What The Mercury Prize Shortlist Would Look Like If The Right People Were On The Panel

When the Mercury Music Prize nominations were announced last month, we weren't impressed. In fact we said they were a "staid group of albums, unrepresentative of the ethnic, age, social or musical mix of Britain… a narrow view of music picked by judges of a narrow background, creating the deeply false impression that British music has had its progressive, subcultural tendencies expunged."

But at Noisey we don't just whinge, we act. Part of the problem with the Mercury Prize is that the judges are nearly all middle-age rock fans. Last year the panel was alleged to include the heads of music for Radio 2, Absolute Radio and a presenter from XFM. Do we need so many judges that enjoy the music of Ben Howard?

So we got together the people who we thought should have been on the Mercury panel: journalists, DJs and musicians from a broad range of backgrounds and genres who better understand the musical temperature of the UK today. We asked them to each nominate one British album from the timeframe of the Mercury Prize (September 2012 to September 2013) This is what they came up with. We think it's a lot closer to the best of British.

Swindle, Long Live The Jazz

This album is so different from what’s out there at the moment. It’s got a bit of grime, dubstep and obviously touches on jazz. What Swindle has got, over other producers, is that feel of live instrumental and percussion. Rather than being just straight electronic music it gives it a different edge, I think that’s what’s helped him make it into a live show. He’s pretty much the only one I know from dubstep and grime whose been able to bring saxophonists on the stage and a keys player, and drummer as well. He’s got an all round package. The original list is more pop, it’s got Rudimental and Disclosure. They’re both talented, but they ain't Swindle.

Roska, Rinse FM

Money, Shadow of Heaven Fair enough Mercury panel, it is quite hard to Google. But to vindicate this year’s selection as representing the boldest, most urgent voices in this year’s album-length crop, and not include the breathless, half-delusional, hyperbolic, and downright ruddy thrilling rhetoric of Jamie Lee and his band of Mancunian mavericks verifies the list’s uninspiring level-headedness. Yes, it’s not a record about cocks and chip shops, but its affective potential guns to a level of spirituality unsurpassed this year. From the creak of the piano stool, to its lush atmospherics, it’s so beautifully depthless you could do breast stroke in it. The Shadow of Heaven makes a claim for radicalism with such an elementally human charge that it’s impossible to ignore - leaving you toplessly enamoured with these loony luminaries. It’s a record about challenging language and meaning, embracing the glorious transience of the fleeting moments that make up modern life, and snogging the person next to you. It also occasionally sounds like the Verve, but none of us are perfect.
Sam Briggs, Features Editor, The Line of Best Fit

These New Puritans - Field of Reeds

While a dour song-suite about Jack Barnett's conflicted heart was always unlikely to trouble many, the most revealing attacks on Field Of Reeds have come from admirers of These New Puritans' second album, Hidden. They're annoyed that the Southend-on-Sea band made this introspective, small record, finding it pretentious and contrarian (as opposed to the wholly palatable Taiko drums and commonplace numerological chanting of Hidden) and a betrayal of the goodwill they generated last time around. How dare they squander the chance to become A Bigger Deal! That attitude - the idea that a band owes their listeners something, that all music is made for audiences and made legitimate by commercial exchange (on as big a scale as possible) - is everything that's wrong with this year's Mercury Music Prize, more a quota-related benefit than recognition of artistic achievement. (With some exceptions.) Field Of Reeds doesn't deserve wider recognition because it's "brave" or "risk-taking" - that doesn't seem the spirit in which it was made. It deserved a nomination because it's personal, beautiful and thoughtful.
Laura Snapes, Features Editor, NME

Dragged Into Sunlight - Widowmaker

Supposedly comprised of veteran, but thus far uncredited, UK extreme metal vets, DIS trade in the usual black/death metal tropes but manage to do it faster and harder than the rest. The album is one 40 minute long song that jumps between sparse doom metal sections and ultra fast thrash passages. As ever the lyrics are about serial killers / mass murders.
Claves, Producer

James Blake Overgrown

I think the James Blake record is genuinely a great album. I think it’s worthy of the nomination. To answer these questions you have to take yourself out of the intellectual realm and think to yourself what do I actually like to listen to, on my headphones, on a Sunday. That’s the best test of what relationship you have with an album. I do think that James delivered a series of amazing songs, I think that he’s a unique artist in that he’s the sum of all of his influences and yet doesn’t sound like any of them. When I listen to James Blake, I hear him standing at the end of the night at DMZ or Deviation as the lights come on, but I also hear Joni Mitchell and gospel, all of the things that go into the product. What comes out is totally unique to him. It’s extremely soulful and extremely deep.
Benji B, Radio 1

London Grammar If You Wait A stand out album and act over the past year for me has been London Grammar. I first saw them live this year, and the atmosphere and mesmerising vocals of Hannah Reid absolutely blew me away. The album will transfix your attention just as much - you can get lost in it.
Monki, BBC Radio 1

Haxan Cloak, Excavation After the disfigured pagan folk of his debut, Yorkshireman Bobby Krlic buries even deeper on Excavation; this is the sediment of the soul churned up and regurgitated as digital drones, witchy static and unyielding, monolithic bass. Ok, so there’s passages which are pure American Horror Story - and check the artwork - but Excavation is a record that’s steeped in the (personal, collective) malaise of the present and ultimately, through Krlic’s singular vision, an act of violent exorcism.
Louise Brailey - Deputy Editor, electronicbeats.net

King Krule - 6 Feet Beneath The Moon There’s a line in King Krule’s “Noose of Jah City” that goes “suffocated in concrete / it took a hold of me / put me on repeat”. Which, if I were a PR, would be the first thing I’d be putting on my press release. Because, in the same way that Dizzee Rascal et al. so perfectly captured the sound of growing up in Bow, Archy taps into the other end of the metropolis, assimilating the sounds of predominantly suburban teens, concreted into their home with nothing to do but get stoned and surf YouTube. It sounds bleak. But then again, so is renting in London. It's already been nominated, and deserves to win, because 6 Feet Beneath The Moon is an artefact for those living on the apathetic side of the generation gap. And King Krule is fucking cooler than everyone else.
Ryan Bassil - Staff Writer, Noisey

Mercury Music Prize Hater
My response would be the whole notion of giving awards out based on albums is out of date. It doesn't apply. It inherently discriminates against certain genres, like reggae and dancehall- they're not really organised around albums anymore. Maybe more so in the past, but now they're much more about singles, and the body of work they've produced. A lot of the classic dancehall albums over the years have been multiple artists put together by one producer rather than artist albums. I can imagine one of the reasons the list is 'unimpressive' is because often, an album isn't the main thing people are interested in. There have been amazing albums in the past, but the fact is, the popularity of CDs and albums aren't really that relevant anymore. Even in its hey day, the Mercury Music Prize wasn't even that relevant! I didn't even know it was happening. That says something. In this day and age you should be focusing on the body of work of an artist, however it's released.
Gabriel, The Heatwave

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