Music Time
Saturday December 27, 2008 in music |
It’s possible that I’m the first person ever to announce that Christmas is a good time for simple data tables. But they come in very useful, especially when you’re thinking about the music you’ve listened to in the last year. Here’s my table, which is taken from my iTunes Top 25 playlist:
| Song | Artist | Plays | Year |
|---|---|---|---|
| Mercy | Duffy | 55 | 2008 |
| Warwick Avenue | Duffy | 41 | 2008 |
| Stepping Stone | Duffy | 40 | 2008 |
| Delayed Devotion | Duffy | 39 | 2008 |
| Standing Next to Me | The Last Shadow Puppets | 39 | 2008 |
| This Old Town | Graham Coxon and Paul Weller | 37 | 2007 |
| Rockferry | Duffy | 36 | 2008 |
| My Mistakes Were Made for You | The Last Shadow Puppets | 36 | 2008 |
| Fluorescent Adolescent | Arctic Monkeys | 34 | 2007 |
| Serious | Duffy | 34 | 2008 |
| Calm Like You | The Last Shadow Puppets | 33 | 2008 |
| Hanging on Too Long | Duffy | 32 | 2008 |
| Who’s Gonna Find Me | The Coral | 31 | 2007 |
| The Chamber | The Last Shadow Puppets | 31 | 2008 |
| Teddy Picker | Arctic Monkeys | 29 | 2007 |
| I’m Scared | Duffy | 29 | 2008 |
| Sing the Changes | The Fireman | 29 | 2008 |
| Seperate and Ever Deadly | The Last Shadow Puppets | 28 | 2008 |
| Only Ones who Know | Arctic Monkeys | 27 | 2007 |
| An End has a Start | Editors | 26 | 2007 |
| Bones | Editors | 26 | 2007 |
| Mirrorball | Elbow | 26 | 2008 |
| The Age of the Understatement | The Last Shadow Puppets | 26 | 2008 |
| Only the Truth | The Last Shadow Puppets | 26 | 2008 |
| Meeting Place | The Last Shadow Puppets | 26 | 2008 |
Two of my purchases from early in 2008 dominate my playlist. Duffy and the Last Shadow Puppets both released excellent albums, although Duffy was also a favourite of my daughter’s which is part of the reason for its high positioning. There was a time when Mercy and only Mercy echoed around our house. The Age of the Understatement proves Alex Turner (usual Arctic Monkeys frontman) an increasingly gifted songwriter. The Last Shadow Puppets put the familiar tinkle of the Monkeys on hold, and deliver a more retrospective sound that recalls the era of The Walker Brothers. It’s not just trying to recreate the 60s though, this album is as good as some of the best releases from that decade.
A more mainstream favourite of mine was Coldplay’s Viva la Vida, although if you want a real slice of moodiness I would prescribe The Seldom Seen Kid by Elbow, which quite rightly won the Mercury Music Prize this year. It’s good to have one great discovery per year. Editors were my great discovery of 2007. In 2008 I discovered Elbow. A band that’s also confidently crept into the mainstream are The Killers, and I think that Day and Age, their third album, is their best to date. It’s very commercial, but they manage to pull it off and there are any number of tracks there ready to follow up the excellent single Human. Another choice from the year is We Started Nothing by The Ting Tings, who fall just outside my top 25 plays, as do Snow Patrol with A Hundred Million Suns.
For something more obscure The Fireman appear in the table with the song Sing the Changes. It’s from the excellent album Electric Arguments. This is the third Fireman album and their first in over a decade, but one half of The Fireman has been around for a lot longer than that. This is a collection of some of Paul McCartney’s best songs in over thirty years. Trust me. Buy it and see.
My iTunes table also features Paul Weller and Graham Coxon with a song from last year. Weller released 22 Dreams in 2008 which was one of his better solo efforts in recent years. Alas nothing new from Coxon recently, although we have the Blur reunion to look forward to in 2009…