My favourite albums of 2010. This year I’ve struggled to find anything much to say about my choices other than to recommend them all highly. At the very least please follow up my listen to recommendations. And there is a joint number 10.
The Klaxons: Surfing the Void
Listen to: Venusia.
Oh, and best album cover of the year too.
Paul Weller: Wake up the Nation
Listen to: Fast Car, Slow Traffic where Weller reunites with Bruce Foxton.
Laura Manning: I Speak Because I Can
Listen to: Rambling Man. I bought I Speak Because I Can on the strength of a review in the Sunday Times. She’s one of my best discoveries of the last year.
Robert Plant: Band of Joy
Listen to: Plant’s version of Low’s Monkey.
Goldfrapp: Head First
Listen to: Head First.
The Xx
Listen to: Heart Skipped a Beat.
Arcade Fire: The Suburbs
Listen to: Modern Man.
Take That: Progress
Listen to: Pretty Things.
John Grant: Queen of Denmark
Listen to: Sigourney Weaver.
John Grant is my other great discovery of 2010. This is a brilliant album. Only hearing it for the first time in December, I’m still listening to it intently to gauge just how good it is.
Gorillaz: Plastic Beach
Listen to: Some Kind of Nature featuring Lou Reed. Forget the rather odd appearance at Glastonbury this year and you’ll enjoy it more.
Plastic Beach is a great album, but far more interesting is the late 2010 Gorillaz offering. The Fall was recorded on their US tour in October using an iPad and is well worth investigating.
Danger Mouse and Sparklehorse: Dark Night of the Soul
My favourite album of 2010 and one of the year’s most bizarre offerings. Held up for some time following the untimely death of Mark Linkous, Dark Night of the Soul features collaborations with The Flaming Lips, Julian Casablancas, David Lynch, Suzanne Vega and Vic Chestnut.
Listen to: all of it! Although the standout track is perhaps Daddy’s Gone featuring Linkous and Nina Persson.
This year the BBC offered a rare treat for M.R. James fans with a new adaptation of Whistle and I’ll Come to You. As a student of the ghost story genre I was very satisfied with the film although I suspect that many a die hard James devotee was left disappointed. The 2010 version was really M.R. James in name only, with many changes to the original short story. Most of the similarities I picked up were with Jonathan Miller’s 1968 film, taking the chilling image of an indistinct figure on a deserted beach as its key terrifying motif.
Whistle and I’ll Come to You 2010 was frustrating for me as I watched it with a small family audience. Confused by the subtleties of the storyline they turned to me for an explanation as an apparent expert on James. As the original had been changed so much I couldn’t provide one. They expected answers from an often vague and ultimately open ended film. They turned their confusion and dissatisfaction towards me.
However, now given time to digest both this and my Christmas overindulgence I’ve concluded that this was indeed an excellent adaptation. John Hurt plays Parkin, portrayed so well in 1968 by Michael Hordern, although Hurt added an extra layer of pitiful terror to the man. Parkin 2010 leaves his ailing wife in a rest home and visits a hotel by the sea for a few days contemplation and rest. A bleak and empty establishment where Parkin learns he is the only guest. Walking on the beach he discovers – not a whistle – but a wedding ring with the engraving “who is this who is coming?” Following the discovery, Parkin is troubled by something; the indistinct figure on the beach, a scratching under his bed at night, the rattling of the door…
Writer Neil Cross takes many liberties in bringing this 1905 story up to date, although I found it an absorbing study of age, death and the real purpose of the supernatural. Coming to terms with his haunting, Parkin remarks that more terrifying than ghosts is the living shell of a human being, suggesting that the wife he has left behind is the most chilling reality in his world. The closing scenes, where Parkin fails to keep out what’s rattling at his hotel door, are genuinely frightening. I’ll remember this film for a long time.
So highly recommended, but you must put your yellowing Ghost Stories of an Antiquary to one side and enjoy this for what it is; a film that takes only the smallest ingredient of James, a dashing of Miller, but employs the ever reliable Hurt to deliver something of real quality.
