Hello You.

This Wednesday 24th December (Christmas Eve, naturellement), at or around abouts 10pm GMT (USA: 2pm PST + 3pm MST + 4pm CST + 5pm EST; Europe: 11pm CET), splashed all over the interwaves via the usual birdshit splatter pattern, for your listening consideration, will be The Waiting Room Christmas Eve 3hr Best Of 2008 Round-Up Show.

On this very (quite, in this case, literally) Eve we, one half of Drunk Country & The Woman of The House, will be dishing out thoughtfully considered Gold Guitar Pick of Excellence ‘Awards’* to the lucky Nominee(s) what is found to be the Best Of in their particular category.

It’s almost like a real end of year music award’s show but with less drinking & no Gallagher brothers.

Below, then, is the list of Categories & Nominees, 34 Artistes + 34 Songs. We have rather cruelly (although this is clearly a cynical attempt at injecting some tension into the proceedings) refrained from listing the Nominees in the last 2 Categories. Those will be revealed on the night. Mwah, I believe, Ha Ha, indeed, Ha.

So, there you go.  This took us AGES to compile from thousands of songs listened to & playlisted over the whole of this past year. *PHEW* just does not cut it. 2008 was simply awash with brilliance, surprises, genius & plain old breathtaking musicalisation. Oh, & singing.

The list, then:

Best “What The Fuck Was That?!”

1) Celebrity Chimp – Celebrity Chimp

2) The Just Joans – Hey Boy… You’re Oh So Sensitive

3) Aidan John Moffat – Cunts

4) Eagleowl – Motherfucker

5) The Theatre Fire – Coyote

6) Joe Rodger & The Velcro Quartet – Suddenly They Realised…

Best Cover Versions

1) Robin Grey – There’s A Guy Works Down The Chip Shop Swears He’s Elvis (Kirsty MacColl cover)

2) Erlend Ropstad – 7 (Prince cover)

3) The Miserable Rich – Over & Over (Hot Chip cover)

4) Taken By Trees – Sweet Child O’ Mine (Guns ‘n’ Roses cover)

Best Contenders for a Bond Theme

1) Isobel Campbell & Mark Lanegan – Come On Over (Turn Me On)

2) The Last Shadow Puppets – In My Room

3) Get Well Soon – You/Aurora/You/Seaside

4) Hour Of The Shipwreck – Unclouded Eyes

Best Emotional Blackmail

1) Porlolo – Turning On Heels

2) Samantha Crain & The Midnight Shivers – Beloved, We Have Expired

3) The Dø – Stay (Just A Little Bit More)

4) Meaghan Smith – 5 More Minutes

5) Ane Brun – Don’t Leave

6) Plants & Animals – Bye Bye Bye

Best Pound Down The Back of The Sofa

Nominees 1-8 = a big fat question mark

Best Song of 2008

Nominees 1-6 = a bigger, fatter question mark

The podcast will be available, as we say, sometime tomorrow around 10pm (we have very limited access where we are headed for the holidays, so bear with us).

It remains only for us to wish every one of you all the very best this Christmas holiday & to remind you that our 3hr New Year’s Eve 2008 Jukebox show will be on (just like the title reads) Wednesday 31st December, from 10pm-1am GMT. See the New Year in with us, why don’t you?  (Yah, fucking right…).

Thanks for tuning in & listening. It’s been a heck of a year.

MC & a HNY,

½DC + TWoTH

*when we say ‘Awards’, what we really mean is  we will email a picture of a solid Gold Guitar Pick of Excellence – we’re not that unhinged that we’d actually fork out for 6 solid gold plectrums. Jesus, no.

What a brilliant burst of cod-spy thriller soundtrack lounge croon bombastic orchestrated melodramatic bedlam this is.  The Arctic Monkeys last album was something of a damp squib really, although it contained a little bit of quite decent material, but it seemed like a band who just made an album without really thinking about why.

Listening to that album, one track which really struck me was this one:

Arctic Monkeys – The Bakery

At the time I thought ‘bugger me, Alex must be developing a bit of a Richard Hawley fetish’.  Both being from Sheffield this didn’t seem too far-fetched, and as much as I was left underwhelmed by most of Flourescent Adolescent, it piqued my interest for their next album.  I never expected this though!

Instead of a slightly 50s-sounding Monkeys album Turner and his pal Miles Kane have gone all the way and more, producing an album a radio DJ apparently described as “more Scott Walker than Scott Walker”.  I don’t really know much Scott Walker, so I couldn’t tell you how much sense this makes.  Quite how they recorded this in a fortnight is beyond me, but hearing something like this, even a scratch and hiss fanatic like myself finds himself thinking ‘now that’s what Big Production is for’.  It could be the soundtrack to a dozen stylish sixties films, or a dozen spy movies: theatrical, grandiose and really ambitious.

It’s brilliantly successful too, a real rattling, swooning pleasure to listen to, although I have a minor, nagging caveat.  For all the music of the Artctic Monkeys sometimes left me a little cold, it was generally saved by Alex Turner’s baldly honest lyrics and incredibly deft turn of phrase.  The turn of phrase is still clearly at his command here, but the writing is much more artful, which sometimes makes this album feel like more of a stylistic exercise than a heartfelt musical one.  They are exploring, and fair play to them, few bands could manage anything half so inventive, nor so enormously excellent, but there are times when it seems slightly more like a project and less like a mission.

The Last Shadow Puppets – My Mistakes Were Made For You
The Last Shadow Puppets – I Don’t Like You Anymore

website | hype | amazon

It’s not often that things make their way straight from the breathless email of a marketing monkey to my inbox to the blog without a lot more time spent letting things sink in. In this case however I’ve been curious for news about this project for some time but always assumed it would be one of those major label projects that would bring the Web Sherriff down on my head like a sack of spanners.

You can imagine, therefore, my surprise and delight when an email not only plugging this band, but also containing two promotional mp3s officially sanctioned the the Enforcers of teh Internetz, landed in the Toadly inbox.

The Last Shadow Puppets are a side project of Miles Kane from The Rascals (who?) and Alex Turner from the Arctic Monkeys, and inspired by a mutual love of Scott Walker and early Bowie. The album itself is recorded with a full 22-piece orchestra, so quite how representative these acoustic versions will be is anyone’s guess, but it’ll be out on Monday (except in the States – ha ha!) so you can judge for yourselves.

I tend to waver on the Arctic Monkeys. They have some great songs, but the last album didn’t really excite me all that much and, if I’m honest, the first one took me quite a while to get into as well. Alex Turner is undeniably a really gifted lyricist though, and from the interviews I have read seems like an intelligent, inquisitive fellow so I have high hopes for The Age of the Understatement. Turner seems to have been developing an interest in 50s rock ‘n’ roll recently: something of an affinity for the same influences that inform Richard Hawley. Basically, this is a good thing, and if this project gives him the chance to throw off the shackles of the often mealy pub-rock of the Monkeys then this can only be good news.

The Last Shadow Puppets – My Mistakes Were Made For You
The Last Shadow Puppets – The Age of Understatement