Let’s face it, tinnitus is just another encouraging sign that you’ve really enjoyed your life (other positive signs are bad teeth and a negative bank balance) instead of having spent it swathed in bubble wrap and surrounded by health and safety officials. In fact, if I’m going to be honest, it seems that people these days are spending far too much time fussing over whether their earplugs are sitting at the right angle, and checking decibel levels at gigs, before adjusting themselves to a suitably quiet distance from the speakers.
Japandroids’ critically fawned over “Post Nothing” is the complete antithesis of this, which is partly why I placed them at #16 in my inevitable “Albums of 2009” list. Made their year, I heard. Thank the lords, then, that similarly adored Liverpool tastemakers Evol & Meshuggy have lured Japandroids over from their native Canada to recklessly abuse the cochleae* of Liverpool’s music lovers this Saturday.
You can buy tickets here, or, for those of you with little money, no conscience, or who simple enjoy free stuff, we are giving away a ticket for the gig at Korova. All you need to do to win is follow us on our brand new twitter and re-tweet the few words we put down about Japandroids. We’ll then pick a random winner and get in touch with you. *We should probably point out in the interests of the naive that going to this gig is not going to damage your ability to hear noises with your ears.
Japandroids fans will also be pleased to hear that the band are going to be hitting the studio in the short gaps on their current tour and releasing a slew of unreleased Japandroids songs on 7”. The first in this series is “Art Czars”, which you can hear above and buy here.
Condensing an entire year of music that you’ve listened to is an absolutely impossible task. And yet, it’s so tempting to gaze at the year that hasn’t even gone and attempt to squash it all into one post. At the same time, end of year lists are exceptionally popular, and yet all anyone seems to do is complain about them. “What the hell? I was expecting your top 50 to be exactly the same as mine!”. Which, blatantly, is a ridiculous way to look at things. Personally, I think that end of year lists are more than a romantic glance back at a year, they’re simply the best way to introduce people to music that they might have missed. I guess that it’s also a great way to stimulate debate about albums, and an interesting way to think about the ways that we find music. For example, I had something of an epiphany back in 2007 when everyone’s end of year lists made me realise that I had better start using blogs to find music and the NME only for mopping up spilt coffee.
Most of all, though, we’re all guilty of using end of year lists as a sort of test. How many of my favourite albums are there? All I can ask is that you take into account that I am not saying that these are not the best albums of 2009. They are my favourite albums of 2009, nothing more. I’m sure you’ll disagree, and I’d love to hear your thoughts below. However, at the end of the day, I couldn’t allow myself to be anything less than 100% honest. These lists aren’t the place for posturing or flexing your musical muscles; the only question I asked myself when ordering these incredible albums was which one I liked more. At the end of the day, the whole compiling of end of year lists process is very time consuming and complicated, but it really shouldn’t be anything more complex than a question of which albums you liked the most. And that is all I intended this to be, so please let me hear your thoughts and which albums I missed that would be on your list, but all I can say is that I am absolutely and completely correct, because these are 1/2 of my 27 favourite albums of 2009: (read the quite epic second half here)
“She wears white six days a week… And if you’re lucky, on the seventh day, she’ll wear nothing”
Artist: Japandroids
Album: Post Nothing
For Fans Of: Nihilism, music conceived in a garage, many terrible noises coming together to form a great musical tapestry, No Age, White Denim, feeling like a pariah, Pitchfork, using youth as an excuse for being foolish.
