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Mercury Music Prize – Nominations

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This usually causes some debate and looking at this list I can’t see that changing this year. I’ve heard a few of these – Love the Glass Animals album, clever, catchy pop songs with depth. Not so keen on Blossoms, two decent tracks and a wave of hype? My gut feeling is that Stormzy will take the cheque. Right, I’m off to Spotify to check out the ones i’m not familiar with

Alt-J – Relaxer

Blossoms – Blossoms

Dinosaur – Together, As One

Ed Sheeran – Divide

Glass Animals – How To Be a Human Being

J Hus – Common Sense

Kate Tempest – Let Them Eat Chaos

Loyle Carner – Yesterday’s Gone

Sampha – Process

Stormzy – Gang Signs and Prayer

The Big Moon – Love in the 4th Dimension

The xx – I See You

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Comments

  3. The Loyle Carner album is a stunner. This would be my tip for the winner.

    Disclaimer – I will have to check out the J Hus & The Big Moon albums.

    @Lemonhope, is there any chance you could share the links to your playlists?

  4. I liked The Big Moon. It’s unashamedly retro, but I can’t imagine that being a problem here. It’s also the only one on the list that is bit of a surprise – the rest of it is pretty predictable middlebrow broadsheet fodder, isn’t it?

    • Speaking as someone who would have replaced Blossoms with Laura Marling and The XX with London Grammar I don’t feel qualified to suggest what should be there that wouldn’t be classed as predictable middlebrow broadsheet fodder.
      Genuine question, what would you have picked and what would you ditch in order to accommodate your choices?

      • My list:

        Into Violet Hours – The Kurds
        Man Dem Style – Brap 14
        Baby Disaster Scenario – Crazy Joe Horrible
        New Evolutions In Spermwave, Vol 2 – Flailing Arms
        Fucked By Lightning – Black Rhino
        4pm Mint Tea – The Nick Drakes

    • Honestly, no idea. It wasn’t so much a dig at the music, more an observation that once again the shortlist is almost entirely drawn from the pool of bands you’ve read about in the music pages of the Guardian all year. Is it a reflection of the paucity of current British music, or is it a sign of a limited worldview from the judges? I don’t know.

      • Did M People have an album out in the qualifying period? I would like to have seen Jane Weaver and Forest Swords on there, maybe Pumarosa and British Sea Power. Anna Meredith would have been a great shout, but I’m not sure if it fell in the last twelve months. Matthew Stevens would have been my token jazz record, but I think he might be American. It is a surprise that Laura Marling isn’t there.

        I’d certainly ditch Sheeran and Stormzy. They’re both Brits fodder, and in no need of any further leg ups. The xx album is subjectively really not very good at all, and objectively no great development from their previous records, so why nominate it? It’s Annie Lennox at the Brits all over again. Alt-J….utter pish, and if I were a cynical man I’d suggest that their label might have ahem, encouraged the judges to pick an album that has so far massively commercially underperformed expectations. I do quite like the Sampha album, and I’ve been meaning to listen to Loyle Carner for ages.

          • I wasn’t having a pop – was genuinely interested in your choices, thanks for replying.

            I wonder if the prize fulfils it’s own brief?
            “The main objectives of the Prize are to recognise and celebrate artistic achievement, provide a snapshot of the year in music and to help introduce new albums from a range of music genres to a wider audience.”

    • @Kid-Dynamite . Clueless me feels almost as distanced from most of the names on this list as I am from most of the reviews on the site recently but I do like Big Moon a lot. Decided me I WILL go see them when they play my local cult venue this autumn even though its a sunday night!

  5. I really do despair of anyone/thing that thinks that Kate Tempest has anything to do with music.

    Just the usual annual ‘look at us, aren’t we hip’ list of mostly unlistenable nonsense from a group of people who should know better.

  8. Great quote in this article in the Guardian:

    As usual, there’s nothing from any part of the spectrum of hard rock (“[metal] is a niche genre that many people don’t listen to,” as Mercury prize chair Simon Frith explained some years ago, helpfully explaining why even its biggest names, from Iron Maiden to Black Sabbath to Bring Me the Horizon remain little-known cult figures, sadly unable to attract the kind of vast audience that performance poetry set to post-dubstep soundscapes invariably garners).

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