It's That Time Of Year Again.....

It's that time of year again where blokes of a certain age have an insatiable urge to share with others their favourite albums, songs, gigs etc of the year and I am more than happy to join many other bloggers in this task for the first time....

Most of my posts since starting this blog on Halloween have been about bands that I grew up with that may have slipped from view, bands that should have been more successful than they were and to try and re-ignite memories or introduce the music to fresh ears....However I do still try and stay in touch as much as possible with new stuff coming out and this is my contribution to what excited me in 2010...

My own personal fave records of the year included :

Edwyn Collins, Arcade Fire, Vampire Weekend, Alasdair Roberts, KORT, Jenny and Johnny, John Grant's gorgeous Queen Of Denmark, Conor O'Brien's beguiling debut as Villagers, and Twin Shadow's 80's influenced but very modern sounding Forget....

Other musical highlights include Springsteen's The Promise, the expanded reissue of R.E.M.'s Fables..., Galaxie 500's deluxe edition of On Fire and the one essential purchase this Christmas, Coals To Newcastle. Every home should have one...here's hoping in a couple of weeks that mine does....

Gigs of 2010 were The Wedding Present's Bizarro gig at the QMU, Phonemenal Handclap Band at The Captain's Rest, Sir Paul at Hampden and best gig of the year for me was The Primitives at Stereo.The gig, including encores only lasted about an hour but it was one hour of sheer pop perfection. Not sure if it's just an age thing but I find my attention span getting shorter and some gigs these days tend to lag a bit in the middle but there was no time time for lag with this one, you barely had time to draw breath between tracks...I have a feeling they may have listened a few times to It's Alive over the years....