Jimmy E's Music List Mania

Gentle men and women, lend me your eyes for this fifth annual instalment of my end of year favourite records list.   I am quietly hopeful that my audience might even number more than ten folks this time around.   How’s that for passive expansion? Despite the glut of these lists around the internet and the big words used, let’s be honest for a moment.   They’re not even remotely objective, arguably not really proper journalism and as comforting as they are, lists are an extraordinarily lazy way of forming and writing an article.   Neither they nor the music they mention are going to cure cancer or strife in Syria anytime soon, not even the new Daft Punk record on the 67th listen.  Still with me?  Great, clearly you care about music not sorting out the world's problems as much as I do (maybe it can, but I'll save that for another time), so let's plow on together regardless. My shame Not that it really matters, but I do like to point out that I ...

*A note before I begin.  By "double album" I am referring to the original media format on which the album was released (and let's ignore greatest hits and live albums, because that's just cheating).* "There's a good single album's worth of material in there somewhere."  Just because it's a cliche readily thrown out by practically every reviewer of every double album ever made, doesn't mean it's not true.  Why would artists open themselves up to that inevitability?  Backing up, why make a double anyway? - too many ideas for a single disc? A way to make twice as much money if released separately?  Aesthetic and / or artistic reasons that us mere mortals aren't meant to understand?  Whatever the reason, the double-album has been around for a long time; it doesn't seem to be genre specific and nor does it seem to be going away anytime soon.  Quite the opposite in fact. I have for a long time believed that Bob Dylan's Bonde on Blo...

2009 has been a good year (for me) for music. This year I have got into, in a big way, Converge, Thrice, Mastodon and Lily Allen, the latter 2 artists releasing arguably their greatest work to date. For example, if Jane Doe and Vheissu/the Alchemy Index had been released in 2009, they would be my albums of the year. As it is, Axe to Fall makes the cut (no pun intended), as does Beggars, but neither are the forementioned masterpieces. Disappointments of the year include Dream Theater - Black Clouds and Silver Linings, which I forced myself to listen to a few more times, but I still think I wasted the £60 the darn special edition cost me. Porcupine Tree's The Incident, on the other hand, was worth the cash for the beautiful packaging and artwork alone, it's just a shame someone doesn't check Steven Wilson's quality control. There are, as ever, some jawdropping moments, but there is an awful lot of filler, and the chorus of Draw the Line is cringingly horribl...

Hello, and welcome to the second instalment of this potentially ill-advised annual tradition that is my top 10 of the year list.  Not wishing to dive right in, let's pad it out a bit, first with some disappointments and then with some records that didn't quite make the cut. Disappointments of the year Stone Sour - Audio Secrecy.  I gather this is a grower, but I couldn't find much to like and couldn't be bothered to wade through all the soppy ballads. Coheed and Cambria - Year of the Black Rainbow.  Nothing jumped out, no matter how many times I listened to it. The Melvins - The Bride Screamed Murder.  This band is amazing, have at least 10 great albums to their name, including the last one, but this one was too experimental at times, even for me, and a bit rubbish. Dan Le Sac vs Scroobius Pip - The Logic of Chance. I just can't excited about this duo like many people can. Angles was a decent record but at best only about half of ...