Monday, April 20, 2015

Ten years of STN: 2005

"This song is dedicated to some of the best bands in the country..."

On April 29th 2015 Sweeping The Nation will turn ten years old. It’s been a hard old journey to get this far, full of disenchantment with the way both blogging and music were going, but we’re going to make it.

What more fitting way to celebrate the milestone, then, but with an overwrought and overthought series of playlists? To be exact, over the next ten working days we'll be posting a 20-track playlist a day, each of them featuring some of the best songs to have come through our office between the start of 2005 and the end of 2014. We've taken out some of the big obvious stuff, mixed it up a bit, been forced to drop some really good records that just aren't on Spotify at the moment and used our ninja mixtaping skills for a better listen. Think of it as a Garry Mulholland-style trawl through the thick edge of cool music culture, only half-arsed and with nothing like a representative taste of fashions, genres and cultures. And hey, it fills the time.

And by the way, had we been more appreciative of SEO back then the blog wouldn’t have such an obviously cribbed title.





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M.I.A. - Bucky Done Gun
The first record ever written about on STN, and a track that with its Rocky slicing is as much a call to arms as anything else we've written about

CSS - Let’s Make Love And Listen To Death From Above
Wine and bed and more and again. Didn't know their strengths, which invariably meant a punked-up second album swiftly followed by obscurity

Patrick Wolf - The Libertine
Has there been a more frustrating pop auetur in the last ten years? Big chorus and hook surrounded by florid vignettes

M83 - Don't Save Us From The Flames
Before the brief backing music ubiquity, the ghostly synths got overloaded

Pagan Wanderer Lu - The Memorial Hall
AKA Andrew Paul Regan, one of those we've stuck by through these years for the fairly obvious reason that his records always come at ideas from odd angles

Broadcast - Black Cat
Nobody really thought about things in the way they did, and post-Ghost Box what would have happened had Trish Keenan not passed on would have been fascinating

The New Pornographers - Sing Me Spanish Techno
Big brassy power-pop. Every New Pornographers album contains one amazing moment; this was Twin Cinema's, and it might have been the best of all

The Go-Betweens - Here Comes A City
An object lesson in how to reform a working relationship and pick up in just the way you left off. Grant McLennan another great loss of the decade

Sons And Daughters - Red Receiver
From the Glaswegian set they never quite received their due but The Repulsion Box was an overloaded red-lit sweatbox in sound

Sleater-Kinney - Entertain
Righteous fury and HGV riffage. How did it take them this whole ten years to gain their widespread due?

The Lucksmiths - A Hiccup In Your Happiness
Picking up the Go-Betweens' striped sunlight sound and turning it inwards, they should soundtrack every midsummer existential crisis

The Spinto Band - Oh Mandy
Well ahead of ukelele trends, they're still around but never recaptured their wistful moment

Sufjan Stevens - Decatur, or, Round of Applause for Your Stepmother!
He only did two states! The slacker. Never trust him with anything

The Mountain Goats - This Year
Teenage John Darnielle escaping his abusive stepfather for a while to spend time a girl not doing much except underage drinking. A tiny story in an overgrowing narrative

Jeffrey Lewis - Williamsburg Will Oldham Horror
In which our narrator is sparked by seeing someone who might be Bonnie Prince Billy into an extended self-searching quest as to whether DIY life is really worthwile. Doesn't end well for Lewis

Prefuse 73 feat. El-P & Ghostface Killah – Hide Ya Face
Yeah, alright, we really dropped the ball over the years on our affection for skewed rap production just as it became mainstream. Scott Herren isn't a hip-hop producer, which makes this more interesting

Girls Aloud - Biology
Ah, the failed poptimist's easy get-out. But it's great, isn't it?

Saint Etienne - Milk Bottle Symphony
And so in a different way is this, taking leads from the Annie record of a year earlier as it draws pen pictures of morning home life, suburban and urban simultaneously

Final Fantasy - This Is The Dream Of Win And Regine
Owen Pallett can made the smallest details sound huge and the most heroic violin solos sound sad. And we know Funeral came out in 2005 in the UK, but it's too obvious

William Campbell & Kevin MacNeil - Local Man Ruins Everything
Singer with briefly feted Astrid and Outer Hebriden poet combine for extended acidly nostalgic soliquoly. How all mixtapes should end, maybe

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