Standing Where The Point Used to Be

I am standing on Mount Stuart Square, about five hundred yards from the waters of Cardiff Bay. It is a warm and sunny April evening - the busiest part of the day is over, and aside from a few stray pedestrians and the odd seagull, the street is more or less deserted.

Before me looms the spire of St Stephen's, a Gothic-style church and Grade II listed building that has stood on this corner for more than a hundred years. Back in the noughties, this place was a 500-capacity music venue called The Point; I can still remember spilling out onto this very pavement, exhausted and ecstatic, in the middle of a sticky August night in 2006. Broken Social Scene had just finished a gargantuan two-hour set, plus multiple encores, and I (a shaggy-haired GCSE student, just barely fifteen years old) had been in the thick of the crowd for the whole thing, jumping around and sweating buckets and shouting for them to play I'm Still Your Fag. That show at The Point remains one of the best gigs I've ever attended - The Rolling Stones were also in town that night for a concert at the Millennium Stadium, and I must say that I feel a little sorry for the thousands of people who spent the evening with Keith and Mick instead of with Kevin Drew and Brendan Canning and goodness knows how many others.

Scottish Albums of the Year

The longlist for this year's SAY (Scottish Album of the Year) award was released yesterday You can see the full list here; I've only heard 3 of the 20 albums nominated, but since that's better than I managed for the Welsh Music Prize, I'm going to blog the hell out of it anyway.

I'll start with my thoughts on the three nominees I know, and then I'll talk about a few other albums that should perhaps have made the list.

5 Album Tracks That Deserved to Be Singles

We're a lucky bunch, us album-buying folk. While some people never bother to look beyond an artist's hit singles, we're privy to a whole bunch of additional treasures that can only be found on the full LP. Sure, some people opt to simply pad their albums out with filler, offering very little reward to the people who buy the full-length release, but there are plenty of amazing songs that we would never have heard if we only listened to the singles.

It's a point that Liam 1p touched upon in his guest post last year (he highlighted Blur's Yuko & Hiro as an outstanding album track), and I'm revisiting it today. Here are five album tracks - that is, songs that were never released as singles - that, in my opinion, are better than any of the singles that surround them.

The View by Modest Mouse (from Good News for People Who Love Bad News)

This, of course, was Modest Mouse's big breakthrough album. It's best known for Float On, which was a #1 hit in America; Ocean Breathes Salty was also released as a single, albeit to far less fanfare. The View, however, trumps both of those songs, with its purposeful riff, infectious boots 'n' cats drumming, and strangely appealing world-weariness.