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No Arctic Monkeys this year, which means the award was wide open.  “But if the debut album by London-based rapper Speech Debelle isn’t the most musically adventurous of the nominees – it certainly doesn’t deliver anything like the forward-looking sonic shock provided by the last hip-hop album to win the Mercury, Dizzee Rascal’s Boy in the Corner – and the artist who made it has some deeply peculiar opinions about her fellow pop stars (”Jesus went around preaching the gospel and touching people to make the blind see and making lepers better. Michael Jackson’s gone around the world and done that,” she opined in a London freesheet yesterday), it’s an intriguing, beautifully made album, with a sound based less around samples than acoustic guitars and pianos.”

For once, the Mercury Prize might have lived up to its purpose to help promote very good albums by unheard of musicians (Speech Debelle got a 4,000% sales increase from the win).  And yet, if you read the comments after the article, most Brits kind of feel like this album was boring and didn’t deserve to win.

Hopefuls for this year’s Mercury Prize include La Roux, Bat for Lashes, Florence and the Machine, Glasvegas and other artists you may or may not have heard of.  Seems as if this year the Mercury Prize committe had a difficult time since neither Radiohead nor The Arctic Monkey’s released albums. 

If for nothing else, it gives me another list of albums to check out before the year is over.

Which is like saying here are some good albums from some British bands you may have heard of.  The award is given strictly on merits of music. But, it helps if you are a member of The Arctic Monkeys since they always get nominated for this prize.  Among the notables in contention for the award this year are: Radiohead – In Rainbows, Adele – 19, British Sea Power – Do You Like Rock Music?, Burial – Untrue, Elbow – The Seldom Seen Kid, Estelle – Shine, Laura Marling – Alas I Cannot Swim, Neon Neon – Stainless Style, Portico Quartet – Knee - Deep in the North Sea, Rachel Unthank & The Winterset – The Bairns, Robert Plant & Alison Krauss – Raising Sand, and finally, The Last Shadow Puppets (Monkey’s frontman Alex Turner’s other band) – The Age of the Understatement.