My Top 10 Debut Albums

I'm not sure where it started, or how long it's been going on for, but quite a few people have been tweeting their 'Top 50 Debut Albums' over the last few days.

I wanted to jump on the bandwagon, but I'm not sure I've even heard fifty debut albums, let alone fifty good ones. I decided that I could just about stretch to a Top 10, so here we are - The Album Wall's Official Top 10 Debut Albums:

10. Give Blood by Brakes
Recorded in one long take (or so I vaguely remember reading), this awesome album gave the world its first glimpse of the Brakes and their bonkers little world.

Standout Track: Hi How Are You

9. Clap Your Hands Say Yeah by Clap Your Hands Say Yeah
In which Alec Ounsworth finds beauty and brilliance in his own nasal passages, and deigns to share it with us. As every review mentioned at the time of its release, Davids Byrne and Bowie were both big fans.

Standout Track: The Skin of My Yellow Country Teeth

Charity Shopping with Twitter

I'm embarrassingly new to the smartphone game - less than a month ago, I was still using the hyper-outdated LG phone that I inherited from Sarah when she first graduated to smartphones.

However, I'm pleased to report that I have now joined the 21st century and got myself an iPhone. I'm still kind of awed by all the stuff it lets me do; I can check Facebook, play Risk, and even write these blogs on the go. Like the N64 owned by your far cooler friend in primary school, this is the kind of technology that has always seemed to belong to other people, but now I've got it in my pocket as well and I couldn't be more thrilled.

5 Artists Who Should Release a New Album, Already

It's been too long!

The Decemberists

• Last Proper Album: The King is Dead, released in January 2011.


• Recent Activity: They put out a live album, We All Raise Our Voices to the Air, in March 2012, but haven't released anything since. They've got a few gigs in May - a festival and a couple of benefit concerts - and singer Colin Meloy recently recorded an EP of Kinks covers, but aside from his vague assertion that he's "starting to dabble" with new Decemberists material, there's been no word on when we might get a new set of songs from the band.


• Why I'm Desperate for New Material: The King is Dead was good, but it represented a conscious effort to strip things back after the proggy song structures and epic rocking that littered The Crane Wife and The Hazards of Love. As enjoyable as it is, the slender, folksy LP that the band left us with in 2011 simply isn't enough to keep us going for this long. We need more (and I personally need more of the aforementioned proggy epic rock).