The Mercury Prize 2010

The Mercury Prize (or rather Barclaycard Mercury Prize): where the big dogs of the music biz pick one album from 12 shortlisted artists to make us realise how little we know about music and how we should always listen to them about which albums we should be buying.

Now in its nineteenth year, the Mercury’s are something of an institution in the British music scene, rounding up the best in new and undervalued UK bands and giving them the chance to win £20,000 to help them break into the commercial market.

Yet, with Mumford & Sons, Laura Marling, Corinne Bailey Rae, The XX, Wild Beasts, Foals and former winner Dizzee Rascal amongst the nominees, 2010’s list is less plucked from obscurity, as has come to be expected from the Mercury’s, and more selected from the artists and albums we’ve already been buying. As a result, we have a relatively controversy free shortlist; that is if we ignore the absence of hotly tipped Gorillaz’s Plastic Beach. Or in my opinion M.I.A and Hot Chip…

Listening to the nominated albums is a fine testament to the new maturity and musical prowess that has replaced the all too generic rough-and-ready indie bands that have bombarded the charts for too long. With the exception of Dizzee and Biffy Clyro, 2010’s shortlist offers a more sedate and wholesome representation of UK music. Reverting to stripped down sounds, like the serenely intense The XX, a reinvention of the hoedown with the Mumford boys and classical operatic vocals with soaring guitars from Wild Beasts, 2010 has produced some corkers. But we already knew that…because we already bought the albums.

Call me cynical but with such big names nominated, it seems unlikely this year’s wildcards, Villagers and the Kit Downes Trio – the standard anomalous jazz record – will even get a look in. Villagers’ Becoming a Jackal has garnered comparisons to Neil Young and Bright Eyes for Irish front man Conor J O’Brien, with his quiet intensity and immeasurable talent, playing all the instruments on the album himself. Continuing the Mercury’s love- in but failure to deliver with jazz, the Kit Downes Trio’s Golden is perhaps the most obscure album on the list. Having collaborated with Micachu and Acoustic Ladyland, pianist Kit Downes is already renowned in London’s underground jazz circuit and so a kick from the Mercury Prize could be set to finally break jazz into the mainstream.

But is winning the Mercury Prize the golden ticket to success it purports to be? Remember last year’s winning album, Speech Therapy by Speech Debelle? Me neither. Selling only 10,000 copies in the two months after the ceremony, the infamous Mercury Prize curse was back with a vengeance. Then again, east Londoner Dizzee Rascal’s 2003 win for Boy in Da Corner didn’t do his commercial success any harm…

If I am to offer my humble opinion, my vote is going to stay local and go with London band The XX, not because they need the £20,000 to help their careers but because for me they represent what the kind of original music the Mercury’s once stood for. But my fingers are still crossed that 2010 might be the year for that lonely jazz record…

The winner of the Barclaycard Mercury Prize 2010 will be announced on Tuesday 7 September.

Image by gabriel “gab” pinto courtesy of Flickr