The End

You may have noticed that I lost some interest in this little light green corner for a bit. It just didn’t seem important to me anymore, and I really didn’t want to force it. So I didn’t. And here it lies. I really loved writing here – I’d always regarded blogs as relf-referential paradises for pricks but found out that, with a little direction (and some help from places like the Hype Machine). you could actually find people to talk to about whatever you wanted.

I wanted to talk about music, and that was great, but I don’t anymore. It’s been a strange journey, losing interest. I’m not sure if it’s a natural reaction to a hobby turning into work, but I bloody hope it isn’t because I just got a job writing about video games. Which is still a weird thing to say for me. Basically, my unfocused point is that I won’t be posting here anymore. At least, not for a long time. Not ’til I really care about music again, enough to fit the talking about it into a schedule that is much, much tighter than it used to be.

It would be a bit shitty of me not to leave without talking about some music though, right? And there aren’t many more fitting bands I could write about than Meursault. I fucking love Meursault, I genuinely think they’re one of the most exciting bands in the whole bloody world, and I’ve been posting about them for a long time now. So it seems wonderfully serendipitous that the day I post this is the day their third album, Something for the Weakened, has its launch party. I genuinely didn’t construct that coincedence.

Something for the Weakened could finally make Meursault a “big band”. Unfortunately, I say this with the authority of a man who has said exactly the same thing about the last two albums, but this time I’m even more right. It continues the band’s proud tradition of refusing to ever sound the same – they’ve gone from the first album’s bleeps and banjos to the EP’s stripped back folk to the second album’s Wizard of Oz style (by that, I mean it sounded like there was a single, small man behind all the huge noise) and eneded up in serious anthem territory. Meursault have always been a band that trades in melodies, but this album sticks straight up the front of proceedings and glares at you until you scream along. It’s fucking wonderful, and you should all buy it.And I really hope “the public” will buck up their ideas and buy it too.

I don’t know whether it’s my favourite album of the year just yet – it has some stiff competition from Father John Misty, Barna Howard and White Birds – but it’s putting up a fight. I’m going to attach the single, ‘Flittin” for you to enjoy, and then you should buy all of those albums and think of me and this blog, misty-eyed whilst you compare them. I’m not actually dying, so you can still find out what I’m prattling on about over on Twitter (@2plus2isjoe), or you can read what I’m doing for money in Official Nintendo Magazine or you can see what music I care about enough to write about in my free time by reading DIY or For Folk’s Sake. But that’s it for Music From A Green Window for now. Bit sad. Bye.

 

Light and Dark

Here are the last two weeks of Folk Bloke shows. Put aside two hours and ruminate on the dualistic nature of the world. One was recorded outside in the sun, the other inside as it rained. Binary systems, yeah?

 

The Sound of Illness

I felt like death during this show so I filled full of music that meant I didn’t have to talk. Luckily, that meant Meursault got a double bill and lots of big, long songs got some nice airing out. Depending on whether you’re me or not, that could be a good thing.

 

Talk Radio

There was a lot I enjoyed about this week’s show – I managed to sound vaguely engaged by talking about Bandcamp and Sound of 2012 and I managed to sound detached from reality by imagining the war wound that could have resulted in Jamie N Commons’ vocals. The world is in balance. Also, this song is absolutely brilliant, and shall thus be receiving the show and post adornment treatment:

Tigerlily – If You Were There, You’d Understand

 

The Blog Sound of 2012 Longlist

So by now I imagine you’ve seen this year’s BBC Sound of 2012 long list. It’s not spectacular. Which is why a group of the UK’s best music blogs – and me, somehow – were petitioned to put together their own list within much the same parameters to see what kind of alternatives we would come up with. No matter what I might think, the aim wasn’t to disrespect what had been suggested elsewhere, but rather to provide another viewpoint, from a different section of the industry (namely, outside of it, looking ravenously in) and, looking at the results, I think we’ve managed that admirably. So here it is, the Blog Sound of 2012 longlist:

• Houdini Dax
• Lianne De Haves
• Theme Park
• French Wives
• The Good Natured
• Alt J
• The Jezabels
• Lucy Rose
• Bastille
• Washington
• Friends
• Meursault
• Daughter
• Beth Jeans Houghton
• Outfit

No prizes for guessing who I voted for there.

Meursault – Sleet

The shortlist will be revealed as and when the Beeb’s own version is released and we’ll continue from there. Oh, and just so you know, the “panel” was made up of:

Breaking More Waves, My Band Is Better Than Your Band,  God Is In the TV,  Sweeping The Nation, The Von Pip Musical Express, The Recommender, Faded Glamour, Drunken Werewolf, Flying With Anna, Not Many Experts, Underclassed Idle Ideas, Sonic Masala, Mudkiss, The Pop Cop, The Ring Master, Both Bars On, Music From A Green Window, Dots And Dashes, The Daily Growl, And Everyones A DJ, Kowolskiy, Just Music That I Like, Cruel Rhythms,  The Blue Walrus, Music Fans Mic, Seventeen Seconds, Eaten By Monsters, Seven Sevens, Unpeeled, New Rave Brain Wave, Peenko, Music Liberation and Song By Toad.

 

10 Shows In

You have had to deal with ten of these now. They ain’t stopping.

Beirut – Untitled 10 (YSI)

 

Plug(s)

I’m just going to leave these here. Do with them as you will.

Tenacious D – Double Team (YSI)

 

PLUGPLUGPLUG

Today, DIY Radio broadcast the first episode of my new weekly show, The Folk Bloke, and that’s what you can see above. If you like the kind of thing I post here, you’re more than likely to approve of the show, so please do listen in. Please? Oh, go on. Please?

Metronomy – Radio Ladio (YSI)

 

MFAGW’s Albums of the Year 2010: 5-1

5. Sleigh Bells - Treats

Sleigh Bells make me want to believe in questionable tales. If the story that Alexis Krauss and Derek Miller were a failed girl group member and hardcore guitarist respectively isn’t true, it will still be a perfect way to explain their music. But if it is true, then that’s so much better, because it just makes the fact that this album could ever have been made that much more improbable and, thus, wonderful. I could spend time making up torturous ‘sounds like’ similes here, but nothing betters that origin story. Then again, this is my blog, so fuck you. This is the sound of a sugar-induced migraine. Ha, too easy.

Sleigh Bells – Infinity Guitars (YSI)

4. The Morning Benders – Big Echo

Equally indebted to early Noughties indie and ’60s pop groups, Big Echo is an unpredictable album. Demure and harmonic at one moment, it can become familiarly punchy the next without warning. When I first listened to it, I thought it could quite easily be a “summer” album, one that never stands up against the first few blissful listens when you got it. Upon relistening, its charms are still brilliantly evident – Chris Chu’s Casablancas intonations, the willingness to slow the tempo (‘Pleasure Sighs’ is a simply incredible show of pacing and gradualised songwriting) and a propensity for simply excellent harmonies pop up throughout. Equilibrium is all here – a sense of action and restraint is ever-present, and it’s their constant struggle for dominance that makes this album such a brilliant listening experience.

The Morning Benders – Wet Cement (YSI)

3. Deerhunter – Halcyon Digest

I’m almost incredulous at my previous indifference to this band now. Halcyon Digest is a tumult of experimentation, not in the noodly, self-indulgent sense, but in the sense of playing with how guitar music can be stretched and reformed into new and more interesting shapes. It never lets go of its central core – this is American indie at its heart, but Cox and co. never allow it to get stale. The underwater tones of ‘Helicopter’, ‘Sailing’s simplistic, faraway tone or ‘He Would Have Laughed’, a shambling tribute to Jay Reatard, all come from the same sensibility, but have ended up in very different musical territories. This is music that’s unafraid to take you somewhere you didn’t know you wanted to go.

Deerhunter – Helicopter (YSI)

2. Harlem – Hippies

This could be so easy to dismiss. It sounds like any number of other bands, it’s doing nothing new, it’s juvenile. But here’s the deciding factor. Show me another album this year that sounds like more fun than this one. Bet you can’t. Hippies is the sound of friends making music for fun and nothing more, and never suffers for that. Michael Coomer and Curtis O’Mara’s alternating, breathless deliveries seemingly never let up, the drumming’s fantastically frenetic and every song sounds like an old friend. When I’m listening to this kind of music, I ask for nothing more than this – that the songs that are short, sharp and barely professional. Harlem deliver on every front.

Harlem – Faces (YSI)

1. Meursault – All Creatures Will Make Merry

2010 was the year that saw me properly, deeply fall in love with Meursault. Pissing On Bonfires/Kissing With Tongues hooked me good and deep. The Nothing Broke EP made me realise just how talented this band was. But it took All Creatures Will Make Merry for me to forego any kind of detached journalistic cool and throw myself wholeheartedly into unabashed fawning at their feet. No other album has made me run the gamut of emotions this one has; sheer sadness in ‘Crank Resolutions’, singalong contentment in ‘One Day This’ll All Be Fields’, sheer energy in ‘What You Don’t Have’ and barely concealed terror in ‘New Ruin’ – it has it all.

I’ve searched for a long time for how to articulate just why I think this isn’t just one of the best records I’ve heard this year, but in my life, and I think it comes down to this: There is no song on this album that feels constructed. By that I don’t mean in a songwriting sense, these are clearly meticulously designed and nurtured compositions, but in the sense that every one feels entirely natural to the band – whether it be the lyrics, the raw emotion in Neil’s vocals or the incredible interplay between electronics and more organic sound. There’s no experimentation if the feeling was there the whole time.

Meursault are not a band who are finding their sound, their niche or their fans – they are a band who seem to follow a path laid out for them alone, and the singular nature of All Creatures Will Make Merry shows that perfectly. This is the best album of the year, for me, because it sounds like no-one else, and I’m not sure anyone else could sound like this.

Basically, if you haven’t listened to this, your life isn’t as good as it could be, so, you know, get on it.

Meursault – All Creatures Will Make Merry (YSI)

Phew, what a day! So now that that’s all done, here’s the final list:

1. Meursault – All Creatures Will Make Merry
2. Harlem – Hippies
3. Deerhunter – Halcyon Digest
4. The Morning Benders – Big Echo
5. Sleigh Bells – Treats
6. Mountain Man – Made The Harbor
7. Beach House – Teen Dream
8. Laura Marling – I Speak Because I Can
9. Arcade Fire – The Suburbs
10. Good Shoes – No Hope, No Future
11. Bombay Bicycle Club – Flaws
12. The National – High Violet
13. Spoon – Transference
14. Woodpigeon – Die Stadt Muzikanten
15. Working For A Nuclear Free City – The Jojo Burger Tempest
16. Johnny Flynn – Been Listening
17. Timber Timbre – Timber Timbre
18. The Savings and Loan – Today I Need Light
19. Vampire Weekend – Contra
20. Scott Pilgrim vs. The World – OST

Merry Christmas one and all!

 

More Proof

If you require proof beyond my wild, inarticulate rantings as to why Meursault are the best new(ish) band to grace our shores in a very long time, just check out how perfectly they combine the verses of Radiohead’s ‘Bullet Proof… I Wish I Was’ and the chorus of La Roux’s ‘Bulletproof’ to make a jaunty folk tune. The cover came courtesy of a BBC Scotland session, and I sneakily ripped this from the 137th(!) episode of Mr. Toad’s excellent Toadcast podcasts*. These guys are just getting absurdly brilliant now, it’s almost unfair.

Meursault – Bulletproof (Radiohead/La Roux Cover) (YSI)

*Apologies for all the ‘toad’s and ‘cast’s there.