British gene

In the lists of the best albums for the year traditionally composed of world media, American musicians dominate-this is not surprising, in the States, consider, they came up with pop culture and have been producing it for more than a hundred years, there are more powerful show business and the media. However, this does not mean that in other countries they release less interesting music - just the angle of view.

Throughout the year at the request of British Council I led a blog dedicated to new British music, and reviewed the radio show The Selector , where the novelties of the United Kingdom sounds weekly - both from stars and from novice musicians. Having reviewed the archive of the show and the blog for the whole of 2014, I made up a dozen British albums, which left the most strong impression that did not disappear over time. There are no most promoted records of the British crown of 2014 like the debuts of Temples , Royal Blood , FKA Twigs , Sam Smith and Jungle and Return Aphex Twin , because this is wonderful work, but I wanted to tell you about something else. Albums are listed in alphabetical order.

The alt-j intending, Miley Cyrus with French romantic poets, is called “new Radiohead ”, and although this loud label is more likely annoying with pretentiousness than attracts, it is not only chopping advertising. The greatness of the Radiohead group is that with the onset of Millennium, she offered the mainstream (and to all of humanity) a new sound-saying goodbye to the arrogant masculinity of the electrihitar, who dominated the pop culture for the past 50 years, Tom York and the company lengthened the Ice in the ocean of electronic sound. In the songs of Alt-J , the promise of the sound revolution also imagines, only it is not that it accompanies the singer-the roaring Fender , moaning Korg MS20 or squeaking plugins VST , but that in the middle of the scene, in the center of the light beam, they have a singer, vocal, voice.

“Well-oh,” you will stretch out in disappointment, “you also found innovation.” Indeed, there is nothing fundamentally new in this, and even funny, it is funny that the newly “this is all yours” , which will probably be included in a variety of lists of the best albums for 2014, is very reminiscent of records of male vocal quarters that reigned in the charts of Britain and the states of the 1950s and 1960s. He broadcasts the same exhibitionist rapture by the capabilities of human ligaments. The fundamental difference is that Alt-J has one vocalist who does not compare with the golden voices of the 1960s is not so gifted with the nature of Joe Newman, whose flexible vocal group and its producers are deployed with arrangements into a multi-eccute panorama. A similar transformation occurs in the mirror tube of the kaleidoscope, where modest glass suddenly folds into a multi -colored universe.