Here’s the latest album chart:
The final step we need to take with the NME Awards is to summarise all the winners in one single, easy-to-digest place. So, continuing with the part one of two-part NME Poll Winners 1952-1992, let’s do that!
Here are all the winners for specific singles, videos, albums, films, and books!
The group of media awards, for radio, TV, films, and venues.
Continuing the odd and eclectic categories from 1954-1992, the NME Awards still give slightly odd awards out to individuals.
Continuing some of the odder categories from the earlier NME Polls. For clarity, I’ve separated the “live” events from the other “musical” events, although I think the award category was sometimes the same.
Join us again next week, when we’ll finish this list off!
Here’s a brilliant oldie from Tiësto, In the Dark:
My Robot Friend was already a couple of years into his career before I accidentally found the original 2002 version of his debut album Hot Action! on sale in a record fair, and by this time I was already aware of some of his better known tracks. Having started out as a MySpace musician, he seems to have made a name for himself by making excellent, eccentric music, and not a lot else.
The album opens with the beatsy and somewhat intimidating I Am the Robot, and if you can handle its energy, you’ll quickly realise that it’s actually fantastic. Then Sex Machine will always have a special place in my heart, thanks to its inclusion on the brilliant Robopop Vol. 1 compilation (which I should definitely review here at some point). It’s a little more vulgar than I normally like my music to be, but it’s another brilliant track.
There’s little here that’s longer than three minutes, and so the great tracks come flying. You’re Out of the Computer tells the story of an angry hacker who has a grudge to bear against a rival. One general theme on this album is very eccentric samples, and the dog barks used as thwacky snares at times on this track are particularly brilliant.
Why Won’t You Call Me Back? is probably one of the more normal tracks on here, but it still hides some very odd lyrics, lots of telephone noises, and a whole load of other things in amongst the acid noises and guitar work. OK, this is every bit as odd as everything else.
However used you might be, five tracks in, to the unexpected samples, there’s very little that could prepare you for the table tennis percussion of The Power of Love. It’s quite fantastic, and there’s really no point in any further discussion on the matter.
After the sudden end of that track, anything could happen. But there’s no way you would ever expect the soft synth pads of the amazing We’re the Pet Shop Boys. It was so good, so accurate, that not only Pet Shop Boys themselves covered it the following year, but also Robbie Williams covered it on his Rudebox album. It’s completely spot on – every sound, melody, and lyric seems to have been designed to directly reference something that Pet Shop Boys themselves did. It’s not a pastiche; it’s a carefully crafted and perfect homage, that reaches its pinnacle in the middle section, in which Mr. Robot Friend holds his nose to make himself sound a bit more like Neil Tennant, and lists some of Pet Shop Boys‘ hits.
Really, anything was going to be a disappointment after that – those first six tracks seem to have been fighting one another to out-bizarre each other, and that had to reach its pinnacle by the halfway point on the album. Sure enough, Understand Your Man is a bit dull, which I suspect would have been true at any position on the album, but it’s particularly true here.
The good stuff is far from over, though – The Fake tones down some of the oddness but makes up for it by being a great song, and then I Know What Women Want brings it back and builds a whole song around very silly samples and acid noises. But it’s the lyrics that are truly brilliant here – “I know what women want; I decide what women want” is clever stuff.
But there are a lot of tracks on here, and after the onslaught at the start, there was bound to be a bit of a period where they didn’t quite hit as hard. For me, this is the trio of Boing!, Way Down, and Walking Jewish, none of which seem entirely necessary on here, really. They’re mercifully short, but they don’t seem to add much.
But the thing about My Robot Friend is that he always seems to have one more surprise up his sleeve, and sure enough, Walt Whitman is brilliant. It’s not a typical closing track, by any stretch of the imagination, but it’s a great song, and I’m glad to see it tacked on here, closing out this exceptional debut.
None of the physical formats of Hot Action! appear to be available any more, but the digital release does get you some extra tracks, which may be worth having.
Zoot Woman is the band whose most famous member is probably Stuart Price, and who made the brilliant It’s Automatic back in 2001, and apparently have continued releasing albums ever since. The fifth, Redesigned, is out now, and includes this, the lovely Ordinary Face:
These are the top singles this week:
I know it’s a bit old itself now, but I found this article recently, and read it with interest. If you can’t be bothered reading it in full right now, the gist is that songs that fade out peaked in the US chart in 1984, and have been disappearing ever since, hitting zero for two years running in 2011 and 2012, for the first time in over fifty years. If you’ll pardon the obvious pun, they seem to have literally faded away.
What’s particularly interesting about this is that in the 1990s, when fadeouts were everywhere, it always seemed a bit lazy to me, as though artists couldn’t really be bothered working out how to end their songs. I was wrong, of course – a fade is every bit as much of an artistic decision as a snare sound or guitar effect. Billboard wrote a lengthy, and interesting analysis of how fades work, as did NPR, and others seem to have concluded much the same – it’s very much part of the song (look for Survey 845 here). The AV Club go further, suggesting that abrupt endings are just plain wrong in pop music.
But they were pretty much omnipresent, and to have lost them is a tragedy indeed. So what happened, exactly? The Slate article above blames twitchy iPod fingers and millennial attention spans, which seems fair.
It’s perhaps slightly surprising that this hasn’t raised more attention – issues this big tend to hit all the major news channels, but apparently nobody cares about the loss of fadeouts. The fact that there are academic papers on the matter is a relief, though.
Songs that fade in, of course, are another matter entirely…
You can watch an interesting analysis of the problem via Vox below:
No video for this one, I’m afraid, but here’s the brilliant Snow Patrol, from Alpinestars:
I’ve very probably mused about the nature of time here before, but the fifteenth anniversary of Richard X‘sPresents His X-Factor Vol. 1 is a pretty strange one to celebrate. He’s still producing artists, but has never bothered to follow this up, but as a collection of great retro soundclashes, it’s really pretty good. What blows my mind now is that some of the things he samples were as old then as the whole album is now.
It opens with the brief Start, in which a voice says “x” a few times, before Liberty X (remember them? They lost The X Factor, or something) turn up to introduce themselves over the introduction to Being Nobody, a soundclash between Ain’t Nobody and The Human League‘s Being Boiled. It’s brilliant in a way that pop seemed to stop being after Richard X‘s brief reign on the charts.
The Human League are probably the omnipresent force on this album, turning up briefly on Rock Jacket alongside a number of other influences and samples. This one’s a filler, though, carrying us along until another guest vocalist turns up.
This is really a who’s who of early 2000s British pop music in some ways, but I had no memory of who Javine was. Apparently she represented the UK at the 2005 Eurovision Song Contest, finishing, unsurprisingly, excruciatingly close to the bottom of the table. You Used To is a decent pop song, and who knows, maybe it could have been a huge hit too. Pop music is unpredictable sometimes.
Annie is next, pretty much right at the beginning of her career with the brilliant Just Friends, which is brilliant, and then for IX, a German computer repeatedly spells out Richard X‘s name, which makes a nice little interlude. Then the huge voice of Caron Wheeler, of Soul II Soul fame, turns up for the dull but worthy Lonely.
Deborah Evans-Strickland delivers vocals on the next two tracks, an eccentric posh version of Walk on By, and then Lemon/Lime. Pleasant, but there isn’t a lot of point in these unfortunately. Although some of the lyrics on the second track are pretty funny.
Finest Dreams brings Kelis, and was the third single from this album, peaking at number 8 in the UK. It marries another Human League track The Things That Dreams Are Made Of with The S.O.S. Band‘s 1986 hit The Finest (then fifteen years old), and works very well indeed. In fact, it performed better on the charts than either of the tracks it samples, which is impressive.
The unexpected vocalist on the next track is Tiga, who performs You (Better Let Me Love You X4) Tonight. It’s brilliant, but then most of Tiga‘s work seems to be of an extremely high calibre. It’s just a bit too repetitive though, and as with several of the tracks on here, it drags a little towards the end.
The next track, Mark One, is a moment that anyone who grew up in the 1990s will appreciate, as Mark Goodier turns up to do a very meta in-album advert for this album. It’s a brilliant transition to Sugababes‘ Freak Like Me, sampling Gary Numan and Tubeway Army‘s Are “Friends” Electric? for the backing track. I suspect this might be how the album started out, as Richard X‘s original bootleg version had been a near-hit a couple of years earlier.
Into U is lovely, bringing together a new vocal by Jarvis Cocker with a sample of Hope Sandoval, and some unusually underplayed backing. It makes a great final track, closing out a pretty good album. The actual closing track is the brief End, which is one of the nicer interludes, and then the album is over already.
So in summary, despite a strong cast of extras, Richard X‘s debut may not be the best album ever produced, but it’s pretty good, and it did bring us some of the best pop hits of 2002 and 2003. In short, it’s definitely worth a listen.
You can still find Richard X Presents His X-Factor Vol. 1 on wide release.
Tunng are a group I know pretty much nothing about, except that they seem to turn up periodically and make nice music. Their latest is Songs You Make At Night, from which this is ABOP:
Music for stowaways 