musicOMH has reviewed nearly 700 albums released during 2009. A great many of them tugged gently at our sleeve wearing a pleading look that negated any need for words. "I'm a Top 50 Album Of The Year, aren't I?" is what that look says, all big eyes and trembling lower lip.
Our writers all had their personal favourites; as we cover everything from commercial pop to wistful folk via hip hop, drone metal and contemporary classical, it's arguably more difficult for an album to reach our Top 50 than it is for almost any other comparable list.
Those who deigned to vote - 36 writers in total - offered up their ordered picks of the year from a longlist.
The longlist lived up to its name, consisting as it did of everything we've awarded 4, 4.5 or 5 stars to, plus Mercury nominees released in 2009 and selected albums saved from lower ratings at the suggestion of writers. So yes; long. Compilations and live albums weren't eligible, but that still left nearly 300 of that 700, to be precise-ish.
There was then a second round (still listening at the back?) to pare that longlist down to a 'mediumlist' of a mere 100 titles, from which the shortlist that makes up the Top 50 was devised. This stage was painful; some fantastic albums fell by the wayside. Those that didn't make it through to the final 50 suffered from no quality deficit. The only conclusion to be drawn is that 2009 was a very fine year for albums.
Springing straight to mind by way of illustration are these 10 which oh-so-nearly made it:
I'd happily recommend listening to and buying all of these. But they still didn't make the list.
Amid extraordinary scenes, the winner of the BBC Sound Of 2009 poll Little Boots didn't make it either. Nor did Mercury winner Speech Debelle.
So do you want to see who did? NOW YOU CAN. In bits, starting with Nos 50-31, with the rest following every day for the rest of the week, linked from this page.
Thoughts of agreement, outrage or omission are welcome below. Have we missed your favourite? And can you guess the correct order of the Top Three before Friday?
musicOMH's Top 50 Albums Of 2009 was voted by:
Jamil Ahmad, Mike Barnes, Gideon Brody, Andrew Burgess, Jude Clarke, Christian Cottingham, Jenni Cole, Michael Cragg, Justin de la Cruz, Gemma Hampson, Darren Harvey, Peter Hayward, Ryan Helfand, Tony Heywood, Ben Hogwood, Michael Hubbard, Darren Lee, Tim Lee, Daniel Marner, Cat McGovern, Jamie Milton, Christopher Monk, John Murphy, Shaun Newport, Ceiri O'Driscoll, Nic Oliver, Alan Pedder, Camilla Pia, Ian Roullier, Sam Shepherd, DB Telford, Ben Urdang, Ian Wade, Rob Watson, Ben Winbolt-Lewis
As well as the deceptively simple slabs of thunderous electropop for which she's become a byword this year, Lady Gaga has managed to create a persona so perfectly in keeping with the times that Madonna must be livid.
She's an obvious pop construct, revelling in her superficiality and trotting out the whole 'commodity as art' shtick. But she's also a brilliantly clever artist who knows exactly which buttons to push.
The Fame Monster was initially set to be a repackaged 'deluxe' version of her multi-million selling The Fame debut. But the eight new songs were so strong that they've been released as an entity in their own right Stateside, while the UK gets them bundled with The Fame as a two CD set (buy it here).
So is the new material worth your pennies this Christmas? Michael Cragg directly injected Gaga into his ears and wrote some notes...
Bad Romance
Hardly a massive departure, Bad Romance finds producer RedOne turning the gauge marked 'Gaga' up to 11. The intro is a bonkers mix of heavy synth lines and the lady herself intoning "ga ga oh la la", before delivering lines as devilish as "I want you ugly/ I want you diseased". The chorus is one of her best yet, mainly because it seems to contain at least three separate sections, each as catchy as the last. It's The Fame Monster's single; check out the video at the bottom of this post.
Alejandro
Ace Of Base, anyone? They're there in the cheesy, cheap beats, the lilting vocal melody and the fact that Gaga sometimes sounds like English isn't her first language. Words are slurred about in her mouth as if alien. But, as with Sweden's, er, finest, Alejandro is brilliantly catchy, deceptively simple and wonderfully melancholy. It's also reminiscent of those early Madonna singles that dealt with tough subjects but enclosed them in joyfully uplifting melodies.
Monster
"Don't call me Gaga" she says at the beginning, which is annoying because that's what we've been doing throughout. Would she prefer Lady? That seems a bit of a stretch given her general attire and the fact that this song seems to be about men with large appendages ("I've never seen one like that before"). Again, this is a potential single, all descending keyboard lines, massive choruses and a Timbaland-esque male vocal blathering on about Gaga (sorry!) being "hot as hell". Things get a bit gruesome at the end: "He tore my clothes right off/ He ate my heart and then he ate my brain."
Speechless
Ever wondered what Lady Gaga fronting Scissor Sisters would sound like? Well, wonder no more. Speechless is a big rock ballad which, for reasons unknown, finds our narrator using a strange cockney accent ("You threw your 'ands up"). Without the bluster and the general whiff of Mika, this could have been a nice piano ballad, but Ron Fair's production swallows a lot of the emotion. It's not bad per se, just a bit of a disappointment.
Dance In The Dark
Ah, the synths are back. After a stuttering intro of orgasmic groans it becomes a little bit Gaga-by-numbers, which is a shame given the standard of the early tracks. Once again though, the whole thing is saved by another monumental chorus and some Madonna-esque spoken-word moments, including this shout out to a lost Royal: "You will never fall apart Diana, you're still in our hearts / Never let you fall apart/ Together we'll dance in the dark". Which is nice.
Telephone
Originally written for Britney's last album, Telephone is the big duet with a certain Beyoncé. Only, it's not a duet at all, with Beyoncé turning up midway to sing/rap her way through a brief interlude. Not that it isn't completely amazing and probably the best thing on here, because clearly it is. It's also very obviously a Britney song and probably the least conceptual thing on here. Essentially, Gaga's in a club and her boyfriend keeps ringing, but she can't talk right now because she's drinking and dancing to her favourite song. The chorus runs thusly: "Stop calling, stop calling, I don't want to talk anymore." It also features a brilliant bridge, middle eight, verse, rap and even the bit where the caller gets through to her voicemail is maddeningly great.
So Happy I Could Die
The pace is slowed slightly here, with Gaga still in a club, but probably enjoying a bit of a sit down. Some of the lyrics are a bit too contrived ("I am as vain as I allow...I touch myself all through the night"), and it lacks the fizz of the earlier tracks but it's still about 20 times better than the current Sugababes single.
Teeth
This is possibly the biggest curveball on the album. Over a compulsive marching beat and processed horn blasts, Gaga implores her new man to show her his teeth. In the background another voice intones strange messages, which may or may not revolve around dentistry. It doesn't really go anywhere, the chorus getting mixed in with the verses, but it's still a compellingly dancey listen and may be indicative of where she's heading next.
Given the strength of these eight stopgap songs – it's amazing to think they were due to be lumped in on a re-release – Lady Gaga is the real deal. This world and others had better watch out.
Now, bringing bags crammed with the antidote to Christmas cheer, he's back. This time he has Simon Cowell, The X-Factor and its dominance of the music charts in his sights, but offers an unexpectedly mind-bending solution...
Criticising The X-Factor is akin to criticising mud. Whatever you do, whatever you say, it's still going to be there, staining your trousers and ruining your carpets. Best just walk round it. Stand on the stones. Wait until summer and it'll dry up and go away.
But then, every so often, there's this urge to jump right into the middle of it. To splash and to wallow in the crapulence and regress to a mental age of three.
Which, as Calvin Harris has proven, can be fun. And the day you stop finding the fun in that is the day you start failing to derive pleasure from scribbling manically on the walls of social convention with a massive thick crayon, the day Michael Bublé becomes your soundtrack of choice, a Saturday afternoon 99p hot-dog drenched in flat-pack mustard from the Ikea canteen becomes the treat to get you through the week ahead, and your existence becomes entirely inconsequential.
My point? How much more enjoyable watching The X-Factor is if you have a mental age of three. And criticism. Or more specifically, how pointless it feels criticising The X-Factor or whoever releases records on the back of it, even though it dominates the charts at this time of year with a spirit-sapping inevitability.
Normally, year-upon-year, you can understand the way it avoids many of the barbs thrown at it. Aside from the gigantic exposure it offers to whoever appears on it, most of the contestants can sing, in the way that most people can drive, after six months of lessons, a written exam, and a two hour practical test with a trained professional.
From time to time they even manage to unearth someone who could be described as 'good' - if by 'good' you mean they can do a passable impression of a current, well established recording artist. It's not and never has been about music; this is about mass-producing celebrities. The fame game.
Yet this year they've broken with convention and mixed up the set of faceless, amorphous, interchangeable wannabes with a pair of human beings so indescribably bad at doing any of the things you'd expect from musician or, if you prefer, an entertainer that it's, it's... Well, it's indescribable. So much so that the only way to describe them is to invent a word. So let's call them Jedward.
They can't sing. They can't dance. They approximate the former with this weird, slightly out of sync harmonisation which sounds like someone has pressed play on one of them a nanosecond before the other. They attempt the latter by flinging any one of eight limbs out in any direction with such violent and random force it's as if someone's attached a car battery to their gonads.
As for their haunted, dead-behind-the-eyes looks and the rejected-from-Beetlejuice-for-scaring-animals costume choices... well, the less said, the better.
But, tearing ourselves away from laughing at this year's oddities, what can you, me, us do about The X-Factor? We've tried criticising it: taking the high-ground, snidely remarking how awful the performers are. We've tried ignoring it: saying how it has no bearing on us as 'proper' music fans.
Neither has worked. The unwinnable war on drugs has nothing on the battle to stop Simon Cowell. So rather than waste your time and energy, what about something revolutionary. What about...caring?
I'm serious. Perhaps the only way to beat it is to join it. Given that what is basically being decided here in front of tellies across the land on Saturday evenings - and Sundays too, is it? - is at the very least going to be the person spoiling your Christmas, shouldn't we, as people who supposedly care about these kind of things, try and get our opinions across in some way?
If you consider yourself a music fan, find the one faceless, amorphous, interchangeable wannabe who offends you least and vote for them.
Like Lao-Tzu said: "A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step." The first step to subverting the utter dross that gets delivered to us via these type of shows - specifically this one - could well be to help pick the least drossy one as the winner. Let's face it, what Chinese philosophers can't teach us about reality TV isn't worth knowing.
Besides, 30p per week is a small price to pay to keep Snow Patrol covers out of the charts.
The National Theatre of Wales announced its arrival today with a press conference that was broadcast from Cardiff to the world via the internet.
The company's Artistic Director, John McGrath, announced their first year of work which will kick off in March 2010 with Alan Harris' A Good Night Out in the Valleys, an agenda-setting play about the Welsh Miners' Institutes. Harris and McGrath have visited a number of these places, asking the locals about their idea of a good night out, and turning some of their repsonses into the basis of a play that will tour the Miners' Institues throughout March.
This will be followed by Shelf Life, a collaboration between Volcano Theatre and Welsh National Opera, and a revival of The Devil Inside Himself, John Osborne's first play, written when he was eighteen.
Later productions in their inaugral year will include The Perisans,a new version of Aeschylus’s classic play by Kaite O’Reilly and Welsh playwright Gary Owen's exploration of the youth of Bridgend, Love Steals Us From Loneliness.
Following on from The Independent listing musicOMH as one of the 25 best music websites in its feature last month, we've now been longlisted in the Best Digital Publication category in the 2009 Record Of The Day Awards.
