The Bells, The Bells

Daniel Holdsworth and Aidan Roberts, Mike Oldfield’s Tubular Bells for Two *****

There was a time when all I wrote about online was the subject captured in this antique corner of this site. My introduction to Mike Oldfield wasn’t through his most famous album, but once I was hooked I bought it in short order, and there’s no doubt that it helped consolidate my lifelong love of his work. Even if it’s never been my favourite of his albums, that 1973 recording has a vitality that some of his later work lacks, including his subsequent remixes of the album in the search for its platonic ideal, which culminated in its complete re-recording in 2003.

Fantastic Bombastic

This will surprise nobody who’s ever heard me go on about them, but I can’t stop watching the new Muse video. It’s so perfectly edited, it adds enormously to an already excellent song.

I was trying to think what the expression on Kelly Holmes’s face in the last few seconds reminded me of. But of course: it was another video that made me very happy indeed.

Another subliminal parallel: Bellamy singing “race, it’s a race” at 2:23 brought to mind 0:24 of this. Snake, it’s a snake...

5 July 2012

Disconnected

Several years ago I wrestled with Keane’s catchy debut album and their reputation for being Dad Rock. Their second, Under the Iron Sea, was so good that I decided I didn’t really care what the critics thought about sad paternal rockers, I just loved it. Once I actually was a dad, and album number three came out, I actually went off them a bit, loving the teaser single for it but not the end result—so much so that I failed to purchase their third-and-a-halfth album, Night Train, and figured I was done with them.

But Amazon insisted that I should try their latest, Strangeland, at a bargain price on mp3; and I did.

Read More · 17 May 2012

The first thing I thought of on hearing the news of Donna Summer’s death was the 9.4 reader score for “I Feel Love” at Popular, making it the readers’ favourite UK number one to date. That’s some testament, both to Summer’s influence on popular music and to Popular’s influence on me.

I’ve also been reading her obituary thread at MetaFilter, where this comment in particular appealed. Here’s Sound on Sound’s Classic Tracks dissection of “I Feel Love”.

17 May 2012

Sweet Heart Sweet Light continues to gets its hooks into me (and it really is bristling with hooks), so I’ve been reading around on it. Jason Pierce has been doing the interview rounds: apart from the Guardian interview I linked yesterday, there’s one at Pitchfork and another at Stereogum, where he said:

There are an awful lot of records ... made by people that, whether they want to or not, they've soaked up a bit of that wisdom. ... You might think of them as the great, but often forgotten, mid-period records by big artists. There is this group of records that probably outnumber the records that people hailed as the classics, or the big moves in rock and roll, and they seem like the very backbone, the spine, of the music I love. I wanted to make one of those kinds of records, one of those things that befitted my age a little bit more.

So Last Year

Time for a look back on my favourite music of 2011, before we get too far into 2012. (Early February isn’t too far, is it?) I heard more music last year than in the preceding few, thanks in part to a general relaxing of objections from one of the junior members of our household; in part to buying a Squeezebox Touch so I could move all my CDs up to the attic; and in part to my increasing conversion to buying digital music over CDs. It wouldn’t make sense to focus on 2011 releases alone, or to try to rank everything below, so instead I’ve gone for a list in order of Date Added to iTunes for a chronological wander through my year, listing songs, albums, or both, as seemed most appropriate.