we’re all bampots now;

Just when you thought it was safe to get back onto your feed reader: Lloyd of Peenko fame has spent the past few weeks curating some interesting chat among Scottish music bloggy types* and the focal point thus far has been the inaugural Scottish Bloggers and Music Sites Awards (Scottish BAMS Awards). We were asked to submit our top ten album lists, with the overall winners looking a little like this:

1. The Phantom Band: Checkmate Savage
2. Animal Collective: Merriweather Post Pavilion
3. De Rosa: Prevention
4. King Creosote: Flick the V’s
5. Withered Hand: Good News
6. The Twilight Sad: Forget The Night Ahead
7. We Were Promised Jetpacks: These Four Walls
8. Beerjacket: Animosity
9. Mumford & Sons: Sigh No More
10. Camera Obscura: My Maudlin Career
11. My Latest Novel: Deaths and Entrances
12. Malcolm Middleton: Waxing Gibbous
13. The Pains of Being Pure at Heart: S/T
14. You Already Know: S/T
15. Broken Records: Until the Earth Begins to Part
16. The XX: S/T
17. The Antlers: Hospice
18. Sufjan Stevens: The BQE
19. And So I Watch You From Afar
20. Wilco: The Album

Only one of my own Top Ten made the list, which is fine because there’s no accounting for taste it means I have lots of brilliant albums I’m yet to discover.

Andy of our own Phantom Band said of the award: “This makes us feel very honoured because the opinion of people out there giving opinions is what matters most, rather than the financially influenced press. It always amazes me that people would take it upon themselves to go out and champion a band or an album or a band for no material gain, but it gives me faith in human nature. Blogs and reviews have been the only advertising we’ve ever had. Apart from all those people who got online and promoted us, we’d like to thank those little almost-stale doughnuts you get in big tubs from Sainsburys for keeping us fat during the recording. We obviously also have our Producer Paul Savage and the wonderful people at Chemikal Underground to thank for letting us do what we want. These guys are the quiet heroes of Scottish music for sure.”

The chat over the past few days have been brilliant and I’m looking forward to getting to know my fellow bloggers better and hopefully… collaborating on future projects?

DOWNLOAD: The Phantom Band – Halfhound
BUY: Checkmate Savage from Chemikal Underground

[*Participating sites: 17 Seconds; AyeTunes; Dear Scotland; Earz Mag; Elba Sessions; Glasgow PodcART; Hooligan's Lament; Jim Gellatly; JocknRoll; Jockrock; Kowalskiy; Last Year's Girl; Love Shack, Baby; Manic Pop Thrills; My Portis Wasp Says; Off the Beaten Tracks; The Pop Cop; Products of a Gaseous Brain; Song, By Toad; The Blues Bunny; The Daily Growl; The 'Spill; The Steinberg Principle; The Vinyl Villain and Under the Radar.]