Scottish Album of the Year

12No Fuzzy Friday today because, er, nobody’s sent anything in , and because we were up all night laughing our asses off at Nigel Farage. So instead of Top Tips for the Weekend here’s a pointer to the fantastic SAY Awards.

The Scottish Album of the Year (SAY) Award celebrates, promotes and rewards the most outstanding albums released by Scottish artists between January and December of the previous calendar year. The SAY Award promotes a longlist of twenty albums which, in turn, is reduced to a shortlist of ten in advance of the award ceremony when the winner is announced. The process of choosing the Top albums is hideously complicated you need a PHd in Choosing Things just to understand how it’s done.

18But who cares?  Each day you get a free album to listen to for 24 hours and a track from each album are available for the next 13 days. Today’s album is No One Can Ever Know by The Twilight Sad.

SAY this year is a funny mix. It seems a bit more commercial than last year with Calvin Harris and Emeli Sandé’s Our Version of Events – so plenty of ms pop-pap jumbled in beside the resolutely gloomy contemporary indie scene.

Bella’s favourite albums are: Paul Buchanan’s Mid Air, a huge album that grows and grows all through you, Mearsault’s melachcoly masterpiece Something for the Weakened; the amazing grace of Tree Bursts in the Snow by Admiral Fallow; and who can’t love Kris Drever’s vocals and Aidan O’Rourke on Race the Loser, by Lau; and Stanley Odd’s groundbreaking Reject.

Stanley Odd are back to play a couple of shows over the next couple of months, a co-headline with Hector Bezerk at Oran Mor (as part of Glasgow’s West End Festival) and today can announce a very special show with the ten piece Electric String Orchestra at Queen’s Hall in Edinburgh on Friday 2 August. Tickets for the latter on sale here. Solareye has also announced two solo shows himself – headlining Voodoo Rooms on 29 May and in the Solus Tent at Wickerman Festival on 26 July.

Oh yeah – there’s also a great art commission bit to SAY that everyone seems to forget about, with a £20,000 prize fund from Creative Scotland, for eight young graduates. Details here.

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