Albums of the year

My picks for my favorite albums this year:

Blue Scholars
Bayani

This album has been rocking my world. Really lovely, conscious, thoughtful hip-hop. The song Morning of America is my favorite of the year - alas can't find it online for the link. Enjoy however Back Home, a powerful if a little on-the-nose anthem, NorthbyNorthwest, a delightful self-introduction and Ordinary Guys, a cute alternative to aggrandizement. Their first album is great, too.


Brother Ali
The Undisputed Truth

Incredible album for the albino rapper - Truth Is, sadly bleeped, makes me feel like I'm already free. I also love Daylight and his intro to Uncle Sam Goddamn quotes Nina Simone's classic line "this is a show tune, but the show hasn't been written for it... yet" and that made me very happy.


The White Stripes
Icky Thump

You already know about this one, unless, you know, you don't rock. Rag and Bone is my favorite track.

The Cat Empire
So Many Nights

Great third (and a half) album from The Cats. No Longer There is a beautiful song, Fishes is up there with their classic good time tunes like Hello Hello, but for me the best track is The Darkness, which is clearly Harry-led and shows the influence of his work on the Jackson Jackson album. I need to figure out how to host mp3s.

Feist
The Reminder

Talking of triumphant Nina Simone covers. Feist makes me happy.


Bruce Springsteen
Magic

Girls in Their Summer Clothes, to blatantly steal from the Onion Avclub, is the best Magnetic Fields song Bruce ever wrote. And Living in the Future stops me fretting about all this happening yet. His live in Belfast album, also out this year is also good news, it's all his classics but redone in the Seeger Sessions folk style.

We Love You

Here's what I love. I love bubblegum punk. It's not a very big genre. It seems to be entirely girl bands (boys just don't get the aesthetic). Ok, so I can only think of two bubblegum punk bands. One is The Rondelles. The other is Helen Love. She's from wales.

The song is "We Love You" and it's super awesome. It's from the album "Radio Hits Vol 2." You can hear it on her myspace

This song is all about the tude. It's about making your own music with your friends and it being awesome because you love music and you don't give a fuck. Incidentally, I discovered Helen Love while I was on a wiki search for the origin of the phrase 'girl power.' Helen Love coined it, before Shampoo even. Helen has a song about this boy who beats up on her friend and how her and all her friends are going to go kick the shit out of him. It's called "beat him up" because when you are punk, you don't have to be subtle (enjoy the link to the serge gainsbourg original).

On a only vaguely related note (girl power via the spice girls), I found out Simon Cowell and Simon Fuller are not the same person, despite both being British and associated with American idol and good at picking out generically-pretty-voiced-and-looking girls who will make lots of money selling mediocre albums. And they're both called Simon. I digress, and in a dramatically unpunk-rock way. I told you boys didn't get it.

Anyhow, We Love You. It's great, Julie has more fizz than a bottle of tizer, and it's my song of the week.

Lollipop

I like things that are gay and bouncy, and this tune by Mika is both.

I don't have much to say about this song except that Mika is real pretty and that also I like the part where the kid sings the "I went walking with my mama one day" verse. The whole album - life in cartoon motion, is a good one although I rarely listen to more than the first two tracks any more (this and Grace Kelly). Add Mika to the list of chirpy pop coming out of the UK recently, like Lily Allen and The Pippettes. Must be some kinda spirit of doo-wop thing going around.

This brings the number of songs which are great fun and have lollipop in the title to 3:
My Boy Lollipop by Millie Small

Lollipop by the Chordettes


So for being fun, gay, pretty, bouncy and called 'lollipop,' lollipop was the tune of a couple of weeks ago.