Mike Perrin

So a friend asked me to compile a list of my favourite albums of the 00s.

As it turned out, there aren’t so many records in the list that have come out recently, which I thought was interesting. I think this could mean one of four things:

1. I’m turning into a grumpy old git
2. People don’t listen to albums all the way through so much any more
3. I’m worried that I might stop liking a newer albums or that it might stop being cool
4. The newer albums haven’t had time to ‘bed in’ to my brain.

Personally I think there may be a small element of truth in all the above.  Anyway, here’s the ten, in no particular order:

The ten best albums of the decade, Obviously:

• Arcade Fire – Funeral (2004) - Neon Bible is a classic as well of course, but I prefer my indie unpolished
• Sufjan Stevens – Illinois (2005) - just as good as Seven Swans, only a little more so.
• Sigur Rós – () (2002) - Incredibly pretentious. Incredibly awesome. Was going to be either this or Ágætis Byrjun (although wikipedia thinks that came out in 1999?)
• The Strokes - Is this it? (2001) - Totally lost their way but this still sounds great
• 2 Many DJs - As Heard on Radio Soulwax, Part 2 (2002) -  launched Soulwax's career proper, really. Showed millions of indie kids that it was ok to like dance music, and millions of dance kids that dancin could be FUN.
• The Go! Team - Thunder, Lightning, Strike (2004) – utterly brilliant. Original version with the illegal samples throughout still sounds better to this ear.
• Maximo Park - A Certain Trigger (2005) - Bordering on a guilty pleasure these days... but I do love a good pop song.
• RJD2- Deadringer (2002) - Amazing first album, pushed hip hop forward. Catastrophic fall from grace with his third album. Why does that seem to be a common theme?
• Kings of Convenience - Quiet is the new loud (2001) - Still a classic, and a big influence on a lot of the best records of the whole decade IMAO
• The Dandy Warhols - Welcome to the Monkey House (2003) - Yeah, not even the DW's best album of the 00s. But will forever remind me of driving through the crisp New Zealand winter of 2004 with my future wife.

Ones that came close:

• Gurls Allowed - What will the neighbours say? - obv.
• Bill Callahan - Sometimes I Wish We Were an Eagle. My fave album of 2009 so far, Pitchfork-tastic
• Ulrich Schnauss – A Strangely Isolated Place - not cool, but I love everything this guy does
• Four Tet - Rounds - can't be doing with his jazzy b'llocks, but this is a classic
• Elliott Smith - Figure 8
• Badly Drawn Boy – Hour of the Bewilderbeast - close, very close.
• PJ Harvey- Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea – ditto
• Paul Kalkbrenner - Berlin Calling - Been a little obsessed with this recently
• Godspeed You Black Emperor - Lift Your Skinny Fists like Antennas to Heaven - actually, this one is just "very, very good". Wanted it in the top ten to make me look cool but there wasn't room. :)
• Beastie boys - To the 5 Boroughs - still got it.
• I Am Kloot - Gods and Monsters. Why wasn't this huge?

Ones that didn't come close:

• Outkast - Speakerboxxx/The Love Below - was I the only person in the world who thought this was, well.... Meh? ('Hey Ya' excepted)
• Kanye West - Might have made it a year or so ago, but now he's succeding in showing himself up to be a complete tool.
• Radiohead - Yeah yeah yeah, very good, move along pls.

So, itunes nagged me to upgrade to the latest version of *blah blah* *I don't use it* *but have to have it installed for my new iPhone* and media monkey stopped working. Bah! Got "Audio Library has stopped working" on startup. Lots of people complaining about it on the interweb but no definitive answers. :(

On a hunch I renamed C:\Program Files\MediaMonkey\Plugins\d_iPhone.dll to C:\Program Files\MediaMonkey\Plugins\d_iPhone.old and it can start up again, yey!

I stongly suspect this iTunes stopping something from working in Media Monkey but those monkey folks really need to sort it out, it's them that's looking bad. By the way, what is it with iTunes stealing the focus every few seconds when it is "Updating iTunes library"?? Incredibly irritating, does anyone else get this?

So, yeah I finally fixed my one gripe with the sonos, to automatically create playlists of tunage from my libraries:

I run that baby as a scheduled task each night on my server and wake up with three playlists, one showing all the new tunage from yesterday, one for the last week and one for the previous month. Lovely.

Created by Train Horns

As a "bit of a librarian" when it comes to tuneage, at the end of every year I like to catch up on any decent cds I might have missed. As I was away over new year, since I've got back to broadbandland I've hungrily hoovered up all the songs I've missed, it's suprising how much you can miss in just a few months away. The end-of-year lists on hype machine last.fm, metacritic, rough trade records help and picadilly records always throws up a few things I've missed. Anyway to that end was interested to read about Amanda Palmer's latest tune, which seems to have been shunned by all the major radio stations in the UK because it “makes light of rape, religion and abortion”. Now I'm all for a bit of a conspiracy theory, (and all the arguments can be read on those links if you're interested) but at the end of the day that tune just isn't very good. Why can't we have pop stars these days who produce "offensive" songs which also have a damn good tune a la Frankie or George Michael?

See the video here if you care...

Was amused to read this article on the bbc news site about Globish, as it's pretty much how I've been speaking for the past few months: "Why no clean sheets?", "Your price too expensive!", "No want Tiger Balm", etc. etc. In fact I got so good at it that I was finding it hard to switch back to English 'proper' and was using it as my default language, even when we met people who spoke English as a mother tongue.... which meant we had to work hard on more than one occasion to to convince people from the UK that I wasn't Russian or Finnish or something.

We did a couple of hours of lessons learning Bahasa Indonesia in Ubud and Globish reminds me a bit of that in it's simplicity (at least for beginners) - it has no plural forms, no genders, and no conjugation of verbs. We didn't learn all that much but one phrase we used a lot with agressive taxi drivers was Saya mau jalan-jalan - "I want walk!"

We holed up on Gili Trawangan, off Lombok for six days for a bit of chilling out. Actually Trawangan has a bit of a reputation as a party island, with a party every night at one of the bars on the beach front and then often going on till dawn. But the island was big enough to make it easy to find places to chill as well, along with plenty of snorkelling and diving (yeeeah, pink fins are IN, baby!). We found a place to stay at a bargain basement price (about £8 a night) but it was a way off the main drag so we hired bikes to get about:

We took day trips over to the other islands Gili Air and Gili Meno, Gili Meno has only about 300 inhabitants but does have a bird sanctuary of sorts, check me out, Dr Doolittle.

One afternoon I decided to run all the way around the island. It's not so far - maybe 7km? But I've not run for months now and the heat and the sand beat me, I couldn't make it all the way round without a breather. I guess the muscles used in trekking, diving, biking and rafting aren't the same as in running :) Helen had a much better idea, stroll round the island along the shoreline:

Generally speaking through, it was a chance to relax after the hard life we've been living the past few months...

In Bali we had the chance to see a coffee plantation where they told us about their special coffee. The Palm Civet (a wild cat-like creature thingy) wanders around and eats the coffee beans, and the bean ferments in its stomach for a few days. Then when it comes out, people go round and collect the poo and make it into coffee. How people discover these things is beyond me, but I'll try anything once!

It cost a fortune - that jar costs 25 USD, I got just the one cup which cost me 30,000 Rupiah - about £2. And yup, it was good. Not sure I'll be making a habit of drinking it though.