B-Side Sunday.

Saints be praised! In these days of drag, with the recession’s sickly shadow looming across every nook and cranny of the interweb, it is with some pride and not inconsiderable pleasure that B-Side Sunday rises once again and, stigmata-dripping, turns its attentions to saving 09 for those who just ain’t ready to stop believin’ – armed only with a single nugget of ‘Side Two’ salvation and a cheeky trouserful of charm. The semi-religious ceremony so prodigiously peerless that it hangs the competition from a flagpole before biting the head off a passing dog, drinking its Winalot-flavoured blood and giggling like a teenage girl knee-deep in the Jonas Brothers’ stinky kecks. Your weekly wanderlust in musical magic that puts the ‘pop’ in poppers and the ‘mental’ in religious fundamentalism, plucking you by your ears from the downward pull of a culture geared only to leave you fat, content, controlled and miserable as Sky+ boxes twinkle merrily in the background. Choice ain’t just a button on your TV remote, baby.

If neurotics build castles in the air, psychotics live in them and psychiatrists charge the rent, then Underworld certainly provided the soundtrack for more than a few of the castle’s E casualty residents, certified head-snapper ‘Rez’ being a fantastic track that even appeared in the club scene of head-scratching psycho-romp Vanilla Sky. Recognising that dance music’s fundamental tenet is that the artist isn’t the star; the audience is, Underworld steered an inimitable course until they had charted a legacy far beyond the navel-gazing meanderment of most 90s dance. Flipside of the ‘Cowgirl’ single, ‘Rez’ is ample proof and any clubber worth their poppers can tell you why.

Sure, it might sound about as cutting-edge as a Sinclair C5 spluttering noisily into life but back in the early-90s this wedge of electrobop managed to sound more intoxicating than gaffa-taping a bucket of poppers to the underside of your nose and doing a headstand. Whirry bleep-tastic nonsense with a warm fuzzy centre, ‘Rez’ builds steadily like a slow train coming until you’re numbly clawing at your own nipples with vinyl-encrusted fingers in wide-eyed remembrance of those MDMAzing days of yore.

Of course, the whole shebang is utterly useless if you’re not totally pickled on industrial-strength pharmaceuticals, but then so is tipping cows – and we all do that. Besides, once the track has rattled to a close and all that remains is the memory, are you left scratching your chin in beardy befuddlement or body-popping like Bobby Brown on day release? Thought so.

The Research ‘The Old Terminal’.

Wakefield’s The Research first popped into view in 2006 with the literally-quite-good ‘Breaking Up’ LP, touring to rave reviews with the likes of Maximo Park and Mystery Jets before EMI dropped the poor souls in 2007. Having gone home, regrouped and retooled, the group are once again ready to fire off another collection of songs rife with loss, love, and fearful longing – this time with none-more-indie label This Is Fake DIY. Packing a headily commercial mix of tender defiance and alluring assurance, ‘The Old Terminal’ is a commendable stab at the mainstream that sounds like Snow Patrol staring proudly in the mirror at their first chest hairs.

Boasting thirteen sparky pop songs that pay you the compliment of being blunt by cutting straight to the chase, ‘The Old Terminal’ bounds out of the traps boasting more hooks than an abattoir and bursting at its lo-fi seams with gleeful girlpop harmony and frenetic guitar strummery (bedroom-brewed for that extra earnestness). ‘Lost Souls In The Vapours’ and ‘I Think She’s The One I Love’ are so rooted in charming wonderment that they could cause even the most dead-eyed hipster casualty to at least temporarily lose the will to be cynical. ‘Golden Rules’ is a hearty lump of sunshine-through-the-clouds joy and ‘Treasure Every Measure’ is just glorious, exhibiting an explosive elation that it sounds like it could coax Bambi’s mum back to life well before the second chorus.

Extended plays might leave you slightly bloated on its relentless saccharine sugarpop, but if you like your indie chock full of weather-beaten sincerity and wide-eyed whimsy you’ll doubtless have a corking old time.

2009.

Welcome then, to 2009. You’ll find that everything is just as you left it and things are very much as always, but here goes another 365 days of trying to get it right before watching it go slowly wrong. Of course, this seasonal missive would have reached you earlier, except everyone at CA has only just peeled themselves off the ceiling after the Bacchanalian revelry of the 31st (party pic below), where the good and few embraced ludicrous excess with shameless enthusiasm until their legs were nought but gummy, bleeding stumps amid a vertiable bukkake rave of arching neon cumshots that looked like they were beamed in from Planet Sin by leading sexpert scientists.

The guys strutted like peacocks on ketamine and the girls were gurning harder than a grandad who had removed his false teeth and entered a whimsical seaside competition. The CA interns jigged around the dancefloor like their balls had been injected with fanta and the shareholders had more fun than Pete Doherty in a chemists. By 11, the Vicar had filled a dustbin full of flake coke, dangled several of the CA secretaries in by their legs and had them sniffing like a widow at the wake, before welcoming in the new year spread-eagled across the foyer floor with the CEO’s wife and mistress. More fun than realising you can get away with photocopying your paychecks, by midnight the dancefloor resembled a bang bus from Sodom & Gomorrah, and in all the haze of bodypopping hedonism I lost my leather tie. It was more than a party. It was a happening. The only way to describe it is by saying that it was indescribable.

The night ended with us trying to feed Haribo into the CD player and the rest is a foggy blur. But is it better to know everything or know nothing? 2009′s here to help us find out.

B-Side Sunday.

Churchill’s last words were “I’m bored with it all”, but not even the man who laughed in the face of animal rights by walking around with a little black dog on his shoulder could have been perspicacious enough to predict the glorious triumphalism of B-Side Sunday – the weekly ceremony that bridges the mainstream and the marginalised under the edifying glow of pop’s forgotten pantheon with such portentous magnificence that even the merest sliver could have made the great man leap from his death bed, score an ounce of devil’s dandruff and groove up the West End in search of some top-drawer boilers and a bit of nonsense. It’s your gumshoe sleuth in the house of pop, lurking in the dregs of 2008 to pull the faithful down the rabbit hole of sonic salvation in much the same way air rescue plucks stranded passengers from sinking ships. Like an American GI lost deep in the jungles of Vietnam who hasn’t heard that the war is long over, B-Side Sunday waits, knee-deep in the beat and far from the madding crowd, in order to keep you underground, overground and a-wombling free with the finest cuts of ‘Side Two’ salvation.

Famously protective of the integrity of their albums (if not their reunion tours..), those cheeky hard-rock pioneers Led Zeppelin released a scant amount of music outside their official LPs. ‘Hey Hey What Can I Do’, the B-side of the ‘Immigrant Song’ single, was later tacked onto the post-breakup cashola comp ‘Coda’ when it was reissued on CD for the ‘Complete Studio Recordings’ box – but like a dog that was bought just for Christmas and is fated for the skip alongside with the Christmas tree, it deserved much more than the treatment it received – a fine example of exactly why our fave pervo, smack-rock herberts from planet indulgence could walk the tightrope between peerless brilliance and tragic wankerama with the type of hunkin’ carnal zest that could give your granny a hard on whilst making your grandad dance like a little girl and still have us clamouring for reunion tickets that have prices that look like telephone numbers. Sounding like it was recorded mid-orgasm, ‘Hey Hey What Can I Do’ is a track that flirts drunkedly with you before nicking off with your best mate and self-esteem. You’ll keep coming back of course, cos secretly you think you deserve it.

But as you prance pompously in front of the bedroom mirror singing along in a vain attempt to shift all that turkey and your mind slowly turns to gaze wistfully into the rearview mirror of 2008, remember that it wouldn’t be New Year’s without the regrets. There is a Scandinavian word ‘Vermod’, that means to be simultaneously happy and sad, and although Monday morning may be coming like a jail on wheels, the New Year is hot on its heels – carrying with it another chance to make a fresh start on old habits once the blizzard of white vows have melted away. Until 2009, amen.

Andrew Bird ‘Noble Beast’.

Multi-talented, multi-instrumentalist and all round brainybox genius Andrew Bird returns with another glorious blast of sonic wonderment. Dotted with more peaks than the Rocky Mountains, ‘Noble Beast’ is a further evidence of the man’s polysyllabic style that is flecked with all the same charm and pastoral whimsy that kept Grandpa’s heart beating before he copped it trying to sneak into that Convent across the road.

‘Masterswarm’ is a dizzily brilliant sway whilst the inappropriately-named ‘Tenuousness’ is anything but; scaling the majestic heights of previous high-point ‘Scythian Empires’ and the anthemic surge of ‘The Privateers’ rocks with the hip-shimmying swing of ‘Imitosis’. ‘Effigy’ packs more hooks than an abattoir and ‘Souverian’ gets you all misty eyed before the instrumental lament of ‘On Ho!’ makes for a fittingly skewed and lilting coda.

Sure, it isn’t perfect; Noble Beast suffered from being slightly overlong and, God bless him, old Birdy still has an uncomfortable preoccupation with jaunty whistling and his muso tendencies do sometimes blunt his impact, but overall its another bold step towards greater recognition without straying one inch from his pottering prolificancy. Wonderful stuff – and ‘Imitosis’ is lurking below to get you in the mood:

B-Side Sunday.

In this troubled world with its uncertain future, where you either hold ‘em or fold ‘em as the masses of sold souls hurl themselves, goggle-eyed and credit-cards wedged between every outstretched finger, into the fresh hell of another Xmas, it’s comforting to know that B-Side Sunday is there to soothe your furrowed brow and lift you above the season’s cloyingly chartbound sounds with another forgotten slice of ‘Side Two’ magic plucked from pop’s shiniest jewellery box. We would have picked an Xmas-y tune for the last B-Side Sunday before old Saint Nick goes about his business, but we are better than that and far less tawdrily predicable. So are you.

Timeless like a broken watch, B-Side Sunday stands as a God to the Godless in these irreligious last days, a Sabbath ceremony so naggingly addictive that you would gladly hock your granny down the knackers yard for just one more solitary second in the sanctifying light of its polysyllabic style and blue-sky outlook. Smoother than James Brown covered in babyoil and more wholesome than a truckload of brown bread; alongside doing its damnedest to get you a +1 with St. Peter at Heaven’s Gate, it’s here to cater for all your cheapest thrills with its swoony rushes of giddy bliss. And in accordance with those gabbled ideas, here comes ‘Patiently’ by Rilo Kiley – B-side from the rather lovely ‘It’s A Hit’ release.

Featuring the sugar-sweet sonorance of Jenny Lewis, who boasts a voice so effortlessly beatific it makes Bjork sound like a 60-a-day fishwife clearing her throat, the band push on with an heads-down indie bluster that somehow manages to come together to form much more than the sum of its parts. All in all, it’s more mischevously marvellous than an afternoon spent goosing Cat Deeley and, like losing your virginity, it’s a pleasurably sticky mess that’s over far too quickly.

So despite all the turkey and incoming relatives, enjoy December’s dregs while they last. ‘Cos next to a circus there ain’t nothing that packs up and tears out faster than the Xmas spirit. Amen.

Diplo ‘Decent Work For Decent Pay’.

DJ and Producer Diplo releases the first compilation of his recent production work, bringing shedloads of hyper-charged, poppers o’clock remix brilliance to a host of hipster-baiting and chart-bothering artists’ biggest hits.

Things start well with M.I.A’s ‘Paper Planes’, a track that throbs so sexily you can only paw helplessly at your moist crotch before scurrying to the bar to get whatever it desires. Things get even better with Diplo’s own ‘200’, a tightly regimented stomp that kicks the cynics out the door before dragging you to the dancefloor by your very ears. CSS’s ‘Let’s Make Love…’ begins as a moody slither before exploding in a firestorm of glitter like an electro tranny strapped with dynamite. Admittedly, the wanton experimentia of Hot Chip’s ‘Shake A Fist’ is a bit guff – but if you never lose, how are you going to know when you’ve ever won? Largely, ‘Decent Work For Decent Pay’ is the sound of Diplo going toe-to-toe with today’s zeitgeist and getting it exactly right.

All told, Diplo’s laconic and sinful exercises in noise pollution look set to pay off big; making his remix debut a bona fide, day-glo, amoral, bottoms-up-noses-down partystarter that rocks like an absolute bastard. In the infinitely wise words of Catchphrases’ Roy Walker, “It’s good but it’s not right”.

Reigns ‘The House On The Causeway’.

Famous playwright and world-renowned brainbox George Bernard Shaw once wrote: “If you can’t get rid of the skeletons in your closet, you’d better teach them how to dance” – Reigns were clearly paying attention. Like Mogwai having a nervous breakdown in a haunted house, Wessex-based brothers Tim and Roo Farthing craft surreal and epic soundscapes that revel in the curio of their coastal eccentricity. From the epic melancholia of ‘Bad Slate’ to the spooky brilliance of ’Mirrors At Night’ and ’Vaulted’, Reigns are befuddling brilliant; the only real criticism with ‘The House On The Causeway’ is that it arrived too late for Halloween.

Singing like they have collectively trapped their balls in a car door, these brothers Grimm fashion a compellingly aeriform racket that is far more heartfelt and considered than the majority of today’s numbing indie flotsam. Ghostly ambience, distorted vocals and eerie electronics segue beautifully into instrumental breaks of folky melodica and chilling stabs of piano, the whole package unfurling with an ethereal grandeur that charms and unsettles in equal measure. Indeed, Reigns’ pastoral prog is more than a little creepy, most of it sounding like it was tailormade to soundtrack Fred West’s inner monologue during his quieter moments of introspection, although repeat listens reveal that it is well worth more than a perfunctory glance. Just remember to check the wardrobe for monsters before you push ‘Play’.

Beggars Belief, Beggars Can’t Be Choosers, Etc. Etc.

So the new Foreign Beggar single ‘Hit That Gash’ is starting to make waves across the blogoverse in preparation for the imminent album ‘drop’. And why not, after the urbane mix of lyrical genius and breezeblock-solid beats that was ‘Asylum Speakers’ and ‘Stray Point Agenda’? But wait! Why aren’t we going batshit with joy in a feverish fit of bodypopping delirium? Well, for starters the beat sounds like a Dalek dipped in amyl nitrate fondling a kickdrum outside a cheesy disco, which rolls around under a wheelbarrow full of tediously priapic Fiddy-esque “I’m so thugged up and blinged out and knee deep in the skeef” lyrics that you always thought the Beggar Boys were better than. ‘Hit That Gash’ isn’t bad per se, but after a three year wait it’s a long way from good – we haven’t been this disappointed since we found that turd in Grandpa’s cutlery drawer.

It’s also largely composed of French rapping and production, courtesy of Rouge A Levres. Which is a shame, because French rap is a bit rubbish it’s difficult to ‘dig’ what they are ‘spitting’. To make matters worse, in a feat of shit punnery almost as cringe-worthy as Public Enemy’s ‘New Whirl Odor’ (which becomes ‘New World Order’ if you scratch your head and squint at it for several hours), Foreign Beggars have sagely decided to call their next effort ‘United Colours Of Beggatron’, some lead-coated wordplay which revolves around a shit clothing line that may or may not have once considered putting RFID tracking chips in their clothes. Ho hum.

Speaking of hip hop, remember when Mark Ronson was Tim Westwood? We haven’t laughed this much since we found that turd in Grandpa’s cutlery drawer.

B-Side Sunday.

Leaping lustily into view with more portentious rumblings than Jezuz kicking Buddha down Heaven’s grandest stairwell, it’s B-Side Sunday! The holy box social of beautiful idiots and brilliant lunatics that is already planning to hijack the Large Hadron Collider and subvert it to commit nuclear murderation on the scores of lesser weekly ceremonies that seek to detract from its supergyrating splendour. The ceremony that packs more soul than a sock with a hole but still wouldn’t think twice about plucking the purse from your bag whilst you’re in the toilets and rifling through all the messages on your phone. The spiritual weekend retreat that sets out to save you from skittering around Skid Row with your trousers round your ankles with tears in your eyes by bathing you in the sanctifying light of those tunes pushed to the margins of pop by the solipsistic strut of all them chart-bothering A-Sides: like a dog licking sick off a slumbering tramp, we’re here to make you a better you. Who says there are no heroes anymore?

So relax and unwind as your third favourite Sunday service tugs another bound-and-gagged B-Side from the cellar and sets to it by the hearth of a roaring fireplace, pausing only to get into the groove with, um, Muse’s ‘The Groove’. B-Side to the steely mighty of ‘Time Is Running Out’, it’s the cacophonous sound of Bellamy channelling Tom Morello after just the right amount of ketamine, fashioning an assured blast of typewriter-chewing-concrete twatfunkery so damnedably thrustworthy that it pretty much grabs you by your hair and forcibly drags you, kicking and screaming, to the dancefloor to melt your knees in a delirious spacerock frogmarch as you shit your brains out of your ears in sheer, unadulterated joy. It won’t be pretty; but what a way to go.

Featuring exactly the kind of pummelling riff that allows Matt Bellamy to strut around onstage with blue hair in a natty labcoat and still look cooler than a Polar Bear that’s been kicked through Topman, Muse don’t want to change your world; just rock the effing eff out of it. Unbelievers may sniff airily and harp on about Bellamy’s fretboard gymnastics and helium histrionics but extended scientific study has revealed that this track is precisely 5.768 times better than the majority of their last album and even if that doesn’t convince you of this track’s utter brilliance, just remember that experience is what you get when you didn’t get what you wanted. Aaaaaamen.