Sunday 6 December 2009

Countdown, 19 - 11

We're on the penultimate stretch of my countdown of my favourite songs of the year, and to reward each of these tracks for making it so far in the list, each one will be treated to a short description explaining why it ranks so highly. The twist is that each description will be written in the style of someone else, which I'm pretty sure is a terrible idea but will be done nonetheless.


19. La Roux - Bulletproof - (in the style of Caspa & Rusko) - 2009 was a great year for La Roux ("IT'S ME BELT, TURKISH"). Their début album spawned a string of hit singles ("CHILL WINSTON") and was a strong contender for this year's Mercury Prize ("ARSE TICKLER'S FAGGOT FAN CLUB").


18. Floating Points - Vacuum Boogie - (in the style of Noel Fielding) - Hey, yeah, I went to a vacuum boogie once, it was held underwater and there was a bouncy castle made of scampi. I brought a Henry vacuum cleaner as my date, I stuck some long hair made of a raccoon's fur on it and pretended it was called Henrietta, we had a WILD night. I accidentally spilled some syrup made of Spandau Ballet's back catalogue all over her towards the end though, she stormed off and hooked up with a hoover called Douglas.


17. Dorian Concept - The Fucking Formula - (in the style of Malcolm Tucker from 'The Thick Of It') - The fucking formula is one of the fucking best tunes of the whole fucking year, now listen to the fucking thing or FUCK THE FUCK OFF.


16. jj - Things Will Never Be The Same Again - (in the style of Kanye West's blog) - THIS SONG IS DA BOMB YO!!! JJ, MJ, OJ, S'ALL GOOD IN '09 YO! NONE AS GOOD AS YO BOY KANYE THOUGH, I'M JUST REAL YO!! NOW HERE'S A RANDOM PIC OF A PARISIAN WOMAN'S DRESS THAT I LIKE YO!


15. Floating Points - Love Me Like This (Nonsense Dub) - (in the style of Kanye West interrupting Taylor Swift at MTV VMA's) - YO LOVE ME LIKE THIS (ORIGINAL VERSION), I'M REAL HAPPY FOR YOU AND I'MMA LET YOU FINISH, BUT THE NONSENSE DUB WAS ONE OF THE GREATEST TRACKS OF '09.... OF '09!!


14. Vitalic - Second Lives - (in the style of Matthew Friedberger) - "Oh hi, I'm Vitalic, please listen to my song about Second Life" - FUCK YOU!! What is this, some kind of anthem for on-line virtual worlds? Are the beats made on a three-dimensional modelling tool? Vitalic's just trying to align himself with what people consider cool, and everybody knows there's nothing cooler than devoting your entire existence to an internet persona rather than your actual real life. Or being Matthew Friedberger. Vitalic is such a bogus arse.


13. Tempa T - Next Hype (also probably the best video of the year) - (in the style of Jan Moir) - Is it just me who finds the circumstances around this song very troubling? Here we have yet another young man who, because he is black, was always destined to record an angry and violent rap song, just like so many of his kind have done before him. Now, I'm a civil rights champion and often black up myself of an evening so I am well aware of the problems faced by young black adults these days, but even I am disturbed by the sheer amount of pars that occur throughout the course of this song. Why is it that this young man feels compelled to rap about violent acts, when his contemporaries such as Giddy Rascal can achieve success purely by singing about playing conkers? I find Tempz's lifestyle to be full of sleaze, and I think this song is a real blow to the myth that black people can create songs of equal worth as normal people. What an absolute par.


12. 2000F & J Kamata - You Don't Know What Love Is - (in the style of Joker's Twitter) - LOOOL I WOZ ON DIS EP 2!!!! DUTTY TOOOON!


11. Clark - Growls Garden - (in the style of Brian Collins) - This is a tune from..... Clark. From Clark's. From Clark's album Totems Flare. Oh yes. Clark, who comes from...................... It, umm, starts off slow and.....umm, slowbot, deadboat..... downbeat. Hmm. The vocals are in! It's building up to a hefty bass drop! Here comes the bass....... and boom goes the dynamite.


Classic Track


Continuing this series of classic tracks, we shuffle genres yet again and this time we've arrived at industrial goth metal. Ever the shy and uncontroversial one, Marilyn Manson likes to let his music do the talking and back in the day produced some real killer tunes. This one in particular is a bona fide rock classic, with everything oozing sinister menace - the rhythmic drumming, the crunching guitar riff, and the snarling vocals of MM (any fact fans? All the original members of his band created their stage names by taking the first name of a famous female sex symbol, and adding the surname of a serial killer, hence Twiggy Ramirez, Olivia Newton Bundy etc).


Marilyn Manson - The Beautiful People


Songs I'm Currently Loving

  • Robyn - Be Mine - I might well be the world's biggest chump - WHY THE HELL HAVEN'T I HEARD THIS SONG BEFORE?!? It's so good that, having turned off my laptop and gone to bed, I've now got up and turned my comp on again just so that I can listen to it some more. But seriously, why did it take this long for me to hear this song? I presume it must've been played quite heavily on the radio a while ago when Robyn was all the rage? Maybe I was too busy pretending that pop music was below me for it to have registered on my radar, but now I'm making up for lost time and hereby declare this song as up with there with the finest pop tracks of at least the past decade.
  • Gang Gang Dance - Princes - contrary to popular opinion, Tinchy Stryder has actually featured on at least one good record in his life, and this is it.
  • King Midas Sound - One Ting (Dabrye Remix) - King Midas Sound released their début album within the past few weeks, so what better way to hail it's arrival than to post a song which isn't actually on it? This remix by Flying Lotus' buddy Dabrye spruces up the ethereal dub of the original with some hip-hop beats to create more of a toe-tapper, but both versions are great and the album is well worth a listen.
  • Pangaea - Memories - some more moody bass stylings here, but this one has a bassline and drum pattern that will really keep your head bopping until you've completely run out of bop juice.
  • Simian Mobile Disco - Hustler (from Spank Rock's Fabriclive Mix) - never really a fan of uploading/downloading tracks from mixes to be honest, but I've now reached the point of my musical menstrual cycle whereby I go through a phase of listening to Rick Ross' Hustlin' a lot, which always inevitably leads me to also visit this delightful bit of mashing up which features on Spank Rock's Fabriclive 33 CD. It combines Hustler by SMD and Hustlin', you see. Do you see? Do you see what they've done there?

2 comments:

  1. I love your blog.....and yes yes having Next Hype there cos would have been a serious par if it wasn't and yeh you're house would have got cleeeeeeared.

    Also Memories is massive....should be in top 10.

    Much love from Deutschland.

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  2. I'm not a fan of isolating songs from mixes either, but my Spank Rock play count reads something along the lines of:


    Previous song, plays: 3
    Hustler, plays: 7364
    Next song, plays: 10 (and all those are from starting the mix on hustler then accidently leaving it on)

    Good call!

    Although I'm still disappointed by the continued presence of La Roux... or should I say, La POO!

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