38. Field Music

Previously unpublished, originally written for The Boar.

Field Music – Field Music (Measure) (Memphis Industries)

The video for 'Them That Do Nothing', the second song on this 72-minute fourth album, is filmed in the Brewis brothers' native Sunderland, a city left behind by post-industrial 'regeneration' even more thoroughly than neighbouring Newcastle: unkempt streets, empty industrial spaces, dank underpasses. Over a spry rhythm threaded with bright and smartly melodic guitar, they trade, in those unmistakable accents, uncannily familiar sentiments: “Well once we were concerned/Then we grew up to be bored... We tried to stand for nothing/Now there's nothing to stand for”. But (handclaps popping) they remind us that the only solution is to “Get your keys and get to work”, the cryptic but adeptly literate wordspill coalescing for a second like clouds forming recognisable shapes.

They know at least how to take their own advice. After a brief hiatus which saw records by the brothers' solo projects, they've returned with their most ambitious work yet. Field Music take their inspiration from the British art-pop tradition of XTC, Peter Gabriel, Kate Bush: intelligent, polished, oblique, haunted by ideas of what it is to be English, possibilities whose energy courses through these 20 tracks, animated by a sense of drama, cohesion and emotional weight gold-dust rare in the world of landfill-indie. 'Lights Up', slowly rising and exploding, incandescent with strings. 'Effortlessly's unashamedly complex stomp, the ass-wiggle in its riff. The intertwining of the Brewis brothers' voices throughout in wry, eccentric and smart gestures. The queasy synths on 'Let's Write A Book' blurting upward among wah-wah squalls. The way 'Precious Plans' shifts from mantra moving over hypnotic fingerpicking to violin-threaded requiem: “Where are those futureless precious plans/Where we had a place to get to/A place that lasted?”

This record seems to capture what it feels like to be a thinking person in Britain 2010: the irony and crooked humour that gets us through the days; the sense of betrayal; the dread and fits of darkness. By the time you read this, we might well be living under a Tory government. It keeps me up at night: that we've inherited a world without choice, in which hope is not a given but the hardest of burdens; that the best we can expect is so much less than our hearts demand. The last words, before the string-haunted field-recordings – alley-footsteps, backfiring cars – of 'It's About Time', are those of desperation that hopes – that knows – there is still a world to be won: “I have a lot to learn/But I have clung to you.”

37. Xiu Xiu

Review of Xiu Xiu's performance at Taylor John's House, Coventry (the last of their European tour), over at The Boar.

36. Roberto Bolaño

A review of Roberto Bolaño's Nazi Literature in the Americas (Picador, 2010) written for The Boar.

Perhaps it's better to say nothing. Beginning with the English-language publication of The Savage Detectives in 2007, Roberto Bolaño has posthumously gathered acclaim unlike any Latin American writer since Gabriel Garcia Marquez. The English translation of his leviathan posthumous work 2666 became the cult book of last year, and new editions of his earlier works have been rushed out – Nazi Literature In The Americas comes with glowing jacket-puff from Colm Tóibín and John Banville. The backlash has already started: in a Guardian review of Nazi Literature..., Alberto Manguel dismissed the majority of Bolaño's oeuvre as “light, playful experiments, not very successful, with little intelligence and less ambition”. This kind of peevish resentment is the rock to the hard place of a Western literary public famously unable to handle more than one popular foreign writer at a time; with Bolaño safely and romantically dead, it becomes, between the hyperbole of the two, difficult to assess his real achievement.

Well, first off: Nazi Literature... is not among Bolaño's best work. The fascinating, murky depths of 2666 or By Night In Chile (2000) aren't to be found here, and the mock-encyclopedic style restrains the astonishing and sustained writing that powered those books. It's his most humorous work, and his most transparent in its conceit – one that has a long and distinguished lineage in Spanish-language literature, beginning with Borges' numerous fake texts, in particular A Universal History of Infamy, his 1935 catalogue of (semi-)fictional criminals. (It even comes with a bibliography of non-existent texts, making cast-iron an authenticity we already know to be fake.) A succession of mini-biographies of Nazi, nationalist, ultra-Catholic and anti-Semitic writers, it is at times riotous and rollicking in its mordant humour – the travails of Ernesto Pérez Masón, silenced by the Castro regime after OuLiPian acrostics (“LONG LIVE HITLER”) are discovered in his books, are but one example to raise a dry guffaw. But it is not – or not just – satire: Bolaño hits his target – the warped absurdity of right-wing ideology – first time, and then keeps hitting it, long after the audience has gotten the apparent joke.

Importantly, this is a guide not to right-wing culture generally, but to literature: this gallery of fanatics, like most of Bolaño's narrators and principal characters, are obsessed with writing. Or perhaps, rather, writing is obsession – excess, desperation, madness. Many of the undertakings described here are riddled with absurdity and insanity: Edelmira Thompson's Poe's Room, mostly a vast description of the room described in Poe's 'Philosophy of Furniture'; Luiz Fontaine Da Souza's five-volume Critique of Sartre's Being and Nothingness (“his siblings and nephews were obliged to have him interned once again in the clinic”); Harry Sibelius' 1333-page-long speculative history of America under Nazism. In spite of the embitterment, alcoholism, destruction and failure (there's a lot of all of them) what keeps them all going is writing – Argentino Schiaffino, on the run, churning out pamphlets and plays; “the widow Mendiluce” producing books, writing prefaces, financing journals and publishing houses into her dotage. It is a thus a powerful tribute both to the therapeutic aspect of literature – the comforts of bibliomania, the way literature, by remaking the world in integrity, makes it liveable – and its shortcomings. Not only does it fail to help its authors – Luz Mendiluce, a not-exactly-stellar poet, alcoholic, overweight, fascist and a thwarted lesbian, who is typical of the lives of these artists, dies in a car crash that is both bang and whimper: “The explosion was considerable” – but it also fails to change the world.

It's impossible not to note the persistent note of darkness running through the work. It is in part an attempt to negotiate, in perhaps the only way possible, with the with the horrific legacy of Latin America's 20th century, a history so absurd as to be almost beyond satire. That reality hangs in the background of these fictions like a suffocating fog: the dictatorships in Argentina, Brazil, Peru, Haiti, Mexico, Guatemala and, in particular, Bolaño's native Chile, where the democratic socialist Allende government was unseated by a CIA-sponsored coup in 1973; the repression, torture, censorship, poverty, violence, life in a world where civilised values have been utterly rescinded. It intrudes constantly: Edelmira Thompson meets and collaborates with Eva Perón; Masón “figures in the Dictionary of Cuban Authors... which omits Guillermo Cabrera Infante”; two young Colombian poets volunteer for Franco's forces in Spain. In that sense, the book recalls Marquez's Autumn of the Patriarch and Infante's View of Dawn in the Tropics – dealing with the horror through transformation into an aesthetic form just as fragmented and skewed.

One can't help but feel that the individual deficiencies of the authors in Nazi Literature... – haunted, like most writers, by the idea of being no good – is a remnant of the vast political tragedy: the foregrounding of this parade of right-wingers calls up their opposite, and absent, numbers – the silenced, the exiled, the disappeared. The appearance of two left-wing poets in the final chapter makes tangible the void that has always been there, and the painful dialectic between hope and defeat literature is enmeshed with. Literature, Bolaño emphasises, always exists in the shadow of death – one thinks of the scene in By Night in Chile where the narrator attends a literary party while torture occurs in the building's basement; “that is how literature is made in Chile”. We become graphically aware of this in 'The Infamous Ramírez Hoffman', the chapter (later the basis of the novella Distant Star) that comes closest to home for Bolaño – it deals with the Pinochet coup and is, in fact, narrated by the author. Hoffman is a young pilot and poet who sky-writes fascistic verse, and then disappears after a scandal over a photographic exhibition. This Kurtzian void – a fugitive existing only in rumour, apparently lacking any motive for his horrific crimes – is the novel's dark heart: a vexed inconclusion, an acknowledgement that literature, for all its weight of pain, is worth cherishing in our desperation. This book's strange pleasures prove again Bolaño's work among that worth saving.

35. Kate Bush

A re-appreciation of Kate Bush's Hounds of Love, first published in The Boar.

Kate Bush Hounds of Love (EMI, 1985)

This isn't about us. The greatest pop reconfigures yr nervous system, implants false memories, but always exceeds you: it gives us other narratives, other untold-of possibilities, other worlds, that remain inside us like ghosts. The expression Kate Bush achieved on Hounds Of Love (1985) is intensely personal, even esoteric, and the listener's response – this listener's, anyway – is no less so, but both still spiral out into constellations of experience; it is precisely the depth of this journey into the personal that allows it to expand into the universal. Its fractured narratives – the two sides, titled 'Hounds of Love' and 'The Ninth Wave' , the latter of which itself forms a kind of conceptual sequence narrated by the half-consciousness of a drowning woman, a gloriously strange counterpart to the hit parade of the first – together form an oblique totality more comparable to a feminist Waste Land than most pop.

It represents, indeed, a point where the language of pop exceeds its prosaic, everyday use and enters the realm of poetry. The syn-drums, throbbing electronics, borderline-OTT guitar solos and soaring vocals that marred so many mid-80s power-ballads reappear throughout – made alien, as if heard for the first time. So it is that opener and No. 1 single 'Running Up That Hill', beginning from a synth-tone like cold dawn breaking and processional drum-machine, spirals into ecstatic throes like the universe opening up overhead, just as does the euphoric 'Big Sky'. The title-track feeds Angela Carter through New Pop, accessing a feminine sexuality at once assertive and naïve, afraid of its own power, seemingly excavated from folk-memory; Bush bursts, at the whiplash of strings and percussion, into glossolalia – “a Dadaist postscript to 'Reynard The Fox'”, as Marcello Carlin puts it. The album plunges further into Freudian psychodrama with the disturbing 'Mother Stands For Comfort' (Joy Division's 'I Remember Nothing' remade as a domestic drama), and the graceful, controlled surge of 'Cloudbusting'.

'The Ninth Wave' follows like a long plunge in icy water, a disappearance into the other world promised by the first side, anticipating all of pop's future potential languages in one glorious conglomeration – and, indeed, outdoing most 'experimental' music of the next twenty years in daring and strangeness. Bush had received, through Peter Gabriel, a Fairlight sampler, then the technological cutting-edge, used the previous year to disorientating effect on Art of Noise's 'Close (To The Edit)' - resulting in the sampled voices, Morse code bleeps, cut-up vocals and breakbeats threaded throughout 'The Ninth Wave', anticipating, by a number of years, the sampledelic hip-hop of Paul's Boutique and the Bomb Squad's Public Enemy productions. 'Waking The Witch' feeds disco and electro through the cut-up of William Burroughs and John Cage; 'Watching You Without Me' presages both the scarred and skipping melodies of Fennesz' Endless Summer and the R&Bollywood trend of the early 00s. But there's nothing drily technical about its jouissance: this purgatorial drama yielding to the undeniable blood-rush of 'Jig of Life' and the summer-morning spryness of 'The Morning Fog' feels like rebirth, like the beginning of a future – for her, for us all.

There is far more here than can be encapsulated in this space – and this is, perhaps, exactly what has allowed the album to stand alone, outstripping all of Bush's progeny in advance. The media has finally opened up to female artists – but only a certain kind, yr Florences and Marinas, 'eccentric', 'passionate', still happy to play the enigmatic (and ultimately subordinate) female Other, all bastardising the language coined here 25 years ago. Michael Bracewell's condescending description of Bush as “pop's... mad girl in the attic” makes clear the problem she presents: a female artist so excessively, effortlessly inventive, so brazenly open and complex in her explorations of dream, memory and sexuality, so ruthlessly ahead of the game, can only make the prissy little boys of critic-land afraid. This album is everything we still need, and so much more.

34. Decade's End

Director's cut version of a piece written for the final issue of The Boar of 2009, and hence the decade, listing our top ten records of the 00s. It is, as acknowledged, both incomplete and over-complete, for the obvious reasons. To get a little perspective: the main list, devised by Dave Toulson, had Manic Street Preachers' Journal For Plague Lovers as its number one. This list was the only one to include any albums by hip-hop artists, or indeed any non-white artists. Aside from Jess Colman's inclusion of Belle & Sebastian's Dear Catastrophe Waitress in a number one slot, this was the only one to include any work by female musicians. That gives you an idea what students listen to these days.

To get everything upfront: this list is redundant. Not enough dust has settled even since the beginning of the decade to make sense of ten years marked by perhaps the most fevered processes of cultural expansion and proliferation the world has yet seen. The increasingly obvious collapse of Britain's old pop media – radio, newspapers, magazines and the monoliths of the corporate pop industry – in the face of the internet has eroded the old models of how we listen, how we consume and love records. Even the CD format, except for small pockets of bloody-minded opposition, manifested as lavish packaging, seems to have its days numbered. There is now far too much music being released every year for anyone, fan or professional critic, to get a handle on it all. Looking at an entire decade, you can fucking forget it - I haven't even heard the most of the records that made most other critics' top 10s, the readymade elect. Lists, ranking and comprehension are for the Nick Hornbys of this world now. Consensus, in a universe of listeners atomised onto their own islands of taste, must be manufactured.

Perhaps the closest thing to a genuinely popular, zeitgeist-reflecting – and, not coincidentally, avant-garde – music was the astonishing renaissance of hip-hop and R&B that accompanied the end millennium: ruthlessly capitalist, relentlessly neophilic, rhizomatically spawning new and alien forms. There were Timbaland's productions, of which his collaborations with Missy Elliot on 'Get Yr Freak On' and the accompanying album Miss E... So Addictive, were the pinnacle; Outkast's psychedelic masterpiece Stankonia, the most feverishly inventive product of the Dirty South; the stoned high-low art absurdism of Madvillain's Madvillainy (Tristan Tzara in a hustler get-up); Cannibal Ox's book of revelations, The Cold Vein; the long-awaited Hell Hath No Fury, on which The Neptunes' production and Pusha T and Malice's oiled and vicious flows meshed like V8 innards; the genesis of grime in London, bent into extraordinary shapes by the artistic will of Dizzee Rascal on Boy In Da Corner; the purest flowering of Kanye West's pop talent in the form of Late Registration.

No surprise that indie simply couldn't compete with this overcharged germination, going, for the most part, into an ever-worsening slough of aesthetic conservatism and emotional infantilism. Where it chose to engage with these artificial intoxications, it produced the shimmering, Platonic dream-pop ideal of Panda Bear's Person Pitch, and Richard Youngs' suite of digital incantations The Naive Shaman – ecstatic accesses to the heart of nature, through the dreamworld of technology.

Shadowing this excitement, in a decade riven by disaster – 9/11, the Iraq War, the market crash – has been a sense of grief, dissolution and trauma, exemplified by Burial's Untrue – the rave burnt out into a world of shadows haunted by the memories of love, the spectral jungle of his first album hollowed-out to a translucent perfection. Coil's ...And The Ambulance Died In His Arms, recorded at their 2003 ATP performance, shortly before the death of frontman Jhonn Balance, was the aching, haunting, end to one of the most brilliant bodies of work of the 20^th century. Forbidding, but gripping this listener like barbed wire: the apocalyptic wasteland of Godspeed You Black Emperor!'s Lift Yr Skinny Fists Like Antennas To Heaven sprawled over the first half of the decade, while The Drift, Scott Walker's first album in more than 10 years, appeared as the most fully-formed, profound and insurmountable artefact of this decade.

What of all this will last? Try me again in 2020.

33. Evangelista

Originally published in the university newspaper, The Boar.

Evangelista – Prince of Truth (Constellation)

Carla Bozulich's muse is deadly: with every release since 2006's disturbing, fractured Evangelista, the record that gave its name to the project she's since piloted, it's assumed a more ferocious, more sulphurous presence. Last year's Hello Voyager intensified its electrified slow-burn into a penetratingly brilliant, fraught record – art-punk cowed with the quietness of exhausted desperation, in ragged structures fringed with noise, finally collapsing into the existential crisis of the long closing title track. Prince of Truth opens with just as stunning a tremor: minutes of crunching concréte noise congeals into an atmosphere electric with dread, Bozulich's desperate and distorted vocal burning in the air.

It comes as no surprise that former Godspeed You Black Emperor! guitarist Efrim Menuck was responsible for the record's production, at the band's Hotel2Tango studio in Montreal: each of these seven songs possesses the ambition, the sense of charged liminality, the ambivalent relationship with melody and structure, and the Gothic light and dark of that band's best work, without the 20-minutes passages of nothing-very-much. Funnelled into each is Bozulich's own 25-year background in art-punk projects like Geraldine Fibbers and Ethel Meatplow and the talents of a host of experimental-rock players, including Xiu Xiu drummer Ches Smith, the brilliantly responsive bass of Tara Barnes, and guitarist Nels Cline, last heard providing the kick to the last few Wilco albums.

That the band should be so utterly congruent with the thrust of Bozulich's singular and intense performances, on an album of such strange contrasts, is itself remarkable. They seem to work as one emotional entity, whether on 'I Lay There In Front of Me Covered In Ice' – a ballad that's also a Gothic story, where organ and piano barely disturb its frozen-pond stasis – or 'You Are A Jaguar', an emotional detonation-zone covered with sheets of cratered noise, a maelstrom of smashing drums, Bozulich's vocal jumping from fragile whispers to a strangled scream. The record's end balances its opening: 10-minute closer 'On The Captain's Side' slowly closes in on you in a drift of accordion and quietly lowering electronic noise like a black fog at sea. The demonic persona Bozulich has channelled throughout – the Baphomet-horned ouroboros of a woman that adorns the inner sleeve – cedes to a kind of peace: “with bitter tears, I float in mourning / I float in the sea alone”. Drift with her.

32. Flaming Lips

Published in The Boar, Warwick University's student newspaper, Vol. 33 Iss. 3.

The Flaming Lips - Embryonic (Warner Brothers)

As they should, they did it different. The Flaming Lips' latest is a turn away from the increasingly glossy symphonic-pop of their post-Soft Bulletin work, but neither is it a turn back to their previous identity as acid-punks. Their least conventional work since 1997's 4CD Zaireeka! – a sprawling, 70-minute panoply of (largely successful) experiments, an unashamedly ambitious prog splurge, even down to its Hipgnosis-goes-photomontage cover-art – but also, undoubtedly, a full-burn hit to the pleasure-centres. It is that now-rare, marvellous thing – a Flaming Lips album you actually remember after it finishes.

From the first spurts of tearing feedback and metallic synths that open 'Convinced of the Hex', immediately underpinned by a Bonham-via-Mantronix drum-pattern from Kliph Scurlock, you know this is something very different. The huge virtuosity that marked the rococo layer-cake productions of their last few albums is fed into making bewildering sprays of psychedelic fireworks, more achieved, if with perhaps less ragged verve, than their coarse and brilliant early work. Scattered throughout are irresistible thrash-out moments – instrumental freak-outs 'Aquarius Sabotage', 'Worm Mountain', like a burial mound of fuzz-boxes landing on top of you – but also strange, narcotic drifts – the suspended longing of 'Evil', 'I Can Be A Frog's whimsical jaunt, Karen O cackling unsettlingly in the background, 'Virgo Self-Esteem Broadcast' like a gathering of Eno's Music For Airports choirs in the crackling aether. But in none of these explorations does their pop touch ever disappear: even the most mind-burning sonic pile-ups are arranged with the care of a gardener. Wayne Coyne's vocodered whisper on combination space-fable/love-song (the best kind) 'The Impulse' might as well be Jeff Lynne on 'Mr. Blue Sky'; the weirdness of his intergalactic evangelist turn on 'Sagittarius Silver Announcement' is only underscored by the conventionally ascending chorus, bathed in white light from the synths. And even this, as with so many of these songs, is refracted through a production haze quite unlike most rock albums – part-in-the-red studio-jam, part-interstellar-transmission, swimming in FX. When they finally hit spirally-ascending closer 'Watch The Planets', you've no choice but to take them at their word: it's cosmic.

The critics had it that The Soft Bulletin marked the moment the Lips passed into maturity. They may have, now, to think again. Coyne may croon “I wish I could go back/Go back in time”, but this will leave you with the tang of the future on yr tongue.