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In the spirit of the fifty word fictions currently being posted by Chan over at A wild slim alien, here are some reviews of exactly that length – tips of the hat to my long-player listening so far this year.  With the odd hand gesture or wrinkled nose thrown in.

The Shortwave Set – Replica sun machine

Seduced by the alethiometeresque cover, but disappointed by the frequency with which the wan, characterless vocals of Andrew Pettitt displace the considerably more elegant singing of Ulrika Bjornse.  Danger Mouse production?  Check.  Van Dyke Parks string arrangements?  Check.  Tunes?  Mostly.  ‘Glitches ‘n’ bugs’, ‘Distant daze’ and ‘No social’ stand out.

Elbow – The seldom seen kid

In the last couple of years Elbow’s records have been surreptitiously stealing their way to the centre of my listening world.  This confirms their place there with its high musicality and wry humour.  Guy Garvey’s songs are lugubrious and beautiful, even managing to reanimate the corny image of the mirrorball.

DeVotchKa – A mad and faithful telling

Romany Mexican indie with Greek or Klezmer undertones, anyone?  Not forgetting occasional forays into chamber and oompah band territories?  Singer Nick Urata looks like a roughed-up cross between Clooney and Morrissey.  One song – ‘The clockwise witness’ – is truly great, throwing off excessive stylistic colouring for an affecting shade of blue.

Carl Craig – Sessions

How long it’s been since I was lost in niteklub rhythm.  For all that Craig is a master of dancefloor dynamics, Sessions ultimately feels relentless, at home or in car.  It’s a relief when the end is near and the unpredictable rhythms of ‘Bug in the bass bin’ take hold.

Four Tet – Ringer

A river whose flow is as relentless as Sessions, but out of the current more is going on.  I wish I had more time to relax into ‘Swimmer’’s patterns; fretted less about the time Kieran Hebden takes to develop his swirls and eddies.  Moments of life that won’t come again.

Neon Neon – Stainless style

After the Rhys-Boom Bip collaboration on Blue eyed in the red room, and Gruff’s loveable Candylion, a disappointment.  In evoking the worst aspects of the eighties, it’s loud, shiny, and as attractive as the boxy lines of the De Lorean car.  But ‘I lust u’ achieves a  Depeche Mode-esque melancholy.

Colin Meloy – Colin Meloy sings live

Just occasionally in these solo performances, Colin Meloy is one note short of a melody.  Otherwise he conveys the best of the Decemberists – as well as Shirley Collins and the Smiths – with songwriter’s conviction, stand-up comedy and helpings of the ‘campfire singalong’ spirit that he declares he is aiming for.

The Last Shadow Puppets – The age of the understatement

The chief northern monkey and his best mate perform a Dukes of Stratosphearic take on Scott Walker (and indeed Brel through Scott’s distorting mirror); in their turtleneck sweaters they’re photo-fit go-getters.  The result is a noirish existential beat group and the second of many reinventions Alex Turner may yet perform.

Goldfrapp – Seventh tree

I lost interest between Black cherry and the insistently decadent electro of Supernature.  Fortunately the duo are aware of the benefits of reinvention and return; Seventh tree is closest in spirit to Felt mountain but with added folk sensibility and pop nous.  ‘Little bird’ floats and ‘Caravan girl’ drives along.

British Sea Power – Do you like rock music?

Like Open season, this is eight-tenths of the way to greatness; if I were eighteen and at my first Glastonbury, I would wave my flag to it.  But it’s as rock as the substance you’d mine were you to tunnel into Mount Blanc, and for me that remains a problem.

Paul Weller – 22 dreams

Press would have you believe that Weller has suddenly emerged from a lengthy spell in rock purgatory.  Truth is he rediscovered his touch over the two preceding sets; you could not get more pastoral than ‘Pan’ on As is now.  22 dreams expands the lightness in familiar and fresh directions.

Portishead – Third

Top bombing from Barrow, Gibbons and Utley.  The avant-garde attack of the electronics is reminiscent of New Order discovering synthesisers.  Next time Portishead can worry less about making it impossible for anyone to countenance putting them on as dinner party listening; this is music with which to greet the apocalypse.

Robert Forster – The evangelist

The healing power of song – I’m so glad RF rediscovered it.  But how could the tone be anything other than elegiac, with fragments of Grant’s last songs among Robert’s lyrical responses to his death.  As we hear those last tunes, Robert sings ‘it was melody he loved most of all’.

‘I read about your death in the paper, when I was buying tomato seed’.  It’s hard not to turn a lyric like this in on its singer when you know he’s gone.  Grant McLennan’s songs often suggested an unusually acute awareness of mortality, but he always threaded them with what it meant to be alive.  ‘Been waking up early on Sundays watching my soil breathe.’

Intermission: the best of the solo recordings 1990-1997 is the result of Robert Forster and Grant hand-picking a baker’s dozen songs each from four times that number.  The character of each disc is striking – if you knew nothing of Robert and Grant, you would never guess from this evidence that they grew up in the same group.  Of course, those characters were already long-developed and contrasting by the time the first phase of the Go-Betweens came to an end, but the bond then was stronger than the difference, so that one could easily drop a vocal into the other’s song.

Had the solo works been songs on four extra Go-Betweens albums, Robert’s might have been softened and harmonised by Grant’s presence.  Owing to Robert’s greater editorial and conceptual clarity, Grant’s songs could have been more focused, less affected by the sheen of a commercial production.  I think Robert survived better than Grant as a former Go-Between, allowing looser inflections of country and country rock to infiltrate his music, and each album (bar the less than successful covers set) has a distinct feel.  But throughout his attempts to produce the perfect song for FM radio, Grant retained his poetic sensibility, mourning the fragility of love, or celebrating its greatness and perfection.

Will Robert go on to make more solo records, inspired rather than haunted by the memory of his friend and foil?  The signs are that he will.  Meanwhile, he has become a prize-winning critic in Australia, writing about Dylan and the Shins for the Monthly, which also published his tribute to Grant, ‘A true hipster’ two months after McLennan’s death in May 2006.  In it Robert says that when they met he was ‘falling into music’, while Grant’s obsession was film.  ‘We became Godard and Truffaut.  Brisbane didn’t know it at the time, but there were two 19-year-olds driving around in a car who thought they were French film directors.’

The ‘acoustic stories’ part of the That striped sunlight sound DVD also illuminates their partnership, with conversation between the pair and great untreated versions of some of their best songs.  Grant begins to lose his voice halfway through the session, recorded the day after the Brisbane show also filmed for the disc.  You feel for him, a man forever stretching, yearning, reaching for artistic highs and heights.  A man very much alive.