Short Blaze of Praise

Another excuse to
print this cover
(design: Tim Bradford)

Writers tend to disdain critics who give them bad reviews, because the reviewers obviously didn't 'get it'. Or, if we're very disciplined, we ignore them. On the other hand, if they write a glowing appraisal, we reciprocate the applause. This person is obviously a highly intelligent, well-adjusted person with a sane and judicious world view. Much like ourselves. And so I link to Neil Nixon's write-up of The Chairman's Daughter this week at the When Saturday Comes website, in a wider piece about football books and digital publishing.

Authors also grab what little positive attention we can in a market so packed with niche-seeking tomes that the available royalties sometimes seem like the literary world's equivalent of twin fish and a clutch of loaves. Only it's not Jesus generously handing them out to the success starved authors, but a tightly stretched business that in some quarters is still peering at the e-market through the foggy monocle of a baffled, tweed-jacketed editor from the 1930s. Which is a long way of saying that, without apology, I here replicate Mr. Nixon's kind words in full:

"You don’t do these things for money, but there is money to be made, and the small sums on offer are expanding. It’s open season for anyone with knowledge, skills and the time to craft a book. The Chairman’s Daughter, by WSC regular Ian Plenderleith, is a Kindle-only delight published in 2012 imagining a lowly factory team, their millionaire owner (rich on the back of a device for scooping dog shit), a 4,000-seat stadium and a 29-year-old former England international on the comeback trail. He signs with one condition: he must avoid the chairman’s daughter. It looks workable, until she shows up.  The book has held its sales to the point it frequently appears in the offers at the bottom of an Amazon page for another book.

"The Chairman’s Daughter is gloriously old school, built on description, action and crowd pleasing plot-twists, and it’s selling in a market in which anyone can load and publish their own Kindle item. If you’ve read this far, maybe you’re football’s next Kindle cult hero author."

Should You Give A Bum A Buck?

Sticking plaster on a suppurating wound?

Here’s an every day scene from my every day life. I drive up to a T junction where the traffic light is on red. A man holding up a tatty cardboard sign saying ‘Hungry and Homeless’ shuffles towards my car. I feel troubled by his hunger and his homelessness. A dialogue starts in my head. Should I wind down the window and give him a dollar? Aside from the immediate alleviation of his hunger, why would I do that?

The charitable side of my brain says: “What's wrong with immediately alleviating hunger, you tight-fisted, mean-hearted bastard, all warm and secure behind your locked car door listening to your alt country indie-pop hard bop yadda yadda wank. How can you ignore this man’s plight? He is hungry. He needs money for food. Now. You have more than enough money. Give him a buck. Now.”

“Oh yeah?” says the resistant (read: ‘cheap’) side of my brain. “You think that if I give him a buck now that I’m in any way helping the plight of the hungry and homeless? Or am I just giving him a buck to make myself feel better? Maybe I’ll even feel a frisson of superiority over the woman in the car in front of me who shook her head and refused his plea.”

“It’s not all about you,” says Charity. “It’s not about you at all. It’s about his need for food, right here and now.”

“No,” says Resistance. “It’s about your conscience, right here and now. It’s not that you care about his hunger. You care about driving away and seeing him in your rear mirror, and feeling guilty in your gut because you gave him nothing. The homeless, hungry guy makes you feel like a bad person, and you can not face up to that truth, even though the huge material gap between you and the needy reflects your willing engagement in a system that perpetuates hunger and homelessness. But how will it actually help this guy if you give him a buck? He’ll be hungry again tomorrow, and all he had was the benefit of your self-serving condescension.”

“Nice rhetoric,” says Charity. “So would you hand him the Communist Party Manifesto instead, and tell him to start organizing? You believe that the hungrier he becomes, the more revolutionary he will be, thus increasing the chances that he will overthrow his oppressors and institute a fairer system where no one goes hungry. Better still, you get to save a buck.”

“You’re being absurd,” Resistance replies. “You are taking to an extreme my belief in Rights Not Charity.”

“Maybe the homeless guy believes in Rights too, but in the meantime he’d like a little Charity because his belly’s empty, and you can’t eat slogans. And besides, what’s wrong with you feeling a little better about yourself for giving him a buck?”

“I can’t bear his gratitude and humility,” says Resistance. “If I’m going to give him a dollar, I’d rather he tell me to fuck off.”

“Why would he do that?”

“So that I’d give him another buck tomorrow.”

“Well, here he comes now. We’ve got three seconds to make a decision.”

Citing my finely honed political principles, I used to ignore the homeless man. Or I’d give him an apologetic smile. Sometimes I’d justify not giving on the grounds that the light might suddenly change to green, and I’d end up holding up the other cars while fumbling around in my wallet. There are few more wrathful phenomena than a column of car-confined westerners being delayed from pressing their well-fed feet down on the gas pedal.

Lately, though, I’ve stashed a bundle of dollar notes in the spare change compartment where I keep quarters for parking meters. I’ve become tired of the reasoning behind Resistance, even though I still harbour profound doubts about Charity’s motivation. But if I were asked to talk to the man with the ‘Homeless and Hungry’ sign, I’d find it much easier to give him a buck than to explain why a properly functional democracy in a wealthy, western society should be providing sufficient welfare for every last one of its citizens.

I suppose I could make my point and then give him the buck, but any such cop-out would feel too much like church-sponsored soup kitchens where the hungry are made to pray and sit through a sermon before they get their food. A gift should come with no strings attached, especially a gift as small as a dollar. Impressive words hold little nutrition for a hungry man.

Doing The Irony

The legs of Modern Man
 (pic: Paul Wetherell)

The latest trends in fashion have a habit of passing me by. This has saved me a ton of money down the decades, but has also left me feeling awfully excluded. From what, I’m not quite sure.

Fortunately, at the age of 47 I’ve just found out where to keep up with What’s New In Threads. It’s a big fat wedge of processed tree inside my Sunday edition of the New York Times called ‘T’. What does ‘T’ stand for? I don’t know, but I’ve a feeling it would be unstylish to ask. 

Inside the latest edition from last weekend is a photo feature called The Modern Man. This is the perfect guide for those of us who fear being laughed at in public by gangs of teenagers because we look like old fuddy-duddies. And here’s what you need to know: “From a clean shave to black socks with bare legs, there’s a frank irony to dressing stylishly today.”

The chosen model looks barely old enough to shave at all (oh, the irony). He’s wearing a $1400 plain white Prada shirt, the frank irony being that you could probably get a couple of dozen plain white shirts at less modern prices if you chose a different brand. But no one’s claiming that being authentically modern is a cheap affair.

Take our picture above, which is from the same feature. The socks (Falke) are $38, the shorts (Krisvanassche, as if you didn’t know) are “about $625”, and the sneakers (Barneys New York Exclusive Diemme) are $405. That’s a total of $1,068 to look like what those ignorant souls outside of fashion circles commonly call “a complete twat”.  

Also shown in the feature is a Louis Vuitton jacket ($1,925) under the sub-heading “Outerwear as Indoor Wear”. Get it? These crazy cats will show up at your next loft party wearing nothing but a vest, and then put their jackets on after they’ve walked through the door. Don’t offer them cheesy snacks, because these crown princes of irony will already have eaten some on their way. All you’ll need to do is guide them to the bathroom so they can walk into the shower and simulate rainfall to complete what voguish insiders are calling the Great Circle of Irony. 

Finally, fellow modern men, if you wear a necklace, don’t expose it all. But don’t hide it completely either. What frankly ironic modern man is showing, reportedly, is just “a hint of chain” (either from Gucci at $415, or a comparative snip of a thing from Dior Homme at $370). Seems from the picture you have to kind of half-drape it over the V-neck of a sweater. It’s perhaps best to practice this at home before you venture out into public and find that the act of walking down the street has dislodged the jewelry, and those snickering teenage hordes cruelly pounce to humiliate you by shouting out loud, “Lot of chain you’re showing there, dude. A lot of chain. We thought you were an old-fashioned toilet waiting to be flushed ha ha ha.”

So, to summarise – modern man wears shorts outside where it’s cold, and a jacket indoors where it’s warm, while spending thousands of dollars. Tsk, and to think some people say there’s no point reading the papers any more. 

Hollywood Gears Up For Oscar Sequels

The movies - where historical accuracy fears to tread.

Hollywood is pondering how to cash in on the success of this year’s Oscar nominees due to the lack of any obvious sequels to the main contenders. Fortunately, the SAHIP blog’s film and media creative arm has been working overtime on some new ideas, all of which have now been bought up by the major studios. Expect to see these big screen follow-ups before the end of the year:

Argo Back For More

Feeling that their first escape was a bit of a breeze, CIA operative Tony Mendez smuggles the six Canadians he liberated from Iran back in to the country the following year to film a fake sequel to the fake sci-fi movie Argo. It’s easy to bribe the witless Iranian officials with free Argo mugs, posters and bobble-heads, because deep down they all want to be Americans really. Things almost go disastrously wrong when the crew tries to film an explicit lesbian sex scene at a mosque during Friday prayers, while the team later makes its narrow escape as Mendez takes on the Ayatollah Khomeini in dramatic hand-to-knife combat on the under-carriage of their departing Swissair jet. Based on a figment of reality.

Lincoln Rises Again

Written after the emergence of new (though currently unavailable) historical evidence that John Wilkes Booth’s shooting of Abraham Lincoln may not have been as successful as commonly thought, this movie charts the political advances made by the unstoppably progressive Lincoln as he rises from the dead three days after his ‘assassination’. Peeved by the country’s reluctance to truly accept blacks as equals, he seizes back the presidency under the moniker of his newly founded Black Power party, and institutes a minimum hourly wage of $15 for all freed slaves. While he’s at it, he persuades both Congress and the Senate to pass bills legalising gay marriage, legislating equal pay for women, severely curbing the right to bear arms, and instigating access to universal health care and education regardless of income or background. And all of this while openly living with his African American male lover, with whom he fathers two sons – Malcolm X and the Reverend Martin Luther King Junior. Screenwriter Tony Kushner says, “Any bitter, jealous fool who quibbles about minor inaccuracies in this script simply wasn’t there.”

Zero Dark Thirty-One

Looking for a landmark moment in the second term of his presidency to cement his legacy as a Nobel Peace Prize winner, US commander-in-chief Barack Obama prays to Allah to reincarnate Osama Bin Laden so that he can target Al Qaeda’s top man once more, and subsequently look good on the news. Luckily, there are already thousands of radical Al Qaeda operatives who have been spawned thanks to previous US military operations, so the President can while away tedious state occasions using his hand-held Drone Console to launch a wave of new attacks from the safety of his dinner table. Which, remarkably, leads to yet more Al Qaeda operatives, so it’s a win-win for both sides. Sample dialogue – Army Chief of Staff: Mr. President, we’ve located a terrorist on a donkey in northern Afghanistan. President (chuckling): Well, how about I call him on my drone? Denounced by the CIA as not violent enough.

Still Les Misérables

Set in Paris during the 1968 student riots, Anne Hathaway stars as a strident young Marxist-feminist determined to make the world a better place, if she can only stop crying for long enough. To better release her emotions, she begins to publicly sing agit-prop melodies to speed up the revolution, only to find that after ten minutes the streets have been miraculously cleared. Students and riot police alike. All gone. Hiding in cafés and under covers. Features popular hit ‘I Sang A Nightmare’.

Django Unchained 2

In this Tarantino-directed sequel, former slave and bounty hunter Django kills every single white person south of the Mason-Dixon line (with each shooting depicted in loving slow motion), and establishes a system of communal farms for the liberated masses run along collective anarchist principles. He then heads on a lecture tour of the European colonies, advising locals on how effectively to deal with their own master-servant problems, providing practical help whenever necessary (which it is, always). “Two severed thumbs up for this 14-hour splatterfest,” Roger Ebert.

Life of Si

Extraordinary biopic of pop mogul Simon Cowell, who finds himself stranded alone in a life-boat with a tiger after a fracas with his staff over the “unacceptable” quality of service on his luxury yacht. Cowell criticises the tiger’s growling as “completely irrelevant to today’s pop market”, and berates the animal for failing to discard “that ghastly, garish 1970s fur outfit”. Rather than bite Cowell’s head off and risk having to taste whatever foul and noxious substance it is that courses through the bilious brain of Britain’s Top Wanker, the tiger opts to throw itself off the side of the boat and drown, prompting the talent show judge to shake his head in disbelief at the tiger’s propensity to quit so easily. Like Cowell, unrated.

Plaudits For The Pensioner Who Pulverized Pizza Hut

"Oops, did I do that? Oh my!" (Pic: CAPT258)

Old people never seem to get the credit they deserve. This week an 86-year-old woman crashed her car into a Pizza Hut in Arlington, Virginia, and the story was presented as though this was all a terrible accident. The wayward octogenarian had lost control of her car after she "apparently confused the gas and brake pedals". I don't believe a word of it. She pranged the chain food outlet on purpose, and I don't blame her. Pizza Hut serves food so bad that I've seen liberated chickens strut out of there and straight back to their battery farms for better chow.

It's not just their scanty, cardboard-based pizzas that offend all right-tasting palettes. It's the miserable atmosphere, the stingy dimensions of the serve-yourself salad bowls, and the understandably depressed demeanours of their under-motivated staff that make visiting Pizza Hut akin to a gastronomic wake. That anyone voluntarily walks into this chain and hands over their own cash in exchange for a series of culinary insults testifies to the rock-bottom discernment of your average western gut. Thank heavens, some of us are fighting back. 

Our blue-rinse heroine should be given a public service award for literally trashing this anti-nutritional fodder stall of flavour disenfranchisement. Where a customer comment of 'Mediocre service' on the feedback form will win you Employee of the Month. Where a meal classified as 'bland and instantly forgettable' is seen as a landmark achievement for the head chef and his partners at the laboratory for chemical colourings (Food and Other Industrial Services Division).

I imagine the aging driver's thought process went something like this as she drove down Lee Highway: "I'm 86 years old, and what is my legacy? How will people remember me? Yeah, sure, I knitted a lot of scarves and pullovers, but they'll unravel in the end. My apple pie always gets praise at Thanksgiving, but I know they're patronising me. What can I do? You know, something meaningful. Dang, look, there's a Pizza Hut. How I hate that goddamned place. Shitty food, shitty service. Heh heh, what if I just accidentally mistook my accelerator for the brake pedal. Ha ha ha, here we go, yeeeeeesssssss!!!!"

Bam.

I've seen it happen before. An elderly lady drove her car off an overhanging wall, through a fence and on to the tennis courts at our neighbourhood swimming pool a couple of years back. They called it an accident, but you can bet she probably spotted on court that slut who was staring too long at the front of her husband's swimming shorts back in 1967 at the end-of-summer barbecue, so she put her foot down for some belated retribution. When you get to that age, what have you got to lose? If things start crashing down around you, then you just look all confused and say, "Oh mighty me, did I really do all that?"

Many people seem to fear old age, but I'm already looking forward to turning 86. In fact I'm ready now to start drawing up a preliminary list of potential locations for an unfortunate collision. Starbucks may one day come to regret all those piss-weak, over-priced lattes they've been serving my generation for the past ten years.

Morrissey at the Strathmore

Financially eviscerated, and no one to blame but
 yourself (note to pedants: concert was re-scheduled)

Morrissey sings on You Were Good In Your Time, a song from a characteristically average solo effort called Years of Refusal (2009), “You were good in your time/And we thank you so/You said more in one day/Than most people say/In a lifetime…” Possibly paraphrasing his critics and former fans, it seems like a defiant, not to mention masturbatory, counter-attack to suggestions that he should call it a day. Last night at the Strathmore Concert Hall in North Bethesda, there was more than enough adulation in the air to blow away any plans he ever harboured to retire. Nonetheless, he really should. And people like me should stop spending $87.50 on tickets (including charges) just to have our view confirmed that his best songs were composed long ago, and he’s no longer much good at singing them.

Not that the concert was bad, if you forget about the price tag, and the seat high up in the balcony with a distant view of the stalwart vegetarian and his journeyman band-mates. For what it’s worth, it was much, much better than the two previous times I’ve seen him solo, at the 9.30 Club and at the sonically challenged outdoor Wolf Trap. The overall delivery was solid, the sound was strong, and like any middle-aged fool for the better days of indie-pop, I waited for the next old hit as though Steve Jobs had never invented playlists on shuffle. If I was Morrissey's music teacher making a neutral assessment, I'd give it a B minus.

It’s hard, though, to feel moved by the music when you’re stuck in a theatre seat, and the woman to your right spends the entire first half of the concert sending texts. At one point, five people directly around me were fucking about on their cell phones, and they weren’t even taking distant, blurry snaps of the stage. No doubt they were letting people know where they are, because people couldn’t wait to be told later.

I might have been more excited if I’d been one of the few standing down at the cusp of the stage, a privilege reserved for those allocated seats in the front row. They all seemed to want to touch Morrissey’s hand, or to get on stage and hug him. These are not teenagers we’re talking about, and this alone constitutes sufficient grounds to cancel any future Morrissey tours. But the open-shirted singer seemed loath to discourage this mid-life obeisance, even though a bouncer lobbed one aging interloper off stage who had completely put the singer off the second line of How Soon Is Now?

I once got up on stage with Morrissey too, but it wasn’t to hug him, it was to dance next to him and Johnny Marr among the trampled flowers. I was 18 and drunk. The Smiths used to encourage it (the getting up on stage, not the drinking). Now I’d only do it for a $90 refund, if I didn’t strain a muscle trying, or risk dropping my phone while posting to Facebook, “About to kiss Morrissey. He seems alarmed for some reason! Oof, just got twatted by a bouncer LOL.”

It wasn’t necessarily the drudge songs and the mediocre new material in between the old favourites that made me think this was a bad idea, rather it was the desultory rendition of Still Ill. Morrissey either couldn’t be bothered to sing it, or is no longer able to hit the notes. That was the moment which confirmed what you’d suspected all along, but didn’t want to admit because it makes you feel like a dupe – this over-40s’ night out was just another plastic cash event. Who would have guessed? The new songs are inferior versions of the old ones, and everybody can hear it, while the old ones should be left in their boxed set.

When there’s nothing new or inspiring, just the dreary old sermons on killing cows, and when you make a tool of yourself on the Colbert Report because you don’t have the perspective to laugh at yourself even just a little bit, you should ignore your accountant and be thankful that, unlike most of us, you had the chance to be good in your time.

Top 30 Albums, 2012

At last, it's the end-of-year musical list that all stay-at-home dads long for and live for. I won't bore you with too much prose this time, having long since run out of new adjectives to describe sounds that deserve more than mere phrases. As always, this is in no way a professionally assessed list, it's a rundown of the recordings I enjoyed listening to most, in approximate order. My apologies to the thousands of artistes I never heard, or have never heard of. It was already a good enough year without me needing to hear any more.

30. Tift Merritt - Traveling Alone (Yep Roc)
Track: Traveling Alone
Listen to: ooh, I don't know. When traveling alone?

29. Cat Power - Sun (Matador Records)

Track: Cherokee

Listen to: still traveling alone, dreamily driving across vast, unpopulated midwest landscapes (never done this, but it's a plan).

28. Air - Le Voyage dans la Lune (EMI)

Track: Sonic Armada

Listen to: while watching the disconcerting 1902 sci-fi film of the same name that Air belatedly put a soundtrack to.

27. Mark Lanegan Band - Blues Funeral (4AD)

Track: The Gravedigger's Song

Listen to: while celebrating decay.

26. Amadou and Mariam - Folilo (Nonesuch)

Track: Oh Amadou

Listen to: when reading reports from northern Mali about how brutal Islamic fundamentalists are suppressing all forms of music beside religious incantations.

25. Alabama Shakes - Boys and Girls (Ato Records)

Track: Hold On

Listen to: for old-fashioned musical virtues - raw, head-ripping, down-to-the-bone brilliance.

24. Cate le Bon - Cyrk (TCG)

Track: Fold The Cloth

Listen to: when you're wishing the Velvet Underground and Nico had made a few more albums.

23. Brandi Carlile - Bear Creek (Columbia)

Track: That Wasn't Me

Listen to: for the voice, for the songs.

22. Laura Gibson – La Grande (Barsuk)

Track: Milk-Heavy, Pollen-Eyed

Listen to: when you want something quiet, but with just enough vocal edge to stop you falling asleep.

21. Leonard Cohen - Old Ideas (Columbia)

Track: Amen

Listen to: if you're feeling old and wise, or as wise as you think it's going to get.

20. Stereo Venus - Close To The Sun (Sudden Hunger Records)

Track: John Sebastian's Girl

Listen to: for pleasure. No other reason.

19. Sweet Billy Pilgrim - Crown and Treaty (Luxor Purchase)

Track: Joyful Reunion

Listen to: for all kinds of wonderful and unusual sounds and directions.

18. Efterklang - Piramida (4AD)

Track: Hollow Mountain

Listen to: on glacial, panoramic nordic vistas (as per the video above).

17. Kathleen Edwards - Voyageur (Zoe/Rounder)

Track: A Soft Place To Land

Listen to: while heading south, watching Canada recede in your rear-view mirror.

16. Quantic and Alice Russell (with the Combo Bárbaro) - Look Around The Corner (Tru Thoughts)
Track: Look Around The Corner

Listen to: for the whole of soul.

15. Barbara Morgenstern - Sweet Silence (Monika Enterprise)
Track: Sweet Silence

Listen to: because you can rarely go wrong with Berlin-manufactured electronica.

14. Deepchord - Sommer (Soma)

Track: Aquatic

Listen to: you know, in a field or a warehouse, or wherever it is those young folk trance around nowadays.

13. Anna Ternheim - The Night Visitor (V2/Cooperative Music)

Track: Black Light Shines

Listen to: late at night, of course, nursing melancholy and a glass of something strong.

12. Bob Mould - Silver Age (Merge Records)

Track: The Descent

Listen to: for he's made a record like Hüsker used to dü.

11. The xx - Coexist (XL)

Track: Angels

Listen to: with a drum-box and a synth in your bedroom, wondering why you didn't think of this first. But you didn't, did you.

10. Calexico - Algiers (ANTI Records)

Track: Splitter

Listen to: their most complete record so far (and there have been several good ones).

9. Andrew Bird - Break It Yourself (Mom and Pop Music)

Track: Danse Caribe

Listen to: dancing wildly under the moonlight with raven-haired gypsy women. Should you get the chance.

8. Staff Benda Bilili - Bouger le Monde (Crammed Discs)
Track: Osali Mabe 

Listen to: because a group of paraplegic street musicians and abandoned children from the Democratic Republic of Congo will give you much more reason to hope than that crappy sports team you waste your time following. Best album ever made with an electronic one-string tin-can lute. 

7. Beach House - Bloom (Sub Pop)

Track: Lazuli

Listen to: loud, for total pop-symphonic immersion.

6. Rumer - Boys Don't Cry (Atlantic)

Track: P F Sloan

Listen to: because you loved The Carpenters and miss them badly.

5. Ben Zabo - Ben Zabo (Glitterhouse)

Track: Sènsènbo

Listen to: for moments of transient joy on greyer days.

4. Gemma Ray - Island Fire (Bronzerat)
Track: Flood and a Fire

Listen to: lurching around the indie-pop dance floor you had built in your basement, but never got round to using.

3. Four Tet - Pink (Text Records)
Track: Peace For Earth

Listen to: while spacing.

2. Samuel Yirga - Guzo (Real World)
Track: Samplings from the whole album/interview

Listen to: when someone tells you there's nothing new or exciting happening in music any more, and to marvel at this extraordinary, precocious jazz pianist from Ethiopia.

1. The Touré-Raichel Collective - The Tel Aviv Session (Cumbancha)
Track: Azawad
Listen to: while floating in a sea of sonic perfection.

Bubbling under:
Metric - Synthetica (Mom and Pop Records)
Ane Brun - It All Starts With One (America)

James Yorkston - I Was A Cat From A Book (Domino)
Rudi Zygadlo - Tragicomedies (Planet Mu)
Band of Horses - Mirage Rock (Columbia)
Lambchop - Mr. M (Merge Records)
Liars - WIXIW (Mute)
Flying Lotus - Until The Quiet Comes (Warp)
John Foxx and the Maths - The Shape of Things (Metamatic)
Antibalas - Antibalas (Daptone)
The Shins - Port of Morrow (Columbia)
Suzanne Vega - Close Up, Vol. 4: Songs of Family (Razor & Tie)
First Aid Kit - The Lion's Roar (Wichita)
Trembling Bells feat. Bonnie 'Prince' Billy - The Marble Downs (Honest Jon's Records)
Jens Lekman - I Know What Love Isn't (Secretly Canadian)

Jim White - Where It Hits You (Yep Roc)
Jeff Lynne - Long Wave (Absolute Marketing)
Mirroring - Foreign Body (Kranky)
Jason Lytle - Dept. of Disappearance (ANTI Records)
Sun Kil Moon - Among The Leaves (Caldo Verde)
Bat For Lashes - The Haunted Man (Parlophone)
Damien Jurado - Maraqopa (Secretly Canadian)

Ben Kweller - Go Fly A Kite (The Noise Company)
David Byrne and St. Vincent - Love This Giant (4AD/Todo Mundo)

Reissues/compilations etc.:
1. Various - Metal Dance Industrial/Post-Punk/Ebm: Classics & Rarities (Strut).
2. Can - The Lost Tapes (Mute)
3. The Durutti Column - Short Stories For Pauline (LTM)
4. Various - This One's For Him: A Tribute to Guy Clark (Icehouse Music)
5. Various - Personal Space: Electronic Soul 1974 - 1984 (Chocolate Industries)