Blog: The View from Yoorp

Now I'm the first to admit that I don't get what everybody sees in Kentucky's own My Morning Jacket, but somehow it still manages to amaze me that Off The Record is rated so highly on so many 'best of 2005' lists, despite shamelessly ripping off 2 classic pieces of '60s music within the first few bars - the Hawaii 5-0 theme in the opening riff and James Taylor's 'Up on the Roof' in the verse - before lurching on with some cod ska in best Regatta de Blanc fashion. OK this is [...]

Kink FM is a Dutch online indie radio station which webcasts in top sound quality, and even makes 128kbps MP3 podcasts available of all its shows. Its playlist is refreshingly European, although it has a big soft spot for all things Brit. At the end of 2005 it webcast its Interactive top 41 of the year, as voted for by listeners: 0. Editors - Munich 1. Spinvis - Het Voordeel Van Video 2. dEUS - 7 Days, 7 Weeks [...]

PMSL @ the first paragraph of Alexis Petridis' 5-star review of the Arctic Monkeys' debut album : In a few weeks' time, it seems likely that When the Sun Goes Down, the third single by Arctic Monkeys, will follow its predecessor straight to number one. The teenage quartet have become fixed in the national conscience with such speed that it's hard to react to this prospect with more than a shrug. In the past six months, the media have parroted the tale of their rise to stardom so often that there [...]

Congratulations to No Rock&Roll Fun for reaching its fifth birthday ( and 1 millionth visitor!) yesterday. The UK's best place for up-to-the-minute comment on the world of popular music, it's like Private Eye but with stories you're actually interested in reading, delivered free to your doorstep every morning. Yes, it's that good.

Playlouder has pointed out that most of the albums nominated for Best International Album Brit award were released a very long time ago. Green Day - American Idiot - September 2004 U2 - How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb - November 2004 Arcade Fire - Funeral - September 2004 (Feb 2005 in the UK, ok ok) Kanye West and Madonna's albums, the other two nominees, were solidly inside 2005 So if there's apparently no time limit, I can think of plenty of [...]

I've downloaded a few more tracks by Aberdeen City and they are all seriously good, proving that the MP3s on MySpace were not killer and the rest filler (scroll down for the links). The three I found on Limewire were Pretty Pet, Incredible Story and Final Bout. I've had the six tracks I've now got on heavy rotation for the past couple of days and they just get better and better. I've just spotted a comprehensive list of MP3s to download via blogs which I am just about to explore. [...]

THIS MONTH I WILL MOSTLY BE LISTENING TO Tracklist of January's compilation CD 1 We Are Scientists - It's a Hit 2 Tom Vek - CC (You set the fire in me) 3 Clap Your Hands Say Yeah - Let The Cool Goddess Rust Away 4 Ladytron - Destroy Everything You Touch 5 Queens [...]

Clap Your Hands Say Yeah's debut album is reviewed in this month's Uncut magazine, on its UK release. The quarter page article somehow manages to avoid any reference to blogs, Pitchfork or even the internet. Could it be that IPC has seen the writing on the music publishing wall and has wielded its editorial scissors to excise anything that could point its readers towards sources of free, up-to-the-minute, interactive information?

Thanks to the wonders of satellite television I have been transfixed by Chantelle's attempts to convince her Celebrity Big Brother housemates that she is in fact a celeb herself. It has basically been like watching a moth flying closer and closer to a flamethrower, but somehow she has managed what looked like the impossible. The 11 housemates had to rank themselves 1 - 11 in order of fame, and Chantelle managed to grab the no. 9 spot, edging out indie boys Preston and Maggot. One wonders how her mother feels after Chantelle swore to [...]

Reading No Rock n Roll Fun 's excellent rock press round-up I was surprised to see no mention of the Guardian's hilarious attempt to fill some column inches by getting 8 music celebs to swap their iPods around then try to guess which one belonged to whom, and comment on each selection. Predictably enough, the selections were either 'too eclectic' or 'too mainstream' for most of the listeners, with various bitchy asides quoted which I predict will result in icy looks at the next music awards bash. Mylo [...]

OK so now I've had the chance to read everyone else's tips and I can cherrypick my own ... not quite the point, I hear you say, but that's exactly what plenty of other bloggers and journos seem to have been doing. And how much insight do you really need to predict that Arctic Monkeys are going to be massive? So it might look like lazy journalism (not to mention partisanism, considering my links to the city) to predict that a few others from the Sheffield scene will break through this year, but the fact is [...]

My main tip for 2006 is Boston band Aberdeen City . Their first album came out in October 2005, but they have been largely ignored by the press and pundits. The tracks I've heard off the album have been excellent, however - an icy Echo and the Bunnymen-y guitar sound, solid Bloc Party-like beat, with soaring vocals floating over the top. Hear them for yourselves - you can download two tracks from their website : In Combat and God Is Going to get Sick of Me . An even [...]

The story of The Fall, whether you love them or hate them, is a fascinating saga. In the Guardian, Dave Simpson tells about his quest to find all the former members: "This has been my life for weeks. I've become an internet stalker and a telephone pest, all because of an obsessive drive to track down everyone who has ever played in the Fall. That's 40-odd people, including drummers abandoned at motorway services, guitarists left in foreign hotels and various wives and girlfriends of the band's provocateur-ringmaster, Mark E Smith."

XFM have posted the Music Response top 50 tracks of 2005 . Very UK-skewed, but generally a fair assessment of the year. The only surprise for me is Athlete at no. 2 (and 33). They do about as much for me as Snow Patrol, yawn. The top 5: 1. Arctic Monkeys - I Bet You Look Good on the Dancefloor 2. Athlete - Wires 3. Kaiser Chiefs - Oh My God 4. Hard-Fi - Hard to Beat [...]

Thanks to Take Your Medicine for pointing me in the direction of The Cuban Boys - The Nation Needs You . A tribute to John Peel which in 3 minutes 14 seconds achieves more than all the tribute albums, concerts, biographies and commemorative magazine issues put together.

The National released one of my favourite albums of 2005, Alligator. For those of you not yet familiar with them, here's the perfect opportunity - a radio session which you can download in high quality MP3 format from The Muzzle of Bees blog . The sound quality is excellent, it sounds like you are in the studio with them.

I posted this as a comment on the excellent Take Your Medicine MP3 blog, but decided it was worth using as my first entry here: 2006 looks like being another vintage year for albums. Apart from anything else, there should be a new one from Radiohead to look forward to. I'll be interested to see if the class of '04 can come up with the goods this year - Razorlight, Kasabian, Interpol, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Futureheads, the Bravery, the Zutons, the Caesars.... Franz Ferdinand have [...]

After reading Alexis Petridis' review of the new Strokes album in the Guardian , in which he claims that the album is smothered in 'widdly-woo guitar', I was half-expecting to hear something approaching Santana when I eventually heard the thing. This seemed unlikely though, given the chugging groove of Juicebox (love the song, hate the video), and on first listen I thought he was way off the mark. Second and third time through, however, I started to see what he meant. In the new musical landscape dominated by stripped back rock a la [...]