Shane Richmond

I seem to publish my albums of the year every other year. Here’s the 2006 list and here’s 2008. I didn’t publish a list last year because I was doing my albums of the decade instead.

First of all, here are the new albums that Last.fm says I’ve listened to most, based on the number of tracks played by each artist:

1. The Roots – How I Got Over*
2. Field Music – Field Music (Measure)
3. Mount Kimbie – Crooks & Lovers
4. Mulatu Astatke – Mulatu Steps Ahead*
5. These New Puritans – Hidden

*There are probably some older tracks being counted in there too.

That might be a more honest measure of my favourites but it might not. Albums with more tracks naturally have an advantage.

No album has really blown me away this year but here are my 20 favourites with links to Spotify where available:

1. Mount Kimbie – Crooks & Lovers
The dubstep genre has provided some of my favourite albums of recent years. File this alongside Burial and King Midas Sound.

2. These New Puritans – Hidden
This is a little self-conciously ‘arty’ but there’s something very compelling about it. Great percussion and strings add to the depth of sound.

3. Joanna Newsom – Have One On Me
I didn’t really get Ys, her previous album, but this is wonderful. Beautiful, fragile piano-driven songs that sound great on snowy evenings, as I’ve recently discovered.

4. The Books – The Way Out
This year’s Broadcast & The Focus Group, this is a collection of menacing, atmospheric, sample-driven electronica.

5. Field Music – Field Music (Measure)
Seventy minutes of precise, sinuous tunes that will appeal to anyone with a taste for XTC.

6. Pantha Du Prince – Black Noise
The latest from German techno producer Hendrik Weber. Highly recommended.

7. Wildbirds & Peacedrums – Rivers
This minimalist, percussion-driven album by Swedish husband and wife team Mariam Wallentin and Andreas Werliin was originally two EPs. Putting them together creates an old-fashioned album of two halves.

8. The Knife, Mt Sims and Planningtorock – Tomorrow, in a Year
Another Swedish duo, siblings this time. The Knife got together with a host of collaborators to produce this electronica-meets-opera concept album about Charles Darwin. It’s heavy going in places but stunning in others.

9. Actress – Splazsh
An eccentric – and eclectic – collection of “R&B concrete” that is The Wire’s album of the year, which should be all the recommendation you need.

10. Beach House – Teen Dream
Taking their 60s and 70s rock influences and pairing them with an almost 80s sound, this is a compelling album that bears repeated listening.

11. Bonobo – Black Sands
The fourth album of downtempo electronica from Simon Green is more of the same – but that’s no bad thing at all.

12. Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti – Before Today
I’ve heard bits of Ariel Pink over the last 10 years or so but this is the first album that’s really impressed me. It’s psychedelic rock that reminds me of Of Montreal’s Hissing Fauna… album.

13. Sufjan Stevens – The Age of Adz
Sufjan Stevens really will have to get a move on if he’s going to complete his series of albums about every US state. In the meantime, however, this is a pretty good stopgap.

14. The Roots – How I Got Over
Not the best of The Roots, by any means, but the quality – and the consistency – is still higher than most hip hop records of 2010.

15. Gonjasufi – A Sufi and a Killer
This is a strange album and something of an acquired taste but it rewards persistence. It reminds me a lot of a hip hop Cody ChesnuTT.

16. Caribou – Swim
Another case of more of the same being no bad thing, the latest outing from Daniel Snaith is every bit as good as his previous albums.

17. Frightened Rabbit – The Winter of Mixed Drinks
I’ve got a bit of a soft spot for this Scottish indie outfit after seeing them play at SXSW this year. At root they are quite conventional but some neat production tricks and some anthemic songs make this worth a listen.

18. Kanye West – My Beautiful Dark Twisted Nightmare
Monster stands so far above everything else on this album that the rest can feel like a bit of a disappointment but this is still a very good album.

19. Broken Bells – Broken Bells
That bloke from The Shins and producer Danger Mouse get together for an album of song-based electronica. Recommended for fans of The Postal Service.

20. Gil Scott-Heron – I’m New Here
Gil Scott-Heron has been given the Johnny Cash treatment – wheeled out by a producer/record label owner and dusted-up for a new generation. It’s flawed – Scott-Heron’s lyrics are sometimes weak and the production doesn’t always work – but there are enough moments of brilliance to make it worth a listen.

And here are five disappointments:

Eels – End Times
I like Eels a lot and this has had good reviews but I just haven’t been able to get into it.

Erykah Badu – New Amerykah Pt 2: Return of the Ankh
New Amerykah part one was fantastic but this is mediocre. A missed opportunity.

The National – High Violet
I’ve tried and tried but I can’t see what the fuss is about with The National. It all just merges into one mid-tempo, Ian Curtis-voiced, sub-Wilco drone. I like the drummer though.

Belle & Sebastian – Write About Love
It’s now more than a decade since Belle & Sebastian released an album that I loved. Still, the ones since then have usually had a handful of excellent songs. This doesn’t, as far as I can tell. They’ve always been twee, of course, but this time they’ve dialled the tweeness all the way back to bland.

Of Montreal – False Priest
This isn’t a bad album. It’s worth listening to, certainly, but I’m listing it as a disappointment because I’m still waiting for them to produce another record that matches Hissing Fauna… This isn’t in that class.

I’ve reached the end of my fifth year of 26 Books. This year ends with a nice round number, too: 40 books. Here’s what I read this month:

Book 37: Remainder by Tom McCarthy
Book 38: Morbo by Philip Ball
Book 39: Mediactive by Dan Gillmor
Book 40: Transition by Iain Banks

It’s been such a miserable year for the Miami Dolphins that I’m trying to pretend they don’t exist. Instead I’m concentrating on my second team, the Baltimore Ravens. (Yeah, I’m one of those people. I wouldn’t dream of having two football teams but I support two NFL teams. Long story.)

Anyway, writing in the Miami Herald, Greg Cote has raised an exciting prospect:

“[Bill] Cowher, Jon Gruden, Brian Billick, Tony Dungy and maybe Jeff Fisher provide a bounty of all-star, free agent coaching talent that could be available.”

All five of those coaches, with the possible exception of Fisher, would be an exciting upgrade for the Dolphins. Not that I dislike Tony Sparano but he does seem to have run out of ideas.

Fingers crossed for a big change in the New Year.

How did I not know about this? It was only through reading Cracked’s post 10 Mind-Blowing Easter Eggs Hidden in Famous Albums that tipped me off to the supposed hidden Radiohead album that can be made by mixing together OK Computer and In Rainbows.

It seems like this theory originated on the Puddlegum blog shortly after In Rainbows came out in 2007. Noting that OK Computer had been released 10 years earlier, Puddlegum discovered a whole sequence of occurences of the number 10 that apparently connected the two albums. Then, and it’s not clear why, they came up with the idea to merge them:

“To create the 01 and 10 playlist, begin with OK Computer’s track one, Airbag, and follow this with In Rainbow’s track one, 15 Step. Alternate the albums, track by track, until you reach Karma Police on OK Computer, making All I Need the tenth track on the 01 and 10 playlist. Follow Karma Police with Fitter Happier from OK Computer, for tracks eleven and twelve. These two tracks act as a bridge between the first ten and the following ten tracks on the 01 and 10 playlist. Then continue to alternate the albums again, picking up with Faust Arp on In Rainbows, with Electioneering on OK Computer as the following track.”

It does work surprisingly well – if In Rainbows was on Spotify I would have created a playlist to demonstrate. The guitars at the end of Paranoid Android seem to continue into Bodysnatchers, for example, and Nude seems to float back down from the same dark spot of night sky that Subterranean Homesick Alien vanished into seconds earlier.

It’s almost certainly not deliberate, of course. From what I’ve heard about Radiohead’s working methods, I doubt that they could be disciplined enough to carry the idea through even if they had thought of it. This is a band whose songs often go through numerous variations before making it to record and who chop and change the running order of their albums right until the very last.

Puddlegum notes that ideas “in one song” on the 01 and 10 album are “picked up by the next”. Indeed ideas like alienation, technology, social collapse, death and so on do recur throughout this playlist, just as they do on pretty much everything Thom Yorke writes.

Still, this is a fascinating way to listen to these two albums. Radiohead followed OK Computer with Kid A – a wilful attempt to avoid ending up in the middle of the road. As I wrote this time last year (see number 17 on this list), In Rainbows is the band’s most successful attempt since that moment to reconcile their experimental and traditional sides. This playlist makes that clear.

A dead rat in the living room inspires D C Friedlander to consider fear:

“Fears persist when avoided or not viewed. If I had looked at the rat right from the get-go, there would have been no drama. Instead I avoided looking at it, and the interval between perceived threat and recognition that the threat was imaginary, was spent in terror. I won’t get that interval back. My life in those five or so minutes was completely subsumed by fear. This is analogous to all my fears: until I face and look at them, they plague me, pervading all the moments of my life.”

This diagram of nearly all the characters in David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest,
with connections and relations shown thereamong is pretty amazing.

If you haven’t read Infinite Jest yet and want to know why you should, start here.

Last month’s books:

Book 35: The Sot-Weed Factor by John Barth
Book 36: The Erasers by Alain Robbe-Grillet

I’ve been teaching journalism students at City University this year. I’m grateful to one of my students, Tom Barfield, for pointing me to this interview with author William Gibson. I’ve read just two Gibson books – Neuromancer, which I read years ago and enjoyed very much, and Pattern Recognition, which I read this year and didn’t particularly enjoy.

Anyway, Gibson is a man with lots of interesting ideas and two in particular from this interview struck me. The first is a familiar one that is always worth repeating:

“Terrorism is a hopeful thing if you’re a freedom fighter. Terrorists and freedom fighters are two sides of the same coin. The freedom fighter lives in hope that he will overthrow the vast injustice of whoever. The people who live in the vast injustice can, if they choose, live in fear that the terrorist will come and do something bad to them. I don’t know. People are such suckers for the most part. The terrorists are smarter, in a way. The terrorists are at least playing a game that makes sense and has various win positions. If they can make you frightened, they’ve won. If they can make you deform your society in ways that will decrease everyone’s pleasure in life, they’ve won.”

The second idea was one I hadn’t really considered, about the essential difference between Twitter and Facebook:

“I was never interested in Facebook or MySpace because the environment seemed too top-down mediated. They feel like malls to me. But Twitter actually feels like the street. You can bump into anybody on Twitter.”

Here’s last month’s reading list:

Book 31: Freedom by Jonathan Franzen
Book 32: Things We Didn’t See Coming by Steven Amsterdam
Book 33: Ordinary Thunderstorms by William Boyd
Book 34: The Shawl by Cynthia Ozick

A busy month last month thanks to a run of short Philip Roth novels:

Book 25: The Day Watch by Sergei Lukyanenko
Book 26: King Death by Toby Litt
Book 27: The Ghost Writer by Philip Roth
Book 28: Zuckerman Unbound by Philip Roth
Book 29: The Anatomy Lesson by Philip Roth
Book 30: The Prague Orgy by Philip Roth