Music: Year in Review

siva — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 18:18:30 +0000

A little after everyone else has finished publishing their favourite music of the past year, here is my sampling of what got a lot of airplay with me.
Girls Aloud must have been my most listened-to band of the year. The girl band from the UK somehow has continued to deliver good music album after album and the most recent ones (Tangled Up and Out of Control) both lived up to high expectations. It is enough to get me to try a couple of other British girl groups: The Saturdays and Girls Can’t Catch in the coming year. Staying with the Brits, Lily Allen’s sophomore outing “It’s Not Me, It’s You” was a brilliant effort. Also delivering a solid album of ear-friendly material was Pixie Lott’s Turn It Up. Rounding up this solid British year is Paloma Faith. You may not have heard of her, but the album Do You Want The Truth Or Something Beautiful really grows on you.
From across the channel came the hugely successful and foot-tappingly good One Love by David Guetta. The anthem song, When Love Takes Over, introduced us to it during our summer holiday in Europe. Guetta’s other great hit for the year was the collaboration with the Black Eyed Peas on I Gotta Feeling, a crappy song if there was ever one, but how catchy! A trademark BEP outing. Another francophone singer that impressed me this year was the Quebecois Coeur de Pirate.
Staying on this side of the pond for another moment, it would be remiss to not mention Something Sally, a northern European band whose album Familiar Strangers had songs like The Taste and Tip Of My Tongue – the latter a collaboration with Joss Stone. Joss Stone herself had a good year out with Colour Me Free! The other European artiste for me was Lenka, who I found on aurgasm a while ago & whose song The Show is a definite highlight of the recent past in music.
Jumping across the Atlantic, rock music was underrepresented in my playlist. The only band that I played consistently was Cobra Starship after I caught their lovely single Good Girl Go Bad from the album Hot Mess. The single featuring Leighton Meester is itself well made and includes an XOXO text, for those with a keen eye. Also check out Leighton’s single Somebody to Love (featuring Robin Thicke).
Norah Jones’ The Fall is interesting as it is so different from her normally piano focussed songs. These songs are very rock-ish with a much greater guitar emphasis.
That about rounds up my favourite music of the last year (or so). I wanted to mention a couple of albums, Rihanna’s Rated-R and Shakira’s She Wolf, that somehow failed to get me. Both have some good material and I think one resolution for me should be to listen to these two a bit more.

Eye of Siva » 2009

Music: Year in Review