Continuing from yesterday, ANBAD takes a look back at a thrilling year of music. Today, the second bunch of runners-up are revealed…
Looking back over a whole year of bands is a sobering experience, partly because there are so many of them, and partly because I can fairly accurately calculate just how many days I have spent over 2010 writing about new bands. I won’t publish that figure. I value my sanity too much.
This long trawl through the last 12 months also revealed a few other interesting details:
- The default musical setting for this writer – that is, a preponderance of jangling Indie bands that might easily have harked from 1989.
- There are slightly fewer Scandinavian bands than in previous years, though still a hugely disproportionate number of bands hail from this part of the world;
- Brooklyn, as postulated earlier this week, is vomiting good bands at an rate unparalleled in recent times;
- The words “lovely”, “delightful”, “whelped”, “swoon” and “jittering” – words that I never use in real life, abound in my more florid reviews.
Regardless of these foibles, here is the second group of runners-up – the bands that didn’t quite make the Top Five.
- Friendly Foliage “write the kind of drop-dead gorgeous, burblingly beautiful song that I would happily have soundtracking every move of my life from here onwards.”
Friendly Foliage // Masonic Meadows
- The Horn The Hunt “crystallise the mania of the creative process into one shimmering, glittering moment of brilliance. Excellent.”
- Young Mammals: “Imagine a traditional children’s chanting nursery song recorded over and over again until lack of sleep causes a simultaneous and sudden burst of manic adrenal energy in all bandmates, and this is what the ensuing edge-of-lunacy song would sound like.”
- White Ring: “music so pitch-black that they are rumoured to make all of their music at Witching Hour whilst drinking snake venom mixed with virgin’s blood… thrillingly deep, sonorous and throbbing.”
- B-Lock and The Girl: “in two and a half minutes they cram in enough invention, new ideas and moments of QUIET/loud shock to elevate them way beyond the majority.”
B-Lock and The Girl // Tired Of The Sick Hype
That’s the extremely strong runners-up list done. The Top Five Bands Of 2010 will appear next week. Keep ’em peeled…