As a nation we may not be the best at blowing our own trumpet, but maybe we should get tooting: it's a good time for Scottish music. An hour before our show aired last week the nominees were announced for the Scottish Album Of The Year (SAY) Awards, and what a handsome bunch they are. Drawn from a longlist of twenty exceptional Scottish albums released between January and December 2012, a shortlist of ten records was duly declared: nine albums as chosen by an esteemed panel of judges, and the tenth the result of a public vote. And it's a truly great array of records - Admiral Fallow, Django Django, Human Don't Be Angry, Karine Polwart, LAU, Meursault, Paul Buchanan, RM Hubbert, Stanley Odd, and The Twilight Sad all fighting it out for the top prize. Much has been made of the omission of those more successful albums - in financial terms at least - from acts such as Emeli Sande, but there is much to celebrate in the fact that most of the works nominated were either self-financed or released on independent labels. That the nominees are all so strong, and indeed pleasingly different from each other, is cause enough to give us great hope for the state of our homegrown industry.
A kind of Scottish Mercury Music Prize seems to be the best description. Inaugurated in partnership with Creative Scotland, first prize is the not inconsiderable sum of £20,000 (which, if the winning act can resist the temptation to hit Vegas, will easily help to deliver another album or two) with nine runners-up prizes of £1000 and an Art Commission valued at £20,000. So it's undoubtedly an event to be taken seriously, and one that should be lauded for its attempts to highlight the rich tapestry of music that covers our own fair country. As great as every record is, however, sadly not all fit our designated genre of show, and so we haven't had the opportunity to let our dear listeners hear selected cuts from all the artists. But of those that we have featured, five of the nominees made our "Record Of Note" on the show this past year. And every one of them has more than measured up to the quality of the albums that have come from further afield, which is always heartening. We may not be able to compete at football as we once did, but it seems we have mad skills when it comes to music.
And so over the next two weeks we'll be investigating the ten nominees in more detail, so that we can all be safe in the knowledge that we know the albums just that little bit better when the winner is announced on the 20th June. What's more our Record of Note is Camera Obscura's Desire Lines, which may well feature in next year's list for its beautifully realised pop magnificence, and in honour of Neil Young's impending visit to Glasgow's SECC we'll have some vintage Shakey from 1971 as our Live on Arrival.
