Word Magazine 083 - Now Hear This!: Best Of The Decade
CD, 2009, Heftbeilage, Digipak

What's on the Best Of The Noughties CD with the January issue

1. The Aliens - Magic Man
The Aliens, like their Beta Band forebears, used to stumble as often as they soared. The Scottish trio radiate delicate rock melodies as easily as they breathe but were regularly undone by their own indiscipline. On this second album they finally voiced their natural expansiveness (folk, rock, prog, sea shanties and a rocket full of psychedelia) without getting lost in space. Bookended by ten-minute epics Bobby’s Song and Blue Mantle, Luna is a world of whimsy that’s finally found its own orbit. (Steve Yates)
From the album Luna

2. British Sea Power - Waving Flags
Sometimes it’s worth reiterating the basic questions. Do you like rock music? There have been enough reasons to answer “no” over the past ten years – many of them wearing skinny white jeans or a deceased grandad’s trilby – but when listening to BSP’s gale-blasted epics the answer can only be an ecstatic yes. The Lakeland-Brighton quartet reunited roaring guitars with their elemental forebears in the natural world, conjuring images of William Wordsworth getting down with Joey Santiago on an album to render even the most cynical listener helpless. (Andrew Harrison)
From the album Do You Like Rock Music?

3. Madness - Idiot Child
Bands who are 30 years into the game just do not make their best record. And pop bands just do not make mystic concept albums, or at least not mystic concept albums that work. But Madness – toughened and maybe nourished by ten years of mutual discord and self-rediscovery – achieved both those feats on the sumptuous, insightful Norton Folgate. A psycho-geographic exploration of London’s occult past and present, it contained as much beauty, darkness, musical vigour and dry humour as the capital itself. (Andrew Harrison)
From the album The Liberty Of Norton Folgate

4. Björk - Hidden Place
Sometimes the idea of Björk is better than the actual music, but Vespertine is the glowing exception. She more or less drops the kooky affectations and makes a gently immersive 53 minutes of song. The delicate electronics of Matmos, Matthew Herbert and Valgeir Sigurdsson, together with harp melodies and choirs, weave a fragile surrounding for Björk’s intimate cooing and personal musings, incidentally creating the template for the decade’s folktronica. (Joe Muggs)
From the album Vespertine

5.: Shara Worden (of My Brightest Diamond)
The Decemberists - The Wanting Comes In Waves/Repaid
Previous albums leant towards novelisations of historical events but this fifth recording by the West Coast experimentalists is pure fiction set in a medieval landscape, a 17-track song suite – a rock opera, really – in which a suggestible young women falls in love with a shape-shifting spirit, her miseries compounded by a child-killing rake and a jealous forest queen, all this to a baroque soundtrack of progressive rock and folk. It’s rich and endlessly repeatable. (Mark Ellen)
From the album The Hazards Of Love

6. Nick Lowe - I Trained Her How To Love Me
The great truth of pop songwriting is it doesn’t respond to effort. The best songs just arrive as if complete. Nick Lowe reckons his best tunes are donated to him by The Bloke, a great and anonymous craftsman who has the knack of giving a minute twist to familiar emotions. Most of this record, a rueful celebration of belated maturity sung by a man who has clearly been there, is The Bloke’s finest hour. (David Hepworth)
From the album At My Age

7. Speech Debelle - Searching
Twenty years after its “golden age”, hip hop still wrong-foots people, as anyone watching the reaction to 26-year-old Corynne Elliot’s album winning this year’s Mercury Prize will have noticed. The odd broadsheet fool bemoaned Speech Therapy’s “dinner party” aesthetics, but anyone who can misunderstand the power of utterly raw, emotionally complex words set to wonderfully diverse arrangements – oboes, strings, stand-up bass – and coolly fresh, skin-prickling melancholia doesn’t deserve to hear it anyway. (Rob Fitzpatrick)
From the album Speech Therapy

8. The Phantom Band - The Howling
Glasgow bands have a knack of making unlikely sounds accessible. As The Jesus & Mary Chain with distortion-laden drone, and The Blue Nile with abstracted jazz-pop, so The Phantom Band with the most unlikely combination of eight-minute driving motorik krautrock grooves and synth bass with road-movie Americana country/rockabilly twang. And a thick Scottish accent. Their debut album manages to be both startlingly weird and instantly enjoyable. Just don’t call it “krautJock”. (Joe Muggs)
From the album Checkmate Savage

9. Richard Hawley - Run For Me
Hawley’s third album was a gorgeous foreshadowing of his commercial breakthrough with 2005’s Cole’s Corner – from its sumptuous, star-crossed content to a title from South Yorks geography. Ancien-régime touches from pedal steel to doo-wop are so beautifully rendered they conjure a thought from Graham Greene – sometimes accusing someone of sentimentality is merely indicating a sentiment you don’t share. (Roy Wilkinson)
From the album Lowedges

10. Half Man Half Biscuit - Evening Of Swing (Has Been Cancelled)
Twenty-plus years since 99% Of Gargoyles Look Like Bob Todd, HMHB remain the invaluable grumps in the corner of the jolly pop-culture party. Ambleside, their 11th album, is leader Nigel Blackwell’s Great Art Statement, broadsiding the minutiae of the everyday, from bad losers on Yahoo Chess to abusers of disabled parking badges and men in high-visibility jackets waltzing into any event they choose. The closing National Shite Day (“there’s a man with a mullet going mad with a mallet in Millets”) reveals a lyricist of superhuman archness.(Eamonn Forde)
From the album CSI: Ambleside

11. Midlake - Bandits
Labelmates Fleet Foxes stole all the glory two years later, but this gorgeous record played John the Baptist to their revival of pastoral folk-rock, while also welcoming back into fashion the driving undertow and streamlined surfaces of Fleetwood Mac. Despite pioneer-era subject matter and a song-cycle feel, this is no harking-back to simpler times, but a forward-looking, even progressive record; Grandaddy got close to
this but never achieved its gentle, wintry beauty. (James Medd)
From the album The Trials Of Van Occupanther

12. Joan As Police Woman - The Ride
Jazz-soul trios led by punk-rock violinists are no one’s idea of fun, but this is one of those genre-confounding albums that come along every now and then to mock your boxed-in thinking. Real Life has the same allcomers-welcome resonance as Carole King’s Tapestry, but Joan “Police Woman” Wasser has a voice to match her material – rich, sexy, capable of reaching emotional parts others can’t – and her compositions run just as deep. (James Medd)
From the forthcoming album Real Life

13. Epic45 - Lost In Failing Light
Sometimes the smallest records make the biggest impact on hearts and lives, and this was one of the decade’s loveliest examples. Tracing emotional reactions to shifting seasons, it did something new with old materials – ghostly, fingerpicked guitars, sampled found sounds, memories of shoegazery and dusty electronica that conjured up old British films – and gave the Black Country its very own Boards of Canada. (Jude Rogers)
From the album Make Mine

14. Edwyn Collins - One Track Mind
A record inseparable from the two brain haemorrhages that struck Collins in 2005. It was recorded beforehand and mixed afterwards, but was far from the rock equivalent of a three-legged kitten kept alive only by cooing goodwill. With its seabirds and ancient stones, here was bewitching Celtic reverie but also eerie foreboding, the sound of a less mumblingly self-absorbed Van Morrison. (Roy Wilkinson)
From the album Home Again

15. Espers - Cruel Storm
Devendra Banhart might be a bit of a posturing boho twit but he has brought some wonderful musicians to public attention, including the witchy, psychedelic Philadelphia band Espers. As much Wicker Man or Dario Argento soundtrack as they are Fairport Convention or Pentangle, Espers’ acid folk has a distinctly chilling air to it, never more so than on their second album, which firmly put paid to the idea of “nu folk” being cutesy, twee or naive. (Joe Muggs)
From the album Espers II