Film / Games / Music: Harry's Review of 2006

2006 was, as always with the arts, an interesting year.

In music there were highly-publicised releases from the likes of The Beatles, The Killers, Bob Dylan, Nas, Beyonce, Justin, Christina, My Chemical Romance and Tom Waits, as well as fervent championing of a number of lesser-known acts such as Belle & Sebastian, Liars, The Knife, Joanna Newsom, Ghostface, TV on the Radio (proving the old adage that one single does not a good album make) and more. We saw Hope of the States split up after disastrous sales of their sophomore album, Left, and the effective demise of The Futureheads as they too experienced second album difficulties - News & Tributes shifted a measly 32,000 copies and the band were subsequently dropped from their label, 679 Recordings.

Movie-wise, we witnessed "the end of Western civilisation as we know it" (Mark Kermode) as Gore Verbinski's bloated Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest became one of the highest grossing movies ever made, while a number of foreign language films broke through into the mainstream, most notably Requiem and Pan's Labyrinth. We had a new Bond (yay), Borat's debut (nay) and everyone's favourite slightly disturbing celebrity (no, not Michael Jackson) return in Mission Impossible: III (hmm). Just when you thought it wasn't possible to continue raping the cash cow that is 1970s horror movies, along came Jonathan Liebesman's horrific (in a bad way) prequel to the remake The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning. At least we had Saw 3, eh?

2006 brought a sad end to the decade-old era of gameplay with the arrival of next-gen tomfoolery; Gears of War scooping countless awards for being shiny, despite lacking original narrative, setting, characters or gameplay comes to mind. At least Monsieur Sea Bass Takatsuka finally perfected his world-beating footie franchise with the colossal Pro Evolution Soccer 6 (this time it can't get any better, it just can't damn it!) and we saw a slight return to story-based gaming on the PC with Dreamfall: The Longest Journey, Broken Sword: The Angel of Death and the welcome return of Sam & Max. Artsy gaming continued to suffer as the big names trumped the independent studios, culminating in the lamentable demise of Clover Studios, creators of the (apparently) masterful Okami. The Nintendo DS outfought the PSP, though as long as portable games remain laughably overpriced that fails to be of particular concern.

And, without further ado, here is my rundown of the best of this year's releases in music, movies and games.

Top 10 Singles:

01. The Spinto Band - "Oh Mandy"
02. The Wombats - "Moving to New York"
03. The Pipettes - "Pull Shapes"
04. CSS - "Let's Make Love and Listen to Death from Above"
05. Justice vs. Simian - "We Are Your Friends"
06. Christina Aguilera - "Ain't No Other Man"
07. Gnarls Barkley - "Crazy"
08. TV on the Radio - "Wolf Like Me"
09. Peter Bjorn & John - "Young Folks"
10. Belle & Sebastian - "Funny Little Frog"

Top 10 Album Tracks:

01. Belle & Sebastian - "Another Sunny Day"
02. Liars - "Let's Not Wrestle Mt. Heart Attack"
03. Squarepusher - "The Modern Bass Guitar"
04. Hope of the States - "This is A Question"
05. Clipse - Dirty Money
06. The Long Blondes - "Swallow Tattoo"
07. The Pipettes - "It Hurts to See You Dance So Well"
08. The Knife - "Silent Shout"
09. Thom Yorke - "Cymbal Rush"
10. Guillemots -"Sao Paulo"

Top 10 Albums:

01. Liars - Drum's Not Dead*
02. Joanna Newsom - Ys*
03. Guillemots - Through the Window Pane*
04. The Knife - Silent Shout
05. Thom Yorke - The Eraser
06. Clipse - Hell Hath No Fury
07. Squarepusher - Hello Everything
08. Ghostface - Fishscale
09. Amy Winehouse - Back to Black
10. Howling Bells - Howling Bells

Top 5 Movies:

01. Pan's Labyrinth (del Toro)*
02. Grbavica (Zbanic)
03. The Departed (Scorsese)
04. Inside Man (Lee)
05. Requiem (Schmid)

Top 5 Games:

01. Pro Evolution Soccer 6 (KCET)*
02. The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion (Bethesda)*
03. Dreamfall: The Longest Journey (Funcom)
04. Medieval 2: Total War (Sega)
05. Half-Life 2: Episode One (Valve)

* denotes 90+ rating

Music: Adrian's Review of 2006

Best Albums:

1) Arctic Monkeys - Whatever People Say...
Hyped to death, overplayed by radio and embarassingly clung to by politicians wanting to be down with the kids, but still by far the best thing 2006 gave us. In blending the two most important British acts of the noughties - the Streets and the Libertines - Arctic Monkeys produced an album that is both a pop classic and a lyrical masterpiece. The highlight of an album of highlights comes at the end, with "A Certain Romance" offering as vivid a representation as you'll find of what it's like to be a young person growing up in Britain today.

2) Long Blondes - Someone To Drive You Home
The success of the aforementioned Monkeys brought about a plethora of very similar sounding (and frankly generally crap) bands from Sheffield passing observation on increasingly mundane parts of life. With their distinctive appearance and a female vocalist, The Long Blondes were bound to stand out from this cloud of mediocrity emerging from the Steel City. If not exactly original, Someone to Drive You Home stood out in a year of increasing blandness in British indie. The dark yet intelligent lyrics of lost female autonomy combined with wonderful pop songs create an album that's both packed with killer tunes and highly intelligent.

3) Brakes - Beatific Visions
Pithiness defined Brakes' excellent 2005 debut Give Blood, and rare is it to see musicians express a political view as succinctly as Brakes do in the first verse of opening track "Hold Me In The River": 'I woke up late and found my liberty lost / It had been written down in law as a security cost'. If only Sting knew such brevity. Beatific Visions' triumph is its electicness, with it never leaving the listener on one musical strand long enough to induce boredom. One moment vocalist Eamon Hamilton is pontificating animatedly about who would win in a battle between a porcupine or a pineapple (continuing, however eccentricly, the anti-war theme), the next he's moved onto the surprsingly touching "Mobile Communication". More consistent than British Sea Power, less stodgy than Electric Soft Parade, what was once a side-project has become a far more exciting prospect than the bands that originally formed it.

4) Ben Kweller - Ben Kweller
2006 was not a good year for the singer-songwriter, with the genre suffering from the critical derision brought onto it by a certain Mr. Blunt, and Damien Rice's highly anticipated second album proving disappointing. Ben Kweller's eponymous third album represented a bridging of the gap between the delicacy of Coner Oberst and the summer pop of Ben Folds. Displaying a great sense of melody, maturity and consistency, this was one of the year's hidden gems.

5) My Latest Novel - Wolves
My Latest Novel have been described as the Scottish Arcade Fire; undoubtedly a flattering comparison, but one which does not entirely do justice to the originality of the band. They build up layers of sound, steadily increasing an impressive array of instruments before reaching a triumphant climax. This lacks the wrist-slitting inducing frustration of similarly whimsical bands such as Explosions In The Sky, with the songs always going somewhere and possessing enough hooks to make them stick in the listener's head. Subtle, but very sophisticated.

Top 5 Singles:
1) Flaming Lips - "The Yeah Yeah Song"
2) Divine Comedy - "A Lady of a Certain Age"
3) Dustins Bar Mitzvah - "To The Ramones"
4) Guillemots - "Trains To Brazil"
5) Jarvis Cocker - "Running The World"

Top 5 Gigs:
1) Divine Comedy - Newcastle - October
2) Art Brut - London - April
3) Arctic Monkeys - Sheffield - January
4) Dustins Bar Mitzvah - Newcastle - May
5) Captain Dangerous - Nottingham - December

Best Video:
Jim Noir - My Patch

Biggest Disappointments:
The Futureheads - News And Tributes
Morrissey - Ringleader of the Tormentors
Razorlight - Razorlight
The Holloways - So This Is Great Britain

Tips for 2007:
Jamie T
Hot Club De Paris
The Maccabees
The Rumble Strips
Foals
Captain Dangerous

2006 - Half a year in focus

As we haven’t been around for the first half of 2006, what follows is a brief guide to the best I’ve experienced so far this year in each field of the arts.

Music:

Liars – Drum’s Not Dead
[Experimental]
Much maligned experimental trio create a concept album worthy of attention. Unlike their previous LP of noise, distortion, feedback and a bit more noise, Drum’s Not Dead has an unexpected hypnotic quality underneath the walls of percussion and falsetto wails. They even have a crack at a ‘normal’ song at the end, too! 86

Games:

The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion (PC, X360)
[RPG]
Yes, the battles, skill system, dialogue and story have all been dumbed down to give the series mainstream appeal, but the unexpected linearity lends the game a pace and cohesion severely lacking in Morrowind. Hundreds of side quests still exist for the determined, mind, and the depth of Oblivion is well beyond your standard GTA fare, so it should keep most purists, as well as newcomers, content. Did I mention it’s the best looking game of all time? 93

Film:

Inside Man
[Heist Thriller]
Not Spike Lee’s best but a clever, slick thriller with great performances from Clive Owen and Jodie Foster. If you don’t mind the familiar bank robbery build up in the first half hour it’s the year’s smartest mainstream release. However, with the main competition coming from the admittedly solid Wallace and Gromit it’s hardly been a fantastic year for cinema. 76

Books:

DBC Pierre – Ludmila’s Broken English
[Contemporary Fiction]
The dull shouting and screaming of the first hundred pages are rescued by Pierre’s unique use of sublime metaphors and fluid language, and from then on the main plot manifests itself terrifically. Overlook the author’s overzealous and hammy political commentary (the Siamese twin protagonists are named Blair and Gordon…) and at times this book is a joy to read; just don’t expect Vernon God Little 2. 82