We wish to bid farewell to 2010, which turned out to be a bumper year for this music blog, with many highlights, in a year in which our visitor numbers improved, our network grew like never before, we received more comments per post, our credibility as a music commentator grew, and our reach continued to stretch around the globe.
The single biggest thing that we experienced was the blog’s full redesign. A wonderful job was completed by Andy Nelson, a full-time web designer, who also happens to be the excellent lead guitarist from one of Brighton’s most joyful bands, :Kinema:. “Slick” was the word most commonly used by the many people that mentioned it on Twitter and in our comments section.
Our editor, Mike, was interviewed on radio stations both here in the UK and in the US, as well as getting decent mentions, such as ‘Website Of The Week‘, on major music websites around the world. Cloud Speakers.com and Musformation.com Q&A’d us and they have been known to quote our tweets to help inform professional musicians.
Our Twitter account has grown month by month and as we close the year we are about to hit 2000 followers. We put a lot of effort into throwing out our opinions on there, alongside some decent updates and genuinely useful links, to make sure it’s rewarding and providing additional information (that you won’t find on the main blog) to our followers. As a consequence, the large American website, Flavourwire, put us in their ‘top 10 music critics to follow on Twitter‘.
We were also made a proud ‘Charter Member’ of the all-too-brief global blog collective Strangers In Stereo, which launched in style at SXSW, before it’s untimely demise only a few months later, but the creator Will Hines informs us that he plans a return, so it’s not over, just due for a full re-launch in 2011. One of the best things to come out of it was being fully integrated with an expanded network of high quality music bloggers.
We covered this year’s SXSW Festival like never before, as we sent our contributor and Austin local, Olivia, around the town to hunt out the giant festival’s highlights. Meeting up with many fellow bloggers, chatting with Anthony the creator of the Hype Machine, and reviewing what seemed like a million bands. You can read that coverage here.
The music industry continued to interact with us on a greater scale in 2010, with A&R employees, record labels and booking agencies picking up on The Recommender’s popularity and ability to help discover new music. We were fortunate enough to be lavished with free drinks, dinners and a multitude of guestlist shows by a handful of these companies, allowing us to feel a sense of appreciation and respect.
PR companies were kind enough to hand our blog a selection of exclusives throughout the year, which is always appreciated. This was alongside being sent many new albums, EPs and single releases, both in the post and digitally, with 2010 being a year that physical promo copies were replaced more and more by digital ones.
In February we launched The Recommender’s parties, a monthly get-together, based at venues in central Brighton, showcasing some of the finest cutting edge talent from around the world. Every show seemed to produce exceptional performances, which we hope is partly due to the effort we put into making it feel like a proper party, rather than a standard gig. The Phenomenal Handclap Band, We Have Band, Velo, Young Empires, The Foreign Office and King Charles, all stated that they had experienced their best ever gig in the UK at the close of their amazing sets.
One major highlight from our promotions was the packed out after-party that we organised for The Great Escape Festival back in May, alongside the magazine that we continue to proudly write for, Brighton’s ‘going out bible‘, The Source Magazine. Five amazing bands were on show, with King Charles stepping in at the last minute, after Velo sadly had to pull out. The venue is probably still trying to repair the roof, which was duly removed by all five thunderous performances.
During November, we were once again asked to vote in the annual BBC ‘Sound Of 2011‘ poll, amongst just 165 of the UK’s nominated tastemakers, with two out of our three votes making the list. The final winners of this will be announced in the first week of January.
As the year closed we provided our large, annual posts, that always turn out to be among the most popular of each year, with Everything Everything scooping ‘Track Of The Year‘, with ‘Suffragette Suffragette‘, and Sleigh Bells’ ‘Treats‘ earning ‘Album Of The Year‘.
Since the blog’s re-design we’ve dipped into new areas with our editorial too, as we tried our first forays into reviewing, rather than our typical previewing. This allowed us to write the occasional negative piece – how else can you do it if you’re being honest – about some of the worst music on show this year, and more recently with the post titled, ‘The Most Disappointing Albums of 2010‘. Although we fully intend to remain a largely positive site, who’s intention is to make your lives better with amazing music, this other style of editorial always stirs up debate, which is also healthy.
One successful, new idea was to hold a peers-only vote for ‘The Best Music Blogs Of 2010‘, where we invited everyone on our network of music bloggers, from around the world, to nominate their three favourite music blogs. The response was enormous, with the post receiving more visitors than any other posts this year, as well as getting mentioned all over the web and the social networks. Votes arrived in their hundreds and the overall winner was announced as the very friendly Sunset In The Rearview.
Looking ahead to next year we will certainly do the vote again, alongside all of our other successful, annual posts. We plan to do a 2011 preview on our next piece, which seeks to point out and predict the year’s hotly anticipated releases, so make sure you head back here soon for that.
All that is left to say is a MASSIVE thank you to all of our contributors, all of the industry professionals who have interacted with us this year, all of the music bloggers in our network, all of the bands that have played absolute blinders each month, but most of all to our readers. Without you all we wouldn’t exist. Music is one of those things that serves to make life that little bit better, so we wish to raise a glass for all those people that enjoy searching it out.
Just to be clear, this list is not so much about the worst LPs, but rather the most disappointing. If you can imagine for a moment just how many terrible albums there are in a year, from all those truly rubbish artists, so a ‘worst’ list would surely be impossible, plus we clearly haven’t spent 2010 listening to all of those, so we couldn’t critique them properly if we tried.
This list is about those albums that had our appetite fixated towards the end of 2009, as well as our ears’ attention upon their release, only to actually feel massively disappointed. Even after several listens and a willing effort to see if the album was going to grow on us we still concluded that it was a bit shit, so this list is about those minutes we’re never going to get back.
KLAXONS – SURFING THE VOID: OK lads, bring your drums to the recording studio, but you can leave those instrument thingys, we won’t be needing them. Lord only knows what Klaxons did with all the clever, razor sharp tunes and melodies between the previous album and this new one. This sounds like a band desperate to shake the shackles of nu rave by surprising everyone with a new direction, but actually simply lobotomising the invention out of their brains in the process. The title track is two and a half minutes of all the banging and crashing off of the debut, without any sign of a tune. Things improved slightly with ‘Valley Of The Calm Trees‘ and ‘Twin Flames‘, but even they feel like the worst tracks off Myths Of The Near Future. Music’s history clearly notes that sophomore albums are a distinctly tricky hurdle to overcome and none more so when the debut albums are as massive and genre-defining as Klaxons was, but to wade so far the wrong way smacks of bad advice. Their second effort seemed to take an eternity to come out, having ditched producer James Ford mid-process and replaced him with rock producer Ross Robinson. Tracks such as ‘The Same Space‘ show us a band lacking in enthusiasm and mis-directed energy, with a song that feels like it could run out of steam and completely stop at any moment. It’s a horrific track that never finds its tune and ends in a confused mess. We can’t imagine an album having less repeats than this one, but we persevered to see if it was a grower and can report that it’s seed is very much still in the dirt. File this on under ‘Aimless’ and ‘Lacking’. Here’s hoping that, with the nu rave shackles fully removed, they can now create something genuinely interesting for that now-even-trickier third album.
MIA – MAYA: This album isn’t a complete failure, with tracks such as ‘XXXO‘ showing us the talent that’s undeniably been on display since we first discovered Maya Arulpragasam back on her debut LP. However, her successful progression as a challenging, alternative artist seems to have been halted with her latest work. You should always be wary of any critic that dismisses music as “bleeps and whistles“, as it sounds like your parents reviewing it, but it’s almost impossible not to mention it with this new album, as there are parts on here that feel like they’ve been created by a deaf robot. It’s like she saved up all her bad ideas and released them on one LP. ‘Steppin Up‘ sounds like a joke without a punchline, firing off the kind of lyrics that The Black Eyes Peas would have settled for, and no amount of style, or even the odd swear word, can save it. We know Maya has successfully commanded an alternative brand of pop with her previous work, but this album felt like it passed ten minutes before we even found a recognizable chorus, albeit getting delivered like she was as bored of recording it as we were listening to it. Throughout the album’s forty odd minutes there was a sense that she’d removed the substance and tried to keep the style, whilst replacing the substance with, well, nothing really. ‘Teqkilla‘ finds her trying to locate a decent hook, but it quickly gets annoying and if you removed the vocals altogether you’re left with a tune that sounds worse then your alarm clock on a Monday morning. For someone who often combined a bit of street edge with her Sri-Lankan roots, we seem to find neither particularly strong on here. She is closest to her heritage with ‘Story To Be Told‘ and ‘Tell Me Why‘, even finding some melody on the album’s best moment, ‘It Takes A Muscle‘, but it’s not strong enough to prop up the rest, leaving us with a feeling that this talented artist has run out of something. Lets hope she finds it again before the next album.
HURTS – HAPPINESS: We documented our love/hate relationship with Hurts back with our post about their recent Christmas single, ‘All I Want For Christmas Is New Years Day‘. Suffice to say the relationship was well over before that moment, as we now enjoy more of a hate/hate relationship with them. This album was found at the end of a path that gave us some interesting singles and an image so tightly controlled it had Obama’s team suggesting the President consider holding a comb when making speeches. A large group of Hansel Hipsters and Gretel bloggers were lead along to their lair, as the hype climbed in tandem with the bands well-plotted career hopes. However, what arrived was an album of clichéd pop mulch, that was dripping with desperation. The bubble of their cool image burst like a rain cloud, leaving us drenched in the kind of boy band music that people make for 14 year olds, with the sole aim of making money. You know the sort – a kind of manufactured brand of mid-80s pop that only people with zero shame can sing straight-faced into the TV cameras. Sickly and confusing from the outset, with opener ‘Silver Lining‘ bringing in the synthetic strings and ending with a manly chorus of mens voices chanting “silver” to it’s finish, like a piece of over-dramatic, camp theatre. They don’t seem to have realised that this stuff is done far better by the likes of Clare Maguire and that it’s because she can really sing. Hurts’ lead man, Theo Hutchcraft, simply isn’t good enough and brings the whole set crashing down by constantly singing with a faux yearning. Sure, folk will tell you it’s got melodies and is just a piece of pop, so don’t take it too seriously, but you could explain X-Factor like that and surely most sensible people realise that show is a little embarrassing, especially to all of those real pop stars of yesteryear that they karaoke to with each series. The filler on the album – songs like ‘Sunday‘, ‘The Water‘ and ‘Evelyn‘ – are so terrible and lacking that with cement this thin the walls were always going to come tumbling down. Having been positively excited at the prospect of hearing an album that promised some mature, stylish, classy synth pop, we never imagined that it would get so rapidly shelved next to your mum’s Westlife CDs.
MGMT – CONGRATULATIONS: Another casualty of hype, this album let you down before you even hit the play button, with a strong contender for ‘Worst Album Cover of 2010′. It’s not even good in an ironic way. It’s plain awful. Plain and awful are indeed two strong themes running throughout this LP. Opener, ‘It’s Working‘, does the exact opposite, feeling very much broken, like a bad Beach Boys parody. ‘Song For Dan Treacy‘ continues the joke, taking them in a direction that was entirely missing on their debut, sounding in parts like a Vic Reeves sketch, were it written by Ray Davies. Twee little noises and samples run right through the album, hitting an echo peddle here and a ‘whacky’, fried bit of synth there. Ooh, how psychedelic. Gone are the hit singles from the previous album, such as ‘Kids‘ or ‘Time To Pretend‘, and in their place is a collection of songs that sound like they were written for four year olds. There’s a moment half way through ‘Flash Delirium‘ that sounds like Spinal Tap playing at a circus. They’ve almost totally ignored the dancefloors on this album, with songs such as ‘I Found A Whistle‘ and ‘Siberian Breaks‘ slowing down the record right in it’s centre, sending the last few stoners, that thought they were enjoying it, off too sleep on their couches. Your teeth will be grinding if you make it to the remaining tracks, with ‘Brian Eno‘ being a random move that should have perhaps been left alone immediately after they hatched the idea. Where the album tries to get clever, it seems obvious and panto-like, where it tries to mature, it gets snail-paced and lifeless. This is a record that had the Brooklyn duo trying to follow up a vibrant debut with a new direction, only to quickly get lost and realise nobody has come along with them. It doesn’t lack ideas, it just lacks good ones, and they’ve ended up with a poor, self-indulgent work that shows us a band that crashed into their ‘difficult’ second album with blindfolds on.
THE DRUMS – THE DRUMS: We don’t want to come across too snobbish here, as there are plenty of sunny ditties found on this album, but they took a selection of simple songs and beat them with a boring stick. They neither nailed the kind of summery enchanting music that you just want to lay in a field getting stoned to, such as you got with Best Coast, nor did their brighter points really sparkle enough, unlike say, Two Door Cinema Club. The singles were the best bits, but that’s like turning to your mate, after he’s watched his team get thrashed 5-2, and saying “at least you scored a couple of goals“. Even on the better tunes there’s a recurring theme that sees them trying to out-do the previous song’s appalling lyrics, by delving ever deeper into the kind of poetry that’s just one bad idea after another. There’s far too many “whooaooaoaahs“, “hey hey hey heys“, “fun fun fun”, and words like “skyeeyeeyeeeye“, which make you want to throw your iPod to the floor in frustration. Some of the vocals aim for the Beach Boys, but they always sound like the backing harmonies are in a different room and they stretch them out for way too many bars, clearly believing they’ve found an awesome refrain. The whole album sounds like it’s lacking in IQ. It waves from boring, to slow, to boring again, like driving on a motorway in bad traffic; and on this album there’s 12 junctions to go before you get off. Johnathan Pierce regularly sings with a broken heart, but rather then feeling sorry to hear of his downtrodden breakups, you think, “good, I’m glad she left you, you probably bored the fucking life out of her“. At one point he even declares “I don’t feel sorry for you when you cry“, on ‘It Will All End In Tears‘ – quite. It feels empty, average and could easily have all the critics using that most forbidden of words, “nice“. It’s all so bloody nice! Well, Jonathan, everything is not alright – it wasn’t when Cast sang it back in the mid-90s and it still isn’t now. You were beige in your failed band, Elkland, and this new, strange, u-turn-of-a-new-outfit has somehow returned to similar mundane levels. This self-titled album makes this list for being the most irritating and featureless LP of 2010.
ELLIE GOULDING – LIGHTS: When the best thing about the pop star’s album is not in fact the pop star, but the producer behind it, then you should worry. Starsmith did a fine job adding beats, putting the movement where there really wasn’t much, the pace where things were flat and electricity where there was previously only folk. The results are a tidy pop album with singles that grabbed number ones and the overall LP did well commercially shifting nearly 500k copies in 2010, but success doesn’t necessarily mean it’s any good. The Sun is the most popular newspaper, but that don’t equate to quality now does it? Having been tipped by everybody at the end of 2009 you will sadly not find many of those tipsters returning to add Ellie into their best albums of 2010 lists. We were expecting an inventive, sparkling new pop star and we received something a lot more, well, boring. It plummets to the depths of dullness in parts, being entirely forgotten approximately three seconds after it finishes. Her star isn’t bright enough, her charisma too timid to be the showman that’s needed with this style of youthful pop. She doesn’t enjoy a particularly strong voice either, even having her vocals tweaked by the sound technician whist playing live on her UK tour. She certainly showed some talent when we first came across her, but this entire album felt like Ellie had been persuaded to adapt her natural folk leanings to suit 2010′s popular sound – electro pop – and the results were an uncomfortable mismatch. Unfortunately the resulting album fell flat and quickly ran out of steam for us. To be this dull and wet and slotted into the genre of electro pop was a bad piece of major label shelving. Lets just hope that she’s not left on that shelf for album number two, focusing more on her original folk talent, rather than considering how friendly it feels in the middle-of-the-road.
So who would be in your list of this year’s most disappointing albums? Let us know in the comments as there’s always plenty of opinions on matters such as these.
(MB)
