One Of Those Things: 2008 In Review

So here we are at the end of another year. By most accounts, 2008 has been a lean year for music, with the disparity between the usual critical end-of-year lists showing a lack of consensus on direction. I’m almost tempted to mark the musical year by the losses – great individuals such as Klaus Dinger (Neu!), Rick Wright (Floyd) and Ron Ashton (Stooges), to great bands – my favourite modern band, Electrelane, are on ‘indefinite hiatus’, and The Long Blondes are no more. Nostalgia was as prominent as ever, with more and more bands responding to the call to reform and do just a few more gigs for the cash. Not that this didn’t provide one of the musical highlights of the year, with the opportunity to see My Bloody Valentine live in all their glory. Gig-wise, other highlights were Marillion, Rings, and, as ever, The Fall. Things have been pretty quiet on the blogging front, partly due to lack of time and partly because when I did have the time, I just didn’t feel inspired to preach to the void. However, time and energy permitting, I do have some fun posts planned ahead, from a review of Spirit’s excellent Spirit of ’76 double LP to the long-promised and highly controversial Why Marillion Are Loads Better Then Radiohead post. 2008 was also the year I lost faith in Nick Cave. I still love his early records, but after going cold on the bizarrely over-rated Abattoir Blues/Lyre Of Orpheus double and not warming to Grinderman at all, I found myself simply not caring about his new record, something that only a year ago would have seemed unthinkable. Hopefully I’ll recover from my Cave-related apathy and Old Saint Nick will recover from his recent tendency to do his hammed-up mad preacher act over every track and get back to singing again. Other irritants include Vampire Weekend and Hot Chip. Aside from Fleet Foxes and Bon Iver, which I have still not heard, Vampire Weekend really was the indie hit of the year, the album praised to the high heavens in Pitchfork and charting high in most end of year polls. I suppose they are this year’s Strokes/Franz Ferdinand/whatever, which in itself is mildly irritating, but that’s not really what gets my goat. So much noise has been made about Vampire Weekend’s Ivy League education and their Afrobeat influences that you could be forgiven for expecting the record to a) have intelligent and literate lyrics and b) actually have Afrobeat influences. I’d go for that; that sounds like quite an enjoyable record to me. The problem being that all the premature hype and backlash cycle (insanely completed before the band had even released their record!) served to obscure that the album is, in most respects, your typical late 2000s meat and veg indie record. The lyrics cheerfully reference Oxford commas and the like whilst still being as shallow, banal and crushingly unimaginative as the next band’s. And Afrobeat influences? Come on, these guys listened to Graceland once and quite liked it, that’s as far as it goes. If you’re going to bang on about Afrobeat influences it’s not unreasonable to expect at least a little rhythmic sophistication, an attempt to recreate or absorb the blistering, primal fusion of funk, jazz and African music found in Fela Kuti’s work. Vampire Weekend are as rhythmicly staid as the next bland, sexless stadium indie drivel. Hot Chip have been vaguely irritating me for a while by crassly re-imagining LCD Soundsystem’s ‘All Channels Open’ plundering of past electronic and organic dance music as a poor, stodgy Pet Shop Boys rip off with smug lyrics by stupid people who are under the delusion that they’re smarter then their fans. This is all ignorable enough if you put your mind to it, but it’s their recent work collaborating with Peter Gabriel (covering Vampire Weekend, no less!) and Robert Wyatt that is really irritating. I think it reflects quite nicely on Wyatt and Gabriel, who are clearly too nice and polite to tell Hot Chip to piss off, but really I wish they would find somebody musically more interesting and, well, not crap, to collaborate. How about Robert Wyatt doing guest keyboard work on the next Belbury Poly album?
2008 hasn’t been a complete write off for new music by any means. There has been some great music released. The new Fall LP is reliably excellent, as is the new Marillion album. Ghost Box have been releasing consistently excellent and fascinating stuff for a number of years now, and their 2008 release, Other Channels by The Advisory Circle, is possibly the best thing to come out on that label. The Rings album is possibly the best record to be released on Paw Tracks (and that includes all the Animal Collective LPs), and Diagonal’s debut LP, coming across like a halfway house between early Softs and 70s Crim, is an excellent resurrection of all the elements of prog that are so sorely missed in modern music without falling into the common pitfall of neo-prog. The problem is that the chances of these records reaching the audience they deserve seem farther away then ever. Although in some ways the internet might level the playing field in music by opening all the channels, most of the channels are still clogged up with lowest common denominator guff. And I think in this day and age, there is always someone willing to go lower, crasser, more obvious, and more commercial, less challenging then you, which essentially leaves interesting music high and dry as far as the market is concerned. So whilst I am sure that there will be plenty of great music released in 2009, I also am sure that I will have to look further then the pages of NME or Pitchfork to find it, and that its chances of breaking out and having an impact on mainstream music to make it less dull and homogenized and more exciting and innovative is slim. And, as ever, I feel the tug of the past more and more strongly as the reissues pile up and more and more lost treasures from the past are excavated. Ultimately though, I hope that I’m proved wrong.