I Eat Music

Back in January, we at CMU launched a new feature in CMU Weekly called Powers Of Ten. Each week we ask a different music-related (or not, as you will see in the near-ish future) person to select ten songs they love and then tell us a little bit about each one.

It’s fast become one of my favourite features, as it often throws up little nuggets of information about the compiler that you might not get from a normal interview. Plus, you get to listen to ten songs that you might not already know, which is always fun.

The feature is named after a 1997 documentary, which “depicts the relative scale of the Universe in factors of ten” (read the Wikipedia page here). Slightly pretentious, yes. But it sort of explains the aim of the piece. You can see all the playlists so far here, or sign up to get them (and the rest of CMU Weekly) delivered straight to your inbox every Friday afternoon here.

To get the ball rolling, I did the first one. You can listen to it on Spotify by clicking here. My selections and their blurbs are below.

01: Scott Walker – It’s Raining Today
This is the first track on what, I would argue, is Scott Walker’s best album. The strings just hint at the darker turn his music would eventually take.

02: Latyrx – Latyrx
I actually wanted to include the alternative version of this track, ‘Latyrx (Last Chance To Comprehend)’, which is stripped back to almost nothing but the two vocal lines. The way the work against each other is amazing. Unfortunately, Spotify doesn’t have it. This album version is still excellent, and it’s longer, so that’s a bonus.

03: Mommy And Daddy – Confection
I never tire of hearing this song, and every time I do a little buzz of excitement shoots through me. It’s amazing what you can do with a bass guitar and a drum machine.

04: Kelly Clarkson – Since U Been Gone
I was going to stick some hardcore or metal in here, but it broke up the flow of the playlist too much. So, instead, I went with something that will be equally offensive to a large number of listeners. It’s a bloody brilliant song, though.

05: Faith No More – Midlife Crisis
I’m sure Faith No More were wasted on me as a teenager, but they acted a gateway to all kinds of other great music. The first time I bought Metal Hammer was because it came with a FNM special. They continue to be one of my favourite bands.

06: Mew – Am I Wry? No
I interviewed Martin Grech before a gig in Northampton in 2002. After speaking to him, I sat down to watch the support band soundcheck. I’d never heard of them, but the two songs they played completely floored me. They were Mew, and this was one of those songs.

07: MC 900 Ft Jesus – Adventures In Failure
The lyrics on this track are just brilliant; man dissatisfied with his life goes on a drunken rampage and then considers holding himself to ransom so that he doesn’t have to explain to his wife how he came to destroy her car.

08: Busdriver – Sphinx’s Coonery
The whole of Busdriver’s ‘Fear Of A Black Tangent’ album is brilliant, but this track has always stood out for me. More psychedelic guitar on hip hop tracks, I say.

09: Arab Strap – Love Detective
There’s something about dark lyrics delivered in a Glaswegian accent that I’ve always really liked.

10: Plans & Apologies – The Paperclip Key
Plans & Apologies are one of my all time favourite bands. This song was written after the computer containing the original recordings for their ‘Tree Dee Pee’ EP was stolen. I love how angry it gets before nonchalantly dismissing the thieves and ending in an upbeat fashion.

It is the law that all music journalists must come up with at least one end-of-year list come December. And I do not want to go to journalist prison. Not after last time. So, here are the ten albums I decided were better than all the others released in 2009 for CMU.

Patrick Wolf – The Bachelor
Outside the studio, Patrick Wolf appears to be a man who goes out looking for conflict and then complains very loudly when he finds it. Inside, this personality trait manifests itself as a self-assured knowledge that he knows best. Hence, he shunned the label system and raised £100,000 through Bandstocks.com in order to record the not unironically named double album, ‘Battle’, which he later elected to split into two separate releases.

A lush album, full of rich strings and contrasting electronics, the first part of the set, ‘The Bachelor’, was released in June. Wilfully theatrical, the album shares much in common with My Life Story, but also takes clear influence from Alec Empire (who appears on two tracks) and The Postal Service.

As well as Empire, other guests include actress Tilda Swinton, who provides passages of spoken word on three tracks, dance experimentalist Matthew Herbert, and folk musician Eliza Carthy, who provides some beautiful violin on the album’s title track. Though Carthy’s appearance is not the only injection of folk on the album. In fact, at a time when ‘folk’ has become synonymous with a person playing an acoustic guitar, it’s quite refreshing to see genuine Celtic folk have such an influence on contemporary music.

So, as off-putting as his bullish determination may be at times, when it comes to his music, it works. ‘The Bachelor’ is a near-flawless album, over the top without running away with itself and diverse without losing focus.

iTunes – Amazon – Spotify

The Big Pink – A Brief History Of Love
The Big Pink’s debut album ‘A Brief History Of Love’ has been on heavy rotation since it arrived in the CMU office back in August. Formed by Robbie Furze and Milo Cordell, who for several years have made and promoted noise at various levels of extremity, The Big Pink is very much an extension of that past. However, here the duo have avoided drowning absolutely everything in distortion, leaving melody and pop sensibilities exposed.

The tone of the album is set perfectly by opener, ‘Crystal Visions’, which is surrounded by swirling guitars, which buzz and flicker, getting ever closer. By the end of the track they sound like a swarm of angry wasps encircling your head, but Furze’s vocals remain melodic and intimate, cutting through the noise.

As well as all manner of shoegaze bands, the album’s most overt sonic reference point is The Verve, particularly in the deadpan vocals and lyrics, which are summed up by one line in ‘Frisk’: “If this is love, then I was just leaving”. In fact, for the most part, the history promised in the album’s title offers up a fairly dim view of love, often focusing on the fallout, or the period after the initial rush of excitement. Very Ashcroft.

Despite all this, the album’s actually pretty upbeat, as the football terrace-style chanting ‘Dominos’ now elicits when performed live attests. And while you’d expect the wall of sound element of the recording to be a barrier for most, those pop elements seem to draw people in. That balance of noise and pop is no easy thing to get right, and that The Big Pink have managed it over an entire album is worthy of an Album Of The Year nod on its own.

iTunes – Amazon – Spotify

Converge – Axe To Fall
Formed nearly twenty years ago, Converge shunned the rivalry between the hardcore punk and metal scenes, to become one of the bands which defined the ‘metalcore’ genre that grew up in the mid-nineties. And unlike many of their contemporaries, who either burnt out or spent years plugging away at the same old ideas, Converge’s genius has always been their ability to stick to their genre while constantly evolving.

‘Axe To Fall’ stays in similar territory to 2006’s ‘No Heroes’, though leans more on the band’s metal influences to add more texture to the often relentless barrage of noise. Kurt Ballou’s crushingly heavy guitar riffs are as apparent as ever, as are Jake Bannon’s unmistakable vocals, which sound like they come straight from his stomach.

Heaviness is all well and good, of course. But I always think that the real test of a heavy band is their quiet songs. There are hundreds of bands who can play at breakneck speeds, but many fall down when it comes to doing something more restrained. But Converge fully expose their talent for songwriting by lowering the volume on the piano-led ‘Cruel Bloom’, which rolls along under soft growls from Neurosis frontman Steve Von Till, and closer ‘Wretched World’ brings the album to rest while still hinting that it could again explode.

The ability to write good songs at lower volume means that when they crank it up they know how to play hard and fast but still keep it interesting, making ‘Axe To Fall’ a far more varied and diverse album than most could manage.

iTunes – Amazon – Spotify

Jeffrey Lewis & The Junkyard – Em Are I
The first of Jeffrey Lewis’ five studio albums to have backing band The Junkyard’s name stamped right up next to his on the album cover, the subject matter of ‘Em Are I’ is largely shaped by Lewis’ break-up with his girlfriend and keyboard player over several months of touring together. It wasn’t the cleanest of splits, by all accounts, and Lewis paints himself (or, rather, draws – the whole episode is chronicled in a comic strip for The New York Times, ‘My 2008 In A Nutshell’) as a broken character, unable to concentrate on the recording.

All of which doesn’t bode well for the finished product. And yet, here we are, talking in terms of albums of the year. Lewis’ lyrics are as good as ever (“Just tell me that you like me in the same sentence as a mountainside, cos it would be such a relief to be objectified”, for example), but the overshadowing gloom reduces the sometimes throwaway edge of his humour without losing it altogether, making this album stand up far better to repeat listens than some of his earlier work.

There are in fact only two overt break-up songs on the album, one being ‘Broken Broken Broken Heart’, in which Lewis blames himself the fact that his ex is now with “a less cruel and curious man”, while the other, the rolling psychedelia of ‘The Upside-Down Cross’, is actually penned by his brother Jack.

Not just an album of the year, this is also easily Lewis’ best and most accessible work to date.

iTunes – Amazon – Spotify

Tyondai Braxton – Central Market
The son of highly regarded avant-garde jazz musician Anthony Braxton, Tyondai is best known these days as the frontman of post-rockers Battles. His second solo album, ‘Central Market’, has been described as ‘free jazz meets Disney’ by some. But, while jazz it might be, to lump it in with a largely improvisational art form is a little insulting to the amount of work that has gone into composing it.

Suggesting it sounds like the soundtrack to an animated film, however, is completely fair. In fact, it most reminds me of Joe Hisaishi’s soundtrack to ‘Spirited Away’ (an album I also recommend highly, incidentally). The orchestral instruments do sound as if they’re voicing an array of strange characters, while Braxton’s occasional abstract and heavily affected vocalisations act, if not as a narrator, then some sort of benevolent overseer.

While the first five tracks of the album follow this pattern, flowing into one another to create one complete piece, proceedings are brought to a halt with ‘J City’, which, though not what you’d call a ‘standard’ rock song, has the guitar-drums-bass-vocals format we’re all more used to. And it would be weird for it to be included, if it didn’t somehow work.

When Braxton returns to the style of the rest of the album for its final track, ‘Dead Strings’, albeit with a darker tone, you realise that, had track five, ‘Unfurling’, run straight into it, the shift would have been too jarring and ruined the flow of the whole thing. Because of this careful construction, ‘Central Market’ really works as a whole, perhaps more so than any other album I’ve heard this year.

iTunes – Amazon

King Cannibal – Let The Night Roar
“You’ve got about one hour to think about what you’ve done to me”, a voice announces at the start of King Cannibal’s debut album. I’m not exactly sure what it is I’m supposed to have done, but from the sound of the next hour of music, I’m not a very nice person.

Merging influences from drum n bass, dancehall and dubstep, King Cannibal, aka Dylan Richards, operates in similar territory to follow Ninja Tune-signee The Bug. But where The Bug brings in MCs to lament the ills of modern society, Richards goes straight for samples taken from obscure films and video games, and pulls things down to a much darker place.

There are a few collaborations, though. Berlin electronic outfit Jahcoozi, French hip hop duo Face à Face and MC Daddy Freddy all appear, adding further to the album’s varied textures. Daddy Freddy’s shouts over bass that slices and throbs like a failing heartbeat making a last ditch, fear-fuelled attempt at survival are a particular highlight on ‘Dirt’. Elsewhere, ‘Aragami Style’ sets the tone for the album nicely, while recent single ‘Embrace The Minimum’ acts as a moment of lighter, more ambient tones, converse to ‘Colder Still’, a reworking of early single ‘Call Me Mr Cold Blooded’, which furthest explores the torture themes often hinted at in other tracks.

All of which makes the album sound like an unpleasant experience, but that’s really not the case. It’s eleven impressively well-crafted tracks that stretch Richards’ influences to their limits in order to that take you on a journey that is both cathartic and exciting. It’s nothing as unseemly as a dubstep concept album, but ‘Let The Night Roar’ certainly features one of the most complete sets of tracks you’ll hear on an electronic album this year.

iTunes – Amazon – Spotify

Mew – No More Stories
It was with some trepidation that I approached Mew’s latest album. Having been a massive fan of the band for the best part of a decade, I was nonetheless aware that album five is often the point at which many once great artists completely run out of ideas and cause our relationship to end in bitter disappointment. Thankfully, this was not the case on this occasion, as ‘No More Stories’ is packed full of as many great ideas and delightfully overblown pop tunes as any Mew album that has gone before it.

Mew have always been a band who have really understood rhythm, and that is more apparent than ever on this album. Particularly on ‘Introducing Palace Players’, a track where Bo Madsen’s disjointed guitar part and Silas Graae’s Tortoise-esque stuttering drums barely fit together, but are pulled in by Jonas Bjerre’s vocals, making the piece a whole. It seems that the departure of bassist Johan Wohlert in 2006, following the release of previous album ‘And The Glass Handed Kites’, has served to focus the attention-to-detail of the remaining three members ever further.

Latest single, ‘Repeaterbeater’, is another highlight, featuring one of the finest big choruses Mew have ever penned, putting it right up their with older songs like ‘Snow Brigade’ and ‘She Came Home For Christmas’. ‘Hawaii’, similarly, builds from an almost-samba beat and music box melodies to a soaring chorus, before dropping back into a state of fragility to begin the process again.

The whole album is filled not only with great songs, but clever little touches add something special, and make every repeat listen much more enjoyable.

iTunes – Amazon – Spotify

Bat For Lashes – Two Suns
Bat For Lashes’ second album was the first long player I remember getting really excited about in 2009. In fact, a quick look back through the CMU archives suggests that I started getting excited about it a week and a half into January. It was the news that it would feature Scott Walker and members of Yeasayer that really peaked my interest, although I was (and still am) a big fan of Natasha Khan’s very good, if slightly patchy, debut, ‘Fur And Gold’.

So, when a copy of the album found its way to my desk in March, I listened to it for the first time with the sort of expectation that can only end in disappointment. Except on this occasion it didn’t. From the moment she hits that first high note on opening track ‘Glass’, I was sold. And, thankfully, the standard remains high throughout the eleven tracks, not just that one note.

Khan is clearly someone who takes songwriting very seriously, and recognises the place of the recording studio in that process. Each song has a story, which sees her adopting various characters, but with as much importance placed on the music as the lyrics. ‘Daniel’ is the most obvious example, a recognisable story of teenage love over a youthful-sounding, 80s-influenced backing. But something like ‘Siren Song’ perhaps illustrates better what I’m talking about, with almost monotonous piano and violin, using volume rather than melody to drive the emotion in the words.

Everything on the album sounds like it was tightly planned, with nothing left to chance, but without forgetting to leave room for warmth and passion. It’s this perfectionist attitude which makes ‘Two Suns’, well, perfect.

iTunes – Amazon – Spotify

80kidz – This Is My Shit
Formed in Tokyo in 2007, 80kidz’s Jun, Ali& and Mayu originally came together as DJs, but really started turning heads, including ours, when they began tweaking records for a series of increasingly impressive remixes. Original music soon followed, and their debut album, ‘This Is My Shit’, arrived this year. In the UK, it was only soft released on iTunes through the band’s own Kidz Rec label, meaning the album largely went unnoticed, though has received a boost after their track, ‘Miss Mars’, was featured on a Kitsuné Maison compilation earlier this year.

From the moment the synth riff on the opening track, ‘Go Mynci’, kicks in, it’s apparent that ‘This Is My Shit’ is not going to be just another run-of-the-mill electronic album. The riff is too good to be a fluke, and the band follow it up with plenty more across sixteen tracks, making it one of the few albums of such length released this year that isn’t bulked out with unnecessary filler tracks.

Although the trio themselves are an instrumental outfit, they do draft in vocals from autoKratz, Ghostape, Hey Champ and The Shoes, drawing them more towards a pure pop sound. On ‘She’, in particular, autoKratz frontman David Cox offers a soft vocal that works wonderfully at odds with 80kidz’s upbeat, synth-heavy sound, and makes the sudden burst of the previously mentioned ‘Miss Mars’, which follows it, all the more effective.

With music that is endlessly energetic and exciting, I really hope that 2010 will bring 80kidz, now a duo following the recent departure of Mayu, to a much wider attention. They truly deserve it.

iTunes

Grizzly Bear – Veckatimest
Beginning as a solo project for singer-songwriter Edward Droste in the early part of the decade, Grizzly Bear’s popularity has risen in sharp spurts with the release of each of their albums. 2006’s ‘Yellow House’ brought the band wide acclaim and a reasonable level of commercial success. Still, if you had described to anyone the shape their 2009 would take at the beginning of the year, I’m not sure anyone would have believed you. Not until they’d heard ‘Two Weeks’, the lead single from ‘Veckatimest’, anyway.

‘Two Weeks’ is what you might call Grizzly Bear’s crossover hit. It’s certainly the closest they’ve ever got to writing a proper pop song – catchy, upbeat and easy to sing along to, but without compromising their smart, ethereal folk sound. Although, it’s not the album’s only pop moment. The chorus of ‘While You Wait For The Others’, in particular, sees the band again getting infectious.

But it’s not just catchiness which makes this album one of the best of the year, it’s much more that no note is wasted. The band make every single sound on the album count, to such a degree that you can barely believe these songs were written by real people. Okay, maybe that’s a step too far into hyperbole, but they certainly take indie-folk to a very different and infinitely more interesting place than the painful tedium of Fleet Foxes or Bon Iver.

More so than any other album in our 2009 round-up, I am convinced that this is one with real staying power. The kind of album people will be discussing in too much detail on TV shows and in magazine articles of the future.

iTunes – Amazon

So, this morning I woke up with Happy Birthday Ralph by Atom And His Package in my head. Who knows why. It’s possibly that I was thinking about what to get my girlfriend for her birthday. Though I should point out that her name is not Ralph and the sentiment of the song’s chorus (“Happy birthday Ralph, I love you! Even though you are fucking disgusting”) only holds up in part to my feelings for her.

Anyway, arriving in my office, I cranked up Spotify and put on Atom’s live album, Hair: Debatable, to satisfy by sudden need to hear that song. Somewhere along the way, something I heard on the album made me think of King Missile. So once Atom was finished with his very silly pop songs, I moved on to King Missile’s also quite silly Mystical Shit album.

Once again, something in the record sparked a memory of something else. This time it was easier to pinpoint, there was something in the spoken word delivery that made me think of Want by Recoil. Not that there are any real similarities between them, really. But that spark was still there and came out of nowhere immediately discernable, save for a few vague memories that somehow linked themselves to each other.

So, at this point I decided to only listen to albums my head subconsciously suggested to me. The only condition being that they had to be on Spotify. Now, I will warn you at this point, I am going to continue describing the choices I made, which will either be incredibly tedious or a fascinating inside into the way the human brain works. I’m expecting the former, so if you want to skip to the end, I won’t be offended.

From Recoil, I went to Curve. This one is easy to explain. Curve’s Dean Garcia was involved in Recoil’s Liquid album (from which Want is taken) and I still very clearly remember reading this fact on the press release back in 2000. Then from Curve’s Come Clean I went to Songs Of Faith And Devotion by Depeche Mode, partly because of a sonic similarity and partly because the guy who introduced my to Curve also introduced me to that particular Depeche Mode album.

The next move may seem slightly odd, because it’s to Deftones. However, I seem to remember that Be Quiet And Drive (Far Away) by Deftones was influenced by Depeche Mode’s In Your Room. And then Be Quiet And Drive linked me to Foo Fighters because that and Everlong have quite similar guitar parts.

The problem now is that we’re heading into my teenage years and memories were firing off in all directions, throwing all kinds of stuff at me (well, mainly other 90s rock). I had to go with what I thought was the first one that had come to mind, which was Groop Dogdrill’s album, Every Six Seconds. This lead me to what was possibly the strangest connection, because I went from the noisy rock of Groop Dogdrill to the far more chilled electronica of King Of Woolworths.

Why? Okay, here goes. First thing to start things rolling was the porny lyrics on On Me Not In Me by Groop Dogdrill, which caused Stalker Song by King Of Woolworths to come hazily into view. However, the link was cemented because I have a vivid memory of playing that particular Groop Dogdrill album to my friend Ven in my car several years ago. I have another memory, less vivid but a memory nonetheless, of playing King Of Woolworths’ Ming Star album to Ven, also in my car. The great thing about listening to Ming Star is that you always realise how many (and how often) track from it are used on TV. It’s not a well-known album, but you’d recognise a lot of it. Probably not Stalker Song, though. That one’s a bit dark.

Next up (and finally) came Xploding Plastix, because the spoken word sample in To The Devil A Donut by King Of Woolworths is similar to the one on Xploding Plastix’s Comatose Luck. Which isn’t the most interesting connection to end on, but that’s what happens when you rely on your stupid sub-conscious.

So, there you go, that is how my brain works. The reward for those of you who read this far (and those of you who took my advice to skip to the end) is this Spotify playlist, featuring a track from each of the albums mentioned.

http://open.spotify.com/user/ieatmusic/playlist/0MDlJdwuDVLRUcIJp8Owt6

EDIT: I also wrote about this in my editorial in CMU Weekly. I love self-plagiarism. Check it out here.

Because I hate trying to answer the question “So, what kind of music are you into?” (and because I am horrifically anal about these things), I have spent much of the last ten years trying to condense my entire musical taste down to one word.

For a while I toyed with borrowing an idea from a friend, who just tells everyone she likes ‘good music.’ But the problem is that it wouldn’t be true. I like quite a lot of really awful music. And what constitutes ‘good,’ anyway? If I say that to a lot of people they’ll automatically have me down as a fan of U2. And I can’t have people thinking that.

I’ve actually adopted the phrase, “I like pretty much anything from music hall to white noise,” in the last year or so. I think it covers most bases, despite sounding quite pretentious. But a while ago I thought I might have actually stumbled across that one killer word that would sum everything up. That word, as you’ve probably already guessed, is ‘dramatic.’

Until I collected my last Twitter-recommended playlist, I hadn’t managed to come up with a way of testing this theory (okay, I hadn’t actually given it much thought at all, but stick with me). But as all those suggestions of ’achingly beautiful’ music came flooding in, I suddenly thought maybe I could use the same method to find out if ‘dramatic’ really is the catch all word for the music I like.

Now, there are all sorts of reasons why it can’t be, not least because there is a lot of completely undramatic music out there that I love. Also, there’s plenty of dramatic music around that I don’t like – Celine Dion does drama well, but I’m never going to start liking what she does and, apologies everyone, I’m not a massive fan of Queen either. Then there’s the fact that my definition of dramatic doesn’t always line up with other people’s.

That actually makes things a lot more interesting. This could have just been a list of power ballads, but because the theme means different things to different people we’ve got a massive variety of songs. There are tracks where the drama builds through the music and/or vocals in a wide variety of ways, while in others it comes through the lyrics, like on R Kelly’s hilarious musical soap opera, Trapped In The Closet. Sometimes it’s just a general vibe. And then, just to prove that we don’t all find the same things dramatic, there are songs on this playlist, admittedly only a very small number, in which I can’t hear any drama at all.

But at the same time, a lot of my favourite songs were suggested. She Spider by Mew, Bachelorette by Björk, Après Moi by Regina Spektor, Skream’s remix of La Roux’s In For The Kill, Passenger by Deftones, Hurt by Nine Inch Nails, and Touched by Vast are all songs I know and love and would probably have suggested myself. And listening to many of the songs I didn’t already know, I had a feeling I was listening to a lot of future favourites too. So maybe there is something in this after all.

There are artists who came up repeatedly; mostly Björk and Kate Bush, who I had expected, and The Chemical Brothers, who I hadn’t. I was also surprised that only one post-rock track came up, The Birth And Death Of The Day by Explosions In The Sky. Only three songs were named more than once: Jóga by Björk, Wuthering Heights by Kate Bush and Deftones’ aforementioned collaboration with Tool and A Perfect Circle frontman, Maynard James Keenan, Passenger. A Perfect Circle, incidentally, were another band who popped up several times, getting one song from each of their three albums included. And if someone hadn’t suggested Total Eclipse Of The Heart, I think I might have had to slip it in myself.

I wasn’t put in that position, though. So my contribution is the playlist’s opening track, the stripped back version of Something I Can Never Have by Nine Inch Nails from Still. I considered going in with a torrent of hardcore, but went with this because it manages to built drama and tension with just piano, guitar and voice and gets things off to a more gentle start. Also, as Mr Reznor stormed off Twitter in a huff this week, I thought it was somehow fitting.

Going back to my original question, I think it’s fairly safe to say that it’s not possible to condense my entire musical taste down into one word. So unfortunately it looks like I am going to have to continue offering slightly confused and confusing explanations. But that’s probably a good thing. Anyone who asks you what music you like expecting to get a simple answer probably doesn’t deserve an answer at all.

You can listen to almost all of the songs listed here in this handy Spotify playlist.

Nine Inch Nails – Something I Can Never Have (Still version) (Spotify|Last.fm)
Mew – She Spider (Spotify|Last.fm)
Divine Comedy – Through A Long And Sleepless Night (Spotify)
Beyoncé – Ring The Alarm (Spotify|Last.fm)
Spandau Ballet – To Cut A Long Story Short (Spotify|Last.fm)
Celine Dion – It’s All Coming Back To Me Now (Spotify|Last.fm)
The Veronicas – Untouched (Spotify)
Ladytron – Destroy Everything You Touch (Spotify|Last.fm)
The Chameleons – A Person Isn’t Safe Anywhere These Days (Spotify|Last.fm)
Magazine – Motorcade (Spotify|Last.fm)
My Life Story – 12 Reasons Why I Love Her (Spotify|Last.fm)
Björk – Jóga (Spotify)
Bauhaus – She’s In Parties (Spotify)
Bright Eyes – Arienette
Deftones – Passenger (Spotify|Last.fm)
Devotchka – Comrade Z (Spotify)
Final Fantasy – Please Please Please (Spotify|Last.fm)
The Germs – Media Blitz (Spotify|Last.fm)
Heart – Alone (Spotify|Last.fm)
Kate Bush – Wuthering Heights (Spotify)
Clint Mansell – Death Is The Road To Awe (Spotify)
The One AM Radio – Fires
Patrick Wolf – This Weather (Last.fm)
A Perfect Circle – Magdalena (Spotify|Last.fm)
Björk – Bachelorette (Spotify)
Fat Boy Slim – Right Here Right Now
Fionn Regan – Snowy Atlas Mountains (Spotify|Last.fm)
Andrew Bird – Fake Palindromes (Spotify|Last.fm)
Andrew Bird – Imitosis (Spotify|Last.fm)
Regina Spektor – Après Moi (Spotify|Last.fm)
Elbow – The Loneliness Of A Tower Crane Driver (Spotify|Last.fm)
Biffy Clyro – Living Is A Problem Because Everything Dies (Spotify)
A-ha – The Sun Always Shines On TV (Spotify|Last.fm)
Arctic Monkeys – The View From The Afternoon (Spotify)
Bloc Party – Helicopter (Spotify)
Cake – The Distance (Spotify)
The Chemical Brothers – Leave Home (Spotify|Last.fm)
The Chemical Brothers – Setting Sun (feat. Noel Gallagher) (Spotify|Last.fm)
The Chemical Brothers – The Test (Spotify|Last.fm)
The Diamonds – The Stroll (Spotify|Last.fm)
Eels – Souljacker Part 1 (Spotify)
La Roux – In For The Kill (Skream’s Let’s Get Ravey Remix) (Spotify|Last.fm)
Johnny Foreigner – Salt, Pepa And Spindarella (Spotify|Last.fm)
Besnard Lakes – And You Lied To Me (Spotify|Last.fm)
Led Zeppelin – Since I’ve Been Loving You
Sparks – This Town Ain’t Big Enough For The Both Of Us (Spotify|Last.fm)
Kate Bush – Babooshka (Spotify|Last.fm
Explosions In The Sky – The Birth And Death Of The Day (Spotify|Last.fm)
Reparata & The Delrons – I’m Nobody’s Baby Now
Glenda Collins – Something I’ve Got To Tell You
Puccini – Nessum Dorma (Spotify)
Puccini – O Mio Bambino Caro (Spotify)
Dire Straits – Brothers In Arms (Spotify|Last.fm)
Queen – Innuendo (Spotify|Last.fm)
Alanis Morissette – Uninvited (Spotify)
Sub6 – 7th Son (Ticon Remix) (Spotify)
Deftones – Minerva (Spotify)
A Perfect Circle – Imagine (Spotify)
The Pink Mountaintops – Vampire (Spotify)
Fever Ray – Concrete Walls (Spotify|Last.fm)
Xiu Xiu – I Luv The Valley, OH! (Last.fm)
Foals – Titan Arum (Spotify)
Modest Mouse – Satin In A Coffin (Spotify|Last.fm)
Radiohead – Exit Music (For A Film) (Spotify|Last.fm)
Elbow – Mexican Standoff (Spotify|Last.fm)
Dan Le Sac vs Scroobius Pip – Waiting For The Beat To Kick In (Spotify|Last.fm)
R Kelly – Trapped In The Closet 1-13 (Spotify)
The Chemical Brothers – Saturate (Spotify|Last.fm)
Sia – Breathe Me (Spotify)
Lorraine Ellison – Stay With Me (Baby) (Spotify|Last.fm)
Scott Walker – The Cockfighter (Spotify|Last.fm)
The Monkees – Porpoise Song (Spotify|Last.fm)
Bonnie Tyler – Total Eclipse Of The Heart (Spotify|Last.fm)
Nine Inch Nails – Hurt (Spotify|Last.fm)
My Dying Bride – The Cry Of Mankind (Spotify|Last.fm)
Faith No More – Caffeine (Spotify)
A Perfect Circle – Pet (Spotify)
Vast – Touched (Spotify|Last.fm)

Thanks to all of the following, who recommended the music on this playlist and all have impeccable taste: @radioedit, @trixie, @nickpeters, @MyChemToilet, @mrstealeaves, @marshamusic, @jaimemcc, @sesp, @CaroUnLimited, @davidriley, @DanReballato, @mariusvandyk, @sus_ond, @benedit, @rebekahwalker, @KRamness, @beristwicke, @joeparry, @venpedro

This week I found myself with five tracks available in my monthly allowance on eMusic and no idea what to download. This is something that happens a lot. Under pressure to choose something, I experience the same thing that generally happens when I walk into a record shop, where I forget the name of every band I’ve ever heard of and just start flicking aimlessly through the shelves in the vague hope that something might trigger a memory.

The other option, of course, is to ask someone else what I should be listening to. So, I fired up Twitter and posted this message: “I have five eMusic tracks that I don’t know what to do with. Everyone name one achingly beautiful song. Please. Thank you.” Simple but, as it turned out, very effective.

There are plenty of new ways to get automated musical recommendations, on sites such as Last.fm, or Pandora, or iTunes’ Genius function. But these all have their faults. They’ll never quite match up to real human recommendations, because a computer will never say to you “I want it played at my funeral, but only as a way of forcing people to listen to and remember it,” as @marshamusic did when recommending Bread by Clem Snide. Plus a computer’s recommendation is all too easy to dismiss. But when someone’s told you that they find something achingly beautiful, you feel some kind of duty to listen to it. You can’t just click delete and forget about it.

For example, I’ve never had much time for Sigur Rós, but as you might expect, there were a number of their songs recommended. Normally I’d avoid them but today I’ve sat down and given them proper time and attention and discovered Sæglópur, which left me gasping for air when it kicked in. I also have to admit that Svefn-G-Englar was a pretty impressive track to end on.

For the most part, people recommended the kind of gentle music that would initially spring to mind when you mention beautiful music. But then there’s Thinktank by Airiel, a fast-paced rock track with shoegazer-y vocals that builds and almost runs out of control across four minutes. It’s not an obvious contender, but you can see why @_joshhall_ thinks it’s beautiful. It is beautiful. The way the guitar and vocal melodies play against each other is really lovely and there’s an upbeat feel that is completely infectious. The same could be said for Teen Angst by M83, which rushes at you and envelops you, rather than soothing you from a distance. Or even Dilaudid by Mountain Goats, which you could argue is a bit confrontational but is so simple and compelling that I had to listen to it four times in a row.

It’s also interesting to see which songs by bands whose music I know well other people rate. For all the Elbow songs that came through, no one mentioned Switching Off, which for me is their finest moment and finds them at their most beautiful. Also, the one Cure song that was recommended was A Night Like This. Not a bad choice by any means, but on the very same album (Head On The Door) you’ve got Push. And while Samson by Regina Spektor is definitely beautiful, what about Us?

But if I wanted to write a list of all the songs I think are achingly beautiful, I would. That’s not what this is about. This is much better than that. It’s been an opportunity for me to discover new music, as well as re-discovering some old things as well. If I was to write my own list now, there are some things I’ve just heard that would now appear on it, which I suppose is the point.

So, after that very long introduction, here is the playlist. We kick off with my own choice, An Ending (Ascent) by Brian Eno, before moving onto what my followers on Twitter decided was the most achingly beautiful music out there in the order it was recommended to me. If you want to contribute to my next playlist, follow me on Twitter at www.twitter.com/andymalt.

You can listen to all the tracks that are available on Spotify (sadly not everything at the moment) all together here.

Brian Eno – An Ending (Ascent) (Spotify | Last.fm)
TV On The Radio – Family Tree (Spotify | Last.fm)
Catherine AD – Carry Your Heart (Last.fm)
Sigur Rós – Vaka (Spotify | Last.fm)
Clem Snide – Bread (Spotify | Last.fm)
Andrew Bird – Masterfade (Last.fm)
The Reindeer Section – Where I Fall (Spotify | Last.fm)
Elbow – Scattered Black And Whites (Spotify)
Elbow – Great Expectations ( Spotify | Last.fm)
Fionn Regan – Snow Atlas Mountains (Spotify)
Death Cab For Cutie – Brothers On A Hotel Bed (Spotify)
Regina Spektor – Samson (Spotify | Last.fm)
Sufjan Stevens – Concerning The UFO Sighting Near Highland, Illinois (Spotify)
David Berkeley – The Blood And The Wine (MySpace)
Richard Buckner – Lil Wallet Picture (Last.fm)
King Creosote – Admiral (Spotify)
Jenniferever – From Across The Sea (Spotify | Last.fm)
Airiel – Thinktank (Last.fm)
M83 – Teen Angst (Spotify | Last.fm)
Mew – White Lips Kissed (Last.fm)
Oceansize – Music For A Nurse (Spotify)
M. Ward – Post War (Spotify)
Elliott Smith – Whatever (Folk Song In C) (Spotify)
Great Lake Swimmers – Your Rocky Spine (Spotify | Last.fm)
Tunng – Bullets (Hot Chip Remix)
The Mountain Goats – Dilaudid (Spotify)
Joanna Newsom – This Side Of The Blue (Last.fm)
Nick Drake – Northern Lights
Bonnie Raitt – I Ain’t Gonna Let You Break My Heart Again (Spotify | Last.fm)
The Cinematic Orchestra – To Build A Home (Spotify)
Joseph Arthur – Honey And The Moon (Spotify | Last.fm)
Jacques Brel – Ne Me Quitte Pas (Spotify | Last.fm)
Doves – The Cedar Room (Spotify | Last.fm)
Elbow – Starlings (Spotify)
Bette Middler – The Rose (Spotify)
Coldplay – Yellow (Spotify | Last.fm)
The Cure – A Night Like This (Spotify | Last.fm)
Beck – Lonesome Tears (Spotify | Last.fm)
Nick Drake – Way To Blue (Spotify | Last.fm)
The Beatles – She’s Leaving Home
The Postal Service – Nothing Better (Last.fm)
Joni Mitchell – Blue (Spotify | Last.fm)
Sigur Rós – Sæglópur (Spotify | Last.fm)
Alison Krauss and Union Station – Ghost In This House
Wolfman feat. Pete Doherty – For Lovers (Spotify)
M83 – Unrecorded (Spotify | Last.fm)
Sigur Rós – Hoppípolla (Spotify | Last.fm)
Sigur Rós – Glósóli (Spotify | Last.fm)
Manchester Orchestra – Sleeper 1972 (Spotify | Last.fm)
Nine Black Alps – Intermission (Spotify | Last.fm)
Interpol – Untitled (Spotify)
Radiohead – All I Need (Last.fm)
Maria Mena – It Must Have Been Love (Last.fm)
Des’Ree – Kissing You (Spotify | Last.fm)
Smashing Pumpkins – …Said Sadly (Spotify)
Iron & Wine – Upwards Over The Mountain
Michel Polnareff – Lettre À France (Last.fm)
Bruce Springsteen – Thunder Road (‘Live 75-85’ version) (Spotify | Last.fm)
The Magnetic Fields – All My Little Words (Spotify)
Sigur Rós – Svefn-G-Englar (Spotify | Last.fm)

Thanks to @MyChemToilet, @CatherineAD, @luke_is_best, @marshamusic, @adamkillip, @sesp, @_joshhall_, @mrstealeaves, @katbrightlights, @SongHooks, @charliemoo, @CaroUnLimited, @radioedit, @agoss, @Astrild, @winstonszen, @JonathanDeamer, @ianshepherd, @lsutherland, @Quiverdisc, @JackMarshall, @myrrhlarsen, @James1am, @samovarious, @JeremyMeyers, @smkng, @Mark_Mulligan, @frani_lieberman, @Jeremiah_James, @tomgillet, @tamipants