David Emery Online

Giant Drag - Hearts and Unicorns

Rounding out the bottom half of the top 10 in my list of the best albums of 2006 is Hearts and Unicorns by Giant Drag at number 6.

This album could have quite easily been number 1 in any other year – it really is that good. It has two absolute classic standout tracks – an embarrassment of riches almost. The album kicks off with the stunning Kevin Is Gay – you couldn’t ask for a better, more catchy piece of alt-indie:

Not content with that, they then put on This isn’t it – which is even better. A classic. Plain and simple. Could well be the best track of this year:

The rest of the album – with the notable exception of the hidden track, which is awful – is amazing, great song following great song. One of the most wonderful things is that you get the sense that Giant Drag are really quite weird – weird in that interesting, unique quirky ways that is often lacking from indie/alternative bands these days.

Tapes 'n Tapes - The Loon

After a brief diversion it’s back to my list of the best albums of 2006 – in at number 7 comes The Loon by Tapes ‘n Tapes.

The Loon is somewhat of a grower; at first pass to me it seemed good, but not amazing – fairly normal run-of-the-mill indie rock. But boy – does it have depth! All of the tracks are packed with layer upon layer of interesting hooks – just at the point you’re thinking that a song can’t get any better, it flips around and changes and brings in something new.

On top of the variety in the music, the lyrics in places are utterly sublime. Take the last single, for example:

The line “I’ve been a better lover with your mother” certainly is a contender for lyric of the year.

Live, Tapes ‘n Tapes are a powerhouse. I caught them at Reading this year and they were definitely one of the highlights – the power and aggression that they have in the flesh works so well. Hopefully, we may even get another album out of them as early as next year which should be a treat.

BBC Backstage Bash

Yesterday was the BBC Backstage Xmas Bash and as far as I can tell a good time was had by all.

It made for a nice change at these sort of things that the venue was pretty much spot on – it didn’t get to hot, nobody insisted on turning the DJs up too loud (which always seems to happen, defeating the whole point of being there to talk to people…) and it never got too full. Sure, more free booze would have been nice (always), but we did get cake. Big props as ever go to Ian and all the other organisers – well done folks!

The conversation was diverse and interesting as it always is at these “geek” things, ranging from some more thoughts on personal content publishing, big city IT systems, how to move printing presses and whether the Wii is a good as it looks (short answer: yes). Good to catch up with Matt, Ben, Toby, Steve and Frances amongst many others.

Roll on the next one!

Oh. It seems to be on thursday.

The Knife - Silent Shout

Continuing my list of the best albums of 2006 at number 8 comes The Knife’s latest album, Silent Shout.

The Knife are a band that almost completely defy description, and Silent Shout is a truly amazing and unique piece of work. Hauntingly beautiful, whilst also dark and disturbing it really does sounds quite unlike everything else.

In fact, I won’t even try – here’s one of the best songs off the album, Like a Pen:

Interestingly, I find that this album – which is almost all brilliance, with only one or two tracks that aren’t up to the extremely high standard of the rest – works best shuffled in with other stuff. There’s something wonderful about having a sudden injection of bonkers electronica-pop into a otherwise straightforward mix of indie-alternative.

The Gossip - Standing in the way of control

In at number 9 in my list of the best albums of 2006 comes The Gossip’s breakthrough album, Standing in the way of control.

Following on from yesterdays entry by Metric, this is another stunning album that maintains it’s quality throughout. Again, like the Metric album it has one standout track that has really broken through into the mainstream – the title track, which is indeed a stunning song, and a contender for song of the year.

The comparisons continue; Beth Ditto – recently voted by NME as the coolest person in the world – has an absolutely stunning voice. In fact, her voice is the reason that the Gossip are quite so interesting; the combination of a deep, soulful voice with full on punk guitars is a fairly unique one and really set them apart.

Metric - Live It Out

Heading up the top 10 of my list of the best albums of 2006 comes Metric’s second album, Live It Out.

I first saw Metric last year, sandwiched between the new-rave-before-new-rave-had-been-invented stylings of Test Icicles and the heavy electro-rock of DFA 1979 and even though they stuck out a bit in that bill, they were obviously something special. Their latest album, Live It Out, is a truly brilliant effort – not only is it packed with excellent songs, it’s one of the few albums that keeps up the quality over all of it’s tracks.

While the tracks are all uniformly good, there is one obvious standout; Monster Hospital. Not only is it the best song on the album, it’s one of the best songs released all year, packing supreme lyrical ability with haunting (check out the video) guitar. It showcases all of the the things that Metric so good – Emily Haines’ voice contrasts perfectly with the heavier then you expect guitar, and just when you think the song is going to lapse into something predictable, they catch you unawares with something unexpected.

Interestingly, catching them at Reading this year they were quite disappointing live – somehow the album just didn’t translate...

Top Twenty Albums of the Year

Welcome one and all to the first annual David Emery Online Top Twenty Albums of the Year. This year it’s been a bit of a bumper year for all things musical, so a lot of very good albums haven’t even made it – of particular note the excellent Rogers Sisters album, The Invisible Deck. The Rogers Sisters have been consistently brilliant every time I’ve seen them live, but they still haven’t quite managed to transfer this successfully to record yet.

Here’s how this is all going to work – today will be the countdown from 20 to 11. Then, over the following 2 weeks will be a day by day trek through the top 10. Hopefully that should work out ok, but it wouldn’t surprise me too much if there were some interruptions along the way. So, onto the countdown:

20: Peaches – Impeach My Bush

Peaches came back this year with an absolute corker of an album, although one that didn’t quite live up to the political nature implied by the title. Instead we got something that’s just plain and simple dirty, and all the better for it.

19: Ratatat – Classics

An odd one, for me – the Ratatat album is the first...

Late

Sorry one and all – this is indeed Friday’s post, coming at you on Saturday evening. I only managed to get though Friday by almost continual top-ups of Lemsip Max Strength (which works wonders*), so a blog post was totally out of the question.

Of course, I would imagine that the vast majority of blog writers would not apologise for not posting for one day – a Friday at that. I do often wonder whether or not my self imposed one-post-per-weekday strategy is one that really pays off in the long run.

Fred Wilson over at A VC has been wondering along similar lines – how often is the optimal frequency to post on a blog? I think once a day works out quite nicely – it’s not too often that you get swamped by posts, but you always know that the content is going to be fresh. It’s also a fairly easy schedule to keep up, from the bloggers point of view – it’s normally not too hard to find 30mins – 1hr a day to update this site.

The only major problem I find with a strict policy on how often you update is that of content – having to...

Ill

I’m ill.

Not that good type of ill (the street slang meaning).

That bad kind – the kind that needs copious amounts of Lemsip.

Hence, no real post today – my brain is bunged up.

I’m going to leave you with a quick question:

Now that we’re nearing the end of the year, lets look back; have you had a good year? Has it been all you wanted it to be? If not, why not? Would you do anything different if could do it all again?

I’ve had a good year, all told – hope you have too.

Soon to come, my countdown of this years best albums – it’ll will hopefully start tomorrow if I can manage to string two sentences together…

Management Material

This week had been an interesting one for me personally, as we’ve taken on someone new at work which has put me firmly in the position of “management”. This is new thing for me – I’ve ordered people around quite a lot in previous jobs, but this is the first time I’ve had to do it officially.

First things first; it’s hard. Not hard as in difficult, but hard as in tiring. Going from a position of the delegated to one of the delegatee is actually quite a radical mind change – more then I had initially anticipated at least. My primary concern has changed from getting my work done to making sure that he’s got enough work to do; not having any problems; not got any questions needing answers.

It’s certainly given me a whole new insight into the field of people management – in all honesty I hadn’t considered it too much from the point of view of a manager that actually cared about their employee. This is mostly due to my abysmal outlook on the rest of humanity – I always assume the worst – but it really adds up when I compare against previous manager-underling situations.

It’s always fascinating...