Being disconnected from the action in Brisbane for half the year, I don't see 2008 in terms of sweeping trends (I never really have viewed years that way anyway). Also, it's difficult to not factor in both the weather and parenting when it comes to assessing music: no one wants to listen to balls-out sweaty rock when the temperature is topping 36C (97F) outside or your three-year-old is screaming louder than any rock star can manage. So much as I might appreciate the heaviness of Harvey Milk's Life: The Best Game In Town or the free-form jazz skronk of Thurston Moore and Jim O'Rourke's Original Silence, I'm not rushing to put them in a separate iTunes folder.
Likewise, Nas's excellent, Last Poets-referencing Nas feels too alien to what's going on over here – tropical storms that rip up thousands of trees, sheltering from the heat – to connect, much as I dig its groove. Portishead's eerie third album (wittily titled Third), meanwhile, feels entirely out of place: I wrote a column several months back about how I found myself unable to listen to Amy Winehouse now that I was, once again, rootless and without a job. Context matters when it comes to music: and what seemed so enticing and alluring in Brighton, UK can feel totally wrong in The Gap, QLD.
Fuck Buttons seem like they'd totally be a great live experience – and, sure, I'm looking forward to them coming here as part of the ATP extravaganza in January – but this music just ain't right for a Queenslander, all-wooden house crawling with small insects, lizards and a hyperactive son.
So the music I have managed to snatch listens to this year has been gentler, more immediate: Swedish singer Frida Hyvönen's startling third album Silence is Wild, which has the additional merit of boasting songs that we can all sing along boisterously to; Herman Düne's beautifully optimistic Next Year in Zion, which soundtracked a very memorable drive through the forest up the road. And, of course, fellow Jonathan Richman acolytes The Wave Pictures and their own marvellous Instant Coffee Baby, a group that - as someone at Plan B Magazine remarked – sound like the curmudgeonly, arms-folded younger cousins to Jonathan's idiot-dancing uncle.
