Neon

The tragic life of pioneer Joe Meek: part comedy, part nightmare

The labour divided, the songs still blessedly odd

When I went off on my annual start-of-year rant about hotly-tipped new bands in January (and Lord, I’ve been forced to rethink my opinions about Florence And The Machine after seeing her shocking performance with Glasvegas at the NME Awards), I mentioned that, in the midst of so much electropop, “Maybe even Peaches might get a bit more love as the result of all this, which would be great.”

I was reading my blog on Super Furry Animals’ “Hey Venus” the other day, and noticed a comment that the band were working on two other albums for imminent release, albums that’d put the tidy poppiness of “Hey Venus” into quite a different context. Like so many talked-up projects in that vein, nothing seemed to come of them. But the new Super Furry Animals album, “Dark Days/Light Years” feels very much like the yang to the yin of “Hey Venus”.

The ninth album is due out in April, see the full track list here

With blogging, of course, you publish and be damned, then, once damned, you publish again. So it is with the Top 75 I unleashed on an unsuspecting world on Tuesday, only to soon realise that it was, basically, a bit of a cock-up.

To try and express how much new music I’ve enjoyed in 2008, I’ve gone overboard and come up with a Top 75 albums.

Mirror Noir documents a year in the life of the band

Brandon Flowers and co start learning from Las Vegas on extravagant third album

The band's third album is due in November