The Best Albums of 2009: a pre-amble

Who's the winner going to be? Stay tuned to find out!

Is it hypocritical to write an end-of-year list comprising ranked opinions gathered and analysed from a large pool of writers if you’re a website sat so staunchly against ratings-out-of-whatever? Or is it more a case of prized reflections, paeans to our favourite albums – the chance to step back from just how much music is at our disposal and do a critical evaluation, if you will, of what we’ve been listening to this year?

Perhaps arbitrarily, it seems fairer to rank them now as they’re being approached at the same time. Perhaps, even more arbitarily, it seems less so; the albums after all are being ranked separately by people with different experiences of them, different amounts of time with them, different personalities. But that we’ve come up with a top 50 receiving multiply high-placed rankings from our pool of writers means that our point of intersection has finally hit the spot.

See, I can’t just look back at the albums that got 9s – there are no 9s, there are no scores! But this is a great thing, as lists require this distance. And so to re-start by asking the writers to send me their top 20s…

Now how did we get to the stage of holding in our precious hands The List? Was it via a magical formula, albums pulled out of a massive hat, did they come from above? Let me hand you over to our very own Excel Guru, a mysterious character who lurks behind spreadsheets in a mysterious way: … Continue Reading

The Inaugural Muso’s Guide Mix CD Event!

Blank canvases, a.k.a. CDs for mixology.

As Rob Flemming’s character says in High Fidelity (or Rob Gordon if you’ve never read the book):

“To me, making a mix tape is like writing a letter — there’s a lot of erasing and rethinking and starting again. A good compilation tape, like breaking up, is hard to do.”

So without further ado, welcome, ladies and gentlemen, to the inaugural Muso’s Guide Mix CD event!

Here’s how it’s gonna go down:

Send an email to me, Peter Harris (I’m on podge9<at>gmail<dot>com), including the following information:

1. Your name
2. Your home address (or where you would like the CD sent)
3. Whether you are going to the Summer social* (’cause CDs can be exchanged there)
4. Up to three of your favourite all time bands
5. Up to three of your most liked albums
6. Up to three of your least liked bands/music genres
7. A link to your Last.fm page (if you have one) – ours is here, in case you didn’t know

I will try and match people up accordingly.

*[Ed: The summer meet-up is a special day in celebration of Muso's Guide's sixth anniversary, and you're all invited. We're having an all-day picnic - more details are available on the page in the link] … Continue Reading

Musoings with Jeremy Warmsley

Jeremy Warmsley

Jeremy Warmsley is a bit of a Muso’s Guide favourite, at least round these parts. How We Became is such an inviting record, so full of sonic variation yet with this very real, wholesome core of honesty. So it was our pleasure to speak with its purveyor on the phone for this very interesting conversation on opinion and such like. It went a little like this:

What are your favourite albums?
The Dreaming by Kate Bush. It’s a great example of someone who’s moulded as a key pop artist, someone who’s really tried to make something completely confrontational and difficult, and in fact very beautiful. A lot of people would’ve written Kate Bush off. Another one would be Richard D. James by Aphex Twin. People got used to the idea that Aphex Twin was difficult, but then he came up with this album which is really melodically good. It’s just so simple and beautiful. Recently I’ve been playing the Fanfarlo record a lot – it’s produced by Peter Katis, one of my favourite producers, it’s got great songs, great arrangements. And I’m going to be joining them on guitar on the tour coming up. Another is John Martyn’s Grace and Danger. … Continue Reading

1(b): Meaningless as aesthetic judgment

The debate about ‘the meaningless and the meaningful’ has a political and an economic slant. Consider hiphop: the great (racist) accusation is invariably that it ‘just isn’t music’.

James Brown

You don’t often hear anyone calling hiphop ‘meaningless’, which is a neat rhetorical trick – steering the debate away from the pivotal function: to demonstrate ‘lyrical skills’ even in the absence of a band, musicianship, or originality. Hiphop is profoundly democratic in its most basic (and affordable) formula: not even two turntables and a microphone, but one. Effectively, Hiphop is supremely meaningful in its central gesture: to assert the validity and audibility of its underprivileged, under-represented voices, which is why the main line of attack for critics must be on the musical front, where old soul records are recycled. (Arguably, there are complex semiotics here, too: using the records themselves suggests a knowledge of cultural history, unlike white musicians passing off black music as their own.)

Public Enemy

Music aside, to be meaningful is threatening: Public Enemy’s snapshots of black history made them targets for FBI phonetaps, although NWA’s exhortations to comparatively random violence (albeit in response to police brutality) made them inadvertent agents of normativity. Admittedly, Hiphop shades into meaningless (or inaudibility) when it adds to the chorus of black and white voices normalising consumer-capitalism. In the 1960s, black-owned record labels were at the vanguard of black businesses (see Peter Doggett, There’s a Riot Going On), but the current commodity fetishism of mainstream hiphop is a massive debasement of the (already problematic) ‘Big Payback’ demanded by James Brown, referencing Martin Luther King. Is it subversive to make ‘art’ that’s so openly about making money? Or is it defeatist?

WEB DuBois

Still, there’s an underlying urge toward significance (or ‘being taken seriously as public speakers rather than entertainers’) that can be traced back to figures like Booker T. Washington, WEB DuBois, and MLK. White mainstream pop music has no qualms about meaninglessness in lyrics… although try telling that (as an adult or parent) to a teen or pre-teen who then complains “you just don’t understand”. I’d argue that the inanities of manufactured pop music are strangely comforting to parents who actually shell out for the stuff – contra David Cameron and others, there aren’t really all that many exhortations to flaunt your teen sexuality, spend lots of money, let alone challenge the values of your parents: just irritate them, which you’re bound to do anyway. (The day after writing that, I dug up a quote from Mick Jagger – in Doggett, 2008 – claiming that rock’n'roll was never about protest, just winding up your parents, and even that’s pointless when they listen to the same music as you; it’s possible, of course, that he wasn’t being cynical, but despairing of the failure of the counter-culture.) … Continue Reading

1(a): The meaningful and the meaningless

For about as long as I’ve been writing about music, I’ve argued that there are so many literate, intelligent, profound lyricists out there – should you care to look – that no-one who truly loves music need ever waste their time listening to the trite, empty sentiments of lazy lyricists who happen to knock out good tunes, or be paired with a decent guitarist, say. … Continue Reading

The meaning of soul

To close our informative, eye-opening, enlightening series, we’ve got something in non-word form. We reckon if you’ve been following the series on a day-to-day basis, you’ll have learned a fair shot more on what you think soul is – and you may have discovered a few new artists as a result of not only their music but their opinions. How novel. … Continue Reading

Laura Izibor’s meaning of soul

The Welcome Wagon’s meaning of soul

The Welcome To The Welcome Wagon album - by The Welcome Wagon - was famously produced by Sufjan Stevens. It’s arguably the only contemporary liturgical album that the masses got to hear about in 2008. And The Welcome Wagon, equally famously, comprises the Reverend Thomas Vito Aiuto and his wife Monique; born in Michigan, the former agnostic studied Theology at Princeton and is now senior pastor of Resurrection Presbyterian Church. Not quite your usual background, then – and to continue, Monique was raised on a farm and has been previously employed as a craftmaker for Martha Stewart. … Continue Reading

Vessels’ meaning of soul

We rather like Vessels, go have a listen to them Vessels, go have a listen to them here - their snappy insights on soul proved weightier than imaginable. We hope this inspires you to have a read of our review of White Fields And Open Devices, and then perhaps even go and purchase some of their music. Here’s what they gave us: … Continue Reading

Tom Allalone’s meaning of soul

Come on now, who has a list of influences reading anything like this in 2009?

… Continue Reading