Ladies, gentlemen and, err, candied crabs, put your hands and claws together...

"Testing..testing...one...two..."

"krrkkkkssshhccchhhbzzzzzz"

Cripes, I never expected to deal with these sort of problems when I agreed to become a virtual venue. First, Candy Claws's bizzarro backstage requests, and now this useless lump of a virtual roadie - I downloaded him from freeware so it's probably my fault. Well it looks like things are just about fixed up, so I'll hand you over to the brilliant Candy Claws, who I am very proud to have presenting exclusive music on my weblog...

Here we are in Ireland at last! It's been a dream working with Kevin at Indiecater putting "In the Dream of the Sea Life" out into the world. If you see him around, shake his hand and give him many gifts. We're on a "virtual" tour, and today we have a video for Lantern Fish, second song on the album. Ryan went to Bucerias, Mexico two weeks ago with his family, and filmed the descent into Mexico City at night. The footage was twice as long as the song, so we cut it into two parts and overlapped them. Here you can see evidence that humans have finally learned to make sparkly fields of light, something the plankton have been doing for millions of years. Will all of these videos be in black and white? What will the universe say?

You can stream the entire album, read reviews, and pick up a copy (digital or physical) at Indiecater.

Visit our blog to catch up on the tour and see a full list of dates and links.

We just came from The Devil Has the Best Tuna in Liverpool. Tomorrow we're off to Eardrums Music in Norway. Exciting! Thanks for watching, see you soon!

And here is the video for Lantern Fish. Enjoy.


Lantern Fish - Candy Claws Online World Tour - Day 12 from Candy Claws on Vimeo.

My favourite albums of the decade #25 and #24 (fuck this is going to take a long time)

Time to stop gnawing your fingernails guys, the exit poll results from my brain have started to trickle in. But first..a picture of Santa, taken after he rolled into Kells atop a fire engine and heroically switched on the Christmas lights. Thanks Santa, we were genuinely worried this year.

As you can see from the picture, Santa also managed to accidentally light up a person. Thankfully, she only suffered minor burns, and, being in the civil defense, was able to regenerate the damaged flesh using her special suit.

But second...Candy Claws (Santy Claus's lil indie cousins) are dropping by tomorrow night as part of their virtual tour! Pop in at 7pm to catch their exclusive video.

Right then, the list. Oh one last thing. I said I'd be rigorous, but didn't really manage. The closest I got was faffing around with scraps of paper with album titles scribbled on them last Sunday afternoon. It's a list in flux, but I'd like to think it's representative of my relationship with music over the last nine years. In others words, some stuff is pretty obvious, and some is less so. It's all very personal though.

#25 Bloc Party - Silent Alarm (2005)

A couple of weeks ago I listened to Silent Alarm for the first time in a while and it pretty much punched me in the face for not remembering its brilliance. It also kneed me in the gut with this deep and weepy sense of nostalgia, which is odd because it only came out in 2005. While my getting smashed and hopping around indie niteclubs to 'Helicopter' might partly explain this response, I think Kele Okereke's songs themselves should probably shoulder most of the blame. Especially the less visceral and more romantic numbers like 'This modern love' and 'So here we are'. Indeed, I'd go so far as to say these songs are so breathy and evocative that they colour memories in retrospect. Like, did I really run down Brighton Pier with Tamara one chilly December night to watch the stars turn to dawn over the English Channel, holding hands as the MDMA we got from Effie's mate...shite, that was an episode of Skins wasn't it?

Silent Alarm: a lighthouse in the decade's dark ocean of NME guitar indie, and better than the Libertines.

#24 Luomo - Vocalcity (2000)

In the sort of marriage between the visual and the audio aesthetic that I love, the cover - a face fragmenting into tiny squares across an ice-blue disco ball - gives you a bit of an idea of what's going on with this one. Volcacity is the Finnish dance producer Sasu Ripatti's (aka Vladislav Delay)'s first and best release as Luomo, the moniker he adopted for recordings that spin endless lengths of strange fabric out of the bones of house music (fruit of the loom-o?). Beats rattle and click like marbles dropped on hard surfaces in huge hollow spaces while analogue bass lines contort themselves in a receding sea of jazzy movement that shifts seamlessly across lengthy tracks. All the while, that mainstay of house music, a treated vocal (male? female? joyous? mournful? emotionless?) is an ever-present will o'the wisp leading us through Vocalcity's organic musical terrain. Actually, the word 'organic' gets bandied around a lot in relation to certain types of dance music. Volcacity deserves the description though. If you buried it in your back garden and sprayed it with baby bio, it would probably grow into the next Luomo album.

Before I begin....

These astonishing videos of my favourite songwriter just turned up on youtube. All I can say is fucking wow.

Problems with Lists? Then Evacuate Now! Abort...Abort...Abort. Knock in Next January when Business will Resume as Usual.

People moan about lists a lot at this time of year. But hey, lists aren't all bad. Look at Schindler; his list saved lives. And what about Santa's list? Sure without that objective global roll-call of naughtiness and niceness, spoiled little rich shits would get loads of cool stuff for Christmas while their virtuous but poor counterparts get crap from Valuland. And then, of course, there are shopping lists, not to mention lists of wanted people to look out for on holiday, or lists of endangered things like buildings and charismatic megafauna such as the giant panda, or even fifteen truly bizarre creatures. In fact, the list goes on...

To an expectant crowd, Oskar finished his list and announced the name of his all-time number one favouritist Irish stand-up comic of the decade

I'm a list-a-holic. Indeed, at this time of year, I hoover them into me like gak into Amy Winehouse. Pitchfork, Irish Times, The Quietus, State - you name it, it's all gone up me and man, am I wired for shite-talk. Yet, I've never been great at making them, because I typically balk at the small degree of application and rigour required to make one that is anything other than arbitrary. This year will be different, though. No. It really will - for the following list of reasons.

(i) I spent 2009 finishing a PhD, so rigour and application come a little easier to me now.
(ii) I began the decade aged nineteen and am finishing it aged 28 so I am well placed to do an albums of the decade type thing.
(iii) I work a 9-to-5 type job at the moment so if I write blog posts every evening I don't have to choke on the invisible 24-hour backward vomit of PhD guilt that stalked me last year.
(iv) I think this was a brilliant decade for music (refer to sneak preview MP3 below)
(v) I also think this was a brilliant year for music.
(vi) I just want to look back over my twenties.

With the above in mind, I'm going to attempt two lists. The first will be of my top 20 albums of 2009, and the other will be of my top 20 albums of the decade. I'll alternate between them over the coming month. Of course, the construct of objectivity will be utter nonsense here. If you want a good example of objectivity, though, look to State's ongoing countdown which draws on a wide pool of journalists with varied tastes. As a counter example, my lists won't be heavy on pop (which is probably better represented by songs anyway), hip-hop, or country. Similarly, they won't be definitive or anything like that - just me looking back on a year and a decade. I do hope they'll be illuminating, or at least encourage readers to check out either what's new or to go back to the old stuff they've forgotten about. Finally, I invite comments. Like, if you're roughly in my musical ballpark and want to duke it out over albums I'm fair game. Also, if there is an excellent album from a genre with which I'm not au fait, please let me know. However, if you are going to try to tell me that I am some sort of cunt for not having the Arcade Fire anywhere near my top 20 then now is probably the time to leave. Here goes!

MP3: Four Tet-Slow Jam

Danger accident black spot

We used to go to Mayo to visit granny four or five times in the year. That was some long journey from Kells, cooped up in the back of a Nissan Bluebird with my brother and sister, watching half-lit midlands towns streak past the window at forty miles per hour (this was the speed at which my Dad drove) while something maudlin warbled on the radio - "I wonder if it's raining back home in Donegal". We used to fight in the back of the car too. Terribly. I remember elbowing my sister's nose near Strokestown once and the blood pumping down her face. Another time, my twin brother flung a burger I bought from the Luigi take-away in Longford out the car window. I recall how we both watched in shock and amazement as it lay sad and tiny on the road before disappearing under the headlamps of the car behind.

When we got west of the Shannon it was normally dark, even though Daddy used to say we'd be there by night time. It wasn't his fault though - he had good intentions but just never managed to break the 40 mph barrier. At this point, the back of the Bluebird was a funny little place onto itself. My sister would be fast asleep, actually nearly comatose, and her little head would bounce audibly off the car window. Meanwhile my brother and I were lost in eddies of perception and thought which changed depending on where we were sitting in the car. Whichever twin sat at the side window had a view of Bellacorick power station sticking blackly out of the bog. The twin looking forward saw pointy Achill Island cut out of the navy sea. Both views were something different after four hours of Strokestowns and Edgewardstowns. Bellacorick was a gigantic cooling tower belonging to the ESB which loomed over the local flatlands and our imaginations. We called it the big chimney.

We knew we were coming close to granny when the big chimney reared out of the bog. On winter nights the steam sometimes floated a mile above. Frozen. Like a cloud in an acid trip. Sometimes the steam caught the moon. Sometimes it looked further away, weirder than the moon. And the stars, of course, were rampant. No light pollution. Indeed, the far west of county Mayo is still one of the most perfect places for star spotting in Europe. Once, long ago (the 80s), our parents told us Santa lived in Bellacorick. It made sense. He came down a chimney. And, after all, Bellacorick was a big chimney. As a child, it looked to me like it could manage a lot of industrial toy manufacturing too. I really thought Santa lived there. I stopped believing in Santa in 1989. Bellacorick cooling tower was demolished in 2007. Watch below. The wind whistling in the camera mic is my favourite thing about the demolition of Bellacorick.



This post was going to be about Hunter-Gatherer, an Irish electronic producer who has a current album called 'I dreamed I was a footstep in the trail of a murderer'. I started writing this post while listening to the album, and it was on loop when I finished. The album is a fine piece of work and I believe it audibly fits with all of the thoughts expressed above. Hunter-Gatherer FTW.

MP3: Hunter Gatherer-Left for Dead