It's been a particularly fine year for Scottish music, with some career highlights from favourites and a whole host of exciting new acts making their mark. Here are ten of the best.
• Bill Wells and Aidan Moffat – Everything’s Getting Older
Since the break-up of Arab Strap in 2006, Aidan Moffat has turned his attentions to several different projects, including a spoken word album, a release under the guise of Lucky Pierre, work with The Best Ofs and a thoroughly entertaining agony aunt column. Bill Wells has had an equally nomadic musical existence, working with touring Japanese musicians as well as the likes of Isobel Campbell and his own National Jazz Trio of Scotland in recent years. Coming together, the pair have produced one of the most satisfying, literate and honest albums of recent years.
As the title suggests, it is a work about being older and not necessarily wiser, retaining Moffat’s keen, dissecting eye for life, love and longing while allowing Wells room to push the music into all manner of places. Moffat’s lyrics have often been misinterpreted as overtly bleak, and many miss the self-depreciating humour that is spiked throughout.
One of the greatest compliments you can pay is that Bill Wells’ arrangements emphasise that playful, if cynical, side. There’s an almost-Jacques Brel-like pomp to songs like Glasgow Jubilee, while the music on Let’s Stop Here and (If You) Keep Me In Your Heart lightly frame the lyrics and sweeten (or sour) the vocals as necessary. Both men have produced wonderful albums in their time, and this is as good as anything they’ve worked on.
• Dananananaykroyd – There is a Way
Despite deciding to call it a day in the autumn the Glasgow six-piece left us with the perfect epitaph thanks to this superb second album. If it’s pure energy that you are looking for then there are few albums recorded in any year that really capture hyperactivity and adrenaline quite like this. Imagine a human centipede, loaded up on red bull, slam dancing to early Idlewild. It’s not pretty is it? It’s not exactly dainty, but my god is it entertaining. That thinking permeates the entire album.
Recruiting Ross Robinson, who focused At the Drive-In’s energies for Relationship of Command, certainly helped, but the real stars of the show were the songs. The band were always openly aiming for “fight-pop” and There is a Way delivered hooks in both senses of the word.
Lead single, Muscle Memory, was as instant a record as we heard all year, while Think and Feel had a swagger that demanded movements banned in some countries. Dananananaykroyd lived fast and they died young, but they were so very handsome. Who wants to form a cover band? Hahahaharold Ramis anyone?
• Dead Boy Robotics – Dead Boy Robotics
If this isn’t too much to get your head around, this album sounds like a futuristic civilisation’s attempts to recreate what they think tribal music sounded like. You can well imagine it being the soundtrack to ritual sacrifice, but using lasers and an AT-AT rather than anything as barbaric as the Aztecs might have had in mind.
Debut albums should act as a manifesto, and the Edinburgh three-piece seem to be advocating more industry, time travel and restrictions on Skynet to stop the inevitable Robot Uprising. It’s not an easy album to sink into because there’s a constant sense of unease running through it, but that’s as hearty a recommendation as you should ever want to hear.
If you think of Kasabian as being on the cutting edge of music, this will melt your mind. If you want something that gets into your pores and makes you actually concentrate on what’s pumping into yer lugs, there aren’t many better examples this year.
• Found – Factorycraft
Clockwork is a funny thing. It is only ever really thought about in terms of the cogs and the way that they are interconnected. The cog is the visual part, but it is only just as important as the space. Miles Davis famously commented on this idea in music when he suggested “don’t play what’s there, play what’s not there.” Rarely do you find an album that understands this quite so comprehensively.
Lead single (featured in the video) Anti-Climb Paint is a case in point, as the instrumentation is sparse but interlocking. It ticks along with metronomic precision because everything is reliant on everything else to achieve the effect. Rarely has an album been so appropriately titled.
This is an album of spaces and subtleties that draws on tiny pieces of Cool from the last two decades. A dash of Stereolab, a touch of Teenage Fanclub, a light dusting of Franz… but as with a real production line, the finished item is so much more than a sum of its parts.
• King Creosote and Jon Hopkins – Diamond Mine
It’s perhaps a little ironic that in opting to record a soul-searching ode to his home town, King Creosote found his work exposed to the largest possible audience. Recent recordings such as Flick the Vs and Bombshell had seen Mr Anderson exploring adventurous, genre-spanning terrain, more attuned to the likes of the Beta Band (of whom his brother was a founding member) than the traditional Scottish folk singer.
In returning to something more personal and exposed King Creosote and Jon Hopkins created a wholesome, quaint and meticulously paced tribute to the history and ghosts of the East Neuk.
• Mogwai – Hardcore Will Never Die, But You Will
Album title of the year? Definitely. Track title of the year for George Square Thatcher Death Party? Probably. Best album of their career? Quite possibly.
Early Mogwai releases were all about brawn; building up as a way of showing how easily they could obliterate their creations. It was a beautiful, apocalyptic destruction. More recent work has been more thoughtful, building and layering sound with the acknowledgement that it doesn’t have to always end in a Big Bang. 2006’s Mr Beast was the high water mark for the new, streamlined, ever-aggressive Mogwai, their “silver age” to borrow a comic book term.
On this album they’ve fully realised everything they’ve hinted at in recent releases. This beast still has teeth, but it measures every thought, has reason behind its actions and speaks eloquently (although, of course, without words!). There are so many different directions hinted at in this album and the Earth Division EP that it’s obvious this is yet another new beginning. They may have once said “I am not Batman” but to extend an already stretched comic book metaphor, this could be their Year One.
• Remember Remember – The Quickening
One of the biggest problems about creating wondrous music that invokes ice caps crashing, volcanoes erupting or new life coming into existence is that your music will then be used, almost exclusively, to soundtrack videos about ice caps crashing, volcanoes erupting and new life coming into existence. Just ask Sigur Ros.
Remember Remember’s second album deserves so much more. It is a creation about creation; a collection of extensive pieces of neo-classical music that takes lungfulls of mountain air and dives into the deepest seas. Ambition should always be applauded, but ambition fulfilled is a particularly rare beast. The Quickening fits the latter category perfectly.
• Sons and Daughters – Mirror Mirror
Gone are the days of Sons and Daughters sounding like charity shop glamour and the stamping of feet around the handbag. Mirror Mirror is a far more introverted, wounded animal than This Gift. While they previously evoked nights on the tiles, this album sounds as if it was followed home by something with murderous intentions.
In previous work the interplay between Scott Paterson’s sigh and Adele Bethel’s howl characterised the band. Mirror Mirror focuses more on the instrumentation, with Paterson’s effects laden guitar playing a more prominent role, and Bethel whispering ice-queen seductions throughout.
• Sparrow and the Workshop – Spitting Daggers
One of the hardest tricks that any artist can pull off in the duration of an album is to sound both diverse and focused. Just how do you focus a lifetime's worth of influences into something that has to sound like you? There are few Scottish albums in recent times that have achieved this trick quite so effectively.
Spitting Daggers could easily be compared to the work of Wilco, or Grandaddy, or Belle and Sebastian or any number of influential acts of the past decades. But that would be lazy and far too easy. The second album from the American/Irish/Scottish trio takes elements of folk, country, alternative rock and even some of the less fashionable 70s guitar music, binding it into something really rather wonderful and entirely their own.
It's that rarest of animals - thinking person's pop music. These are songs that deserve an audience far wider than they've currently been getting. And only you can do something to change that...
• We Were Promised Jetpacks – In the Pit of the Stomach
As far as dynamic follow-ups go there are few who have reached so far beyond their debuts as We Were Promised Jetpacks did on In the Pit of the Stomach. Medicine, the first track I heard from the album, sums up so much of what they are now about. The pause and ominous wandering bassline, the line “it’s not about me now”, and the thunderous crash of the rhythm section returning.
Glasgow is now to rock music what Sheffield was in 2005, and WWPJ now have every right to consider themselves amongst the leaders in their field. Promised jetpacks? On this evidence they might not need them to scale the heights.
