Mercury Reverence…?

Supposedly, the Mercury Music Prize was once the heroic advocate of the left-field, and champion of the musical subculture. But considering that the 2013 shortlist poses the odious possibility that – by some incalculable travesty – Foals or Rudimental might ascend to the same throne-room as the likes of Portishead, PJ Harvey and Gomez, one has to question the award’s self-description as a celebration of the most “urgent” and “reflective” releases of the year.

While Kevin Shields of My Bloody Valentine sounds a bit like a paranoid, wounded lamb, bleating about the “sinister forces at work” behind the Mercury Prize’s leering corporate agenda, he ultimately has a point. It’s a sorry state of affairs when subservience to the mass market (the subtext behind the fuzzier stipulation for a “digital and physical distribution deal”) is a qualifying feature of a landmark album release.

mbv wasn’t the only casualty of the 2013 shortlist. If Everything Everything’s debut Man Alive was recognised in 2011, the omission of their sleeker sophomore is nothing short of mystifying. Meanwhile, the likes of Jake Bugg and Rudimental seem to have been copied and pasted straight out of the Top 40: radio-friendly enough, but hardly innovators of their fields. If there is any gram of justice, the prize will go to Savages or James Blake, whose 2013 releases offer a scintilla of the verve that boundary-pushers Melt Yourself Down or Factory Floor harbour by the barrel.

The Mercury Prize, short of answering the qualms and conundrums of contemporary music, has sparked off an exasperated ream of questions this year. Questions such as: “what about Fuck Buttons?” And also: “is this the Brit Awards?” Rechristened in 2009 as the Barclaycard Mercury Prize, its very name nods to the sands of systemic commercialisation that it has built its house upon. Rather than tapping into the wellsprings of talent occupying the fringes of British music, the Mercury Prize seems to have mutated into a well-manicured hand, stroking the egos of established names and well-heeled industry fatcats.

Sophie Monk

If there’s anything this year which has a true chance of sounding nothing like anything you’ve ever heard before, it’s These New Puritans’ Field of Reeds.

An award that is supposed to champion the most forward-thinking music outside the mainstream, the Mercury Prize is often noted for not quite getting it right, and boundary-pushing / game-changing albums are overlooked almost every year. But the fact that records such as The xx’s debut and PJ Harvey’s Let England Shake have bagged the generous £20,000 prize in previous years does suggest that an eye for ground-breaking soundscapes does exist amongst the panel’s set of judges.

Just as xx did in 2009, sonically, Field of Reeds fills a musical void which no-one ever really knew existed, and successfully sustains a peerless world of its own. An art-rock album composed largely of classical arrangements (alongside the incorporations of Portuguese singing, the sound of smashed glass, and the recording of a hawk), it wouldn’t be necessarily wrong to dub it a pretentious composition. Indeed, you certainly won’t be likely to hear ‘The Light in Your Name’ soundtracking BBC election coverage anytime soon. But Field of Reeds arguably manages what all great art should achieve: it pushes the listener, challenging him or her to rethink their own preconceptions about music’s possibilities and capabilities.

Bound together by evocations of (and ideas concerning) the east-English countryside, the record also meets PJ Harvey’s magnum opus on a similar plain thematically, displaying attention to detail and a vision which is astounding for a group only three albums into its career. Moreover, with concerns about the destruction of the environment appearing to creep back into public consciousness with increased potency and urgency in the past couple of months, Field of Reeds’ defamiliarising depictions of the complex relationship between ourselves and the natural world are perhaps now more relevant than ever.

Overall, this year’s shortlist isn’t exactly shambolic, and recognition of the UK’s increased recent shift towards dance / electronic music is marked through commendable inclusions of Disclosure, James Blake and Jon Hopkins. And yet, while Savages, Bowie, Foals and Laura Marling have each produced great albums, can any be said to have produced something as genuinely innovative, pertinent, astonishing and downright strange as Field of Reeds?

Ed Graham

 

There’s no point ranting about Mercury Prize absentees. At its basis (beyond the pungent fear of industry in-trading and politics like so much world-wide-compost), what happened is that some people picked their favourite records of the last twelve months. That’s it.

See, the real issue with the Mercury Prize – and it’s an increasingly prevalent and necessary one – is quite simple: what do they stand for? If anyone can do what they do (and surely, most music connoisseurs do), then what is the purpose of this institution now?

Independence, perhaps? Sadly not: as Kevin Shields recently pointed out, the rules exclude those who don’t have a distribution deal. Celebrating critical and commercial crossover capabilities? For every Dizzee Rascal, The xx or Arctic Monkeys, there’s a Speech Debelle, Roni Size or Talvin Singh.

Diversity, maybe? No such luck: the album choices for 2013 have an overwhelmingly obvious allegiance to the indie-rock genre. Oh, and for good measure, the nominations of Laura Mvula and Rudimental smack of the kind of Big Society multi-culturalism which snuck into BPI’s Cameron-endorsed G8 mixtape. Tin-hat aside, one can’t help but suspect that Ms Mvula in particular has been plonked into the running like the previous (and now frustratingly absent) token classical / jazz nomination.

In a way, the annual shortlists offer up an irritatingly wonderful hodgepodge typical of these isles. Sonic epochs change, as do judging panels, and accordingly, the latter may be ahead of (or far behind) the curve on occasion. Some of the bands could desperately use the £20,000, whereas others won’t even have the cost of their private jet to the ceremony covered. In comparison to the faux-glamour of the Grammys or the Brits, it’s actually rather tolerable to see acclaim being given to actual song-writers, and to several outré artists who’ve possibly never had the chance of being interviewed by Fearne Cotton.

But in short, the Mercury Prize doesn’t stand for anything, and fundamentally, it doesn’t matter. The discussions that the Mercury Prize creates between you and your friends will be more valuable than the prize itself.

As a side-note, I’m hitching up my taste-wagon to Jon Hopkins. He probably won’t win. But then, maybe I don’t want him to: there’s always, of course, the infamous “curse”. So, in that case, hopefully Jake Bugg will win.

Christopher Sharpe

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EPpwlMlKVwc