The scrag end of the year (Kells - post Christmas)

Tweet What would you call this time of the year? The tail end of the year? The scrag end of the year? The greasy cold leftover turkey skin and bone shop of the soul?

The town is dull and lifeless (pubs in Kells only half-fill on New Year's Eve because everyone with sense cops on and gets the fuck out of dodge after Christmas), save for the odd shit splattered tractor rolling down a rain-slicked Farrell street, and the permanent hive of surly teenage activity around the doors of Xtravision (the only shop doing well in the current economic clusterfuck). Fuckin' Xtravision anyway. Fuck it. It never has any interesting releases, only ten million copies of "De Expendables" (a savage 'oul action flick), and 11 million copies of "Sex and De Cihy 2 with de free Gahlaxee Baar" (to keep Her happy).

Oh, I forgot the bookies. There are plenty of swaying lumps standing outside the doors of the bookies (of which we have four), or doing the cricket wicket run from bookies to pub (of which we have 27), to bookies, and back to pub, while rotten mounds of fag-ends pile up in front of the doors of both, even though there are metal boxes on the walls purposely built for putting said ends into. Too much effort for the average gobdaw, that.

And then there's the spit. For reasons unknown, hacking a big lump of toxic quivering gullier onto the pavement when someone walks by is a real bucko thing to do. Never done alone, mind. Only when there's company, or when someone is walking by. That's the moment, boy. Gargle up a good golf-ball sized nugget of Benson and Hedges flavoured Meath throat-slime and spatter that mess, with a disgusting hollow pop of a sound, onto the pavement - then finish with a cocky turkey-bob of your scaldy head. For bonus points, you could hold one nostril and whip a string of green mucus on top, like an English premiership player unloading his sinuses on the field.

But only when someone's walking by. Mark the territory.

Though, its hard to find a spot - among all the crinkled silver cartons coated in the slime of yesterday's garlic chips, empty milkshake tubs, wet pages of the Racing Post (our great monastic town's new manuscript), and forgotten pint glasses that sit around the town in completely arbitrary places, like ancient walls and once sacred spots.

Pass the buck, here, there, and wherever you can, lads. Sure, it's always someone else's mess.

No*way - My top tracks of 2010 (13-11)

Tweet You know when you start something fun, and it quickly becomes disgusting, yet some strange masochistic drive pushes you on? Like ordering, then eating, ten chicken balls dipped nuclear orange sweet and sour sauce, followed by a bag of chips? I'm at that point now. Up to my neck in another taxonomic shitheap of songs, and wondering why the eff I started. I'm afraid the albums may have to wait until the brain cools down. Maybe February.

Regardless, there's no looking back now...time to grimace and suck the battered reconstituted muck out of that fifth chicken ball. Hopefully, it's the one where I burp - and eating them becomes temporarily fun again...

Letterlanders - the most disturbing creatures ever assembled in the name of teaching the alphabet

#13 Perfume Genius - Mr Peterson

When we were in primary school and beating each other up like animals was a mundane part of the average school day, we used to do this thing called 'the slow rattler'. The slow rattler is when you catch a rival (male) kid unawares, and flick him sharply in the balls with your index finger, then stand back and watch the unfolding damage. Aware of what's about to happen, he'll sit still for the next half a minute or so with a look of increasing dread on his face. He's waiting for the inevitable rattle. Then, boom. His face turns green, the fetal position is assumed, and he's cupping his crotch and groaning like a dying donkey in the centre of a circle of laughing ten-year-olds led by you. 

Mr Peterson caught me like a slow rattler. More than any other song this year, it knocked the wind out of me, flicking me in the balls with a sudden lyrical turn that made it a bit of a Petrarchen sonnet of a song. Over a cobweb-frail melody, Mike Hadreas (Perfume Genius) draws us into an uncomfortable tale of a teenage relationship he had with an older man (his teacher?) who seems to be calling the shots in return for favours ("he let me smoke weed in his truck"). The song then suddenly shifts gears, zooming out into a tragically ambiguous scenario, where your assumptions take the precision flick. And the final couplet? Well if the sonnet-like turn in the song is the slow rattle, the last line is a finishing move; a genuinely unsettling prism that refracts the entire song back at you. We are looking at a new songwriter of some real substance here.

MP3: Perfume Genius-Mr Peterson

#12 NDF-Since we Last Met

Reading Resident Advisor's top tracks of 2010, I was genuinely taken aback that this sublime effort didn't make the grade, never mind the top ten. It's one of those techno tracks that perfectly nails the dissociated squiggly mood of those weird sunlight-behind-the-curtains marathons that used to roll into never-ending vistas of mong at the end of bank holiday weekends. Yet it captures something else vital about the human spirit. So much so, that it has transcended whatever fleeting moment it illuminated in the first place. 

On their last.fm page, NDF (signed to DFA) are described as "seeking to make dance music twilit by the melancholy of, say, a Donald Justice poem". This can only be a good thing. A muttered lovelorn vocal (which is known in the parlance of 2010 clubbers as a keta-vocal* - digression to follow), floats over one of those endlessly deep, deeper, nay, ocean-trench-deep, progressions that feel like they never will, and never should, end. Flutes, of the Astral Weeks variety, hover in the mid-range doing things to your brain that would make Noah Lennox sick with envy, and the muttered lyric goes on and on and on. It's about meeting someone the protagonist once loved, and now he's feeling okay about it, because he and his lover have both moved on. It's loved-up and dippity, and perhaps won't be true in the cold light of day, but it feels like a moment of genuine, if perhaps temporary, release. (I know - more break-up).

Ricardo Vilallobos, who knows when a track should go on for ever, got his hands on this to remix it. His full edit - surprise, surprise - is 18 minutes long. It's weird and works, but not as well as the original though. 'Since we last met' in its original edit is techno magic.

*Ketamine vocals were a big part of the dance music coming out of Berlin this year, popularized initially by Ricardo Villalobos a few years back, and now by Seth Troxler, and a whole bunch of others. The term basically describes stoned-sounding, disjointed, and mostly kind-of-spoken vocal snippets which move back and forward in the mix, typically repeating like mantras until the initial sense of them dissolves away into some beat driven flux of sensation and sound. A bit like how things might sound at a party if you did accidentally find a substance typically used to sedate a horse entering your bloodstream through a nasal cavity. But, that's beside the point. You don't need to gobble LSD to enjoy 'I am the Warlrus' - ergo you don't need to ring your nearest horse vet to appreciate the dissociative, mantric effects of some of the current wave of Berghain techno.

Top ten tomorrow folks.

Everybody knows/ I'm a mollycoddled FUNSTER - My top tracks of 2010 (16-14)

Tweet "Wow this lad is some kind of creep..." "What sort of a sadcase spends the entire period between Christmas and the New Year blogging about songs?" "No friends, obviously..." "I can see him now, hunched over a laptop in a room that smells of fart, eating aldi peanuts, listening to some bet down MP3, and deluding himself that people care whether Avey Tare or some other lame-a-ZOID gets 17 or 18 in his piece of shit list..." "The lad's thirty for fuck sake..."

Shoo, mental crow demons. Shoo! I am actually doing some other stuff during this grueling Christmas doldrum period. I am writing my first piece for, umm, another blog. But it's a cool new group blog. My piece will be about Dub Techno. I'm also procrastinating over a piece of research. I fed the birds today too - and found out that starlings will eat gone-off brie.

Yes, even beards have a hierarchy. And you thought the universe was all chaos and entropy

#16 Caribou - Sun

Shamefully, it took the remix album of Odessa to alert me to its quality. This was sort of characteristic of how I came at music in 2010. I mostly listened to it in transit, on commutes that variously took me to work destinations via every shitty new unnecessary pitstop on the N3 since the M3 motorway was built (here's looking at you Clonee, ya glorified chipper and bookies pretending to be a town), or via every google-map resistant crescent in the Rathfarnham (which is mind-melting-fucking-huge in a horrible Kafkaesque way). Anyway, the sort of music I listen to when I travel is propulsive, dancey stuff (clichés all the way for me here, I'm afraid), and Odessa filtered down to me, very late in the year, through the Gavin Bussom remix of 'bowls'. 

Maybe this was apt. The clannish dance wonks over on Resident Advisor gave Caribou album of 2010. And friends of mine who spent the best part of the year zonked in Panoramabar or Berghain in Berlin said that 'Sun' would often drop seamlessly and beautifully into techno sets. In short, Dr Dan Snaith appears to have made the perfect crossover dance album. Following a theme that seems to be all over my list this year, it's about a break-up. One can only assume that he coped with said break-up by horsing a big bag o'yokes down his throat (via Willie O'Dea), partying the pain away, and really getting techno. He got techno, techno got him, and we got an album of some of the most outstanding music of the year. 

When you boil Sun down to its core components, it is about as indie-rock as Bon Jovi. It is, to all intents and purposes, a hypnotic slab of dance music, sharing genetic material with any big release falling out of any record bag at 3am in any barn of a night club in Europe. 

Ah crap, it should really be further up this list, shouldn't it? 

MP3: Caribou-Sun

#15 Girls - Carolina

Marmite alert. Do you love Girls or do you hate them? I don't think there is an in-between. As an unreconstructed Spiritualized fan, they push so many of the right buttons in me, that I'd forgive them any amount of meandering shite (they're capable of it), as long as they continue to spin out such big, dopey, painfully (almost funnily) sincere songs like 'Carolina'. This is the sort of song that makes me believe in all sorts of clichéd romantic crap about America. Like being a seventeen-year-old all over again and driving outside the city limits before dawn with a bunch of skinny, bleary, chums; before we all goof lazily around the car at sunrise like models in a corny jeans ad. 

"I'm going to pick you up baby, throw you over my shoulder

Take you away; I'm going to carry you home
To Carolina, Carolina
Away to Southern Carolina
And then I'll never let you go"

Eat the earnest-to-goodness musical corn kids. It's good for you sometimes. But stay off the opiates, ya hear? I heard Girls like to pop them like smarties.

MP3: Girls-Carolina

#14 Lindstrom feat Christabelle - Music...In my Mind

There are so many things I admire about Lindstrom, but the thing that gets me the most about his productions are the size of the basslines (a byproduct, surely, of his background noodling around with classical and jazz instruments). The bass melodies in tracks like 'music...in my mind' are like these big thick rubber noodles, so thick that you can almost imagine people interacting with them in a science of sound museum. Like kids jumping up and down on them as if they were trampolines, while all this obscenely polished disco plays in the background. 'Real Life is no Cool' came out at the start of 2010 and it has proven to be a real sticker, as good an album of this sort as you'll hear outside of an Italo-disco record crate from the '80s. 'Music in my Mind' just about pips 'Lovesick' as my favourite cut, because of those big noodly basslines. How the jesus did he make them sound so bloody massive? He's a bit of a beardy wiz, is our Hans Peter.

Ce n'est pas 'appening. - My top tracks of 2010 (19-17)

Tweet Let's see if I can get five of these out of the way before dinner (baked pork chops with apple topping and veg).

my favourite chromosome is no.9 (left). It's a bit cheeky, no?

#19 Avey Tare - Oliver Twist

Pitchfork gave Avey Tare's solo album 'Down There' 7 point something in 2010. This made me a bit sad, because even though I (like many music fans) might protest the relevance of such things, deep down I know what Hipster Runoff knows. Pitchfork is a terrifyingly powerful tastemaker - and anything less than 8.0 for an artist associated with a band as critically noted as Animal Collective amounts, in Crls's shrewd lingo, to a 'panning' among the docile hive-mind that sees such scores as absolutes rather than opinions. 

I dunno how much it had to do with that pitchfork score, or how much it had to do with publicity surrounding 'Down There', but the album seemed to undeservedly slip under the radar. Sure, melodically, some of the songs may not play out as fully formed as Animal Collective songs, but 'Down There' is more than a sketchbook of ideas. It is (in the old sense of the word) a 'queer' album, full of mournful riddles and swampy allusions. The lyrics - those that I can make out - are often frighteningly existential, obsessing over things sinking, thoughts unspooling, and an overall feeling of dampness creeping into a soul that has found itself separated from another. 

The aesthetic is best represented by Oliver Twist, where the quickening and slowing beat (reflecting to me thoughts caught in a paranoid loop), and watery instrumental motifs, are matched by a strange swampy double of Avey's voice. If you look up the lyrics online, aptly, you will find lots of spooky ???'s where the words are too unclear to decode. In between these ellipses, are half-articulated ribbons of thoughts questioning themselves in the gloom. 

Don't let the seven point something fool you; this strange lonely music is some of the best material to come out of the Animal Collective camp - ever.

MP3: Avey Tare-Oliver Twist

#18 Robyn - Dancing on my Own

I didn't go to this year's Electric Picnic. My brother (who has a PhD in Environmental Science) did, with a bunch of his gay friends. I got lots of demented texts from the trenches. One went something like this:

"Fkcu Lykke Lee or wotever de indie kidzz r listening 2, de gays kno the scroe Robyn is de real deal! Emotino, drma, its like de Pet Shop Boyzz, itz proper soulflu dicso pop". 

I can't really top that. I would like to think she was playing Dancing on My Own when he sent it.

#17 Woods - Sufferin' Season

Where are all da Woods fans at? For real - these guys are almost peerless. (actually while we're at it, where are all da Menomena fans at?). There was a time when this sort of sunstroke psychedelic folk would have Woods topping end-of-year polls all over the shop. Instead, their latest album, At Echo Lake, like poor heartbroken Avey's (I'm there for you bro), slipped under all the radars like some sort of low-flying, practically invisible, indie fighter jet. More about the album in my albums list - 'cos it's a fucking corker. 

For now, let us consider 'Sufferin' Season' and let us note how it would easily beat up a good half of Mercury Rev's best work in a psychedelic smackdown. It's a sort of Wanderly Wagon song. You hitch on to the back of it, and let it take you somewhere freaky and sunny. The change in tempo at 1.55 is blissful genius, the moment when the slime off the frog you licked kicks in and the Wanderly Wagon suddenly takes off into the sky. 

MP3: Woods - Sufferin' Season

Badbuzz Ohio - My top tracks of 2010 (22-20)

Tweet I can't stop listing, listing, listing...oops I've capsized.

#22 Solar Bears - Dolls
Solar Bears' album 'She was coloured in' is great. But, in parts, it sounds so borderline-overblown as to be almost demented, like Vangelis if he was running a boiling temperature and seeing things in the dark. A case in point is 'Dolls', which builds from a slow synth-line into something that sounds like the theme to the opening ceremony of the Tokyo Olympics in 2024, replete with sampled Japanese school children's voices. It's pure orchestral escapism that might have been considered ridiculous before Radiohead dropped 'Kid A' on the world. As such, it's a track that isn't afraid to jump through increasingly ornate space-hoops to make good on the far-out promises made elsewhere on Solar Bears' album. If I could describe it in one word, that word would be, ummm, 'deluxe'?

MP3: Solar Bears-Dolls

Before I move on, I think this is where I get the "almost demented" from. The track really reminds me of a round-the-bend animal crackers Anime I saw a few years ago called Paprika. There's a bit where the head of a corporation dreams a parade of inanimate objects, which break into the real world and...well, just watch. And listen to the music...



#21 Addison Groove - Footcrab 
Welcome to the post dubstep world; non-pedants, please leave your self-esteem at the door. I am not going to go near trying to label this teeming monstrosity of a production from Addison Groove (AKA Headhunter). I will, however, offer a couple of small notes on it. First, not since Animal Collective started an album with the joyous holler of "Bonefish" has music heard a nonsense-word as madly expressive as "footcrab".

"Footcrab/ footcrab/ footcrab/ footcrab/ footcrab" goes the vocal over a screwy, funky post-something-or-other beat with house overtones. The refrain eventually insinuates itself so far into your lizard brain that you start to think you understand the word. "I'm the fuckin' footcrab bro. Yeah it makes total sense now. Crabs dance sideways, and this has, like, a sideways beat, yeah? And to dance to it man, your foot would have to make shapes like a crab? Like a fuckin' footcrab maaaan". Altogether now, "footcrab/ footcrab/ footcrab/ footcrab..."



#20 Squarehead - Fake Blood
And now for something completely different. Squarehead's 'Fake Blood' seemed to capture a definite zeitgeist moment in the Irish music scene in 2010. Between the Popical Islanders, the Richter Collectivites, and many other like-minded sorts, a patchwork wave of colourful music crested this year. It was not always brilliantly crafted - but that was sort of the point anyway. 'Fake Blood', with its crumpled-up paper-snowflake melody, boy-loses-girl lyric, and inviting sing-a-long hand-clap chorus, sewed the entire 'scene' (for want of a better word) up. I challenge you to look through cart-loads of 60's Garage, New Zealand lo-fi and K Records twee, and find three minutes of music as wistfully sublime as 'Fake Blood'. It sits comfortably in the canon alongside all those great songs that equate to:

Some barely tuned chords + nearly-there way with a melody + heart in pieces = universal truth:  breaking up sucks.

MP3: Squarehead - Fake Blood

These are the dying screams of Win and Regine - My top tracks of 2010 (25-23)

Tweet Normally when I do a top album thing, I notice that techno is underrepresented, which isn't fair on techno, because I love it and listen to big fun bucket-loads of the stuff. It's just that the genre rarely throws up big cohesive albums. While that has changed somewhat in the last decade or so, techno is still mostly about the track. This list of my favourite songs of the year will be fairer to techno than my album list will, as there were some exceptionally good standalone tracks this year.

So are we all excited to be settling into another list? Yeah? YEAH? Good, because you won't be able to move until its finished anyway; I've manacled you all good and tight to the furniture, and if you all look up and see, those breezeblocks suspended on ropes above your heads are remotely attached to the tab key on my laptop. They will fall if you even attempt to click off this page. I hear the human head splatters a bit like a grey and red creme egg when it splits open. But of course, you wouldn't click off because lists are compelling and we can never read to many of them. Can we? CAN WE??

categorising shit is fun. 

#25 Ceo - Come with Me

In a distillery somewhere in the north of Sweden they melt down landfill-sized amounts of New Order's saddest records, then add a little bit of Abba sweetener and decant the resulting concoction into songs like this. Ceo is the solo project of The Tough Alliance's Eric Berglund, a mysterious (sometimes dangerous and paranoid-sounding) fellow with a soaring heart. This post-rave epic should come with a warning attached : "contains extremely concentrated amounts of sugared melancholy. Consume at risk of sobbing uncontrollably".

MP3: Ceo-Come with Me

#24 Emeralds - Candy Shoppe

Emeralds are prodigies. Their mean age is something ridiculous like twenty. In the last year and a half, they have shown a mastery of the drone genre that approaches it confidently from every angle, and in Mark McGuire (who's well able to churn out the solo stuff), they have one of the most emotionally sensitive guitarists around. Their album 'Does it look like I'm here?' is immense. It starts off with Candy Shoppe, which begins life as a little repeating digital figure from Final Fantasy III before turning into an absolute tropical weather-front of spiraling, welcoming, thick sound. When it arrives, the drone comes down regally, ceremoniously; it descends from on high and settles all over your dopey grinning head. Don't fight it. Melt.

MP3: Emeralds-Candy Shoppe

#23 Superpitcher - Rabbits in a Hurry

Kompakt producer Superpitcher's latest full-length, Kilimanjaro, was a bit of a mixed 'oul bag, but one thing that was lovable about it was his willingness to sing on many of the tracks in spite of having a voice more suited for the rookery than the studio.

This quirk lent the best tracks a sort of human touch which was very Kompakt - a juxtaposition of imperfect vocals and slow-building slabs of perfectly produced techno; a heart in the machine. 'Rabbits in a Hurry' was by far away my favourite track on the record. Lyrically, though, if we prod too far beyond the lovable voice, it's typical of a sizable portion of 2010 techno in its relatively shallow insularity, borne out by a deadpan line or two about getting sloppy and having fast nighttime sex on the Berlin club scene.

The real draw is that sampled string instrument getting cranked up against the popping beat. Yikes, it's merciless. It's the sound of pure anxiety coupled with a kind of psychosomatic excitement - perfectly evocative of the lurching mixed-up feelings that emerge from the memory fog of a lost bank holiday weekend.

And what about that funky bassline, eh?

See also: Sachse Funke's blinding up-tempo remix.

I'll try get a few more of these up later on tonight. Ciao for now.

Kells nicknames: a reprisal

Tweet For Hunter Gatherer - with love from gardenhead.

Lala Smith, bee baw Power, bop Power, flap Lynch, The U boat (went to school with me but is follically receding now), the plank, mono, luscious Lynch, baldy Barrett, bodice mitchell, the honey monster, bubble balfe, turkey hogan, johnny eyeballs, skinny O'Brien, forty arses, hulky smith, snialler, scrounger, fisher price, dots, mongo, the soggipins, piko, Mr Bean (me), parrafin lamp, jellyhead, Braysheens, beano laing, little wart, big wart, forty year old man, scaldy reilly, tailor, donkey, wolf, spud, magic arse, pudsy, gilly, ironside, Ba Tum, smiley Kiely, jomps, jaffa, razor, Hollywood, bear, smelly benny, 10 to 2 (because when he walks his legs are in the ten to two position), thruppence (because he's not the full shilling), Stateside, gingo, ball of muck, buttery, deko, feshtie, gitsie, the toll, tits, crow, golly, jingles, burger bite, truck walshe, duckas, fiver (looked like the baldy man on the old Irish fiver), peanut, the cube, bobo, noddy, fly, fats, apache, fathead, fozzi, fat, hamp, toad, moggy, mouse, BaDump, nuts, bog, Joe The goat, John the hog, loon, wonka, effie, scurray, straw, woolly, gimp, ding dong, slimer, cunt (I know, it's actually a nickame), n****r Lynch (again, actually a nickname), creamy, the truck, oddjob, monkey madden, cola bottle, balfy, pudsy, the pigeon, man (I do not know how this is a nickname but it is), cow, freddybrek, the klingon, stinger, the real deal....

My favourite albums of the decade #1

Tweet

No, I can't believe it either folks. We've made it, Ma. Top of the world. It is Christmas eve 2010 and I have finished this godforsaken list after about a year and three months that felt like a decade in itself, so eventful was my concurrent private life. 

It was a harsh mistress at times, this list. Teasing and goading me every time I logged into blogger (particularly around the time of my multiple abortive Of Montreal attempts - you should just see some of the embarrassing 4am poetry I bashed out around that one). But like all torrid affairs - Burton and Taylor, O'Hara and Butler, Linda Martin and Twink - the rough times have been balanced out by periods of wild and prolonged, err, coupling - like that time back in February where I managed an album a week. 

Time to say goodbye to ya list. Where will you go? What will you do? Frankly, list, I don't give a damn. But remember, tomorrow is another day, and there will be top ten albums of 2010 to do, *gulp*.

Before moving on, I must say I'm pleased with the happy confluence of timing that has let me finish the list a day after turning thirty. The number one record came out when I was twenty and I bought it on its release. I have lived with this album for a decade, and now it has bookended that decade. Sweet, huh?

Oh, and all the stats, and the full list of albums, with links will go up tomorrow, after Eastenders.

#1 Fennesz - Endless Summer (2001)

I am getting a framed print of this for my wall

I will not write a lot about my favourite album of the decade for a couple of reasons. First, it is instrumental electronic music, and you just cannot write much about that sort of stuff without relying on engorged prose and sounding like a windbag. Second, it is both profoundly mysterious and deeply connected to me in precious ways that I'll probably end up cheapening with my words. I will allow myself to say a few things, however.

First, look at the cover. To an album art junkie like me, that image by Peter Rehberg, and the title itself, composed perfectly in a two-tone font, is so pregnant with meaning and promise that I cannot listen to the album without mentally hooking the music on and around it. Indeed, by now, I've imbued it with the spiritual depths of a Mark Rothko painting, and for that reason I'm going to get a huge print of it for the wall.

A lot of recent 'chillwave' albums have come out with a blurry, summery, aesthetic on their front covers, promising a similar experience to what Endless Summer appears to promise (and deliver), but they have failed spectacularly, floundering in a sticky mess of superficial stoner nostalgia as bright and shallow as a melted loop-the-loop on tarmac. 

So what is this promise? This endless summer? It runs deeper than nostalgia for a start, yet it is still somehow tied up with the past. I've tried to read some of Proust, and I've read enough to know that this is Proustian music. It explores and evokes strong memory associations; yet it's also very much here in the present - as a vital and real work of art. It searches for what once was and is now lost. Not memories alone; but a way of recapturing things, a widening of one's perception of the present moment by incorporating past moments into it.

The deeper (deeper because there are many grainy surface layers of composition across this entire album) structure of title track for example, based around a simple strummed acoustic guitar figure that moves through layers of static abstractions and thick glitch, emerges at one heart-stopping point into an exalted memory space where the air seems thick and sweet and all the abrasive glitches recede into a gentle atmospheric purr, and your appreciation of the music feels completely tied up somehow with remembering, or recapturing. Sounds hover like dandelion burrs, and everything quivers as if it were seen through a road-mirage. Almost every time I hear this track on headphones, and I don't care if I sound like a twit in saying this, I experience a moment of utter mindfulness and peace. The promise of the album cover is delivered. A door has opened, and every single long hot day of childhood lies behind it.

To finish, I don't care if I sound even more of a twit leaving the last words to Baudelaire, who once said 'genius is childhood recovered at will'. 

MP3: Fennesz-Endless Summer

Q: What do you plug into a Digital Socket? A: Your opinions on Irish music Kidzzzz

Tweet Oh good gosh in a fancy bag, I have utterly and unforgivably not done enough to bang on about these awards - and now there is only one remaining day to vote for them. I could give excuses about snow and chest infections and work and a heap of yaddas on top of yaddas mashed up with blathers. But I won't. I've been neglectful and scatterbrained.

Click this magical coloured in text, known in the industry as a 'hyperlink', to vist the Digital Sockets site

But the awards have gotten great publicity already. And it is snowing, so a lot of you must be indoors, distracting yerselves with all things internet (like grimly frittering away the 'santa' fund on partypoker in the unforgiving neon glow of your laptop).

If you have been living under a stone of some sort - and not read coverage in various parts of the 'net, the Irish Times et al. - then I'll describe the awards in brief. They are longlisted by commentators; they are then shortlisted and fought over by a big gang of bloggers, the full list of which appears on the site; and the prizes are finally given out to the winners at an awards ceremony on February 3rd. The gang of bloggers is truly big - there are, like, 26 of us. I've spotted a few ping pong balls of criticism lobbed our way about the awards being elitist, but I cannot see for the life of me how a spectrum of opinion that runs from the experimental to the extremely commercial could be defined elitist by any measure of thought.

I, of course, am not the main architect of this fine ceremony. If I was, it would be held in my back garden, via video link, and I'd still be promising to make my mind up about the final award, a hand drawn sketch of an award on the back of a blank CD sellotaped to the foot of my Credit Union schools table quiz award (won in 1991 guys!), sometime in, ooh about January 2012.

 poster by Stephen Maurice Graham - that's me at front left, giving Nialler an oul' friendly nod

The very organised people are Naomi, Ronan, Peter and Aidan. We're on a first name basis now, but we'll see how that remains when we all discover how argumentative and mad as sacks of various crawling things most of us are.

My last thoughts on these awards? They are probably a good baby step for many, not all, Irish bloggers evolving from being cheerleaders (I include myself here), to being more critically engaged when it comes to how we disseminate music. A bit of criticism is good for writers' and readers' mental development yo!

QUICK THERE IS ONLY A DAY LEFT BEFORE THE WEBSITE SELF DESTRUCTS!!!!

GET VOTING KIDZ

HAVE A FUNZO CHRISTMAS!

Tweet Funzo are a Dublin band who lurrrrrve Christmas and tend to have a song on the go at this time of year, with proceeds going to charity. Why? Because they have big icky Christmas hearts. The lads' latest is called "This Christmas" and you can buy it on iTunes for the teeny amount of 99cent. Do it for charity - do it for Christmas - do it 'cos the song is lovely.

The link to the iTunes preview of the song is right over Simpsons Funzo. Go on, click.

Funzo - This Christmas

Compost heap service is a little slow at the moment due to the usual day job yadda yadda. I'll be back ASAP with news of The Digital Sockets Awards (which are exciting new awards that I, and a cast of 20+ Irish music bloggers, will be involved with).

My favourite albums of the decade #2

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#2 Of Montreal - Hissing Fauna, are you the Destroyer? (2007)

Vicissitudes boxed Kevin Barnes' head, back in the day. He recorded that shit, too.

Fuck me, it took a long time to get to this point and I still don't really know what to write about this delirious, unleashed, fucking hot-mess of an album. I swear to God, I started, and subsequently canned, enough posts about this ugly/gorgeous psychedelic mutant of a thing, that I could start a whole series of tragically-failed-yet-heroically-pretentious posts about why 'Hissing Fauna, are you the Destroyer?' (HFAYTD?) is so brilliant.

I cannot. Do it. Justice.

So Imma takin' advice from my inner Kanye Barnes and freestyling some thoughts from here on in. It's the only way I'll get this chimeric, motherfucking thing; this mountain of a yoke out of the way. Yall.

Thought (i) : I love this album because I have a sweet tooth.

My sweet tooth crosses from mouth to music-bits-of-brain with little or no resistance. The music on HFAYTD? contains toxic levels of pure melody. You know those recurring dreams where you are employed as a loose-confectionery receptacle by Sweet Factory? The ones where you are wheeled horizontally around a shop floor on a low trolley and never-ending streams of slightly irregular sweets float across your gaze like glorious slow motion parabolas that always end in your wide-open gob?

Yeah, those dreams. Musically, this album = those dreams. HFAYTD? is an endless oscillating rainbow of sound; sometimes thick, sometimes thin and fast and scattered, sometimes shattered, and sometimes cut from the same Grade-A-pure melodic weird stuff 'I am the Walrus' seemed to be cut from that first time you heard it on Dave Fanning and your tummy tightened with sick glee (see 'A Sentence of Sorts in Kongsvinger' for further evidence).

Thought (ii): I love this album because it is conceptually perfect.

HFAYTD? is a concept album about change. A change of life circumstances (it's ostensibly an almost real-time document of Kevin Barnes' broken relationship and the dramatic life changes he experienced thereafter). A change of sound too. It represents not so much your gradual shift along a continuum that sees a band start as Elephant Six psych-rockers and slowly evolving into something new yet kinda predictable; but more a big, doorty (Dublin doorty), Cesarean section of an album birthed from strange disco-light couplings between little melodic ideas from earlier albums and Kevin Barnes' rampaging Id.

It also marks a ferocious shift in lyrical content from the Blur-esque fripperies of the band's earlier releases to some powerfully confessional stuff. This narrative sees a depressed/ suddenly-single man crawl back up inside his penis and subsequently eject himself from it in a shower of fireworks during a frigid Norwegian winter. The newborn baby gurgle at the start of the album is not tacked on. It's key. When it comes to being born again, we're talkin' about Van Morrison levels of shit right here yo. 

Thought (iii): I love this album because it is as pretentious as fuck. AS FUCK.

"I fell in love with the first cute girl that I met/ who could appreciate Georges Bataille". One couplet from a cast of thousands, folks. 

Thought (iv): I love this album because it is also as demented as fuck.

Listening to music, my lizard brain makes an important distinction between the Elephant Six psychedelia that birthed Of Montreal (e.g. Neutral Milk Hotel, The Olivia Tremor Control) and contemporaneous British stuff (e.g. Super Furry Animals, The Coral). It's a distinction that is borne out by the Elephant Six stuff sounding pure delirious in comparison to the rest. Elephant Six sounds like large ceramic objects from the bathroom growing arms and legs and chasing you down a hill - as seen in penny viewfinder animations on a French pier, all coloured in with fluorescent pens. I.E. NOT PASTORAL. This is urgent stuff, itchy stuff. HFATD? holds its own among a weird cast of contemporaries. 

When I was very young, I got so sick with the chicken pox that my parents had my identical twin and I sit in the front room in the same plastic bath so they could sponge us down with water to help cool our fevers. The new colour television (yes, I remember watching Bosco in black and white in '86. We were slow catching up with the times) was tuned to ITV and there was a James Bond movie on. I was five and raving mad. I remember seeing teeming floods of tiny baddies pouring out of the telly and onto the carpet - it was one of those set pieces shot inside a criminal base with hundreds of baddies. My mind was sick and crawly, but sort of fascinated too. 

For some reason, a lot of Elephant Six albums bring that feeling back to me. HFAYTD?, let it be noted, jury, is not short on the power to evoke such demented imaginings. 

Thought (v): I love this album because it manages to be completely lyrically fuckin' raw while being as pretentious as fuck. AS FUCK EH? Has that been done? Ladies and gentlemen look away from the repeated emotive language, and move on. Nothing to see here.

"Let's just have some fun/ Let's tear this shit apart /Let's tear the fucking house apart/ Let's tear our fucking bodies apart/ But let's just have some fun"

One of the most lauded songs of our generation is a track by LCD Soundsystem called 'All my Friends' which is a relatively ambiguous (veering towards hard melancholy) assessment of a life lived in thrall to, and, indeed, defined by, the popular music of the time. John Cale covered it. If John Cale covers your shit, your shit means something. He understands that it is 'lyrically fuckin' raw shit' -------- TM "thisblog".

John Cale hasn't covered 'The Past is a Grotesteque Animal'. As of yet. John Cale, if you are the John Cale I think you are, I just know you are going to cover 'The Past is a Grotesque Animal' before you pop your hallowed clogs. That song is a John Cale cover version waiting to happen. If Lennon were still alive, he might cover it too.

Thought (vi): I love this album because it's the most proactive break-up album of all time. 

If HFAYTD? is anything, it is a how-to guide for thoughtful people coming out of relationships - although, you might want to draw the line somewhere prior to Georgie Fruit (the black transexual character Barnes morphs into) in your 'post break-up' continuum of reinvention. On a scale of one to Georgie Fruit, I'd say about a four will get you by with demented aplomb in Ireland.

Thought (vii): I love this album because I would have hated it aged twenty, and I love it now.

I'm turning thirty next week.

Thought (viii) 'The Past is a Grotesque Album' is not just the best song of the decade, it stands head and shoulders with the canon.

It is unassailable shit. 

MP3: Of Montreal-A Sentence of Sorts in Konsvinger

MP3: Of Montreal- The Past is a Grotesque Animal

Weirdly, I will have to expound a lot less on my number one album of the decade.

The Argos catalogue and visual thinking (and an MP3)

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woop woop

A week or so ago I posted about little things kids with autism like and some of my rudimentary theories about why they might like them. I mentioned Thomas the Tank Engine, We're Going on a Bear Hunt, and Beyonce. I forgot to mention the Argos catalogue. The autumn/winter 2010 edition of the Argos catalogue, in all its door-stopping glory, is probably on the go in every ABA school in Ireland. I have come into contact with at least six kids who are addicted to the Argos catalogue as if it were crack. Crack!

What, tell, does someone addicted to the Argos catalogue actually do with it? Good question. It seems they flick through it, mostly. They do this quickly but very methodically and, if you watch them while they do this, you will see how thoroughly their eyes scan every busy page of heaped up pictures of watches, digital alarm clocks, towels, and diamanté engagement rings from what Chandler Bing might call the "Liberace House of Crap". Everything is happily, calmly taken in. A child who, minutes before, might have been aggressively tapping the theme tune to Teletubbies against the nearest window with a loose shoe, will be suddenly breathing deeply, calmly, and moving through the Argos catalogue at a steady yet relaxed clip. It's a bit like speed reading, except - and this I think is the important bit - it's speed reading with nothing but pictures. 

A key term you hear as soon as you start working with people with autism is 'visual thinking'. Unfortunately because we hear so many of these terms, we rarely give them the thought they deserve. What is visual thinking? Well, what is thinking? How do you think? Unless you are out of your bin on frog slime, it is likely your thoughts are hammered into the shape of language. You think mostly in words. Yet, if you have a very profound or remarkable thought, you might feel frustrated and say something along the lines of 'words can't describe it'. 

This feeling might be more pronounced if your were trying to compose a poem or if you took a shedful of heavy psychedelics - not that the 'heap condones such activities. Then, you might have a very deep sensory experience that your poetically attuned/rewired/mangled brain experiences in a more sensory/visual way than you might typically expect. You might feel like a very young child. You might feel wonderful one minute, but overwhelmed by a world of unfiltered information the next. Maybe such experiences provide tiny insights into how a person with autism thinks? Visual thinking. It's a foreign country really, known only to those who live in it.

I often wonder when I see children with autism flick through the Argos catalogue, what exactly is it about the catalogue that appeals to them? I wonder if it comforts them because it symbolises the way they think in a way? All those little pictures of categorically related material items set out in grids? Is the Argos catalogue a reassuring visual and structured analogue to their thought processes in a world running riot beyond compromised and/or over-reliant tendencies to predict and control? 

Temple Grandin, a famous academic who has autism, once tried to describe visual thinking in a such a way that the rest of us might begin to understand it. I think she put it that visual thinking is like your mind being Google image search in reverse - full of millions of images linked together images first, words second. This is her natural way of thinking. To communicate with the rest of us, she needs to painstakingly learn and vocalise the words that match up to these images. That's just an analogy of course. In reality is that this way of thinking is complex and alien in ways that most of us will never understand. 

But still, I think about visual thinking a lot. And guess what; Google image search is a big hit with some kids with autism too.

At precisely 5.32pm, on his cycle home from school, the thought occurred to Kevin decided the block of hash he ate had something to do with his bike slowing down

MP3: Boards of Canada-ROYBGIV

Synesthesia alert. I know it is a contradiction in terms really, but this is the most visual thinky piece of melodic auditory material I can find. Primarily because its musical components seem so vivid and tactile, and also because the letters are a mnemonic for remembering the colours of the rainbow. What a perfect music/title match.

Old Christmas Post

Tweet I don't hate music as much as that last manic post suggests...my Grinch was out yesterday...gave Beach House a spin there earlier and feel I was a bit harsh on the achingly hip duo.

Here's an old post about Christmas

Anyone who ever visited the Santa's grotto in Carolan's Londis shop in Navan during the 80s will know that Christmas can be as creepy a time of year as Halloween. Santa had thick orange fingernails, coldsores, and resided in the shadowy confines of a black polythene cube decked out with the odd fluttering wisp of tinsel. It didn't help that there were stray Halloween decorations knocking about his 'grotto' either. Or that he spoke with a swollen-tongued Navan accent. Or that the shop in question was a garishly-lit bargain barn with no customers, that my parents always took us to at five minutes to closing on a Friday evening. This was the time when everyone else was driving home from the normality of Quinnsworth with boots full of luxury edibles. They always piped a lower grade of Christmas song through the speakers in Carolan's. Bizzaro bargain-bin stuff like Chris De Burgh warbling about aliens; or to really chill your spinal fluid, how about a vocoder and panpipes version of the little drummer boy?



MP3: The Cocteau Twins-Frosty the Snowman

In their freakish take on 'Frosty the Snowman' the Cocteau Twins seem to have somehow managed to bundle everything I ever found spooky about Christmas into one of the most profoundly upsetting pieces of music ever. They have taken a relatively second league Christmas song, drenched it in reverb and created a wibbly nightmare of off-kilter overlapping voices and synthesizers. The song's once innocent lyrics about a snowman who comes to life and frolics with a group of children take on a nightmarish new intensity against the Cocteau's hall-of-mirrors sonic treatment. Listening to this, I get the horrible feeling of what it must be like to be trapped in the Ilac centre at midnight with all the shoppers gone home and only the increasingly more life-like Christmas mannequins to keep you company...

ALLSORTS!! BONUS DAY

Tweet BONUS BONUS BONUS BONUS BONUS BONUS BONUS BONUS BONUS BONUS BONUS
PRIZE PRIZE PRIZE PRIZE PRIZE PRIZE PRIZE PRIZE PRIZE PRIZE PRIZE PRIZE PRIZE PRIZE

Thanks for the three pounds of pick'n'mix Mom. We'll be off to bed without a squeak!*

An uneasy chilled silence hangs over the blogosphere. Rumours abound that 2010 wasn't a vintage year for music. Yes, word on the street explicitly or implicitly indicates that some disappointing albums have been phoned in by the main players in 'music' this year. What? You want to know who is perpetuating these dreary rumours? You won't just take it as blog truth? Okay then, it might be the people who will place Villagers (prickly Irish guy who oesn't like being compared to Bright Eyes), Beach House (who have two okay songs), The Arcade Fire (who have one good song and an entire catalogue of self-mythologizing, rapidly fermenting, musical compost that critics don't know what to do with), Daft Punk (genius gone pure bombastic shite on a flaming stick of shite - and this after the dying robotic bluebottle rock band version of Slade - aka 'Human after all?'), The National (too self-important), and LCD Gone-shite System (just gone shite) on top of their dreary polls; who will then drearily proclaim it wasn't a great year for music; or perhaps say one or other of these bands barely 'saved' a bad year.

Or even worse, they might say it was an okay year, and then make a dreary poll with one of those bands on top before ramming the victory of said band down our necks with a bunch of stupid superlative adjectives - as if no other popular or alternative music could exist outside of the world bookmarked by those adjectives. Before someone calls me out with Flying Lotus or some shit, I am excluding the perpetually excited and genuinely enthusiastic Nialler from this post from here on in. And Karl goes without saying.

The overall feeling though, seems to be that 2010 was shit. Am I wrong? And if not, why? Is it because the people who decide whether a year is shit or not (generic bloggers - we are many) had to cope with disappointing albums from four or five bands who were supposed to deliver the goods? Because, let it be said, if Beach House's 'Teen Dream' tops best-of 2010 polls, then that, to me, reveals a lot more about the quality of polls than the quality of music in 2010. 'Norway' is a good song, okay, but that's like going to Dunnes' Stores and looking at their selection of wallpaper and saying, "you know what, wallpaper is shit in 2010. Apart from this one pleasing pattern, that is". Well, what about Penneys? Eh? EH? IKEA? Go on, look? They have wallpaper too...and stuff that isn't so obviously wallpaper.

Beach House are the relatively feeble end (bar Norway) of an ill continuum which started with Fleet Foxes, (and which always contained the National) before it progressed to Grizzly Bear when they got shit and overworked, and now will presumably infect some other MOR masquerading as indie-flavour-of-the-month in January. Of  course, it would be lousy to condemn people for enjoying this sort of music. In the cases of Fleet Foxes and Beach House - yes, their music is and was indeed pleasant. No doubt. But when people start to rumble about it being the best stuff released in a given year to the detriment of all else, then, that's when it is okay to start to freak. I mean Fleet Foxes? Especially when a band as whip-smart, emotive, canonically aware, commercially successful and, most of all, FUN, as Vampire Weekend were knocking around. (And they are this year too). Somehow, I think the post-Automatic for the People ghost of Michael Stipe is causing us all mischief.

I didn't do a best of list last year 'cos I was bogged down in the whole albums of the decade thing, which I thankfully finished, on schedule, on January 3rd 2010. No really, take my wife. No, take her. I'm going to do a list this year, though. Why? Well, to rise to the challenge of the people who tell me that music is stagnating in a year that produced resoundingly brilliant stuff by James Blake, Hunter Gatherer, Thread Pulls, Titus Andronicus, Grimes, Deerhunter, How to Dress Well, Porn on Vinyl, Vampire Weekend, Superpitcher, Sow Cow, Solar Bears, EMERALDS, Deepchord Presents Echospace, Lady Gaga, Kanye West, Joanna Newsom, Mount Kimbie... And piles of other good shit that I (or possibly neither you) have heard or never heard.

Look. I might be pooping into my own poop pipe, here. But there is one underlying point. And it is this - that good enough as Beach House are, let me say just one thing in advance of this whole male-brain listing shit season? This. Every time a magazine or blog poll rates Beach House's album as the best of 2010, a little piece of the world will die. If Metacritic votes it the best album of 2010, I fear the two Koreas will go to war and we will all die. Yes. It will be that bad. And we will all deserve it for our lack of imagination.

MP3: How to Dress Well-You won't need me where I'm going
MP3: Emeralds-Now You see me
MP3: Grimes- Weregild
MP3: James Blake-I only know (What I know now)
MP3: Avey Tare-Oliver Twist

I PROMISE TO DO ALBUM OF THE DECADE #2 and #1 by weekend's end, and get started on 2010 list of excellence before midweek.

This entire rant has been brought to you in good-hearted spirits. It is spurred by one or two friends who have already decided 2010 is a shit year for music, but are taking the measure of the year from a fairly limited viewpoint. I am serious about Beach House. They are just one or two songs. But great songs, dudes.

Maybe I'm wrong. If I am, then kill me mercifully, because I am turning into that wretched dude who turns up at ATP each year, with aviator shades and a filthy paunch, and moans about how Oneohtrix Point Never represent the pitchforkization of Swans.

*fooled you. We are going to play mario 3 'til dawn and we've already shit our pants

Polar Flares

Tweet We journeyed by car from Kells to my granny's house in Mayo when she was alive and we were all little. It was long (she lived near Belmullet and my Dad was a slowcoach) and, no matter what time of year it was, the trip always ended in darkness. Proper darkness. If you travel that far west of the Shannon, the night will inevitably go inky black. But not really, because then it slowly fills with the least light-polluted skies in Western Europe.

In Kells, I used to run out of the house to look at the stars on moonless winter nights. Yet no matter how clear the night was, the Milky Way was always poisoned by a dull sodium-orange seepage. It was a crappy Kells colour. Or not even a colour. It was the afterthought of the colour of a town; a filter that fought off the constellations that children must have marveled at since children could marvel. It was the universe as seen through a faded chocolate wrapper picked off a football pitch in 1998.

Yah, I know it could have been worse - sure, pick out anything more obvious than Orion's belt in Dublin tonight and you'll win a special prize from Specsavers*. 

In Mayo, the night sky sometimes left us dumbfounded. Even from the car. Going past Crossmolina on a crisp November night, we could see constellations we couldn't name. But we saw them, moving in lucid parallax beyond the hills and windbent fir trees; 'cos constellations tend to leap out at kids that way - sure they wouldn't be constellations otherwise.  

My granny lived exactly here.

Her house was/is the one on the right, behind the wind-whipped Mayo flag. The tiny hump of a hill behind the house is called Mount Jublilee. To a Meath flatlander like me, who never went abroad as a child, it was just that, a mountain. The first time I climbed it, I thought I was King with a capital K; or half a capital K 'cos there were two of us, identical twins. I remember sitting on a mossy ditch, looking out at the Atlantic, and proudly thinking none of our class from Kells were ever this high.

Try and swivel the map around to see the bog heading toward the sea. Yeah? And then think of how little light intrudes into the night sky in that part of Ireland. Mayo = sky tourism. I'm not kidding. Mayo, and parts of Kerry and Donegal could sell their views of the night sky to countries who can't turn off the lights.

On the way down, in the car, we sometimes saw this silent lightning. Worrying illuminations. The entire sky would light up but there was no thunder. Just fluorescent flashes that picked out the clouds. They were weird flashes; epic flashes to my little brain. We were scared of them. My twin and I had very scientific ways of working things out and had previously got over our fear of thunder and lightning through science. But lightning without thunder? In the bottomless Mayo sky? What was this shit? Our baby science had no handle on it. We were fucked. We had to ask Mammy.

"It's sky openings", our mother calmly informed us. Sky openings. The. Sky. Opening. Easy as, cold weather phenomenon - just like something out of a Norwegian myth turned into a common observation. 

I am still freaked out by that phenomenon. But I'm not the only one. When the snowstorm hit Dublin last week twitter was full of people saying 'holy shit, was that a meteorite over the M3?' and 'Oh fuck I swear to god, the mothership is landing in Rathfarnham - lightning but no thunder wotz going on h8 dis?', I thought to myself, yes, it's the sky openings.

Yikes, I called this blog 'Polar Flares' as a riff on Solar Bears. Yet digressed, right? But it's all okay, 'cos the Solar Bears' album is cosmic and fits in (or dovetails as a secondary school woodwork teacher might say) with all of the above. It's a bit proggy. A bit indebted to Boards of Canada (but in the same way Blur are indebted to the Kinks - i.e. both are great and different 'cos of music moving onwards). It sups on the fountain of prog, and relaxes in the spa of cosmic disco (which is good, 'cos if it just relaxed without supping it would be 'chillwave'). It's probably the best Irish album this year. In a good year. Vintage shit.

MP3: Solar Bears-She was Coloured in.

*a free eyeball

We're going on a bear hunt.

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"We're going on a bear hunt. / We're going to catch a big one. / What a beautiful day! / We're not scared"

Autism is a spectrum disorder in that it manifests itself in as many different ways as there are individuals who have it. We all know the stereotypes (thanks Dustin Hoffman with your oscar-winning performance in Rain Man), but none of them ring remotely true for any one individual. However, to interact with kids with autism, is to quickly find there are certain quirky things that appeal to many of them more than other things do. I've noticed that these things include, in no particular order: Thomas the Tank Engine, the child's face appearing over the hill in Teletubbies, The Bear in The Big Blue House singing goodbye to the moon, beads on strings, getting squeezed either side of their faces, food that's all the same colour (typically beige or white) - and finally, the one thing I've noticed which has the strongest appeal to the most kids I've worked with in various jobs: Michael Rosen's illustrated book, 'We're going on a bear hunt'. I'll get to it in a while.

I have my own little theories as to why certain kids with autism like certain things (again, I stress it is a spectrum disorder, so none of these can ever be relevant to all of them). Thomas is an easy one. There is a sense of great predictability and control involved in characters that run across tracks the entire time - unlike us zany unpredictable people who switch track from one second to the next (a terrifying prospect for someone with a limited theory of mind). Also, Thomas and his friends have faces that switch from one emotion to another without any transition. Thomas is either happy or vexed. Gordon's big Dante Alighieri-esque head is typically vexed, but sometimes he is happy too. This means there is less ambiguity about the trains' emotions and, again, they are easier to understand than the infinitely complex emotional messages communicated through peoples' changing facial expressions. Others have noticed this phenomenon too; to the point that there is a therapeutic intervention based on Thomas to help develop emotional understanding in kids with autism. You'll never guess who invented it? Ali G's brother, Simon Baron Cohen, perhaps the world's leading authority on the disorder. Eagle eyed viewers of the film Bruno will see a joke where Bruno confuses the word artistic with autistic, a definite nod to Sacha's brainy bro.

That's Thomas. Um, less easy to explain is the Beyoncé Single Ladies video - which exerts its own power. For some reason, this video is endlessly fascinating for a good many kids I know with autism.

Yo Taylor, imma let you finish but Beyoncé made the best video for kids with autism of all time. OF ALL TIME!

Now, I could be facetious and riff off the idea that because autism is sometimes theorised as an exaggeration of the male brain, that it's the mesmeric movement of Beyoncé and her dancers' bums that elicit the fascination - but it is mostly pre-teen kids we are talking about. I think the secret is more about the rhythm of the song, those chant-like staccato bursts of "aw-aw-aw". They have the power. Which brings me to 'We're Going on a Bear Hunt'. 

The prose of the book, which I believe is based on an old cub scout song or the like, can have an effect over some kids with autism that is mesmeric beyond belief. It's actually incredible to witness. There is some secret sensory key to unadulterated joy embedded in the story's repeating refrains about a Dad and his kids heading out on an imaginary bear hunt. And I can think of barely one other book that has this power (perhaps 'Green Eggs and Ham' to a certain extent, but not nearly close). The prose has a see-sawing cadence; and, if you read it correctly, the urge for kids, who would rarely speak otherwise, to shout out the ends of sentences where you pause for dramatic effect, is incredible. It can draw full words and even phrases out of them!

There is a theory (yeah I know, autism has more theories associated with it today than there were theories about gravity knocking around during the age of enlightenment) that some children with autism find it easier to speak in musical or rhythmic ways than in less-patterned everyday speech. This phenomenon could be explained by music eliciting responses in different parts of the brain than those parts affected by everyday speech. But what about where speech and music overlap? Musical speech? It is something that has been tested as a language therapy. Bear hunt is at the centre of this Venn diagram, I think. Musical speech. Speechical music. It's a confluence dramatically explored in Steve Reich's classical piece Different Trains, Brian Eno's and David Byrne's My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, and, indeed, in Pitchfork indie band The Books' music. I would love to see an electro remix of 'We're going on a bear hunt' by any of the above. And I would love to play it to some kids with autism to see how they respond. 

This was going to be a post about Solar Bears, but I got thinking about bears, and then bear hunts and ehh, yah, big digression. A post about Solar Bears will be up shortly.