BETTER THAN OXYGEN.....

As 2005 began i stopped buying singles on CD altogether, opting for the download. And this presented me with a cheaper opportunity to widen my tastes and discover more new music. And as the post-punk revival of the last couple of years had started to slow down and broaden out, there was  potential for music with a wider scope. iTunes and the internet in general was ripe with new bands. There were still blokes with guitars playing nervy, angular, but danceable music - Editors, Maximo Park and the Specials/Clash indebted The Dead 60's were three newcomers - but bands with a bit more ambition and emotional scope made their mark, and the most well known of these was Montreals' Arcade Fire. Their debut album Funeral was widely acclaimed, and was a slow burner sales-wise having actually been released in September 2004. The band are now huge worldwide, but at the time they were mainly the critics favourites. I had downloaded a couple of their singles - "Neighbourhood #2 (Laika)" and "Neighbourhood #3 (Power Out)" - before picking up the album, and i was immediately drawn in by its dramatic and passionate baroque pop and rock. Rousing anthemic songs like "Rebellion (Lies)" and "Wake Up" sat alongside more reflective moments ("Un annee sans lumiere", "Crown Of Love") and clattering percussive rock. Lyrical themes ranged from the ice storm of 1998 which left their home city in a week-long blackout, Haiti (band member Regine Chassange's homeland), desperation, yearning for an imperfect past, lost romance..... all delivered with a goose bump inducing cathartic euphoria that says no matter how dark things get, love will win. It's the only album of theirs that i've got - their follow up The Neon Bible was so impenetrable to me that i never bought another of their releases. 

 Secret Machines were another band that grabbed my interest. Describing their sound as "space rock", with influences from Prog Rock and Krautrock, their dense but melodic sound was something new to my ears. With driving rhythms overlaid with psychedelic keyboards and fuzzy guitars on the nine minute opener "First Wave Intact", singles "Sad And Lonely" ,"The Road Leads Where It's Led" and "Nowhere Again", and themes of paranoia, political and sexual tension, their debut album Now Here Is Nowhere cut a mysterious figure amongst all the indie bands. 

                                                                                                                                       

                                                                                                                                                                     

British Sea Power released their second album, Open Season, with a more accessible feel. Yearning guitars and festival-friendly melodies backed the still obscure and esoteric lyrical themes, and both the album and first single - "It Ended On An Oily Stage" - cracked the Top 20, and for a while it looked like BSP might become more than just a cult concern. Open Season has some great songs on it - the aforementioned single plus "Be Gone" and "How Will I Ever Find My Way Home?" form an impressive opening trio, and "Oh Larsen B", "The Land Beyond" and "Please Stand Up" are worthy additions to the bands catalogue - but the sound is a bit too clean, and the manic energy of the first album is gone, maybe in pursuit of more success. It's not a bad album though.

                                                                                                                                                           

One of the latest of the Post-Punk influenced bands to appear were Editors, an austere-looking four piece from Birmingham with tight muscular rhythms topped with highwire guitar lines and baritone vocals. I was watching the MTV2 channel a lot at the time and their "Munich" single was played regularly, and soon it was on my iPod. Its surging basslines and frenetic guitars, and vocals that managed to sound harsh and fragile at the same time made it a lasting favourite, and when their debut album The Back Room came out i snapped it up. A collection of punchy, staccato songs without an ounce of fat on them - "Bullets", "Munich", "Blood", "Lights", "Fingers In The Factories" -, the atmospheric gloom of "Fall", and the exquisite synth sheen of  "Camera", a standout track: "Look at us through the lens of a camera/Does it remove all of our pain?". Forced smiles, hidden feelings, ignoring some impending crisis, clinging on to hope - whether it is about a relationship breakup, a song about depression, or the way that photos of a disaster provide emotional distance from the subject, it's pretty powerful stuff. The whole album has that feel of somehow being uplifting despite all the gloom, and it still stands up as a great album.

                                                                                                                                  

                                                                             There were a few artists who had some fleeting success that year, who blinked in and out of existence - the quirky and wonky pop of Clor, whose self-titled album and three singles weren't exactly huge hits but added some flavour to the alternative scene: The Dead 60's from Liverpool who bought Ska and 2-Tone influences to the party; and The Tears, formed by ex-Suede frontman Brett Anderson and their estranged former guitarist Bernard Butler who had finally put their differences aside to make a couple of great singles and a so-so album that sounded like..... well, like their former band ("Refugees", their debut single, was more or less a rewrite of "Trash"). But the year ultimately belonged to a band who were probably the first to benefit from the internet to build up a fanbase, sharing free demos with their fans and gaining popularity through word of mouth to become one of the most talked about unsigned bands since Suede. That band was Sheffield's Arctic Monkeys. They had been together since 2002, beavering away playing local gigs and recording demos which were then given away free to their audiences. Those songs, known as the Beneath The Boardwalk collection, were then file-shared online by fans, which resulted in their popularity spreading throughout the north. Eventually they put out the Five Minutes With Arctic Monkeys EP on their own label, and it became their first widely available release after it appeared on iTunes. Heavily hyped by the music press by this point, i was initially sceptical - i'd seen many bands touted as "the next big thing" and only a few had lived up to expectations - but when they signed to indie label Domino (home to Franz Ferdinand, Pavement and Sebadoh) and put out their first single proper i was convinced. In fact, so was the record buying public at large! "I Bet That You Look Good On The Dancefloor" went straight in at No.1 when it was released in October, beating Robbie Williams to it, with little promotion from the band beyond the video which was recorded live on a studio set, Old Grey Whistle Test style. Just under 3 minutes of frantic and scratchy indie guitar rock, and possibly the best single of that year, by four unassuming northern lads who were barely heard of just 12 months earlier. Proof that great and original talent will always win out.

   

                                                                

There are a few other songs from 2005 that have stuck with me, singles from artists whose parent albums have not stayed in my collection. Willy Mason from NYC released an album of sparsely recorded folk, country and blues titled Where The Humans Eat, which crept into the Top 40 based on the success of the lead single "Oxygen", an ode to a better America, to a more hopeful and helpful society. After seeing the quirky video on MTV2 and hearing the song on 6Music a few times i bought the album, which had a few good points but didn't really grab me. But the song did. The same thing happened with an album by Icelandic post-rockers Sigur Ros. The soaring, ethereal strains of the "Hoppipolla" single made an impact on me, despite being sung in Icelandic, and ended up soundtracking the BBC series Planet Earth, not to mention turning up in various films. The songs parent album, Takk..., had a couple of tracks that had made a similar impression on me, but the album as a whole didn't. Maybe i would enjoy those albums now that i'm older and have wider tastes.