That Monday night sunset, London

Christmas books

More book stack photos

My top 75 tracks of 2011

Despite the fact that I completed LA Noire on the PS3 this year, I don't really get that Lana Del Rey song. Although I have been a passenger in a car on numerous motorways, I don't really get M83. And even though I thnk vwls r 4 dckhds, I don't really get Sbtrkt. I'M SORRY. And with that very negative introduction out of the way, we at The Electric Goose are delighted to present our top 75 tracks of 2011, as always, in no particular order. Enjoy!

 Click here for the Spotify goodness 

Joan As Police Woman – The Magic
Killer Mike – God In The Building II
Tune-Yards – Powa
Ben Folds Five – Stumblin' Home Winter Blue
Battles – Ice Cream (Featuring Matias Aguayo)
Wild Flag – Romance
Cocknbullkid – Hold On To Your Misery
Cornershop – Topknot
The Decemberists – Calamity Song
Half Man Half Biscuit – Fix It So She Dreams Of Me
TV On The Radio – Will Do
The Vaccines – Wreckin' Bar (Ra Ra Ra)
Camille – My Man Is Married But Not To Me
Dark Dark Dark – In Your Dreams
Ezra Furman & The Harpoons – Teenage Wasteland
The Feelies – When You Know
Elbow – lippy kids
Lady Gaga – Born This Way
Jay Z – Otis
Dirty Projectors + Björk – On and Ever Onward
Guided By Voices – One, Two, Three, Four
Ghostpoet – Survive It
The Pains Of Being Pure At Heart – Belong
Anna Calvi – Desire
Sons And Daughters – Rose Red
Glee Cast – I Love New York / New York, New York
Tune-Yards – Gangsta
Dutch Uncles – The Ink
The Vaccines – Norgaard
Ezra Furman & The Harpoons – Hard Time in a Terrible Land
The Civil Wars – Barton Hollow
The Drums – Days
Emily Barker & The Red Clay Halo – Pause
Akira The Don – Video Highway
Nicki Minaj – Roman's Revenge
Wild Flag – Endless Talk
The Strokes – Taken For A Fool
The Horrors – Still Life
Camille – Ilo Veyou
PJ Harvey – The Glorious Land
Half Man Half Biscuit – RSVP
Killer Mike – Burn
Lady Gaga – You And I
The Electric Soft Parade – If I Can Dream
Hannah Peel – Don't Kiss The Broken One
Generationals – Ten-Twenty-Ten
Foo Fighters – White Limo
Friends – I'm His Girl
Azealia Banks – 212
Clap Your Hands Say Yeah – Ketamine And Ecstasy
Arctic Monkeys – Black Treacle
Metronomy – Everything Goes My Way
Feist – How Come You Never Go There
Nicola Roberts – Beat Of My Drum
Florence + The Machine – Lover To Lover
The Streets – Going Through Hell
Brett Anderson – Brittle Heart
Stephen Malkmus & The Jicks – Fall Away
Sweet Baboo – Bounce
Hugh Laurie – Let Them Talk
Timber Timbre – Black Water
Laura Marling – Sophia
Wilco – Born Alone
Martin Solveig ft Dragonette – Hello
Wiley – Wise Man and his Words
Trevor Moss & Hannah-Lou – A Hill Far, Far Away
The Indelicates – The Road From Houston To Waco
Tyler, The Creator – Yonkers
My Morning Jacket – Outta My System
EMA – California
Stephen Malkmus & The Jicks – All Over Gently
Aloe Blacc – I Need A Dollar
Stooshe – Betty Woz Gone - Original
Camille – La France
Emmy The Great & Tim Wheeler – Marshmallow World

See also...
Last year's top 50
Top 20 tracks of 2009
Top 25 tracks of 2007 (didn't do one in 2008, for some reason)
Top 25 tracks of 2006
Top 25 tracks of 2005

Red chairs

Killing time

Look, I love it as much as you do, but if The Killing has one flaw, it's surely this:

Stuck inside with Playmobil and the Fenton blues again

Unbelievable. Just when I thought I could take a well-earned break from all the Benton / Fenton memes by going offline and indulging heartily at a friend's wedding, the cheeky pup turns up on my table. Playmobil Benton! PLAYMOBIL FENTON! PLAAAYMOBIIIILL BEEENTTOOOONNNN! Jesus Christ.

From 1990...

The holy trinity: Theroux, Buxton, Cornish.


Top comment: "It's like they knew YouTube was going to be invented one day!"

A surprisingly rambling post about shelving and tennis

Sarah and I will be celebrating our first wedding anniversary in a week and a day. It may qualify as the strangest, happiest and most unsettled year of my life (ask me again in 50 years. Set an Outlook reminder so you don't forget). We spent every day together in India for nearly six months, we got back and kept on moving (from Oval to Shannon to Cheadle to Ealing to Salisbury), slowed down for a few months in the Cheshire countryside (courtesy of generous family members, shout out), got a hefty chunk of freelance work, and took Megabuses between Manchester and London. I played a little Xbox, before the E74 error put a stop to that.

 

I can't be bothered to do a tortured drawn-out metaphor about striding boldly through the furrowed fields of the present towards the horizon of the future (see photo), because really we're just feeling our way in the dark. We got to go through our old possessions a few months back and realised that not much of the stash is really worth hauling down from the loft. You'd have to be pretty hard-minded not to concede after a few months of backpacking that unless you own a house with extensive shelving, you can forget the removal van and get by with a hard drive and a Kindle. Not that a house with extensive shelving is on the agenda anyway - instead, we're back in south London in a flat-share with a couple of old friends. Not your average post-marriage set-up, it's true, but it's turning out to be immensely fun. I haven't been this sociable since 2002. And in the last month I've played more hours of tennis than I did throughout my 20s, thanks to this.

 

The Landlord and I (after some drinks, admittedly) were inspired and set about it. Disaster struck, but slowly. It chipped away, really. After 13 consecutive days we caved in (literally, almost) and rested due to a combination of wristy RSI, back pain and all-round massive exhaustion. Shame. I would say this, though: getting to the office at 9am having already played a set of tennis is an amazing thing, and you walk round energised, smiling at the secret in your head. Going down the escalator at Vauxhall on my way to work after a 7am knockabout, my eye was caught by the sight of a woman handing her young son a tennis ball. I looked again; it was an apple. Tennis on the brain.

A friend saw this picture on Facebook and said later, "Oh! You're living somewhere gritty and urban now, aren't you?" - and the snap was supposed to have something of the Original Pirate Material about it. But actually this is the view looking out. Sarah was originally wary about the transition from the rolling hills of Bollington, identifying one of our new local London landmarks, a massive painted wooden board with the legend "PLEASE LEAVE ROOM FOR ACCESS :-)" as a downer, an unwelcoming symbol of city life. I think for her it was like a passive-aggressive post-it note scaled up 500% and evidence that the capital is snarling at innocent passers-by. I was like, "BUT WHAT ABOUT THE SMILEY?" That did the trick. It's a pretty persuasive argument.

YOU'RE SO UNFAIR I HATE YOU

We need someone who's handy at video editing to create a feature-length We Need to Talk About Kevin mash-up so this important joke can be fully realised in time for Oscar season, but I've made a start below, so it wouldn't really be that much work.

Smoke and mirrors

A strong whiff of media beef wafted through Electric Goose Towers this morning, as we noticed that page 11 of the Daily Mirror featured a story (which isn't online and doesn't seem to have been picked up by any other papers or websites) about an allegedly sexist Ryanair advert which appeared in The Guardian at some unspecified moment in time.

According to the Mirror article, the ad, which was promoting cheap flights to Germany and featured "a large-breasted blonde clutching a huge beer glass" alongside the tagline "See The Frauleins With The Big Jugs", upset many of the "ailing" Guardian's "right-on" readers. It continues, in hilariously sarcastic vein:

Even their own staff were up in arms, some phoning in from their rustic Tuscan holidays to complain.

One said: 'I nearly choked on my gluten-free organic muesli when I saw it.

'We are keepers of the nation's morals, and we let the nation down.'

Of course, only a paranoid and crazy person would suggest the snarky tone of this piece had anything to do with articles like this, this or this…