I’m actually going to post some new album reviews this week. I’ve got four planned. Forget about that for now though because more important things are here to be talked about. Namely THERE’S NEW TOM VEK! Seriously Tom. You have us wait all that time and then come back with something so soon after Leisure Seizure I haven’t even had time to write my begging letters to you yet. And the video is just you playing with a remote control car. Brilliant. You can stream it below as well, but that way you wouldn’t get to watch Tom playing with a remote control car would you.

how was your christmas? mine has been fun. present wise, i finally own a record player meaning that i can now play the piles of vinyl i’ve built up due to my complete lack of self restraint when faced with a pretty looking 12″. no longer will i have to shift uneasily or change the subject when somebody when i get home from flashback records and emma asks me why i’ve bought another record. having said that, 2011 has once again been dominated by digital music of course. your spotify account now links to your facebook, everybody has their top three played artists of the week feed through from their last.fm to twitter and you can’t move on the tube for people with a pair of beats headphones plugged into their iphone. some artists are fighting back though. it is not unusual to see a band release lovely vinyl versions of their albums with limited edition t-shirts, posters or chocolate brownies. but they still have to include that code for the digital download of course.

enough of all that though. let’s get on with the list. once again, i’ve nominated a top ten, with a single winner and then an extra addition which i simply couldn’t ignore. the 2011 apologies for just missing out go to battles, emmy the great, the kills, pj harvey, the pains of being pure at heart and last year’s winner cloud nothings.

bon iver. bon iver

he’s still a miserable fucker, but compared to for emma, forever ago this is positively rainbows & puppies. let mr iver take you on tour of his favourite places while he sits alone in a vets. (buy here)

girls. father, son, holy ghost

their ep was one of my favourites of 2010 and this full length is a worthy successor. in a year when the beach boys announced they’re reforming for 2012, girls released an album that any californian worth their salt would be proud off. (buy here)

the horrors. skying

i’m still at a loss as to how a band can improve so immeasurably (actually, you can measure it. only in terms of back to the future though). still debating whether it’s as good as primary colours, but who would i have thought they’d be anywhere near this list four years ago? (buy here)

lykke li. wounded rhymes

oh lykke. we all love lykke. her second album ticked all the boxes about growing up and while not as instantly pickupable (real word) as her first is far more accomplished overall. (buy here)

m+a. things.yes

this was the album that i could just put on this year and drift away. what a a truly beautiful album. (buy here)

metronomy. the english riviera

what isn’t to love about this album? nothing. the perfect advert for tourism of the english coast. (buy here)

times new viking. dancer enquired

there are lots of bands producing that lo-fi sound that i love so at the moment. the greatest example of the year though came not from a teenage genius in his bedroom, but a five-album veteran three piece. (buy here)

tom vek. leisure seizure

so excited i was about the release of this album that i dedicated a day to tom vek day. any other year he would have probably walked off with the winner’s badge. tom vek is back in a big way. (buy here)

yuck. yuck

the first new album i listened to of the year. a great start it was too. especially for a sonic youth and cajun dance party fan like myself. (buy here)

so, who wins? if you’ve been an avid reader of this blog over the year i’m sure you already know. a couple of years ago nobody knew whether they were a swedish collective or an east london teen. it transpired that they were in fact a guy who was already established as solo artist in his own right, and a girl who was a music journalist – and had in fact been asked to cover the band before people knew their true make up. i’ve seen them over a dozen times live and i hoped the album would live up to the high standards they’d set. it more than did.

summer camp. welcome to condale

summer camp introduced us to the fictional american town of condale. with teen crushes, a burgeoning rock band and ultimately death, welcome to condale and the accompanying fanzine takes us through an americana dream. it isn’t just the story that makes this album so good though. elizabeth has the sort of voice that is recognisable and easy to listen to. jeremy knows more about electronic instruments and how to use them than i know about cheese. the songs have more variety than early releases did and straight away remove the risk of becoming bored of the sound. this is a worthy winner. as an aside, if i was writing a list of my live performances of the year, i fancy summer camp’s gig at efes would top that too. (buy here)

alex turner. submarine original songs

i couldn’t complete the list without giving a shout out to alex turner’s soundtrack to submarine as well. my favourite film of the year was also my favourite soundtrack. just six tracks long, but it was pretty much all i listened to for a period earlier in the year. superb songs, brilliantly performed. (buy here)

in case you’ve ignored all of my subtle hints to buy the albums mentioned, you can listen to them all on this handy spotify playlist.

just because.

it’s been a quiet month here on sockformation thanks to me moving and finding out that virgin media can’t service my flat. the shits. that means that the playlist for june doesn’t fit in with the posts quite as simply. that’s nice in a way though as you can hear what i’ve been listening to on the bus every morning instead.

one of the mains things is monsieur serge gainsbourg. i watched the biopic and my obsession with all things to do with cool french people smoking just increased. what a man. anybody who has ever looked at the header here will know that i’m a bardot fan of course, but funnily enough after watching the film i’ve decided that serge and jane birkin are my new couple crush. what a pair they were. having said that it’s a bardot duet that i’ve gone and included on here so that makes little sense.

you can get your playlist here and i’ll be back with more frequent posts soon.

live review: tom vek. heaven, london. 16 june 2011.

this was the one i’d been waiting for. anybody who has read this blog before will know my man love for tom vek. i still can’t really put my finger on what it is i love about him. i do though. i’m wearing a tom vek t shirt and listening to him again right now. i’m obsessed with the man. for that reason, this was never going to be a particularly balance review.

as soon as he stepped onto the stage and started up ‘c-c (you set the fire in me)’ i knew this was what i’d been waiting for. he raced through the majority of the new album with sprinkles of the debut throughout. sometimes vek gets bad press for having a less than wonderful singing voice. do you know what? i don’t care. it’s part of his appeal. the slow drawl that i’ve mentioned many times on this blog in the past is such a clash with the brutal electro behind it that he wouldn’t be the same if he had the voice of an angel.

the crowd certainly seemed to agree as well. ‘aroused’, ‘i ain’t saying my goodbyes’ and ‘nothing but greenlight’ were all greeted with huge cheers and sing alongs. by the time he reached the end of the main set with ‘a.p.o.l.o.g.y’ i think you would have been hard pushed to find anybody not fully satisfied. he then topped the night off with an encore featuring just one song. when the band returned they were not joined by vek, but with the girl in the video to ‘a chore’. with tom somewhere in the back providing the live vocals, she mimed along just like we were right there in the actual proper video. brilliant.

i really hope it won’t be six years until i see him again, because there is nobody that is doing what tom vek is doing around at the moment. i’ll shut up about him for a bit now though. this has pretty much been a blog just about him in recent weeks.

the reviews are starting to come thick and fast for leisure seizure. the good news is that they’re almost all positive. i’m not sure any are as positive as the sockformation one though. sample line: “this is getting top marks. i don’t give a shit if i’m a fanboy or not. i’ve waited six years for this and it has been worth it.”

although the bbc music review doesn’t hand out an exact mark, there is no doubting that this should be marked firmly positive. it talks about vek’s “thrillingly singular way with rhythm”. there is also reference the hiatus for which he has become famous – “leisure seizure sounds fresh and fully-realised rather than excessively fussed-over or borne out of frustration “.

nme award the album an eight and equal the praise shown there as john doran compares vek favourably with jamie woon, james blake and jamie xx. albeit, his tongue may be leaning towards his cheek. he also goes on to talk about vek’s mulit-instrumental talents as well, and why it works. “vek truly exploits the benefits of being in a one-man band: all instruments and ideas can be used as often or as sparingly as he likes”.

in drowned in sound the reviewer takes on the hype that tom vek has generated with his absence. will it live it up to it or be a massive disappointment? “the answer, inevitably, is somewhere in between.” he agrees with my love of ‘on a plate’, but is let down by “no generation-defining anthems, no radical new approach to songwriting, no active rejection of genre distinctions and a few too many years of new musical precedents”. he goes on to explain that this is a little too much to expect though and gives leisure seizure a seven.

three & a half stars from musicomh in a review that echoes the drowned in sound one. this time though the reviewer also looks back at we have sound briefly and describes it as “an impressive debut, but it wasn’t quite the flawless diamond of popular memory.” the same thought is given to the newer album, although he goes on to concede that “a pop scene with an active tom vek in it firing his myriad of ideas at the canvas is an infinitely more interesting and fun place to be than one where everyone is mourning his absence.”

so, onto the guardian. although there is a certain amount of praise in the three star review, especially surrounding ‘a chore’ (“a spectacularly wounded break-up song”) the overwhelming theme is one of distaste for vek’s voice. while dave simpson praises his writing at one point, he follows it up by claiming that his voice is one that “only a mother could truly love”. i disagree, but each to their own, and that’s why i wrote this post.

remember to check out freedom spark’s review as well. i haven’t read it yet, but i will do this evening. promise. and shamfrolic’s.

one of the many things that tom vek does well is wear glasses. i wear glasses as well, but he wears them better. what better list to compile then than my favourite glasses wearers in music. not only is it a catchy title, but it gives me another chance to compile a list.

i’ve decided not to include tom vek himself. today is all about him already and i don’t want it going to his head. there are also a number of other omissions. some are explained in the top five itself, but i should say sorry to elton john. he always gets in these lists, so i’m letting somebody else have a go for once. others that came close were graham coxon, the bloke from semisonic, jarvis cocker, jeremy warmsley, timmy mallet, judge jules and all three from cleopatra.

5: craig david
i decided it necessary to include a blind person. they all wear sunglasses very well and i like their style. it could have been ray charles or stevie wonder, but surely the most famous of all blind musicans is craig david.

4: elvis costello
i love elvis costello. he’s even my twitter avatar. he has similar glasses to me and is a bit of an icon for me. the space could easily have been taken by buddy holly or hank marvin, but it’s my list and i’ve chosen elvis costello.

3: kanye west
i don’t like kanye west. let me make that clear. it’s just what happens when you sample daft punk in such an atrocious way. i also don’t like those crappy slanty shade things he wore. you have to give him some props for them though because what else would knobheads wear to late to yates’s in the summer.

2: john lennon
he made those little round specs his own didn’t he.

1: lisa loeb
in number one spot it has to be lisa loeb. would ‘stay (i missed you)’ have been so successful without those leopard print beauties? would she have got a song on the soundtrack to the rugrats movie if she didn’t have that affiliation with chuckie? i’m certain she wouldn’t have managed to keep recording for so long if she wore contacts. she is the ultimate glasses wearing musician.

well done lisa. in case you can’t use google, here are pictures of each of the other four winners.

it all started with this. ‘if i had changed my mind’ was limited to a vinyl only release, and did exactly nothing sales wise. it is unmistakable vek though, although his voice perhaps wasn’t quite as natural as the one he has come to use since. he followed it up with ‘if you want’ but i don’t think he did a video for that. if i’m wrong, please tell me.

‘i ain’t saying my goodbyes’ was his first single to trouble the mainstream. it charted at 45 anyway. that’s not bad. the video features a nice bit of blood, skulls and owls. all very pleasant.

possibly tom’s most famous song? ‘c-c (you set the fire in me)’ seems to be the track that friends of mine know more than any other. the video, once again, makes no sense. he’s dressed in old time military garb and is walking along in a wood banging a drum. his companions seem to be left overs from labyrinth.

i once heard this song on the box or one of those video request music channels that might or might not still be going. it was the first time i’d heard tom vek and ‘nothing but green lights’ continues to be my favourite. he looks like he’s having super fun in the video as well. which is nice.

his comeback single! his new hair! the same amazing sound! ‘a chore’ was a relief. a delight. everything we’d hoped for.

and that brings us to ‘world of doubt’. i’m going to stop going one now and just let you listen to them all again. that’s what i’m going to do.

welcome to tom vek day. after six years of waiting he finally releases his second album today. i’m ridiculously excited about this so have decided to dedicate today to thomas timothy vernon-kell himself.

there has already been quite a bit about him on here, including me welcoming his return and my fanboy album review. you will be able to access all the tom vek day articles from this page. and if you’re a twitter user, don’t forget to use the hashtag #tomvekday.

tom vek videography
top five glasses wearing musicians
leisure seizure. the reviews

have i mentioned tom vek enough in recent weeks? probably not because you can never mention tom vek enough. i have had the album on pretty constantly since last week and forgone listening to many an album i should have checked out by now. now, just a day after i decided to turn him off and listen to something else in its entirety (emmy the great, since you ask) he goes and releases a brand new video. all it consists of is a couple of girls, a wind machine and a smiling face on a tv screen, but as with everything sir vek touches, it works perfectly. i will endeavor not to mention him again until i review his camden gig next month. i’m not promising anything though.