THE BLUE IN THE AIR 2007 TOP 50 ALBUMS: THE TOP TEN

10. ELVIS PERKINS: Ash Wednesday
The sanest and saddest musical response to 9/11 we are likely ever to hear; Perkins faces his dual loss squarely, can hardly bear doing it at times and it’s not a record for rabidly repeated listening. Still it hovers hymnal as a reminder that something can often come from the loss of everything – and on the deeply spiritual closure of the aptly named “Good Friday,” acknowledgement and resolution are serenely achieved.

9. THE KEITH TIPPETT TAPESTRY ORCHESTRA: First Weaving – Live At Le Mans
Recorded back in 1998 but purposely not released until now, and inevitably carrying extra poignancy following the losses of Elton Dean and Paul Rutherford, Tippett’s third large ensemble record is happily his happiest and widest-ranging, from Stimmung clicks and sighs through “Lili Marlene,” “Let’s Face The Music And Dance” and Beat Boom backing vocals through to post-bop, freeform scrums and contemporary classical ruminations. All the more reason (even more so given the loss of another of my childhood heroes, Mike Osborne, this year) to be grateful for the new wave, as delineated by the Fulborn Teversham, Led Bib and Fraud tips of the hopeful iceberg, which proves that another generation has seized the baton and fucked the airplay.

8. KYLIE MINOGUE: X
X for love and kisses, X for the beginning of her tenth life, XX for coming back from where she was sent and deciding to dance and be happy in ways Madonna could never plan, XXX for “The One,” XXXX for adventure and mischief making X the first great non-compilation Kylie album, XXXXX for “love me, love me, love me,” XXXXXX for big red futures of us.

7. BROKEN SOCIAL SCENE PRESENTS KEVIN DREW: Spirit If…
“Farewell To The Pressure Kids” indeed; the most florid, damn you first two minutes of any album this year signified immediately rediscovered freedom. Happily the “solo” project concept seem to have rekindled Broken Social Scene’s slightly frayed sense of community; although Spirit If… is nominally a Kevin Drew album and the songs are his, pretty well all of BSS turn up throughout and sound thoroughly revitalised, as do the cunningly placed cameos, most remarkably the rebirth of J Mascis on “Backed Out On The…” And Ms Feist gives a career best (thus far) vocal performance on “Aging Faces/Losing Places”; a Reminder to those who discovered her the other way of where she came from and how true ties remain strong, even at a geographical distance.

6. AMERIE: Because I Love It
No other pop star this year sounded as though they loved doing it more fervently; the best pop/R&B album in ages found Amerie coming of age and daring to be adventurous; no one did the Human League better this year than she did on “Crush,” “Gotta Work” remained a supreme anthem and the sentiments of the gorgeously fluttering “Somebody Up There” proved to be true.

5. LULLABYE ARKESTRA: Ampgrave
Not only the year’s highest placed Canadian release, but also the highest placed entry to have been released in 2006; it has yet to see an official UK release but hearing and feeling it in Chippy’s proved a revelation. Comprised of a nucleus of Do Make Say Think drummer Justin Small and bassist Katie Taylor, they roared out genuinely soulful, passionate and honest entreaties like a bulldozer raucously razing the slums of indifference; indeed one of the key songs is entitled “Bulldozer Of Love.” Assisted by horns which alternated between minimalist charts and free honks and squeals, the righteous whole came across like a cross between Rocket From The Crypt and Coltrane’s Ascension. One of two consecutive entries in this list which you should cross oceans to obtain if necessary.

4. SALLY SHAPIRO: Disco Romance
Likewise, this beautiful pop album only really exists as a full-blown album in its Stateside form, including as it does indispensable songs like “He Keeps Me Alive” and “Skating In The Moonshine” unavailable on the European edition. Hesitant Nordic indie voice meets a new Pet Shop Boys world ready for rebuilding; swimworthy beats, gorgeous chord changes, and yes, he was in her way at the supermarket and they end up suspending time with their new found love. How does Sally Shapiro, with her relatively minimal sales, count as pop and the multimillion selling Katie Melua not? It helps to think of “pop” as synonymous with “protect other people.”

3. BRITNEY SPEARS: Blackout
This, however, is the best pop album of the decade thus far; however far she wandered off other paths, Britney was uncannily on target for raising the pop bar. In addition, her sundry vocal twists, deprecations and distortions worked in her favour since even at her angriest she was happy to remain in the electric red playroom. Where “Sexy No No No” descends into something I could easily imagine Tom Jones singing, the likes of “Ooh Ooh Baby” and “Radar” are truly worthy of Elvis, “Heaven On Earth” is seamlessly perfect, and even the closing ballad zigzags in ways which are simultaneously poignant and pungent. Most pop operatives worth their salt and pepa will spend most of 2008 trying to better Blackout.

2. THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE QUEEN: The Good, The Bad And The Queen
1. RACHEL UNTHANK AND THE WINTERSET: The Bairns

Land too poor to be taxable, or they cannae get any money out of this place? The original Saxon meaning of the word “unthank” and Alastair Gray’s interpretation of same; in Lanark, he renames his fluctuant fiction of Glasgow as Unthank. And Lanark in turn is about someone who cannot come to terms with the world as it is, as opposed to the world as he would like to see it; he drowns himself (out of boredom!) but the spirit survives and somehow he finds himself resurfaced in a future.

Listening to these two portraits of Britain in 2007 it is hard not to think about floods and rebirths and indeed never-ending murals being painted in the interiors of derelict churches; a ship is metaphorically sinking somewhere, and here are two modest proposals for refloating; one from the formerly beautiful South, the other from the to be beautiful North. Together they tell their year’s most compelling musical story; all the more captivating because not too many people took great notice of either at the time of their release…their spirit has seeped steadily and patiently throughout the intervening months and they are justified in turning around at the threshold of 2008 and saying they told us so. Theirs is a story of historical decay and prospects for renewal; their apparently calm surfaces conceal blades of violence, pillows of tears (in both senses) – but both resolve to continue, to rebuild, to live once more.

Few could listen to The Good, The Bad And The Queen and not have it confirmed in their minds that Damon Albarn has turned out the most creative and vital of all musicians shovelled together under the name of Britpop; not quite a 1967 child, he has nevertheless maintained and developed that same fleeting, feathery spirit of adventure into a permanent fixture. Some chuckled at what looked on paper like an updated Ronnie Wood jam session; Paul Simonon, Simon Tong and Tony Allen did not appear a personnel listing to set hearts pacing in triplicate…but they forgot improvisation in these people, and although the album is recognisably the work of the same man who slowly crumbled throughout Parklife and The Great Escape (not to mention the under-visited dungeons of Think Tank) and then slowly found a new, yellower solution in Demon Days, its songs sound constructed from the bottom up; both rhythms and melodies seem to stem from Simonon’s bass in the first instance – and how good it was to hear that “Guns Of Brixton” rumble in full flight again – while Allen’s subtly present and never predictable drums encourage fluidity, avoid group stasis. Both leave Albarn’s keyboards and Tong’s guitars to decorate, embellish, flourish and sink as required.

The record wasn’t really a requiem, even though Albarn’s voice sounded throatier and more beaten than ever before; it acknowledged the damage of the war, the sundering apart of London, but Albarn examined the debris both pathologically and emotionally – and this is where he exceeds Burial in that he is able to fit the distant whispers and semi-submerged whiplashes into a context which bolsters their significance rather than using them as easy signifiers. Whereas Burial observes from a hilltop, Albarn seems ready to dive in at any given moment to start salvaging. So we receive reminders of a slightly shinier path; the shattering and shattered reappearance of Emperor’s Gate from “For Tomorrow” a third of the way through “Nature Springs,” the exhausted retreat into swearing on “Behind The Sun,” the terrifyingly calm hysteria of “Herculean,” the latest of Albarn’s great elegiac epics. But the climax of liberation comes with the astonishing titular closing track, with its increasing intensity, volume and concentration where the group sound as though they are manfully winding up the biggest of levers to kickstart music back into life; finally the sun materialises through the grey slate as they rock as though they are the first and last people to do so. It is a moment of true awe; restoration and reincarnation.

Meanwhile, in the northeast, there is quiet; four young women who resemble the Brontës so much that their front room appears to be the real ghost box. Unlike the cynical and lazy recycling of sampled clichés which constitutes most of the output of the capitalised Ghostbox, everything on The Bairns was unavoidably human generated; piano stools creak, percussion when needed is provided by the steady stamp of a high-heeled foot on boards of wood; and although The Bairns is the Winterset’s second album it sounds to me like the reopening of the old to begin something new. It confirms Newsom’s Ys. to be the collegiate busman’s holiday it really is; almost alone in British music this year, it did not shout to make itself heard. It just sat there, patiently, not especially drawing attention to itself, waiting for ears and hearts to find it.

Further, given their Geordie origins, The Bairns is the album which I secretly hoped Girls Aloud would make; acoustic, dreamy and nightmarish in roughly equal proportions, taking its time, seductive but rationalist. Few tracks have had as much impact on my ears this year as the opening seven minute plus “Felton Lonnin,” an adaptation of an old Tyneside nursery rhyme with disturbing undercurrents of implied violence, which sways back and forth with its sad refrain, its unearthily beautiful chord sequence and the strings which ellipse into its second half; its implications going far beyond music itself.

There are location solo vocal fragments (including a startling, if brief, take on Will Oldham’s “A Minor Place”), utterly hypnotic setpieces like the encroaching minimalism of “Fareweel Regality” which turns into a circular but intense assertion of the vitality of community and togetherness or the astounding drone of “I Wish” with Belinda O’Hooley’s deliberately discontinuous piano solo which makes the track something which could have come straight from Keith Tippett’s Ark, and even kind lunges at something approaching pop in the remarkable “Blackbird,” the best song about the joys of the mechanics of writing and performing music since Natasha Bedingfield’s “These Words.” The final resolution of “Newcastle Lullaby” finds voices and instruments winding with happy ethereality around each other in a systems roundelay, gradually dissolving into electronic signals and bleeps – you see, there is a future! – before coming to rest on a solitary, satisfied “sister sleep.”

But the deciding factor which convinced me that this was 2007’s best album was their reading of Robert Wyatt’s “Sea Song.” As regular readers will know, “Sea Song” is to me virtual holy writ, and musicians mess with it at their peril (Tears For Fears, go and stand in the corner). But Rachel Unthank and the Winterset take six glorious minutes to make the song matter in their old world, with a piano which sounds as old as the trees which helped make it, and instead of Wyatt’s small battery and wineglass Rachel uses her foot to mark the beat. June Tabor springs to instant mind, inevitably, as do Shirley and Dolly Collins not far behind, but their voice is their own, and their reading is both truthful and personal – the little cue from O’Hooley’s piano for Becky Unthank’s vocal to return for the final verse is priceless, the new middle section inspired, and it is revealed as the diatonic folk song it always was and yet as something I had not heard before. Any musician capable of doing that has to be in a rarefied world of greatness, and in The Bairns I hear promises of genuine greatness. The sky outside is grey and unstable, but the sun persists in our hearts nevertheless, and all the more.

THE BLUE IN THE AIR 2007 TOP 50 ALBUMS: PART FOUR

20. M.I.A.: Kala
Larkin’s Law dilemma in miniature: can you disagree with an artist about certain fundamentals and still be entranced by their art? Or maybe I should just shut up until I’ve learned more. Compelling, warily entertaining, far more diverting than Arular, and, with the “Straight To Hell” sample on “Paper Planes,” a belated but welcome displacing of 1979’s urgent (Crass?) spirit into the overly sober contritions of now.

19. THE MOST SERENE REPUBLIC: Population
Not available in the UK until next month but a giant jog forward from the excellent Underwater Cinematographer; another typically New Canada wander through different fields of music which through natural collective effort and love (and not in that order) manages to thread everything together without the listener ever feeling that they’re simply cherry picking the most arcane reaches of their mp3 playlists. From unexpected Bob James MoR jazz-funk recollections (“Mix Of Sun And Cloud” – but watch those footsteps at the end) to anxiously proud and forthright post-everything pop singalongs like the astounding “Solipsism Millionaires” the record is never less than original and its heart is well placed. Who will say the same for the Klaxons in six months’ time?

18. RIHANNA: Good Girl Gone Bad
As we discovered, the only way to enter the heart of Rihanna’s third and best album is in the manner of the film Memento; start at the end, work backwards through the heartbreak until betrayal is bypassed, true love recaptured and, in “Umbrella,” the year’s outstanding pop single; a hymn of togetherness and support under which we can huddle as the world torments and burns around us.

17. ROISIN MURPHY: Overpowered
She never quite sounds tormented, but burns steadily and readily; tentatively re-entering what used to be called the pop mainstream, Roisin managed what Madonna couldn’t (could Madonna get away with sitting in a chippy’s wearing full court jester costume?) with icily reassuring post-New Pop meditations on dance, and loss, and recovery, and so much else; the sleeve design was worthy of ZTT in its Morley prime.

16. LCD SOUNDSYSTEM: Sound Of Silver
I have some explaining to do. I couldn’t find my way through this album for most of this year; something not quite tangible seemed to bar my path and I wondered whether it was not connected to what we might call the Let Them Snort Coke coterie of newly-moneyed musicians pretending to be down with the Primark ghetto kids; LCD and Mark Ronson being merely the extreme West Wing of the cloisters which nurtured Allen and Melua and Nash and Penates (with the Kaiser Chiefs and Kooks somewhere to the right), which as a totality might represent the best argument for societal overthrow this side of 1976, except that the credit crunch may do for their audience more smartly than bullets; this was the soundtrack to a slow sunset of a decline.

On the other hand, if we excluded all middle class musicians pretending to have arisen from The Street, then there would hardly be any pop worth writing about; in such cases the question is whether good acting aids or impedes access to the artist’s heart. Thus Sound Of Silver initially sounded smug, and self-satisfied, a bit Ikea flatpack; like its cover, too damned white for comfort.

But I revisited it recently to try to get a firmer grasp on it since I was suspicious of excluding it from my list for reasons unreasonable, and quite to my surprise I discovered a record of hitherto hidden seamless architecture, something which for once (or the second time, if you count the early singles) amounted to more than the sum total of James Murphy’s record collection. Critical beams have quite rightly focused on the twin towers of “Someone Great” and “All My Friends”; the latter’s worth perhaps more greatly underlined by the reappearance of Dinosaur L’s 24-24 Music on CD, with its “I want to see all my friends at once!” but an overwhelming pair of songs about slowly coming to terms with personal loss and then gaming oneself up to re-enter the world; the celebration which comes out of “Friends” is slow to come and hard won, but when it finally emerges, almost humbly, it is hard to fault.

Their centre position works because the joint axis balances out the lightness of touch and approach we find elsewhere; thus the self-aware “North American Scum” with its priceless aside of “Don’t blame the Canadians!” (how could I have missed that?) and the superb bookends of “Get Innocuous!” and the Rufus-lost-in-Studio-54 finale of “New York, I Love You But You’re Bringing Me Down.” Yes, !!! were harder on the downbeat and closer to the ground, but perhaps more so than any other 2007 release, Sound Of Silver divulged its real worth only very slowly. But it’s here because of its pretty immaculate hole rather than for its unanswerable centre alone.

15. ARCADE FIRE: Neon Bible

They've gone soft, they've gone electric, they've gone Springsteen, as though there were something wrong with any of these given the right hearts. No, Neon Bible was never going to be Funeral II (by titular definition alone), but its anger was radiant, its hope undimmed, its power subtler but no less valid. "Intervention" and "No Cars Go" were holy parables of deliverance, "(Antichrist Television Blues)" contained the most frightening last 60 seconds of any piece of 2007 music, "My Body Is A Cage" blasphemed the blues (and were therefore truer to the blues)...no, we're safe with them. For now. Who else could have performed "Guns Of Brixton" as a 19th-century rebel song in the foyer of Brixton Academy and make it acutely, painfully relevant?

14. BATTLES: Mirrored
The 20-11 section of my list has traditionally been a haven for the popular critical choices which frequent most of the other end of year round-ups. This is not out of an inverse perversity but because ten other records spoke to me more directly and personally, and as such it would be remarkable if they tended to make prolific appearances elsewhere. Still, Mirrored holds a special place in my 2007 heart, and not just because of Battles having Anthony Braxton’s son at their helm (though the mathematics of father and son compute); this was the soundtrack to my recent house move, playing in the car as we travelled down through the back of sunny Battersea and across Wandsworth Bridge en route to the Golden West, and it felt like the beginning of everything; prog rock without the pomp, lean and decisive, and as for “Atlas,” the hugest of 2007 dance anthems – the Chipmunks do Suzi Quatro and take it both out there and back in seven or so minutes – it stood alone, unapologetic and looking the future squarely, if not rectangularly, in the eye.

13. BJÖRK: Volta
Sounding her most alive for a decade, Björk here was grand, tender and patient (“I See Who You Are”) and punkily/free jazzily explosive (“Declare Independence,” which may yet join “Atlas” as the foundation of a new, harder, more sensuous school of dance music) where required, with the most inventive use of brass on a pop record since Roy Harper’s HQ.

12. FULBORN TEVERSHAM: Count Herbert II
Speaking of which, Seb Rochford’s latest variation on the Polar Bear/Acoustic Ladyland template could have come out on Virgin in 1974 and no one would have blinked in surprise; yet its disconsolate electronica, its frustrated post-punk vocals and sizzling decamping of boundaries could only have belonged to now, featuring a thus far career best round of playing by saxman Pete Wareham. The lineage continues, and it did my heart a cosmos of good to know that people in 2007 were still making music as insolently powerful as this.

11. FEIST: The Reminder
Sometimes the public, when discreetly aided, do get it right; Feist’s “1-2-3-4” was a deserved slow burner of a top ten hit and it speaks libraries that I’ve yet to tire of it; elsewhere the songs and her singer are mournful, sometimes satirical, sometimes lost in limbo, and even joyous, but that Broken Social Scene ethic pervades everything; you know she is not doing this to fulfil a Brits School quota, and you love her for it all the more. An important milestone on the highway which that other overlooked Canadian number eight hit single, “Steal My Sunshine” helped open.

THE BLUE IN THE AIR 2007 TOP 50 ALBUMS: PART THREE

30. APOSTLE OF HUSTLE: National Anthem Of Nowhere
The second album by Broken Social Scene guitarist Andrew Whiteman’s day job band was a far more remarkable example of world music fusion than many other more loudly trumpeted records; percussion-heavy but inclining towards the kind of stealthy, thoughtful pre-post-rock typical of mid-eighties SST and therefore re-opening some musical doors long since sealed off.

29. NATASHA BEDINGFIELD: N.B.
Provided that she gives a major body swerve to the glutinous Diane Warren ballads, Natasha has the potential to become perhaps the furthest out there of all British female pop singers this side of Julie Driscoll; songs like “I Wanna Have Your Babies,” “How Do You Do?” and the brilliantly baffling “Pirate Bones” were quite unlike anything produced by the more feted (because more immediately comprehensible/because better connected in the industry) likes of Amy, Lily and sundry Kates. New Pop with a curl of a wink and a soupcon of genuine lunacy; fearlessly adventurous but always approachable.

28. ROBYN: Robyn
Making a return appearance from its original appearance in the same section of this list in 2005, largely because things like “With Every Heartbeat” – one of the great number ones – weren’t on the original downloaded CD, but it still sounds bold and shiveringly contemporary and points towards the tape of pop winding forward forever.

27. DIZZEE RASCAL: Maths And English
How was he going to cope with no longer being “grime”? He simply went about his enhanced manor as boundlessly as ever; often furiously (“You Can’t Tell Me Nuffin’”), sometimes guiltily (facing up to his own grim past in “Sirens”), but more often than not hilariously, particularly on “Wanna Be,” a.k.a. The Bugsy Malone One, where “Diamond Lil” Allen finally finds her niche and which contained the year’s best lyrical couplet: “Why don’t you just kick back, be jolly?/Stay at home with a cup of tea and watch Corrie?”

26. JUSTICE: †
Extracting the relay baton from Daft Punk, Justice took French disco smartly forward with this encouragingly noisy and resilient album, taking in everything from disorganised children’s choirs (“D.A.N.C.E.”) to one of the finest examples of hypnosis-inspiring-awe which constitutes the first and second parts of “Waters Of Nazareth,” a CN Tower of a dance tune if ever there were one.

25. HOLYFUCK: LP
They’re from Toronto, have been likened to a crash between the Chemical Brothers and Lightning Bolt, though if Joe Meek had lived to work in the post-rock field he might have come up with something like “Lovely Allen”; squalling synths meet ramshackle rhythms to equal a record which squirted life back into the hardening arteries of Gimme Indie Rock – largely instrumental, but speaking volumes, and the year’s biggest seller in Rough Trade’s shops. The miracle is that it sounds like the first post-rock record ever made.

24. ROBERT WYATT: Comicopera
Wyatt will have an indirect input into another album higher up this list, but it remains depressing how our enfeebled mainstream critical community (although in Monday's Guardian its Film and Music Editor urged its readers to abandon any notion of a “community” in a particularly nauseating and smug tone) saw fit to bury this record in the “three stars equal ageing arty weirdo” category, which as we all know is nowhere near as profitable or attractive as the “five stars equal bad Dusty Springfield impersonator” field. But the album’s tripartite structure served Wyatt well; at first he sounds and feels utterly lost, seceding his grasp on a fading age, then he wanders out into a world which turns into a tumult of war, and finally, frustrated, he finds (not for the first time) salvation and deliverance in the words and sentiments of other languages. As the man himself ruefully noted back in 1985: “We get so out of touch/Words take the place of meaning.”

23. PJ HARVEY: White Chalk
Such a seemingly unassuming record, coming in a sleeve so slim it could easily be lost on one’s shelves; but Harvey has always been at her best when no one is watching her; ancient keyboards and a purposely strained upper register – did somebody say Scott Walker? – are used as tools to express immense outpourings of grief; a quiet passage of thought until “The Mountain” when the unwary are quickly snapped by her most trenchant bark of rage. A stunning half hour.

22. DIRTY PROJECTORS: Rise Above
The tactic doesn't always work but here it did; Yale man David Longstreth and his band decided to tackle Black Flag’s Damaged, a 1981 beginning of time for many, song by song and from memory alone. The result was one of the most unassumingly inventive albums of 2007 to come out of any arena of “rock”; girl group harmonies, Nigerian hi-life and various other improbable post-MBV stratagems are put to creative ends, all gloriously climaxing in the subtly immense onset of the title track – “We are tired of your abuse/Try to stop us but it’s no use.” Perhaps as radical and influential as Greg and Henry’s original, if the world will let it.

21. LADY SOVEREIGN: Public Warning
Rescued from 2006 because I hummed and hawed about including it in last year’s list, but provided you’re not looking for the Great Grime Album (I suspect that any search for the Great Bassline Album in 2008 will prove equally fruitless) this is Neneh Cherry sassiness writ anew; the lovely sliding sarcasms of “Those Were The Days” were the hook which caught me, and “My England,” “Hoodie” and “Blah Blah” are much more than alright, still.

THE BLUE IN THE AIR 2007 TOP 50 ALBUMS: PART TWO

40. NORTHERN STATE: Can I Keep This Pen?
Fearlessly maintaining the tradition set by Luscious Jackson – and you have no idea how old typing that made me feel – their raps are sharp, their hooks deadly and delicious, and “Sucka Mofo” is a modern masterpiece. If only Tangled Up had sounded like this.

39. THE GOSSIP: Standing In The Way Of Control
Yes I KNOW it’s technically a 2005 album but two 2007 tracks – or at least mixes – have been added and this was the year when Beth Ditto really came forward as an articulate spokeswoman for a systematically replenishing political Left in America; she impressed me wherever I saw or heard or read her and this is a terrific modern R&B-gone-punk explosion of a record, whereas, say, Icky Thump by the White Stripes packed a somewhat less cumulative punch than “Wild Thing” as performed by the Goodies.

38. TUNNG: Good Arrows
Took me three albums to get Tunng’s point but it was worth trying; British folk music escorted into the modern world denuded of unnecessary inverted commas and bolstered by real musical adventure; remarkable songs like “Arms” and “Bullets” suggest that the 1967 experiment is still being conducted.

37. RUFUS WAINWRIGHT: Release The Stars
Splenetic, tender, ranting, caressing, hardening and worrying; the umbilical cord stretches all the way to Paris and back but Rufus is going to say his piece anyway and does so with spectacular, spot-on venom through this carousing post-Pet Shop Boys concept of a pop record.

36. LED BIB: Sizewell Tea
The real rebirth of British jazz, part two: drummer Mark Holub leads decisively, altoists Pete Grogan and Chris Williams do their best to blow each other’s brains out and electronica flutters underneath, all culminating in a brilliant deconstruction of Bowie’s “Heroes” as John Stevens’ Away might once have interpreted it. Mercy be blessed for the return of BLOOD to this music!

35. THE BIRD AND THE BEE: The Bird And The Bee
In which Greg Kurstin proves himself to be the year’s least sung backroom pop saviour – he is also an important contributor to Natasha and Kylie’s records – in tandem with the unlikely figure of Lowell George’s daughter to produce something which sounds as though it should have come out on Warp Records in 1995; the spectre (or Spector?) of the Beach Boys is never far away, but they are never overawed or subdued by prospects of ghosts; compare and contrast with Panda Bear’s Person Pitch, the year’s winner of the So Uncontrived That It’s Contrived award, and just the record for you if you fancy seven inferior remixes of “Zabadak!” by Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick and Tich but don’t actually like pop music (and no one, but no one, samples from “Always Coming Back To You” uncredited on my watch and gets away with it).

34. RICHARD HAWLEY: Lady’s Bridge
Less easy to palpate than Coles Corner, but its rewards were profound; in the subtlest of ways, so subtle that most people missed it, Hawley learns from the Everlys and Big O records that he loves but applies it to the wracking indecision of modern-era Sheffield in an attempt to make the whole place live and breathe again, and he did it with a lot more wisdom than the Arctic Monkeys, who this year delivered their rapid-fire second album, and qualitatively it was easily comparable with This Is The Modern World.

33. CARIBOU: Andorra
When he was known as Manitoba I’m not sure he’d worked out quite what to do with his notion of 1967 – the early records were a bit all over the Four Tet place – but now he grasps those Strawberry Alarm Clocks and Misunderstoods, he is more able to feed them through his own bubblegum telescope and makes soft but sinuous and deceptively hard-hitting music.

32. LAVENDER DIAMOND: Imagine Our Love
LA burnout leads to beyond passionate post-folk songs of hope and unambiguous wonder; “When will I love again?” sings Becky Sharp as though leaning into a thresher one nanoinch short of impalement with every beat, and yes, there are answers to follow and they are all to do with letting go of the bad and holding onto and nurturing love, love and, as Smokey Robinson once said in LA in 1967, more love.

31. SUBURBAN KIDS WITH BIBLICAL NAMES: #3
Ah, the golden summer that was this Easter, and warm late nights hearing these two lads from Sweden who fancied trying it and came up with songs which happily wandered off to all kinds of unexpected harmonic and genre corners, largely and fortunately because they hadn’t yet worked out how to do it, and therefore did it better.

THE BLUE IN THE AIR 2007 TOP 50 ALBUMS: PART ONE

50. DRAGONETTE: Galore
In a year where so much pop tried just too hard, it was a relief to see New Pop revisited and updated in ways creative and humorous without ever descending into pastiche or guiltily pleased blocks of cheese. Some dramatic quantum leaps were in fact achieved, but the elegance of Toronto duo Dragonette is a fine place to start; perk-filled electropop drawn in vivid and vibrating shapes with words anxious and low down. Conservative experimentation, perhaps, but there was little arguing with the tenderly thrusting likes of songs like “Take It Like A Man” or the anti-rust raunch of “Jesus Doesn’t Love Me.”

49. BURIAL: Untrue
Down here because it verges on being Fennesz filleted for crunching coffee tables, but still in here because it avoids the leaking of information about and by its creator which has been a little too frequent and eager over the last couple of months and retains all the important secrets; anyone who can make an interlude entitled “In McDonald’s” sound like the stellar baying of archangels isn’t quite ready to soundtrack Ikea assemblages yet.

48. KEVIN AYERS: The Unfairground
His first bona fide album of new songs for some fifteen years and the magic was refined but still present; old friends like Bridget St John and Phil Manzanera joined sundry newer types from Teenage Fanclub, Gorky’s etc. to create an auburn set of croons, sometimes barely oozing desperation, at others content to ride the roughage like a winking Canterbury Leonard Cohen.

47. GIRLS ALOUD: Tangled Up
In an equivocal position because this was one of 2007’s most problematic records. Although Tangled Up is a highly listenable and even danceable album, it is clearly the work of a unit who don’t quite realise that time and circumstance have overtaken them; next to Britney or Kylie’s jumps it sounded unnaturally cautious. The crux of the situation comes with “Sexy No No No…” whose startling intro suggested an entire new direction for both group and Xenomania to take, and it is difficult not to be frustrated by its rapid and tired descent into what can fairly be described as rockism. The ska update, the Basement Jaxx nod, even the stuttering “d”s have all seen better and more original days. An unwelcome development was the predominance of post-Banararama monotone group singing; in such an environment, where few solo spaces are given, it’s easy to lose sight of who Girls Aloud are, or are supposed to be, and they have to careful not to end up sounding like anybody else (e.g. Frank). I do revisit the album frequently, which is why I finally opted to include it – and I wonder what sort of album it would have become had Xenomania decided to give the songs to the reconstituted Spice Girls - but this is pretty much the last time that Xenomania can get away with it without decisively moving forward, or at least sideways.

46. FRAUD: Fraud
45. BILLY JENKINS: Songs Of Praise – Live!
The restoration of adventure, mischief and meaningful pluralism to contemporary British jazz and improv continued unabashed throughout 2007 – one of the few welcome developments in the comparatively fallow field of 2007 British music per se. The quintet Fraud were an early indicator that others were champing at and running off with the lead which Polar Bear and Acoustic Ladyland had concocted, and they did a fine job of it; saxophonist/leader James Allsopp is a hugely impressive player, blasting out righteous Aylerish melodies before twisting into extremely welcome George Khan/Gary Windo snarls and honks, while otherplanetary soundscapes are wrenched into being by drummer/electronicist Tim Giles. Meanwhile, the venerable Billy Jenkins, recorded live in Leeds with an abundantly smoking group, reminds us that some people have been working at this coalface for some considerable time; everything here, from the elegiac, stark “Bhopal” to breakneck ska-punk runs through “Sunny,” suggests that he should replace Jools Holland on BBC2 quicksnap. Aside from Howard Johnson on the reissued and indispensable Mingus At UCLA ’65, Oren Marshall demonstrated the best use of tuba as bass on any record released this year.

44. SIOUXSIE: Mantaray
Undaunted, largely uncompromising, sneakily smiling, Siouxsie sneaked back via the semi-derelict fields of trip hop and pre-Goldfrapp glittershatter to deliver a hugely confident and daring solo debut; ageist/demographic-friendly radio worked against its becoming a big seller, but she sounded the lightest and happiest – and boldest – she had sounded since A Kiss In The Dreamhouse.

43. GIRL TALK: Night Ripper
One of several albums in this list which strictly belong to 2006 but which I couldn’t allow to slip away unheralded. Come to think of it, any end of year survey is by necessity awkward and incomplete, so this list should not be treated as “authoritative”; In Rainbows, for instance, is absent since I want to evaluate it properly as a discrete record when it gets its “terrestrial” release on Hogmanay. Other more than worthy contenders such as In Our Bedroom After The War by Stars, or Fur And Gold by Bat For Lashes, or Tinariwen’s Aman Iman: Water Is Life do not appear for the simple reason that I’ve yet to catch up with them and/or give them a proper listen but I’m sure I’ll be able to reserve places for all of them in the 2008 list. Since what I usually do in such cases is listen to them in depth over the Christmas/New Year holiday itself, it would logically make more sense to post this list upon my return in January, but for private (premature fatigue) reasons it’s easier for me to get it all done before I go off on holiday.

Anyway, Night Ripper is a cut-and-paste sample/bootleg/mash-up job – it appears on the Illegal Art label, so don’t expect to stumble across a copy in your local pocket-sized megastore – but a very pop-friendly one; Soulwax-style mixes of elements from contemporary R&B, rap and pulverisingly plastic pop, and mostly sounding concise and thoroughly good-natured. Elsewhere it’s been termed “pop Plunderphonics” which seems fair enough (and if you’re looking for something similar but of more political import, try Plagiarhythm Nation by the Evolution Control Committee from 2003, if you can find it).

42. THE NEW PORNOGRAPHERS: Challengers
It met with a mixed reaction, as though musicians are not allowed to grow or change; but songs like “All The Things That Go To Make Heaven And Earth” are as powerfully playful as anything they’ve ever done, and the two big setpieces of “My Rights Versus Yours” and “Unguided” were two of 2007’s quietly twinkling highlights; the latter in particular literally makes you want to kiss all skies, particularly the one which lives above the red/gold and blue/green of the CN Tower.

41. MALCOLM MIDDLETON: A Brighter Beat
You can always rely on steamroller irony from either Arab Strap alumnus, or just double-edged pleasure as brisk, joyful pop is used to soundtrack gloriously miserabilist words; but as with his previous Into The Woods, there is so much sheer pleasure evident in Middleton’s solo work that it comes across as the most pleasurable of moans this side of Donna Summer.

And naturally I am happy to lobby for “We’re All Going To Die” as The People’s Christmas Number One, as little hope as there is of that happening (prove me wrong!) since back in 1995 even “Wonderwall” at one knowing remove couldn’t compete against the big Sony marketing forces behind “Earth Song.” But at least “Earth Song” had its merits; instead we are being primed to expect a Michael Buble impressionist to offer a born-stolid cover of a winceworthy old Mariah/Whitney duet from nine Christmases ago, Cowell still searching for that international crossover market which all evidence, tangible and intangible, has proven to be receding into the land of nowhere…or perhaps he too has twigged The X-Factor as being a glorified, limited lifespan vanity project. And it is a tragedy; a 1982 Rhydian would have been snapped up by Horn and/or ZTT, magnified into something potentially supernatural; now he is cut down to size with humbling showtunes, effectively forced to do a Lewis Hamilton because we can no longer deal with the prospect of other people not being us (and Cowell’s closing Freudian slip probably indicated that it had been decided anyway; it’s inexpensive marketing to take the last letter off all of those “Leona” products), we have become incapable of worship. For next year, please: Trevor Horn and/or Paul Morley and/or Malcolm McLaren on the judging panel, more mischief, more real risk. In the meantime, cop those 1985 glossy reminders which form the faintly ominous bridge of "We're All Going To Die" but revel in the fact that its music is on the side of life, as all art must finally be.

LIZARD MUSIC: Routine

Chicago, late 1994: Albini is recording a low-key, low-burning post-Gen X quartet. The scarcely circulated album is entitled Fashionably Lame and “Routine” is the even scarcer single extracted from the album, a hushed, solemn cycle of four major-augmented minor Farfisa organ chords which sounds like a hymn to be hummed in the remotest niche of the city. The album credits aren’t vocal specific but it sounds as though bassist Chris Guice is double tracking himself. Confusingly both Guices sound like Chris Difford and thus “Routine” marks out Lizard Music as a belated missing link between Squeeze and Slint. Ancient pop tropes – “Cool teen, I think you’ll hit the town” – mix with internal rumblings (“Even if I’m in cul de sac”) and post-Kurt cinders (“Just to satisfy my junkie style”) rekindle into shapes of Joy Division (“Fall into raincoats once again”) with a life supporting sopranino organ bleep on the bridge (“Wish him luck on the ships ahoy/I tasted tear in my junkie smile”) falling into an unduly animated middle eight (“A time to show Helene there’s no tricks up my sleeve”) before rising back towards the transept of solemnity as the first verse is repeated and fades into mirrored whiteouts of “my vanity.” I thought I dreamt hearing it on the radio and finding a copy in whichever shop I found it; along with other stray American darts from that period (Eels’ Daisies Of The Galaxy at the other extreme/bookend) it still feels like a pop just too tender to materialise.

VAN MORRISON: Come Here My Love

He has a slightly scared look on his face, even though he looks to be protected in the middle of not quite utterable peace. Is he afraid those Irish wolfhounds might turn on him? Should his distant resemblance to Nick Drake in this picture, taken in late 1974, cause concern? An abandoned cigarette, a groove-worn second side of a blues album from 1958 which doesn't cut like it used to, the glass half-expectant; his voice booms out the title with Cyril Cusack authority but no one is even looking for hardness here: "This feeling has me spellbound/Yet the storyline, in paragraphs, laid down the same." Once again, it is voice and guitar only, sitting in a room different to the one his love is in now. "I'm mystified - OH! - by this mood," (that "OH!" as though he'd had a nanosecond of revelatory vision; piece them all together and would they listen?) "This melancholy feeling that just don't do no good" - the way he always slides into those Skip James elisions when life is at stake (cf. "Slim Slow Slider," the leaves which fall all the way down side one of Hard Nose The Highway) - he is unsure whether to prolong existence but will make the effort: "Come here my love/And I will lift my spirits high for you," he pledges in a less resonant, more intimate baritone, but where flamingos fly so do Gil Evans and Jimmy Knepper and his scarred memories. "I'd like to fly away and spend a day or two/Just contemplating the fields and leaves and talking about nothing," and talks that "nothing" as though it is "everything" which of course it is and then the Joycean global scan of "shades of effervescent, effervescent odours/and shades of time and tide" flowing through towards an innate understanding of and communion with the "intrigue of nature's beauty," a forest, a globe visualised in her shining eyes. Finally he is nearly unable to speak because of wonder: "Come along with me/and take it all in" - he entreats, he pleads - "come here, my love." Rochester melting and becoming himself before Jane, but then you guessed that already. He knows there's no need to be scared.

AMERICAN MUSIC CLUB: Last Harbor

California still seems to me the unequivocal masterpiece in the American Music Club/Mark Eitzel canon: an opaque reflection on betrayal, isolation and love lost and rediscovered which defies the boundary of existence/non-existence by degrees daring by even 1988 (Spirit Of Eden/69) standards, and its long-term absence from circulation - caused by our old friend, Legal Issues - remains regrettable. Eitzel sometimes appears to defy happiness through crying on the soft, greying outwards sands of California - hear his collapse on the final "Jenny don't go" on the song "Jenny" - but "Last Harbor" signals either a last wave before slow drowning or the slower realisation of a gradual dawn.

He starts the song sounding as beaten as any male singer I can think of, over a bare background of mid-tempo mid-register acoustic guitar and discreet bass, meditating on the many faces of betrayal and false new starts: "Some of them are kind and it's phony/Some of them are kind...and it's OK..." but he's losing his spiritual grip. "Falling, falling," he falls before exclaiming in slow-motion horror, "Hey, I can't see the bottom!," his "bottom" bottoming out in the faint hope that it might act as parachute, before climbing to Art Garfunkel heights - tonally unsteady, but totally heartfelt - to ask "are you gonna be my last harbor?"

Then he laughs-cum-sobs the second verse, perhaps to mock, or more urgently to convince himself: "She'll soon find a way to make you feel fine/She's laughing and she's clapping her hands/As she walks across your cup of wine" - note the ambiguous Biblical reference - "She'll make it real easy for you," he sings with slightly more strength, before falling in a float through the distended syllables of "all you've got to do is remember her name" and landing on a stern "She's almost your passport to the world" followed by a slightly breathless and expectant "She's almost your ticket out...again!" as though he cannot quite believe in himself that she is the actual answer.

The chorus is sung once more, and then, after a pause to allow a presumed answer, he repeats the "are you gonna be...my...last...har...bor?" question more hoarsely, more vulnerably, more life-saving pleadingly descending in scale until that "bor" finds its buoy in a sudden, subtle Pacific Ocean horizon of distant synthesiser (thus underlining the parallel with Dennis Wilson's Pacific Ocean Blue, especially "Thoughts Of You"). Eitzel reiterates the first two lines of the first verse while the synth implies but doesn't fanfare a resolving major chord, before quietly concluding: "Some of them never tell you/Just how much they'll give away," with which he merges with both sea and sky as guitar and bass fade into the middleground as the synth turns everything into a transcendent gasp of quiet wonder until it becomes a Whistler blur of beauty; not so much the last harbour before expiration but the patient rising of a new sun, and spiritually not that far away from the Spanish quays of AR Kane; swimming with strokes generous.

The FACES: You Can Make Me Dance, Sing Or Anything (Even Take The Dog For A Walk, Mend A Fuse, Fold Away The Ironing Board...)

(...Or Any Other Domestic Shortcomings)

It was their last word, though was never strictly intended to be; caught up in the Christmas rush it peaked at #12 in our charts at the end of 1974, and in America it charted not at all. But "You Can Make Me Dance, Sing Or Anything..." still sounds like the most gracious and good-natured of musical farewells, and certainly marks the last audible occasion when Rod sounded as though he was enjoying making a record rather than clocking in to make one. The band's shared composer credits suggest an impromptu jam slowly shaping its way into a song, and the ebullience and spark of both playing and singing betray a group playing together and loving it.

Rod offers the reliable old lyrical raincoat of yes baby, I know I'm an irretrievably recidivist, womanising sot, but hey I always bring it on home to you; a scenario you would hardly accept from the subsequent Atlantic-crossing, tax-dodging solo Stewart but here his frequent exclamations of "ooh baby!" and the best "listen!"s this side of Kevin Rowland keep our sympathy afloat. "You can make me do just any old thing!" he proclaims in the chorus, and follows with the winking aside "...and I love it." He knows that summer will merge into winter and he'll never learn a thing, but "this old heart of mine" - he leaps at the paraphrase - "is far too proud not to keep on trying" and besides "I'd rather LOSE BOTH MY eyes/Than never see your smiling face again, girl."

Beside and behind him the band cook up most agreeably; Ian MacLagan's funky post-Stevie clavinet (and discreet Hammond asides) squirting in symmetry with Ronnie Wood's deadpan guitar responses to Rod's latest apology/justification, although the star here is Kenney Jones, thudding a definite foursquare beat on snare and floor tom as though this is his last chance to beat the beat. But the miracle of the song comes with the final turnaround; as Stewart murmurs "Keep on lovin' me baby" and the record appears to be reaching a natural quietude of an end, the key suddenly changes upward and late hope comes flooding in through the scratched French windows; refuelled, Stewart plays with the words "baby" and "darling," revelling in their implications as the band eagerly make their final push - the punctum coming with Jones' gavel-like quartet of cymbal/snare splashes/crashes answering Rod's four ascending "darling"s (who'd have thought the influence of Levon Helm would stretch so far?) and an unobtrusive string section enters with Oriental curlicues to take the record, and the band, out on the highest of highs. Nine months later, Rod was sailing and lost to wonder forever.

DANA GILLESPIE: Dead

In common with most British female pop albums, then and now, Dana Gillespie’s 1968 debut Foolish Seasons is something of a jumble rather than a coherent statement; a trying on of differing pop hats. Its dozen songs were largely produced by the young Wayne Bickerton and arranged by Mike Vickers and run the expected gamut of slop (Les Reed’s execrable MoR dribble of “Souvenirs Of Stefan”) via energetic but unfocused pop (“Tears In My Eyes,” “Can’t You See I’m Dreaming”) and through to the credibility Customs gate – two Billy Nicholls songs, “Life Is Short” and “London Social Degree” (alliteration alert ahem), both of which the teenage Gillespie handles with just the right balance of frailty and nascent venom. Jimmy Page produced and played lead guitar on the lead single, a reading of Donovan’s “You Just Gotta Know My Name” which bounces around with equal expectant buoyancy to Vashti’s “Some Things Just Stick In Your Mind.” Despite the recent rave review as part of the Guardian Music thousand – which, not for the first time, raises the question of whether the reviewer was listening to the same record as me – nothing cuts the pop mustard as extravagantly as “Nothin’ But A Heartache” or “Sugar Baby Love” (to name Bickerton’s two most famous productions). Indeed, in her notes to the CD edition Gillespie is markedly reluctant to endorse several of the tracks (she refers to her own “He Loves Me, He Loves Me Not” as “pretentious twaddle” and terms “Can’t You See I’m Dreaming” as “pretty pedestrian”).

But she is better known now as a blues singer, and “Dead” is easily the album’s most startling track as well as the most accurate pointer to where she was heading (though her knowing reading of Richard Farina’s “Hard Lovin’ Loser” which closes the record runs it a not too distant second). With a breakbeat so tough that you could walk the Brontë Way and back thrice on it – all minimalist organ, scratchy guitar from Page and some mournfully sprightly trumpet improvising from what sounds like a young Mark Charig – Gillespie proclaims her boredom with life in a Cadogan Square vowelly manner somewhere between the Viv Stanshall of “I’m Bored” and the Deborah Strickland-Evans of the Flying Lizards per se: “Leave me alone,” she sighs, “I don’t care no more” in perfect finishing school Estuary English. “I ain’t got nothing to live for,” she yawns, and yet this air of detachment works in the record’s favour as she launches into unsteady but heartfelt pleas to let herself end it all with the razor in her hand because her man is not coming back; partly Julie Driscoll in its yearning and with definite ambitions beyond the fan mags. As she herself admits in the sleevenote, however, you have to live and learn before you can truly sing the blues; her next album dropped the orchestra and went back to basics, cut as it was with Brit blues stalwarts Savoy Brown; although in the dripping semi-despair of “Dead” we also hear predications of her brief early seventies adventures under Bowie’s wing, even if Annette Peacock took it out further. It is to be hoped that the likes of Duffy and Adele can be allowed to do similar; why do I already suspect that they are doomed?

WAS (NOT WAS) STARRING MEL TORMÉ: Zaz Turned Blue

If you think you owe somebody one, don’t be surprised if they bend you out of your way for the payback. David Was gave Mel Tormé a rave review sometime in 1982; Tormé got in touch and suggested working together. I’m not sure how much attention he devoted to the lyrics on the first Was (Not Was) album but those on the second, Born To Laugh At Tornadoes, were sufficiently warped to darn at least one of Paul Haines’ socks. The album has never appeared on CD; some say this was down to Tormé’s reticence to let the world hear “Zaz Turned Blue,” but the track did appear carefully hidden away at the tail end of a posthumous 4CD box set.

The key is that Tormé sings it straight. The song is a light-verging-on-terminal vignette, perched midway between Carver and Coupland, about this kid Zaz who indulges with wrestling-hold-as-psychoasphyxiation-turn-on one night in the park (“Steve squeezed his neck/He figured…what the heck?”) but then collapses (“Zaz turned blue…what were we supposed to do?”) following which he joins the Marines – “at the age of eighteen” Tormé intones with Tom Clay-ish solemnity - fights, or maybe doesn’t fight, for a bit, then comes back to hang out, shoot pool and wear a silly grin on his chin. A typical Was (Not Was) scenario, in other words.

But Tormé and his pianist Mike Renzi don’t treat it like chapter 439 of “Out Come The Freaks”; the Velvet Fog applies his most tender compassion to the song, treats it as though it were “It Was A Very Good Year” or “None But The Lonely Heart”; his tenor soft, tactile, arching to noble when required, the melody played slowly and delicately. With his final, undemonstrably extended “blue,” into which he indeed seems to vanish into the blue of the air, Tormé turns the song into a starkly lush elegia; for what, it’s not quite certain, but he defies both himself and his listener to drop the straight face; he clearly had some idea of the cumulative absurdity of what he was singing, and in turn what does that tell us about Pavlovian responses to emotional signifiers related to the grain of a voice? He started out in 1946 as one of Artie Shaw’s bluffingly bright harmony singers wondering “What Is This Thing Called Love?” and in the intermediate lifetime he continually sought to supersede the notion of voice as direct expression of words; he was Art Pepper without the horn and without the drug hassles. “Zaz Turned Blue”’s implication might yet turn out to be: was that all there was?

PAVEMENT: No More Kings

Hauntology schmauntology! Talk about all the old Oliver Postgate soundtrack acetates to your heart's content, but for real unimaginable childhood memories at one remove (from a British perspective) I find it hard to beat Schoolhouse Rock, the American children's education series which seems to have run on ABC in the early seventies; brief cartoon sequences with songs contributed by pros like Dave Frishberg, Lynn Ahrens and (mainly) Bob Dorough - so that's where "3 Is The Magic Number" originally came from!

Given that, according to the CD booklet of the 1996 compilation Schoolhouse Rock Rocks!, the entire 41-episode run of the series could be accommodated on four half-hour video cassettes, one must assume that these ran (and probably still run) in syndication for perpetuity, Teletubbies-style; I only saw a few examples while over in Toronto and it quickly became clear why the show, unlike Sesame Street, never made it to these shores; stirring songs like "No More Kings" and "The Shot Heard 'Round The World" describing and unapologetically applauding the 1776 Revolution (cue open-mouthed/slack-jawed Brit viewer) mingle with more straightforward info setpieces like "I'm Just A Bill" or "Verb: That's What's Happening."

Objectively, however, these are marvellous pieces of work; the songs are catchy and ingeniously not straightforward and both audio and visuals do the job of communicating history, procedures and semantics as simply and directly to their audience as possible. So it was no surprise that a generation of indie types who grew up on the show would contribute to the abovementioned compilation, issued to raise money for the Children's Defense Fund, to aid poor/disabled/disadvantaged children who would otherwise have no voice to raise.

Lena has the album on cassette, but while exploring the second-hand shops of our new surroundings a couple of evenings ago I randomly came across it on CD amid all the usual charity shop pabulum. Well, I couldn't just leave it there, could I? And it's a fine compilation indeed; Lou Barlow and his Deluxx Folk Implosion make a splendid job of bringing out the songwriting qualities of "I'm Just A Bill," Ween do "The Shot Heard 'Round The World" in apposite indie Monkees style, Moby enjoys himself resculpting "Verb: That's What's Happening," and "My Hero's Zero" is oddly fitting for the Lemonheads to tackle.

But Pavement's assault on "No More Kings" is the highlight; the original song describes the evolution of America from the arrival of the Pilgrims to the War of Independence via the Boston Tea Party. Malkmus and Co. initially handle it with a yellow crayon playfulness ("do it to me one time" indeed!) at the delight of the New; note the rapping of the guitar over the "they finally knocked on Plymouth Rock" line and Malkmus' woozy slo-mo delivery of "Oh they were missing Mother England," although by the end of the latter verse he is already changing the lyric to read "We've all just got to get together/Talk to call each other on the telephone."

Thereafter the song begins to dissolve into flaccid howls of the song's title, odd interjections of 1983 MTV synths, random slowdowns and speedups; at one point the band even stops to turn over their pages (history books or score manuscripts?) before catching their breath and starting up again, gurgling over the remnants of the tea chests and resolving everything into a chant of "Gonna run things our own way! Gonna run it into the ground!" thereby quietly underlining the irony of how America would go on to develop. It is anarchy and sounds exactly like a bunch of nine-year-olds in the music class attempting to play the song they've just seen on Schoolhouse Rock; childish in the best of ways, and they couldn't be truer to the song's essential emotional core. Now if any American readers need to learn about the peculiar magic of Play School or Rainbow...

THE MEKONS: Ghosts Of American Astronauts

Most of the abandoned KGB listening posts masquerading as obscure petrol stations I tended to discover along the East Anglian coast (Suffolk slightly more so than Norfolk) but highways travelled for long enough time turn into dreams and it was in one of those not-quite-lucid dreams that I first heard "Ghosts Of American Astronauts," late at night, semi-asleep on a cassette copy of the So Good It Hurts album towards the end of the eighties, somewhere in the Bermuda Triangle of the M6 (Kendal? Lancaster? Preston? Who can tell when all I saw was a darkness with the odd ray of yellow from a nocturnally burning haystack?); blue lights melting into yellow settling into occasional startle blasts of sound, mostly from Sally Timms' authoritative vocal. Some months later I saw the video which Viv Albertine of the Slits directed for the record, an isolated space-filler on late night/early morning weekend ITV, and those dreams dissolved double.

"Ghosts Of American Astronauts" is one of the ten greatest singles of its decade, and maybe of any decade, because the listener (and viewer?) has to work hard at its tangibility, but when you reach there it becomes a song which appears to be about something more important than life and death; it is country-derived but its steely angularity is entrenched in post-punk; it is slowly and patiently angry, a microscope sufficiently focused to make it a missing link between "It's Grim Up North" and "America No More" - "Up in the hills above Bradford/Outside the napalm factory (they're floating above us)," Timms intones (and the backing ghost voices respond), and it gradually becomes apparent that what appears to be a post-psychedelic elegy (the 1967-8 phasing in the record's last 90 seconds underlines that lineage) hides a fairly brutal attack on notions of pre-postmodern imperialism: "It's just a small step for him/It's a nice break from Vietnam/Out on the back lot in Houston/Who says the world isn't flat?" Timms sings marginally short of sweetly, and later "John Glenn drinks cocktails with God/In a cafe in downtown Saigon" topped by "Nixon sucks a dry Martini."

So the message gradually settles under the quasi-bristling skin and the music is everything that Nixon's America couldn't be, wouldn't be or refuted; idyllic, icily lush guitars, the great Gram cosmos, but a voice unmistakeably Northern British. It persuades where most of its contemporaries battered into premature and unjustified exhaustion. But it also represents the aesthetic peak of this scattered group of people from Leeds who a decade earlier had no money and couldn't really play their instruments properly but had a vision of the world they wanted to make and went about creating it with what they had, both internally and externally, until they had such power that they showed (or should have showed) the Pogues the door, such delicacy that the Cowboy Junkies perhaps ought to be paying them a residual. Finally, Candlestick Park blends with Brontë, and new unions are forged; maybe not too far from the one involving the Californian girl and the Scotsman...staying with us in our reality as well as in our dreams.

THE ZOMBIES: The Way I Feel Inside

It is the first track on our wedding CD and the only one of its eighteen tracks which doesn't date from 1967; it originally stole in, unnoticed, towards the end of 1966 as the B-side of their flop single "Gotta Get A Hold Of Myself." Even by 1966 standards it's a startling construct; Colin Blunstone strolls unhurriedly through the echoing studio corridors, approaches the microphone, takes a preparatory breath and sings quietly, and slightly fearfully, about what he feels and whether she feels the same way too and is it just possible that she might and if so but how will he know and he'll just have to keep it to himself until he knows for sure. Some considerable distance is implied by the resonance of Blunstone's voice set against and blending into the natural resonance of the recording studio itself; although the vocal line itself only suggests the rich harmonic structure of the underlying song, the melody is cleverly constructed so that the echoes supply their own bedrock of a cathedral - and this was some time before Alvin Lucier sat in that room, different to the one we are in now.

Eventually Rod Argent joins in on organ, and later adding the bass pedals, but it still doesn't feel as though the full song has been revealed; Blunstone's unaffected poignancy is quietly devastating - he wants her so much, can barely hope to breathe without wanting (her) to say something, but for now he can only hold it in, and hope. And abruptly, the piece ends; Blunstone drops a penny which we can hear whirling onto the floor, in anticipation of her finding it and placing it in her shoe, and shuffles out of the studio. He doesn't know (yet), so we only receive part of the picture of the song, rather than all of it in its full and proud flourish - but we know how badly he wants to sing it, unleashed and fulfilled. And despite his hesitancy of delivery, there is a quiet and humble confidence that he will eventually be given the chance to speak.

With that as a prelude you can see how magnificently something like Blunstone's 1974 "Wonderful"/"Beginning"/"Keep The Curtains Closed Today" trilogy acts as a gesture of liberation and consolidation of confirmed mutual love. But of course it also acts as a suitable prelude to our own story, and the rest of the tracklisting should hopefully be sufficient without my needing to sketch it out further. Anyway, in response to multiple requests, the eighteen tracks were as follows:

1. The Zombies - The Way I Feel Inside (if only...)
2. The Turtles - Happy Together (wouldn't it be nice?)
3. The Marvelettes - The Hunter Gets Captured By The Game (my God, he feels the same and I didn't know!)
4. The Monkees - I'm A Believer (beginning of our time)
5. The Spencer Davis Group - I'm A Man (no longer a prisoner of the past)
6. The Mamas and The Papas - Dedicated To The One I Love (the darkest hour is just before dawn)
7. The Lovin' Spoonful - Darlin' Be Home Soon (relief!)
8. Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell - Ain't No Mountain High Enough (it only takes eight hours)
9. The Association - Windy (bending down to give me a rainbow)
10. Smokey Robinson and The Miracles - More Love (the first major Motown side cut in LA and suddenly the breathing is easier; the intro itself is responsible for inventing everything from Westbrook's "Original Peter" to Charles and Eddie's "Would I Lie To You"? - and yes, more love, better love, realer love...)
11. The Byrds - Have You Seen Her Face? (dazed but ecstatic)
12. Stevie Wonder - I Was Made To Love Her ("My baby NEEDS me!" No longer kept inside)
13. Pink Floyd - See Emily Play (the only way is UP...)
14. The 13th Floor Elevators - Slip Inside This House (...and UP...)
15. Scott Walker - Montague Terrace (In Blue) (the world continues its winding way but we are HAPPY because we KNOW...)
16. Aretha Franklin - (You Make Me Feel Like A) Natural Woman (wowwowwowWOW...)
17. Love - You Set The Scene (Arthur thought he was dying when he wrote and recorded this and he wasn't - not just yet anyway - but heavens, that "oh-wowowowowowWOW..." and it is now OUR time and that's sweet...)
18. The Beach Boys - Darlin' (Brian getting back from the brink, rediscovering simplicity and joy and happiness - a more than fitting upbeat finale and a happy ending!)

KYLIE MINOGUE: Wow

La Kylie gains the dubious honour of being the first artist to be featured twice on BiA, but then the need is rather pressing; there is an eerily familiar tendency to berate her (softly, with the brushed end of a broomstick) over the head for not returning with a concept album about cancer and betrayal unlike SHOCKINGLY AWARE, PRO-ACTIVE Britney who is ON THE SUSPECT CASE with her ACUTE GRASP of her not-remotely-resembling-Kelly-Rowland (but oddly-resembling-Kevin-Rowland) dilemma. Not that I want to demur on behalf of Blackout which as a pop album the rest of the century will find hard to surpass; it is beyond great and its awareness and grasp do not require mandatory capitalisation. But if Kylie wants to come back from what she was thrust into with an album of more-complicated-than-we-seem dancefloor sexpop then I'm likewise happy about that. Then again, this X album of hers is not bereft of demons; it bears the most disturbing front/back cover of any record since Simon Finn's Pass The Distance - the awkwardly candid eyebrow raising amidst the white and red polkadots on the front contrasting with the nightmare negative image on the reverse; is it Mephistopheles' butterfly, an image of her own expiry (was Morley a little too keen on the Ballardian car crash finale)?

The muted critical reception - other than the standard picture of men wanting Kylie to suffer on their behalf - is pretty inexplicable since X sounds mostly terrific, in 1981 terms a sort of Olivia Newton-John to Blackout's Kim Wilde. This is made particularly explicit by the two Bloodshy and Avant contributions which sound worldly yet suitably unworldly; "Speakerphone" is mellifluously desperate to be human, and "Nu-Di-Ty" padlocks Gwen S's trunk for good with its unprecedented Cabaret Voltaire/Roswell Rudd interface. "Into Your Arms" is sparky enough to make one temporarily forgive Calvin Harris in a Lily Allen/better with Dizzee sense. "2 Hearts" makes a better rockist fist than the overly prosaic rock (Brighton or Budgie?) of the new Girls Aloud platter. And I will leave it to others to extol to the important stars "The One," another song which I wish Billy MacKenzie had survived long enough to hear or sing with its exquisite Miro float of a chorus ("Loveme loveme loveme LOVE ME!") and its never apter story ("I'm the one!," "I'm connecting with you," "Are you receiving me?").

For here I will reserve unalloyed love for "Wow," the record's most straightforward (although it is hardly straightforward) pop/dance song and the one which, when she performed it on The Kylie Show, I initially mistook for Special Guest Star G Stefani before realising there was no such thing. Another miraculous production from Greg Kurstin - when are people going to realise the unassuming genius of this man, LA's own Brian Higgins? - "Wow"'s central motif of processed mouths-as-muted-plunger-trombone-section ("WowWowWowWOW!") seems to construct a daisy chain of all great girl pop right back to the Boswells and the Andrews and its early 1982 purple glow is smashing, with its "Look Of Love"/"Holiday" chord sequence (but its 2007 rhythms!) and its subject matter of dancing, and looking, and fancying, and taking it from here (no more Glums, or as another track has it "No More Rain"); "I Should Be So Lucky"'s necessary bookend, the melting, poised icicle of the "Every inch of you smells of desire" section of the chorus. She's lucky that she can sing this, we're luckier that we can dance and love to it, and the car drives on ("You're such a rush! The rush is never ending!") so let's enjoy the newly green city in full knowledge of the highway we had to dream to reach there. You got it? XXXX!

NAT "KING" COLE: Unforgettable

More than any other city, Toronto reminds me of Glasgow; a grid system of imperturbably long and straight streets guarded by imperious, high sandstone buildings. The streetcars also make me think of the old Glasgow trams on which my father briefly worked as a teenager to earn student holiday money. It looks older than its 200 or so years, and despite the surface appearance of prosperity in its centre its pockets of less than affluent areas very quickly become apparent. Nonetheless it was very reassuring to see the CN Tower blinking at us wherever we ventured, even from three or four miles away; as with the Post Office Tower (I can't get used to the BT Tower terminology) or St Paul's in London it is a reassuring beacon to remind us that we can never get lost in the city. At night it cascades into colour; Tufty Club blue and yellow alternating with scarlet and green.

However, even after a few days back in London it is also apparent that Toronto is a far politer city; try putting your left hand up when crossing the road to stop a car in London and see how many emergency operations you'll need in hospital. The people, even to an extent the thrusting Mulroneykids, seem less in a rush, less prevailed upon (usually by themselves) to project An Image.

With expert timing (ha!) I flew into Toronto in the immediate aftermath of their heaviest snowfall in months; as the 'plane descended through the clouds the outlying suburb of Scarborough was white and unpeopled, and we spent a tricky half hour inching our way along the marathon runways at Pearson Airport since they were covered by sheer ice. Meanwhile the slush of the city streets was already freezing over, and Lena and I had to pick our way through treacherous blocks with heavy luggage. Still, when we checked in at the Baldwin Village Inn (which I thoroughly recommend to all Toronto-visiting readers, particularly those with a penchant for the writings of Margaret Atwood and Michael Ondaatje), it suddenly felt like Christmas; we crept next door to the Vegetarian Haven restaurant, which was, shall we say, functional but protein-friendly - however it did not matter because we were together again and so utterly happy.

Other memories are plentiful; the brass band in Nathan Phillips Square on Friday morning playing Bachman-Turner Overdrive's "Takin' Care Of Business" in the style of the Brotherhood of Breath; the resonant, name-encrypting bells of the Cathedral Church of St James which I had waited a long time to hear and feel; McTamney's the jewellers in Church Street for the quality and HUMANITY which the diamond-heavy likes of People's Jewellers will never understand; the house dog who kept sneezing on our feet; a glorious Sunday wandering out into Queen St West, taking in the fantastic Pages bookshop where I picked up a much desired (and totally unavailable in Britain) book, Secret Carnival Workers by Paul Haines, leading to Rotate This! Records - Toronto's answer to Rough Trade - where as we entered, Kevin Drew and Brendan Canning were leaving; we were too starstruck to ask them useful questions, e.g. playing at our London wedding ceremony - and Chippy's, indisputably the world's greatest indie fish and chip shop; as we came in "I Wanna Be Your Dog" was blasting out over the speakers, and as we sat contentedly munching our gigantic haddock and cod packages the Lullabye Arkestra album was played in its ecstatically epileptic entirety (we only found out who they were after Lena asked for an artist ID; needless to say we rushed immediately back to Rotate This! to pick up a copy, and of course it was the last copy they had in the shop - I have no idea whether it is available in the UK but petition your local dealer if it isn't); the extensive and quite alarming Sonic Boom second hand record shop at Bloor Street W, massive and perhaps intimidatingly so, even though they have perhaps the best used cassette section I've ever seen outside of Brighton, and I randomly found the long sought Mary Queen Of Scots CD by Eugenius for Lena; the humbly lovely Kensington Market and the Big Fat Burrito Cafe, the best indie burrito cafe you're likely to see...

There are many other deeply personal memories too but nothing can surpass Saturday, 24 November, when we became man and wife before 25 or so close friends and family members in the "party room" downstairs in the apartment block where Lena lives - the minister was beyond fantastic, the food (lovingly and untiringly prepared by my mother in law and her team) wonderful, and the music (courtesy of my best man, the great Scott Woods, who really ought to be given a Club Poptimism slot when he visits the UK next year) uncanny, spot on and fabulous, able to encompass both "Party Fears Two" and "Dancing Queen" (air piano ahoy!), Monk's "Misterioso" (yes!) and "Get Ur Freak On."

And, of course, "Unforgettable," which was our first dance; recently resurrected by Nas for the brilliant "Can't Forget About You," that rarest of phenomena, a rap record about contentment, stability and positive memory - but for our first dance it had to be the original; smooth, heartfelt, lush, deep, pleasantly astonished and utterly dedicated and truthful. And so, six years after thinking that I'd never experience this situation again, I am once again married and completely in love, have returned to a new home in London (which by the current look of the front room will take two months to sort out/unpack, but hey, that's the fun and purpose of it) and - well, I've returned to the life I used to have, except now it is new and even more glorious. Lena will hopefully join me (British High Commission notwithstanding) sometime in February; in the meantime I have also gained a new and loving family - to Beverley, my new mother in law, get well soon; you are the most remarkable of people - and it's all going to be wonderful, as though it already weren't. Oh, and for the 25 lucky people who received our super-limited edition, individually numbered wedding CD compilation (18 tracks from 1967, the year of Lena's birth; eighteen different ways of telling our story), enjoy to your heart's content, because our hearts are certainly content...