What a year it's been for English quartet Metronomy . Their third album, The English Riviera , exuded a quirky brand of funky, nerdy electro-pop and delivered an onslaught of sexy music videos ( "The Bay" and "She Wants" ), tour dates all over the world, and a nomination for the prestigious Mercury Music Prize. We pinned down founding member Joseph Mount and asked him to look back on 2011. How was 2011 for you? It was pretty much amazing; it exceeded expectation for me [...]
Featuring the honeyed vocals of Roxanne Clifford from Veronica Falls, 'Everything Goes My Way' is the third single to be taken from Metronomy's Mercury Music Prize nominated album, 'The English Riviera'. Off the back of a sold out album tour in May and an appearance on Later...With Jools Holland, the b... Read more..
The new Justice album is not what you are expecting. It certainly wasn't what we were expecting after the unquestionable pop brilliance of singles 'Civilization' and 'Audio Video Disco'. What the new Justice album is, is 40 minutes of spellbinding electronic pop music and without question one of the most captivating and enjoyable albums of 2011. It doesn't really have any hit singles on it, but that's really not what 'Audio Video Disco' is all about. Like PJ Harvey winning the Mercury Music Prize for her album celebrating the album [...]
Words: Saam Das We don't particularly have anything against the Mercury Music Prize but we thought we'd like to offer our own alternative Mercury 2011 winner. With the actual winner PJ Harvey also in our shortlist , we could well have ended up with the same result. Instead, it came down to the third albums from The Horrors and Wild Beasts . Three is a magic number? Simon wrote a [...]
There's been a bit of a fluster over Jessie J's revelation she doesn't know the work of Polly Jean : When asked to comment on PJ Harvey's win, the 'Price Tag' and 'Do It Like A Dude' star confessed that she'd never heard of her, but vowed to explore her back catalogue after the interview, asking, "Is she good then?" Is it really so surprising that a 23 year-old didn't spend a lot of time listening to classic era John Peel? I'll bet she doesn't know who Silverfish were, either. Wasn't the point of the [...]
Words: Simon Opie You'll have heard by now that PJ Harvey has won the 2011 Mercury Music Prize , with 'Let England Shake' . The Mercury has a long and somewhat controversial history since it was first won in 1992 by Primal Scream – from U2 , Simply Red and others - for 'Screamadelica' (and yes the Scream were young and emerging back then). For a [...]
Polly Jean Harvey has become the first person ever to win The Mercury Music prize twice. Beginning in 1992, The Mercury Music prize honours celebrates music by British or Irish artists, assessed soley on one album. Despite being the bookmakers' favourite, the record beat of tough competition from the likes of Adele, Tinie Tempah, and Elbow to take home the £20,000 prize. PJ Harvery previously won the award in 2001, but was unable to collect the award in person due to being stranded in Washington after 9/11. "Let England Shake" [...]
Vittoria a sorpresa. Non che sia facile capire ogni anno chi la spunterà ai " Mercury Prizes ", da sempre fra i premi più imprevedibili quando si tratta di incoronare il disco vincitore. 'Stavolta tra i candidati in lizza c'erano Anna Calvi , gli Elbow e l'omonimo esordio di James Blake . Dischi che hanno ottenuto molto successo sia negli States che in UK: a spuntarla però è stata PJ Harvey con il suo "Let England shake". Un album sicuramente non facile, ma capace di arrivare anche a chi è abituato a [...]
So, now we've got a second truth to add to "winning the Mercury curses your career": PJ Harvey always wins in a year which ends in a 1. It was a bit of an odd show on BBC Two. Not least, there was Jools Holland twice confusing "album" and "envelope", which isn't great for an album award prizegiving. Maybe he was nipping up the road to do the Stationery Suppliers Awards afterwards. Polly's acceptance speech reference to September 11th 2001 seemed surprisingly ill-judged; like a thought that truncated itself for fear of accidentally turning into a [...]
Congratulations to PJ Harvey who has just won the Mercury Music Prize for her epic album Let England Shake, beating out competition from the likes of Adele . It is the second time she has won the award, the first being 10 years ago for Stories From The City, Stories From The Sea , when she was the first female to ever win. Tonight, she had this to say when receiving the award.. "So much has happened since then. This album [...]
Great Britain's annual Mercury Music Prize is a lot of fun. In the annual ceremony, a panel of music-business figures decides the best British album of the year. They often pick grand-consensus records like Suede's first album and Pulp's Different Class , but sometimes they go way off the reservation and pick something weird like Speech Debelle. Not this time, though! Today, the prize went to PJ Harvey's excellent, much-esteemed wartime concept album Let England Shake . According to the BBC , the album was the bookmakers' favorite, which means that a [...]
The winner of this year's Mercury Music Prize has just been announced in London, with the award going to PJ Harvey for her Let England Shake album. Read our interview with her about the album on State tomorrow.
Words: Saam Das The actual Mercury Music Prize 2011 winner will be announced tomorrow. Do enough people still care? We're not so sure. 2009 winner Speech Debelle , for example, has already been long forgotten. We're even less confident that anyone is interested about our own little version of the Mercury - taking our top twelve reviewed albums of July 2010-July 2011 and then choosing our winner (by panel vote) at the end of this week. [...]
Taking Stock of the Field: UK Acts You Should Know Tinie Tempah Tinie Tempah - Baby NICK PARKER reporting - August brings with it the annual [...]
Following the news of her nomination for this year's Mercury Music Prize with her with her self titled debut album, Anna Calvi is set to release 'Suzanne and I' as her next single on 12 September. Read more..
2010's winners The xx Each and every year I look through the Mercury Prize list and tally it up with the list I have in my head. Sometimes the list is good and includes virtually everything that I too considered to be the best of that period. Other times, and particularly in recent years, the list seems to consist of two groups the year's big financial hitters and some seemingly willful curve balls. This year's list falls between the two stalls. There's a lot on the list that seems to be dictated by [...]
The Mercurys have a knack of choosing terrible days for their big announcements, don't they? Obviously, holding your shortlist launch on the same day as the Murdoch-Murdoch-Brooks fibathon isn't quite on a par with the eclipsing of the 2001 prize giving, but even so, it's hardly the best time to do it. Here's the shortlist: Adele - 21 Anna Calvi - Anna Calvi Elbow - Build A Rocket Boys! Everything Everything - Man Alive Ghostpoet - Peanut Butter Blues and Melancholy Jam Gwilym Simcock - Good Days At Schloss Elmau James Blake - James [...]
Pictured: James Blake The shortlist for the much coveted Mercury Music Prize 2011 has been announced today and there are some great records amongst them. For those who aren't fully familiar with the prize it was introduced in 1992 as an effort by the industry to expose and applaud the credible, experimental and independent albums released each year. Previously winning albums come from artists like Primal Scream, Portishead, Roni Size, Dizzee Rascal, Arctic Monkeys, Elbow and The xx so you get the idea with the kind of acts on their radar. [...]
Every year following the announcement of the Mercury music prize the internet is full of chatter about how the nominations are wrong and who should have been featured and who shouldn't have been. Let's take some examples. "Very funny, where's the real list," wrote Eltham on the Drowned in Sound Message Board . "God, with maybe the exception of 2 albums, the Mercury Prize nominations are just F'ing awful," tweeted @quiksnowboard7 – we can only assume that he has [...]
Big Shot Magazine
Never Enough Notes
RobotPigeon
FADED GLAMOUR
No Rock And Roll Fun
The Music Street Team
soundsblog
Hard.Candy.Music.
Stereogum
State Magazine
the RSL weblog
Sucking Lemons
Stereo Jealousy
The Mahogany Blog
Breaking More Waves
![Niki & The Dove - The Fox [OFFICIAL VIDEO]](http://cdn.elbo.ws/youtube/l2f6UbMnlq4_130.jpg)
Skrillex Uses Satanic and Homosexual Influence to Win Grammys
Bad Vintage Postcards Between 1950 And 1975
Warm Brew – Creep (TLC Remix)
[Listen] The Decemberists - "One Engine"
