Late reviews of 2011 #1: Music

January has gone by in a blur.

But 2011 was a decent year for music and here are my three highlights.

1) The Suburban Legends - we saw them supporting Bowling for Soup and bought their album Getting Down to Business. Classy brassy ska-punk all the way from Orange County. Great up-tempo music to make chores less boring or the walk to work a tiny bit faster. Seriously, buy their album and be enriched.

2) Noah and the Whale: Last Night on Earth. I love this album. Several singalong songs, deceptively clever lyrics, muscially accomplished. It carries a sense of yearning for the brighter lights just over the hill and, in that sense, is genuinely inspirational.

3) Last but not least, Ceremonials by Florence and the Machine. I understand that Flo and co are divisive - you either love her (like me) or aren't particularly fussed (like Cathy) - but I think this is one of the albums that will be considered a classic in 20 or 30 years time. From the pealing church bells on the opening song to the haunting threat to leave this world and move up to a higher plane, I found the album deeply spiritually resonant. 'Heartlines' in particular has made me want to cry with the bold audacity of its chorus.

So there you go - three records of the year that already seems so long ago.

#awfulsupergroups

This was a recent meme on Twitter that really made me smile. The basic premise is you combine two artists, bands or pop groups to form an ‘awful supergroup’.

A couple that really caught my eye were Rage Against Florence and the Machine and Nirvanarama.

I had a go myself. What if Macy Gray joined AC-DC? Macy DC. And The Future Soundgarden of London would be pretty bad too.

While driving the minibus on a recent youth weekend, I was chatting about it to a couple of fellow leaders, and it caught their imaginations too. Minty suggested Thirty Seconds to Bruno Mars, while Sam came up with the frankly brilliant Incubusted.

Since then, I’ve been thinking of some more. I’m not sure what Queens of the GarbAge would sound like. And I think I’d avoid anything by Liberty XTC, New Order on the Block or Freddie Mercury Rev. Ditto My Chemical Brothers Romance.

But my favourite contribution by a twitter-user was the person who just put Velvet Revolver, and added the hashtag #missing the point. Irony is alive and well.

What would your #awfulsupergroups be? Leave a comment!

2010 - that was the year that was

It's 2011. It seems like only last week it was 2010...

A year in review always seems more momentous after the fact. But some stuff did happen worth chronicling.

January
In a journal entry in early January I wrote: "I do feel like I need to get out of [workplace]. I feel disengaged and unmotivated. Money is tight in the organisation but I feel very calm... I think I just don't care about [workplace] any more." Four months later I was gone.

February
Rumours of redundancies at work. It doesn't help when a load of redundancy packs are discovered on the printer (for real!). The eventual announcement reveals over 30 redundancies are needed - over a third of the organisation.

March
While under notice of redundancy I did a few days freelance in the office where I would end up working just seven weeks later!

April
Was interviewed for and offered a new job the day before my birthday. Then I went to the theatre and met Dirk Benedict!

May
Started the new job. Spent a week in London with my Dad at the London Festival of Stamps. Didn't vote for either of the parties in the new coalition government.

June
I went to a disappointing Florence & the Machine gig at Cooper's Field in Cardiff. Why was it disappointing, I hear you ask...

July
Being made redundant has an upside - you can get training paid for by the government. I had a fun couple of days playing about with Dreamweaver. Also saw Terrorvision at yet another 'we said we retired but we quite like gigging so here we are again' gigs.

August
Saw Toy Story 3. Nearly cried. Went to a wedding. Didn't cry. I don't cry at weddings. I don't really understand why people do. That's just one of the many things that makes me feel like I'm abnormal.

September
We spent a week in Sussex with Mum and Dad. A number of highlights - Beachy Head, Dungeness, a cliff railway in Hastings, a steam railway in Tenterden.

Fantastic gig - Barenaked Ladies in Bristol. Probably number 2 on my all-time gig list. Also the place where we heard Joel Plaskett for the first time.

October
A football match, an ice hockey match, and my boss won a national award at a fancy ceremony. What a month!

November
This won't make much sense unless you're a writer, too. Or maybe it will. But anyway, I had to write an introduction for a report 'from' our programme chairs. I wrote it, and rewrote it and then it got rewritten again by someone else and then they had a look at it and tweaked it, and in the final result only two paragraphs of mine survived unchanged.

Then at a national event, to over 300 of the key players from across Wales, one of our chairs got up and summed up everything we do using two of the sentences I wrote.

Those were my words. Being spoken by a very important person.

At that moment I knew what it must feel like to be a speechwriter for a president or equivalent. To hear your words articulated by someone else is incredible. It meant so much, but most of all it meant that when I wrote them I caught the essence and 'got it right'.

(In other news, the house next door is raided by the police because the tenants have been using it to farm cannabis!)

December
I have an enquiry about publishing my Zodiac Team novel. I also get asked to do some freelance writing for a national organisation in the New Year. My brother and sister-in-law go public with news that, tangentially, means I am going to be an Uncle. Snow threatens to white out Christmas, but fails. However, the bad weather means we don't get to the church carol service and also miss out on going to a footie match on Boxing Day.

December was some month, to end some year.

Best bits of 2010, part 1 - Music

I've started this early this year, with a category that I don't have much to say in really.

We went to one stand-out gig this year - the Barenaked Ladies in Bristol. They were awesome and it was a privelige to be present when a bunch of very talented people were having fun making music and wanted you to join in. That's always the best kind of gig, really.

At the gig we also discovered Canadian singer/songwriter Joel Plaskett. We bought his album and have listened to it many times since. I would like to collect his other stuff but as it's only available in Canada, I've put off buying up the back catalogue for the moment.

We saw Terrorvision on one of their sporadic returns to the gigging scene. They were very good, although replacing the legendary Shutty meant they weren't the 'Vision of old.

Album-wise, there hasn't been much really that I was particularly convinced by. Crossfire by Brandon Flowers was fairly good. I enjoyed it. Have to admit I think the description of it as 'Killers Lite' just about summed it up.

The new Florence & the Machine album that she promised at the disappointing Cooper's Field gig back in the summer still hasn't materialised. Meanwhile a second special edition of 'Lungs' has been released with some remixes on. The bonus material on the first special edition was fairly low quality. I'm beginning to wonder if Florence is going to be a one-album success. Hopefully not.

Which leaves us with 'Everyone Wants to be on TV' by Scouting for Girls, which is okay, but probably earns my vote for best album by default because there wasn't much else out there.

Gig review: Florence and the Machine at Cooper's Field, Cardiff

This was an eagerly anticipated 'massive' gig by an artist I have a genuine respect and deep-down love for, and yet I was left quite disappointed by it.

For one thing if you're going to pay £30 for a ticket (once you add on the 'booking fee' aka 'being screwed by the ticket office fee) you expect to be able to hear the freakin vocals. Unfortunately the punch drunk baboon on the sound desk had only been given rudimentary training in knob-fiddling and so the resultant sound was something akin to listening to a car radio underwater. When she spoke between songs she may as well not have had a mike at all.

Or to put it another way it reduced the gig rating in my estimation from a potential 9.5/10 to a barely scraping it 6/10.

The energy was there. The crowd were there and loving Florence in all her dippy, dreamy wedding-dress-wearing kookiness. But it's a good thing that the crowd drowned out Miss Welch during the big hits because that obscured the terrible PA job.

And it was some crowd, crushed into a sweaty, claustrophobic rubbery canvas tent that seemed to keep the heat in, but let the sound out. (I think that was part of the problem. Canvas walls don't reflect audio waves the way walls do.)

So all in all I felt a bit let down.

(It also means I want to see her again somewhere where they get the vocal mix right.)

Ubiquity kills the sense of you, Florence

I just can’t seem to be able to escape from Florence and the Machine these days, espcially since their album won the Brit Award. Last night they sang ‘Dog Days are Over’ on Alan Carr’s Chatty Man. It was nice to actually hear them perform. Because almost every other time I hear them it’s on an ad.

Before I even knew who they were ‘A Kiss with a Fist’ was selling iPods. Then they seemed to take off ad-wise. Over Christmas ‘Dog Days’ was used on Channel 4’s many trails for the premiere of Slumdog Millionaire. ‘You’ve Got the Love’ was used to promote two TV shows, one of them being a dance contest thing on Sky. Now Sky are using the same song to promote, well, just Sky TV full stop. (Other people have noticed this too.) I even heard an instrumental version of YGTL as a backing track on a goals sequence on a football show recently.

Meanwhile the "Brit Awards single" (WHAT?) ‘You’ve Got the Dirtee Love’ by Dizzee Rascal, which mashes up the song with some rapping is never off Radio 1.

So the Machine has gone into overdrive. It’s great that a band with such a unique sound has become so universal. (And yeah I know it's the record company selling the rights, it's not the band engaging in naughty commercialism...) But, I have a big question: when are we going to hear some new songs?

There’s a risk that soon the songs we’ve got will be ‘over-heard’ and we’ll all be bored.

What then?

(Oooh, apparently there's a 'deluxe edition' 2-CD version of Lungs out. Hmmm.)

Continuing the theme of the best bits of 2009, I now turn to music releases

Bit of a tough one this. On the one hand The Tragically Hip released a new album, 'We Are The Same', which would ordinarily be a shoe-in for my favourite album of the year, by virtue of being an album from the Hip, whatever it sounded like. And as it's probably the third of fourth best album they've ever released, that's got to be a pretty strong contender. A couple of the tracks in particular nearly instantly made it onto my ever-changing 'Hip faves' playlist.

But then, you see, the All American Rejects released 'When the World Comes Down' and that's a truly awesome album. As a band they keep getting better and better (as I've said before), and I really like WtWCD. So, there's a conundrum.

And there's the outsiders. At the moment an album I just love and can't seem to grow tired of is 'Lungs' by Florence and the Machine. I was saying to Cathy earlier, I just don't know what it is I love so much about that album, but you know how somehow you really like something and you're not sure why? That's how I feel about Florence and the Machine.

Other bands? Although I haven't listened to it as much as other albums '21st Century Breakdown' by Green Day continues in the vein of 'American Idiot', even if it doesn't quite match it. Plus, The Killers released a live album, but I don't know whether to count that or not.

So, I think I'm going to stick with the Hip and the All American Rejects for my albums of 2009, with Florence and the Machine running them a (very) close third.