It’s half a song with none of the wires plugged in properly, but Justin Vernon doesn’t need much space (nor, indeed, reliable electrics) to create something beautiful. The extended version slots a reflective early morning on the prairie in at the end, adding a late dab of understated grandeur to a withdrawn, tentative track that chose not to build into a greater piece.
Frustrating, really. The gorgeous, reaching, multi-tracked melody, the Mahalia Jackson samples, the gentle synth wash; they leave you wanting more. What it needs is that massive widdling solo from ‘Beth/Rest’.
Juniors 2 and 3 have a different hot take: “It’s out of tune.”
A big couple of years for the Crutchfield twins, because of course Waxahatchee made this countdown last year. Check their Wikipedia entries. No, don’t check their Wikipedia entries. Allison’s made the right decision to stretch her legs outside Swearin’. Her debut solo album Tourist In This Town (which I’ve just seen is not out until February, so, sorry about the spoilers) takes her band’s scratchy lo-fi brashness but then digs out all the pop possibilities, bringing out the toplines and generally sounding like it’s not afraid to be out front.
And ‘Dean’s Room’ is the best New Order song since all those very decent efforts on last year’s Music Complete. Kind of undermined the compliment there, but you get the idea. It’s particularly good when it slaps the splashy beats on the chorus. J3 mimes them, J1 shouts “I like this!” with some surprise, J2 is making wry comments about her mum’s friend Allison: “Well, I never knew she could do this…”
For all its raucous earworm abandon, there’s something creepy underneath ‘Dean’s Room’ (“You just want to catch me alone… Think of you like a roach at my feet”) but it all slips under the pounding drums.
It was like Now That’s What I Call Music, wasn’t it? A Moon Shaped Pool was stuffed, once more, with wall-to-wall hits purpose-built for warbling in the shower, soundtracking summer BBQs and filling your favourite banger playlists. And ‘Burn The Witch’ was the catchiest of the lot with its convulsive judder, portent-heavy chorus and bouncing bassline. We got our Radiohead back.
You know, a bit.
“Apart from the singing,” observes Junior, “the music’s actually quite good! I can’t imagine playing it on my flute though – it’d be forte all the way through.”
I’m listening to The 1975’s I Like It When You Sleep… (that’ll do) for the whateverth time this year. Still don’t quite get the decision to end with two acoustic ballads. Every time I play it, I expect it to make some kind of sense to see out one of the most fidgety pop albums of the last 30 years in such a one-note way, but I’m not there yet. I’ll try to make this sound relevant in a minute.
“Is this Prince?” asks J2. She’s got a point. Clipped funk, falsetto and a knack for addictive pop make ‘Love As A Weapon’ very Purple, even if it feels more eager to please than he ever was. “Is it a man or a lady?” she adds. Clearly, Laurel Sprengelmeyer begs the same questions as Prince too. If Bowie managed to write his own epitaph this year, at least Prince got to hang around in spirit, and not just here. He’s embedded in that sprawling 1975 double as well, nestled alongside Duran Duran of every period from 1981 to 2004.
Perhaps we should recoil from referencing heritage artists whenever we listen to new stuff, but if the current breed can’t help doing it themselves, what can you do? It doesn’t bother me.
There are people who’d have gone from reception to graduation in the time it took The Avalanches to get off their sample-clearing backsides and release a second album. I kept a faith that was looking increasingly stupid, wishful and, frankly, futile all those years, but was improbably repaid. Wildflower – I’m not going to review it now; I did that quite comprehensively here – was almost everything I wanted, and certainly good enough to top my 2016 list, even if half that impetus was powered by nostalgia.
Nostalgia – that’s what The Avalanches are built on. ‘Because I’m Me’, Wildflower’s riotous, sunshine intro, pulls from The Honey Cone and 1950s street sounds to recreate The Jackson 5 (with some J Walter Negro-style block party rap) and makes you hug yourself to have them back.
“Ohhh Frankie Sinatra,” sings J2 because she knows what’s coming next, but not here. J1 likes the anonymous kid’s voice. That’s the feedback. The rest is dancing.
J2 gasps.
J1: “Awesome. The best.”
J3: “It’s gonna win.”
Well, that’s clearly, mathematically untrue. They’re all singing and dancing now, proving this isn’t just dad disco, it’s kid disco too. Monumentally cheesy, but somehow irresistible, which probably isn’t where JT should be at this stage of his career. More and more pop stars are accelerating towards Vegas, aren’t they? Sam Smith started about half a mile outside.
There are two things that really get me with this song: The hurtling chorus bonus line “All those things I shouldn’t do” that keeps it flying; the phrase “It goes electric wavy”. That’s charming, a bit ‘timey-wimey’. I’d dance to this in a really dad way if I still knew people who’d invite me to a wedding.
Not really. More pertinent questions: what’s a single? What is this? Who are we?
A single is a single, and we’re going to make the best of it. It’s also an ‘impact’ track these days, and pretty much any song that’s even marginally promoted outside the confines of its album. Look, these are confusing times.
This is a blog that’s been running since November 2005. Admittedly, it’s running rather sporadically now, but if I’m going to go through my favourite songs of the year, it’s still the best place.
We are me and my three daughters. Junior (J1) who’s 11 and has been doing this since she was flapping her babygro arms to Kanye West all those years ago; Junior 2 (J2) who’s eight and massively into Top Of The Pops 1982, smuggling Dexys and Haircut 100 CDs up to her room; and Junior 3 (J3) who’s six and opinionated.
Finally, Karl Blau is a honey-toned C&W geezer from the Pacific Northwest who, after years on the circuit, released the wry Introducing Karl Blau this year, a collection of covers that’s the best of 2016, pipping good old Dexys’ mind-bogglingly loose selection of ‘Irish and Country Soul’. They both did the Bee Gees’ ‘To Love Somebody’ but Blau wins there too by the length of a Hammond organ. This wildly extended version of Link Wray’s ‘Fallin’ Rain’ uses gently tinkling piano to evoke the raindrops and Blau’s own gentle commitment to convey the woes of the world. He’s a Nashville Isaac Hayes.
Over to our panel: J2 is measuring angles on her mum’s macbook, J1 is watching her. J3 is bouncing a cuddly tiger on my head.
J1: “It’s all right.”
J3: “It’s bad.” She pops on her headphones and goes to play the little Yamaha keyboard on the rug.
2008: [20] Hot Chip, ‘Ready For The Floor’
2000s: [26] Hot Chip, ‘Over And Over’
2010: [8] Hot Chip, ‘One Life Stand’
2012: [6] Hot Chip, ‘Let Me Be Him’
So, basically, Hot Chip have been heading this way. Regular readers of Jukebox Junior (hi Mum!) will know my feelings about Hot Chip – they should be right up my street, but something’s always missing, at least over the course of an album – but I started to feel different this year, mainly down to a cracking Glastonbury set that was a ‘moment’ from start to finish. ‘Huarache Lights’, thumping organic rhythm, cheeky sample later repurposed, nerdy bounce, talkbox, joy of records, everything, was already my single of the year; the gig just made sure.
Everything Everything found some heart in the oddest of ways. By the time ‘No Reptiles’ reaches its final lines, “Just give me this one night/Just one night to feel/Like I might be on the right path,” it’s sending shivers with its quivering synths and rising desperation, like it really means something, like its overwhelming sense of dislocation is giving way to some kind of truth, a way out of this.
Of course you have to fight through some pretty gnarly stuff to get here. “Oh, is it ‘a fat child in a pushchair’?” asks Junior as it starts. “I really like it.” Naturally. They all do, she and her sisters, because it’s about a fat child in a pushchair. They’ve been singing it all year. It’s funny. Never mind its unflinching dissection of a rotten society – it’s funny. Clever boys, those Everything Everythings.
“How can this be so high when there have been so many great songs?” Junior isn’t happy. “It’s not as exciting. He doesn’t sound happy.”
Which says something about her criteria when judging pop songs, and pretty solid criteria they are too. Of course, Stuart Murdoch isn’t very happy, at least not to begin with, because ‘Nobody’s Empire’ tackles the ME that debilitated him in the 1990s and still rears up occasionally. But, with his favourite layering effects that lifted ‘The State I Am In’, ‘The Boy With The Arab Strap’ and ‘I’m A Cuckoo’ to the heavens, Murdoch eventually elevates this to something approaching ecstasy. A note of hope, certainly.
Jukebox Junior 