We’ve spent the last two days unveiling numbers 50-11 in our top 50 songs of 2011, and now the time has come to unveil what Muso’s Guide’s hefty panel of writers nominated as their top 10 songs released this year. It’s been a pretty diverse selection thus far, and the top end of the chart is no different. … Continue Reading
Yesterday we posted numbers 50-21 in our Favourite Songs of the year countdown, and we’re edging ever closer to the Top 10. Today sees us revealing the bottom half of our top 20, which can be enjoyed below, in tantalising reverse order of course. … Continue Reading
Last week we unveiled our top 50 albums of the year, but as regular Muso’s readers will know, we get just as excitable about the good old song as we do about full length albums. So with that in mind, over the next three days we’re going to be unveiling which songs our writers have voted their top picks of the year. Enormous thanks are due to Mitchell Sterling who did us proud in fulfilling his annual chore sifted through the emails from the Muso’s Guide staff, compiling them into something resembling a logical order. … Continue Reading
Los Campesinos! - Hello Sadness
By Paul Brown
We need to get one thing straight from the off. While Los Campesinos!’ evolution from those energetic kids who first charmed us with songs about cherryade and Amelia Fletcher, into Serious Indie Musicians has been divisive, I’m firmly in favour of it. It’s not a coincidence that their songs have become stronger as they’ve become more ambitious musicians, and while it’s been sad to see them waving goodbye to old friends along the way, the cold hard truth of the matter is that they’re a better band now than they were four years ago. Besides, as fun as Hold On Now Youngster was, and still remains, four doses of the same scratchy lo-fi boisterousness would have got less and less enjoyable, and the band wouldn’t have held people’s attention for as long as they have. … Continue Reading
Manic Street Preachers - National Treasures: The Complete Singles Collection
By Paul Brown
‘Never ever wanted to be with you. The only thing you gave me was the boredom I suffocated in’
… and with a scratchy, Clash rip-off of a riff, so begins twenty ridiculous, contradictory and constantly engrossing years of Manic Street Preachers as a singles band. All the, ahem, kicks they’ve given us down the years mean they’ve earned the unquestionable right to make a lie of all that schtick about making one album and splitting up, so boringly thrown back in their faces for so many years. The long and short of it is that the release of National Treasures represents far and away the most interesting, heart-warming singles collection that the Christmas cash-in market will throw at us this year. … Continue Reading
by Paul Brown
As someone who considers himself to be a major lover of the North East’s musical happenings, it is quite simply a travesty that I haven’t yet made it to either of the previous installments of Split Festival, so I’m pleased to finally rectify that this year, even if I’m only able to make it to the festival’s first day. Set in the lovely surroundings of Ashbrooke Sports Club in a pretty leafy part of Sunderland, the line-up of the festival is a gratifying blend of local and bigger name talent, and acts as a lesson to the organisers of the farcically aborted Ignition fest in Newcastle who attempted something similar recently. … Continue Reading
by Paul Brown
We’ve all probably seen the distressing scenes of the droughts in East Africa recently, and it’s difficult to shake an over-riding feeling of helplessness. Recently, though, a collection of musicians in the North East of England have come together in an effort to provide some kind of help to those affected, by providing a series of exclusive songs to a stunning new compilation called North East by East Africa. … Continue Reading
By Paul Brown
For a few months now, I’ve been excitedly looking forward to Slow Down, the debut album from Hyde and Beast, the North East super-group of sorts, comprised of Futureheads drummer Dave Hyde and former Golden Virgins member Neil Bassett. The record came out on August 15th, and as Dave tells us, has been a long time in the making: “We’ve known each other for twelve years or something, and we’ve been pretty good friends for a while, but a few years ago I was really busy with the Futureheads and kind of lost contact. We were doing our own things for ages, and then a few years ago, he was running a studio in Sunderland, and it seemed pretty perfect ‘cos I just lived round the corner from it!, We never intended to do an album at all, it was just that I’d had these few songs for years and years that I just wanted to get down.” … Continue Reading
by Paul Brown
Given the events of the past week, it’d be easy to be a bit flippant and infuse this weeks singles column with some kind of glib riot theme, make some rubbish Kaiser Chiefs joke, or even drop in some shit crack about Gazza and a fishing rod (we’ve all got one of those wankers in our Facebook feeds, right?) However, that’d be pretty disrespectful to those who lost businesses, homes, hope, and in the case of one horrible incident, lives, so it’s probably best we just focus our attentions on the power of music to unite us, to lift us, and infuriate us. After all, few things offer a better escape than a good single. Onwards, then. … Continue Reading
I own neither Frank nor Back to Black. I’ve never had any particularly strong feelings about Amy Winehouse as a musician, save for a vague appreciation of that voice and the clutch of singles which cemented her megastardom. Yet, since the first uneasy pricklings of the rumours of her death began to gather momentum early this evening, it’s dominated my thoughts almost exclusively. … Continue Reading
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