The Best of 2013

It's that time again, folks! I've spent literally months sequencing this selection and I think it may just be the best one yet. It's quite Japan-centric this year, but there's still the usual eclectic mix of genres and languages you've come to expect and love. The selection may be downloaded here. Plug in with an open mind, play and enjoy!

1. "Forbidden Love" by Abel Korzeniowski, from the album "Romeo and Juliet"
The greatest love story ever told finally has the soundtrack it deserves thanks to Polish wunderkind Korzeniowski, who, when movie legend James Horner's completed and fully recorded score was inexplicably rejected at the last minute by the film's producers, stepped in and – in just six weeks – wrote this sweeping, indescribably beautiful replacement.

2. "Mou Nakanai to Sora ni Chikatta Hi" ("The Day I Swore by the Heavens That I Would Weep No More") by Gakido, from the album "'s Note"
The now tragically defunct Tokyo band's epic tribute to their late bandmate Piyo, who died in a car crash in 2010, is replete with duelling vocal harmonies, insanely rubbery bass skills and probably the only use ever of the harmonica in a visual kei song.

3. "Music" by Sakanaction, from their self-titled album
Amazing retro-futurist disco-funk epic from one of Japan's best-kept secrets, superstars in their homeland but virtually unknown in the West.

4. "17 Crimes" by AFI, from the album "Burials"
The Californian death-punks blast back with this thrilling anthem to doomed youth, arguably the most immediately accessible track they have ever recorded.

5. "Alone" by Falling in Reverse, from the album "Fashionably Late"
Frontman and band mastermind Ronnie Radke gleefully tears up the rulebook and flushes the pieces down the toilet, calling out his "haters" on this truly unique, utterly original, foulmouthed and frequently hilarious fusion of electro, metalcore and gangsta rap.

6. "Breakaway" by Celine Dion, from the album "Loved Me Back to Life"
The Québecoise pop diva with the voice once described as "like an iron fist in a velvet glove" blasts back with her best song in more than a decade, a heart-wrenching ode to self-doubt and longed-for emancipation.

7. "Alchemist" by Acidman, from the album "Shinsekai"
The enduring Saitama indie rockers turn in this absolutely gorgeous, transcendent anthem inspired by Paulo Coelho's allegorical novel of the same name.

8. "Xanadu" by Screw, from their self-titled album
Major debut single from the dark-hued, hard-rocking visual band who this year were finally and justly rewarded with a ticket to the big time after four underground albums.

9. "Gunshotta" by Machinedrum, from the album "Vapor City"
American-born Berliner Travis Stewart is at the absolute bleeding edge of electronic music with this ultra-futuristic "slowfast" mélange of jungle, ragga and RnB.

10. "Uns Gehört die Nacht" ("The Night Belongs to Us") by Blutengel, from the album "Monument"
The vampire-obsessed Berliners tear up the floor with this almost impossibly epic, 80s-influenced futurepop anthem.

11. "I Wanna Be a Warhol" by Alkaline Trio, from the album "My Shame Is True"
Thrilling return to form from the gothic pop-punk heroes, a yearning paean to obsession with a chorus that unfortunately, and highly amusingly, sounds like "I wanna be a warthog".

12. "First Sight" by The Devil Wears Prada, from the album "8:18"
Ensuring that metalcore remains relevant in the 21st century, the Ohioan quintet show why they are the best band in the scene today with this gut-ripping yet melodic display of aggression.

13. "Passion Theme" by Pino Donaggio, from the album "Passion"
Giallo veteran Donaggio's stunningly gorgeous orchestral score for campmeister Brian de Palma's latest lurid straight-to-video shocker is one of the best things about the movie.

14. "Teeny-Tiny Star" by Baroque, from the album "Non-Fiction"
The seminal oshare band sometimes known as Kannivalism return after a eight-year hiatus with this effervescent, life-affirming nugget guaranteed to plaster a smile on any face.

15. "Seasons" by Div, from the album "Zero One"
The young Tokyo quintet demonstrate why they are the best oshare act in the scene right now with this incredibly lush, openhearted, instant pop-rock classic.

16. "Vanilla" by Haruka to Miyuki, from the album "Cyanotype"
An astonishing, incendiary racket made by two tiny Japanese girls with childlike voices who look about fifteen but who clearly have old, world-weary souls.

17. "Taigh an Uillt" ("Taynuilt") by Joy Dunlop, from the album "Faileasan"
This love letter to the Argyllshire town of Taynuilt and its people, complete with Disneyesque interludes of flute and violin, is stirring, stunning, preposterously beautiful – music to stand atop a mountain to, arms outstretched. Were there any justice, this would have been the theme song from "Brave".

Wedding dream

A friend of my daughter's is getting married, aged just 13. We get invited to the wedding, in the beautiful manicured grounds of a Japanese temple, and I meet her mother Ti (pronounced Tai), who is Malaysian or Burmese or something - a soft-spoken, fiercely intellectual, Aung San Suu Kyi type - and a portly, mustachioed Indian man whom I take to be her father. Part of the ceremony involves the bride in a sort of ritualized wrestling with her bridesmaids, who are dark, heavyset girls. When the groom, a smart, bookish-looking boy no older than the bride, is finally produced, I am surprised that he is white. But later at the reception I discover in conversation that the bride's father died when she was very young, and that her stepfather, with whom she has lived for years, is also white. He couldn't be there for some reason; the Indian man whom I had taken for her father is in fact the mother's lawyer, a family friend.

Dream 03/11/13

I wake to the sound of a ringing phone and discover I am in a tiny, shabby, sparsely furnished apartment. I answer the ancient bakelite phone and a guy asks to speak to Chini, wants to know whether he can come round and hang out, make some tunes. An African dude, apparently Chini, appears and grabs the phone, starts talking to the other guy. I look out the window to blazing sunlight. It is immediately apparent from my surroundings that I'm not in Kansas any more. Where the hell am I, and how did I get here? Chini is ready to go to work, so I follow him downstairs and we exit through a small closet door into the department store where he works. He tells me to come back later for lunch, then disappears. After wandering about the store for a bit, I go outside and, strolling around a street market, I discover from road signs that I am in Durban, South Africa. I spend the morning walking about town before going back to the apartment building, but it's not how I remember it - the department store has disappeared and seems to have been replaced by a series of luxury apartments and offices. I wander around asking for Chini, but no-one knows when he will be back. From the way they talk about him, it sounds as though he is a person of some importance, rather than a lowly department store clerk. When I finally find him, he takes me back to his apartment, which has turned into a preposterously plush mansion complete with fountains and views over a sort of hanging gardens of Babylon. He tells me he's going to get changed for dinner, then proceeds to remove his trousers right then and there. I don't know where to look.

Elysium

Just saw Elysium in what I think was full IMAX at the O2 (formerly the Millennium Dome). Stepping inside this monolithic temple to entertainment is a truly surreal experience somewhat akin to entering Elysium itself. South African Neill Blomkamp's new film, about a man desperate to get to the offworld paradise of the super-rich in order to heal himself of a lethal dose of radiation poisoning, is a grand sci-fi spectacle heavily indebted to both Mad Max and Aliens and starts off, at least, as an intriguing social parable which clearly aims to draw parallels with today's gulf between rich and poor. It's intelligent and interesting - and then, about halfway through, it turns into a completely different movie which is primarily stuff blowing up. There's a ludicrous overuse of shakycam, so much so that during many of the action sequences it's actually hard to tell what is going on. None of the characters is particularly likeable or memorable and it's hard to care about any of them. Sharlto Copley's preposterously over-the-top, psychotic supervillain Kruger gets all the best lines, but half of them are incomprehensible, so thick is his Boer accent. Another pivotal character has exactly the same problem except with a South American accent. Taken simply as a sci-fi spectacle it's awesome and is definitely worth seeing, but it's not nearly so incisive or intelligent a social critique as its director obviously thinks it is. On the strength of this showing, Blomkamp shows promise, but definitely has some way to go. One thumb up.

Gotcharocka - "Crisis"

Gotcharocka is the new band of Jui, erstwhile frontman of the sorely lamented Vidoll - one of the best VK bands of the last decade, if not of all time. After a quickly tossed-off contractual-obligation solo album, he's back on an indie (God Child Records, the label run by Asagi of D) and has teamed up with guitarist Jun, formerly of Spiv States, for an album of catchy light rock with both funky and heavy moments. Jui, ever the Casanova, is in full swing here with his usual slightly dirty, pervy lyrics (see "Qtie" and "Virginity"). Thanks in part to his unique voice, and to some similarity in the musical style, this does sound quite a lot like Vidoll, but it's rather more self-consciously classicist; Jun has obviously got a bit of a guitar god thing going on, and there's a distinct classical influence in some of the lead guitar work, with recycled baroque melodies. On the whole it's a really good album with some great riffs and loads of singalongable choruses. Two thumbs up.

Passion

Watched Passion the other night, Brian De Palma's lurid new straight-to-video shocker starring Rachel McAdams and Noomi Rapace as advertising executives whose bitchy rivalry escalates into murder. Based on the recent French film Crime d'Amour, it's absolutely vintage De Palma as he uses every cinematic trick in the book from his 70s and 80s heyday - dream sequences, weird camera angles, funky lighting, even split screen! - to confuse and confound the audience as to what is really going on. The dialogue is terrible, the acting hammy, the plot ludicrous, the ending a confused and muddled mess, and you can see the twist coming from a mile off - I loved it. The two leads are both terrific fun, and Pino Donaggio's haunting, beautiful score is simply the icing on the cake. It doesn't stand up with the best of this great director's work, but should certainly please his fans. One and a half thumbs up.

Only God Forgives

Went to see Only God Forgives this evening - my goodness, what a film. It's sure not going to be for everyone - the Gosling fangirls in the row in front were baffled - but if you're a lover of the art of film, you will love this, because it's basically an exercise in pure cinema. I can put it no better than The Guardian's film critic, who, giving the film one of its few positive reviews, said "each scene is executed with pure formal brilliance". You could write the plot on the back of a postage stamp, but this is not about the plot. Dark, mysterious, extremely minimalist, incredibly stylized and exceedingly violent, it has the fingerprints of David Lynch all over it. It also reminded me of Blade Runner, for some weird reason. At times, it even feels a bit like a spaghetti western mysteriously transposed to Bangkok. It's almost worth seeing for Kristin Scott Thomas's searing performance alone, as Gosling's monstrous, domineering mother. Vithaya Pansringarm, previously unknown in the West, is also superb as the chillingly impassive antagonist. Naturally, the lighting, design, and cinematography (by Larry Smith, who shot Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut) are all impeccable. Cliff Martinez's roiling electronic score provides the film with a lot of its atmosphere and is also highly to be commended. All in all, love it or hate it, this is not a film you will forget in a hurry. Two bloody thumbs up.