I know I wrote something a bit snide about the whole “Tips For 2009” business the other day. But then, when dutifully and only slightly hypocritically compiling my submission to the BBC poll, I found myself – hugely hypocritically, I suppose – tipping one of the doubtless most-tipped tips of 2009, Florence And The Machine. Because, I guess, in spite of my high-handed disdain for music hacks obediently following the new bands prescribed to them by publicists, I’m not quite pompous enough to be put off by the hype when one I like comes along. So it is with Florence Welch, who seems to have harvested most of her publicity for some performance art-like stunts at live shows rather than the impressive vigour of her music. I have a new single by her called “Dog Days Are Over”, which I think is out about now, and while I rarely dip my toes into the British indie scene here, please trust me that this one’s pretty impressive. The easy reference point is PJ Harvey – Welch has a similar boom and heft to her voice, that impressive stentorian depth that Harvey can summon up (or at least did prior to the lovely “White Chalk”; it remains to be seen whether to her shift to a higher and more vulnerable register is permanent. I doubt it). Welch is soulful, too, and there seems to be a harp subtly tracking her through the big James Ford production. That soulfulness comes even more into focus on the flipside, a cover of Candi Staton & The Source’s “You’ve Got The Love”, which treats the song with the respect, passion and muscle it deserves. I was whingeing on about indie types covering pop hits the other week, but this is one of those rare exceptions to the rule. Good stuff, as is some more traditional Wild Mercury Sound fare on vinyl I got hold of last week. First up is a seven-inch on Sick Thirst which is such a perfect fit for us here it’s almost embarrassingly corny – a cover of Neil Young’s “Vampire Blues” by West Coast psych-drone groovers Wooden Shjips. If you’ve ever heard the Shjips, you’ll be able to guess what happens here: a bobbling rhythm, a shrill organ, profuse distortion and reverberance, the heady stench of the Spacemen 3, and a heartening rock’n’roll classicism which still manages to shine out beneath all the fuzz and drone. Next, a 12-inch by Sun Araw called “Boat Trip”. Not a generous amount of info on this one, though I do know it’s the work of one of Magic Lantern, who I mentioned briefly a while back. Magic Lantern seem like a high-grade freak-out band from their Myspace (I must get the album actually), but while Sun Araw is still heavily psych, the guitar jams are sunk down in the mix on these two long tracks, deep behind tribal dirge vibes. Ostensibly, “Boat Trip” plods, but in an utterly intoxicating, potentially menacing sort of way. I’ve seen this 12 (and an album, which again I must get) compared to a wilder Panda Bear, and I can see there’s some hypnotic, exotic affinities. But there’s something distinctly muggier, hippier about Sun Araw; a wasted, oppressive atmosphere and smothered vocals which remind me, abstractedly, of New Kingdom circa “Unicorns Were Horses”. Which is cool. Amazing record. Want more.

More talk from the judges today, as they get to grips with the debut from Vampire Weekend. Allison Howe: I absolutely love it, it’s my favourite record of the year. It is a really crap cover, I admit. I love Graceland, and we can’t deny where a lot of this has come from. I think it’s a pop record for a generation that obviously loves them. I’ve seen them at a lot of festivals, kids love them and yet what they do is so steeped in a different era that it shouldn’t work. They’re a bit dull live sometimes, but we’re here to judge a record and for me this is the record of the year. Mark Radcliffe: I like Vampire Weekend a lot, but it’s not my record of the year. They’ve got that strange combination of being quite preppy, the way they look and the way they sound reminded me a bit of early Talking Heads, but there are these strange kind of African guitar influences in it. I like it very much, it’s a very pretty and well-made record, but the only thing I would say about it is that among the new breed of American bands that are on this shortlist I think you get Vampire Weekend quicker but I think it lacks a dimension. Whereas the Fleet Foxes was one of those records that with repeated listening you start to hear more things in it, which to me the great records have. I think this is a really good record, I don’t think it’s a great record. Danny: I think this is the one record on the shortlist that’s possible for people to really dislike. I don’t, I really like it. The Graceland thing is possibly a bit of a red herring. They are a new wave band with an African-sounding guitar, filtered through Paul Simon, but when you listen to it you realise what a strange thing it is to do. Mark mentioned Talking Heads, but from the same era and same clubs I can hear Jonathan Richman in it as well. When I first listened to it I wrote down that I liked the riffs, but they’re almost too small to be riffs, I had to change it to riffette. There’s lots of lovely riffettes in it. I like this record a great deal, I don’t think it’s up to the standards of the Fleet Foxes, but it’s a brilliant and strange little record. I like the fact that it’s coming from nowhere else, I don’t know anybody remotely like them – what scene did they come out of? I can’t imagine. Which of them heard these little CBGBs-type songs and said “we should put some African guitar on these, it’d be great”. Where is that bar? I wanna go there. It’s my second favourite record on this list, although I hate ranking things. Allan Jones: It was played a lot in the office when it came out, and I enjoyed listening to it, and the Talking Heads thing is interesting. Some of it is as fresh as “Love Goes To Buildings On Fire”. Tony Wadsworth: There’s a bit of Televison in there as well. Allan: Yeah, it just shot out of there. But I must say that out of all the records on the shortlist, I kind of graduated to that one as something that I didn’t play as much before but have in time got more and more out of it. It’s a really great record. Alison: It’s beautifully short, as well. Danny: Well said, that woman. They whacked the four-minute one on the end so you can go and make the tea. Allan: That’s one of the things that appealed to me about the Radiohead album. Alison: It doesn’t overstay its welcome. Allan: Absolutely not. I thought “Oh God, I’m gonna be here for an eternity”, people shining torches in my face. Linda Thompson: I was prepared not to like this, I’ve heard them live and they’re four posh boys like The Strokes – very posh and very spoilt – and I thought it had finally happened: these people are too young for me. But I started to listen to it, and now I’m madly in love with it. It amused me that they’re so influence by Paul Simon, who else is these days? It’s so arch, it’s so out there. I’d be very happy for it to win, I think it’s fresh and everything rock ‘n’ roll should be; young, full of energy and “Blake’s Got A New Face” is my favourite song, I just love it. I love the atonal quality of it, it’s like Schoenberg. Tony: I think it’s great, it’s intelligent pop music which is something we forgot existed. It’s reminiscent of the CBGBs era of 1977. It’s interesting that Linda mentioned posh boys, because posh boys make a lot of the best albums. Some of the biggest bands in the world are inhabited by posh boys. I tended to look for posh boys when I was signing artists. Alison: Hanging outside Harrow or something...? Linda: They’re better than the posh boys like Guy Ritchie who pretend not to be posh! Tony: I think it’s nice, it’s edgy, it’s got great lyrics, it’s clean and shiny. I don’t know whether I’ll listen to it in ten years’ time like I’ll certainly be listening to Elbow in ten years’ time, but it’s a great intelligent pop album and I really enjoyed it. Danny: Shit cover. Mark: It’s unforgiveable. Tony: Yeah, but I bet they thought it was bloody brilliant. Linda: I’m someone who’s done the shittest covers in the history of music. Danny: Which would you say was the worst, Linda? Linda: All of them. They’re the worst I’ve ever seen. Tony: Sunnyvista was possibly one of the worst. Danny: Oh, it was terrible. Tony: I think the reason behind this was that they didn’t want to put the name of the band on the cover. Danny: But they’ve got two lovely words in their name! Vampire and weekend!

It’s still a few days before the next issue of Uncut comes out, but I think I can let slip that REM’s “Accelerate”, while being included in our writers’ Top 50 Albums Of 2008 chart, didn’t actually make it into the Top 40. A disappointing showing for such a hyped “return to form”, maybe. But I was re-reading the blog I wrote about “Accelerate”, and the follow-up post, and much of it still holds true. I’m drawn especially to this bit: “Well, it’s a good record and, as I said, the best since ‘New Adventures’. I can’t imagine that I’m going to reach for this instead of, say, ‘Murmur’, in a couple of years’ time. Ten months on, I must admit I haven’t revisited “Accelerate” too often, but I seized on the reissue of “Murmur” when it turned up in the office the other day. It’s hard for me to comment on the remastering of the original album because I’ve never owned a CD of the album before. Consequently, I can’t tell whether the clarity of this version is down to the new mastering, or just through hearing it on CD, through a decent sound system. In some ways, listening to “Murmur” like this is rather jarring. Part of the album’s romance, to me at least, is predicated on its mythical murkiness, its rep as a record of muttered incantations, of hazy provenance. However real or imagined that murkiness might be, hearing “Murmur” with an enhanced crispness feels like part of its indistinct allure has been dismantled. A lot of its allure remains, though, and it’s still clear why, intermittently over the past 25 years, I’ve cited “Murmur”, professionally and privately, as one of my favourite records.The songs, for a start, are astonishing, and if hearing them with new sharpness privileges one thing, it’s that precarious, odd hybrid of post-punk awkwardness and mellifluous, Byrdsian folk-rock. “The perfect amalgam of The Velvet Underground and The Doors,” producer Don Dixon is quoted as saying, which I don’t quite get, because it always struck me more that – and again, perhaps this may be a romanticised idea – REM took the brittle, uptight art-rock of New York and then allied it to a vision of the American South that is cryptic, eccentric, yet also warm and rich in tradition. Not much room for The Doors in that. This comes through even stronger on “Live At Larry’s Hideaway”, the second CD of this deluxe package. It’s a recording of a Toronto gig from the summer of 1983, three months after “Murmur” was released. More than ever here, their post-punk roots are most striking; a clipped, wiry edge to the guitar and bass patterns. What drags the sound away from the rigours of post-punk is, of course, a certain warmth, albeit one that’s baffling rather than conventionally homely. It’s there in Michael Stipe’s husky, elliptical vocals, and in the phenomenally unsteady harmonies. It’s also present in his between-songs banter, where you get a sense of what Stipe was like before he had completely constructed a persona for himself as a frontman, and with a particular self-consciousness that suggests, onstage at least, he had yet to learn how to make full use of his considerable charisma. In this raw state, you can hear the evolution of REM’s early songwriting, from the rickety, buzzing likes of “1,000,000”, through the more realised marvels of “Pilgrimage”, “Sitting Still” and “Talk About The Passion”, and on to a couple of “Reckoning” songs, “7 Chinese Brothers” and “Harborcoat”; freshly minted, and with a greater density to their jangle which foreshadowed the band’s development over the next three or four years. There’s also a cover of the Velvets’ “There She Goes Again”, pretty similar to one I already have somewhere (on “Dead Letter Office”, maybe?), and an early airing for “Just A Touch”, which wouldn’t surface on record for another three years, and “Lifes Rich Pageant”. There, it’s helter-skeltering, muscular. Here, it’s not quite so deranged, spindlier and maybe closer in spirit to something like “West Of The Fields”, though there’s still a catch, a hint of gravel, in Stipe’s voice. There’s edge, too, to his vocals on “Radio Free Europe”, as the band go into a sort of ramshackle overdrive and he veers out of tune. It’s another way of pulling apart the mystique, I guess, proving that REM were once so fallible. But compared with the last time I saw them play live, at the Albert Hall, what a band they were.

And here we are with the judges on Radiohead. Next up, Vampire Weekend. Mark Radcliffe: It’s a great Radiohead album. It may be the best Radiohead album. They’re one of a rare breed who’ve become an international arena-filling rock band that have had the courage to play with it and fuck about with it once they got there, rather than keeping going just the same. I think this has got better songs than certainly anything since OK Computer, possibly ever. There’s songs on here which are absolutely out of their top drawer; “House Of Cards”, “Nude”. I know they’re constantly eulogised and it sounds daft to say we take them for granted, but you would expect Radiohead to make a marvellous record every time. Pretty much they do, but this is better even than their usual standard. I think Thom Yorke’s voice has just got better and better, the space it occupies, the air around it, the self-consciousness of the falsetto that he’s developed. Funnily enough, I was listening to “Creep” the other day, and where he goes into the high register there’s nothing like the purity that there is on these songs. The end section of “Nude”, which is like a choir but it’s all him, is incredible. What they’ve managed to do is distill and reduce the absolute essence of what Radiohead is. I think they’re one of our most precious bands, a brilliant record. Danny Kelly: I share some of Mark’s views, but not all of them. It is their best record since OK Computer, but I don’t share the view that they’re a national treasure. I don’t blame them for the horrible bands they’ve set in tow any more than I blame Kraftwerk for the horrible bands they set in tow in the ‘80s, I don’t think that’s fair. My dislike of the way they’ve gone and how to be just discordant and screechy is good enough now. At one of the awards ceremonies he did a seven or eight-minute solo number on the piano in front of people who were clearly wishing to kill him. Mark: That was from his solo album, though, Danny. Danny: Yeah, I know, but I just wanted him to stop making music and leave the building. This record, however, is really good, there’s no point in pretending that it’s not; there’s more melody on it, they’ve rediscovered rhythm – even the opening track [“15 Step”], the way it bounces along is lovely to hear. It’s an enjoyable Radiohead record, after they’d become torture for me. It’s enjoyable maybe because Jonny Greenwood went off and did the thing with the BBC Symphony Orchestra, maybe because Thom Yorke had done his solo album, they’d got all that stuff out of them and they’re back to being the basic band they were when they made The Bends. Mark: No, they’re not, they’re not like The Bends at all, they’re a completely different band! Danny: What I’m saying is they’ve gone back to way of making records, they’re not having to add a load of stuff into it. I liked “Reckoner” a lot, I like the way it goes all symphonic, and “House Of Cards” is a great song. Allan Jones: This was quite a revelation for me, especially the latter half of it. I think Mark is absolutely right, it’s the concision of the songs on there, nothing out-stays its welcome at all. It’s really, really spot on. Linda Thompson: I love this record, I’m a big Thom Yorke fan. I liked all the mad stuff that came between OK Computer and OK Abacus, or whatever this is. I really like the way he’s gone for no grandstanding at all, I like the way they’ve let the music speak for itself. I’m a big fan of Nigel Godrich, too. He can overproduce things a bit too much, like he’s got his eyes on the charts a bit too much, but he is a wonderful producer. And I’m really soppy about Thom Yorke, because I think he’s a great talent, very spiritual. I keep coming back to the fact that you can always tell that he’s doing it from the right place. Some of you guys, all of you for all I know, might be musicians, but, y’know, it’s not as easy as it looks. I wouldn’t be unhappy if this won. They’re amazing live, and I like the stuff Thom did with Polly Harvey too. Tony Wadsworth: Declaring an interest, I worked with them throughout their career, and if you think you’ve been tortured, Danny, it’s nowhere near as much as they torture themselves. They turn themselves inside out between every album, it’s almost like they break up after every album, because they feel such a massive obligation to do something different and amazing and better than they’ve ever done. It doesn’t always work, and I think on the couple of albums prior to this one it didn’t. This one, I think, everything really came together. They were touring the songs for a couple of years before they started recording, and that really shows. What struck me about the songs when they were first trying them out live and finally went they went into the studio is that this is almost like their soul album. That may sound weird in terms of Radiohead, but I started hearing Curtis Mayfield in there, and Bob Marley. There’s a rhythm and more of a sexy thing going on than you’re used to with Radiohead. I think the songs are great; “Nude”, I know, was written at the time of OK Computer, and suffered that Radiohead editorial process. When someone says to them “that sounds like a hit!”, you’ll never fuckin’ hear it again! They put it away for 15 years. I think, until now, they never felt they’d made the definitive version of it, but of course there’s no such thing as the definitive version of a song. I think this is probably their best album. It’s great that somebody is so damn serious about making pop music with skill. I think it’s shame that the music kind of got obscured by the way they released it, which from an industry point of view was quite a pivotal moment. Basically, they took two ends of the market, they said “OK, here’s the download, pay what you want for it”, and most people paid nothing. “Oh, and here’s a special edition of the album, pay £40”. And both of those were very interesting things to do, because they were playing with the perceived value of music. You could say that file-sharing has effectively made music worthless, but of course we all know that it’s worth so much, it’s priceless. So their £40 box set was them asking “how can we bring the value out again?”. They hit upon a couple of really good ideas, from a business point of view it was a very clever thing to do. After they’d done those two things they did a conventional record deal with XL, so they had their cake and they ate it. Mark: Well, they always knew that they were gonna sell a truckload of CDs anyway. They had the security of knowing what their fanbase was and that it would still buy a CD for a tenner from Tesco’s. Tony: Absolutely, but I think the pity is that it became the story of the album at the time, it wasn’t the music. Allan: That’s a very good point, it did overshadow the music. I think I was more interested in the background surrounding it, and it was ages before I actually got round to listening to the record. Alison Howe: I love Radiohead, I’ve liked all their albums for different reasons. I’ve always found something on each one to like, and I like this one more than lots of the others. It almost feels like their pop album to me, it’s got lots of tunes on it, which you can’t say about recent Radiohead records. I think they play it very well, I think this year and the shows they played last year were almost like a new chapter of Radiohead. They looked like they were into it again, I don’t know if maybe for a couple of years they got a bit bored. This feels a bit like a Radiohead record on an independent label, it just feels different to me. Tony: What I can assure is that it wasn’t made in any different way from when they were signed to a major label. If ever a band was truly independent they’re one of ‘em. Alison: I’ve been thinking about this, and my three or four favourite records have come from the same place, the stable of XL or Beggars; The Raconteurs, Vampire Weekend, this one and Bon Iver. I think that’s really interesting, because they’re four very different records. I wouldn’t want Radiohead to win, but they’d be in my Top Three. Mark: I think they wouldn’t want to win, they didn’t want to win the Mercury. Allan: Well, let’s give it to them, really wind them up!