popped a pill at some stage. While I couldn’t possibly comment on the veracity of that statement, I dare say there’s a grain of truth.

For those of you inclined towards the dance, I’ve put together this mix of 2006 tracks. Andrew has been amazed bored by my ability to absorb some of the tracks over various club nights in London, New York, Rio, Brighton, Edinburgh and indeed Dublin. I hear snippets of a lyric, a recognisable sample or a distinctive synth riff and soon I’m all over DJDownload to get the stats. How I thrilled bored him with tales of the significance of Richard X, and let’s not go into the back story of ‘Love Don’t Let Me Go (Walking Away)’.

A track such as Boogie 2Nite hits the upper regions of the Top 40 and I can tell him how it was he, after dancing to it months before, who bought the Housexy album 18 months ago which had the remix of the Tweet album track and how this in turn led to a remake with a fab Seamus Haji mix being used for the radio edit. Oh, he (correctly) doen’t give a crap; he just wants to boogie.

And I salute him - and thank him for introducing me to his world. x

Tracklist:

• Funk (Robbie Rivera Mix) * Matteo Esse
• Boogie 2Nite (Seamus Haji Big Love Remix) * Booty Luv
• Speechless (Seamus Haji Big Love Remix) * Mish Mash feat. Lois
• Crazy (Vission Remix) * Gnarls Barkley
• Changes * Chris Lake
• The Wings (Gabriel & Dresden Remix) * Gustavo Santaolalla
• Chasing Cars (Topher Jones & Blake Jarrell bootleg) * Snow Patrol
• No More Conversations (Richard X Remix) * Freeform Five
• Exceeder (Original) * Mason
• Cruel (Fonzerelli Full Vocal Club Mix) * Aaron McClelland
• Love Don’t Let Me Go (Walking Away) * David Guetta vs The Egg
• Find Yourself A Friend (Seamus Haji Big Love Vocal) * Paul Harris
• Fugitive (Richard X Extended Mix) * Pet Shop Boys

Right click or ALT click to download 2006’s Over… Let’s Boogie! Mixed by Enda P (97 MB, 80 mins)

Like this? Why wouldn’t you.