Five of the Best: #8: Alexis Somerville

The second last in the Five of the Best series is from Alexis Somerville. Alexis is a journo who has written for Plan B, Aesthetica and Nude. Some great albums in here, my own will follow (hopefully tomorrow). Happy New Year!

Radiohead – In Rainbows (2007)

When I first heard it

A Saturday night in November 2007, drunk and wondering where I was (incidentally: on the 13^th floor of a skyscraper in Taipei, Taiwan at about 3am).

Why I love it

I have to admit, I'd almost forgotten about Radiohead. After obsessive listening to OK Computer, Kid A etc. as a college student, I developed new obsessions and Radiohead slipped my mind for a while. So I wasn't even excited when they released a new album, though it captured my attention for its unusual payment options (what? You can pay as much or as little as you like to download it?!) which clearly worked to their advantage as it entered the US Billboard charts and UK album charts at number one.

I heard about all this and yet I still didn't download it as I was living approximately 6,000 miles from home without the internet. And then I went to an indie disco (appropriately named Idioteque after the Radiohead song) and found someone who owned it. Initially I listened to it not once but several times in a row.

I was shocked and slightly ashamed. How could I have forgotten about Radiohead?! They were always impressive, let's face it, and now... an album of exquisitely beautiful songs which are both interesting and oddly accessible. Not proggy experimentalism or guitar-heavy rock (though they do those impeccably well too) but pared down, lyrically astounding platforms for Thom Yorke's voice and the band's ability to create an atmosphere.

What it reminds me of

A strangely unfestive yet magical Christmas in Taiwan, listening to it on repeat forever and never getting bored.

Standout track

Reckoner

Beirut – Gulag Orkestar (2006)

When I first heard it

When exploring a friend's computer for exciting music two or three years ago.

Why I love it

Zach Condon's voice, the instrumentation, the melodies, the atmospherics and the fact that it's a ridiculously impressive debut. Surely at 20 Condon didn't have the life experience to make music which sounded like it had been recorded by a seasoned, virtuoso Eastern European gypsy... but somehow he pulled it off.

What it reminds me of

My friend Lewis bragging about how he was going to listen to it on a solo trip from Poland to China by rail. It seemed the perfect setting and I was insanely jealous. Although he got his MP3 player nicked by Manchester United fans in Russia so it didn't all pan out.

Standout track

Postcards from Italy

Geoff Muldaur - Private Astronomy: A Vision of the Music of Bix Beiderbecke (2003)

When I first heard it

When I raided my dad's CD collection a few years ago.

Why I love it

It introduced me to the music of Bix Beiderbecke and has its own delightful take on the 1920s jazz musician's work. Featuring the likes of Loudon Wainwright III and Martha Wainwright alongside Muldaur's chamber arrangements and extraordinary vocals, some jazz purists hate it simply for not being Beiderbecke. But it manages to avoid gimmickry and is respectful in its tribute while injecting something new into the diverse mix of instrumentals and vocal tracks. Muldaur employs a mix of exceptional classical and jazz musicians and the album as a whole is a creative, intelligent homage to the jazz innovator.

What it reminds me of

Family Christmases in York and adding my favourite track – There Ain't No Sweet Man, with guest vocalist Martha Wainwright – to every mix CD I made for a while.

Standout track

There Ain't No Sweet Man

Low – Things We Lost in the Fire (2001)

When I first heard it

At university in Leeds in 2005. Someone put Sunflowers on a compilation for me and I went out and bought the album immediately.

Why I love it

They do so much with so little, and make melancholy beautiful. This record should be depressing, it should be too slow for comfort. But instead it's chillingly ambient and engaging. The songwriting is weirdly brilliant and the sparse instrumentation perfectly fitting.

What it reminds me of

Being blown away by their live set at All Tomorrow's Parties in 2007.

Standout track

In Metal

Feist – The Reminder (2007)

When I first heard it

On a Singapore Airlines flight to Taiwan in September 2007, having just bid goodbye to my friends and family for the last time in what would be over a year.

Why I love it

Leslie Feist's voice and the elegant simplicity of her melodies. Also, The Reminder was written on the road and inspired by brief stays in various global hotels, a theme which was particularly easy for me to identify with at the time.

What it reminds me of

The beginning of my time in Taiwan. The plane journey as I drifted in and out of sleep, catching occasional glimpses of pretty Singaporean air hostesses and far-away seas. Sitting outside a restaurant in the intense October heat as my friends plugged in their speakers to the outdoor power supply and The Reminder soundtracked our meal. Settling into my new apartment with its huge balcony and views of temples, rundown skyscrapers and misty mountains.

Standout track

So Sorry

Choice Cut Video: Beirut - Postcards From Italy

Five of the Best: #4: Nick Mitchell

Nick Mitchell is the Editor of the excellent blog Under the Radar, which presents the cream of new Scottish music, daily. He works for The Scotsman and writes about all things musical for The Skinny, Clash and The Line of Best Fit. Hats off to Nick for selecting perhaps one of the most underrated albums of the past ten years, Midlake's excellent Trials of Van Occupanther in part 4 of Five of the Best.

Radiohead - Amnesiac (2001)

When I first heard it

On its release in 2001 I reckon.

Why I love it

Close call between this and Kid A, and most people would have gone for Kid A, but it's the second cut from those sessions that shades it for me. At the time everyone was trying to get their head around where Thom Yorke was going, and this album contains some of his weirdest experimentations, so it took some getting used to. But once you did get over that you found the same spine-tingling songwriting underneath. It's far from uniformly excellent, but Pyramid Song still stands out as one of my favourite Radiohead tracks.

What it reminds me of

Strangely, considering it coincides with the time when I was finishing school and about to leave home for uni, it doesn't really have any memories attached to it for me. Odd that.

Standout track

Pyramid Song

Anything else?

It came out of a difficult time for the band, the how-do-you-follow-OK-Computer era, and you can really hear the creative energies of the band members being pushed to the limit.

OutKast - Speakerboxx/The Love Below (2003)

When I first heard it

Christmas time, 2003

Why I love it

Speakerboxx is a forward thinking rap album, which is fine for rap fans, but for everyone else, The Love Below is just a brilliant collection of pop songs that flows from start to finish. Sure, there's Hey Ya, which has been touted as the hit of the decade, but the whole thing is the Andre 3000 show, the grandest, most ridiculously overblown LP of the decade, full of superlative songwriting, rapping and production. And the skits are actually listenable, for once.

What it reminds me of

I took it with me on a working holiday to the Basque Country the following summer, so it reminds me of lying on a beach in San Sebastian.

Standout track

Hey Ya for everyone, Spread for me.

Anything else?

OutKast purists would probably go for Stankonia, but to be honest I only heard the singles at the time, so it doesn't hold the same retrospective appeal.

Midlake - The Trials of Van Occupanther (2006)

When I first heard it

Autumn of 2006 I think.

Why I love it

This is a strange one, and even as I write this I'm questioning its inclusion in the top five albums of the last ten years. I doubt it would actually make any magazines' top 100. But when you listen to music it's a linear thing: it either makes a connection with you or it doesn't, and what other people think shouldn't come into it. This album really caught my attention at the time as it seemed to have come out of a past era of woodcutters and log cabins. But timeless in another sense. I listened to it a lot then, and I can still enjoy it now. And that's what matters.

What it reminds me of

Going for a solitary walk through the woods near the sea at my parent's home on a very cold winter day. Perfect hangover remedy.

Standout track

Roscoe

Anything else?

Their new album is due out in February.

The Strokes - Is This It

When I first heard it

Back in the halcyon days of the early noughties.

Why I love it

OK, so it's the NME's album of the decade, but that shouldn't detract from just how important this album was at the time. Not that it was trying to be anything, and that's what's so good about it: it's effortless. It's also innocent, the soundtrack to being young and carefree and getting drunk and having fun. It's also just two guitars, a bass and drums. And so it heralded a new wave of garage rock bands after all the self-consciously epic dross that accompanied the turn of the millenium.

Standout track

Someday. Yes, I prefer it to Last Nite.

What it reminds me of

A thousand student nights out. And the massive poster of the cover I had on my wall at the time. And generally just being young. Sigh.

The Knife - Silent Shout (2006)

When I first heard it

Some time in 2006.

Why I love it

I got into The Knife through the huge success of Heartbeats when it was covered by Jose Gonzalez and then re-released in 2004. I love electronic music, I think I have a kind of attraction towards anything cool and inhuman and synthetic, and this was The Knife in a nutshell. But you've got to remember that synths have been around for over 30 years, and somehow the Swedish duo make electronic music that sounds utterly unlike anything you've ever heard. They're more than musicians, they're arti sts, and when Silent Shout came out it was their masterpiece.

Standout track

We Share Our Mother's Health

What it reminds me of

Walking around Edinburgh and feeling cooler than everyone on the street just by listening to it.

Choice Cut Video: Midlake - Roscoe

Five of the Best: #2 Finn Scott-Delany

Number two in the series features Finn Scott-Delany, a music critic who writes for Drowned in Sound and Alternative Ulster. He also plays a mean guitar and occasionally, sports a killer quiff.

Grizzly Bear – Yellow House

A steady fixture on album of the year lists in 2006, the drip-drop of critical praise eventually led me to buy Yellow House. An enveloping mood piece, it has been part-relegated by the excellent, chirpier follow-up Veckamist. But to my mind this edges it as one of the most unlikely great albums to get lost in, the abstract and fantastical sonic imagery making it a rare album that commands intensive listening alone. The intro to ‘Reprise’ seems to suck back inside itself before emerging in all its dawn chorus glory.

Cut Copy – In Ghost Colours

Surely the best modern dance-based album, this also works as an indie crossover because it doesn’t compromise on either. Song-based but mix-led, In Ghost Colours ebbs, pulsates and swoons, a collection of expertly compiled pop songs that knows when to make you dance and when to stand hands aloft. The climax arrives when the driving clatter of ‘So Haunted’ bottlenecks into the set-up for the euphoric ‘Heart on Fire’. In thrall to 80s aesthetics but undeniably fresh.

Common – Be

Kanye West might have made my personal top-5, but since Be is his greatest effort behind the desk, it will do just fine. Spoiling us with a rich palette of deep soul and retooled funk and jazz, Be works as a loving tribute to the black musical canon. Standing proud among his best efforts, Common is streaming with a mature, laidback wisdom. A master class in rhythmic en Pointe delivery, ‘The Corner’ is Common at his most expressive.

The Streets – Original Pirate Material

Being a middle-class kid was no barrier to revelling in the (sub)urban witticisms of Mike Skinner. With too many great lines to quote, this “day in the life of a geezer” was set to homemade two-step beats, normalising a much-pilloried sub-genre. A real memory-jerker, Skinner articulated modern culture on Original Pirate Material in a way he hasn’t done since, ‘Weak Become Heroes’ a poignant celebration of a misspent youth: “But this ain’t tomorrow and for now I still love ya”.

Radiohead – Amnesiac

The second release from the Kid A sessions, Amnesiac has all the progressiveness of its predecessor, but is less bogged down in the post-Ok Computer landscape. As a teenage Radiohead devotee, I would have lapped up almost any release, but this stands out handsomely. ‘Pyramid Song’ is archetypical Radiohead with its discordant piano chords, cut-up time signatures and swirling Thom Yorke vocal.

Choice Cut Video: Cut Copy - Hearts on Fire