Heads Roll Off (2008 Part 1)

I was going to write a detailed and poignant tale about my Christmas, from the moment I got out of the car in Winchester to be greeted by a pub full of weirdos and none of my friends. I was going to continue with how I went to a different pub after being the only person from my group of friends to do the Christmas Eve tradition 10 years running, and ended up going to The Black Boy where everyone is foppish, young, drunk and beautiful, and how I drank enough red wine to be sick over the edge of the bridge into the weir. Then I was going to humour you with stories of board games and presents and christmas cake, but none of this is very exciting. I'm just going to get this year over and done with. My festivities and calamities which came to a head on Christmas Eve were the culmination of this years driving forces; my hopeless inability to keep in contact with my friends, and my belief that getting drunk alone will somehow combat the pain, are best left in the past.



And whilst we're on the subject of the past, here's a list of my top 20 albums of 2008. Unlike my forthcoming list of my favourite songs of 2008, this list is for albums released this year. Otherwise it would be Little Drummer Boy by Mark Kozelek, easily the album I've listened to most this year.



20 Neil Diamond – Home Before Dark
19 Get Well Soon – Rest Your Weary Head, You Will Get Well Soon
18 Cut Copy – In Ghost Colours
17 The Tallest Man on Earth – Shallow Grave
16 The Magnetic Fields - Distortion
15 Glasvegas - Glasvegas
14 Constantines – Kensington Heights
13 Shearwater - Rook
12 Wild Beasts – Limbo, Panto
11 Bon Iver – For Emma, Forever Ago
10 Kleerup - Kleerup
09 Parts and Labor - Receivers
08 Wilderness – (K)no(W)here
07 The Gaslight Anthem – The ’59 Sound
06 Fuck Buttons – Street Horrrsing
05 Titus Andronicus – The Airing of Grievances
04 Sun Kil Moon - April
03 Studio – Yearbook 2
02 Of Great and Mortal Men – 43 Songs for 43 Presidencies
01 Frightened Rabbit – The Midnight Organ Fight



All predictable stuff. With the exception of maybe 3) which is a collection of remixes and shouldn't really count, 2) which nobody has bothered to listen to despite it's brilliance (although the fact that it doesn't appear to have an 'artist' listed anywhere so I've decided myself to call the project 'Of Great And Mortal Men' might be the problem) and 10) which I think has only been released in Sweden, all of these have appeared on other peoples lists. I could bang on about all of these for pages and pages but I'll pass. Highlights of the year though have been Parts and Labor following up last years #1 with another flawless, if diluted album, an unbelievable return to form for Wilderness, an album at number one which is nothing but pitch-perfect angsty excellence, and Glasvegas, who I haven't just included to aggrivate, it turned out to be a pretty good album after all.



If you care (why do you care), you can see how these translate to the top 100 songs of the year, revealed in the new year.

Good News For People Who Love Bad News

Hello

No, not the Blur reunion. No, not Mark Ronson's list of his 99 favourite musical recording acts of all time. No, not the fact that I think my mouth is going to internally collapse like a bouncy castle at the end of a kids birthday party. No, the fact that for the first time since, what, late August? I'm going to ressurect this silly useless thing, because someone called Anonymous, who can't even spell the word anonymous, said to. That's it. Exciting.

So, coming soon: a review of the year, my top 100 songs of 2008 based on order of enjoyment, a possible aesthetical re-theme so this page looks less like pages from teletext. I might even put some more photographs up. But not today. No, not today.

bullets might give you black eyes