SPINAL BAP'S TOP ALBUMS OF 2010

The xXx - xXx
Unenthusiastic disco-goth featuring an unusually subdued Vin Deisel.

Janelle Monáe - The ArchAndroid
So ground-breaking, forward-thinking, and futuristic it didn’t even have gaps between the songs. Like Madonna’s Confessions on the Dancefloor. From 2005.

Robyn - Body Talk
SHE’S THE CREDIBLE FACE OF POP MUSIC
SHE’S THE CREDIBLE FACE OF POP MUSIC
SHE’S THE CREDIBLE FACE OF POP MUSIC
SHE’S THE CREDIBLE FACE OF POP…
Why aren’t you listening?
What do you mean you’re not interested?
Hello?

Katy Perry - Teenage Dream
An album as refreshing as having an ignorant Californian partygirl spray Bacardi hangover piss into your eyes and mouth whilst Snoop Doggy Dogg does a bit of a rap.

Gorillaz - Plastic Beach
Following the success of this record, Gorillaz mainman Murdoc plans to spend 2011 working on his conceptual cartoon band Blur. The “band” is made up of fictional characters based on age-old rock clichés who perform contrived novelty pop music for children. The members are “Damon” (the sanctimonious one), “Graham” (the misunderstood one), “Dave” (the boring one), and “Alex” (the floppy-haired cheese-making cunt). The project is a collaboration with Murdoc’s old flatmate, Arnold from Hey Arnold!

Hawkwind - Yes, We Are Still Going
Hawkwind are actually still going. This was their 283rd LP, they spent last month touring the UK, and currently live in what band leader Dave Brock believes to be a inter-dimensional multi-galactic quantum spaceship (a pokey bed-sit with tin foil for wallpaper and an overabundance of lava-lamps).

Michael Jackson - Yes, I did those things to those boys
Surprisingly confessional posthumous album from the late King of Pop.

Joanna Newsom - Have One (or rather, have eighteen) On Me
A record so needlessly long if you tried to sit through the whole thing in one go you’d end up with hair as long as Newsom’s herself and as well as a crippling physical aversion of all harps. But you can avoid listening to her warbling faux-folk hippyisms and still enjoy the album by not even playing the record and simply staring longingly at the many beautifully composed artful photographs of the singer’s long, stocking-clad legs which Newsom so generously included in the insert.

Vampire Weekend - Cuntra
Who says vampires have to hang around in coffins drinking blood and avoiding garlic? Some turn up in broad daylight, slap-bang in the middle billing of some popular indie festival, and proceed to play the kind of material Paul Simon himself would dismiss as “a little too Radio 2”.

Cher and Christina Aguilera - Burlesque Soundtrack
No, no, you’re quite mistaken. Burlesque in fact differs significantly from the humiliating and degrading practices of stripping or lapdancing. It involves elements of satire and vaudeville, the women are actually empowered by the experience, the participants never get completely naked, and sometimes even fat ugly birds are allowed to take part. But not in this film, thank god. The best scene featured Cher feeding a vocoder into the lips of her botoxed vagina and squeezing out a range of differently pitched fanny-farts which Christina then had to match with her multi-octave voice, despite the disadvantage of having her throat clogged up by a particularly stubborn globule of executive producer semen.

2010 MERCURY MUSIC PRIZE TO BE JUDGED BY PANEL OF DEAF PEOPLE

The shortlist was announced earlier this week, and it has now been revealed that the panel set to cast the final decision on which album will receive this year’s prestigious Mercury Music Prize will consist entirely of aurally challenged judges. The appointment of the hard-of-hearing jury is speculated to have been instigated in response to last year’s competition problems, during which several panel members were struck down with sickness and nausea caused by intense and prolonged exposure to Kasabian’s West Ryder Pauper Lunatic Asylum. Further alarm bells were triggered in the process of compiling the shortlist for 2010’s award when several listeners contracted symptoms of bilharzial dysentery upon being forced to listen to the debut album of Mumford & Sons for the third time in a row.

The employment of deaf people in judging the prize may effect the criteria for winning the award, although nobody at the Mercury Prize has ever revealed what the criteria may consist of, or if there is any criteria at all. However, it seems that quality of the albums’ artwork will hold more sway than usual this year, as well as the quality of the lyrics (at least for those of the nominees who bothered to reproduce them in the liner notes). It is perhaps for reasons of aesthetics, then, that since the announcement of the deaf judges, the betting odds on the prize have changed rather dramatically. Previous favourites The xx have slipped to 200/1 on account of their cheap haircuts, visible zits, and inability to appear non-monochrome, whereas Laura Marling and Corrine Bailey Rae have shot up to joint favourites as the panel, although being all-deaf, is still ninety per cent male and are therefore expected to admire the view of both Marling and Rae’s seductively crossed, long, luscious, young legs as each takes her turn to timidly and unenthusiastically strum her acoustic guitar whilst sat atop the traditional female singer-songwriter quite-high-stool.

Fears that the panel might accidentally pick an album that might not in fact the best British record of the year on account of their deafness are said not be troubling the organisers of the prize; previous winners have included Suede, Elbow and M People.