• Kara – Top 10 albums
• Ben – Top 5 albums
• Asha – Eugene & The Lizards – Glue
• Fez – Top 10 albums
• Trent – Top 10 albums
• Mark – Top 10 albums
• Anna – Mos Def – The Ecstatic
• Tara – Top 10 albums
• Justin – Top 10 albums
• Pri – Phoenix – Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix

Kara

	Them Crooked Vultures – self titled Don’t question The Homme. Turn up your stereo, wait for the drums to kick in on Nobody Loves Me And Neither Do I, and engage in some SERIOUS air-drumming.
	Temper Trap Somehow manages to balance being utterly beautiful & haunting with pop sensibilities.
	Royksopp – Junior I’m a sucker for a string section. Royksopp Forever is incredible. Read the rest of this entry »

How did it come to this? Ten short years ago I was dancing to TLC’s No Scrubs (judge ye not!) on Manly Beach for the countdown to *gasp* The Millennium.

Suddenly, we’re at the other end of the decade, and we never did work out what to call ‘00-10… “The Noughties” didn’t really cut it. We’d better come up with something quick sticks, because the tunes from the last ten years have been incredible and future generations are going to need to refer to us somehow…

NME’s Top 100 albums of the last decade has some mean contributions, not the least of which is the man of the hour Emperor Luke Steele’s early effort, Lovers from The Sleepy Jackson. The Empire defining epochs, even way back when!

Other EMI faves from the list you can regularly hear blasting around the office are below:

One very notable absence however… WHERE IS THE DAFT PUNK!?!?

Whilst we greatly respect NME’s all-seeing UK hipster stylings, stay tuned for The In Sound’s very own and very wise Best Of 2009 album list – coming soon to a browser near you!

Check this out, Arctic Monkeys performing Cornerstone on French TV!!

I don’t know what I love more… the girl presenting them saying god knows what in French that sounds completely adorable and something I could listen to mindlessly for hours, or the fact that the album is pronounced “OM-BARG” in French!!!!

Too cute. And a great performance too!

Les Singes Artiques on Le Grand Journal for your viewing pleasure:

Cornerstone is the second single off the latest Arctic Monkeys LP Humbug. It’s a charming little ballad in the unmistakable slightly embittered cynical Monkeys fashion… seriously have those guys ever written a true love song!?

No need: Alex Turner spits with vitriol even when he’s romancin’.

The clip for Cornerstone is stunningly simple. Shot in one take, Alex Turner croons with vintage headphones and cassette recorder and stares down the barrel of a camera directed by Monkeys specialist Richard Ayoade. It’s a 180 degree turn from the previous Monkeys-Ayoade venture, the bombastic spectacle of Crying Lightning.

Trawling through my 2008 playlist, I re-stumbled across this utterly brilliant video for The Last Shadow Puppets‘ The Age of the Understatement. Videos don’t get much grander than this: sweeping shots of Mother Russia, towering iconic onion-domed Moscow architecture, ice-rinks, Orthodox priests, a rousing chorus of Russian soldiers… and Alex Turner (yannow, that chap from the Arctic Monkeys) and Miles Kane riding Soviet tanks.

And what a thundering tune! Beats Muse’s Knight of Cydonia right outta the water.

The clip was directed by Frenchman Romain Gavras (son of filmmaker Costa Gavras, but clearly a damn good director in his own right). Romain also shot Simian Mobile Disco’s I Believe and Justice’s Stress, and is a cofounder of the collective Kourtrajmé .

News making lots of people here at HQ very very happy: Josh Homme (Queens of the Stone Age), Dave Grohl (ummm… every band ever), and John Paul Jones (Zeppelin!) have linked arms to become Them Crooked Vultures.

These guys made their live debut on the final night of Lollapollooza at the Metro in Chicago, and people around the globe have been breaking into manic sweaty air-drumming fits and salivating at the sum total of 33sec of audio we’ve been handed.

Check out a sneak peek of the guys in the studio. The track is Nobody Loves Me And Neither Do I.

What does this have to do with us at theinsound you ask? Well, Josh worked with the Arctic Monkeys in the Mojave Desert on their new album Humbug (out this Friday)… OK it’s a long shot but I’m excited about Josh and Dave playing together!

We’ve blogged about the Homme & Turner connection previously, but now everyone has had a chance to hear the heavy tripped-out QOTSA influence all over Humbug… Listen to the backing vocals on Potion Approaching from the Monkeys’ July Web Transmission. 2:08-3:08 is straight off the Desert Sessions 9&10, don’t ya think?

In little under 2 hours, triple j will broadcast the brand new Arctic Monkeys album Humbug in full. Tune it at 8pm for your 60min fix before anyone else in the world (yep, this is a worldwide radio premiere!)

WE’VE already listened to Humbug, and guarantee ya it’s dark, heavy, sweaty, swaggering, and exactly the type of thing you’d expect a few Brit lads to stumbling out of the Mojave Desert with Josh Homme to have concocted…

If you miss the full broadcast, don’t fear as Humbug is the feature album on triple j all week.

Winter’s premier festival Splendour In The Grass has come and gone for 2009. Weren’t there? Well you missed out didn’t you! So what were the highs? The surprises? The low lights? Just keep reading and I’ll give you my two cents.

Manchester Orchestra
Leader Cheetah
Yves Klein Blue
Miami Horror
You Am I
Paul Dempsey
Bob Evans
more more more…

Read the rest of this entry »

At last we have the visuals! And they’re totally apt: dark, stormy, dramatic, and featuring Poseidon-esque ghouly giant band members towering out of crashing waves and craggycliffs scaring the living cr*p out their diminutive sailing counterparts. Watch it on Babelgum.

Take a gander at the making-of too, and you’ll recognise the director as Richard Ayoade (AKA Marurice Moss from The IT Crowd – the credits of which were done by my fave animation gurus, Shynola, who just did the new Coldplay vid):

Ayoade is a talented guy: as well as being a stand-up comedian, he also directed the Monkeys’ clip for Fluorescant Adolescant, plus the 2007 Arctic Monkeys Live at the Apollo DVD, The Last Shadow Puppets clips for Standing Next To Me and My Mistakes Were Made For You, Vampire Weekend’s Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa, Kasabian’s Vlad The Impaler, and the Yeah Yeah Yeah’s Heads Will Roll.

CONNECTSHAWWWNS!

Ladies and Gentlemen… It’s TURNER AND HOMME GENIUS.

I may have fleetingly mentioned an affinity for Homme projects in the past… but this is everything of which I could have dreamed – and more. Crying Lightning, the first single from Arctic Monkeys‘ third album Humbug is a menacing, swaggering, helluva tune, straight out of Lullabies to Paralyze with a lick of O’Malley Monkeys bass.

Humbug was produced by Josh Homme in the Mojave Desert and LA and James Ford in Brooklyn. If the single is anything to go by, the album will terrify your hamster: the percussion is thundering – stepped up ten notches from Brianstorm. The guitars whine and wail and howl like the wind at your nan’s window on a stormy night. Alex Turner’s trademark contempt-filled, breakneck, spitting yet plummy vocals are on fire.

It’s yummmm.

The Aussie premiere of Crying Lightning (other than blasting on repeat in our office) will be on radio today, and the track available on iTunes Australia to buy after 9am. The album Humbug is available August 21. For the massive fans (hands up) you can pre-order the album in bundle form with a collectible limited edition poster, from www.arcticmonkeys-store.co.uk

(post update – you can now listen to Crying Lightning in full on www.myspace.com/arcticmonkeys)

Track listing is as follows:

1. My Propeller
2. Crying Lightning
3. Dangerous Animals
4. Secret Door
5. Potion Approaching
6. Fire And The Thud
7. Cornerstone
8. Dance Little Liar
9. Pretty Visitors
10. The Jeweller’s Hands