5 Alternative Top 5s for, but not necessarily related to, 2012.

Since I started this blog my mission statement has been "I can't compete with Pitchfork, so why bother?" So why compile a list of the 10/40/1000 best albums/songs/gigs of 2012 when a million other publications have produced better ones? Nonetheless, I thought putting together a few end of year lists would be fun.

Instead of doing a more traditional "best of the year" list, I've decided to compile 5 top 5s that I want to compile. Are they related to 2012? I think one is. I hope that they are nonetheless funny, informative, and a little bit different. To help me with making these lists I've drafted in two of my closest musical allies: Tyrone Stoddart and Finlay Bernard. Tyrone is a long-term friend and band mate. He somehow manages to simultaneously have the best and worst sense of humour of anyone I know. Finlay has something that was vitally important to this project. He has the largest one I've ever seen. It's meticulously maintained. It is however unfortunately so big that women find it intimidating.

His music collection. 

He has a large music collection.

Pervert.

Music I just did not get this year.
I try not to be a dick in life. It helps. I named this blog Pointless, Harsh, and Long after the Dirty Projectors lyrics over on the right there, but I like the dual meaning. I think that the majority of blogging is indeed pointless, harsh and long, and I hope that I distance myself from that, even if only a little. But every now and then being a dick is important. It's also good for the soul. Patiently allow me to get 5 things off my chest:

1. The Lovely Eggs - Wildlife
• Wildlife is one of the worst albums I have ever had the displeasure of hearing. I imagine the band's sound could only be replicated by handing instruments to the nastiest, sleaziest nursery-age children that money could buy. You would indeed be buying them, because their parents would have sold them on the black market.
  
  
2. Holly Herdon - Movement
• I wish I loved Movement - it would allow me to say boundlessly pretentious things like "I can totally hear her Skype calls coming through these songs".
  
  
3. Swans - The Seer
• I patiently waited 10 and a half minutes for the introduction to this song to end.
  
  It didn't.
  
  
4. Fiona Apple - The Idler Wheel...
   
   

   I'll admit I only came to the snappily titled The Idler Wheel Is Wiser Than the Driver of the Screw and Whipping Cords Will Serve You More Than Ropes Will Ever Do recently, based on the attention it has been getting in critics' best of 2012 lists. I might grow to love it over time, but for now I just don't get it.

   
   

   I was immediately struck by how well Ms. Apple can write lyrics - her phrasing is exceptional - but when listening to the album I simply feel stressed.  Maybe it's because Apple and her jazz background are smarter than I am, but an hour or so of almost atonal piano music makes me feel like I'm listening to a woman's dissent into madness. Not in a cool Brand New way, but in an "I've chosen to listen to the soundtrack to The Shining as a bit of light entertainment" kind of way.

   
   
5. San Cisco
• Full Disclosure: I've not even listened to this band. I loathed them from the second I saw that the screenshot for a YouTube video for a song called "Awkward" featured some Topman-looking indie brat singing with an iPhone text messaging box superimposed next to his head with the words "do do do do do doo do" in it.
  
  
  Am I getting old and grumpy? Probably. But if the band's record label are going to describe Awkward as a "viral megahit from down under" I don't want to listen to it.

Best Opening Tracks.
And so ends our connection to 2012, and also, thankfully, our connection to being a massive dick. Despite what iTunes has done to the way we listen to music, it should not be forgotten that albums, in their entirety, are works of art. My favourite albums are those which feel like journeys. When the last song ends I like to feel like I've been part of something, that something significant has taken place over the court of the record. Of course, every journey must have a beginning, and these are some of our favourites.

1. Hornets! Hornets! by The Hold Steady, opening Separation Sunday.
• Separation Sunday is perhaps the best example of the album-as-journey idea I led off with. When How a Resurrection Really Feels closes the record it's impossible not to feel as if you've borne witness to a significant development in the life of the record's main character, Holly.
  
  Hornets! Hornets! sets the tone perfectly. Craig Finn's raspy narrative "sung" solo, talking about girls who are "gonna have to go with with whoever's gonna get me the highest", sets the tone perfectly for the seedy, drug filled story of redemption to follow.
  
  
2. Pots & Pans by Les Savy Fav, opening Let's Stay Friends.
• Pots & Pans stands apart from the magnificent chaos that is Let's Stay Friends. It's driven by mid-tempo purposiveness, huge, delay-soaked guitars and some of the finest drumming on the record. It's sort of how I imagine Coldplay would sound if they had balls.  It acts as a mission statement as much as it does an introduction:
  
  "The people said no. The drummer said yes. This tour is a test."
  
  
3. Perth by Bon Iver, opening Bon Iver, Bon Iver.*
• The true power of Perth as an opening track is apparent when it's used to open Bon Iver's live sets.
  
  *yup, it's called "Bon Iver, Bon Iver" and it's by Bon Iver.
  
  
4. Jenny was a Friend of Mine by The Killers, opening Hot Fuss.
• Just as it's unwise to go full retard, it's unwise to go full Vegas. Before the Killers went full neon lights and suspect facial hair, the massive Jenny was a Friend of Mine opened their perfect debut.
  
  
5. Seven Nation Army by The White Stripes, opening Elephant.
• Seven Nation Army has become this generation's Stairway to Heaven. Everyone you went to high school with can "play" it on guitar. It's used in football chants. When you search it on YouTube one of the suggested results is "Seven Nation Army dubstep". It's easy to forget that, when played properly, it's actually a really great riff and that's why it became so popular in the first place.

Best songs under two minutes long.
It's easy to tell if a short song works. It should leave you feeling like you need more. The beauty of such songs though is that they can be listened on repeat without feeling tired.

1. True Colours by Gallows. [0:39]
• PUNK MUSIC.
  
  
2. Black Sheep Boy by Okkervil River. [1:19]
• It wouldn't be a PH&L blog post without gratuitous Okkervil River adoration. Black Sheep Boy is of course in fact Tim Harden's track, and in many ways is everything an Okkervil River Song is not: short and to the point with no flowery lyrics. The contrast is fascinating, especially when it is borne in mind that this tiny song led Will Sheff to create an entire double album about the troubled "Black Sheep Boy".
  
  
3. Self Esteem by Andrew Jackson Jihad. [1:37]
• Some songs simply don't need to be long, as this fine folk punk demonstrates. Could you cram this much John Darnielle-y lyrical artistry and crash cymbal love into just one minute and thirty seven seconds?
  
  
  No. You could not.
  
  
4. Stranger Calls by Honeydrum. [1:52]
• Three things that we're intensely passionate about: Lobster Festivals, Donald Sutherland, and good value music.
  
  
  The French Canadian province of New Brunswick has given the world all three. Honeydrum's excellent shoegaze pop 7" is available for a mere $1. The title track fits comfortably into our sub 2:00 criteria.
  
  
5. Fashion Coat by The National. [2:03]
• Okay, so we're cheating with this one. The studio version of Fashion Coat actually comes in at 2:03, but our roguish amateurism is why you're still reading... right?
  
  
  High Violet, the band's latest album, is a masterpiece of atmosphere, helped in no small way by its excellent production: Matt Berninger's baritone singing often sounds like the voice of God. But returning to 2003's Sad Songs for Dirty Lovers reminds us just how good the band's songs and textures, stripped of all expensive studio tricks, actually are. The succinct Fashion Coat is exemplary.
  
  
  "Everywhere I am is just another thing without you in it."

Best unreasonably long song titles.
We started compiling this one on a purely objective basis - most characters wins. But that just got boring. All the winners were either obscure post rock bands or Sufjan Stevens.Instead, we've compiled 5 tracks with long titles, but tracks that are also worth listening to.

1. The Sad But True Story Of Ray Mingus, The Lumberjack Of Bulk Rock City, And His Never Slacking Stribe In Exploiting The So Far Undiscovered Areas Of The Intention To Bodily Intercourse From The Opposite Species Of His Kind, During Intake Of All The Mental Condition That Could Be Derived From Fermentation - Rednex.
• We said worth listening to, but we couldn't not include the outright winner. At 305 characters (including spaces) Rednex win.
  
  It's just a shame that everything about the song is terrible.
  
  
2. The Boy Bands Have Won, and All the Copyists and the Tribute Bands and the TV Talent Show Producers Have Won, If We Allow Our Culture to Be Shaped by Mimicry, Whether from Lack of Ideas or From Exaggerated Respect. You Should Never Try to Freeze Culture. What You Can Do Is Recycle That Culture. Take Your Older Brother's Hand-Me-Down Jacket and Re-Style It, Re-Fashion It to the Point Where It Becomes Your Own. But Don't Just Regurgitate Creative History, or Hold Art and Music and Literature as Fixed, Untouchable and Kept Under Glass. The People Who Try to 'Guard' Any Particular Form of Music Are, Like the Copyists and Manufactured Bands, Doing It the Worst Disservice, Because the Only Thing That You Can Do to Music That Will Damage It Is Not Change It, Not Make It Your Own. Because Then It Dies, Then It's Over, Then It's Done, and the Boy Bands Have Won - Chumbawamba.
• Not technically a song, so it couldn't win, but at 865 characters it deserves an honorary mention. What's more, the album is pretty much everything that the Rednex song is not.
  
  Everything about it isn't terrible.
  
  
3. They Provide the Paint for the Picture Perfect Masterpiece That You Will Paint on the Inside of Your Eyelids - Bandits of the Acoustic Revolution.
• The best part of this song is listening to Thomas Kalnoky sing its title in about 3 seconds.
  
  
4. Mothers, Tell Your Daughters Our Music is All Awful Noise and We're Just a Bunch of No-Goods - All Shall Be Well (and all shall be well and all manner of things shall be well).
• Some post-rock made the list. This band deserved a mention because of their humility and humour. They're lovely, check 'em out.
  
  
5. Late Due to Sweatpants Boner (Alarm Malfunction, Slow Motion Love Interest, Mean Principal, Etc.) by Ebu Gogo.
• When pushing Finlay on the subject of why this song ought to make the list he began to describe it as "happy math rock... sort of".
  
  That charming description was reason enough.

Top 5 songs to make love to.

1. Remix to ignition - R Kelly
2. Remix to ignition - R Kelly
3. Remix to ignition - R Kelly
4. Remix to ignition - R Kelly
5. Remix to ignition - R Kelly

My own personal top 5 musical moments of 2012.
I know this makes it 6 top 5s, but this last one's just for me. 

1. Discovering Titus Andronicus.
   I wrote pretty extensively about why I fell in love with Titus Andronicus in October's post The Enemy Is Everywhere. The band's existentialist indie punk has soundtracked the year of my life in which I came to realise that we've only got one life, and that it's far too short to be spent doing something we don't love.
   
   
2. My first encounter with vinyl.
   In an apartment just north of UT campus in Austin, Tx, the girl I had just begun dating (I was living in the States, it was "dating") introduced me to the ritual of dropping the needle and listening to music the way it was supposed to be enjoyed. 
   
   
   I couldn't have asked for a better Sunday morning.
   
   
3. SXSW 2012
   Early in 2011 I had to chose which University I wanted to study abroad at for a year. I had no idea. The University of Texas at Austin stood out. I knew a lot of bands from the city. I'd heard that it played host to a variety of music festivals.
   
   
   Snobs will tell you that SXSW isn't what it used to be. That could be the case, but I struggle to care. Admittedly, I didn't have a badge so couldn't attend any of the badge-only events, the state of which I suspect is what bugs a lot of SXSW veterans.
   
   SXSW 2012 was one of the greatest weeks of my life, but it made me reflect a little unhappily on Scotland and it's drinking culture. At virtually every event I attended in the festival I was handed free drink, free food, and asked to enjoy good films or good music.
   
   
   When I returned to Scotland over the summer I began working at an outdoor bar in the Edinburgh festival. Drink promotions are outlawed in Scotland because of our chronic binge-drinking culture. While this hacks me off, I can understand the rule. Even without people consuming inane amounts of unreasonably cheap booze, as a barman I saw some pretty shameful stuff, received abuse, and witnessed plenty of fights. While I loved SXSW, the contrast made me sad to realise that Scots can't be trusted with a drink.
   
   
4. Bonding.
   One of my favourite pastimes is spamming the Facebook walls of friends with links to bands that they might like. I enjoy getting spammed in return.
   
   
   While both my brother and I are middle class white boys from a well-to-do suburb in the south of Edinburgh, this year I discovered that we're both pretty passionate about hip-hop. As passionate about hip-hop as two middle class white boys from a well-to-do suburb in the south of Edinburgh can be. A beautiful spamming relationship ensued.
   
   
5. Starting this blog.
   I have no idea what I want to do with my life, but I think it's important that I try to find something that I love. I've started this blog. Over 1000 people from across the world have read it. I've also been lucky enough to do a bit of work for AnyDecentMusic?
   
   I owe a massive thank you to my friend mentioned in no.2 for encouraging me to grow some balls and start searching for a career I'll enjoy.