Entertainment For Lively Minds
NME's best of the year list.
Posted by MrSib on 7 December 2011 - 11:49am.
For those of you wondering what the cool down at the NME are listening too. Despite not actually buying a copy for 20 years.
1) PJ Harvey
2) Metronomy
3) Horrors
4) Wild Beasts
5) Kurt Vile
6) Arctic Monkeys
7) St. Vincent
8) Katy B
9) Tune Yards
10) Wu Lyf.
The rest in the next post....
- More from MrSib.
- Login or register to post comments
-
And the rest...
11 Anna Calvi
12 Scum
13 Suuns
14 The Vaccines
15 Wild Flag
16 Bombay Bicycle Club
17 Battles
18 Cats Eyes
19 Laura Marling
20 Radiohead
21 Kasabian
22 Noah and the Whale
23 Yuck
24 Big talk
25 PlanningtoRock
26 Girls
27 Black Lips
28 The Field
29 Smith Westerns
30 Friendly Fires
31 Florence and the Machine
32 Alex Turner
33 Justice
34 Unknown Mortal Orchestra
35 TV on the Radio
36 Ice Age
37 White Denim
38 Bjork
39 Noel Gallagher
40 Cold Cave
41 Death Grips
42 Patrick Wolf
43 Foo Fighters
44 Destroyer
45 Austra
46 Bon Iver
47 Real Estate
48 Slow Club
49 SBTRKT
50 Jay Z & Kayne West
Wow
I have the Top 5!
Pleased to see Kurt Vile get a nod in Word's albums of the year.
Good for them.
Blimey. I knew I was out of touch, but that just confirms it. I've only got 1 of the top 10 albums (Katy B). I've heard Metronomy but didn't like it.
The rest of it? On the most part, might as well be in a foreign language.
Oh well.
Yeah
PJ Harvey?, Arctic Monkeys? Foo Fighters? I think they make these names up ;)
Yeah, but
I think someone did make up "The Wild Beats" at no. 4!
I'd blame it on a typo from me.
But i cut and pasted the list so blame some sloppy work from the NME.
Fixed now any way.
Just hit the Spotifyer...
Kurt Vile's album is rather good.
No surprises
Much of it is same as other best of lists for year isn't it?
Yes
and that level of consensus isn't really a good thing. Where's the "get lost granddad" aesthetic gone from NME?
A part of me would have been much happier with an NME top 5 I was clueless about.
Are music mags all chasing the same demographic these days and/or are teenagers and parents all listening to the same new music? Is this an accumulative effect of new music being instantly accessible on-line so there's nowhere for acts to hide in a tribe of yoof?
That's a Myth
Certainly in my day, NME top ten wouldn't have scared off Mojo or Q readers either. Would have consisted of The Boo Radleys, Primal Scream, REM, Nirvana and The Pixies.
If anything the monthlies have gone less mainstream, not the other way around.
My NME era
was '77 to '87 so slap bang in the middle of the reactionary stance of many writers and the burgeoning "indie" spirit.
I don't think it's a myth but then again my NME period is largely before the concept of music monthlies for oldies.
OK I guess it was quite a different beast
back then, plus Indie music wasn't on daytime radio and Glastonbury wasn't televised.
Speaking of music monthlies, I still fondly remember the distinctly non-Dadrock Select and Vox magazines.
I know
I still have some up in the loft.
Reading-wise I gave up on monthlies for probably about 10 years until Word came along. I'd buy the odd copy of Mojo/Uncut just to keep my hand in but became bored at the conservative familiarity. Reading them was like being ushered prematurely into a retirement home strictly for fans of past musical glories, left to wallow in a boorish common room smelling of Brut, Party 7 spillage and rolled sweet baccy with a sign above the entrance saying "Members Only: Strict Legend Code".
Like myself at that time NME in the late 70s to mid80s could be quite precociously obnoxious about great swathes of popular music. With hindsight it was distinctly Stalinist about much music that didn't conform with its agit-pop perspective. It applauded a lot of guff but it also gave some new tools and ideas about listening to different sounds and noises that didn't conform to the guitar, bass and drum "rules".
A-B
It does seem to have become more in line with the monthlies. Way back in the dim and distant noughties it was much more militantly young, hipster-indie and skinny.
I remember picking it up
a few years ago and it had this photo-spread of Carl Barat meeting Pete Doherty after he was released from prison. It was as if Hello! magazine was guest editor for the week.
I may have to buy it as I have been informed by spritely young chaps my 18 year old nephew knocks about with that it is much more music-focused again.
Oops
I was editing my post then and lost it - must have been you replying at the same time. Anyway what I was saying was looking at the archive below I note that the choices seem to become narrower and more conservative if anything, although the more recent years are less unfamiliar and obscure to me than I thought. In fact I seem to have consistently ended up with 3-6 of the entries each year, well more like 3 in the recent past and peaking at around 6 in late 70s when right age to be most into new music. Hey! I've always had my finger on the pulse of the hip and happening sounds. I think I exaggerated the gulf between the monthlies and NME though, yet the NME leant toward the skinny-indie style inevitably.
Hmmmm....
A bit off-topic, but does anyone else find the PJ Harvey album to be almost unlistenably badly recorded/compressed? Maybe I'm too fussy, but I'm struggling to get past the dire mix and lowest-common-denominator sound quality.
The same is true, tbh, for the Bon Iver album too.
Can't say I've heard of most of the others on the list though...
1979
wow, that was a good year!
http://www.rocklistmusic.co.uk/1979.html
97/98
interesting list. It shows me that I completely left the nme orbit around 1997/8. Up till then I had/have a strong sampling of their top 10 (and almost every number one). After that almost nothing.
Me too
.