As Simon Cowell jets back home to L.A before the new year, Joe McElderry just a vague memory of the past, he will be 8 million pounds richer and counting. The only thing on his mind will not be how to forge a career out of this year’s X Factor winner, but how to make more money from the next series. But let’s face it; making money is what Simon Cowell does best and a viral campaign, not even one that lures in 600,000 supporters will stop him from cashing in.
If you’re on facebook, either you or several or your friends, or both, will have signed up to the now-famous group, aiming to get Rage Against The Machine, last year’s Reading and Leeds headliners but essentially dead band, to Christmas number 1. There was a similar campaign last year, aiming to get the deceased Jeff Buckley onto the top of the charts in a protest to Alexandra Burke’s version of his ever-so-precious ‘Hallelujah’. Only thing, was that it was Leonard Cohen who wrote the original. And for that reason, a lot of people just sneered at the campaign.
The same applies to this year’s effort: the striking flaw being that Rage Against The Machine are signed to Sony. So for major labels, it’s a win-win situation. The other (arguable) setback is that ‘Killing In The Name Of’ has been leapt upon for the last few years as a novelty “angsty rock” song. It’s probably the only song a lot of those on the facebook group have heard of by the band. Due to many factors (being on a Grand Theft Auto soundtrack and not being such a bad song being some of them), it’s enjoyed a sudden surge in popularity, peaking here at this social networking sensation.
And let’s not forget the pre-X Factor number 1’s, Bob the Builder’s ‘Can We Fix It?’, Robbie Williams and Nicole Kidman’s ‘Something Stupid’. It seems that at this time of year, something triggers in the brainwaves to allow the British people to become incredibly stupid and wasteful with their money.
Now I’m not against snatching the lollipop from baby Simon’s lips, but us masses must be patient: we cannot win it we aren’t united, if our plans have such fatal flaws and contradictions. Simon is winning; already slamming the effort as “stupid” in a really quite decent PR stunt. He’s definitely worried, and it’s certainly possible that whoever it be that wins on Saturday, (adopts X Factor announcement voice) “JOE MCEEEELDERY” or “RACHEEL ADEDEDEDAAYJI“, or whatever fame-hungry face, might be left to sob in the corner in defeat to a cult band. But then if we do “win”, won’t we be left slightly embarrassed by the fact that Sony are raking in the money this Christmas?
In conclusion: all of this is just making us look like morons.
A couple of weeks back, Leeds-band Grammaticsannounced (to very little reaction) the departure of their cellist Emilia. We hear about these “mutual parting of ways” every now and then, from Ira Trevisan exiting from C.S.S for “fear of climate change” as well as many other reasons being cited, all inevitably leading to the “musical differences” line. And we all know that, deep inside, all that happened was a bloody bust-up. But never has it been so evident here.
To quote the Grammatics blog, written by main songwriter and clearly talented bloke Owen:
“….I’d like to mention that Emilia’s departure is not a creative change for Grammatics as she had very minimal input into our music. I say this without putting her down in any way and because I believe it important you know that her departure will not affect the music we make in a negative way.” Before going on to say “we are now more of a band”.
And so it’s obvious that Grammatics aren’t trying to paint thickly over the truth. There was a sour note, that much is obvious even though Owen chooses not to spell it out in bold. But to analyse that comment for a minute; there is no reason to say such a thing. Clearly some of the incentive of stating this is to keep Grammatics fans close, to ensure they know that the sound won’t be changing. That’s a relatively selfish act on its own but to specifically target, single out and belittle a former member as someone with no creative input, someone with obvious craft at playing their instrument, is cruel and petty.
It’s unlike any post-split band statement I’ve ever read before. To claim that all is said “without putting her down in any way” is like expecting a blood-stained human entering a river full of piranhas to come out alive. This was a really nasty parting of ways, make no mistake. Owen himself, who writes intelligent lyrics and who writes challenging songs, takes considerable pride in what he does so much so that he deems it necessary to erase the contribution of one quarter of the band. To sew it up, to set it in stone: “This was what happened. Emilia gave nothing.” That’s bitter, that’s not on.
Many of the stars of tomorrow or the next day haven’t shown their faces yet. They’ll pop up in an SXSW or national talent show or out of the purse of a record label executive. But some of the biggest names are already staring us in the face. Some have released one, two albums and will continue to grow in spectacular fashion.
Below are just a small handful of artists who are without doubt capable of evolving like Radiohead did, like Spoon did, like Sigur Ros did in the last ten years. Existing bands who will still very much exist in ten years time.
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Frightened Rabbit
In Frightened Rabbit you get the eschewed, twisted take on delivering heart-rendering love songs from the pit of the heart. Their brand of stadium-approved Scottish rock is probably something that most of the band’s fans don’t want to explode into the mainstream. But it’s more than capable of doing so. With a new album due next year, expert songwriting might eventually find a home on mainstream radio and as easily as that, it could erupt into new beginnings.
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HEALTH
The consensus about HEALTH is that they’re already far ahead of their time. The music they make; hard-hitting slabs of perfectly-crafted noise rock, will never win millions of fans. But critical acclaim towards the band will go overboard if the follow-up to this year’s ‘Get Color‘ is more spectacular, intricate and jaw-dropping that its already impressive predecessors. Expect to hear the sound of the future develop nicely over the next few years.
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Laura Marling
The only solo artist that we’re mentioning. And that’s for a reason because most successful solo artists cannot forge a lengthy career of success – the likes of Lily Allen, James Blunt, Jack Johnson can all vouch for that. But Marling has something of a PJ Harvey aura about her, someone capable of developing that dark yet relatively simplistic acoustic sound of hers. We’re not asking Laura Marling to go rock n’roll but let’s face it, one word heavily featured around press of her debut album was “potential” and as she enters a new decade with a new album in tow, it wouldn’t be fair not to expect anything but excellence.
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Wild Beasts
It seems quite strange that when ‘Two Dancers‘ was released and when nearly everybody fell head over heels in love with it, that there was talk that this band had an ‘OK Computer’ in them. This is odd considering Wild Beasts sound more like a lot of bands than Radiohead but where they’re coming from is the idea that this is a band who so crucially developed from their debut to their sophomore record and when a band are as driven and determined to out-do themselves as Wild Beasts are, you can only assume there’s more to come.
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The XX
The new faces in our choices, the XX are already crafting an original, mature sound in their (sort of) self-titled debut. Their live performances are appreciated and brains behind the sound Jamie XX is making waves in the blog community with his exceptional remixes. The best thing about the debut was that it in no way pigeonholed the band’s sound: there was a dabbling into straightforward pop, into dubstep, into hip-hop. The doors are still open and the band could go nearly anywhere from this fantastic starting point. No pressure. mp3: Basic Space (Pariah Remix)
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Yeasayer
‘Ambling Alp‘ having just arrived, Yeasayer effectively announcing a more direct route into cultured pop from their ambitious debut ‘All Hour Cymbals’. ‘Odd Blood’ is the forthcoming release, due out next February and a level of expectation akin to that which surrounded the latest Animal Collective and Grizzly Bear albums, is beginning to build. Trust me though, it’s for a reason. Yeasayer have been showcasing intelligent yet instant pop music through their new songs in shows recently and you get the sense that they won’t be finishing at ‘Odd Blood’. mp3: Ambling Alp
Don’t pretend you haven’t spent the last five days re-visiting pitchfork.com for the next chapter in their top 200 albums of the decade list . You might have left the page thinking “Hmm, that was totally predictable…” and yes, it was. Without splashing out any spoilers for you poor deprived readers, the list, bar some dubious ordering, had a consensual winner and the site certainly didn’t go out to name a nobody just for some PR kudos.
Other publications, including ours, will find it difficult to differ from the list. If you go over to Pop Tarts Suck Toasted today and have a gander at their list, you’ll probably notice that nearly every choice could also be found in the Pitchfork list too. PTST is indeed a blog that represents the P4K-taste, but Pat himself would have found it difficult to include any surprise choices. This is merely because we’ve had a good ten years to assess the albums making the lists, time to re-consider evaluations. That’s probably why these lists will be so scarce of 2009 releases, although granted, 2009 has been decidedly below-par. There is a consensus already that Arcade Fire, Radiohead, The Knife, Sufjan Stevens and Interpol, amongst others, have all made some of the greatest albums of the decade. There’s no breaking away from that. And so you’ll probably be able to draw parallels between nearly every other list you see and believe me, you’ll be growing tired of them very soon.
But these matter an awful lot. Why? Because yearly lists can be scrutinised and mocked when a retrospective shadow is cast but these decade lists…they have an almighty importance in guiding new music listeners in decades to come to scrawl back through time and discover the music their Mum and Dads used to love. If a particular album is picked in its masses as the best record released between 2000 and 2009, it’s going to be difficult to resist. And so it’s satisfying that Pitchfork, the most influential taste-making music publication in the world, have resisted temptation to tip an outsider. It’d be unfair to give glory to the underdog.
Music Fan’s Mic’s own summarisation of the decade will be published from October 19th, where you can find out our top 10 songs of the decade and our 20 top albums, alongside some other miscellaneous lists.
I’d expect most visitors to Music Fan’s Mic — a blog that many would classify as an “mp3 blog” first and foremost — would find the subject of file-sharing a tiresome one. But reading the perspective of someone who would by some, be accused as a culprit of file-sharing, could be interesting, maybe? I hope so.
A vast amount of my blog’s visitors (a good 70/80%) come via. Hype Machine. Therefore, they’re on the blog for just about five seconds – enough time to click on the link to the blog post, scroll down to the mp3 and click “save link as”. My aim when Music Fan’s Mic started was to build an online community of people who shared the same taste as mine. I found it increasingly difficult to draw in visitors, particularly those who comment on a piece, and was always in limbo as to whether to continue publishing my reviews on the site. Nowadays, mp3’s are a ways and means of attracting those who might come to MFM to stay. I want them to read the content more than anything, but everyday I’m reminded of the fact that in reality, the majority of those who find MFM couldn’t give two fucks about what it stands for or its thoughts on a particular song.
There is no way around this. Music journalism used to be prized, far more important. It used to be a nudge towards someone actually going out and buying a record. But nowadays, album leaks allow everyone around the world to hear an album before reviews are even published. Therefore, they allow their own individual thoughts to simmer, making an average music review as useful as only having a toaster when you want to heat up some soup. Yet something still compels me to write, essentially, hoping that people might care and might value the way I write and what I have to say. I didn’t start Music Fan’s Mic as a means of making a living, I started it because I’d always written reviews, as a way of gathering my thoughts and putting them to one side. It was just a storage space at first, now it’s one of the highest priorities of my every day.
In the UK, momentum in gathering behind a collection of musicians’ efforts to decrease the rate of file-sharing in the country. They’re not naive, expecting to completely remove the problem, but they’re meeting together in order to gather ideas, smart ideas in fact. The latest in the line of thoughts is the plan to “squeeze bandwidth” from internet users who choose to file-share on a regular basis. Admittedly, someone who’s had their internet restricted will find ways around the measure, such as using a friend’s computer or getting a friend to make a copy. There will be loopholes, but it will at least cover some ground in restricting the movement of file-sharing in this country. Lily Allen is seemingly the head of the meetings, although in no way should there be a “leader” of sorts. This should be a unison, not an elite. But it speaks volumes that members of Radiohead and Pink Floyd are joining hands in an effort to curb the impact of illegal downloading.
But it’s too late. File-sharing is global and can only evolve. Across the world, (cue Bono) every time I click my fingers, an artist loses out on £2. It’s a vicious circle but if file-sharers can find ways around the proposed measures from Allen and co., musicians should also be making efforts to find ways around not being able to make a living out of their music. And they are, iTunes, ‘In Rainbows’, ‘Intimacy’, we’ve seen experimentation.
It would be wonderful if release dates mattered again, if anticipation returned and if reviews would once again have importance. But it’s all too farfetched. It’s difficult to see how it can evolve from here but the internet will only become faster, more dangerous for musicians who want to make a living. Music journalism is also on its last knees, but it can also evolve. There will always be interest in interviews, opinions from top-class journalists. As file-sharing increases in volume, as does the chance that an everyday teenager will come across an LCD Soundsystem or the “next big thing” where without the internet, they never would have.
The next decade will see similar efforts being made to those currently emerging through Allen and her cronies. But at the same time, music downloading will never cease and can only grow with faster broadband speeds and an ever-growing cloud of hype that surrounds acts like Washed Out, The Drums, The Xx, in a matter of days. Music press and its efforts to find the next Vampire Weekend/Strokes/etc. only spurs on this ridiculous movement of buzz that in turn, increases the rate of downloading. It’s undecided as to whether a blog like Music Fan’s Mic will survive as an effort to match intelligent journal input with the link to a song that everyone seeks.
Right now, mp3 blogs aren’t the big culprits. Most urge a hypemachine user or someone on a forum to “check out this amazing band/song/show”. A lot of passion is involved. Torrents and .rar files are the enemy, but yet in a matter of minutes, you can have a fantastic album on iPod. That temptation is understandably, too much for most. In my position, I believe that music journalism probably won’t exist in music blogs after a few more years, but passion and energy, the key components to making a music blog, will still remain.
A surprise choice or a pretentious one? The bookies saw it coming, having Speech Debelle down as second favourite to snatch the Mercury Prize from more begging hands, more deserving hands. Don’t take this as a narrow-minded rant: The award should have gone to a better record. ‘Speech Therapy’ does have its moments, and it could indeed be the start of a very exciting career. But it’s a flawed record that in my mind, is judged on value on who recorded it rather than how it sounds. She’s young, she’s urban and she writes about ‘modern life’. This is either going to be another Ms.Dynamite-esque embarrassment for the Mercury judges or I’m going to be proved completely wrong in years to come.
(JM)
Charlie Fink is emerging as a creative prodigy, out of almost nowhere. Previously shadowed out by Laura Marling as just “the male voice” in Noah and the Whale’s debut album, ‘Peaceful, Lays Me Down’, his band’s follow-up sees him taking centre stage. Some, believe he cracks under the pressure. Others, believe this to be a career-defining moment. ‘The First Days of Spring‘ has a visual buddy, a cinematic companion to compliment the uplifting, grand atmospherics of the music. It tackles love, isolation, loss and complete joy. The centrepiece of the record, ‘Love Of An Orchestra’ stands out as something completely different, and the film piece is completely similar. Whilst polaroid-esque visuals dominate the bulk of the film, the anomaly finds an old man, filled with drunken joy, singing and dancing along.
There is one moment however in ‘The First Days of Spring’ that sends shivers down your spine. A dialogue piece precedes ‘Blue Skies’, covering two best friends, one encouraging the other to go out for the first time in God knows how long…The following scene of both riding along a deserted coastline is overwhelming, completely fitting. It all the more confirms that Fink knew exactly what he wanted to achieve with “The First Days of Spring’ and that he’s succeeded with flying colours.
1 – Michael Jackson – The Essential (Some people must be buying this every day? Is it some traditional gift for new-borns all of a sudden?)
New entries: 68 – Wild Beasts – Two Dancers (This is a disgrace. Everyone bums a critically acclaimed album but nobody actually goes out and buys it. Instead it’s beaten by…) 13 – Frankmusik – Complete Me (Now the record company might consider this a failure but ‘Complete Me’ is a pathetic turd of a debut album, and did in no way deserve to come 55 places above Wild Beasts) 20 – The Twang – Jewellery Quarter (The worst of all. The most tame, uninspiring music out there today makes the top 20. This, combined with the whole of Europe going far-right, is the biggest problem we face as human beings)
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This is when the debate of illegal music downloading should begin to come in again. The vast majority of file sharers actually have pretty good taste. Think the hypemachine users, the bloggers even, an awful lot of them file-share. There should be a fine line drawn between sampling a record, seeing if it fits your tastes, and refusing to go out and buy it.
Sure, this might sound hypocritical from a music blogger who 1) puts up mp3’s on his posts for sampling purposes and 2) got sent ‘Two Dancers’ for free for review purposes BUT Wild Beasts might now have problems raising the money to make a third record, an album with so much prospect. Wild Beasts are one of the few British bands to be showing any potential of changing, really enlightening music. But to be outdone in sales by The Twang, goes to show that the UK still has a big taste problem.
All mp3s posted on Music Fan's Mic are posted after gaining the relevant permission.
Jamie Milton began Music Fan's Mic in 2006 as a means of publishing and collecting his reviews for other publications. Since then both Milton and Gareth O'Malley are co-running the blog and posting the best new music on a regular basis.
Boom-box-in':
Yeasayer - Odd Blood LP
Final Fantasy Heartland LP
Beach House - Teen Dream LP
These New Puritans - We Want War
Gigi - The Old Graveyard
jj - The xx Intro
Toro Y Moi - Causers of This LP
Liars - Sisterworld LP
Vampire Weekend - White Sky
Los Campesinos! - In Medias Res
rendering love songs
The music they make; hard-hitting slabs of perfectly-crafted noise rock, will never win millions of fans. But critical acclaim towards the band will go overboard if the follow-up to this year’s ‘
most successful solo artists cannot forge a lengthy career of success – the likes of Lily Allen, James Blunt, Jack Johnson can all vouch for that. But Marling has something of a PJ Harvey aura about her, someone capable of developing that dark yet relatively simplistic acoustic sound of hers. We’re not asking Laura Marling to go rock n’roll but let’s face it, one word heavily featured around press of her 
everybody fell head over heels in love with it, that there was talk that this band had an ‘OK Computer’ in them. This is odd considering Wild Beasts sound more like a lot of bands than Radiohead but where they’re coming from is the idea that this is a band who so crucially developed from their debut to their sophomore record and when a band are as driven and determined to out-do themselves as Wild Beasts are, you can only assume there’s more to come.
sound in their 
direct route into cultured pop from their ambitious debut ‘All Hour Cymbals’. ‘Odd Blood’ is the forthcoming release, due out next February and a level of expectation akin to that which surrounded the latest Animal Collective and Grizzly Bear albums, is beginning to build. Trust me though, it’s for a reason. Yeasayer have been showcasing intelligent yet instant pop music through their new songs in shows recently and you get the sense that they won’t be finishing at ‘Odd Blood’.
1 – Michael Jackson – The Essential (Some people must be buying this every day? Is it some traditional gift for new-borns all of a sudden?)
MFM @ HYPEM
