Somewhere in the same universe as Pizzicato Five but with a slightly more eccentric orbit, Takako Minekawa practiced a more overtly electronic form of pop music that, as time went on, also became more ethereal and narcotic. Minekawa’s early work, of which a helium-voiced cover of “Drive My Car” is somewhat typical, plays heavily to the cute Japanese pop ingenue stereotype. But by the time of Cloudy Cloud Calculator, a good four years into her music career, Minekawa had embarked on a sound that, while still upbeat and bouncy, resembled Kraftwerk more than Puffy AmiYumi.

“Fantastic Voyage” is a cut off Fun9, the album she released a year later. By this point, Minekawa had smoothed out the more staccato, blip-bleepy elements, thanks partially to production work by future husband Cornelius and DJ Me DJ You. “Fantastic Voyage” is the IMAX experience to Cloudy Cloud Calculator’s fifteen-inch rabbit-ear TV. It’s a fully realized dreamscape, peppered with fairy-tale samples referring to rare medicinal plants and magical forests. Oddly compelling and hypnotic, “Fantastic Voyage” may very well be Minekawa’s high point: a perfect amalgam of all her prior tendencies, arranged just so to create an otherworldly sort of experience.

After her marriage to Keigo Oyamada, aka Cornelius, in 2000, Minekawa seems to practically disappear. There’s a handwritten message on her site from 2002, but since it’s in Japanese I can’t make heads or tails of it. A farewell retirement note? A promise of more to come in the future? A grocery list? If only there were more clues.

Popshopping is a series put out by the wonderfully-named German label Crippled Dick Hot Wax, who specialize in mining the vast, forgotten archives of ephemeral music from days gone by. I’m a sucker for old commercial jingles; I have a CD full of old 50s American jingles espousing the finer qualities of Muriel cigarettes, Chevrolet cars and Ballantine beer. So imagine my amazement at stumbling across Popshopping, which features music from German commercials and promotional flexidiscs in the 60s and 70s. Unlike the American jingles, many of the tracks on Popshopping are full-fledged songs. Between that and the mostly German lyrics and monologues, the decontextualization of the jingles from their original products is made more complete; you really have no idea what the hell’s going on, and some of the songs are so catchy that you can easily forget their commercial origins.

The only scary thing about this series of compilations is the thought that in the year 2030, we’ll have to face the future equivalent of mod hipsters toting around retro commercial compilations with “Da Da Da” and “Days Go By” on them.

If you like your old chestnuts old and, uh, unroasted, you probably won’t like this version of the Stan Getz, Joao Gilberto and Antonio Carlos Jobim classic “The Girl From Ipanema.” You’ll probably think more along the lines of James Rogol, who called this Pizzicato Five effort “an abomination of what used to be ‘The Girl from Ipanema.’ ” If you know Pizzicato Five at all, though, you won’t hear anything you probably didn’t already expect from the seminal Shibuya-kei band. Delightfully quirky and with more than a hint of faux retro kitsch, the P5 version is only an abomination if you grew up to love the original and can’t stand to see it changed at all. Which isn’t to say the original is bad, but rather that this jazzy, upbeat remake should be considered on its own terms. If that puts me on the same side as Blueshammer, well, that’s just the way things go sometimes.

This song haunted me for years. Not seriously, mind you; there’s no childhood trauma or bad breakup associated with it or anything. “Am I The Same Girl” haunted me in the way long-forgotten advertising jingles do. That distinctive trumpet hook is easy to remember, but for the longest time I couldn’t remember anything else—not the song’s name, not the person or group who recorded it, even what any of the lyrics were, save for a half-remembered “don’t wanna stop and think it over.” Of course, the line’s actually “Why don’t you stop / and look me over.” But at least I got the trumpet hook right.

Some basic history for you: Eugene Record wrote the song with Acklin, as he did most of the songs on Acklin’s second LP, Seven Days Of Night. At the time, Acklin was a up-and-coming soul singer from Chicago with one Billboard hit already under her belt, and “Am I The Same Girl” could’ve been her breakout hit; it reached the lower echelons of the pop and R&B charts in February of 1969. One big reason why the song never charted any higher was because of Young-Holt Unlimited, who took Acklin’s backing tracks, replaced her vocals with a piano, and recorded “Soulful Strut.” The Acklin song came first, but for whatever reason, “Soulful Strut” was released before Acklin’s vocal version. The instrumental version entered the charts in November of 1968, hit the top ten on both the R&B and pop charts, and eventually sold over two million copies.

[review 2005: the best of the year]

A lot of Saint Etienne’s albums sound like they were conceived as snapshots of life in London, but I think this is the first album where that goal was made explicit. Turnpike House, a tower block of apartments in London, is the setting for Saint Etienne’s most interesting portrait of London to date.

Tales From Turnpike House is the sound of a band apparently at a crossroads, though in reality Saint Etienne have been figuring out a new direction for a long while now. There are a couple of factions: the Good Humor camp seems to have conceived the more organic-sounding, light pop fare of “Sun In My Morning” and “Side Streets.” Then there’s the old school camp, from whence the Eurodisco pop tracks like “A Good Thing” and “Stars Above Us” hail. Finally, there’s a third group that doesn’t sound much like anything the band have done before; file “Slow Down At The Castle,” “Last Order For Gary Stead” and “Teenage Winter” in that category. It all sounds like Saint Etienne, though, and for the reason why you’d have to look at the details. First, while a lot of the tracks on Turnpike House recall earlier incarnations of Saint Etienne, major differences become apparent once you’ve given the album a couple of listens. The Beach Boys harmonies are a good example, and a point of contention amongst the fan base. Lots of people hate them because they think it interferes or competes with Sarah Cracknell’s charming melodies. I personally think they’re a valuable counterpoint; certainly “Sun In My Morning,” one of the best tracks on the album, wouldn’t be at all the same without those sunny backing harmonies.

Second, the shared set of characters and settings—Gary Stead appears in three songs, for example—lend the album a coherence you won’t find on, say, Finisterre or Tiger Bay. In fact, because the theme runs through both the music and the lyrics, this is arguably the Saint Etienne album that feels most like an album rather than just a set of songs. “Relocate” is a bit of a pain to listen to, but its city-country argument makes sense given the context of the rest of the album. It’s also a great counterpoint to “Stars Above Us,” which is just a song about the nightlife until you realize that, in light of “Relocate” and the naive disappointment of “Slow Down At The Castle,” its urban pleasures are fleeting. Another moment of interplay between tracks occurs between the morning rush of “Milk Bottle Symphony” and the evening walk home of “Side Streets.” And of course there’s the previously mentioned miniature narrative of Gary Stead.

I told a friend once that I thought this album was perhaps a bit sad. “Lightning Strikes Twice” is about a woman who thinks she can charm a man through witchcraft; “Side Streets” has someone blithely ignoring the menacing dangers of walking alone late at night; “Teenage Winter” literally recalls the fading artifacts of lost youth. And yet there’s a comfort in the fact that Saint Etienne have seen fit to devote an entire album to the small dramas and little victories of the less-than-glamorous urban life. Cracknell, Stanley and Wiggs were once the purveyors of effortless cool, writing songs about little sisters stealing your beau and telling “every girl, let’s go out tonight, everything’s gonna be alright.” Now their heart, and this album, belongs to the utterly normal people it depicts and the lives they lead. Tales From Turnpike House practically breathes, so compelling and ultimately sympathetic are the tracks; you can relate to these tracks in a way you couldn’t quite do with older Saint Etienne albums. So, more than the sterile electronic left turn of Sound Of Water or the strident manifesto of “Finisterre,” Tales From Turnpike House is a symbol of Saint Etienne’s midlife maturity, and wouldn’t you know it: even pushing 20, they still have more interesting things to say than most bands half their age.

(edited to show that Turnpike House does, indeed, exist. Shows how much I know about London. Thanks, Paul!)

[review 2005: the best of the year]

In The Clear is a dangerous album to write about. It’s not an especially interesting album, it doesn’t challenge the senses or break new ground, and it’s not far different from what people have come to expect from Ivy—effortless pop music of the purest vintage, anchored by Dominique Durand’s luxurious, accented vocals. If we were talking about the most important albums of the year, versus ones that were just my favourites of the year, In The Clear would be nowhere near the top. By nearly every measure you compare it to, In The Clear should fall well short of being on a best-of-year list. And yet, here it is.

So why is this album dangerous? Because if you asked me why I liked it, I’d shrug my shoulders, play you a couple of tracks and say, “isn’t it pretty?” Which it most certainly is. I guess I could drop a couple of two-bit collegiate words like “effervescent” and “ethereal” to describe the album, and those words do sort of fit. But the best explanation I can give of why In The Clear still sticks in my memory where so many albums this year didn’t is that it’s basically a musical anti-depressant. It’s not overly sacchrine, not too brash, not very harsh; it’s just an album of pop music you can pop in the player and drift away to for an hour. If In The Clear commits any sins, it’s perhaps the overproduced sheen. But this is Ivy we’re talking about, one of the slickest pop outfits out there. People call Ivy “sophisticated” not necessarily because they’re complex (though their songs are always layered in a web of textures), but because their music conjures up images of poolside cocktails, European beach resorts and jetsetting across the continent. Overproduced? Did you expect any different?

And anyways, it doesn’t interfere much with the songs. “Nothing Like The Sky” is one of the best pop songs of the year; it’s bliss translated into music, so weightless as to carry you into the stratosphere. The rest of the album can’t help but sink slightly compared to this first track, but to its credit Ivy doesn’t back down easily. Aside maybe from “Clear My Head,” there isn’t a weak song to be found. “Corners Of Your Mind” reminds me of Ivy’s cover of the Go-Betweens’ “Streets Of Your Town,” which is as good a track to take from as any. “I’ve Got You Memorized” is an equally peppy number, the closest Ivy gets to an outright rock song. “Keep Moving” sits at the other end of the spectrum, a fine example of the futuristic Europop Ivy occasionally tries its hand at. But really, the album is so consistently good that many of the nice things I could write about one track would apply equally as well to a bunch of others on the album. And anyways, it all pretty much amounts to the same thing: it’s all so pretty, from the opening strains of “Nothing Like The Sun” to the fade out of “Feel So Free.”

Well executed pop albums don’t get a lot of respect these days, for whatever reason. This is fine to an extent; music would go nowhere if every album was an In The Clear, an album that doesn’t at all push any envelopes. But that doesn’t mean it’s not a great sounding album, or that it doesn’t put a smile on my face. If I can’t explain it any better than that, that’s my fault; you’ll just have to take my word for it.

Another lost gem from 2004, though Annie ended up on a lot of lists last year and will likely end up on a couple more this year; Anniemal was an import-only release until halfway through 2005. Most everything there is to say about this album, consequently, has already been said: the Norwegian Kylie who’s managed to beat the pop diva at her own game (witness the popularity of Anniemal versus Kylie’s own Body Language). She’s another beneficiary of the internet hype machine, garnering attention from mp3blogs everywhere and Pitchfork, to name just one major outlet. Most important, though, is the music: when she’s at her best, like on “Heartbeat,” Annie is pitch-perfect on every level. “Heartbeat” is an effortlessly seductive europop concoction, one the rest of the world hasn’t seen since—well, since “Can’t Get You Out Of My Head,” at least. There are no annoying multi-octave vocal histronics here, no glitzy beats-heavy production team, no special guests or lavish instrumental arrangements. Anniemal is everything that’s great about pop and dance music, without gimmickery or needless ornamentation. It’s pop, pure and simple. No wonder everyone loved it.

Considered by many to be the most innovative video game of 2004, Katamari Damacy was an extremely simple game full of charm and wonder. The basic idea is you roll a ball (or katamari) around the level—say, a cluttered living room—and pick up stuff lying around, like erasers or paper clips. Slowly but surely, your katamari gets bigger and bigger until you can start picking up larger items—a pencil, a remote control, a coffee cup, the cat—until you get big enough to leave the living room and start rolling around the town, picking up bicycles, mailboxes, people… the list goes on. At the end, your katamari becomes a star based on how big you get it. Surrounding this basic premise is a wealth of oddities: you’re rolling up stars because your father, the King of All Cosmos, got drunk one night and smashed all the stars in the sky. There’s a side story about a Japanese family trying to figure out where all the stars have gone. There’s a level where your sole goal is to roll up as many crabs as possible. It’s a quirky, cute game that’s won the hearts of many. And a lot of that has to do with the original music created for the game—bright, cheery and perfectly in tune with the game’s content.

The sequel, We Love Katamari, has recently been released in the States, and the Japanese have had it for several months (under the name Minna Daisuki Katamari Damacy—loosely translated, it means Everybody Loves Katamari Damacy). In addition to new levels that match the quirkiness of the original (one level has you “demolishing” a gingerbread house by rolling up all the candy parts), there’s a new soundtrack. To go along with the new zoo level, the wizards at Namco penned “Scorching Savanna.” Basically, it’s a five minute medley of the original Katamari Damacy tracks—as sung by zoo animals. Yes, it’s as awesome as it reads on paper.

Sorry for the hiccup; I was in sunny Ottawa for the Canada Day festivities. Feist played on the Hill as part of the all-day concert lineup, which was a nice surprise—I’d expected her Harbourfront gig to be the only one she’d play that day. As with all the other performers (including some punk kid from Canadian Idol), she only played one song, a bouncy indie-rock version of “Mushaboom.” But since I can’t find a version of that online, this other slice of Canadiana will have to do—”Jackie, Dressed In Cobras,” off the forthcoming New Pornographers album.

So far, there doesn’t appear to be a Stateside release set for the latest Saint Etienne album, which seems like a crying shame; not that the band is especially popular over here, but Saint Etienne succeeds especially well as a British export; you can count on them for top-notch material so reliably that it’s almost boring, and they’ve got enough tricks up their sleeve that they appeal to a wide spectrum of people. And yet they’re obviously British; no one’s ever going to think Saint Etienne was born in the streets of Berlin (unless you count Sound Of Water, he said snarkily). They’re a bit like Monty Python; even into their second decade, they’re beloved by both their native citizens and the unwashed American masses alike (albeit in smaller portions). Sub Pop even saw fit to put out Travel Edition, a career retrospective destined mainly for American shores; who was the one that decided they wouldn’t have a market here?

No matter. If you were smart, you managed to grab the limited edition disc, which included an EP entitled Up The Wooden Hills. Hard to say whether this is all “exclusive” material, or whether it’ll all show up on the upcoming album of the same name, apparently set for November. Both the EP and the album are geared towards children, so there’s a warning sign (meaning you might be even smarter if you just hold off and buy both albums as standard releases). There were really two directions for the EP to take, considering it’s Saint Etienne we’re talking about. Either they take the road best personified by Good Humor and parts of Sound Of Water and put together six pastoral tracks, complete with babbling brooks and cute little bunnies, all sung in Sarah Cracknell’s sophisticated vocal style. Or there’s the option best personified by their earlier work, where they put together a neo-eurodisco opus for the impossibly hip four-year-old crowd. Turns out the EP is a mix of both, with “Bedfordshire” and “Night Owl” taking the former route, “You Can Count On Me” splitting the difference, and “Let’s Build A Zoo” going mad with 60s mod dance stylings.

Children’s music? Yeah, I guess. If your toddler’s already bemoaning congestion on the Tube and smoking outside nightclubs. But don’t let that stop you from enjoying it.

addendum: The Guardian would like to point out that the three-year-olds do indeed enjoy Up The Wooden Hills. Who am I to argue?