Albums of the Year:

1. PRIMAL SCREAM -- XTRMNTR. Consider this: "Shoot Speed/Kill Light" has perhaps the greatest pedigree of any song ever. The title is a copoff of the Velvets "White Light/White Heat", the song is the lovechild of WL/WH and Joy Division's "Incubation" (right down to the guitar solo by Bernard Sumner), and it's produced by Kevin Shields. What more could you POSSIBLY want in a song?

2. FLUXION -- VIBRANT FORMS II. It's "Adventures Beyond the Ultraworld" for the new breed of minimalists. Warm and hypnotizing throughout, with impossibly dense atmospherics beautifying the mix, this 130 minute opus is easily the most captivating techno released this year.

3. GODSPEED YOU BLACK EMPEROR! -- LEVEZ VOS SKINNY FISTS COMME ANTENNAS TO HEAVEN. Godspeed managed to lighten up a bit on the urban decay theme but still produced their most dramatic statement yet. Over four long, ultimately uplifting sides/symphonies, violins and white noise have never sounded so perfect together.

4. YO LA TENGO -- AND THEN NOTHING TURNED ITSELF INSIDE OUT. The greatest Velvet Underground record never made. Slow burning, creepy, heartfelt letters of love. Fifteen years and counting, YLT just get better and better.

5. V/A -- SEVERAL BANDS GALORE (The sounds of the bands of the MBV mailing list). This year's Verve release. Some of this album is merely OK-good. Much of it is spellbindingly essential. Eighteen bands find eighteen ways to show how much My Bloody Valentine have influenced them. Risk taking and new sounds abound. Someone sign these bands *now*.

6. GAS -- POP. One of the 45691 records that Wolfgang Voigt released this year, but "Pop" displayed an ambient, peaceful side that he rarely shows. Less lo-fi than previous Gas albums, but more melodic (hence, the tongue-in-cheek title). This is the fourth Gas release, and all four of them absolutely rule.

7. V/A -- CLICKS AND CUTS. Minimalism formed from, well, exactly what the title says. The disks could be labeled "conventional" and "abstract" but those are relative terms, because nothing here is the least bit conventional. "Clicks and Cuts" is rapidly becoming an adjective, a la "Basic Channel" and "Detroit".

8. SPEEDY J -- A SHOCKING HOBBY. Jochem Paap took his previous industrial/funk ideas, added some big, dirty beats and voila -- a little brother for last year's "Wireless" (by Luke Slater) was born. This is what big beat should have sounded like had it been worthy of any of the praise it was given.

9. THIRD EYE FOUNDATION -- LITTLE LOST SOUL. Matt Elliot dumped scraping and screaming for whispering and wandering. The anti-"Sound of Violence", if you will. Impossibly lonely and sad, this was the most aptly titled album of the year.

10. SOUND TRACK -- THE COOLER. After re-listening to every Basic Channel and Maurizio release, Savvas Ysatis decided he could do them one better by adding a smoother, house-y feel to those techno blueprints. An album which somehow manages to be stark and fun all at the same time.

I was reading a review of "Creation Records International Guardians of Rock and Roll 1983-1999" in Uncut magazine, and the review mentioned MBV's "You Made Me Realise" and "Soon" being on the compo. I couldn't believe it -- had I majorly screwed up and prepared an unwarranted spot in hell for Creation (DEC 1 comment above?)? Well, no. I don't know what they're selling in the UK, it wouldn't surprise me if the tracklisting is different but the version they're selling here has NO MBV tracks. Thus, that spot in the deepest depths of hell remains reserved, I just don't know who it's for. Whoever was in charge of the tracklisting, you suck. You suck worse than a farsighted eight dollar whore with two missing front teeth.

(later) I've come to the bottom of this, with help from news archives in nme.com (your web site rules, even if it does take forever to download). Alan McGee chose his favourite Creation tracks for the compilation. He chose THREE MBV tracks, "You Made Me Realise", "Soon" and "Sometimes". He chose only ONE Oasis track but three MBV tracks! These tracks did not appear on the compilation because they could not be cleared in time for the album's release. He even said (credit to nme) "(MBV) are a pivotal part of the Creation history, every bit as important as Oasis. They may not have sold as many records, but they have had an immense influence on so many bands. (The compilation) won't be complete without them". Also "I selected the three MBV tracks as I think they are probably my favourite Creation band ever". OK, so let's get this straight. MBV: notorious perfectionists/lazyitis sufferers, spent gargantuan amounts of Creation's money, leading to the main cause of McGee's near-breakdown, financial ruin and subsequent loss of indie status due to the partnership with corporate behemoth Sony. Oasis: notorious party animals/writers of mediocre Beatles homages, made back all the money that MBV lost a hundred fold, leading to McGee's considerable wealth. Which band would YOU favour? Sure, the fact he's financially secure means that he can be more objective and bear no grudges, but still, I gained a lot of respect for Alan McGee after reading those comments.

So whose fault is it for not clearing the tracks in time?

Someone collect my entries from today and December 1st and put them in the Oxford English Dictionary under "irony", because this is irony defined.

In part, at least, it's Kevin Shields' fault.

McGee claims that Kevin and Sony couldn't agree on compilation rights/royalties/what-have-you. Thus, Sony pulled the tracks.

Re: NME's top 20 Influential Musicians. The actual issue arrived this week, but when I read about it on the net a couple of weeks back, well, I was ranting and raving. Bowie as #1, that's a good choice. Radiohead as #2 is just sick. Radiohead more influential than Kraftwerk? Kraftwerk invented just about everything, whereas Radiohead invented an effective method of shoving their collective heads up their asses and recording the air rush of their own farts streaming through their empty heads. I knew that there was NOTHING that the magazine could say to convince me to budge one bit. So I bought the mag, and it goes something like "Just about every band in Britain are making music under the influence of Radiohead, they made stadium rock cool, etc.". First of all, if there's ANY prevailing trend in British rock right now, it's the popularity of bands writing simple, catchy, guitar pop, and THAT trend was popularized by Oasis (who were not in the top 20). Once Oasis became massive after the public chose their three chord jingles over Blur's more compositionally involved approach, it marked an end for cleverness and wit in mid-90's mainstream British rock. Second, stadium rock was cool long before Radiohead did it -- there was a REASON that they were constantly compared to U2 around the time of "The Bends". Third, countless "leftfield" British guitar bands of the last ten years were heavily influenced (to the point of outright COPYING in many cases) by My Bloody Valentine, The Stone Roses or the Smiths. All of them have been more influential than Radiohead, but the first two didn't even make the top 20!!

Random Monday thoughts: Spin magazine picked "Your Hard Drive" as the Album of the Year, dear god, I wish I thought of that, that's pure genius. They're right, of course, because the way that free downloadable music proliferated itself will come to be synonymous with the year 2000 -- far more so than any one music release. In a way it's a shame, because I think this has been one of the top two or three years for new releases in the last 20 years or so. That will likely be forgotten in the wake of the flowering of the Napster generation. I am swaying myself toward the opinion that the first 20 minutes of the Godspeed You Black Emperor! album is the best 20 minutes of music released this year. As for how the *entire* 85-minute opus compares the endless multitude of other outstanding *whole* albums of 2000, I am still undecided.

Creation Records has released a best-of-their-label double CD anthology. The lineup of Creation bands on the compo is truly stellar, but that's not what I'm writing about. I'm writing about the COMPLETELY INEXCUSABLE OMISSION OF MY BLOODY VALENTINE FROM THE COMPILATION. All MBV did was make the best records Creation ever released. OK, that's my opinion, but more objectively there's no arguing that MBV were a crucial part of Creation's history. And it's not like they got embarrassed about anyone and anything associated with early 90's shoegazing because Ride and Slowdive and Adorable, yes, that's right, ADORABLE, a band that did have many fine songs, but were unquestionably the Northside of shoegazing, a band whose name went from being the next big thing to being a "Be Here Now"-type embarrassment at the mere mention of their name, are right there in all their splendor. And it's not like they hold grudges against the bands that have since left the label, because SFA and Oasis are also featured. No, this is a motion by people within Creation to pretend that MBV never existed. They may be just a teensy weensy bit sore at MBV for nearly bankrupting the company by spending a quarter million pounds recording "Loveless" (had this happened, CD2 of the compo would not exist, yeah, I could see people getting upset at one band cutting the label's lifetime in half). Personal feelings aside, MUSICALLY, it's one of the stupidest omissions in the history of compilation albums.

I heard Jefferson Airplane's "White Rabbit" on the radio yesterday morning and it hit me. This is a blatant drug song, I thought. It blatantly tells, no, ENCOURAGES the kids to take drugs. What's more, this song (and many others of the time period with similar sentiments) is played at every oldies station on the continent. The same suits who fondly remember the 60's as a time of peace and love and experimentation balk wildly at the music of Marilyn Manson, Eminem, DMX because they claim that it promotes suicide, violence, misogyny and just about every other bad thing that a person could do. They claim that today's music is warping their kids' minds but are completely accepting of the glamourization of the late 1960's by oldies radio, passing it off as "fond remembrances" or some other confusing rhetoric.

At least the suspects I mentioned above bring an element of satire into their music. Marilyn Manson is eloquent and well aware of the absurdities of pop culture, most recently expressed in the single "Disposable Teens". Yes, the song is utter trite, but kudos to him for taking well-needed shots at such an easy target. Eminem's music is full of witticisms and caricatured celebrity satire. On the other hand, don't try and pretend that the Jefferson Airplane had ANYTHING deeper to say than "feed your head". And it doesn't stop there, because the 60's were full of songs containing this message and nothing more. Let's not get all fuzzy inside and pass these songs off as the good old days of pure and meaningful music when they are nothing more than drug glamourization relics written by hippies who were wasted most of the time which is why they couldn't think of anything more intelligent to write about.

New Musical Express has conducted a year-long poll to determine the 20 most influential acts on today's music scene. Who was polled, or how they defined "influence" will have to wait until the mini-site is posted tomorrow (Eminem was #8, seems a bit early to be labeling him as a major influence on anyone beside 15-old boys who have gotten bored of their Marilyn Manson records). Bowie is #1, which is a good choice, but there is no explanation on God's green earth that can convince me that Radiohead deserve to be #2. WHAT IN THE WORLD WERE THEY SMOKING? I'm actually at a loss of words and I'm angry as hell. The Velvet Underground and Kraftwerk invented everything, oh, yes, but Radiohead recycled 1974 Pink Floyd. And then they went electronic, which is groundbreaking if you went into a coma in 1973 and woke up last week. "The Bends" was a good album, and it would have been a lot better if Thom Yorke hadn't sung on any of it. "Pablo Honey" featured a passable rip-off of vintage Adorable, but the rest was filler. And as personalities, Radiohead make Belle and Sebastian look like Mogwai taking drugs with Happy Mondays in Leonardo di Caprio's flat. AAARRGGHHHH. Screw Radiohead ... no, it's not their fault ... screw everyone who picked Radiohead in this poll and screw their families too.

After the first few listens to PJ Harvey's "Stories From the City, Stories From the Sea", I was totally loving it (my initial reaction to each new PJ Harvey album is to declare that it is her best ever, with the exception of "To Bring You My Love", which took three years for me to fully appreciate. After a few months I always come to my senses and scold myself for ever doubting that "Rid of Me" wasn't her finest recording). My mate Paul, a far bigger fan of Polly Jean Harvey than I am, also thought it was a fine album, but remarked that the final two tracks, sweet ballads they may be, but "a bit too Sarah Mclachlan". And the more I've thought about it, the more I'm convinced that Paul may have summed up the entire album with that comment. One thing which has always separated PJ Harvey from the multitude of female wimp-rockers is the menace that she brings to her records. In the case of "Dry" and "Rid of Me" this needs no explanation, "To Bring You My Love" featured the fierce "Long Snake Moan", and femme fatales a plenty -- "To Bring You My Love" and "The Dancer" in particular. What's more, she dressed like a sexually repressed farmgirl dressing as a tomboy dressing in drag, and if that's not a person that you absolutely do NOT want to be alone with in the back seat of a parked car, then I don't know what is. Anyway, she started dressing normally for "Is This Desire?" which ranged from the near industrial "A Perfect Day Elise" to the plurality of "character" songs with their bleak tales of lonely, abused young women. Lighter on the menace but heavy on the eeriness. Fear abounded. Now comes "Stories" -- where is the fear? The music itself is very radio-friendly. It is far from the desolate electronic-tinged moods of "Is This Desire?". "Big Exit" and "The Whores Hustle and the Hustlers Whore" turn up the guitars but the Sarah factor looms large over the less aggressive tunes like "One Line" and "A Place Called Home". The menace presumably because this is a "New York album". Many people have written this but not a single person has defined exactly what "New York album" means, as if it were supposed to be obvious. I think it means "Velvet Underground", since they (and subsequent Lou Reed albums) are the finest examples of music about urban decay, drugs, the freaks who inhabit a city's underbelly, and introspection about all of the above. Polly was already an expert at writing about most of these, so I'm not sure how moving to NYC and mentioning Manhattan by name in her lyrics makes her new record so distinctly different from her others. As for the music, it's sounds more "Loaded"-era than EPI-era VU. At that point in the Velvets career, the songs were far less intense and the subject matter greatly toned down. The same could be said for the progression of PJ Harvey's career.

Then again, maybe I'm just a crybaby who's been waiting seven years for Polly to write another "Rub Til It Bleeds".

(That's all I have to say about PJ Harvey, but I would feel remiss if I didn't mention that she gets prettier as she gets older. I don't care how shallow and sexist that sounds.)

Dr. Andrew Weil made a double CD in 1997. Music "made" by a guru of alternative medicine -- I expected Indian drone instruments and nine hours of humming a single note. Actually, "Sound Mind, Sound Body" (or was it "Sound Music, Sound Mind" or ... oh, who cares what the exact title was) is 99% propaganda. One CD was mostly spoken word by Dr. Weil's friends, outlining their medicinal theories while speaking so slowly it makes "Eyes Wide Shut" seem like an afternoon at a cattle auction. The other CD was intended as healing through sound. From the extensively detailed liner notes, I surmised that the listener was meant to feel the vibrations, and the body would synchronize itself to the resonances, and heal itself, or something to that effect. But the music was an ordinary excursion through "themes" of Bach, Mozart and other mega-famous classical composers. Jeez, since that music is more than 200 years old, people must have been healing themselves with it for at least that long, in which case why on earth would anybody need to buy a CD from Andrew Weil? Millions of people have found themselves transported by Mozart's music, and they certainly didn't need Andrew Weil's approval. If they didn't want to make a recording of hundreds of people saying "AHMMM", if they wanted to put out a CD of classical music, wouldn't the music of a composer such as Debussy (La Mer) or Satie (endlessly repetitive piano pieces) have been more appropriate? If they REALLY wanted to convince anybody that music has the power to disrupt body chemistry, record some SCHOENBERG for God's sake!! I guess they figured that hardcore Andrew Weil fans would buy any CD with his name on it no matter how low the musical quality, hell, Limp Bizkit rode that pony to the tune of a million sales last week.

This weeks' purchase of Jeff Mills' "Live at the Liquid Room, Tokyo" was both elating and deflating for me. Elating because it is FREAKING AWESOME as our hero slams through the techno equivalent of the world's biggest gangbang with an incredible 38 tracks packed into 70 breathless minutes. Deflating because I clearly remember when this album was released *five* years ago. I remember thinking about buying it. Sometimes I had other musical priorities and would forget look for it and when I did remember it was always too expensive or some other excuse. I always kept my eyes open for his DJ appearances, and was finally all set to see him in January 1999 before a brutal snowstorm prevented me from doing it. I have yet to see Jeff Mills live. And now, even though I have his Axis compilations, even though I own a sick amount of minimalism, I willingly deprived myself of this album for five years.