After being broadcast on Channel 4 for the past three years, 2015’s Mercury Prize has returned to the BBC, celebrating the ‘Albums of the Year’ from the past twelve months. And our beloved Beeb didn’t half shout about it. The BBC set up an online live blog to hype up nomination announcements as they came in, revelled up in all their excitable glory as they were revealed by Lauren Laverne on Radio 6 Music. As always, Twitter was rife with speculations and bets seeping in from every music publication (and just about anyone who fancied shouting about it) as to who would make the shortlist of this year’s ‘best’ twelve British and Irish albums. And what of the shortlist? It is, of course, as eclectic as ever. Because that’s the Mercury’s thing, isn’t it? They don’t go for the obvious. The Mercury seems to pride itself on choosing somewhat underground, or – dare I say it – ‘edgy’ artists, many of whom, in most likelihood, even the keenest Radio 6 Music listener will not have heard of prior to the announcement.

Amongst the twelve nominated albums, seven are debuts. These newbies stand against artists like Florence and the Machine – who has been selling out arenas for a couple of years, now – and the well-established Róisín Murphy and Gaz Coombes (initially of Supergrass fame). This ‘range’ of albums suggests that the Mercury Prize is an enigmatically diverse award, seeking out the best of British music rather than drawing attention to acts whom everyone’s already been talking about all year. And so we come to respect the Mercury. We’re talking about serious music here.

 But the prize is hardly faultless. If you take just a few of the albums on the list, we’re comparing Aphex Twin’s dance-y, intricate Syro with the gritty punk of Slaves’ Are You Satisfied; Jamie XX’s clubtechno In Colour with the comparatively dulcet, thoughtful tones of SOAK’s Before We Forgot How To Dream; Wolf Alice’s grungy, angst-filled My Love Is Cool with the atmospheric soul of Eska’s self-titled release. This diversity is often said to be the greatest thing about the prize. But how can anyone be asked to compare these albums, to choose a ‘best’, when their end results – these soundwaves that we’re basing this all on – sound so different? Not to mention how distinct the craftsmanship and creative process behind each album must be. By choosing a winner, are the panel also declaring a rulebook on how best to ‘do’ art?

 Even amongst this haphazardous thrill of mishmashed genres, not everyone is represented. No classical album has been nominated for the Mercury Prize since 2002, and a metal album has never made the shortlist. In a current music scene which seems saturated with indierock outfits, is it really representative to arguably have just one band – Wolf Alice – represent the lot?

 Last year Edinburgh-based Young Fathers won the Mercury with their socio-political hiphop-come-electro godsend of a debut, Dead. This year’s second album, White Men Are Black Men Too is perhaps better than their debut. It is starker, richer, and even more intelligently-written and politically-driven than the first, which was deemed ‘Album of the Year’. If the Mercury Prize really is only about the music that has been released this year, with no comparisons to external ideas, it’s not ridiculous to say White Men should also have been nominated. But the organisers seem pretty set on introducing new names to us all the time, with PJ Harvey the only artist to have ever been awarded the prize more than once.

In contrast, reviews deemed Florence and the Machine’s How Big, How Blue, How Beautiful her weakest album yet. She still has the huge songs, and instrumentally has stepped up her game, but the album is not as succinct as either of her previous endeavours. Debut Lungs was nominated for the prize in 2009, but is Florence’s nomination this time around suggesting that How Big is a better album than 2011’s Ceremonials? Because critical reviews would suggest otherwise; something doesn’t quite fit.

At the crux of this, I’m asking why we feel the need to rank these albums at all. It is near impossible to discern boundaries and gradients to an ideal as subjective as music. As humans, we feel the need to rank these things, give them figures, finite values, when the whole point of making music is to move beyond nominal figures, and transcend ideas into something numbers and rankings can’t touch.

I suppose following the Mercury shortlist is a bloody easy way to listen to some high-class music if you’ve been asleep for the last year, though. And, well, I just cannot wait to see whether Richard D. James (Aphex Twin) will make a very rare public appearance at the ceremony come 20th November.

★★★★☆

 Four Stars

I first experienced the magic of City and Colour at fourteen years old, sitting on a beach in France, sipping WKD, dreamily listening to ‘The Girl’ from City and Colour’s 2008 album Bring Me Your Love. ‘The Girl’ is representative of Dallas Green’s – aka City and Colour’s – early acoustic folk sound. Deeply romantic, with a melancholic nostalgia, it informed my music taste during several teenage angst-filled years. Just as I matured over the next seven years, so too has City and Colour’s sound developed, revealed in his album If I Should Go Before You, which came out on 9th October. Moving away from the simple folky guitar and voice combination of his early music, in this last album City and Colour has a more electronic sound. This is epitomised in the smoky nine-minute-long opening track ‘Woman’, whose minimalistic mixture of electronic guitar, voice and drums sets up the meditative yet intense tone of the album. The track ‘If I Should Go Before You’ retains City and Colour’s sorrowful disposition, (Green once stated that the “best music” for him is “sad music”). Yet the song’s bluesy/ psychedelic vibes suggest a development in City and Colour’s treatment of melancholy, followed up in the bluesy tracks ‘Killing Time’ and ‘Lover Come Back’. However, it’s not all so serious – the track ‘Map Of The World’ is much more cheerful, with a strong beat and uplifting melody. Bizarrely though, this is at odds with the song’s lyrics, as Green comments on his “weary face”, stating “beneath the tidal wave I will be erased”. Apparently he just can’t rid himself of his tendency to melancholy. However, rather than that being a problem, I would say it adds to the effect. It helps me daydream, as if I were fourteen years old again.

★★★★☆

 Four Stars

History tends to repeat itself. Such is the case with Real Lies’ promising debut, Real Life, an album teeming with evocative synthpop echoes of the 90s. Yet, whilst unashamedly recalling New Order, The Happy Mondays and The Streets, this London trio manage to repackage that erstwhile 90s sound for the new generation living in the “decade with no name”, as ‘Seven Sisters’ cleverly dubs it. The album’s duality is its true success – derivative but fresh, euphoric but occasionally melancholic, Balearic but eloquently lyrical. From the intensely brooding Mike-Skinner-inspired spoken word of ‘Blackmarket Blues’ and ambient chill of ‘North Circular’, to the Hacienda haziness of ‘Dab Housing’ and anthemic piano house, soaring vocals of ‘World Peace’, the band pays homage to the noisy nights out and the silent mornings after. It is almost an ode to UK dance culture and the nights that you never forget, spent with those you love, best captured in the opening song ‘Blackmarket Blues’: “You are the straight-through crew, not the time-out crowd/ I love my friends more dearly than I’m allowed to say aloud”. Equally as danceable as poetically lyrical, this is a soundtrack for the ecstatic highs of Saturday night, and the refl ective lows of Monday morning. A hugely exciting debut from Real Lies, and who cares if history repeats itself if it’s so enjoyable?

Consider the most well-known late 90s and 00s dramas, all part of the TV Golden Age’s upsurge in quality, and all widely considered Greatest Of All Time material: The Wire, Deadwood, Six Feet Under, The West Wing, Breaking Bad, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Mad Men and of course the movement’s spearhead: The Sopranos.

One thing linking all of the above shows is that they’re damn funny. And they don’t just have jokes, or comedy characters floating about – that, in fact, is the approach taken by so many dramas nowadays – but rather humour runs through the entire script. Though their approaches to it may be different, wit is key to each series’ rhythm, too deeply engrained to be disentangled from the show’s makeup without losing its basic essence. One of the great pleasures of watching The Sopranos or The Wire, two shows famed for their thematic richness, grim worldviews, and examinations of heavy issues, is in discovering how much they make you laugh, all the time; it comes as a surprise that these most serious of shows are also the funniest.

Now think about Game of Thrones – perhaps not the very best of ongoing dramas, but nonetheless representative in its approach. Thrones’ neutral state is serious, its dialogue tending towards the turgid. When the show jokes, it’s a Joke, complete with extended setup, punchline, and pause for you to bask in the afterglow. When a scene begins, it’s often immediately clear whether it will be ‘funny’ or ‘serious’, and Thrones isn’t the only (or anywhere near the worst) offender in this regard – just look at any of this year’s bumper crop of acclaimed dramas, from Bloodline to Rectify, The Americans to Penny Dreadful, True Detective to The Leftovers. They share a similar set-up, and similar binary divisions of humour and drama.

So, what’s going on? It certainly seems to be true that writing good comedy is harder than writing good drama, but the ubiquity of this tonal shift suggests other factors are at play. Part of it may be the kinds of stories being told – the genre trappings of shows like Penny Dreadful  and Hannibal lend themselves to grand symbolic gestures, and humourless character types.

More and more, though, it seems that credibility is what these shows seek. It took films over half a century to start receiving mainstream recognition of their worth as an art form, and in the era of Netflix bingeing, it’s clear that television is still a medium with its stigma firmly intact, too often portrayed by online media as a guilty pleasure, or method of procrastination. Maybe, in their pursuit of legitimacy, TV writers have left humour by the wayside, deeming it disreputable, or acceptable in moderation. They would be misguided – The Sopranos, and many of its descendents, are respected for the depth of their realness, for the universality of the characters’ plights, and their dialogue.

This is where the sense of humour comes in, and whether favouring awkward naturalism or Whedonian wit, it’s an inseparable part of every one of these shows’ appeal; perhaps, if they really want to be taken seriously,  modern television writers need only remember how to really make us laugh.

Macbeth starts in the same place as it ends: on the battlefield. No “double, double toil and trouble” – this is a serious and violent depiction of Shakespeare’s tragedy, and one that audiences won’t necessarily enjoy.

Australian director Justin Kurzel understands that for a film adaptation to set itself apart from the almost constant stream of stage performances, it must utilise the specific capabilities of modern cinema. He digs out his copy of Tarantino’s rulebook of screen violence – “it must be both unflinching and aesthetic” – which has been gathering dust since his 2011 Snowtown. Fight scenes alternate between silent stills of Fassbender’s deathly visage, slow motion close-ups of bloodshed and the sound and fury of battle.

Sound is crucial. In a manner reminiscent of Jonny Greenwood’s discordant string soundtrack to Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will be Blood, Jed Kurzel has created a deranged score which evokes the main character’s mad power rush. Nonetheless, Justin knows when to silence his brother and let the actors do the talking.

Superficially, the casting is perfect. Following his stand-out performances in Hunger and 12 Years a Slave, Michael Fassbender is the obvious choice for a complex and serious male lead, whilst Lady Macbeth’s sinister beauty lends itself well to Marion Cotillard, as demonstrated in Inception. However, Kurzel demands forced Scottish accents. It is part of a laudable effort to locate the action in the specific place and time in which it was set. Filmed on location in the highlands and the Isle of Skye, the cold, unforgiving surroundings give a strong visual reminder of the bleak themes.

This is no modern update, set in a Michelin-starred restaurant like Peter Moffat’s 2005 adaptation. This is a medieval Macbeth, with medieval squalor and medieval violence. It is the leaky wooden roof of their rural hut which provides the water with which the Macbeth couple try to “clear themselves of their deed.”

Kurzel appears to be desperately seeking artistic authenticity. Ultimately, this comes at the expense of audience enjoyment. Archaic vocabulary and intricate syntax renders Shakespeare’s dialogue confusing for modern audiences at the best of times. The delivery of the actors goes little way to remedy this. Fassbender’s body and face are frighteningly rigid, which adds to the menace of the character but hinders his ability to communicate.

Also, whereas McKellan and Stewart conveyed Macbeth’s lines clearly in their own voice, Fassbender’s mouth – which, true to character, never approaches anything remotely close to a smile – delivers Shakespeare’s beautiful lines in a gruff, monotonous drawl. But as long as the Palme d’Or committee understand, that is probably enough for Kurzel.