Our Mid-Season Favorite Album Countdown - Nr. 05

Number five in our top ten favourite albums of 2010 so far! Linda, Ilse, and yours truly give you our ten favourite albums at the halfway stage of the musical year in the hope you might discover, rediscover, or agree with our picks. If, in turn, you have some stuff you think we might enjoy, please holler.

Favorite albums of first half 2010: 10 - 9 - 8 - 7 - 6

Linda:
5. The National – High Violet (4AD)
Even though this is not The National at their best, it’s still an awful lot better than what most bands dare to put out. Alligator and Boxer still top the list of their best albums for me, and they’re tied as I keep switching back and forth of liking one of those better than the other. But this is supposed to be about their newest endeavour so let’s focus on that shall we? It took some time for me to really get the album, well, it actually took hearing it being performed live – and is there anything better in this world than hearing ‘England’ live in London? ‘Runaway’ turned out to be another gem, as well as ‘Vanderlyle Crybaby Geeks’ with that beautiful melancholic “All the very best of us / String ourselves up for love” chorus. I just love how Matt Berninger can make any silly thing sound like the most profound truth. Not that his lyrics don’t make sense, but sometimes he just manages to work in a sentence that appears to me more like a mind fuck than a well thought out lyric. And after seeing him joke around a bit at the Electric Ballroom gig, I think he’s rather enjoying people’s attempts to make sense of his nonsense. I’m just sad that ‘Terrible Love’ now seems to have become their set closer of choice, as ‘Mr November’ or ‘About Today’ seemed so much more equipped to let everyone go home on a high.
Listen to random track:’England’

Ilse:
05. Los Campesinos! – Romance is Boring ( Wichita)
Fab Camp! is back, with their third album; another one filled with great, quirky songs and a lot of witty and morbid lyrics. They’re still employing the twee-as-fuck-melodrama sound , though personnel-wise the band underwent some changes: Aleks left the band (not before finishing the album), and the gap she left was filled up by Gareth’s sister Kim. Add Sparky Deathcap and you have 8 band members…what are they trying to do? Start a football team? (actually could be, as Gareth loves football so much). Maybe they finally realized this was a bit much, perhaps that’s why they recently FIRED drummer Ollie… This seemingly instability within the Campesinos! family doesn’t affect the music though, as they still magnificently use an almost dialogue-like singing between Gareth and Aleks/Kim about the usual suspects: death, sex and adolescent romance (mainly failed relationships), and lyrically it’s another gold page in Gareth’s songbook with snarky examples such as ‘I’ve learned more from the toilet walls, than I’ve learned from these words of yours’ (‘We Got Your Back’) and of course some cheeky ones like: ‘I think we need more post coital / and less post rock / feels like the buildup takes forever / but you never get me off’, from possibly my favourite song of the album: ‘Straight In At 101’ (Orwellian references RULE), which ends awesomely in ‘I phone my friends and family / to gather round the television / the talking heads count down the most heart-wrenching break ups of all time / Imagine the great sense of waste / the indignity, the embarrassment / when not a single one of that whole century / was.... mine…’ On the other hand, they also show their darker side with ‘The Sea Is A Good Place To Think Of The Future’; with that song, their debut ‘Hold On Now Youngster…’ seems way beyond the 2 years it’s been since its release. Yep, the Cardiff 7 piece may keep their exclamation mark, as Romance might be boring, but team Campesinos! definitely isn’t.
Listen to random track: ‘Straight in at 101’

Stef:
05. The Time and Space Machine – Set Phazer to Stun (Tirk Records)
Heck yes, I was already wondering where the city-at-night albums had gone! Last year while walking through the city after midnight I was listening to greatness like Circlesquare and Memory Tapes, and even stuff like Alaska in Winter proved very good for that sort of thing. This year, however, I had yet to come across my city soundtrack. Enter The Time and Space Machine, which fit the bill perfectly. Less minimal and distant than Circlesquare, less dreamy than Memory Tapes, but a bit more spacey. One terribly good song after another follows, some with a slightly faster pace, others seductively move forward like ‘You Are the One’. The way all the songs flow is just incredible, and it is so easy on the ear, especially for this kind of music. I have relatively recently “discovered” this one, so in the second part of the year this could still go up or down, so perhaps fittingly it is now situated at five. Did I mention how the songs flow already? Major love for this one.
Listen to random track: ‘Children of the Sun’