thank you for the recommendations. it's weird i don't really know you but i trust you. i wasn't sure about the beth gibbons as portishead seemed to be a little bit of a one trick pony. i heard a track of the new album (don't remember which one, an mp3 from a blog) and i loved it. her voice is something very special...

for the in-depth comments, sean. what you write about beth gibbons and neil halstead is exactly what i feared about these albums. i like mojave 3 but after several listens their music grates a little and it feels superficial. the beth gibbons song i heard was mysteries and if the album does not stand up to that song i am not too eager to get it.

i am a little bit perplexed that you dismiss most of the albums and you write for a commercial(?) site. that gives your comments even more weight. i would have linked to tangmonkey in my watchlist if it had a correct "page freshness" info. unfortunately it always has "now" as the timestamp and would therefore always be on top of the list even without any new updates.

never heard of damien rice but your review sounds thrilling. i will listen to those mp3s. and i advise you to listen to the montgolfier brothers the world is flat. beauty plus wisdom plus love. i wrote on it here. my #1 this year. which is yours then? wilco?

btw i just realised that i forgot the last 16HP in my provisional best of 2002 list. folklore is a wonderful record. my favourite of theirs. edwards voice which can be annoying when it hits this preachers tone is more stripped down and i quite like it on folklore. did you check out that woven hand record, sean? i didn't see a review on tangmonkey.

glad you found my comments useful, and i'm pleased that you found merit in tangmonkey. i'd twiddle (or have someone twiddle) with that "page freshness" value if i had any idea how/what it was. maybe i'll speak to the webguy.

i downloaded the montgolfier brothers album a few months ago, but didn't listen to it for long. on those first playings, it seemed too, i don't know, plummy. i acknowledge that that's a pretty ambiguous adjective, but sadly my memories of the record have mixed together with ideas of the pernice bros, etc. i'll give it another listen - for your sake - when i get home in january. hopefully its rewards will open up.

wilco is indeed my #1. maybe you saw my comments at ilm? then damien at #2, followed by Tom Waits' "Alice", Okkervil River's fabulous barn-buring melancholia... after that it gets fuzzy. lots of very good stuff this year, i think, though not so many greatgreatgreat discs.

i haven't heard the woven hand disc. should i? "folklore" is indeed superb - potent and quite majestic... it's certainly in my top 20.

i think i know what you mean when you call the montgolfiers brothers record too plummy. it is very rich, extremely ripe, very easy to get into, somehow obvious. it has something of a cliché and i can't come up with a better description than the cliché that it is too beautiful for this world. i don't listen to it a lot as i know that the beauty will probably fade away quite soon.

it took me a couple of listens to get into the wilco record when it came out and i soon was stunned. the production is very subtle and there is a lot to discover with each listen. i like their spare employment of electronic sounds though i usually don't like pure electronica. but when i relistened to it recently it had already lost some of its charm and i started to understand people like greil marcus who wrote that it was a futile attempt to redo revolver. there is something very eclectic in wilco which bothers me after too much listening to them. same goes for summerteeth which i loved at first listen but i don't think anymore that it is so remarkable. i still love yhf but i wouldn't consider it a milestone album. like last year's amnesiac for example which was much more powerful. i guessed yhf was your favourite from your tangmonkey review after having seen your best of list at ilm.

i don't know the woven hand album, that's why i asked.

wire is one of those bands i respect but don't love. i have only one cd, it is a compilation called on returning and has supposedly the best of the first two or three records on it. i don't listen to it very often. it doesn't grip me. maybe it's the sequencing. but i am very intrigued about the new eps. more so than about the new suicide. there seem to be some really awful tracks on it with very monotonous beats.

Wire are more about textures and composition and what sound like cut-up lyrics-in-crisis -- and raw energy, creative and otherwise. Not much in the way of polyrhythms here. Or melody, though it's there (much more so on Chairs Missing, 154 and their 80s output to some extent). They are not very warm or approachable, and reading their lyrics doesn't change that. They're restless and change from album to album.

But then you could say most of this about the Velvets, too.

The new EPs are like Pink Flag: compressed high voltage telegrams from a place of well-considered anguish. But the energy level is higher than anything they've done. It either works for you or it doesn't I guess. They've influenced many bands, like REM (who did a cover of "Strange" on Document, I think it was) and many I don't even know, don't listen to as much rock anymore. Their sound was a template for many others, like the Velvets. FischerSpooner did a cover of "The 15th" recently.

There are samples of the 2 EPs here and here.

I haven't listened to Suicide since I saw them in the 70s. Not as much going on there, for me. Though they're a lot more accessible to younger people now than they were then.