50
Lair of the Minotaur
The Ultimate Destroyer
Southern Lord
Metal hath no fury like death done well. People will tell you overly fussy and ineffectual complexities of Mastodon and the 'Matt Pike so it must be amazing' High On Fire are the hipster bands with the riffs, but compared to the 'Lair, that simply isn't so and few bands laid down the metal law with as much impeccable fury as The Ultimate Destroyer.

49
Xasthur
Subliminal Genocide
Hydra Head
A move to a major label and the purists cried foul but it didn't stop Malefic from creating another amazingly atmospheric, skin-crawlingly close and complex album. A beautifully bleak antithesis to the veneer of beauty surrounding him. No sun shines and no trees grow in this Californian's world.

48
Moss
Cthonic Rites
Aurora Borealis
Southampton's crushing black noise doom outfit Moss coughed up an epic and airlessly dense monolith of anti-music. Seriously heavy and seriously dark, this sucked the soul right out of all the other filthy drone around it.

47
Akitsa
La Grande Infamie
Christhunt Productions
High-pitched Canadian shrieking from this Quebec band of one, Akitsa created their most impious work to date. Insistently hooky riffs that smeared fuzz fucked rock and roll all over the black metal template.

46
Bonnie 'Prince' Billy
The Letting Go
Palace/Drag City
After the underwhelming Superwolf and a film cameo in Junebug , Will Oldham returned to his best sombre form with female vocal embellishments and flourishes of optimistic light, a shining counterpoint to the unremittingly bleak reverie of I See A Darkness.

45
Services
Your Desire Is My Business
A Touch of Class Recordings
Aggressive guitar ravaged dance-floor beats with some of the best non-sequitur sloganeering of the year, this beat mash-ups acts like Girl talk at their own game fusing hip-hop and metal into a amphetamine fuelled kaleidoscope of chaos. Who's got the chops?!

44
The Gossip
Standing In The Way Of Control
Kill Rock Stars
Righteous soul-punk disco strut that makes the hair on the back of my neck stand up, with a couple of slow-burners to give it some classy depth. The vocals of Beth Ditto were a high point of the year despite their ubiquity .. simply a measure of how much they can withstand and how much they can deliver.

43
Tussle
Telescope Mind
Smalltown Supersound
This was the year Krautrock returned to form and Tussle locked low-slung grooves to piston hard percussion like it was about to go out of fashion. Which it probably will next year.


42
Built to Spill
You In Reverse
Warner Bros.
This was also the year that I came to appreciate certain kinds of nasal American college rock (for my sins), and Built To Spill made two of the most sky-blazing songs of the year in 'Goin' Against Your Mind' and 'Mess With Time'; both epic euphoric surges of strung out guitar that bound the cosmic milieu of an album intent of shirking conventional wisdom.

41
Jarvis
Jarvis
Rough Trade
And it was the year that Jarvis came back to us. He said he would be gone for good but he just couldn't keep away. Thank you Lord. An album of big sounding tunes with intimate details and acerbic one-liners, Jarvis continues to be the king of the cutting retort. Long may he reign.


40
Fujiya & Miyagi
Transparent Things
Tirk/Inertia
Brighton based krautrockers delivered an album of consummate canned Neu! stylings with each track a space age lazer beam of direct dance rock. Far out and way cool like it was assembled on some intergalactic operating table by the most deft and delicate handed of cosmic surgeons.

39
Blut aus Nord
MoRT
Candlelight
Metamorphosis of Realistic Theories is an impossibly bleak album from a band who continue their descent into ever deeper forms of alienating black metal. Producing an album of mind bending sounds and gruelingly inhospitable atmospheres that made for a dense and deeply unsettling listen Blut Aus Nord stand apart from anyone you'd attempt comparison to.

38
Tunng
Comments Of The Inner Chorus
Full Time Hobby
An album of magical feats and dark desires and it often used one to achieve the other; an album that evokes a subtle melancholic prettiness with enigmatic samples and a seamless blend of percussion and electronic elements. This was the sound of that oft-referenced folktronica taking on a mystic form to produce something beautiful.

37
Les Georges Leningrad
Sangue Pro
Tomlab
When the self-styled petro-chemical rockers kicked up a gear and left the discordant abrasion of Black Eskimo to reach further into their own demented world of leathery silhouettes and glittering dust they created one of the most violently surreal records of the year and one that seared it's impression on me like burnt rubber tread across my head.

36
Holy Shit
Stranded At Two Harbors
Uunited Acoustic Record Company
Ariel Pink and Matt Fishbeck's four-years-in-the-making album must have taken a whole lot of hash to fug it up to the narcotic haze it finds itself drifting in. A restless album that swung from Vapours inhaled kimono-core to elegant swooning as easily as I succumbed to its charms.

35
The Big Sleep
Son Of Tiger
French Kiss
These New Yorkers rocked out in huge fat chunks of flying fur, teeth and claws in wonderfully realised songs that pushed the noise-rock barrier out into the strung-out underground as much as they pushed it onto the dancefloor. One for listening to on the sofa and getting your head wrecked too and you don't get too many of those that will last you all year.

34
Vetiver
To Find Me Gone
FatCat
FatCat can really do no wrong and with Devendra's friends they found a dusty road movie of an album that was all wide open vistas by day and close campfire camaraderie by night. An album that evoked the feeling of sleeping out under the stars as the Earth slowly rolls around.

33
OOIOO
Taiga
Thrill Jockey
Yoshimi Pee-Wee's troupe of girl drummers tightened their circle and beat out rhythms of impenetrable speed , agility and out and out euphoria. To my mind, they were the catalyst for Eye to drop the Bore and add the Vroom to the Boredoms. Taiga was the album that encapsulated that shift in mesmerizing detail.

32
Kirb And Chris
Niggaz And White Girlz
Rapitalism
What's this? A concept album about hip-hop's relationship with white girlz? Black girls aint got shit on white ones you say? Kirb and Chris pretty much close the case with their essential party album that did it like it was err…1985? Yup. Backing their raps and skits to The Cure, The Smiths, Talking Heads and Berlin, Kirb and Chris made their way through a load of skinny white ass and embedded themselves into my head. Some kind of freakin' genius, for sure.

31
The Skygreen Leopards
Disciples Of California
Jagjaguwar
A sumptuous, spellbinding slacker folk album from a label that, like FatCat, are unopposed in the consistency of their releases. The Skygreen Leopards have been building up to this moment and it captures that balmy summer spirit like sunshine in a bottle, ready to be let out in the depths of winter and release it's burning glow into the coldest corners and melt it all away.

30
Heresi
Psalm II - Infusco Ignis
Total Holocaust
Bettering last years Psalm I by a long way, Swedish one man legion Skamfer's solo outfit brought black and death metal toward a perfect unison of groove, riff and atmosphere that bore an enormous weight along fluid structures. Five tracks that continue the sonic tradition begun by Mayhem, this album smoldered and burned fiercely and mercilessly.


29
Candy Bars
On Cutting Ti-Gers in Half and Understanding Narravation
New Granada
An orchestral monument to pop music that sounds absolutely enormous and as limitless in interpretation as its title suggests. Candy Bars debut album brought with it a lush world of blurred images and words like the world from the window of a train. Strain focus and fixate on distant points and the details emerge, or lay passive and let it rush past in an effervescent flurry of colour and sound.

28
Coughs
Secret Passage
Load
Six piece band of three boys and three girls battering the shit out of bass, strings, drums and brass in an utterly focused form of chaos that was intimidating on first listen and several months later still hasn't yielded its assault. Coughs are rumoured to have split up which is a tragedy but testament to the adage live fast die young, and this band fucking fly.

27
The Research
Breaking Up
At Large
Homespun cheap as chips casiotone break-up songs with witty barbs and kettle's on comfort, styled by a brutal commitment to emotional honesty, Russell's lyrics described both the magical moments in romance with lines like "I bet if we kissed the city would plunge into darkness" and the hopeless "I love you, but I'm scared I'll fuck it up." Never better said all year.

26
Islands
Return To The Sea
Equator
Formed from Diamonds and Unicorns members, this band and album more than equaled the sum of their parts, it bettered them by making a record that ventured far into uncharted realms of modern psychedelia. It also contained probably the best song title of the year in 'Don't Call Me Whitney, Bobby'

25
wovoka
II
Holy Room
The years greatest psychedelic, sun-burned free abstract forest folk record surely came from Wovoka, though the chances of many hearing it were limited by its 100 cd run. Probably the biggest crime of the year was to deny more people these ramshackle, tribal ragas, their skeletal frames like trees against the blue night, hunched figures fluttering rhythmic shuffling fingers across string, wood and skin. A rare album of super laid back acoustic hypnotics.

24
Midlake
The Trials Of Van Occupanther
Bella Union
In an album set in the 1890s with a protagonist stuck on the outside and struggling to deal with the disquieting changes in the simple life around him, Midlake produced a work of gossamer beauty and hearty tunes that stuck in my head for months, especially the title track and its' eerie foreboding chorus. An ancient pastoral album with a narrative that leads you through it hand-in-hand like a Sunday stroll through a flower carpeted forest.

23
Grizzly Bear
Yellow House
Warp
From the delicate swelling intro to the abrupt end, grizzly Bear were in full control of a masterpiece of modern pop orchestration. Yellow House is a beautifully rendered, compelling album that, like shafts of light cutting into the darkened room on the cover, is the aural equivalent of that attic full of dusty junk that takes years to search through and uncovers gleaming treasures on every visit.

22
Belong
October Language
CarPark
October Language is an album drawn from shades of blinding white; of multi-coloured fireworks and steaming ice-lands of untouched beauty. Some parts of this record shift and crack open, hissing gas and boiling water frothing onto the frigid surface, revealing the kind of awe inspiring majesty you always knew sound was capable of achieving.

21
Yo La Tengo
I Am Not Afraid Of You And I Will Beat Your Ass
Matador
I was afraid of this album at first. Not because of the indier than thou in the playground title, but because the last couple of albums, after their career peak of And Nothing Turned Itself Inside Out were wholly disappointing. IANAOYAIWBYA is a totally different beast to Nothing… and the churning velvet's headfucks contained within it sound more like the precocious snot spitting of teenagers, not the product of a couple who've been married for twenty five years. By rights, they should be settling into slippers and sign posting their lives with remortgages and grandchildren, not unleashing this kind of raw power on our unsuspecting asses.

20
Akron Family
Meek Warrior
Young God
Waves of cacophonous distortion and serene hypnotics are plucked from strings, drums patter out accompaniments or lead the charges in rumbling storms while multi-part harmonies soar from ethereal laments to Gregorian chanting. Meek Warrior continues from the greatest parts of their joint album with Angels Of Light from last year and pushes this stellar band skywards, further out into the cosmos of headshaking tribal fire gatherings.

19
Superqueens
Royal Shit
Supermarket Records
The Royal We was not expecting such a forcefully potent follow up to 2004's exceptional Cheap Shots but Royal Shit has the duo of Michael Conroy and Bruce Magill on finest rhetoric spewing, bile busting form, releasing the album from their own label. Propping up Conroy's caustic, confrontational yet hazily soporific flow are stronger beats with more complex song structures building some real headnodders.

18
Catfish Haven
Please Come Back
Secretly Canadian
This may be the mini-album that preceded the full length Tell Me later in the year, but it is in this that the better trailer park blues hollered skronk can be found. The southern soul grooved hardest on tracks like 'Please Come Back' and 'You Can Have Me', both indicative of the earnestness that posses this band, and they stand as a testament to the breadth garage rock can travel.

17
Wolfmangler
Dwelling In A Dead Raven For The Glory Of Crucified Wolves
Aurora Borealis
What Moss began with Cthonic Rites Wolfmangler finished and tore to shreds, rolling round in the carcass and decaying mulch. A sickeningly harrowing listen, horrifying in the scale of the depths sound can sink to and as charismatically bleak as an album can be draping itself in cobwebs, heralding the snap of twigs, distant horns and howls from the deep. Wolfmangler pitch doom perfectly into the yawning abyss that every soul has been taught to fear. This is why you shouldn't get lost in the woods.


16
Milanese
Extend
Planet Mu
Volume. It's a dangerous tool. This is one album that will make you lose your bowels functions quicker than you can say baile funk. The deepest bass quaking furrows carve gorges for some of the dankest urban beats this year has dropped. Extend builds it's cityscape from dark electronics, dancehall, jungle and grime and everything from the depth-charge terrorism of 'Mr. Bad News'to the white out malice of 'Tony Sombrero'. Broadsheets that know shit will tell you that Burial has changed the way dubstep will continue. Fuck that.


15
Heartless Bastards
All This Time
Fat Possum
Between Stairs and Elevators, the bastards 2004 album and All This Time, something sesmic must have shifted. The Ohio three-piece sound as if there are twice as many of them in the studio, the same yearning billowing songs are there but they have been embellished with layers of lush feral guitars and the lungs of Erika Wennerstrom have been honed to a silken roar. This is why Beth Ditto's band aren't higher up my list.

14
TV on the Radio
Return To Cookie Mountain
Interscope
The coffee table album of '06 that was so cool to name drop probably confused the shit out of those that patted their own backs for mentioning it over the cheese board, yet 'Wolf Like Me' probably made my year as it's lycanthropic drone struggled to contain it's beastly subconscious and 'I Was A Lover' and 'Blues From Down Here' made me want to dance in all directions at once. Simply put, as imaginative as great albums should be.

13
Oneida
Happy New Year
Jagjaguwar
Retrogressive analogue workshop or forward looking masters of the past? If opinion was divided over Oneida's Happy New Year, then it was due in most part to their reductionist musical approach compared to last year's The Wedding which sprawled further across the psychedelic landscape, compared to the way Happy New Year begins softly softly before locking itself down into the deeply grooved mindset of a band pulling world-worn sounds from well-worn vintage equipment. No shame in that at all.

12
Goliath Bird Eater
Blood Venus
NotNotFun
One look at the sprawling tentacles of that red alien foetus thing on the cover and you just knew this was an album by freaks for freaks, and a whole lot of bassy six-string freaking goes down too. Two pitch-black long-haird dudes who worship at the twin altars of the beat and the riff, galloping towards the 4 Horsemen to meet them head on in an apocalyptic showdown that kicked up a duststorm of noise. There is nothing else between the listener and this band except sheer volume.

11
Agalloch
Ashes Against The Grain
The End
Crossing musical boundaries in the same way as TV On The Radio and Milanese (Though not the same ones, of course), Agalloch seen as some kind of scene leaders in the gradually developing Grey Metal scene; a term which has yet to fully justify itself other than a reference to a wintery palate of sounds and the title of the bands Grey ep itself. Agalloch took the pagan Viking elements of black metal, the atmospheres and structures from post-rock and the direct brutality of death metal to create an epic production of sublimely mastered songs to confound all expectations.

10
Drudkh
Blood In Our Wells
Supernal Music
This Ukranian bands strain of folk-centric black metal has been steadily developing over the last few albums and they even managed to release two this year. Latterly, Songs of Grief and Solitude, an ancient sounding traditional eastern European folk album of indigenous instruments and meter, though it was Blood In Our Wells that truly captivated with it's mix of burnt out drone melting over epic scales encompassing a sprawling sepia tinged vision that had majesty deeply embedded in it's rustic core.

09
The Goslings
Grandeur Of Hair
Archive Recordings
Last year's Between the Dead was a thick serpentine album of dense noise smothering steel cabled songs. Grandeur of Hair pushed that noise closer together, shoring up reserves of doom-laden slow motion riffs that uncoiled through foggy feedback, casting long shadows of songs across thick-boned skeletal frames. Beneath the swirling clouds lay immense shapes as if this band were impertinently hiding perfection beneath a veil that demanded the attention it took to reveal them.

08
Wolf Eyes
Human Animal
SubPop
Like microbial bacteria colonising the charred remains of Burned Mind, Human Animal slowly takes it's time to develop into the ferocious predator Wolf eyes are. This record patiently circles the listener, snapping at its ears and wearing it down before unleashing the full crashing force of its not fetid maw, decimating everything in its path in a relentless avalanche of splintering bone and tearing flesh. Far more measured and far more powerful for it, this was feral noise with an instinctive purpose.

07
Extinction
Down Below The Fog
Todestrieb
UK black metal just isn't getting the same attention as its US counterparts for reasons completely unbeknownst to me. While Xasthur and Leviathan weave their labyrinthine records from an ethereal haze, Crebain and Nachtmystium drop their shoulder, bare their claws and go for the jugular, British bands like Axis Of Perdition, Hateful Abandon and Extinction do exactly the same things to undeservedly less exposure. Extinction draw their sound from the misty lowlands and attack under cover of an impenetrable fog. The album most aptly titled this year, Down Below The Fog is the noisiest chilling black metal to meet these ears all year, coming on like a solid wall of malevolence, a churning maelstrom with the grace to slow itself into eerie ambience and suffocating atmospheric passages. A record to truly experience.

06
The Young Knives
Voices Of Animals And Men
Transgressive
Bizarrely publicized by Transgressive as the Young Knives debut album despite 2002's The Young Knives…Are Dead on Shifty Disco which wasn't that bad, come on. It even had heroic bassist House of Lords fully resplendent in the liner notes, so wool was pulled over my eyes, but still , the difference between that and their second is phenomenal enough to warrant a re-writing of the history books. Humorous, quick-witted enigmatic, catchy and urgent sounding there was only one indie band this year to hone everything down finer than the Knives. This didn't leave my stereo all summer and is still making me throw shapes to all its choruses, not least 'She's Attracted To' – probably the best song of the summer. When they dropped down a gear and swooned all over 'Another Hollow Line' and 'Loughborough Suicide' the results were captivating in the glorious way the best eccentric British pop can be. The Young Knives are well and truly alive.

05
Arctic Monkeys
Whatever People Say I Am, That's What I'm Not
Domino
So this is the indie album that had sharper darts than TYK. Hype. It's the dirtiest word in the English language, and almost always misused (Don't believe the hype? That's what hype actually means, fools). Was the frenzy surrounding the Arctic Monkeys (I don't even think the name is that bad either) really exaggerated and misleading? A deception? When the chorus of '…Dancefloor' breaks from the pause was it really not the most incinerating condescending double bluff you heard all year? The furious vitriol packed into 'Fake Tales of San Francisco' - How was I misled? The only people I really want to be listening to are the ones telling the world to "Get off the bandwagon and put down the handbook." That's the lyric of the year, and a sterling voice of reason.

04
Joanna Newsom
Ys
Drag City
Who would have thought that Steve Albini and Van Dyke Parks would ever work on the same album? And who would imagine the results to be so ambitiously beguiling. From the first harp stroke, Newsome had me with her impish charms and it will take the best exorcist in the business to release me from my rapture. With her strange personal mythology and references she has such an unreal take on reality that it's hard to believe she's talking about the same one the rest of us inhabit. Sure, she can go to the bottom of her garden and see fairies and we can't, but I can see them in music and hers is full of them. An album of shifting baroque movements, romantic sonnets, swaying stabbing ragas, caressed and attacked by a compelling vocal performance in one of the most unique records I have ever heard.

03
Negurã Bunget
Om
Code 666
Eastern Europe is producing some of the best music in metal, or across any genre for that matter. Two in my top ten for starters. Romania's Negura Bunget have created a record of painstaking detail it's a wonder that they managed it in just two years from their superb 'N Crugu Bradului album. This sounds like it has taken a lifetime to craft and is a work of enormous vision, an intricate landscape beautifully textured and realised in cinemascopic sound. From the slow heavily fuzzed build to the surly rocking surges of 'æsarul de Lumini' and 'Cunoa Terea TÄcutÄ' to the tribal breakdown of 'Norilor' out to the folk infused 'Hora Soarelui', this band display a complete control of their art and have a profound understanding of what they want to do with it on their own terms. Where others are happy to let others lead them Negura Bunget are out in the deep uncharted forests, forging new paths of their own.

02
Liars
Drums Not Dead
Mute
Liars have come a long way from their caustic artpunk beginnings of They Threw Us All In A Trench And Stuck A Monument On Top. Their previous album They Were Wrong, So We Drowned was conceptually based around witchcraft and its conjurous tracks were all cryptically potent spells but Drums Not Dead saw the band move to Berlin in an attempt to clear their minds and musical palette and it is a move which has served them very well. The result was an album charting the battle between Drum and Mountain that was almost the most mesmeric album of the year. The Drum tracks lurch and pound with the motorik energy imbued by the teutonic surroundings, dexterous and direct while the peaks and valleys of the atmospheric mountain tracks served as the counterpoint to the chaos. Live, Liars rank with the Boredoms as one of the most entrancing, transcendental bands on the planet and Drums Not Dead is a fittingly recorded document of their abilities.

01
Wolves in the Throne Room
Diadem Of 12 Stars
Vendulus
The ultimate black metal record of the year was also the ultimate album of the year. Wolves in The Throne room have created the first truly post-black metal record; one that is indebted to its forbears as much as it eclipses the original vision in its ability to reconceive and broaden the genre further. The Americans have beaten the Scandinavians at their own game and any rules that governed structure and form have been realigned. The four epic tracks of restlessly shifting atmospheric drone are accompanied by the guttural and histrionic growls and shrieks of Nathan, Luke and guest vocalist Dino Sommese though it is Jamie Myers beautiful feminine tones that sweep across 'Face in a Night Time Mirror part 1' and '(A Shimmering Radiance) Diadem of 12 Stars' that add the extra dimension missing from almost all black metal releases and are the one vital element that makes this album so special. A true force of nature that builds its tracks like Mogwai or Godspeed with a relentless hunger to create something new, this is a band whose flights of technical fancy and grinding segments produce songs that undulate like rivers, ghosting through the misty forests of the cover art. The essence of Black Metal has always been a rejection of wasteful peripheral materialism and distracting influences, of rejecting normalities and dogmatic instruction, of free spirits and the value of individual expression. The old order has been deposed. The wolves are in the throne room

Fri 1 Aug – Cardiff Big Weekend

The Big Weekend’s third day proved to be impressive with a great array of talent from around the country and closer to home. A fantastic crowd gathered in support of every band and some fantastic sets were seen and heard in the capital.

On first were the only bilingual band of the day – Frizbee from Ffestiniog. They played some fantastic upbeat rock and lead singer Ywain’s voice was typically, beautifully Welsh. They delivered great power for a three-piece with well-defined bass, creative guitar and enthusiastic drumming. They helpfully explained their song titles to the bemused but entertained crowd including their great finisher Creaduriaid Nosol (Night Creatures). Hopefully they will become rising stars in the largely underground Welsh language scene which bands like Super Furry Animals and Radio Luxembourg are part of. A fantastic start to the day.

Yoav was introduced as an eclectic mix of genres on one acoustic guitar, and as he sound-checked it was easy to see why. With an incredible ear for interesting sounds he drummed out a beat on his guitar whilst recording it and then played it back to create backing for yet another new beat. The sounds created from such a grassroots instrument sounded like something from a nightclub – and his chipped guitar showed scars of this enthusiasm and creativity. His voice was as layered as his guitar, stretching through different patterns and creating an incredibly powerful sound. All this from just a man and his guitar shows that even the simplest of sounds can be created into something complex. He even shone in his purely acoustic songs with fabulous song-writing skills. Yoav is an incredible, creative artist and was a great asset to the Big Weekend’s lineup.

With the hype and popularity surrounding new soul artists such as Amy Winehouse and Duffy, it was no surprise the Beth Rowley was greeted with enthusiasm. With a fantastic Bristolian voice, she sang melancholy tunes with a fantastic band of vintage instruments with the air of a speakeasy blues singer. Unlike other new soul singers, Beth Rowley seems to carry tradition on by singing in a recognisable way mixing gospel and blues with the newer sounds of soulful pop. She left the stage with hearts melted by her voice.

The front of the crowd had been thick with fans all morning for Go:Audio. In leaps and bounds, they have become an exasperating rock band with boy band status. They bounded onto the stage with incredible energy and unleashed a perfect set. Loyal fans in the front row sang every word. Each band member threw everything into their songs, bounding about the stage, singing and playing their hearts out. Although they played popular, powerful hits like “She Left Me” and “Made Up Stories”, they still acted like a new band encouraging all those who hadn’t heard of them to look at their MySpace. Overall, if you love the sound of synth and guitar in a pop setting or a boy band who aren’t as old as Take That – Go:Audio are for you. After their set fans mobbed the side of the stage to get anything they could signed by the band – and it’s only just beginning for them.

The Automatic spring excitedly onto stage and although a technical hitch mutes their microphones for the first song they still grin and laugh their way through their fan-favourites. Although their new album hasn’t been received as much as their debut, the hits are still there with songs like ‘Steve McQueen’. The crowd roar for ‘Monster’ and are granted it, then go crazy. They play other hits like ‘Raoul’ and ‘Recover’ and include newer tracks from upcoming album ‘This Is A Fix’. Besides their new guitarist, the band hails from Cowbridge in Cardiff and played the rock night Teen Spirit before becoming famous. The experienced group certainly know how to entertain the crowd after extensive worldwide touring and put on a fantastic show.

Glasvegas are on the edge of a huge wave of hype surrounding them. They come onto the stage with cheers from fans and launch into their first song. They influences stem from My Bloody Valentine and their music is that of trying to create a ‘wall of sound’. However, in this attempt of drilling guitars and bass on one long note with pounding drums they end up becoming increasingly boring. It seems inevitable that in trying to perfect such a distinctive powerful sound that the results are repetitive and mind numbing. Even the cutting Glaswegian accent of the singer and their energetic striding across the stage can’t save the band from their overall impact – yawn.

As it starts to get dark, The Young Knives are introduced and walk out with boyish charm and grins. With a name that MPs would be shocked by (although the name is based on a misunderstanding of “young knaves”, which was found by the band by flicking through a book) they unleash a fantastically energetic set. If you haven’t heard of The Young Knives, you’ve probably heard them anyway as their track ‘Weekends and Bleak Days’ with the catchy line ‘Hot summer, hot hot summer!” got the crowd singing along (despite the day’s rain). The Young Knives have an impressive sense of humour and an oddly different look to their sound. Their catchy riffs are reminiscent of 80s band Talking Heads and they’re on the verge of being punks, if only they were a little taller.

To end the day, the stage is bathed in dark red light and on strides Ash with distinctive flying V guitar and an awesome rock sound. They play to an ecstatic crowd, and are overly joyful themselves proclaiming that they must come back to Wales more often. They play ‘Burn Baby Burn’ as their second song and it builds from there, playing all the way through their albums including ‘Girl From Mars’, ‘Oh Yeah’, ‘Orpheus’ ‘Shining Light’ and their finale ‘Twilight of the Innocents’. They also played a new song ‘Ichiban’ which will be released as a single, as will all their new material due to the increasing presence of the internet in music. Singer and guitarist Tim Wheeler and drummer Rick McMurray struggled to make up for former guitarist and singer Charlotte Hatherly’s parts whilst ‘Darth’ Mark Hamilton on bass (named because of the band’s like of Star Wars – Tim notes the number of lightsabers on show in the crowd) is relaxed and wild with his playing. The rock anthems of Ash certainly entertain the crowd with full-blown mosh pits and crowdsurfing. If Ash keep up the classics, they have a long run ahead of them yet.

Oi.
Tenho que cortar o cabelo
e to gostando muito de ouvir Ladyhawke e The Young Knives.
Tchau insetos.

United Kingdom (23/30)
Kaiser Chiefs
The Futureheads
The Automatic
The Pigeon Detectives
The Young Knives
( Parva )
The Wombats
Lily Allen
The Fratellis
Hard-Fi
The Beatles
Keane
Arctic Monkeys
Blood Red Shoes
Franz Ferdinand
The Screening
Coldplay
The Enemy
Oasis
Klaxons
The Kooks
The Cribs
Razorlight

Denmark (1/30)
Dúné

Sweden (1/30)
The Hives

Canada (1/30)
Billy Talent

Germany (2/30)
Die Ärzte
Wir sind Helden

USA (2/30)
The Killers
The White Stripes

Anthony Liekins has a few good scripts on his site to check out your music taste etc. This is what the recommendation script came up with...

Take the 50 top artists in your musical profile, and create a cloud of the similar artists that are not in your top 50. The result is a collection of highly recommended artists for your personal profile. You can generate your own cloud (in BBCode) at http://anthony.liekens.net/pub/scripts/last.fm/recommend.php

My recommendations are

Air Traffic Arctic Monkeys Art Brut Athlete Babyshambles Bloc Party Blood Red Shoes Blur Boy Kill Boy Cajun Dance Party Dirty Pretty Things Elbow Feeder Foals Franz Ferdinand Guillemots Hard-Fi Hope of the States Idlewild Kaiser Chiefs Larrikin Love Little Man Tate Los Campesinos! Milburn Mystery Jets Oasis Pete and The Pirates Razorlight The Cooper Temple Clause The Coral The Courteeners The Cribs The Fratellis The Holloways The Kooks The Long Blondes The Music The National The Paddingtons The Pigeon Detectives The Rakes The Rifles The Subways The Sunshine Underground The Thrills The Wombats The Young Knives The Zutons We Are Scientists ¡Forward, Russia!

It's interesting to note that I've actually seen 29 of these bands, and not many of them are unknown!

On the show...

Hola BRYAN peeps!

Sean, Shelley and Charlie were all sat in the studio, tummies rumbling, when (from a mist of BBC radio presenters who had assembled sheep-like in the open centre to look at exciting things on a screen and listen to a man talking) BIG food arrived…yummy!

There was a first for radio, too. Gerald Jackson (he of the Monday night classic music programme) popped in to tell us about Morning Call. Sean had been filling desperately while he tried to work out what on earth he was on about when the legend that is Gerald Jackson swept into the studio like a knight on a white charger to put Sean on the right track again. He walked among us. He told us stuff... thank you.

After we had been fed, we made a naughty stereotypical joke (om om om…) but were just kiddin'! Just to clarify, Liverpudlians are NOT thieves, well some might be, but the vast majority exude love and kindness. So to confirm then, "Scouse-house" is not when you come back home and your most treasured possessions have been taken away in a stolen van. It's a kind of dance music.

The lovely students from Blackburn College found some real gems of people talking about stuff for us, 'I like Arctic Monkeys' and 'there's no where to go in town that cheap… and good', awww they're a nice lot, aren't they? We thank them for their efforts and look forward to more groovy radio stuff from them over the coming weeks.

REVELATIONS IN THE STUDIO! A technological stride in CD cases, the lever operation is almost organic (Ed: tut, tut sean!) the CD just pops up ready to play from the plastic case and Shelley shows off her brand new sexy nails.

Trappist, right, gave an interview, and in the cool fashion, discussed the subjects of the variations of the word Trappist you can get just by taking out letters, rap, trap…etc. There were others but BBC values prevented us from speaking of them. They also said some mega cool things like 'higgledy piggeldy' and 'we have twelve songs'. And oh how they chuckled when Sean played them Barry Manilow, that was until they succumbed to his charms (that's Barry's musical charms btw).

Shelley songs were all the rage today, somehow. She brings new, fresh, unsigned talent from all over the North West, and bloody good they were too! She played Burn by The Forge, which we all agreed sounded like California… although only Sean had been and he thinks Mama Cass IS California or she ate it... or something.

If you walk just past house 666, you get to an even more sinister place, and today we met Norman and Maureen, the residents of 668, they are the NEIGHBOUR OF THE BEAST. The elderly couple don't mind living next door to Beelzebub, although they do think the dead body's are occasionally a bit of an eyesore. Check out Steve Royle on a Saturday morning from nine o'clock on BBC Radio Lancashire for more of this kind of nonsense.

If YOU want to get involved just email us here at sean.mcginty@bbc.co.uk or myspace us! www.myspace.com/seanmcgintyintroducing

Adios until next time,

Charlie and Sean
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This week’s playlist...


Armrug – Car Trouble
Fox Cubs – You Never Learn
Kings of Leon – Sex on Fire (ooooohhh what a track!)
Morning Call – A Little Late
Sky Larkin – Fossil
I call shotgun - two tracks from one band
The Hot Melts – (I Wish I Had) Never Been In Love.
Cage the Elephant – In One Ear
The Forge – Burn
Sons and Daughters – This Gift
The Street Light – Just Give Me
The Glove Puppets – Wouldn't You
Trappist – Alcoletch, Derrogator, Terrortears
Sound Marshals – Where No One Knows Me
The Young Knives – Rumour Mill.
Johnny Foreigner – Eyes Wide Terrified
Music by Numbers – Static
A Silent Film - Two Days

On the show...

Maupa stop by the BBC open centre to talk about their latest activities. The band - who take their name from the Polish word for 'monkey' - also discuss their involvement on Jamie Holman's course at Blackburn Media College. Jamie, head of the college's media department, is also in the studio tonight to give us info about the college record label On Song records and the opportunities they provide to aspiring musicians.

Terry from 10 X Better music is another man with experience and huge insight into the music industry. He joins the discussion and puts forward his thoughts, especially with regard to band promotion and plugging. All in all, there's a lot of good advice for fledgling musical talents to listen to tonight.

We play a package of Leeds and Reading live tracks from the BBC Introducing stage including The Maybes?, The Joy Formidable, We Are Scientists, Attack! Attack!, Biffy Clyro and Tripwires.


What's Top of the Pops?

Lady GaGa feat. Akon & Colby O'Donis - Just Dance



Katy Perry still reigns supreme at number one on the UK chart, so it’s over to Canada this week where Perry capitulated after nine weeks at the top of the Hot 100 to Lady GaGa. Lady GaGa’s real name is Stefani Gabriella Germanotta and she’s decided to put on some lightning-bolt eye makeup and make her own career after serving time as a songwriter for the likes of Pussycat Dolls and Britney Spears. Her mantra? Just Dance. Does it matter that you can’t remember how your shirt got inside out, that you can’t remember the name of the club you’re in and that you can’t control your “playboy mouth”? Not if you’re body-popping along to the mechanoid beat it doesn’t.

Even though she claims she “can’t see straight anymore”, things are alright now that Lady GaGa is bustin’ her moves to this electronica bilge. The video features the Lady laying into the grooves at a lo-fi robo-disco houseparty with a bunch of other bedraggled ravers and wasters. Amongst the guests is producer Akon and upcoming R&B smoothie Colby O’Donis, though the most interesting of these strung-out synth freaks has got to be the dude crashed out on the toilet wearing a fluffy wolf head. This looks like a real drag of a party; it needs a giant mascot to shake things up.

There also appears to be someone who’s got a toy drum on their shoulders where their face should be. Should we be concerned? Hey, relax... “just dance”. Lady GaGa clearly isn’t interested in her guests and gets on with roughing up an inflatable whale in the backyard paddling pool. Interestingly enough, GaGa recently performed this track at this year’s Miss Universe finals in Vietnam. Who the hell decided that having the plastic humpback-humping Lady blast out her “half-psychotic synth-hypnotic” sounds would be the ideal half-time entertainment at a South East Asian beauty pageant?

We knew that Canadians liked fetishistic action and giant-headed fluffy things, but who knew that the way to score a hit on their charts was to blend ‘em all together in a bad video for a tech-heavy dance track? Ah well, I guess they can only take so much Rush and Bryan Adams. In the absence of a new number one in the UK, looking across the Atlantic it’s Lady GaGa, Colby O’Donis and her fellow anti-social anthropomorphic freaks who are Top of the Pops...


The Bryan Awards...

This week, legendary pop icon Neil Diamond picks up the "The Bryan Award for Being Diamond by Name and Diamond by Nature" after offering fans in Columbus, Ohio a full refund and a heartfelt personalised apology when laryngitis interfered with the concert.


This Week's Playlist...


High Contrast - In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida
Elbow - The Bones of You
The Futureheads - Walking Backwards
The Young Knives - Up All Night
Beth Ditto's Big Christmas Dinner Party - The Gallows Are Too Angry In My Opinion
Gallows - In the Belly of a Shark
Goldblade - Jukebox Generation
Weezer - Troublemaker
Maupa - Big Pig
We Are Scientists - Impatience
Maupa-