My favourite tunes of 2012

At last! My favourite new (new-to-me, that is) tunes of 2012 are now available on one CD-R. But don't go looking for this collection in your local HMV - it is not available in any shop. And it is not available anywhere to download either. If you want a copy you will have to ask me to make one for you. And then I will!

Here are the tracks that appear on this amazing compilation:

Ros Sereysothea 'Gunya Ruoh Sroh (Miss Beautiful)' [1975 at the latest]
Sparks 'Hasta Manana Monsieur' [1974]
Fleetwood Mac 'Sisters of the Moon' [1979]
King Missile 'Cheesecake Truck' [1990]
Melodica Deathship 'All Horizon' [2002]
A Hawk And A Hacksaw 'Portlandtown' [2005]
[Unnamed Nubian Musicians] 'Dahab' [unknown]
Sparks 'Good Morning' [2008]
Tieranniesaur 'Here Be Monsters' [2011]
Matt Berry 'Take My Hand' [2011]
The Unthanks 'Sea Song' [2011]
Cornershop (feat. SoKo) 'Something Makes You Feel Like' [2012]
Cate Le Bon 'Fold the Cloth' [2012]
Gallon Drunk 'Hanging On' [2012]
The North Sea Scrolls 'The Morris Man Cometh' [2012]
Wizards of Firetop Mountain 'Sonic War' [2012]
LA Vampires (feat. Matrix Metals) 'Berlin Baby' [2010]
Tau Emerald 'Full Moon' [2008]

In more detail:

Ros Sereysothea 'Gunya Ruoh Sroh (Miss Beautiful)' [1975 at the latest]
This comes from the compilation Groove Club Vol. 3: Cambodia Rock Intensified!. My beloved and I dance around the room whenever we hear this song. Ros Sereysothea was one of the biggest stars of the Khmer Pop scene of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Then the Khmer Rouge took over Cambodia and exterminated her and everyone else who was involved in this type of music.


Sparks 'Hasta Manana Monsieur' [1974]
This comes from the album Kimono My House. When it was announced that Sparks would be playing in Dublin at the end of October I started to explore their music. This track is from the era when they used to appear on Top of the Pops all the time, with Ron Mael frightening little children all across these islands.

Kimono My House is the Sparks album with 'This Town Ain't Big Enough For The Both Of Us', but that was not new to me. And listening to 'Hasta Manana Monsieur' should make clear to the Sparks-curious that they are not some kind of one-song band.


Fleetwood Mac 'Sisters of the Moon' [1979]
This is from Tusk, Fleetwood Mac's follow-up to the quintillion-selling Rumours. If I was not already familiar with it I would have included the brilliant title track of that album, but it was not new to me so instead I present this Stevie Nicks classic.


King Missile 'Cheesecake Truck' [1990]
This is from a CD-R compilation given to me at All Tomorrow's Parties last March. Like the best novelty tunes it does not outstay its welcome.


Melodica Deathship 'All Horizon' [2002]
This comes from The Sunken Path. Melodica Deathship play a doomy form of hip-hop music with such strong nautical themes that a wag has styled them as "Ship-Hop".


A Hawk And A Hacksaw 'Portlandtown' [2005]
This is from the album Darkness at Noon. Most of this lot's music is instrumental. I saw them perform a new soundtrack to the film Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors at All Tomorrow's Parties last March and fell in love with them.


[Unnamed Nubian Musicians] 'Dahab' [unknown]
This is from a record called Music of Nubia, a bootleg copy of which I bought in Egypt (Egypt being a land untouched by intellectual property laws, at least as far as music is concerned). The photocopied sleeve is a bit thin on detail and I cannot find anything about it online. Ho hum. But the record itself is fascinating. It is mostly call and response vocals with a heavy percussive accompaniment, the drumming having a most hypnotic quality.


Sparks 'Good Morning' [2008]
This is from Exotic Creatures of the Deep. I bought this at the Sparks concert last year. The lyrics describe a situation in which we have all found ourselves. Well maybe you have, with your glamorous and exciting life.


Tieranniesaur 'Here Be Monsters' [2011]
This is from the compilation Popical Island 2. Tieranniesaur are the band of Irish pop star Annie Tierney and they have made music on the Popical Island record label. I keep missing their live concerts. When I put this track on the other day my beloved said "Oh, is this another one by Fleetwood Mac?"


Matt Berry 'Take My Hand' [2011]
This comes from Witchazel, the interesting folky album from the deep-voiced comic actor.


The Unthanks 'Sea Song' [2011]
This is from The Songs of Robert Wyatt and Antony & the Johnsons, Live from the Union Chapel (Diversions Vol. 1). This is a cover of the famous Robert Wyatt song, from his Rock Bottom album.


Cornershop (feat. SoKo) 'Something Makes You Feel Like' [2012]
This is from Urban Turban – The Singhles Club. It features the patented Cornershop stoner groove.


Cate Le Bon 'Fold the Cloth' [2012]
This is from Cyrk, Cate Le Bon's second album, which I embarrassingly have not listened to anything like enough.


Gallon Drunk 'Hanging On' [2012]
This is from The Road Gets Darker From Here, the latest release from this great band.


The North Sea Scrolls 'The Morris Man Cometh' [2012]
This is from the album The North Sea Scrolls. These eponymous scrolls were discovered by Cathal Coughlan, Luke Haines, and Andrew Mueller. They reveal the true history of England. This song concerns the terrifying collaborationist militia from the period of England's 20th century occupation.


Wizards of Firetop Mountain 'Sonic War' [2012]
This is from the compilation MISC that I acquired at the Hunters Moon festival last October. Wizards of Firetop Mountain rock. One day they will have an album.


LA Vampires (feat. Matrix Metals) 'Berlin Baby' [2010]
This is from the album So Unreal, an example of the "hypnagogic pop" that the young people were then very excited about. Most of the album is both strange and dreadful - as previously noted, a lot of it sounds like an avant-garde version of shit 80s music, only with the worst elements of both. But with this track I think they nail what they are trying to do, producing something that sounds strange and hypnotically evocative. You may disagree, which is why I have put it here near the end.


Tau Emerald 'Full Moon' [2008]
This is from the album Travellers Two. Tau Emerald are the collective name for the individual solo stars Fursaxa and Sharron Kraus. Fursaxa is a bit experimental and avant garde while Sharron Kraus alone makes more straight down the line folky music. Put them together and - PA-ZAAAA! It all gets a bit dangerous.


And that's it. If you want a copy, let me know and I will make you one.

image source

Popical Island All-Dayer

Popical Island is a local record label. Somewhat unusually for Dublin, they specialise in indie-pop music, something there had never really been much demand for here. As well as releasing records and stuff they also do occasional all-day musical events, like this one (which was on in the unappealing upstairs venue in Whelans). And I went to it, with my beloved and visiting Englishman Matt B (his name abbreviated to give the false impression that Matt Berry is our friend), as much because it was free and because we could not think of anything better to do than out of any real enthusiasm. And we actually drifted along quite late in the day too, as we did not know any of the bands playing and so had nothing particularly pressing to bring us along earlier. One annoying result from this was that we just missed Tieranniesaur, Popical's star band and an outfit who have a strong live reputation. They had not been publicised as playing and if I had known they were on the bill I would have raced down to see them.

The first actual band we saw were called Groom. Their main guy is apparently one of the main movers behind the whole Popical business. They turned out to be not unpleasant. They were appealingly melodic and had nice songs that referenced now long forgotten British comics from when I was small, so they are obviously one of the best things ever. They also had a song called 'Don't Listen To The Voices', words of wisdom we should all heed.

Next up was… eh, not sure, actually. I thought I had noted these important details, obviously not. This band were somewhat punky. I quite liked them but my beloved thought they were total rubbish. They did have somewhat poncey haircuts, something increasingly hairless me has increasingly little tolerance for.

And then there was Grand Pocket Orchestra. They may have had something going for them musically, maybe, but their really big problem for me was their lead singer, who liked himself a lot more than I did. Mine might however be a minority view, as there seemed to be quite a few people in the audience, especially young ladies, whose fondness for the singer was only slightly less than his own self-regard. But it was still enough to put me off the band completely. Apparently there is actual footage of them playing at this event. I would like to think that the camera pans through the mostly adoring crowd and then briefly alights on me looking old and unimpressed at the back.

At this point we realised that each band we had seen had been less interesting than the one before it, and that there were still more to come, so we cut our losses and left. I did pick up a copy of the second Popical Island compilation. It is now available for free on the Internet, as are the first and third, so you can download it for yourself if you want (I will not link to it as I want delay for as long as possible the Grand Pocket Orchestra people finding this blog and then getting Popical on my arse, but it should be eas). I think this would be worth doing, if only to hear the wonderful track 'Here Be Monsters' by Tieranniesaur. It is stylistically very different from its peers, having a kind of groove and vague resemblance to tracks like Fleetwood Mac's 'Sisters of the Moon' that puts it on a different level to the other indiepop tunes on the compilation.

The other tracks are not unentertaining, though I must admit that I have not listened to them that closely yet. That said, there is at least another entertaining one - 'Popicalia', by the wonderfully named Retarded Cop. It has a perky beat and lyrics about the singer's ineffectual attempts to cop off with some young lady (sample lyric 'If I'd known you were a vegetarian / I wouldn't have served you pork"). As the song goes on he brings her to a Popical Island event, but unfortunately things still go horribly wrong ("If I'd known you were a fucking lunatic / I mightn't have asked you out"). On a first listen I suspect the Hired Hands track might also repay further listening.

I wonder if it was just coincidence that this all-dayer took place while the Indietracks festival was on in darkest Derbyshire? If I was one of the people who ran Indietracks, I would be looking at the Popical Islands roster for bands to play at next year's event. As with Indietracks, even if the music of the Popical Islanders is largely not for me, I am glad it exists.

Pandical Island

An inuit panda production