Nine Feet Underground

Nine Feet Underground was saddened to hear of the untimely death of Trish Keenan, lead singer of Broadcast, earlier this month. I've been a fan of Broadcast and Trish's voice since I first heard the band on John Peel's radio show way back when. Most recently I have been entranced by Broadcast's recordings with The Focus Group, especially 'Investigate Witch Cults of the Radio Age'. Apart from sending me back to the albums - including the aforementioned joint EP with The Focus Group and 'The Noise Made By People' - I've also been looking and videos and live recordings on You Tube. As a small gesture in return for the pleasure their music has brought me, here's a link to them performing 'Come On Let's Go' from the album 'The Noise Made By People' on Jools Holland's show way back in 2000.

In this post I’m presenting my short list of 5 albums for January along with a few words about why this particular 5: From left to right and top to bottom these are Cluster ('71), Oneohtrix Point Never (Returnal), Salem (King Night), The National (High Violet) and , bottom left, Wire (Red Barked Tree). I’m sure you’ll have been following this closely, so I’ll not repeat the original list, though I do have a few words to say about why the other 8 albums didn’t make it. First off the Mothers of Invention and Khan albums: these albums, like Cluster ’71, are from way back in the mists of time, and the rules only allow for one old album at most (the use of the term old is purely time related, the album may still be new to me) and Cluster won that honour, but why? Well, the Mothers album – much as I’d like to hear it - isn’t available online, so it lives to fight another day (perhaps).  The Khan album is available through Spotify, and is reported to be excellent (if you like that

So, the next step in my experiment is to identify a list of music to listen to in January 2011.  This really isn’t going to be difficult as a list has been bubbling under since well before Christmas.  At the moment it’s a fairly long list – a long list I need to whittle down to just five (or maybe six – the rules are not that prescriptive) candidates for my album of the month. This post heralds the full list of hopefuls, possibles and downright eternal optimists that are fighting it out to be included in my January short list. I’m sure you’re wondering how I get to hear the albums in the first place:  any way I can!  In practice this means if it’s not on Spotify , the band’s / artist’s My Space page or streamed somewhere ahead of release ( Pitchfork , the guardian music blog or wherever) it’s not that likely to make the shortlist. After all, one of the rules is that the album must be heard in full, more than once, in order to stand a chance of becoming album of the month. That way

I love music.  I don’t love all music, but I’ll listen to anything. Once. Probably. Overall though it would be fair to say the vast majority of the things I love fall under the heading ‘popular music’, just to avoid unjustified expectation. Beneath that the musical categories, genres, sub-genres and tribes get a bit confusing.  Plus I don’t really like labels.  Just “I like that”, “I hate that” and “that’s so unambitious and mediocre to the point of boredom”. This love of music has made me into a voracious consumer of music.  Probably too much [nah, impossible] – but certainly to the extent that over Christmas my wife accused me of being addicted to music, or at least to buying CDs.  Inexplicably this struck a chord and is the inspiration for the experiment which this blog will record during 2011. So, to this blog then: It’s called ‘Nine Feet Underground’ because it’s named after one of my favourite pieces of music – that’ll probably come up at some point in one of the blogs. That as