Top 50 Singles 2009 – The Top Ten

What’s that sound? Fanfare? Trumpets? Hysterical screaming? No, it’s actually tumbleweed. Festive tumbleweed, perhaps. Everyone’s pretty much in a holiday mood now, I’m assuming, so now is clearly the best time to sneak out the much-anticipated (HA!) conclusion to my annual rundown of tunes of the good variety.

Behind the click below are my top 10 tracks of the year. And you can listen to a (rather pitiful) 42 of the 50 tracks over here via Spotify.

If anyone’s paying attention, what do you reckon to my choices? Too obvious? Not obvious enough? Most importantly – what have I missed? What’s been floating your 2009-shaped boat that should be in here?

So, here goes…

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Lady Gaga – Bad Romance

So, there we all were, thinking we’d had enough of Lady Gaga for 2009. There’s that brilliant Kid Sister single out there that thoroughly out-Gagas 2009 Gaga. Enough already. No need. And then this arrives. Riding a massive glittery phallus from the future.

It’s hard to remember the last time a single simultaneously made you go ‘you WHAT?’ and ‘oh god YES!’ in the same breath. In fairness it was probably another, lesser, Gaga track. But this one steps it all up by a factor of X. It’s utter insanity. The chanted nonsense that’s a smidge away from irritation but instead falls firmly on the side of brilliance; the mentalist bathHAUS antics of the video; the way she makes ‘love love love’ sound like ‘blah blah blah’; and pretty much everything else about this rather excellent five minutes of gibberish.

I quite like this one.

Pet Shop Boys, Lady GaGa, Frankmusik: new vids, essentially

Hallo there blog, I’ve been neglecting you again, ain’t I? Anyway, there are vids and things to catch up on. Probably the most pleasing thing I’ve heard recently is the beautifully synthy new Yeah Yeah Yeahs track Zero. It’s a beast of a track – a grower, and most certainly best appreciated LOUD. Do you know what it makes me think? It makes me think this is the sort of thing that should have come out of the second Long Blondes album, but somehow didn’t. Also, if La Roux doesn’t normally float your boat, check out the brilliant Skream mix of In For The Kill – especially the last minute or so. Bangin’.

Onto the vids. Click below for the vids. Some goodies this week…

Still Flyin’, Lykke Li, and other new stuff

Bit of a break again there, but will hopefully keep this more regular from now on. I tend to post a bit more frequently on Twitter, if you want to follow me over there. So, what’s been going on? Plenty more good stuff on the way, that’s what. Hopefully we’ll get a video for this soon, because it’s awesome: La Roux – In For The Kill (Streaming Audio). For now though, here’s some things that actually have videos and are out soon…

New Year, New Format, BBC Sound of 2009, Passion Pit, and the like

A new year, a new format. A new bandwagon to jump on. While my (ahem) comprehensive single review style was a fun experiment for a year (and I even saw it through!), it’s time to move on. I was too tied to outdated physical single release schedules, and ended up reviewing songs after they’d been at number one for 3 weeks already. Useless. As such, I’m now just going to fire out 5-10 singles each week that I like and are around or upcoming in the next couple of months. Or that I’ve just taken a fancy to. They still have to be proper singles, but the timing of them is less important. Anyway, on with business…