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2010 catch-up: Singles & Songs

Posted: January 2nd, 2011, by Marceline Smith

Our favourite singles and songs of 2010.

Oriol – Spiral
Beauty! Gilles Peterson needs to sort out his playlists – this was hard to find after listening to his outstanding Worldwide show on Vienna’s FM4. This is a pretty daring four and a half minutes of tidy electro-funk. Wait for the sublime little breakdown; more of a collapse, tumbling down into glittering cement clouds. (Pascal Ansell)

Pet Shop Boys – 1986 Remixes
Despite the fact that Pet Shop Boys are still releasing great music, I can’t stop listening to these remixes. Taken from some dodgy megamix CD in their pre-fame Bobby O days, these versions are so bombastically 80s, they’ve come full circle and sound totally 2010. I guarantee this version of West End Girls would fill any dancefloor. Literally amazing. (Marceline Smith)

GRINDERMAN – KITCHENETTE
Even though the second Grinderman record was at times patchy the majestic Kitchenette was a wonderfully lumbering piece of nasty that served to both belittle the advances of a competitor while engineering equally willful and pathetically visceral gestures. As a swirling cacophony of driven distortion it lends an erratic and disorientating frame to proceedings as it was the lines “what’s the husband of yours ever given you, Oprah Winfrey on a plasma screen and a brood of jug-eared, bucktooth imbeciles, the ugliest kids I’ve ever seen” that suddenly captured me as I stood on a packed Central Line glaring at a battered family with a father figure who plainly had been something in his time but now only had a studded earring remaining from his rebellious era. Perhaps I’m just too bitter. Elsewhere I came really close to choosing Infinity Guitars by Sleigh Bells (Royal Trux done on an iPhone), Runaway by Kanye West (a celebration of misanthropy) or Rainbow In The Dark by Das Racist (an ethnic Beastie Boys via Kool Keith/Dr Octagon). (JGRAM)

Staff Benda Bilili – Poliomyelite
Memories of WOMAD festival and working on the Oxfam clothes stall. I whisked myself off to the main stage for a quick peep and was delighted by this moving song about polio, of which the band members suffer. (Pascal Ansell)



Marceline Smith

Marceline is the fierce, terrifying force behind diskant.net, laughing with disdain as she fires sharpened blades of sarcasm in all directions. Based in Scotland, her lexicon consists of words such as 'jings', 'aboot' and 'aye': our trained voice analysts are yet to decipher some of the relentless stream of genius uttered on a twenty-four hour basis. Marceline's hobbies include working too much and going out in bad weather.

http://www.marcelinesmith.com

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