A year ago, I sat in my flat in London, somewhat settled, surrounded by wonderful friends. Sometime over the past twenty-four hours I had got monumentally drunk at Barden’s Boudoir and dancedflailed wildly happily to Soulwax remixes of Klaxons. At some point I would be handed a half-full bottle of vodka by a barman and pour drinks for twenty people in my immediate vicinity and be cheered on like I’d brought home the World Cup.

Life was, mostly, peachy.

Also around that time I had an intriguing conversation across the Atlantic. ‘Have you ever considered working in the States?’ is the executive summary. ‘Nope… but tell me more’ is my abridge response.

It’s difficult to write a retrospective of 2008 because although I didn’t move to the US until August, doing so eclipsed everything else that happened this year. In scale and impact, I mean, not necessarily in importance.

2008 is the year I moved to America. Got offered the chance, knew I couldn’t refuse, took a deep breath, took a lot of risks, and did it.

Moving, especially when it’s at least partially spontaneous, is a rush. So much happens at once that I lost track. So many decisions to make, so many major jobs to do one after another without a break. A new job with new people, new friends to be made.

In a great many ways, I did what I always do, which is to land on my feet and do really well for myself. I don’t like to assume that’s how things will always work out, but it’s become such a recurrence that I should start documenting it more scientifically. That said, at the pace of change, and under the huge rush of emotions and disorientation that comes with moving, I did plenty of things wrong too. My Christmas break came after 139 days in America, and actually, to fly home to England and take stock is exactly what I needed.

The out of control rush had to end, the Yahoo layoffs experience and resultant rush to find new employment did nothing to lower my pulse and so the time away came as a really welcome break.

I’ve come out of it calmer and more stable. I fly back to the US in a few hours, and I think I’m in a good state of mind for starting a new job, and tying up the last few loose ends of 2008.

I ordinarily dismiss the idea of new years resolutions, but the way my experiences have fallen this year I start 2009 feeling unusually resolute.

Some things are both predictable and rather cliché, but also very necessary. Having an operation for appendicitis in April got my weight down to where it should be (note: not a recommendation form of weight loss, plus you can only do it once). Moving to the States has seen me put it all back on, and exercise less. That has to change, else I’ll be a grotesque lardbucket by the time I write the 2009 review.

Elsewhere, the new job is going to let me keep a better work-life balance, since I’ll be commuting from Sunnyvale daily. As such, I want to see my personal projects go live. I have lots to do at microformats.org, I have various wiki-related pieces of work in progress and needing to go live, as well as 33FortyFive, which I’ve been working the concept for for ages now.

I need to track my life better. This year has shown how one really big event can throw off my knowledge of the rest of the year. So starting January first, I’m keeping a retrospective for all my social appointments, so I get a better overview of where my time goes. Maybe I’ll make that public, or anonymized somehow, if it proves interesting.

There’s all manner of small things, and longer term, niggling tasks that I have to get done. Really, it all falls under a renewed determination I’m feeling. It all starts when I land in SFO on Saturday evening.

Let’s see how this works out…

I’ve always been a FIFA Soccer man, but plumped for a change. Pro Evolution Soccer was one of the first buys and probably the most played game I’ve got.

There’s something notably odd about it though. Which is that, frankly, the game is shockingly awful in many, many respects and yet still manages to be outstandingly good.

When you first run the game, the music, menus and incessant requests to choose a storage device have you genuinely worried that defecting from FIFA might’ve been a terrible mistake. The lack of official licenses for most teams would be OK, were the alternate club names actually decipherable. The tactics editor is clumsy, the in-game stats inaccessible. The number of stadia included is under-whelming and when you get into the game the graphics aren’t really very good, either.

But yet when you play, this game really does feel like football. The pace is just right, the way the players respond to the weight of your movements, the way they trap the ball on chest, head or foot and move smoothly with it. The way so much of the subtlety of the play can be felt, intuitively. All its horrid presentational faults, all the pre-match apprehension just fades away as you start to realise how beautiful playing the game really is.

It’s like it’s the anti-FIFA. FIFA 2007 has the slick presentation: As games and menus are loading you run Ronaldino around a training pitch, blasting a ball around for pre-match entertainment; the menus all have a trendy isometric slant and the graphics are pretty fabulous. But it plays like a turd. The players jerk around, run too fast and kick the ball clumsily too far. FIFA reinvents its gameplay every few years as time after time they fail to achieve the subtle brilliance of Pro Evo.

And it’s that which I love. That in a day an age of hi-definition graphics, 5.1 surround sound and multi-gazillion dollar product placements and celebrity tie ins, Pro Evo is made to look like a second rate player, left behind by commercial advances. But all the while, it’s the best playing football game on the planet.

I’ve got one bigger quibble, specific to the XBox 360 edition. The XBox has a fantastic, inter-game high score system called Gamerscore — you can even see my modest score on the internets. In every single game you buy for the 360, you can complete ‘Achievements’ and be rewarded with Gamerscore points. You might receive some for collecting power-ups, for pulling off a difficult special move, completing levels within certain time limits. They’re an interesting extra incentive to work through the games and sometimes go off the path of the principal plot to pick extra bonuses.

FIFA 2007 has some really neat achievements: Score 10 goals in a match, maintain a 60 game winning streak, claim man of the match awards for players in each position, win a fair play award. All quite subtle and separate to the main game aims of just winning matches, league and cup competitions.

By comparison, Pro Evo 6 is utterly shockingly unimaginative. They go something like this: Win the English league, the French league, the Italian league, the American league, the African league, the International league. And, Win the African cup, the European cup, the International cup, the American cup… Each one is 40 points each. Leagues are tedious to complete. You’ll play one and never want to do it again, so I’ve got a achievement scored for winning the English league. I have no desire to do that again for every other league in the game. Worse, during a league season there’s also an integrated cup competition. You don’t get an achievement for that one. You don’t get an achievement for doing the double, either. It’s just… frustrating.

Why not give me an achievement for scoring difficult goals? For running the length of the field from one penalty area to the other and scoring? Scoring a free kick (which is shittingly difficult). Reward doing the double in any league. I think sports games have a lot of interesting opportunities to reward unusual behaviour, and Pro Evo falls flat on its arse with its implementation. A little effort for Pro Evo 7 would be appreciated.

I did mention that it was still the best football game ever though, didn’t I?

Five really good albums of 2005

Nice, eh? Ordinarily, when I stop to think about the best albums of a year, it’s difficult to shrink down the list to something sane. This year was the opposite. For many of the albums I’d bought, I was left doubting their real album quality. There have been some great songs, but there’re not many albums that live up to the same standards. Perhaps I’m getting to cynical Perhaps the NME’s awful rag has finally succeeded in its mission to market disposable rock music above all else, and we’ll never hear most of these bands again. Maybe it’s just been a weak year. It’s easiest to have a cheap pop the NME though.

On the plus side, when I did managed to pick out 5 albums for my list, I felt a whole lot better about the quality. In no particular order:

Editors – The Back Room

Colly insists that this band continue to be shipped with the following disclaimer: On receipt of Editors, you may be confused as to whether you’ve received a new band, or if the component parts of many other bands have been munged into the same jewel casing in a data entry accident. Do not be alarmed as this is normal. Instead continue to live with your new band for a week, and you will begin to realise that it doesn’t matter if it’s a bit like Interpol or hard to describe in any unique manner. You’ll find that you’ve acquired a bloody great rock album.

At first, my cynicism fought against Editors. I have an inner desire to listen to music that’s different from something else I own. That desire is dead silly, because The Back Room is a great record. I still dislike the first few lines of Lights, but then, suddenly if fortune favours the brave and pow Modern A/V equipment may never make that chorus loud enough.

Choruses are what makes this album. Singalong vocals, fabulous guitar and a bit of pace. There’s also Camera, which is soaring brilliance. Again with the guitar.

Doves – Some Cities

So yes, they look a bit like plumbers. In fact, the whole beards thing might be a step backwards (not least because of my housemate’s imitation of said beards). But Some Cities is the best album they’ve ever made, so they could grow facial hair down their ankles and still be folk heroes around Manchester.

Doves are great because they can write brilliant, upbeat pop songs (Black & White Town) as well as brilliant, spine-tingling compositions to shut your eyes and lose yourself in.

I’m trying to describe Almost Forgot Myself, but it’s really hard. It was recorded somewhere up Snowden, and the delicate guitar through the chorus shines of it. But yet it also incorporates a foot tapping intro and a compelling vocal line. It’s just so good.

All the way through there are tunes dabbed with Doves special touch, a sound which is theirs alone and which they continue to push further with each release.

On their first album (Lost Souls), there’s a song called A House. It’s got a stripped back, ghostly brilliance to it. In the live shows it’s better still. On Some Cities, there’s a song called Ambition. It has a rare 5-star rating in my iTunes library because whilst incorporating a similar feel to A House, it also does something rather special. Every single time it plays and with every line delivered by Jimi Goodwin I get a cold shiver from the top of my head, through my back and down to my feet. There are not many pieces of music that can do that, but Ambition is one. It ends the album absolutely perfectly.

Elbow – Leaders of the Free World

I’m living in Manchester for the third year now. I love the place and it often feels like a second home. Elbow’s third album is full of Manchester.

Station Approach is a song about coming home to Manchester, arriving on the train at Piccadilly station. It’s named after the road outside the station. The song conveys that coming home feeling so well. It could be the rainiest, most miserable Mancunian day of the year but if you play this song when you’re walking home it suddenly doesn’t matter any more. Obviously you’re still drenched to the bone, and if you enjoy it too much and go too slow you might get ill, but that’s an important part of living in Manchester. So I’m told.

Guy Garvey is a poet. His lyrics are art, witty art at that. Forget Myself includes this gem:

The man on the door has a head like Mars
Like a baby born to the doors of the bars
And surrounded by steam with his folded arms
Hes got that urban genie thing going on
Hes so mercifully free of the pressures of grace
Saint Peter in satin hes like Buddha with mace

Furthermore, the title track is the best thing that Elbow have ever done.

Gorillaz – Demon Days

I honestly didn’t think I’d like it. I kept expecting something a bit half-arsed from Damon Albarn. Something that might contain a few catchy singles and then not much else. I don’t know why I thought that.

It’s a great record from start to finish. The singles (Feel Good, Inc, Dare and Dirty Harry) are all right, but there are parts of Demon Days which leave me thinking that’s bloody brilliant. The highlight for me is right at the end, where Fire Coming Out of the Monkey’s Head, Don’t Get Lost in Heaven and Demon Days flow into each other over 10 minutes.

It’s varied, inventive and it’s full of incidental moments that make you smile that little bit more than other records.

The Arcade Fire – Funeral

This is a last minute change. I’ve been restricting myself to records that I’ve not only purchased this year, but were released this year. Funeral came out in 2004, so this is cheating. But, the last slot was either this or Sigur Rs Takk and since Funeral got played an awful lot more I’m going to do it anyway. Y’know, a My site, my rules to break sort of arrangement.

I bought it on the strength of one song: Rebellion (Lies). It builds and it builds and it’s great. Great, building songs are what this album does well: Wake Up is perhaps the best of the bunch; most of the song suggests something big is going to happen and then right near the end it does. Wonderful.

Apparently they’re very good live, too. There’s a new album in the works and we’d all be fools to miss them next time around.

Tunes

As I say, I’m not convinced about a lot of the albums this year. However, that leaves an unusually large pile of stand-out individual tunes.

So, in quick-fire style and in your best Tony Blackburn voice, Ben Ward’s favourite tunes of 2005:

At the 11th hour I finally got Arctic Monkeys and Bet You Look Good on the Dancefloor is best of the bunch of pre-debut-album demos. Shuffle Your Feet is a storming opener for BRMC’s new album Howl while Like Eating Glass, Helicopter and So Here We Are stand out on Bloc Party’s Silent Alarm, with the tacked on Two More Years really too cool for words. In at C comes Clap Your Hands Say Yeah with Details of the War and outside the presence of John Oxton we’ll quietly mention White Shadows by Coldplay. Doves Almost Forgot Myself and Ambition really are special and Leaders of the Free World is the best song Elbow have ever recorded.

Another quality album opener is The Fallen on Franz Ferdinands re-release of their first album sorry, second album. Decent Days and Nights made The Futureheads worth owning and Kaiser Chief’s Modern Way will stand the test of time thanks to the absence of ridiculous falsetto screeching. Low open The Great Destroyer with Monkey and later When I Go Deaf is just as good. Apply Some Pressure has Maxmo Park summarised into a single great song.

Oasis have never recording anything else like Turn Up The Sun, but the guitars in the intro are sublime so it gets the nod above The Importance of Being Idle. Glsli is the centrepiece of Sigur Rs explosive beginning to Takk and The Great Escape by We Are Scientists is a good n proper pop song with a nice tight intro.

Giving my flat-mate a mention is cheeky but the Zeus-factor-5 drums that open PTA’s Born To Get Paid wake you up like all the emergency services crashed at the same junction. Finally, Super Furry Animals Love Kraft remains a forgettable album but for the beginning and the end: Zoom! and Cabin Fever may even be the best of this tightly worded bunch.

And with 5 hours left

It’s worth mentioning that Lullabies to Paralyze by Queens of the Stoneage might have made the list, had I listened to it more. I have an inkling I’m going to love it once I find time to actually play it in full. Low’s The Great Destroyer needed more time as well.

But there it is. A year in music summed up in what’s probably my longest entry of the year. With 5 hours of 2005 to go, I think it’s a safe bet that I shan’t hear anything else to make me change the list (again). Although if I get left with the TV control, I suspect we’ll see in the new year with Jools Holland, lets not speak too soon.

Happy New Year to you all, and I hope some of the passion Im feeling for these records rubs off in reading.

Shortlists are being drawn up, and I suspect the new Agenzia office space has settled on roughly 50% Music Yearly drafts, 45% client work and 5% Arctic Monkey aura.

I’ll be focusing on music, mostly because I can’t for life of me remember any of the films I’ve seen this year (apart from Star Wars, which was ace). For album of the year, iTunes is sitting primed with a shortlist of 15 from which to choose. To whet the appetite I thought I’d share the pool I’ll be picking from.

• Arctic Monkeys – Beneath The Boardwalk (OK so it’s a demo, but)
• Bloc Party – Silent Alarm (including Two More Years for added awesomeness)
• Coldplay – X&Y (it’s not going to win; I can live without death at the hands of John Oxton)
• Doves – Some Cities
• Editors – The Back Room
• Elbow – Leaders of the Free World
• Gorillaz – Demon Days
• Idlewild – Warnings/Promises
• Low – The Great Destroyer
• Luke Haines – Luke Haines Is Dead
• Maxmo Park – A Certain Trigger
• Oasis – Don’t Believe The Truth
• PTA - Greedy Gonzalez (I will force you to listen to this band)
• Sigur Rs – Takk
• Super Furry Animals – Love Kraft

There you go. So, World, what’s on your shortlist?