20 Years of the Mercury Prize - Winners Poll

What Christgau had to say about (most of) the winners:

Screamadelica:

Suede:
Make-or-break is "Sleeping Pills," when Brett Anderson drawls/whines/croons "You're a water sign, and I'm an air sign" so tunefully, repetitively, naggingly, inescapably that you swear he said "I'm an asshole" even though he pronounces "air sign" a lot more clearly than the line about Valium that follows. It's fingernail-on-blackboard city for anyone who doesn't believe Marc Bolan is Chuck Berry, and at first I couldn't stand it. Now it's a fave moment on this appropriately overhyped, surprisingly well-crafted coming out. More popwise and also more literary than the Smiths at a comparable stage, Suede's collective genderfuck projects a joyful defiance so rock and roll it obliterates all niggles about literal truth. If you think their victories over depression have nothing to do with you, be grateful you can make do with a report from the front. A-

M People:
Perfect records are so rare that it's foolish to cavil about the scope of the great disco album Soul II Soul and Yaz never got near (although Donna Summer did once). Each five-minute song clicks into its slot on the Michael Pickering-Paul Heard beats and hooks and special effects, with low tenor Heather Small gender-bending her diva devotion and deep, robust, confident shout over the top. What's a rock and roller to do with such music? Proud Heather puts it perfectly in her angriest moment: "Take it like a man baby if that's what you are." A

Portishead:
Sade for androids ("Sour Times," "Wandering Star") *

Pulp:
This year won't produce a more indispensable song than "Common People," but that doesn't mean young Americans know enough about the bourgeoisie to get it. And when sex gods are added up, Bryan-Ferry-plus-Blurandoasis won't equal George Michael. But beyond his devotion to songcraft, Cocker isn't Bluroroasis--Culture Club with lyrics is more like it. Smart and glam, swish and het, its jangle subsumed beneath swelling crescendos or nagging keybs and its rhythms steeped in rave, this isn't pat enough for the disco-still-sucks crowd. And although Cocker's stick-to-itiveness over four expendable albums suggests that he's attained a measure of maturity, his breakthrough is a mutation, not a fruition. If "Common People" should fall short, I recommend Island proceed directly to "Something Changed," a happy love song every bit as clever and realistic as his class war song. A-

Roni Size:
in the mildly overrated tradition of Massive Attack and Soul II Soul ("Digital," "Electricks") **

Gomez:
Really the roots-rock-they mean it, man ("Whipping Piccadilly," "Love Is Better Than a Warm Trombone"). ***

Talvin Singh:
Not reviewed

Badly Drawn Boy:
Damon Gough sounds a lot sadder than he is. It's more like he muses a lot, is easily distracted. On the page, "You left your shoes in the tree with me/I'll wear them to your house tonight" looks hopelessly stupid; on record, it's quite wry. Nor is he undemonstrative--unlike low-affect codependent Elliott Smith, he fusses so much over his tunes, crooning and segueing and arranging and stuff, that you know he loves them to death. You can imagine him being just as nice to a real live girl one of these years. A-

PJ Harvey (1):
If Nirvana and Robert Johnson are rock's essence for you, so's To Bring You My Love. But if you believe the Beatles and George Clinton had more to say in the end, this could be the first PJ album you adore as well as admire. It's a question of whether you use music to face your demons or to vault right over them. Either way the demons will be there, of course, and nobody's claiming they won't catch you by the ankle and bring you down sometime--or that facing them doesn't give you a shot at running them the fuck over. Maybe that's how Harvey got to where she could enjoy the fruits of her own genius and sexuality. Or maybe she just met the right guy. Tempos and pudendum juiced, she feels the world ending and feels immortal on the very first track. The other 11 songs she takes from there. A+

Ms Dynamite:
If all beats are created equal, then Niomi Daley's spare garage is as strong as Kimberley Jones's thick hip-hop. If flow is as flow does, then her earned plasticity is as fresh as Lauryn Hill's easy liquidity. If singing is basically a matter of sincerity, then her straitened cadences express as complexly as Erykah Badu's high-flying scats. If conscious is enough, then "Tell me how many Africans died for the baguettes on your Rolex" will educate as deep as "Black like the perception of who on welfare." But good music isn't the same thing as a catchy feature story, and this Mercury Prize winner has less flavor than a plate of mashed. She's biracial and the eldest of 10 children and manifestly good-hearted, and when she goes ragga on the way out I wish she hadn't been groomed for something bigger and blander. But she made her choice. C+

Dizzee Rascal:
The first thing to understand about Dizzee is that his fundamental appeal is musical, and the second is that there's very little music there. Break down a track and often you'll find only an electro beat--at most three or four sparse elements, rarely long on sustain or tune. Yet as someone who mocked the minimal means of U.K. garage and considered the Streets barely music at all, I was captivated by Dizzee's sound the moment I heard the import. His adolescent gulps and yowls are street-Brit with a Jamaican liquidity, as lean, eccentric, and arresting as the beats. The voice also lends a comic, claustrophobic vulnerability to rhymes whose brilliance varies, though their winning youthfulness does not. Whether he can grow as a lyricist as he struggles to comprehend his success is the old conundrum. The smarts he's got. The right advice will be hard to come by. A-

Franz Ferdinand:
Young enough to only work when they need the money, a musical tradition worth fighting for ("Michael," "Jacqueline"). ***

Antony & the Johnsons:
Whose voice touches who is personal, but that doesn't mean Antony will ever reach as many humans as Aretha Franklin or Billie Holiday, and up against the archer Bryan Ferry, the artier Rufus Wainwright, and the grander Nina Simone, objective physical differences manifest themselves: he's thinner, drier, more strained. Not only is his willingness to express emotion commoner than indie denizens imagine, his failure to undercut that emotion with irony or humor is a spiritual weakness. Right, he suffers. But billions of humans have it worse, and while we who are luckier are morally obliged to remember that, we're not obliged to empathize with any of them. Those convinced of the metaphoric-political centrality of transgender issues and the AIDS epidemic will feel Antony's songs. Those who don't should find a record they enjoy. B-

Arctic Monkeys:
The great thing about this album is how untranscendent it is, as if these lads know the guitar-band pleasures are cons. Sing-along tunes? Breakneck momentum? Next-big-thing ambition? Saturday-night swindles every one. Instead Alex Turner and crew evoke club life as it is actually experienced. They sound like not knowing the doorman, like moving on a girl you think isn't pretty enough, like missing the bus in a leather jacket that doesn't keep out the cold. Many details are too U.K.-specific for Yank-yob gratification. But aesthetes will come to enjoy Turner's nuanced adenoids and his bandmates' thought-through arrangements. A-

Klaxons:

Elbow:
Not reviewed

Speech Debelle:
South Londoner's murmuring flow lets eavesdroppers connect her problems to their own--maybe even suggest solutions ("Daddy's Little Girl," "Finish This Album"). **

xx:
Their minimalism is so contained that as you warm against your better judgement to the well-spaced notes, subtle depth charges, and ostinato hooks with which they couch their gentle cool, you figure that the matched female-and-male drawls the music sets off will prove unworthy of further commitment. But soon you learn that these two Southwest London 20-year-olds--to leave out their ancillary and now departed guitarist and crucial but probably not generative young producer-drummer--aren't being minimal to prove they're any shade of cool. It's more like they're being minimal because they're shy. Rather than resorting to an obscurantism they're too decent for or feigning a sophistication few achieve, they trade ideas about intimacy as contemporaries, comrades, prospects, lovers, ex-lovers, and friends. It's hard to imagine their music getting much better. But it's not hard to imagine their lives getting much better. Which may be all their music needs. A

PJ Harvey (2):
Polly Jean Harvey was major when she meant to shake the world, a life project she gave up on after releasing her finest album in 2000--much of it set, as must be mere coincidence, in New York City. Creating a suite of well-turned if unnecessarily understated antiwar songs, she's a gifted, strong-willed minor artist bent on shaking England in particular. How much that work enriches anyone's understanding of World War I is open to a debate too niggling to pursue. What's certain is that her special interest in the Great War reflects the changing contours of her chosen chauvinism no less than her evolution from the rough-hewn Howlin Wolf she absorbed in downhome Dorsetshire toward the dulcet clarity of Lancashire's prog-folk Annie Haslam. "I live and die/through England/I live and die/through England"? You said it, lady--twice. B+

xp like the wire being all wide-eyed and insistent about TABLAS? AND DRUM N BASS? WITH SQUAREPUSHER? DO YOU SEE?. when did we grow so cold?

liking xgau's klaxons review there

xp It's the school of thought that thinks dance music is only pure when it's lowbrow and self-conscious "sophistication", especially if it dares to invoke jazz, is middlebrow pandering to the coffee-table crowd/indie kids/yuppies/dilettantes/whatever. Thing is, there are more than enough boring, guest-vox-packed, failed crossover albums to enforce that prejudice, and many of my favourite dance producers shoot themselves in the foot trying to do what they think "proper" albums should do but on the rare occasions when it's done well I see no point in knocking it just for not being raw.

Love most of xgau's write-ups but "Tempos and pudendum juiced" is a phrase to be avoided.

Primal Scream was a "Neither" icon and the Klaxons a "Dud" icon.

yes. yes it was.

Maybe that's how Harvey got to where she could enjoy the fruits of her own genius and sexuality. Or maybe she just met the right guy. Tempos and pudendum juiced, s.....(snip)

Unbelieveable, the idea that PJ Harvey made a perfect album because she'd finally had loads of sex.

Well, it was Vincent Gallo.

New Forms (Remix):

― Tim F, Thursday, 8 September 2011 13:21 (44 minutes ago) Bookmark

That was alright. I'm gonna say a few crass things here, mostly based on my attitude to the record when it came out. I won't pretend to be an expert on d'n'b, but I do enjoy it now and again and have been to a fair few raves in my time. Ask me who made what and when and I'm lost though. This track reminds me why I found New Forms so objectionable in the first place. It's the repetition. And no, this isn't a moan about "repetitive dance music", which is a bollocks argument - this is a moan about New Forms, and perhaps other d'n'b of its era. New Forms, to me, sounds particularly repetitive compared to other forms of jungle/d'n'b. Like many tracks on New Forms, it's based around the same break over and over and over and my ears get tired around the 3 or 4 minute mark. There are few breakdowns, build ups or variations and it's not THAT interesting a break to deserve that level of samey-ness. I'd enjoyed the ragga-fied clatter of jungle before, and the intensity and invention of a lot of the stuff that came after (I still adore 'Body Rock' by Andy C for example) - but this stuff, it doesn't move me. It starts off interestingly enough but just kind of "hangs" with the odd vocal snatch or flourish fading in and out for the full 5-6 minutes. If I'm gonna dance to it, I'm sorry but I need more oomph damnit! If I'm going to listen to it at home, then I need more going on. If I wanna chill out, then I prob won't listen to drum'n'bass in the first place.

*puts on blindfold* *back to the wall*

i dislike xgau's writing so much

listen to it from the drums up (d/latin xp) although ideally they needed to be seen and experienced live.

WHY LEX WHY?

I am so tempted to vote for Speech Debelle because I think I'm the only person on ILX with anything positive to say about that album

I too have positive things to say about the album (actually I said them on the blog at the time but anyway).

listen to it from the drums up (d/latin xp) although ideally they needed to be seen and experienced live.

― Here he is with the classic "Poème Électronique." Good track (Marcello Carlin), Thursday, 8 September 2011 14:49 (14 minutes ago) Bookmark

I'm sure they were fab live. I'd have liked to have seen them.

But that was another thing that pissed me off about these guys - suddenly it was "Hey hey people over 30, this is the exciting new sound of drum'n'bass on Jools Holland. No, not that silly jungle stuff - this has got real instruments made of real wood, so it's okay..." Hated that - winning the Mercury felt so token - suddenly d'n'b was this acceptable style of music that people like David Bowie could make a milquetoast record out of it and twat know-nothing commentators would say stuff like "drum'n'bass is the new jazz" (bleeeeeurrrghhhhh!)...

I guess this happens with a lot of music (dubstep par example), but this was the first time I'd been conscious of it.

Jazz has always been the new jazz, but hey.

winning the Mercury felt like he won me a lot of beer tokens

d/l xp: Well no, in this case it WAS the new jazz. Far more radical than the style bibles and 50 quid men of the period would have led you to believe. I wish they'd followed it through. Also Bowie's primary inspiration for going d&b was A Guy Called Gerald, not Reprazent.

I see little relationship between d'n'b and jazz (save the amen break and reprazent's use of a stand-up bass).

oh and that Horny Mutant Jazz track etc... but it wasn't jazz at all was it?

... aren't you a Squarepusher fan

I mean, perhaps I'm off the mark about this, but when forced to make a distinction between jungle and d'n'b, I've always thought of jungle as "breakbeat dancehall" and d'n'b as "breakbeat jazz".

d/l - this will take a while and a long article to explain fully and currently I don't really have time for either but I'll get back to it. for now, trust me.

xxpost sure, but i don't call squarepusher "jazz". just because a few artists sample jazz tracks or use jazz instruments don't make the whole scene "jazz" any more that rave was the new reggae because of "out of space". such quotes are straw clutching attempts at making d'n'b more palatable to people who wouldn't normally listen to dance music.

He was kind of a jazz musician, wasn't he?

I mean, perhaps I'm off the mark about this, but when forced to make a distinction between jungle and d'n'b, I've always thought of jungle as "breakbeat dancehall" and d'n'b as "breakbeat jazz".

― Tal Berkowitz - Vaccine advocate (DJP), Thursday, 8 September 2011 15:25 (2 minutes ago) Bookmark

that's an interesting way of putting it. i agree with the former, but i have trouble parsing the latter.

That was his background

dog latin, have you listened to the way Jenkinson plays bass, or more to the point have you listened to very many jazz bassists play solos?

Also, do you actually understand what "____ is the new jazz" actually means? I mean, beyond there being strong jazz elements in the music being cut up, a lot of what people were reacting to was a live band doing these fast cut-up, sample-heavy pieces with a good amount of improvisation in it. Technically, it wasn't that far removed from the process behind hard bop.

lol @ this list

voted Screamadelica I am a Bird Now

― I can feel it in my spiritual hat (Shakey Mo Collier), Wednesday, 7 September 2011 23:29 (Yesterday) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

dan, yeah i'm very familiar with squarepusher, but he's his own thing really an arguably doesn't fit the jazz or the drum'n'bass hole.

yeah, i understand the jazz tag being applied to reprazent, fine, yes it's jazzy - no arguments behind that, they're a live band with a strong jazz vibe. still object (or at least objected at the time) to people desperately trying to intellectualise or sanitise drum'n'bass, which is really just an offshoot of rave music, by calling it "the new jazz" which, frankly, it isn't and never was.

There was a whole dnb subgenre called jazzstep, and many of those guys themselves were talking about the connection between their music and jazz. So it's not like the "jazz" label was something outsiders wanted to stamp to the music.

squarepusher is pretty firmly rooted in jazz imo, harmonically esp, also oop north you can see him play with the sheffield/leeds free jazz scene playing bass exactly like he does w/ squarepusher

also don't remember v much improvisation, or fast cut up stuff w roni/reprazent?

technically, it's a million miles from hard bop! jeez

And there were also people like Cleveland Watkiss who actually were jazz musicians before coming to dnb.

(x-post)

and it's not like a lot of guys who self-identified as jazz musicians weren't involved in the scene, this notion that hardcore junglists decided to apply a thin veneer of stand-up bass to their existing stuff c. 1996 doesn't describe how it went down at all, from where i was listening

like the head for a roni size track would read

GO
STOP
BASS BREAK
GO AGAIN
Look stonedeyed at each other
Roni Nods, Dribbles
Song Ends

compositional process as well as perfomance tho. i mean anything being "the new anything" is always tinged with the ridic but trying to keep genres in their nice separate tupperware boxes is faintly ridic too

Keeping CDs in a nice separate tupperware box is also ridic...

still object (or at least objected at the time) to people desperately trying to intellectualise or sanitise drum'n'bass, which is really just an offshoot of rave music, by calling it "the new jazz" which, frankly, it isn't and never was.

The more "complex" forms of jazz were also offshoots of a once-popular, populist form of dance music, so perhaps the comparison is not that far-fetched?

not far fetched just pointless

dnb is closer to hiphop than anything else imo

Thriller is still a great album even if you don't approve of Micheal Jackson's caviar smuggling ring.

Is this a euphemism for und3rag3 s3x or have I missed some important Jacko news?

it's a reference to the previous few posts.

I don't like "intellectualise" and "sanitise" being used as interchangeables, nor the subliminal racism in operation when either is applied to black music (subtext: "they're dumb illiterate blacks ergo their music is not worth explaining or analysing"). Anyway DJP sums up things nicely in his post above (apropos hard bop).

Also d&b wasn't "just an offshoot of rave music," its roots go back (at least in part) to the dubplates of the seventies and the reggae sound systems of the mid-seventies onward.

xp Depends entirely on the producer. To Spring Heel Jack or Squarepusher d&b was another way of making jazz. To DJ Hype or Aphrodite it was high-speed hip hop. To others it was a different take on dancehall or Detroit techno or ambient. Even at the time nobody could agree on what it was or should be - some, like Goldie, were just better at shaping and presenting a narrative.

If any of them could have predicted Pendulum they would have quit their squabbling and bonded together against a common foe.

I don't like "intellectualise" and "sanitise" being used as interchangeables, nor the subliminal racism in operation when either is applied to black music

Hold your horses, this is getting way way too semantic and I object to this line of discourse very strongly, Marcello. Disregarding the fact that jazz is also black music, race has fuck all to do with this. The argument is the same as anyone who ever bemoaned punk rock being watered down or castrated or commercialised in the early '80s* - it goes no deeper than this. There've been some excellent points made here by all counts and I appreciate I probably just don't "get" what Roni Size and pals were doing in their sophisticating of drum'n'bass (especially when, as a teenager, I was more interested in visceral, high-impact dance music)- but my misgivings were largely aesthetic and based on personal preferences.

*also not trying to make an argument against whatever happened to punk in the '80s - let's not go down that root or i'll be apologising for things i haven't actually said all day

Don't worry, Marcello loves accusing people of subliminal racism. It's one of his things.

going through the Spotify playlist now, initial thoughts:

Primal Scream - I don't hate this as much as I used to, but I still don't like it
Portishead - duh amazing
Pulp - this is terrible until "Common People", at which point it becomes great for a few songs in a row before falling off again
Roni Size - This is such a mood album; when I'm up for it, it's fantastic, but when I'm not it's a painful slog. Today was a painful slog day.
Gomez - made it through two songs before realizing life is too precious for this
Talvin Singh - I assume this eventually gets to some sort of point? Because right now it's just aimless, vaguely pleasant noodling.

Nothing wrong with aimless, vaguely pleasant noodling.

not intrinsically, no

it's not very compelling to listen to, tho