The CLUAS Archive: 1998 - 2011

27

MGMT, Foals top French polls

Aidan Curran posted on December 27, 2008 18:00
So, you’ve seen the results of the annual CLUAS polls. You, our suave and brainy readers, gave Elbow their second major prize of the year by choosing Mercury-winner ‘The Seldom Seen Kid’ as your top album. We, the aloof and mysterious CLUAS writing caste, had the audacity to reverse your top two: silver for Elbow and gold to Bon Iver for the lovely ‘For Emma, Forever Ago’.
 
If you feel the need to talk about it (for instance, if you = Glasvegas fan), everyone’s waiting for you on this thread over at the CLUAS discussion board.
 
All that remains now is for this blog, the Latin Quarter of CLUAS, to dish out the goodies in our annual Best French Music list. First, though, it may be interesting to see how France’s music publications saw 2008. The French make lists too: let’s compare two of the most prominent to CLUAS’s.
 
Les InrocksLes Inrockuptibles is France’s top music and culture magazine. In their Top 50 Albums of 2008, first place went to MGMT’s ‘Oracular Spectacular’. (You may recall that a mere underground train ride away in London, the NME also picked MGMT as their album of the year.) And the rest of the top five: Fleet Foxes, Vampire Weekend, Santogold and (yikes!) The Last Shadow Puppets.
 
We note that Nicole Atkins’ marvellous 2007 album ‘Neptune City’, released only this year in Europe, made the lower reaches of the Les Inrocks list. Has anyone in Eire heard of this wonderful record?
 
Only nine of Les Inrocks’ Top 50 are French albums. (By comparison, with nine Irish records out of 40 the CLUAS readers' poll has a much healthier domestic representation.) At number nine is the highest home finisher, Sebastien Tellier’s ‘80s-synthpop mess, ‘Sexuality’. Camille’s horrendous ‘Music Hole’ finished 12th. One of the nine French albums is Justice’s live album, ‘A Cross The Universe’, which hardly counts as an album for the pruposes of polls. And no place at all for M83’s “Saturdays = Youth”, which finished 18th in the CLUAS readers’ poll.
 
An Irishman writing in English about French music: bizarre. By contrast, it’s not so strange to discover Sound Of Violence, the excellent French music webzine dedicated solely to UK and Irish alternative music.
 
Sound Of Violence has also published its Writers’ Top Ten of 2008. Only British albums, remember, so no MGMT, Vampire Weekend, Santogold, Bon Iver or Fleet Foxes. Of Her Majesty’s pop stars, CLUAS and Mercury laureates Elbow didn’t make the cut – nor did Glasvegas. (No Irish albums in there either.)
 
Foals, then, win SOV’s prize, ahead of The Kills, Portishead and (eek!) Noah And The Whale. Other big names in the top ten are Oasis and Bloc Party.
 
Even if you don’t speak French, it’s still interesting to have a look at the Les Inrocks and Sound Of Violence end-of-year lists. If anything, you’ll see that Paris pop tastes closely follow the London trends.

Here’s a British song about moving to the French capital, from an album that wasn’t in the SOV, Les Inrocks or CLUAS polls - from the self-titled debut by Friendly Fires, this is 'Paris':


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2003 - Witnness 2003, a comprehensive review by Brian Kelly of the 2 days of what transpired to be the last ever Witnness festival (in 2004 it was rebranded as Oxegen when Heineken stepped into the sponsor shoes).