2023 - Clive's Top Albums of Every Year Challenge

February 16, 2024 by Clive in Clive's Album Challenge, Music

So, as I try to keep up with the present while writing about my favourite albums of every year from 1960, here’s my two pence worth on the albums from 2023. I’ve listened to all of Pitchfork’s ‘Best New Music’, the top 10-15 or so of rateyourmusic.com and albumoftheyear.org’s (aggregate) lists and some other stuff that has tickled my fancy. Below are all the ones I enjoyed enough to give my thoughts on.

I usually give a bit of a summary about the years I’m talking about news-wise before launching into the best music, but I think we could all do without being reminded about 2023 on the news front.

As is customary with my contemporary reviews, they’re a lot shorter. I’ve got a child now and would like to get back to the past (1996 to be precise) and finish this challenge sometime before global warming kills us all.

To save your data plans and such, I’m only going to do the pretty album cover style for the top 20, rather than for all 40+ here.

50. Tomb Mold - The Enduring Spirit

I can get on board with pretty much anything in music, but roaring is still something that eludes me. Shouting and screaming I’m game with, hell I do a lot of that myself, but roaring has always just sounded like I’m listening to some minotaur front a band, rather than a human. The music here is impressive, with angular riffs and beats performed with surgical precision, and if I could just get past the indecipherable roaring I’d love it, but alas, I can’t. I know it’s a personal thing.

6/10

49. Kelela - Raven

Much like the cover, Kelela’s second album feels like treading water in a lovely fluid soundscape, but in the end I got a little tired and felt like it hadn’t really gone anywhere.

48. Yaeji - With a Hammer

Yaeji’s debut is decent, varied pop that just hasn’t quite jumped out and grabbed me, though I very much admire its understated artistry.

6/10

47. Julia Byrne - Greater Wings

Byrne supported the Tallest Man on Earth on a gig I went to a few years ago. They seemed a little mis-matched, Byrne being perhaps the least energetic solo performer I’ve seen, while TTMOE is more energetic than most bands, never mind solo performers. Much like that Byrne performance, Greater Wings is lush, full of lovely, breathy vocals, but just not all that exciting.

Song Picks: The Greater Wings, Hope’s Return

6/10

46. Hotline TNT - Cartwheel

A fuzzy shoegaze factory. Enjoyable but not standing out.

Song Picks: Protocol

6/10

45. Pangea - Changing Channels

Big fish - little fish - cardboard box. Dubstep artist Pangea’s second album is more trance than dubstep, and though I very much enjoy listening to it’s energising beats and sandy synth lines, it’s not one I’m finding all that memorable.

Song Picks: Hole Away

6.5/10

44. Andre 3000 - New Blue Sun

Lovely spacey flutey stuff. A bit of a ‘let’s stick some lovely mood music on’ album, rather than one I’ve got as much out of with active listening. I’m not sure if anyone expected this of Mr 3000, the first song title suggests otherwise. A pleasant curveball.

6.5/10

43. Liv.e - Girl in the Half Pearl

Sumptuous beats and melodies, and a real joy to listen to, but a bit too wishy-washy to have left a solid imprint.

Song Picks: Clowns, NoNewNews!

6.5

42. ANOHNI and the Johnsons - My Back Was a Bridge

Vocals are full of feeling and wholesome mixes. There Wasn’t Enough is probably a masterpiece.

Song Pick: There Wasn't Enough

41. Blue Lake - Sun Arcs

If I retreated to a Swedish cabin with nothing but a dog for company for an extended period of time, I’d either leave and head back to society, or be driven to suicide. Jason Dungan however was a lot more productive, and came out with a beautifully optimistic piece of instrumental music ‘driven’ by his own custom-made zither. I put ‘driven’ in inverted comma because it’s more of a meander than anything with a concrete purpose or destination. The journey on Sun Arcs twinkles and rings like the dawn of a new day of nothing, but in a hopeful way, not the way shrouded in ennui that I’d be prone to write about.

Song Picks: Bloom, Dallas, Writing

40. Lankum - False Lankum

Very trad-folky at its core, but more dissonant and dark than that. A kind of dark, foggy day on the Moors at dusk rather than your folky walk through a forest full of elves. Get me?

Song Picks: Go Dig My Grave

7/10

39. Youth Lagoon - Heaven is a Junkyard

It's no Wondrous Bughouse, but it is an album of nice melodies drowned in reverb, and sometimes that’s just what the doctor ordered.

Song Picks: Rabbit, Trapeze Artist, Mercury

7.1/10

38. JPEGMAFIA / Danny Brown: Scaring the Hoes

JPEGMAFIA produces so it’s the hyperactive, skipping affair you’d expect. Danny Brown’s idiosyncratic vocals fit like a glove. It’s a chaotic, continuously entertaining, but I can't fully wrap my head around it.

Song Picks: God Loves You, Scaring Hoes

7/10

37. PJ Harvey - Inside the Old Year Dying

PJ Harvey’s tenth album is an opaque folk album that opens up only if you study the lyrics, when it’ll swallow you whole, even if you come out the other end none the wiser as to what you’ve just experienced.

Song Picks: Prayer at the Gate, Lwonsome Tonight,

7.5/10

36. King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard - PetroDragonic Apocalypse; or, Dawn of Eternal Night: An Annihilation of Planet Earth and the Beginning of Merciless Damnation

I think we’ve all lost count of just how many albums King Gizzard... have unleashed on the world before now, I mean it looks like they put out three in one year in 2023. Never standing still, and constantly trying new concepts, PetroDragonic… is a thrash metal album, and having just got past Slayer in my album challenge, it’s nice to hear a modern version. I can take or leave the lyrics, they’re the kind of dragon, wizard, lizard stuff you’d expect from the band’s name and the cover (which I rather like), but the riffs are consistently roaring and the whole thing is just a lot of fun. PetroDragonic doesn’t take itself too seriously, despite the impressive instrumental skill going on, and you get the feeling that every riff is winking at you.

Song Picks: Witchcraft, Motor Spirit, Dragon

7.5/10

35. Billy Woods & Kenny Segal - Maps

Segal’s beats are consistently wholesome, Woods’ rapping the perfect accompaniment. Like a bowl of Shredded Wheat. Cleansing.

Song Picks: Baby Steps, Soft Landing, The Layover

7.5/10

34. Wednesday - Rat Saw God

The vocals are nothing new, and at times I'd go so far as to say they're uninspiring. However, musically and lyrically this is a bit of a gem. The way the lead guitar fights with the more straightforward slacker rock sound at points is great, creating a variety of interesting textures, which Karly Hartzman’s murky lyrics work well with. Rat Saw God is unafraid to be ambitious (see the spectacular Bull Believer), and the somewhat derivative vocals are its only drawback.

Song Picks: Bull Believer, Chosen to Deserve

7.5/10

33. Caroline Polachek - Desire, I Want to Turn Into You

A glorious arena pop album. Polachek’ second album crawls up to you as you cower in the corner hiding from the world. Within about 3 minutes you're up dancing to the rat-a-tat-tat of the lights, hands a stuttering silhouette. The record dips a little in the second half, but finishes as strongly as it started.

Song Picks: Welcome to My Island, Bunny is a Rider, Smoke

7.5/10

32. Panopticon - The Rime of Memory

The highest ranking album that has vocals that roar, so make of that what you will. I’m told it’s about the passing milestones of life, but as I can’t understand a word Austin Lunn roars, I wouldn’t get that unless I read the lyrics. Anyway, The Rime of Memory is huge, it has moments of folk instrumentation which interchange perfectly with the black metal onslaughts that drown out Dunn’s yells like fog obscuring a roaring beacon. A clinic in atmosphere and ‘epicness’, for want of a better word. This album sounds important, it sounds serious, and I like to listen to it and think about the fact I’m going to die one day, and that that’s a bit rubbish. Anyway stop reading this and go listen to Cedar Skeletons, it’s glorious. Also note that pretty much everything is played by Mr Lunn himself, which is impressive.

Song Picks: Cedar Skeletons, Enduring the Snow Drought

7.5/10

31. Jaimie Branch - Fly or Die Fly or Die Fly

Branch’s final album was completed following her death last year, according to notes she left. What remains is not a sad funeral to her death, but a joyful, final celebration in jazzy experiments and variety. I do feel like it’s not quite cohesive enough as a whole, but it has that ‘slightly over-reaching album before the masterpiece’ feel to it. As such the only real sadness to the album is that said inevitable masterpiece will remain unwritten.

7.5/10

30. Boygenius - The Record

Supergroup Boygenius achieve what so few supergroups manage: a record that pulls on all their skillsets and talents, while remaining cohesive and not sounding like songs from a bunch of different artists thrown together. There’s a clear leader on many of the tracks (Emily, I’m Sorry has Bridgers’ stamp all over it), but the others contribute in ways that pull the tracks towards sounding like boygenius songs, rather than those of the three individual artists.

Song Picks: Emily, I’m Sorry; True Blue; Letter to an Old Poet

7.5/10

29. Sampha - Lahai

Sampha’s second album is a gorgeously easy-drifting collection of lovely melodies and pitter-patter drum beats that feels like a flock of birds dancing in a blue sky. “I am lifted by your love, I am lifted from above” he sings of his newborn daughter on Suspended. Us too Sampha, us too.

Song Picks: Only, Suspended, Jonothan L. Seagull

8/10

28. NoName - Sundial

Silky smooth rhymes and luxuriously laid-back and angular beats, Sundial is another great hip-hop album and one with a protagonist that has a refreshing ability to take aim at herself just as willingly as she takes aim at Kendrick and Jay-Z.

Song Picks: holde me down, namesake, oblivion

8/10

27. yeule - Softscars

Yeule’s third album is a wonderful dip back into 90s alternative; a grainier, more industrial and less corporate Avril Lavigne & co, full of evocative and cathartic melodies you want to scream your dreams along to.

Song Picks: ghosts, software update,

8/10

26. McKinley Dixon - Beloved! Paradise! Jazz!?

One of the most lyrically and instrumentally interesting hip-hop albums of the year. There are obvious soul, jazz and pop influences, with a rock-solid rhythm section groove holding it together as it colourfully fires in all directions.

Song Picks: Mezzanine Tippin’; Run, Run, Run; Live! From the Kitchen Table

8/10

25. 100 Gecs - 10,000 Gecs

10,000 Gecs is the result of asking a robot to create an album that is cathartic, catchy, nostalgic, and fun, with as much efficiency as possible. The album synthesises a whole heap of genres into the skeletons that hold them together in a way so sharp that it’ll cut to the core of anyone listening to it. Your reaction to this will be one of viscerlal love or distaste.

Song Picks:

8/10

24. L’Rain - I Killed Your Dog

Whether this grabs you or not will correlate with how well you mange to get lost in it. It took me a few listens, but on the final one, I’d clearly found the right moment. I was drowned in its varied soundscapes, melodies, structurelessness and mystery, and I was sold.

Song Picks: I Killed Your Dog, 5 to 8 ours a day,

8/10

23. Model/Actriz - Dogsbody

The New York noise outfit’s debut has an elaborate phallus on the cover and concerns itself with making sex as unsexy as possible. It’s a grimey waddle into the club toilets, only for the cubicle to open into some slime covered underworld. Once you make it back out you’re left feeling a level of filthy that can’t be washed off with the next morning’s shower.

Song Picks: Donkey Show, Divers, Pure Mode, Sun In

8/10

22. Fever Ray - Radical Romantics

A twisted synth dream pumped full of personality (Kandy’s layered synth pads are a world I want to live in), the vocals either piercing through the synthetic underworld or mellowly holding its more erratic edges together for fear they might break off. Radical Romantics is an album of understated hooks, and overstated soundscapes.

Song Picks: Shiver, New Utensils, Even it Out, Kandy, Tapping Fingers

8/10

21. Kara Jackson - Why Does the Earth Give Us People to Love?

A majestic record where the instrumentation, whether it be Jackson’s guitar, or the more lush embellishments on many of the tracks, follows her every word and note. Jackson’s past as National Youth Poet Laureate is obvious in her free verse structures to these songs, where the melodies rarely repeat, and her messages are delivered with an extreme confidence only matched by the spontaneous but pinpoint accurate instrumentation that flows in its wake.

Song Picks: Lily, Brain, Dickhead Blues

8/10

Uchis’ third album is the musical version of that buzz of contentness you get when starting a new relationship.

Song Picks: I Wish You Roses, Moral Conscience, Moonlight

8/10

Not completely sure what the album name is all about, and every song here is essentially different shades of the same thing, but it’s done with such timeless simplicity that it burrows its way in your brain. Pretty much constantly anthemic, the album’s drums are soft and sandy, and the synths layered to create a whole wash of melodies underneath Clanton’s obvious vocal ones. I could imagine it getting old fairly quickly due to its repeated formula, but while it lasts its a glorious oral pillow to get lost in.

Song Picks: Everything I Want, Justify My Life, Punching Down,

8/10

Rodrigo’s second album takes the ‘straight-pop’ title this year. It’s full of catchy songs, delivered in a manner that doesn’t feel completely sanitised (she’ll happily throw out some ‘explicit lyrics’ if the mood dictates). Rodrigo’s vocal range effortlessly fits with the various pop-productions on offer here. It’s just a bloody good pop-album, and the adolescence-to-adulthood theme is one we can all relate to. Not necessarily pioneering, but consistently fun and entertaining, and that’s what pop is all about right?

Song Picks: All American Bitch, Ballad of a Homeschooled Girl, Logical, The Grudge

8/10

A feel good record that rocks the party like it's 1976. Jubilant brass cacophonies, groovy bass lines and melodies that worm their way into your brain like the hungry caterpillar. It's nothing new as such, and there's numerous moments that sound like hits of yesteryear, but it's refreshing to have a great disco record come out in 2023, and it's my favourite party record of the year.

Pearls, Free Yourself, Freak Me Now, Lightning

8.5/10

The Mexico duo create one of the most refreshingly idiosyncratic albums of the year. With Mabe Fratti’s cello and vocals taking centre stage, Titanic builds a world of jazz, classical and folk that seems to take influence from here, there and everywhere. It’s a spacious record, one where the wind is as important as the chimes and, like a tree grasping for the sun, it branches off many times to a common goal, light.

Song Picks: Anónima, Te evite

8.3/10

All hail the pop-punk king! Rosenstock unexpectedly hits a professional studio, but expectedly makes the studio bend to his DIY will, rather than compromising to its allure of a shiny, clean sound. Hellmode is probably the most cleanly produced album of Jeff’s I’ve heard, but it’s far from your Butch Vig style commercialised punk effort. As if making a point that he might be in the studio, but this is still the Jeff we know and love, he opens the album with the anthemic WILL U STILL U, which features vocals so grainy, they sound like they’ve been recorded through a tin can. He continues to make creative decisions that serve his music, which errs on the raw side. Hellmode is another pop-punk triumph, and one with a refreshing self-awareness.

Song Picks: WILL U STILL U, HEAD, LIKED U BETTER, HEALMODE, LIFE ADMIN

8.5/10

Arooj Aftad - Love in Exile

Pakistani-American Arooj Aftad’s fourth album, and her first in collaboration with Vijay Iyer and Shahzad Ismaily is a gorgeous, atmospheric and minimalistic journey through soundscapes that feel like they’d shatter at the slightest touch. It’s as though you’re tip-toeing through a place of prayer, not wanting to disturb anyone’s delicate threads of connection to the etheral.

Song Picks: Haseen Thi, To Remain/To Return

8.5/10

I’ve not listened to enough Yo La Tengo, as this is excellent. There’s more than a hint of the 1970s band Can here, and that is always a good thing. The meditative repetition evident on the opening Sinatra Drive Breakdown, creates a calmness by the back door, as it turns itself inside out and back again, Ira Kaplan’s distorted guitars burning like an effigy of Hendrix, and his vocals quietly contemplating over the top. Kaplan’s vocals drive the album’s hungover feel, where feelings are blurry, undefined, and never overpowering. While the guitars have a satisfying anarchy to them, Kaplan’s vocals feel like a collection of mantras. The tracks Georgia Hubley sings on have a more conventionally melodic feel, like light shining in through the album’s already pleasant machinery. This Stupid World is an acceptance of a world that could be so much better, and taking it dy by day, beat by beat, thought by thought.

Song Picks: Sinatra Drive Breakdown, Fallout, Aselestine, Miles Away

8.5/10

Putting Javelin pretty much has the same effect as putting a fire on in a room, and is much cheaper and more environmentally friendly. Thanks Sufjan, in these times of insane energy bills, this is exactly what we needed. You never disappoint.

Song Picks: My Red Little Fox, Goodbye Evergreen, Genuflecting Ghost, A Running Start,

8.5/10

**11. The Land Is Inhospitable and So Are We**

Mitski

Those backing vocals coming in at the start of the beautiful Bug Like an Angel are one of my favourite musical moments of the year. The dynamic volume shift took me completely aback, and is something we don’t hear enough. The Land is Inhospitable isn’t just studio trickery though, it’s an album that sounds as accomplished in terms of songwriting as it is beautifully produced. Things are stripped back, Mitski’s vocals hover delicately as a hummingbird above the gentle stream of other, mainly acoustic, instrumentation. The whole thing feels kind of timeless.

Song Picks: Bug Like an Angel, Heaven, My Love Mine All Mine

8.5

**10. Did You Know That There's a Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd**

Lana Del Rey

Del Rey’s ninth album is my favourite yet. An epic 1 hour 17 minutes long, it’s only held back by the last few tracks sounding a bit out of sync with the rest, perhaps its the featured musicians? Overall though this is a gorgeous journey of stories, melodies, and atmospheres. It feels like a vivid, poetic book in musical format, and I want to bathe in it.

Song Picks: Did You Know That There's a Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd; Paris, Texas; Candy Necklace

8.5/10

Danny Brown’s sixth album, coming after time in rehab to recover from drug and alcohol addiction, is also his most relaxed and personal. It’s my favourite hip-hop album of the year due to its range. We’ve got the frenetic Tantor, to the laid back Bass Line and everything in between. The production is continually intriguing, and adds to each song’s atmosphere, while never taking away from Brown’s introspective vocals. Every track pulls you in. Also he rhymes ‘celibate’ with ‘sell a bit’, which is superb.

Song Picks: Down Wit It, Tantor, Celibate,

8.5/10

27 minutes of fuzzy delight. Simultaneously lo-fi and yet clearly heavily produced, Girl With Fish is an album of gentle hooks, and constant left turns in instrumentation. Very much guitar led, but in a modern way which takes influence from more electronic ways of recording to create constantly changing, creative and deep soundscapes. Lydia Slocum’s understated and warm vocals certainly help to hold the various sections together, but it’s the production that is most impressive. Unlike the chaos of say a Guided by Voices record (many of which I adore), this somehow makes what could be chaotic sound completely unchaotic. It’s like someone’s taken a huge explosion of music, and squished it into a small cohesive ball. It’s wonderful.

Song Picks: Freak, Sweet, Pocket

8.5/10

The ‘queer antifascist black metal/doom duo’ sound like the final cries of those left on a dying planet. Those cries are broken, grainy and throat rattling, and the primal, pounding drums and apocalyptic guitar only further add to the image of the world going down. The band switch roles back and forth with each song, and it’s this subtle variety of two strong individuals working towards a common sound that makes those peaks and troughs even more dynamic and powerful. It’s dramatic, all encompassing, and bloody glorious, like the death cries of an atheist in a crumbling cathedral as he collapses to the ground with a scream of “why?”.

Song Picks: Ruins, DTA,

9/10

Young Fathers’ fourth album is a jubilant march of chants, pounding drums, and circular instrumental parts that build and build into a cacophony of positive feeling. It’s quite remarkable how original the band continues to sound, while being so completely accessible. Their lyrics are at times hard to decipher, and when you can decipher them they’re hard to penetrate. But as this lovely Pitchfork review says, it’s all about the feeling, which in this case is nearly euphoric. I’ve been a fan of this band for a while, but to me this is their best album yet. It doesn’t feel as gridded as previous efforts, it feels more spontaneous, fun, and communal, and that suits the band just perfectly. It’s hard to listen to Heavy, Heavy attentively and not come out the other side with a rejuvenated zest for live, and in 2023, that was a welcome thing indeed. It could have been 5 minutes or so longer, but its brevity only serves to make it feel more precious; that buzz of happiness that never quite lasts long enough.

Song Picks: Rice, Drum, Tell Somebody,

9/10

Oh Me Oh My is a story, an expression, one beyond choruses and verses, one as much of silence as noise, one of decay, one written in pain, pain overcome but constantly in the rearview mirror. It's an artistic statement one can't help but admire, lifted by its two best pieces, the beautifully simple opener and None of Us Have but a Little While, and the masterfully evocative Mount Meigs, documenting Holley's time in the Alabama Industrial School for Negro Children, and the horrific abuse that took place there, in a malaise of noise, thrashed drums, and Holley’s spoken word. It's a challenging album, an expression of a man dealing with a traumatic past that still gives him night terrors to this day, but it’s one you owe yourself to tackle.

Song Picks: Testing, Mount Meigs, None of us Have But a Little While

9/10

It’s a bit of a conincidence that I’m listening to this right after having loved Cocteau Twins’ Heaven or Las Vegas as part of my favourite albums of 1990, as there’s more than a few similarities here. Parannoul pushes what Cocteau Twins did yet further, so far that at times whatever recording software he is using is struggling to contain it, as bits cut in and out, struggling to not explode on themselves. After the Magic is the beautiful sound of saturated emotion.

Song Picks: Polaris, Sketchbook,

9/10

**3. Praise a Lord Who Chews but Which Does Not Consume; (Or Simply, Hot Between Worlds)**

**Yves Tumor**

Yves Tumor is back with a wall of sound whirling dervish of an album. With the 80s pop sensibilities of Prince and the fuzzy guitars and bass of a much unrulier Muse he creates a world of his own. He's that guy who keeps trying to write a pop hit but can't help making it so elaborate and dense that radio airwaves would quiver at the thought of playing them. There's a whole host of hits at their core here, but they're covered by glorious amounts of intricate fuzz and distortion, not least the soaring guitar solos that snake under many of the tracks. On the glorious In Spite of War the final chorus feels like Tumor's magnum opus, as if all the stars are aligning like a murmuration of birds weaving across the night sky. It's bloody majestic.

Song Picks: Lovely Sewer, Meteora Blues, In Spite of War

9/10

One of those rare albums that sounds instantly classic. Maybe because it's so rooted in it's unembellished songwriting. There's nothing spectacular about the chord progressions here, or indeed any of the musical score, but it's precisely this that leaves the focus on Sternberg's songwriting, which is some of the most consistently great I've heard. The best melodies are often in a major key, but they walk that tightrope above a vat of cheese. I've Got Me walks the tightrope with aplomb, and never looks close to falling off. How refreshing to have an album with a positive/empathetic outlook that will never get old.

Song Picks: People are Toys to You, I've Got Me, Mountains High, Stockholm Syndrome

9/10

I’ve always preferred the bit after a party where everyone is laid around as the sun comes up to all the dancing and such beforehand. Something chilled bounces of the speaker, people talk with worn voices, the odd person gets up and asks if people want a beer bringing. It’s calm, reflective, the interactions are real, there’s a kindness to everyone’s worn glows, the world is on pause and there’s nothing more important to be doing right now. Madre encapsulates that feeling for me, it’s beats are warm and soft, it’s global influences sprinkled on tastefully, its heart on its sleeve, its ego thoroughly dimmed. Madre is all those rare early mornings happily spent just being myself, surrounded by others doing the same.

Song Picks: Madres, How Music Makes You Feel Better, Estacion Esperanza

9/10

2021 - Clive's Top Albums of Every Year Challenge

January 30, 2022 by Clive in Clive's Album Challenge, Music

As I march on with my challenge of deciding on my favourite albums from every year from 1960 to the present day, I also need to keep up with the present day. As such, here’s my favourite albums of the year just gone, 2021. I can’t be bothered to summarise the year because let’s be honest, it wasn’t all that great, and it feels like that massive boat getting stuck in the Suez Canal sums it up pretty well. The music, which is luckily what we’re here to talk about, was top notch however. If you’re more interested in lists for other years gone by, all the ones I’ve done so far are on the index page here.

I’ve made sure to include the 2021 top 10s from rateyourmusic.com ( a user music rating website), albumoftheyear.org (their aggregation of all critic top album lists), Pitchfork (my favourite online music magazine) and Anthony Fantano of the Needle Drop (one of my favourite music reviewers). As these lists only come out towards the end of 2021, I’ve taken January to get through them, making sure I’ve reviewed all the albums contained on them. Should you care to see what those top 10s were, I’ve listed them below this article.

Of course, I’ve also included anything else I’ve listened to this year that I’ve liked. So with a total of 37 to get through, let’s get cracking.

This is technically a 2020 release but presumably included on lots of 2021 lists because it came out on the 25th of December and therefore about 3 weeks after most publications do their ‘end of year’ lists. I’ll spare my rant on that for another time. Whole Lotta Red is Playboi Carti’s second album featuring guest appearances from Kid Cudi, Future and Kanye West - who was an executive producer on the album. 24 tracks and over an hour long, the album is a behemoth, and that to me is what holds it back.

Carti’s vocal style is more concerned with fitting into a tune than necessarily saying anything, but his style is rather singular. His croaks on Stop Breathing cut right through, and provide one of the year’s more interesting vocal performances as various timbres rattle left to right, over the kind of rumbling bass-heavy track that dominates much of the album. The tracks are immediate, effective, but rather repetitive both within themselves and from track to track. The beats are so similar at times that I’m not sure if it’s a new song at all, and by 60 minutes that gets rather old, and even boring. There’s some good stuff here, but not an hour’s worth of it.

Song Picks: Stop Breathing, M3tamorphosis

5.5/10

kick iii is Venezuelan singer and producer Arca’s sixth record and third entry in the Kick quintet. Arca herself describes the album as "a portal directly into the more manic, violently euphoric and aggressively psychedelic sound palettes in the series” which describes it as well as I ever could. There’s a sense of manic violence to it that makes the album quite an aggressive listen, and certainly not the most accessible. Like its enigmatic cover, taken by Frederik Heyman, it takes a while to absorb what the hell is going on, but once you do you’re rewarded with something singular and memorable.

kick iii is a demanding listen, and not something I’ll be putting on too regularly, I find it feels a bit too splattered for my tastes, without anything particularly to hang on to. That aside though, I can’t argue that its remarkably cohesive for how manic it is, and has a sound very much its own.

Song Picks: Intimate Flesh

6.5/10

Naked Flames’ second album is a whirlwind of reflective energy. 247 365 bounces in from the stratosphere, bleeping and sparkling away over the top of gently pounding drums and hyperactive bass grooves, and it never lets up. I’m not sure the lofi production adds all that much, and I think a cleaner sound would have helped, but this is still a favourite when I need to get something done.

Song Picks: 247 365

7/10

Dry Cleaning were one of the rare bands I saw live in 2021, where their post-punky, atmopsheric sound went across really well, though Florence Shaw’s spoken word vocal style got somewhat buried in the live mix.

The band’s debut album, New Long Leg, was one of the most talked about albums of the year over here in the UK, and certainly on my favourite radio station, BBC Radio 6. The band creates a very unique sound with Tom Dowse’s superb post-punk guitar work, where evocative riffs seem to fall to him from the sky; and Shaw’s spoken word, almost boredly mumbled vocals. It’s the vocals that will make or break the band for people I imagine, where you’ll either love the juxtoposition they create with the post-punk instrumental backing, or find them unengaging. I lie somewhere in the middle. I really like the whole ‘vibe’ the band gives off on this record, but I feel Shaw’s lyrics aren’t quite engaging enough to work with her deliberately deadpan delivery. When the lyrical content works with her delivery style, as on the detached Scratchcard Lanyard, I love it, but at other times I can feel the album drifting away from me as it fails to pull me in.

Song Picks: Scratchcard Lanyard, Leafy

7/10

Annie Clark’s sixth album as St. Vincent is inspired by her father’s release from prison in 2019. Daddy’s Home is St. Vincent leaning into 70s rock, but with a style very much her own. The elaborate productions here sound vintage and whisky drenched. Clark’s vocals teeter on the edge of hinged and unhinged, and the whole thing feels like a slightly seedy and lively basement bar.

There’s plenty to love here, such as that peppy Wurlitzer on Pay Your Way in Pain, a song that sinks into an almost groovy chorus for it’s final 30 seconds. The Wurlitzer makes plenty of other prominent appearances on the record, something I personally am a fan of, including its key place in the title track’s unique sonic bedding. I also like the classic feel to the album, something encapsulated in the guitar solo that closes the downtempo Live in the Dream.

Daddy’s Home is the type of album that it’s very hard to get bored of. There’s so much thought that’s gone into creating instrumental depth and atmosphere, that you notice new things on every listen. It completely nails a mood, which I always appreciate in an album, even if it hasn’t totally grabbed me.

Song Picks: Pay Your Way in Pain, Daddy’s Home, Live in the Dream, …At the Holiday Party

7/10

32. For the First Time

Black Country, New Road

For the First Time made quite a stir over here in the UK, with many of my friends becoming rather obsessed with the band’s unique blend of post-punk, math-rock and jazz elements. It was nominated for the Mercury Prize.

The London band’s debut is a remarkably mature, considered affair, with opening track Instrumental showing the band’s instrumental prowess and lack of care for scaring anyone off who might be averse to anything a bit too experimental. Isaac Wood’s vocals blend the tortured screams of La Dispute and the only slightly less tortured mumbles of mewithoutyou, showing as much dynamic range as the music itself. The songs are generally free from more common song-structures, and tend to take the form of longer form, building pieces that often don’t reach the crescendo they allude to earlier on. An exception to this is Science Fair, where the crescendo definitely does happen as Wood’s scream of “there’s black country out there” is followed by howls of saxophone and mashed guitars.

I like For the First Time a lot; it’s endlessly creative, clearly very carefully thought out, and also emotionally affecting at points. However, I can’t help feeling at times it’s trying to be a little too clever for its own good, and there’s a sense of pretentiousness to the whole thing that holds it back for me, and means it lacks soul somehow. I think that’s just a personal response, but hey, this is my personal list.

Song Picks: Science Fair, Sunglasses, Opus

7/10

31. Call Me If You Get Lost

Tyler, the Creator

Tyler, the Creator’s sixth album. The beats be chill, the rhymes be ill, and the sonic textures are lovely.

Song Picks: MASSA, Sweet / I Thought You Wanted to Dance, RUNITUP

7.5/10

30. A Beginner’s Mind

Sufjan Stevens & Angelo De Augustine

A Beginner’s Mind was recorded by Stevens and De Augustine in a cabin where they watched movies for inspiration. I’ve always thought about doing an album of songs inspired by individual movies, they’ve beaten me to it, bastards.

I have to confess here that I’ve not heard much of Sufjan’s stuff so I’m somewhat of a novice on that front - something I know will be rectified once my album of the year challenge gets far enough along (though I’m some way off, having got to 1984 at time of writing).

A Beginner’s Mind is lovely. Sufjan’s whispered melodies are as warm as ever, and they work well with De Augustine’s higher register to create somewhat of a king sized and comforting musical mattress. Musically the palate is fittingly smooth and wholesome, and keeps things just interesting enough without attempting anything particularly novel. It’s all very pretty, and holds up to both background and active listening sessions admirably.

Song Picks: A Beginner’s Mind, Murder and Crime

7.5/10

After multiple delays while Kanye lived at the Mercedez-Benz stadium in Atlanta, the album finally dropped in August, but of course, Kanye claimed that Universal had released it without his approval. As messy as its release, Donda goes on for an intimidating 108 minutes. It’s chaotic, somewhat diluted and disjointed, and yet there’s something magnificent about how impenetrable it can be. There’s plenty of evidence of Kanye is capable of, Off the Grid sounds like an earthquake, Hurricane is minimalist but hits like a storm and there’s a My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy level of magnitude to a lot of the tracks here which I really like. That said, the album is messy, some of the lyrics are lazy - that Messi line anyone? - and there’s nothing quite as mindblowing as we were used to from Kanye in the previous decade.

All four of the ‘part 2’s’, especially considering the controversial nature of their features, add nothing to the album, and only hold it back by making it too long. That - not inconsequential point - aside though, Donda feels like an unflinching look into Kanye’s mind, warts and all, and for that I think it deserves a little more praise than it’s got.

Song Picks: Off the Grid, Hurricane, Come to Life

7.5/10

Taja Cheek’s second album as L’Rain is one of those albums that is pretty difficult to define by genre, so people just call it avant-something, usually avant-pop.

Fatigue feels like a dream, turn the volume up, close your eyes, and you’ll be hovering somewhere between time and space itself, in a place full of lavish, atmospheric sounds, with beautiful melodies coming from all kinds of sources. It feels like swimming through a musical ocean, a description that is particularly apt for the beautiful Blame Me, which is coated in so much reverb it makes you question your own existence.

Fatigue is an oddball, it’s both completely gorgeous and a bit forgettable. I don’t think the short running length helps on the latter. It seems like the kind of album that’ll completely blow me away if I listen to it at the right moment, I just haven’t found that moment yet.

Song Picks: Blame Me, Take Two

7.5/10

The American synth-pop duo’s debut album features a whole variety of influences, and is perhaps best compared to a softer Grimes. Mica’s multi-tracked vocals are thick, warm, and melodic while never being particularly emotional. The production on the tracks is top-notch, with thick synths and bouncy drums creating a very inviting and enjoyable sonic palette.

Although the album doesn’t have any obvious themes to hold it together, it has a very coherent sound, with tracks flowing nicely from one to the other. Mercurial World is a great display of pop songwriting from front to back. If I had to criticise it I’d perhaps say that it lacks a certain unique character to make it particularly stand out, but there’s no doubt this is a well-executed and thoroughly enjoyable album.

Song Picks: Mercurial World, Dawning of the Season, Something for 2

8/10

I heard I Eat Boys played by Iggy Pop on Radio 6 and was pulled in by its great melody, dark lyrics, and just general feel. So I thought I’d best give her album a spin. Moriondo is an 18 year old Youtube star, with over 3 million subscribers, and this is her second album.

Blood Bunny has plenty of humour, including songs about getting high and discovering just how big Manta Rays are after an internet search, and the aforementioned I Eat Boys where she sings about luring boys into her basement and eating them. However, it’s also an album about being yourself: Opener Rly Don’t Care and the later Slacker being great examples of this. Moriondo has a Taylor Swift-esque knack for catchy melodies, and though the production is nothing particularly inventive or fresh, it is clean and atmospheric, giving songs like GIRL ON TV a real added weight, and turning the simple I Want to Be With You into a genuine stadium banger. This is pop with a dash of punk, and it’s one of the most enjoyable, sing-alongable albums of the year.

Song Picks: I Eat Boys, GIRL ON TV, I Want to Be With You

8/10

25. Sometimes I Might Be Introvert

Little Simz

The British rapper’s fourth comes in at a whopping 65 minutes, and it’s ambitious not just in length but in the sheer level of detail to each production, which is as smooth as silk, with gorgeous instrumental touches to accompany the plethora of chilled, funky beats and basslines.

Little Simz raps with an enviable confidence, one that cuts through even when her style barely rises above the volume of a conversation. She talks about personal issues, racism, fathers, and above all success through hard work. One listen to SIMBI (which is incidentally her first name), makes it clear that Little Simz was always going to make it one way or another. She raps about the level of dedication reserved to those who feel they have a right to be heard, and - in Little Simz’s case, she’s right, with a flow that is an absolute joy to listen to combined with astute lyricism.

On very few occasions over the album’s significant running length, Little Simz’s lyrics feel a little forced, and the interludes feel skippable after a listen or two. Those issues aside though Sometimes I Might be Introvert is one of the most straight-up enjoyable hip-hop albums I’ve heard for a while, with quality tracks from start to finish, production that sounds like a million dollars (in a good way), and the rewarding feeling that someone who truly deserved to break through with her last album, has flourished. It’s hard to imagine she doesn’t have a masterpiece up her sleeve soon, but this isn’t quite it.

Song Picks: Introvert, Woman, Point and Kill, Rollin Stone

8/10

Technically her first EP, but coming in at a very album length of 32 minutes it could easily be seen as her fourth album instead. Heaux Tales was named album of the year by Pitchfork.

An honest and personal hip-hop album, Heaux Tales is about women being proud of who they are, of their sexuality, and their femininity. Heaux Tales is a powerhouse of an album, and a bold statement of female empowerment. It makes a mark not only with its message, but also its slick production and great songwriting. Sullivan’s vocals are pitch-perfect, while still containing plenty of character, and her performances are powerful and yet vulnurable in a way that only someone with supreme confidence in her craft could muster. The album is a little too overtly sexual for my tastes, and that’ll impact how often I rerurn to it for sure, but I respect that is very much a personal thing, and that this album achieves what it sets out to do pretty spectacularly.

Oh and Lost One is gorgeous.

Song Picks: Put It Down, On it, Lost One, The Other Side

8/10

Lingua Inota’s fourth album is a vocal powerhouse, the imagery is less satanic than her previous album Caligula but no less religious in content and sound. The whole thing sounds like a visit to some culty church, where Kristin Hayter sings with an otherwordly power and accuracy over the top of the raucous pounding of instruments bouncing off the ornate walls.

Sinner Get Ready is very challenging, and I felt my body bracing to get through certain sections - the doom-laden organ sound on the opening trackTHE ORDER OF SPIRITUAL VIRGINS for example - but it’s ultimately worth it, even if I can’t see myself returning to it too often. Hayter’s vocal performance is astounding, full of drama, variety, and moments of pure brilliance, and the musical bedrock formed by Appalachian folk instruments accompanies the organ perfectly, creating a dark, doomed atmosphere. Sinner Get Ready absolutely isn’t for everyone, but Hayter’s ability to craft albums that sound so unique and important is remarkable, and I’d say this is essential listening for anyone interested in the pushing of musical envelopes.

Song Pick: THE ORDER OF SPIRITUAL VIRGINS, MANY HANDS, MAN IS LIKE A SPRING FLOWER

8/10

22. Collections from the Whiteout

Ben Howard

Howard’s fourth album sees him turning to a more electronic sound, something presumably somewhat forced by his lockdown isolation.

Collections from the Whiteout is meandering, but it’s not the kind of meandering where you’re lost and everything is so grey that no destination appeals more than another, it’s the kind of meandering where everything is so quietly bursting with beauty, that an aimless wander is the only way to soak it all in. It doesn’t hit me as hard as the excellent Noonday Dream, leaning a little too much into the steady and calmer parts of that record, but it’s still as gorgeous and earthy as that forest on the hill.

Song Picks: What a Day, Follies Fixture, Rookery

8/10

The Scottish band’s fourth album does nothing unexpected, but refines what the band do so well yet further.

Lauren Mayberry’s vocals soar even more than usual on this record, as she crafts dramatic melodies that punch through the dense productions with inspirational power. Mayberry’s lyrics are as personal as any from the band’s previous albums, with songs of broken relationships, deaths, and struggles with fame and society’s expectations. Iain Cook and Martin Doherty’s production is as maximalist as always, though with a taste for a few frequency filling instruments rather than many thinner ones to achieve a similar effect. The songs sound bigger than they ever have - no mean feat - and it’s hard not to be swept away by the album’s epic sound. Some of the melodies are starting to sound familiar here, and it wouldn’t hurt to have the odd song that doesn’t sound as if the planet depends on it, but this is another thoroughly enjoyable, danceable, singable and emotional cannonball of an album.

Song Picks: Violent Delights, How Not to Drown, Nightmares

8.5/10

Rodrigo’s debut album has been one of the year’s most commercially successful, and it’s easy to see why. Packed front to back with punchy bangers swarming in catchy melodies, it also features vocal performances from Rodrigo that aren’t afraid to include imperfections for the sake of emotional honesty.

There’s punk rockers like the opening brutal, slower ballads like traitor, and straight-up pop gems like good 4 u, one of the year’s most recognisable singles with its Paramore-esque chorus. There really isn’t a song here that couldn’t be a hit single, and that’s no mean feat.

SOUR isn’t afraid to sound like an album written by a 17-year-old and that’s what makes it so bloody good. It perfectly conveys the raw emotions one experiences at that age before getting numb to it all in later life, and it does it in a way we can all relate to. It’s pretty hard not to sing along to SOUR once its approachable lyrics bury themselves into your brain, and that’s because it encapsulates a part of all of us.

Song Picks: traitor, drivers license, good 4 u, favorite crime

8.5/10

Wye Oak co-founder Jenn Wasner released her debut studio album in 2016 under the moniker Flock of Dimes, this is her second solo album.

Dream pop can easily get lost in its own pretty atmospheres at times, and when that happens it can get quite dreary. Head of Roses is anything but. Jenn Wasner’s melodies and vocals are constantly captivating, rising above the beautiful musical backdrops to take you into the album's dreamy, melancholy world again and again. And when it all gets stripped back on the album’s more minimalist tracks, her vocals more than carry them.

It feels like a ride through some nebula on the back of a dragon, but one of those friendly cartoon dragons. If someone asked me what the prettiest album of 2021 was, this would undoubtedly be in contention.

Song Picks: 2 Heads, Awake for the Sunrise, Head of Roses

8.5/10

The Hold Steady’s eighth studio album was the first very much approached as an album rather than a collection of songs according to vocalist and lyricist Craig Finn, who has made more of a name for himself on his solo records recently. It’s no secret that The Hold Steady are one of my favourite bands, though I generally prefer the earlier records, and I feel their albums are more cohesive than this comment from Finn suggests.

Open Door Policy sees the band slow down, Finn is now nearly 50 after all, but still explosive when they need to be. It feels like a blend of the rambunctious the Hold Steady of old and Craig Finn’s great recent solo records, with the slower, more atmospheric soundscapes accompanying his Kerouac style lyrics on tracks like Lanyards, seamlessly linking with the song’s heavier chorus. It’s one of the album’s most poignant songs, telling the age-old story of someone going to California to follow their dreams of fame, only to come up empty:

I saw a few stars
But I never made it into a movie
Still trying to make moves
But I'm back in Independence, Missouri

The album’s crescendos are tastefully toned back to make sure you can still hear every one of Finn’s lyrics, which makes the louder parts of the record such as the triumphant, brass infused chorus of the lead single Family Farm punch less from an instrumental perspective, but Finn’s poetry and performance has always been what pulls The Hold Steady apart from other bands, and so keeping the focus on that is a wise decision in my books.

Open Door Policy flows as well as any album they’ve ever recorded, and it nails those highs that the band are so good at. It’s my favourite Hold Steady album since 2006’s Boys and Girls in America.

Song Picks: Lanyards, Family Farm

8.5/10

The English rock band’s second album was born of a more thought out and less improvisational style than their excellent 2019 debut, Schlagenheim.

While prog-rock has never quite reached the heady heights it reached in the 70s and 80s, there are still plenty of prog-rock bands around, though many seem to have got lost in the ‘look how well I can play my instrument’ craze. Black-Midi are very much bucking that trend. Don’t get me wrong, they’re stupidly proficient at their instruments, especially considering how young they are (they were just out of high school when gaining prominence in 2018), but that’s not the focus here. The focus here is to keep you on your toes. Cavalcade is constantly surprising, the fact that something as pulsating, grinding, and brilliantly abrasive as the opener John L is followed by something as calm and relaxed as Marlene Dietrich is a prime example of this. But it’s not just between songs, but in the songs themselves that this vivid unpredictability lives. Morgan Simpson’s superb, flurried drumming is the bedrock of an album that’s a perfect blend of calm and chaos. Intricate and barnstorming are words that can be used to describe different sections of many of the album’s songs, Chrondromalcia Patella being a great example, where the song’s finale threatens to explode into a chaotic mess, and yet is reigned in by Simpson’s seemingly superhero like ability to keep a beat no matter how intense and complicated everything gets around him.

My album of the year challenge has educated me plenty about prog-rock’s great records of the past, but Cavalcade is one of the best things I’ve heard released in the genre in recent years.

Song Picks: John L, Marlene Dietrich, Chrondromancia Patella

8.5/10

16. By the Time I Get to Phoenix

Injury Reserve

Injury Reserve member Stepa J Grogs died during the recording of this, their second album, and it is dedicated in his memory by surviving members Ritchie with a T and Parker Corey.

By the Time I Get to Phoenix very much defies genre descriptions, and is rather hard to put in a box. There are the rap elements you’d expect, but they’re by no means a centre point, and in fact the album manages to go along without having a clear centre point. It gracefully moves through its plethora of musical ideas, creating something that is rather hard to pin down, but in a way that adds intrigue rather than any feelings of frustration.

There’s no verses or choruses here, just sounds. It’s not ambient in any way - it hits too hard for that - but it shares a certain floaty, structure-free feel with the genre. However, while ambient music is often akin to something being delicately sprinkled near your ears, this is more like a frenetic scattering of thoughts, both musically and lyrically. Top Picks for You comes close to a structure, with the poetics perfectly accompanied by what sounds like a melodic siren. It’s a song that manages to sound massive with little, and one of my favourites of the year, a soulful, smooth, and ethereal record of loss. Wild Wild West disintegrates any calm that track may have built up, with what sounds like a frantic and futile scramble for cohesion.

By the Time I Get to Phoenix has been considered post-rap by some, and it defies genres so well that the only way to describe it would be to come up with a suitable new one, post-rap seems as good as any to me. I find the album’s reluctance to be grappled frustrating at times, but when I let go and stop trying to grapple it, it feels unlike anything I’ve heard for a long time - and it soars.

Song Picks: Top Picks for You, Knees, Bye Storm

8.5/10

JPEGMAFIA’s fourth album was released as both an ‘online’ (streaming services version) and offline (bandcamp, youtube and music sellers) version. In his ‘liner’ notes on bandcamp, JPEG claims the offline version is the ‘true LP!’, so that’s the one I’m going to review here. The record is perhaps less manic and envelope breaking than 2019’s All My Heroes are Cornballs, but it still skips and shouts with the punk mentality of a renegade.

LP! is an absolute bundle of energy, on DIRTY! it flits between staccato raps and percussion and dropping into one of my favourite bass parts of the year, an exhilarating nose dive down a tunnel slide. On END CREDITS (track 4, naturally), JPEGMAFIA demonstrates why he’s often considered the intersection between rap and punk, as he growls and screams over the top of an almost post-punk guitar riff. As with All My Heroes…, LP! is completely restless, jumping from one idea to the next like a 5-year-old child’s brain, only this time JPEG occasionally decides to turn an idea into a song, rather than having it appear once only for it to never appear again. This makes for a few more songs that work out of the context of the album, such as the aforementioned DIRTY!, as well as the superb REBOUND, where the squashed brass melody sounds massive. However, I’d still say this is best listened to as one crazy whole. THOT’S PRAYER is a great example of JPEGMAFIA’s originality here, and its fabulous repurposing of Britney Spears’ Hit Me Baby One More Time is probably my favourite ‘cover’ of the year

LP! is a condensed hit of unrefined sugar, one that only feels more conservative than his last release because that one broke so much ground it’s hard to find any new ground to break. As JPEG says on bandcamp, this is not for ‘doing the dishes to or whatever’, this is for those that like detail, and LP! sure is crammed with that.

Song Picks: DIRTY!, THOT’S PRAYER, END CREDITS, REBOUND

8.5/10

Bandleader Michelle Zauner said of their third release, "After spending the last five years writing about grief, I wanted our follow up to be about joy". The joy begins with the opening track Paprika, one of my favourite songs of the year featuring a triumphant melody accompanied by orchestral synths and marching toms which switch for a snare drum during the song’s brilliantly cheerful chorus. The joy continues with Be Sweet, an 80s pop-rocker with another immaculate set of melodies, which in a more perfect world would have spent weeks on end at number 1.

The album is full of great little touches around its songs’ central melodic anchors. Slide Tackle, a song about essentially wrestling your mind to be positive features fluttery guitar parts from Ryan Galloway for example, which really add a lot of depth to its sound. Posing in Bondage, a sultry song about controlled desire is elevated by synthy, pounding bass and what sounds like a sparkling xylophone during its climax. There’s a lot going on in each song here, with a sonic depth that is to be lauded. The instrumental ending to the closing track Posing for Cars is absolutely gorgeous too, taking me right back to my childhood with that 80s guitar solo.

Jubilee is a brilliantly executed pop album, that manages to convey a positive outlook, while never sounding too cheesy.

8.5/10

Turnstile’s third album is widely seen as their best yet, and it’s not difficult to see why. GLOW ON sees the band’s hardcore sound sprinkled with more than a dash of dream-pop, and it’s that inspired combination that gives the album a lot of its dynamics, which are what essentially make the album so great. The album makes every riff hit hard, which is no mean feat, and is as much about what precedes those riffs as the riffs themselves. Everything feels carefully sculpted for maximum impact. This almost scientific method of song construction can often make the resulting music sound stale and machine-like, but that’s not the case here. A lot of credit has to be given to Brendan Yates’ vocals, which sound as if he’s completely feeling everything he sings. There’s no feeling of over-rehearsed staleness here, and considering the amount of rehearsing that must have gone into some of these fairly complex arrangements, that’s rather impressive.

GLOW ON is the hardest hitting album of the year by a country mile, and it achieves this not by subjecting us to a constant barrage of distorted guitars (though there’s plenty of that), but by carefully switching things up just enough to keep things fresh, while never sacrificing its accessibility. GLOW ON isn’t revolutionary, but it’s reverb-drenched and slightly softened hardcore is refreshing, and it’s my favourite heavy album of the year.

Song Picks: MYSTERY, BLACKOUT, DON’T PLAY, UNDERWATER BOI, ALIEN LOVE CALL

8.5/10

Richard Dawson is one of those artists glaringly missing from my musical map, and this, his release with Finnish rock group Circle, has made me realise that is a wrong that needs to be righted pronto.

Conceptually the album is rooted (sorry…) in plants, with all seven of its tracks being named after one. Within this framework Dawson weaves the stories he’s so good at, on Ivy, about the Greek God of wine Dionysus, about the true story of a 32,000 year old seed being brought to life on Silene and on Methuselah, about the sad chopping down of what was thought to be the world’s oldest organism by Geographer Donald Rusk Curry in the 60s, the title referring to the name of what is now the oldest known living organism.

Researching lyrics to songs is rarely as fascinating as it is with Henki, but there’s a whole lot more to it than its strong, unique and interesting lyrical content. Dawson’s vocal performance is unpredictable, which is something new for the folk style he leans into. His melodies seem spontaneous, and he’s not afraid to test the range of his vocals and throw in imperfections. Circle’s backing is as masterful as you’d expect from a band that has released around 40 albums. There’s a wide variety of textures, from some that are clearly 70s metal-inspired, to others that are more prog-rock, to more ambient - almost jazzy - work in the breakdown of the 12-minute epic Silphium, which has a superb, almost post-rock finale. Henki stands out like an oak among pines for its sheer uniqueness, and from a songwriting perspective, it’s one of the most inspiring works of the year for me personally.

Song Picks: Cooksonia, Silphium

8.5/10

Many bands sound more and more tired as the years go on, as they become stuck for ideas. This isn’t the case with Low, a duo from Minnesota comprising of Alan Sparhawk on vocals and guitar, and Mimi Parker on drums and vocals. HEY WHAT is their 13th album, and it sounds as fresh, energetic, and bullish as a debut album.

Part trance, part rock, part pop and all Low, HEY WHAT is a statement of minimalism and maximalism all at the same time. There aren’t many instruments here but they all sound huge; that synth pounding into the distance on I Can Wait, sounds like it’s coming from another solar system, a warning of an approaching trance army. Sparhawk and Parker’s vocals often combine on the tracks to create an ethereal sound that seems to have no source, much like the pulverising distorted guitars and synths they sound as if they’ve just been birthed out of the midnight air.

At times, Hey What threatens to crumble into tiny particles and spread into nothingness, as if it’s become too big for this earth. Generally though, Low is a perfect example of making the most of one thing, rather than adding a lot of things. It creates walls of sound without drums or tons of instrumental parts overdubbed, using only the sheer breadth of its sounds. That guitar (I think?) on Disappearing, for example, seems to have its own gravitational pull, sucking you into your headphones.

Low feels like a monstrous barrage of sound and a warm pillow all at once, remarkable.

Song Picks: Disappearing, Hey, Days Like These

8.5/10

SKA DREAM is an oddball - it’s a complete ska rework of Rosenstock’s previous album NO DREAM, one which I confess to not having heard yet, despite it being on my list to check out when it came out last year. I was going to rectify that before listening to this, but then I thought it might be interesting to hear the perspective of someone for whom this is their first exposure to these lyrics and melodies - which I’m told are the same as the initial album.

It goes without saying for a ska album that this thing is energetic, but I’m going to say it anyway. Jeff Rosenstock has always had a talent for great pop-punk melodies and a style of singing that somehow makes them less Blink 182 and Sum 41, and with a lot more edge. Rosenstock’s lyrics are as cynical and brilliant as ever. From the opener NO TIME’s lyrics of having to be ok with living in a world you rather disagree with “Did you learn to make amends with your pile of flaming shit / Gain the patience to deal with total idiots?“ to on the nose commentary of school shootings in the US in NO DREAM, “They were lining up the unsuspecting teens / For a violent moment of celebrity”. Rosenstock is unflinching, and that helps to create that cathartic energy he always seems to muster on his records. He’s also more than happy to make songs less than 2 minutes long, which is an under-appreciated skill in my eyes.

If I had to choose a 2021 album to listen to performed live, then I’d choose NO DREAM. Not only because I’ve missed ska, but because the record’s bursting with resigned anger at the state of the world, and it feels like a scream of frustration at the walls (that of course don’t give a shit) that’s not only relieving but a silly amount of fun too.

Song Picks: NO TIME TO SKANK, Horn Line, Ohio Porkpie

8.5/10

9. To See the Next Part of the Dream

Parannoul

South Korean musician Parannoul’s second album is a post-rock masterstroke. No one knows who they are, or whether they have any help to create this mass of noise.

I guess To See the Next Part of the Dream sounds most like shoegaze if you had to categorise it, but it’s a lot messier than the sparkling, perfectly produced wall-of-sound we’ve come to expect from the genre. The drums on this album sound like they’ve been recorded on a phone - fuzzy and distorted, the bass is there but somehow so woolly it’s hard to tell what it’s doing other than adding some ‘thickness’ and the guitars are so distorted that at times, such as on the title track, they seem to blend into, and become one with the fizzy cymbal mayhem created by the drums. It’s lo-fi, but it somehow also sounds quite full, where a lot of lo-fi is thin. The opening of the penultimate track Chicken sounds bloody humongous for example. Parannoul’s vocals are so drowned out by the din around them, that it barely matters that they’re being sung in South Korean, I’d never have a chance of understanding them even if they were in English. The lyrics are helpfully translated on Bandcamp, and it only takes reading the opening track’s final verse to fully appreciate the amount of self-loathing on offer here:

I wish no one had seen my miserable self
I wish no one had seen my numerous failures
I wish my young and stupid days to disappear forever
My precious relationships, now they’re just in the memories

To See the Next Part of the Dream sounds like the anger of someone being told daily to ‘love themselves’ when all they want to do is scream about how much they don’t. The songs are massive, they build and build so much that at times it feels like flying. It’s as if Parannoul has sunk so low that they’ve found the musical ingredients for euphoria down there, and as the fuzz consumes you for over an hour, they try desperately to scream through the dreamy hiss and chaos. You’re left feeling cleansed, but not because of any renewed positive outlook. Quite the opposite, ‘the next part of the dream’ is a euphoric acceptance of mediocrity.

Song Picks: White Ceiling, Analog Sentimentalism, Chicken

8.5/10

Owusu’s remarkably accomplished debut album is one of the most god-damn fun things to come out this year. Owusu is completely unafraid to shift genres with tracks ranging from hip-hop to rock, to pop and sometimes seemingly all three at once. Owusu states that the album is “Performing what the world wants to see, even if you don't have the capacity to do so honestly. Slathering honey on your demons to make them palatable to people who only want to know if you're okay if the answer is yes. That's the idea, turned into beautiful, youthful, ugly, timeless and strange music.”

It does exactly that, Smiling With No Teeth is infectiously fun while beneath its surface, for those who are ready to hear it, there are stories of depression and mental health struggles. For those not ready to hear it, there’s pumping bass riffs, an infectious enthusiasm coming through from Owusu, catchy melodies, and above all, a variety and quality to the songs that would keep even those with the lowest attention spans entertained. I mean who would have thought that the guy who wrote a song like the emotional depression-ballad A Song About Fishing, would also write something as bouncy and gruff as the excellent Don’t Need You or as ragged and rocking as Black Dogs!. A Song About Fishing , by the way, is quite possibly my favourite song of the year. A perfectly produced song that’s chorus is as apt as anything written on depression this year:

And rise and shine, to dawn I wake
To cast my net in a fishless lake
Rise and shine, to dawn I wake
Casting my net in a fishless lake

Smiling With No Teeth is unpretentious and fun. It has depth while never making you feel bad for not looking for it, and it’s glorious.

Song Picks: Waitin’ On Ya’, A Song About Fishing, On the Move!

9/10

The Weather Station’s fifth album is like a meadow; nothing sticks out and calls for your attention, but together everything creates something majestic. And like a meadow, if you focus in on the individual parts, they’re all gorgeous in their own quiet way.

Tamara Lindeman’s vocals are sung as if no one is listening, so completely personally and quietly that the whole album feels like an intimate and important moment. All the instrumental additions complement this feel perfectly, with an alluring softness to them, gently sparkling as to never distract your attention from the whole, while adding up to make one of the most remarkable soundscapes of the year. A beautifully introverted journey that blooms and blooms with each listen.

Song Picks: Robber, Atlantic, Loss

9/10

Chrystia "Tia" Cabral’s experimental pop project Spellling returns with a third studio album, which Anthony Fantano named his favourite album of 2021 and gave a rare 10 to, something he’s only done with 6 other albums.

The Turning Wheel is sumptuously produced, Cabral’s vocals perfectly clear above the lush soundscapes created by the heap of additional musicians on this album, mainly adding a substantial brass backing to many of the album’s songs. The Turning Wheel is a carefully crafted experience that is melodic, constantly sonically engaging due to the wide array of instrumental touches, and probably the most well-produced record of the year. The whole album is luxurious to listen to and completely cohesive, succeeding in transporting me to a fantastical world that’s a complete joy to be enveloped in. A perfectly executed album.

Song Picks: Little Deer, Turning Wheel, Boys at School

9/10

Tuareg musician Mdou Moctar’s sixth album has made quite a few end of year lists in the English-speaking world. All the more impressive when you consider the whole album is sung in Tamasheq - a Malian variety of Tuareg - and that it’s very much rooted in traditional Tuareg music. For those who don’t know (I didn’t), the Tuareg people are a large ethnic group that principally inhabit the Sahara in a vast area stretching from far southwestern Libya to southern Algeria, Niger, Mali and Burkina Faso. Mdou Moctar himself is based in Niger.

Of course, I can’t speak about the lyrical content of the album, but I can talk about the music. It’s certainly refreshing to have more exotic rhythms and instruments than is typical in any of these albums, but that’s far from the album’s only selling point. The melodies on Afrique Victime are gorgeous - the soft recent single Tala Tannam a fine example, but what really makes Afrique Victime so brilliant, is Moctar’s incomparable guitar playing. It could be because I've not listened to any Tamasheq music before, but to me he sounds so unique, so prodigious, that I get excited every time I put this record on. Known to some as the Hendrix of the desert, his solos are the centrepiece to all the album’s tracks, with his guitar work on the title track in particular being nothing short of stratospheric. From the opening track Chismiten, where he arrives with some gnarly bluesy grit, Moctar’s guitar playing is exciting, bursting with energy, and completely his own. He plays using mainly his hands using a rapid finger movements as shown in this interview, and this pick-free style helps create his more free-form, less defined sound that is at times so fresh and powerful that I was giggling with joy. Afrique Victime is the best ‘guitar album’ I’ve heard for a long time.

Moctar, in the aforementioned interview, talks about how music isn’t as controlled in Africa as it is here, when he makes a tape it inevitably gets copied hundreds of times and sold on. Indeed, he first gained notice through a trading network of cellphones and memory cards. He talks of hearing his music on people’s phones as he sat on buses, people none the wiser that the guitarist they’re listening to is sat right next to them. Moctar doesn’t seem all that bothered about fame, ‘I can’t tell them’ he says, it’s pretty clear that Moctar plays the guitar because he bloody loves it, and that comes across perfectly on Afrique Victime, a tour de force of creative joy, and as great a testament to the power of the guitar as I’ve heard this decade.

Song Picks: Afrique Victime, Chismiten, Tala Tannam

9/10

4. Promises

Floating Points, Pharaoh Sanders & the London Symphony Orchestra

We’ve had Pharaoh Sanders on plenty of albums on these lists already, way back in the 60s and 70s on both John and Alice Coltrane’s records for example, and it’s a delight to have him back here in 2021, combining with British producer Sam Shepherd, more commonly known as Floating Points.

Promises consists of one 46 minute piece divided into nine movements. The whole piece is composed by Sam Shepherd, with Pharaoh’s playing featuring extensively, and yet sparingly, throughout. Promises is a triumph of electronic meets classical, an ambient masterpiece that glides like the passing of time on a cobbled Italian street, with people sitting on balconies nursing a coffee as the sun sets. Pharaoh Sanders’ saxophone playing is some of the finest instrumental playing to appear on any modern record, his phrasing is measured and delicate, and yet he’s unafraid to skitter out more elaborate lines such as on the majestic Movement 5. At 80 years old he plays like an absolute master of his instrument, someone who can do it all, and yet does only what is needed. Shephard’s synth and piano provide a sparkling playground for Sanders to showcase his considerable talents in the opening 4 movements, before the Shephard’s string arrangements (played by the London Symphony Orchestra) take a more central role for the record’s second side. The saturated, long notes conjure up images of dramatic landscapes as Shepherd’s central piano twinkle keeps things grounded and flowing, before the piece settles into a gentle sparkle again in Movement 8.

This has quickly become one of my favourite ambient albums, up there with some of Brian Eno’s 70s creations, and I can’t give it any higher praise than that.

9/10

Space 1.8 is London based Belgian-Caribbean jazz musician Nala Sinephro’s debut album.

I mean where do you even start when talking about such an accomplished, well constructed, delicate piece of art from such a young musician. Nala was only 22 when recording Space 1.8, and yet she leads a whole host of UK jazz musicians to create something - that I guess has to be called ambient due to its lack of beats and relaxed, unstructured nature - but is so much more than that. The complex interwoven instrumental parts here combine to create something that immediately calms the mind, and brings on a state of simple clarity. But there’s a journey here too, as things build gently to the almost agitated Space 6, where the off-beat drums sound as if they’re frantically trying to make their way home, and the synths roar coldly before we’re lulled into the slightly calmer Space 7 which is orchestrated so perfectly with its unpredictable synth waves that it feels much like the calm after a storm. The storm may have disappeared, but it still lingers uneasily in you. By the 18-minute closing Space 8 we’re floating effortlessly through the twinkling stars, guided by various, almost bird-like, sounds and carefully breathed brass parts. Nala’s intricate performances on piano, keyboards and pedal harp have gently guided us - rather shyly for someone with such skill - through something that feels truly unforgettable.

Space 1.8 is a place I’ve escaped to on countless occasions this year, and it’s cleared my mind in a way very few things manage to do. I believe that comes from how well such underlying complexity is masked as something simple and ambient. The latter would stop working on me eventually, but Space 1.8’s underlying complexity seems to mean that my mind focuses on different things every listen, making each one its own journey. The album never quite seems the same, it almost seems alive.

Song Picks: Space 1, Space 2, Space 6

9/10

2. Volcanic Bird Enemy and the Voiced Concern

Lil Ugly Mane

Lil Ugly Mane’s third album sees the Travis Miller project turn away from hip-hop and features him singing on most tacks. It also gets the award for sounding the most like its cover this year which, when you look at the rather mad cover, is impressive.

Volcanic Bird Enemy and the Voiced Concern is scattershot, featuring a whole meld of different genres and styles, presented in Lil Ugly Mane’s characteristic lo-fi style. There’s a definite plunderphonic feel to the album here, and I’d most closely link it to a lo-fi and more drowsy version of the Avalanches, with the music seemingly being plucked or influenced from anywhere and everywhere. Vocally Miller is unspectacular and slightly detached, but that fits here perfectly in my opinion. I’m very much here for the way he sings catchy melodies with a lack of enthusiasm, as if he’s somehow bored of coming up with them. It all contributes to the pot-smoke drenched and breezy feel of the record.

I think Miller’s knack for a catchy melody is what ties the whole thing together (along with the delivery I’ve already mentioned), and while the music from song to song varies massively, there’s an undercurrent of fun and playfulness to all Miller’s seemingly LSD infused productions. The evocative, ramshackle and crackling 50s bar sound of styrofoam is just one of the glorious, complete surprises here, in an album chock full of them. The barnstorming distorted guitar haze of discard combined with the seemingly juxtapositional mumbled vocal is another.

Volcanic Bird Enemy and the Voiced Concern is as weird as it sounds, but it’s also brilliantly enjoyable and unpretentious, emanating a warm glow despite its often sombre lyrical content. It sounds like cynical creativity, and I love it.

Song Picks: benadryl submarine, discard, headboard, porcelain slightly

9/10

Electronic music producer Porter Robinson’s second album, and first for seven years perfectly combines folk, synths, electro-pop and shoegaze to create quite probably the year’s most uplifting album. Thematically songs are often about Robinson’s struggles with depression and his writer’s block. Nurture feels like the perfect expression of a turning point for him, one that he perfectly describes in a letter to fans from his Twitter about the single Get Your Wish, my favourite extract of which I’ll include here:

"I realized I shouldn't write music with the expectation that the productivity or achievement will fix my problems, but instead with the hope that my honest expression will move people the way music moves me. So when I was really struggling to write and it seemed impossible, instead of thinking, 'You're struggling because you're a fraud, you're clearly not cut out for this,' I began to tell myself, 'Yeah, this is what you sacrifice.'"

Both his depression and writer’s block are perfectly summarised in the final verse of the album’s lovely closing track, Trying to Feel Alive:

Then somebody somewhere finds
The warmth of summer in the songs you write
Maybe it's a gift that I couldn't recognize
Trying to feel alive

The album opens with pumping dance anthem Look at the Sky and takes us on a journey of well-produced, catchy songs featuring heavily processed vocals from Robinson, using pitch-shifting to give a male-female duet feel. The whole thing is consistently entrancing and cathartically personal and relatable in a way that electronic music - especially electronic music this lively - often isn’t. In a masterclass of how to pace an hour-long album, the record’s more piano rooted interludes and songs are perfectly placed to make the next folk-infused electronica banger hit all the harder. Robinson picked the name Nurture for the album because of how similar it sounds to ‘nature’. In a year where we’ve needed the former, and many have found it in the latter, it feels like the perfect album to celebrate getting through what has been a particularly tough year for many of us. The album’s heavily folk-inspired sound also helps with the ‘nurturing’ feel, grounding the album’s heavy production values somewhat.

Nurture’s rooting in warm, powerful synths and glowing, fuzzy vocals helps it feel like that childhood teddy bear or toy that still gives you comfort through memories of simpler times. Nurture feels like a euphoric bursting out of one’s mental cage in musical format, and there’s something truly glorious about that.

Song Picks: Sweet Time, Blossom, Wind Tempos, Musician, Something Comforting, Unfold

9.5/10

——————————————————————————————————————————————————

The lists I made sure to listen to (with albums that made it into my own top 10 bolded)

Anthony Fantano had the most make it into my own top 10, with 4.

rateyourmusic.com top 10 - this was taken in January 2022, and - with it being based on average user ratings - may change over time.

Little Simz - Sometimes I Might Be Introvert
LP! - JPEGMAFIA
Injury Reserve - By the Time I Get to Phoenix
black midi - Cavalcade
Floating Points, Pharaoh Sanders & The London Symphony Orchestra - Promises
Lil Ugly Mane - Volcanic Bird Enemy and the Voiced Concern
Lingua Ignota - Sinner Get Ready
Magdalena Bay - Mercurial World
Black Country, New Road - For the First Time
Tyler, the Creator - Call Me if You Get Lost

albumoftheyear.org critic lists aggregated (Top 10)

Little Simz - Sometimes I Might Be Introvert
Tyler, the Creator- CALL ME IF YOU GET LOST
Floating Points, Pharoah Sanders & The London Symphony Orchestra - Promises
Dry Cleaning - New Long Leg
Japanese Breakfast - Jubilee
Olivia Rodrigo - SOUR
Low - Hey What
Turnstile - GLOW ON
Jazmine Sullivan - Heaux Tales
The Weather Station - Ignorance

Pitchfork Top 10

Jazmine Sullivan - Heaux Tales
L'Rain - Fatigue
Tyler, the Creator - CALL ME IF YOU GET LOST
Floating Points, Pharoah Sanders & The London Symphony Orchestra - Promises
Low - Hey What
Turnstile - GLOW ON
The Weather Station - Ignorance
Mdou Moctar - Afrique Victime
Playboi Carti - Whole Lotta Red
Dry Cleaning - New Long Leg

Anthony Fantano (the Needle Drop) Top 10

Spellling - The Turning Wheel
Lingua Ignota - Sinner Get Ready
Arca - KicK iii
Floating Points, Pharoah Sanders & The London Symphony Orchestra - Promises
St Vincent - Daddy’s Home
JPEGMAFIA - LP! (2021)
Richard Dawson & Circle - Henki (2021)
Little Simz - Sometimes I Might Be Introvert
Porter Robinson - Nurture (2021)
Jeff Rosenstock - SKA DREAM (2021)

1982 - Clive's Top Albums of Every Year Challenge

December 09, 2021 by Clive in Clive's Album Challenge, Music

Over what will likely be the next few years I’m going to be ranking and reviewing the top 5 albums - plus a fair few extras - according to users on rateyourmusic.com (think IMDB for music) from every year from 1960 to the present. If you want to know more, I wrote an introduction to the ‘challenge’ here. You can also read all the other entries I’ve written so far by heading to the lovely index page here.

It’s time to musically tackle 1982, the year the space shuttle Columbia made its first mission, Steven Spielberg’s E.T. and the Commodore 64 was released, the Falklands War happened, and Ingrid Bergman died.

We’re here for the music though right? Well, here’s what rateyourmusic.com’s users rate as their top 5 albums of 1982:

#1 The Cure - Pornography
#2 Kate Bush - The Dreaming
#3 Michael Jackson - Thriller
#4 Iron Maiden - The Number of the Beast
#5 Dead Kennedys - Plastic Surgery Disasters

I’m also grabbing this lot from further down the list:

#6 Glenn Gould - The Goldberg Variations
#9 Bruce Springsteen - Nebraska
#13 The Fall - Hex Enduction Hour
#18 Hiroshi Yoshimura - Wave Notation 1: Music for Nine Post Cards

And we’ve also got an extra album from NPR’s best albums by female artists list (Kate Bush’s Dreaming is also on that list, but we already have it above):

Laurie Anderson - Big Science (#80 in NPR’s 150 Best Albums Made by Women)

10 albums, let’s go.

10. The Number of the Beast

Iron Maiden

The English heavy metal outfit’s third album was their last with drummer Clive Burr and first with vocalist Bruce Dickinson.

At this point it’s all a bit of a blur, but I assume I’ve talked about how I’m not a massive fan of the kind of howly, heavy rock that Iron Maiden are famous for, and I’m definitely not a fan of their cover art, this one being partricularly bad. That said, I’ve enjoyed my listens of The Number of the Beast with tracks like Children of the Damned being thoroughly daft and enjoyable. There’s no doubt that Dave Murray knows how to write powerful guitar riffs and ripping solos (see The Prisoner) and that Dickinson’s howled vocals add the required drama to proceedings, it just hasn’t got me past my prejudice towards the genre - something others have managed more effectively.

Song Picks: Children of the Damned

6/10

9. Plastic Surgery Disasters

Dead Kennedys

The Dead Kennedy's second album is lead singer Jello Biafra's favourite and sees them expand further into the high speed hardcore chaos that made Holiday in Cambodia such a great track.

East Bay Ray's guitar riffs are so frantic one imagines his left hand must be a blur while he's playing them, while Biafra’s vocals give off the vibe of someone imminently about to fall off a cliff frantically blurting out as much as they can before they do. Lyrically it’s a mix of political and social commentary, with Biafra’s battling against social norms being as present as ever.

You could certainly critiscise Plastic Surgery Disasters for being samey, and the songs do seem to blend into one a bit, but if you’re after fast songs ranting about a whole range of topics in a relentlessly energetic manner, look no further.

Song Pick: Government Flu

7/10

Kate Bush’s fourth album is often considered her most experimental, and it’s easy to see why. The poppy melodies of her other releases haven’t disappeared entirely, but they are much less frequent and replaced with a playful creativity.

The Dreaming’s tracks feature Kate Bush duetting with herself regularly, in fact - as on the superb Suspended in Gaffa - she’s often singing in four or more distinct styles. Combined with the rhythmic and often staccato instrumentation this creates a really unique sound, and one that I’d struggle to find anything comparable to even today. Bush has herself called the album ‘mad’, and indeed it is. There’s a feeling of freedom to the way the compositions skitter from melody to melody, instrument to instrument and section to section, in a way that is largely unpredictable and unvonventional.

I’m in no doubt that many will find this album a bit too challenging, it’s not as immediately gripping as 1978’s The Kick Inside for example, and there’s not all that much to latch onto or even remember particularly, but to those who give it time this is a really rewarding album that you’re unlikely ever to get bored of.

The Dreaming cements Kate Bush as not only someone who can write great songs - we already knew that from previous entries to these lists - but someone who is completely unafraid to be herself. Bush was already pretty singular before The Dreaming, with its release she became one of the most remarkable artists to grace our airwaves.

Song Picks: Suspended in Gaffa, Sat in Your Lap

8.5/10

The Fall’s fourth album is described by the lead singer, Mark E. Smith, as a satirical stand against "bland bastards like Elvis Costello and Spandau Ballet ... [and] all that shit", and features his standard abrasive vocal style and lyrics rooted in ‘kitchen sink realism’, a movement from the 50s and 60s in the arts that saw protagonists disollusioned with life and living in cramped working-class conditions, portraying a harsh and more realistic style than the art that had come before it. The album was mainly recorded in a disused cinema in Hertfordshire.

The album starts with the fantastically brash The Classical, which unfortunately drops the ‘N’ word within the first few lines, something that was not uncommon at the time. Mark E. Smith has claimed he’s singing as if it’s not him saying it - believable considering his lyrics are often built up of random outbursts coming from seemingly different people - but it’s still problematic as is explored in much more depth than I have room to here. That aside though, the song demonstrates the band’s ability to create an infectiously ramshackle sound - with the melody often coming from the guitars rather than Smith’s vocals, which snarl and grate in a way that’s so brash you can’t help but love them.

Jawbone and the Air-Rifle is another superb track with a guitar riff that you can imagine people bouncing around to aggressively in 80s clubs, Smith’s vocals carry more of a melody this time, something he’s more than capable of doing, while still never loosing that razor sharp edge he has. The track feels entirely unconventional, while also remaining very accessible. It sounds like a band playing in a room far too small for them, so the drums pound over everything else, while the guitars bounce off the grime on the walls and Smith has to thin his voice to make himself heard. It’s a rough, perfectly British mess that’s punker than punk itself. Hex Induction Hour’s remaining tracks are probably less memorable, and certainly less dance-able and infectious, but they’re still the musical equivalent of showing your teeth to the system.

Song Picks: The Classical, Jawbone and the Air-Rifle

8.5/10

The English band’s fourth album wasn’t well received critically, though it was their most succesfull up to that point commercially. It has since garnered plenty of critical acclaim, and is seen as an important album in the development of gothic rock. It was their final album with Simon Gallup, whose departure meant that all of the band’s following albums had a poppier, and lighter feel. This one is very dark though, and was written and recorded during what songwriter and vocalist Rober Smith called “an extremely stressful and self-destructive period”.

The Cure have always been the masters of atmosphere and it doesn’t take long to realise this album is no different, with the opening One Hundred Years’ guitar part sounding positively massive, with so much reverb put on it that you’d be forgiven for thinking you’ve fallen into a cave, “One and one we die one after the other” Smith sings as the guitar echoes this with suitably doomed notes. The Hanging Garden is a great example of the uptempo but downbeat thing that The Cure do so well, as the song chugs along at a fair clip while Smith sings lines like “Fall, fall, fall, fall out of the sky / Cover my face as the animals die” in a manner that suggests he’s had enough. But it’s not all doom and gloom… no, actually it is, every minute of Pornography is unapologetically devoid of hope. It’s a dip into the mind of someone at their lowest point, and yet in all the gloom and sadness, Smith’s melodies still fly. On the title track which closes the album, Smith is practically screaming as the drums march ominously on one side and a doom synth plays like a church organ signifying the end of time in the other, then it all cuts to black. Smith has cited this as the album that turned things around for him personally, and I see that cut at the end as the moment he’s got so low, that the only way is up, a flicker of hope that ignites a fire.

Song Picks: The Hanging Garden, One Hundred Years, Siamese Twins

9/10

Laurie Anderson’s debut is comprised of a selection of highlights from her eight-hour production United States Live - a performance piece in which music was only one element.

Big Science is avant-garde and hard to define. It’s electronic, but more concerned with soundscapes to back Anderson’s spoken word vocals than songs in the traditional sense. Having said that there are still melodies and hooks in there, often provided by other vocalists, as on the eerie title track, which brilliantly conveys the expansion of humankind in the following verse. Here Anderson cleverly turns direction giving on its head, referencing buildings that will be built rather than ones that are/were there:

Well just take a right where they're going to build that new shopping mall
Go straight past where they're going to put in the freeway
Take a left at what's going to be the new sports center
And keep going until you hit the place where
They're thinking of building that drive-in bank

O Superman, which became a surprise hit in the UK after John Peel championed it, is the album’s centrepiece and - in my opinion - masterpiece. Repeated ‘Ha’s’ in two different notes create the song’s spartan musical backdrop as Anderson talks enigmatically, and breaks into eerie melodies as she sings ‘here come the planes’. Originally inspired by the Iran hostage crisis in 1979 - the one depicted in the hit film Argo - it resonates far beyond that calmly presenting the fall of the world into some Orwellian nightmare:

'Cause when love is gone, there's always justice
And when justice is gone, there's always force
And when force is gone, there's always Mom.

Anderson begins to sing more after this song, and the album’s second half shines because of it. There’s a sense that Anderson has freed herself of self-consciousness as she bursts into a gentle, melodic flame.

Big Science is a bit like a 50 minute meditation session, but where instead of ‘scanning’ your body and feeling present, you follow Anderson’s soothing voice into an infinitely interesting and timeless void. It’s a kind of less on the nose, more beautiful 1984 in musical form. One of the most creative albums of the decade.

Song Picks: O Superman, Example #22, Let X=X

9/10

Springsteen’s sixth studio album is made up of songs that were initially intended to be demos that the E-Street band would flesh out, but he decided to release them as they were. It was recorded using just two SM57s and a 4-track recorder, as many a nerdy, wannabe sound engineer forum poster will tell you. Springsteen’s decision to keep the whole thing raw was a stroke of genius, and has played no small impact in the album being one of his most well regarded. Due to the sombre nature of the record, Springsteen never toured it.

Nebraska’s songs are about murderers, working class people, corrupt cops, or Springsteen’s childhood. He’s always been an exceptional storyteller, and when his songs are reduced to simple melodies, sparse acoustic guitar and harmonica arrangements and his voice, it’s his ability to get into the head of his subjects and portray their stories that makes this album shine so brightly. Bruce’s vocals are low and sombre, with none of the energy of Born to Run for example. There’s a resigned longing to all the songs, as if the songs’ subjects are always hoping for more, though they know they’ll never get it.

Such dark and intimate stories are presented here with no frills beside an atmospheric reverb. The lack of backup from a band makes the whole thing more intimate, you’re there with The Boss as he tells his stories. As Pitchfork’s review states, and indeed Bruce himself, Nebraska is as much about the presentation as the content. It was written in the environment it was recorded, and the songs would have lost something when taken out of that context. Nebraska is the perfect document of a moment when Bruce Springsteen sat down in his rented house in New Jersey, and unbeknownst to himself, wrote one of the most touching acoustic albums of all time.

Song Picks: Nebraska, Mansion on the Hill

9/10

3. Music for Nine Postcards

Hiroshi Yoshimura

Yoshimura’s debut album was initially intended to be played in the Hara Museum for Contemporary Art building, but was given a wider release after it garnered interest from the visitors. The album uses only a Fender Rhodes (a type of electric piano) and a piano. In the liner notes Yoshimura stated that he was inspired by “the movements of clouds, the shade of a tree in summertime, the sound of rain, the snow in a town." The album was only released in Japan in 1982, and was not given a release outside the country until 2017, when it was picked up by the Empire of Signs label and re-issued. It’s re-release was highly critically acclaimed.

Music for Nine Postcards is minimalistic, letting each note echo into your ears, it’s sad and yet hopeful, it sparkles and hums. A triumph in minimalism it sounds well ahead of its time, and could just as well have come out this year. The whistful twinkles of Clouds, the almost childish simplicity, but sheer beauty of the melody on Blink, and the quiet euphoria of Dance PM are just samples of the treat that you’re in for if you listen to this gem. The latter is perhaps my favourite album of the track, with certain notes being just out of time enough to feel real, natural, unprogrammed, and human - whilst maintaining a level of repetition that leaves me in a gentle trance. Dance PM is everything this album does so well. Unassuming, simple, really moving and bloody gorgeous from start to finish. Music for Nine Postcards has gently weaved its way into my heart, and I can’t see it ever leaving again. In a decade of excess, it hums along quietly and patiently, waiting for everyone to notice just how damn pretty it is.

Song Picks: Blink, Dance PM,

9/10

I’ve talked about Michael Jackson’s problematic nature in a previous review (1979’s Off the Wall), and how I think the evidence is pretty strong following numerous documentaries on the subject that he did indeed abuse children and that that has undoubtedly tainted his legacy and music, but also - more importantly - caused a lot of children and families unfathomable pain and trauma. Nevertheless, I’m going to talk about the music here, which is completely sublime.

The term is overused but I’ve no reservations in calling Michael Jackson a musical genius, something which is displayed here where he’s at the peak of his powers. Quincy Jones’ production is superb, with crystal clear instrumentation, and instrumental flourishes filling every space in a way that doesn’t feel overblown, but infectious and tasteful. On the all-time-classic opener Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’ , that sublime guitar and bass groove are accompanied not only by Jackson’s sublime vocals - effortlessly going from gritty to smooth and always bang in tune - but also an endless array of instrumental touches; that brass shake echoing the bass and guitar line, the synth taps, I could go on. It’s a dance masterpiece, running through your blood and into your heart.

I’ve always been less of a fan of Jackson’s slower songs, but even those are great here, and he conjures up one of his most memorable melodies in the smooth The Girl is Mine where his vocals work surprisingly well with Paul McCartney’s, while Human Nature is another example of Jones’ knack of accentuating Jackson’s vocals by following them with perfect little guitar jingles, with a skittering, superb synth part that appears twice where most artists would hang an entire song on it.

The mid-album trio of Thriller, Beat It and Billie Jean are quite probably the best successive trio of songs on any album ever and Thriller and Billie Jean are undoubtedly two of the greatest pop songs of all time. The former combining gothic and pop in a way that hasn’t really been equalled before or since - those brass stabs, wolf howls, and that groove and narration by Vincent Price creating an atmosphere that’s so brilliant, that despite the fact I’ve hard it countless times, I still whoop whenever it comes on. Billie Jean features what I think is my favourite bass line ever, one which Quincy Jones apparently didn’t like and was only persuaded to use when Jackson told him it ‘made him want to dance’. I guess even the greats are wrong sometimes. The way the song starts with just the drums, before that bass line comes in, those little trumpet hums in the pre-chorus, Jackson’s imperious vocal performance, and that perfect chorus combine to make a song that’ll forever grace a list of my favourites. Hell, I’ve heard it 5,555,423 times, but yet here I am dancing around in my office chair to it, every nerve in my body revitalised. Billie Jean is a freaking beacon of life and energy smashing through your weary flesh.

Oh and I’ve not even mentioned Van Halen’s stupendous solo on Beat It have I? This album is just chock full of brilliance, so apologies if I’ve missed the odd bit.

I can totally understand those who don’t listen to Thriller, but I’m here to review the music rather than its creators, and I don’t think anyone can argue against the fact that this is one of the finest pop albums of all time.

Song Picks: Wanna Be Startin’ Something, Billie Jean, Beat It, Thriller

9.5/10

Classical pianist Glenn Gould initially recorded his interpretation of Johann Sebastian Bach's Goldberg Variations (BWV 988) in 1955, which sold very well for a classical album and very much launched Gould’s career. He re-recorded the variations in 1981 and died a year later in 1982, when this recording was released. Pitchfork have written an excellent comparison between the two here, but as this is an article about 1982 I’ll be focusing on the latter recording, which had sold over 2 million copies by the year 2000.

As Wikipedia states, Goldberg Variations (BWV 988) “is a musical composition for keyboard by Johann Sebastian Bach, consisting of an aria and a set of 30 variations. First published in 1741, it is named after Johann Gottlieb Goldberg, who may also have been the first performer of the work.”

I’ve always enjoyed listening to solo piano performances - Keith Jarrett’s The Köln Concert is one of my favourite live recordings of all time - but this one definitely stands out among the crowd. Gould’s virtuoisic skill eminantes from all 30 variations here, with a confident, sturdy style full of beautiful flurries. This interpretation of the Variations sounds autumnal, you can almost imagine the leaves of trees falling in time with Gould’s intricate key presses. The Goldberg Variations is a truly sumptuous piano recording, it makes for great background listening while working, but it shines when you lie down, close your eyes, and submit yourself to its joyful, hopeful music, where Gould weaves delicate worlds of piano notes seemingly effortlessly. There’s something magical about being completely transfixed by just one instrument, and that’s absolutely the case here. The Goldberg Variations is magic.

10/10

1980 - Clive's Top Albums of Every Year Challenge

August 03, 2021 by Clive in Clive's Album Challenge, Music, Clive

And so we begin with the 1980s. I’m going to make a couple of changes (don’t worry they’re not that radical!) to the format of these going forward:

I’m going to make a concerted effort to make reviews shorter, so probably more of a summary feel than the song by song narrative I’ve been relying on fairly frequently. I’m still very much finding my review style, something I hope this challenge will help me with, so I’ll keep experimenting with this until I find a style that seems the most ‘me’.
Instead of doing a roundup at the end of a decade, where I check other lists and review any from the decade that have passed me by I’m going to try and incorporate a few from other lists - particularly female artist lists - as I go.

So, before we get onto music, what happened in 1980? Ronald Raegan was elected President of the USA, John Lennon was shot dead in New York City, CNN was launched as the first all-news network and Janice Brown made the first long-distance solar-powered flight in the Solar Challenger.

Onto music, here’s the top 5 rated albums for 1980 on rateyourmusic.com, which - as usual - automatically get added into my list:

#1 Talking Heads - Remain in Light (Also #5 on Pitchfork best of 1980s list)
#2 Joy Division - Closer - (Also #12 on Pitchfork best of 1980s List)
#3 Dead Kennedys - Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables
#4 John Williams - Star Wars: Empire Strikes Back
#5 Peter Gabriel - Melt (Peter Gabriel 3)

Of course, we can’t stop at five, so I’ve grabbed a few from further down the list:

#6 Black Sabbath - Heaven and Hell
#9 Rush - Permanent Waves
#12 David Bowie - Scary Monsters
#14 Kate Bush - Never for Ever
#20 The Cure- Seventeen Seconds

Then, in a futile attempt not to miss anything I’m grabbing the below from a mix of Pitchfork’s best of the 80s list (anything from their top 40 not already included), NPR’s greatest albums by female artists list, and a reader version of the same NPR list.

Prince - Dirty Mind (#33 on Pitchfork best of the 1980s list)
The Pretenders - Pretenders (#60 NPR’s 150 Greatest Albums Made by Women list)
X - Los Angeles (#87 NPR’s 150 Greatest Albums Made by Women list)

And finally a recommendation from a friend: The Cramps - Songs the Lord Taught Us.

That brings the total to a hefty 14 albums. I’d best get on with it. Let’s see who emerges victorious.

Black Sabbath’s 9th album is their first without Ozzy Osbourne, and first with replacement vocalist Ronnie James Dio. It’s also where the 2006 band, again featuring Dio on vocals, gets its name from. The album sold well, becoming the band’s third best selling album, and best selling since 1975’s Sabotage. Critically, a lot of reviews at the time seemed to focus on whether it did or didn’t sound like Black Sabbath.

I’d say it doesn’t sound like Black Sabbath massively. Dio can certainly sing, and his style suits well here, but he doesn’t have Osbourne’s vocal charisma in my eyes (or ears), and sounds a bit cookie-cutter 80s metal to me. I think Heaven and Hell is a really enjoyable album, it’s not as interesting or varied as the previous Sabbath albums we’ve looked at, but it is quite infectious. Iommi’s guitar riffs are on point, and his soloing on tacks such as Die Young is stratospheric. Bill Ward’s drumming pounds more than ever, and Butler’s ever reliable bass playing provides a great foundation to everything.

Heaven and Hell sounds a bit like a band that are really bloody good at what they do playing it safe. Everything sounds clean and rather predictable, but their considerable sonic skill still makes it a very fun listen.

Song Picks: Children of the Sea, Heaven and Hell, Lonely is the Word

7.5/10

Rush’s seventh album see them them turning away slightly from longform songs and towards a more radio friendly format, though the closing song, Natural Science, is still over 9 minutes long.

Permanent Waves is probably one of the band’s most accessible albums, opener Spirit of the Radio is one of their most poppy songs, featuring a wavy arpeggio from Alex Lifeson on the electric guitar, and fluttering and yet completely on point drums from Neil Peart. It’s a pop song written by a band with considerable instrumental talent who aren’t afraid to show off. When the instrumental section lifts off and shifts effortlessly between reggae and metal as the track closes, it’s clear the band have lost none of their inventiveness. Lyrics are never Rush’s strongpoint I feel, and it’s the slightly on the nose nature of Freewill - which is otherwise excellent, especially Lee’s high pitched finish, which was the last time he’d sing like that on a recording - and other songs like Entre Nous, that make the album less interesting than it could be in my opinion. On the epic closer, Natural Science, the band focus on what they do best, flitting from one time signature to another like restless children who also happen to be musical virtuosos, it’s another surprisingly moving epic from the band.

Song Picks: Spirt of the Radio, Natural Science

7.5/10

X’s debut album was produced by ex-The Doors keyboard player Ray Manzarek and ranked at number 286 in Rolling Stones’ best albums of all-time list.

As soon as the starting pistol fires, Los Angeles hits full speed and never lets up. The opener Your Phone’s Off the Hook But You’re Not perfectly displays the band’s unique combination of punk rock and rockabilly in a song about lead singer Exene Cervenka’s sister. Tragically, Exene’s sister died in a car accident on the night of the band’s first gig in support of this album in 1980. The album is energetic, with John Doe and Cervenka’s vocals being consistently great, and working together particularly well on one of the album’s highlights, the haunting The Unheard Music as well as what is quickly becoming one of my famous punk songs The World’s a Mess; It’s in My Kiss, where the rockabilly influence once again adds an unadulterated energy to proceedings.

Inexcusably, in the album’s title track the band drops the ‘N’ word, something an all white band rightly wouldn’t get away with now. The song itself personifies a case of tunnel vision, about someone blaming everyone and everything around them for their problems rather than perhaps once taking a look in the mirror. Apparently the band no longer use the ‘N’ word when performing the song live, changing the lyric to “every Christian and Jew” instead. Unfortunately, it’s still here on the re-release, and somewhat tarnishes what is otherwise a thoroughly enjoyable album.

Song Picks: Your Phone’s Off the Hook But You’re Not, The Unheard Music, The World’s a Mess; It’s in My Kiss

8/10

11. Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables

Dead Kennedys

American punk-rock band Dead Kennedy’s debut album is clearly inspired by the Sex Pistols, and is generally seen as an important album in the hardcore punk genre.

The album is energetic and simple, with much of its appeal being the humour and warble of Jello Biafra’s lyrics and vocals respectively. California Uber Alles is the album’s most famous track, a pop-perfect song about his unfounded belief that California hippy-ism was going to be imposed on the whole of the USA. It’s the only song that prominently features multiple vocal tracks, creating a real punch to the chorus which is further emphasised by East Bay Ray’s searing power chord riffs. It shows Biafra’s vocal energy and humour perfectly. The album’s other banger, Holiday in Cambodia, is a perfect critique of the privileged guy who self-righteously talks about those less fortunate than himself, while never actually doing much to help. The mix isn’t as punchy as California Uber Alles, and again there’s an uncomfortable dropping of the ‘N’ word, but the song is brimming with the liveliness that the band is known for. You could certainly criticise the rest of the tracks for being samey and not all that inventive, but there’s something to be said for the infectious vigour the whole album has. It feels like a musical kick in the arse.

Song Picks: Kill the Poor, California Uber Alles, Holiday in Cambodia.

8/10

Prince’s third album was produced, arranged and composed entirely by Prince in his home studio. He also played the vast majority of the instruments. As you might expect from the title, it’s completely filthy, and is often considered one of the main albums that smashed open the gates for sexually explicit albums and songs in later years.

Quite probably the sexiest album of all time, Dirty Mind is nevertheless a bit too unintentionally comedic to actually be an aphrodisiac. The opening title track sets the tone, managing somehow to be funky and yet entirely on the beat with a synth powering the piece forward like a disco fuelled train. When You Were Mine is one of Prince’s most famous songs, with cracking melody after cracking melody and that synth part combining with the twangy guitar work to create a truly iconic musical moment. Things start to get more comedic as Do It All Night enters the fray. There’s no point me even talking about the subject matter, the title says it all, but that bass part is some of the cheesiest and funkiest disco brilliance I’ve ever heard. Prince’s productions are intricate, and brilliantly measured, which is all the more impressive considering he’s playing most of the instruments here.

It’s difficult to take proceedings particularly seriously as Prince talks about sexual fantasy after sexual fantasy, but damn is this record a lot of fun. It’s rather impossible to sit still, and even trickier to wipe that stupid smile off your face as the album emits a beam of positive energy. Dirty Mind is quite literally ridiculously funky.

Song Picks: Uptown, When You Were Mine

8.5/10

The Pretender’s debut album very much put the band on the musical map, and is regularly mentioned in best albums of all time lists, such as that by Rolling Stone where it came 152nd in the latest iteration.

Pretenders is an intriguing mix of punk - with songs such as the opening Precious with its marching guitars and lively vocals from lead singer Chrissie Hyde - and pop, with hits such as Brass in Pocket and Stop Your Sobbing. Chrissie Hyde is just as at home with either style, and can certainly carry a catchy melody with plenty of personality. There’s a refreshing honesty to all the album’s tracks and Chrissie is unafraid to tackle more promiscuous topics such as on the explicit Tattooed Love Boys. Of the other band members it’s guitarist James Honeyman-Scott who provides the most memorable performances, with his guitar work on Kid being particularly fantastic, from the excellent riffs that follow each verse to the perfect solo that’s just the right side of cheesy. Oh, and there aren’t many better pop songs out there than Brass in Pocket, which blends the band’s punk attitude brilliantly with their growing pop sensibilities.

I think anyone can enjoy Pretenders, it’s a great pop record with some punk smattered in to keep you on your toes.

Song Picks: Stop Your Sobbing, Kid, Brass in Pocket

8.5/10

English rock band The Cure’s second album was their first to yield a UK Top 40 single, A Forest. The band’s lead vocalist and songwriter Robert Smith wrote most of the album’s music and lyrics at his parents’ home on a Hammond organ with a built in tape recorder. Bassist Michael Dempsey didn’t like the direction the band was going in and so left and was replaced by Simon Gallup.

Seventeen Seconds is regularly cited as an early example of gothic rock due to its gloomy atmosphere, and its that atmosphere that makes this record. The album is blurry, undefined, and rumbles along while you fill out the gaps in your mind. Guitar and piano lines are often repeated seemingly endlessly as you’re lifted into a quiet, calming, and ill-lit dream. Robert Smith’s vocals are often barely audible over the instrumentation, a distant, melodic mumble about failing relationships and the endless existential struggle. The album does occasionally pop out of the clouds and hint at The Cure’s poppier side, with songs like Play for Today perfectly demonstrating their penchant for bouncy guitar riffs perfectly accompanying Robert Smith’s quietly tortured vocals, with each as capable of a hook as the other. A Forest provides a slightly murkier demonstration of the same talents.

Seventeen Seconds is not the kind of assertive album to drill your brain with ideas, it’s a more passive, contemplative album for your brain to add its own notes and thoughts, for which it provides a rather gorgeous foundation.

I drown at night in your house
Pretending to swim, pretending to swim

Song Picks: Play for Today, Secrets, A Forest

8.5/10

7. Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps)

David Bowie

David Bowie’s 14th album followed his critically lauded and massively influential Berlin trilogy. Scary Monsters sees Bowie turn to a more commercial sound, with a removal of the more experimental electronic tracks prevalent on particularly the first two albums of the trilogy. Scary Monsters was regularly talked about as Bowie’s last great album, until the releases of The Next Day and Blackstar in 2013 and 2016 respectively.

Scary Monsters feels like a culmination of the poppier aspects of Bowie’s 70s recordings, with catchy melodies, slightly overblown production, and that line between accessibility and weirdness that Bowie always treads so well. Songs like Ashes to Ashes and the bouncy Fashion are perfect examples of this, while Teenage Wildlife treads similar sonic grounds to Heroes, with Robert Fripp’s guitar - which is prevalent on many of the album’s songs - once again providing a perfect dramatic and melodic backdrop to Bowie’s howled vocals in what I think is one of Bowie’s more underrated songs. An album full of 80s pomposity while still being very Bowie, Scary Monsters is somehow both simple and complex at the same time. The sugar rush of a sweet, and the depth of flavour of a good vintage cheddar. Obviously those two things together would be disgusting, but hopefully you get what I mean.

Song Picks: Ashes to Ashes, Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps), Teenage Wildlife, It’s No Game (Pt. 2)

8.5/10

6. Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back Soundtrack

John Williams

Composed by John Williams and recorded with him conducting the London Symphony Orchestra, the Star Wars soundtrack is unarguably one of the most iconic soundtracks in cinema, and nowhere is that demonstrated better than in this soundtrack release for Episode V.

Obviously the main theme is quite probably the greatest main theme of all time. Nothing gets my excitement flowing quite like the start of a Star Wars film as the text scrolls and the horns blare out that fabulous, triumphant tune. But it’s the lesser known pieces that make this collection what it is; the gentle, meditative beauty of Yoda’s Theme, the tentative hopefulness of The Training of a Jedi Knight, and the tense, winding The Heroics of Luke and Han. The latter first introduces the famous melody of The Imperial Death March, which is then elaborated on in Darth Vader’s Theme, one of the most perfect pieces ever written for a soundtrack, perfectly capturing the menace that is The Empire, while the gentle flute sections make it clear there’s hope of some humanity beneath the mask.

Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back does exactly what you’d want a soundtrack to do, it transports you to another world, in this case one of the greatest universes ever created. It’s a cinematic, nostalgic and glorious testament to the power of music in elevating everything, even if that thing is already damn fabulous.

Song Picks: Main Theme, The Imperial March (Darth Vader’s Theme), Yoda’s Theme

9/10

Kate Bush’s third album was the first ever album led by a female artist to enter the UK charts at number 1, and sees her trademark high vocal grace numerous inventive productions - much like her debut.

The album contains three top 20 singles, which summarise the album well. Babooshka, a tale of a woman who poses as someone else to test her husband’s loyalty, and one of Bush’s most famous songs. A great example of how she can make the slightly weird wonderful, with her Babooshka chorus being rather difficult to remove from your head once you’ve heard it. Army Dreamers is a more delicate number, featuring great interplay with Kate Bush’s clear vocal and the murkier male backing vocal, it’s a Waltz that skips along with a sad acceptance of a son’s death in war. The album is closed by Breathing - which is a good example of the effective production present throughout the album - which Bush herself worked on alongside Jon Kelly - skipping from ominous, almost orchestral sounds to a beautiful floating bass and synth section that Bush perfectly complements with a vocal that sails from softly piercing highs, to comforting lows as effortlessly as only she knows how. It’s a masterpiece written from the perspective of a foetus growing in the womb and frightened by nuclear fallout, musically portraying the juxtaposing tone of comfort and fear perfectly.

The rest of the album’s tracks live up to those, continually highlighting Kate Bush’s considerable talent for singing, songwriting, and intrigue. Like a lot of my favourite albums, you never feel like you can grasp it completely, it slides slowly and delicately out of any attempts to catch it.

Song Picks: Breathing, Army Dreamers, All We Ever Look For

9/10

Released two months after Ian Curtis’ suicide, Joy Division’s second album was again produced by Martin Hannett, who’s sound had such a big influence on their first record. As with their debut, it’s regarded as one of the best albums of all time, and particularly important in the post-punk movement.

Closer is as desolate, industrial and bleak as its predecessor, but it’s a little more tight, with less of what could be called ‘jams’. The album opens with Atrocity Exhibition, featuring a rather jolly tom riff from drummer Stephen Morris, which is accompanied by a screeching racket and Curtis’ characteristically deadpan delivery, painting a world of chaos. ‘This is the way, step inside’ he sings as he invites us into the uncomfortable, dissonant noise of his mind. The synth on Isolation is surprisingly catchy, one could even say positive, but Curtis’ detached lyrics about an affair he had on his wife are anything but:

Mother I tried please believe me
I'm doing the best that I can
I'm ashamed of the things I've been put through
I'm ashamed of the person I am

Passover features some of Sumner’s best guitar work, and is a great example of how the band always wrote around the bass and drums, the guitar and vocals providing power from that jumping off point. This is something again evident in the glorious A Means to an End, where Curtis repeats ‘I put my trust in you’ to infinity like a disappointed citizen of the Earth.

By the time we get to the closer, Decades, which again juxtaposes something hopeful - that spritely synth part - with the majority of the track sounding like oblivion itself, it’s been another journey into the a bottomless, dark pit. But one of inescapable beauty.

Song Picks: Isolation, Passover, A Means to an End, Twenty Four Hours

9/10

The debut album by American punk rock band The Cramps was recommended to me for inclusion on this list by my good friend Alasdair.

Let’s be honest, the rock ‘n’ roll that shocked and offended many of our ancestors now sounds pretty tame. Songs the Lord Taught is perhaps as close as we’ll get to understanding how they felt in the 1950s. Although the album’s influences are clearly rock ‘n’ roll and rockabilly, their smothered in so much grime that they become barely recognisable. On the cover of Jimmy Stewart’s Rock on the Moon the guitar is treated with so much echo and reverb that its tight percussive sound becomes a mush only just recognisable as a rock ‘n’ roll riff, and yet still infinitely danceable. Lux Interior’s vocals have great immediacy and freedom to them which complement the band’s messy theatrics perfectly. On Garbageman, the instrumental section in the middle sounds like some sort of garbage disposal centre; crunching, full of sludge and undefined. Interior’s vocals blend in perfectly, like a man who’s just walked into this monstrosity and decided to spontaneously howl along to the centre’s futile attempts to deal with capitalism’s waste. Producer Alex Chilton called the band the night before the album was due to be mastered asking them to re-record the whole thing. Obviously, they refused, and it’s that insistence on being an unfiltered version of themselves that makes this album the messy and unfettered piece of timeless brilliance that it is.

Songs the Lord Taught Us is quite unlike anything else, but while that often comes hand in hand with something being challenging to listen to, I don’t think that’s the case here. Buried beneath the wholesome mud are accessible melodies and riffs that anyone could enjoy, and indeed this is one of the most straight up enjoyable albums I’ve ever heard. A cathartic reminder that even when utter chaos unfolds in front of you - as I’m sure it did during these recording sessions - just going with the flow is sometimes the best thing to do.

Song Picks: Fever, Garbageman,

9/10

Talking Heads’ fourth album, and final album produced by Brian Eno, sees the band experimenting with polyrhythms and funk heavily inspired by Fela Kuti. Regularly considered the band’s magnum opus, it features more side musicians than any of their previous albums.

Remain in the Light is a whirlwind of grooves starting with the perfectly produced and grooviest song ever written about the Watergate scandal, Born Under Punches, and finishing with the eerie and sparse The Overload. It’s a journey of musical creativity, never afraid to repeat itself to burrow its ideas deep in your brain, and punctuated by enigmatic and spontaneous vocal performances from Byrne. These combine perfectly with his new stream of consciousness lyrical style, something he adopted due to struggles with writer’s block, as well as due to inspiration from early rap and African academic literature. The band are on infectious top form and the Fela Kuti afrobeat influence is obvious, but it's the unexpected touching moments like the darkly atmospheric Listening Wind, featuring some superb howling guitar work from Adrian Belew, that makes Remain in the Light not just an album of enjoyable tunes, but an album of continual intrigue and mystique. I had to read into them to work out what many of the album’s songs were about, but I’d actually advise against that. Byrne’s bursts of lyrical energy plant images and ideas in your mind that differ with each spin of the record. It seems to morph into whatever you most need that day, and for that reason it’s one of those albums that’ll be a companion for life.

Song Picks: Born Under Punches, Listening Wind, Once In a Lifetime

9.5/10

1. Peter Gabriel III (Melt)

Peter Gabriel

Peter Gabriel’s third solo album is technically called ‘Peter Gabriel III’, but has taken on the name ‘Melt’ due to its cover art. Melt is widely thought of as Gabriel’s breakthrough album as a solo artist, demonstrating his willingness to push things in new directions.

Melt feels like the perfect introduction to the 80s. It kicks of with Intruder, which triumphantly introduces us to the sound of the decade, a gated snare drum played by Gabriel’s former bandmate Phil Collins. Collins features on many of the albums tracks and even performs a very ‘In the Air Tonight’ fill on No Self Control. Gabriel’s vocals are engaging throughout, showing much more variation than any of his Genesis work with everything from a resigned croak on the aforementioned Intruder, to a triumphant scream on the powerful And Through the Wire. Production wise it’s colourful, with saxophones (yes, I told you this was 80s), xylophones, synths and a whole heap of guitar effects creating a futuristic, dramatic atmosphere. The album is notable for the way it nails its crescendos - No Self Control’s nearly takes your head off for example - and how it manages to nail drama while somehow not quite dropping into the cheese that most of the music attempting the same in the 80s did. There’s echoed saxophones on Start, reverb worthy of the world’s largest cathedral on No Self Control and cascading power chords on I Don’t Remember. It all threatens to become too much, to collapse under its own sense of pomposity, but it never does. Every song hits an all-conquering home-run, flooding life into fatigued veins. It embraces the dark, and then obliterates it with light, finishing with a magnificent ode to the murdered anti-apartheid activist Steve Biko, a seven and a half minute call to arms which finishes, most fittingly, with two gated snare drum blasts. The 80s are here my friends, the 80s are here. Melt is an ambitious, perfectly executed album that’s a perfect representation of its decade.

You can blow out a candle
But you can't blow out a fire
Once the flames begin to catch
The wind will blow it higher

Song Picks: And Through the Wire, No Self Control, Family Snapshot

9.5/10

1970s - Mop-Up and Albums of the Decade List

May 27, 2021 by Clive in Clive's Album Challenge, Music

As promised, before we move onto the 80s, here’s a 70s roundup article, with a whole heap of albums that I didn’t get round to in the individual year lists followed by my best of decade rankings.

Where have you plucked this lot from you ask? Well I added anything that I hadn’t covered already that: is rated in the top 50 of the 1970s on rateyourmusic.com, placed highly on the Pitchfork best of the 70s list, and a few from some female only best-of lists across the internet. Here’s the 13 that are thrown into the mixer for this 70s round-up special, listed alongside the year they were released.

The Velvet Underground - Loaded (1970)
John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band - John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band (1970)
Funkadelic - Maggot Brain (1971)
Dolly Parton - Coat of Many Colours (1971)
Janis Joplin - Pearl (1971)
Sly and the Family Stone - There’s a Riot Going On (1971)
Leonard Cohen - Songs of Love and Hate (1971)
Novos Baianos - Acabou Chorare (1972)
Aretha Franklin - Amazing Grace (1972)
Yes - Fragile (1972)
Labelle - Nightbirds (1974)
Heart - Dreamboat Annie (1976)
Buzzcocks - Singles Going Steady (1979)

Let’s rank this lot, and then we’ll see if any of them make it into my best of decade list!

The first hard rock band fronted by women, Heart, was led by sisters Nancy and Ann Wilson. Their debut album, Dreamboat Annie, includes the band’s hits Magic Man and Crazy on You.

It’s refreshing to hear female vocals over the top of the rocking instrumentals on display here, and the whole thing has a very polished sound. I’ve never been the biggest fan of hard rock, it feels like one of those genres that hasn’t aged all that well to me, but there’s plenty to enjoy here. The guitar riffs underpin the vocals perfectly, Crazy on You being a particularly great example of this, the vocals have great range and thankfully avoid that high pitched squeal that was all the rage in 70s heard-rock. The album has a great flow to it, ending with a nice reprise of the title track, and there’s some really beautiful moments such as Soul of the Sea, which has a fabulously Fleetwood Mac feel about it. The Wilsons’ vocals create a dreamy, ethereal feel that makes this record stand out amongst others in the genre.

Dreamboat Annie is a very enjoyable listen, and of course important as the first women led hard rock recording. As with most hard rock, it leans a bit too much into cheese at points, particularly with (Love Me like Music) I’ll be Your Song, and the production is a little uninspiring, but there’s plenty here to make it a very worthwhile listen.

Song Picks: Magic Man, Soul of the Sea

7/10

12. Coat of Many Colours (1971)

Dolly Parton

Dolly Parton’s eighth album is generally regarded as her best, appearing both in in the Time and Rolling Stone best albums of all time lists. Parton has said that the album’s title track is the best song she’s ever written.

Coat of Many Colours is straight up country, so if that’s not your bag then you’re not going to get on with this. I can’t claim to be the biggest country fan, but when done well I do enjoy it in smaller doses. This album is a delight generally, Parton’s jolly melodies soar over the plodding country arrangements. The title track is pretty much the perfect country song, a touching tale of a mother’s love. Traveling Man is perhaps the album’s other highlight, a twangy guitar rock ‘n’ roller that’s as American as the Grand Canyon. The record continues in a similar vein, with pleasant country song after pleasant country song showcasing Parton’s considerable talent for a melody, and production that really makes them shine.

The grass is always green with Dolly in your ear, but sometimes, as in the final two tracks, it gets a little too green. The ‘la,la,la’s’ of the final track catapulting things a little too far into ‘cheese’ for example.

Song Picks: Coat of Many Colours, Traveling Man,

7.5/10

labelle nightbirds.jpg — 11. Nightbirds (1974)

Labelle

All female vocal group Labelle’s fourth album was their most successful to date, and features their biggest hit, the often covered Lady Marmalade. The album is generally regarded as one of the greatest combinations of poppy r&b with funk and soul. Rolling Stone listed it as the 274th greatest album in their all time top 500 list.

The opener is probably more famous to my generation for the cover by 90s band All Saints, but Labelle’s version of Lady Marmalade trounces that one. That groovy bass riff, the gentle cowbell, the iconic vocals and melodies, it’s a pop gem, and a perfect meld of all the group’s influences into something truly unique.

LaBelle, Hendryx and Dash’s vocals work together brilliantly, with songs like It Took a Long Time being a great demonstration of that, but any of the lively tracks here would serve to make the point. Nightbirds glows with infectious songwriting, Allen Pouissant’s production - which is as comfortable as a warm sofa - and vocals as perfect and soulful as any of the decade. Oh and Hector Seda’s bass playing is some of the most underrated I’ve heard.

“It’s just an all-girl band, dealing with the facts and the pain”

Song Picks: Lady Marmalade, All Girl Band, What Can I Do For You, Somebody Somewhere

8.5/10

10. Songs of Love and Hate (1971)

Leonard Cohen

Cohen’s third album was the only one to make Rollling Stone’s best 500 albums of all time list, and placed at #74 in Pitchfork’s best of the 70s list. It’s here though because it’s rated at number #38 for the 1970s on rateyourmusic.com. Cohen himself spoke rather negatively of the album two years after its release:

"I suppose you could call it gimmicky if you were feeling uncharitable towards me. I have certainly felt uncharitable towards me from time to time over that record, and regretted many things. It was over-produced and over elaborated...an experiment that failed."

Right from the the opening murmurs of Avalanche it’s clear we’re in for a dark ride, as Cohen’s vocals sing his usual poetics over the top of a dark, syncopated guitar line in a timbre even more tired than usual. Though I love the sparse nature of Cohen’s debut, I disagree that this is overproduced and I feel Bob Johnston’s production additions, generally consisting of murmuring strings, flesh out the songs nicely. I think that Cohen’s more passionate vocal performances, such as his intense growl on Diamonds in the Mine, would have worked less well without Johnston’s production touches.

As usual with Cohen, the whole thing is gorgeously poetic, and he’s undoubtedly one of the best lyricists we’ve ever had, something his hummed - and occasionally growled - delivery really emphasises. It doesn’t floor me as much as his debut, but it’s as majestic and bewitching as you’d expect, with a depth as mysterious as the Mariana Trench.

Song picks: Avalanche, Last Year’s Man, Diamonds in the Mine

8.5/10

Fragile Yes.jpg — 9. Fragile (1971)

Yes

Yes’ first album with keyboardist Rick Wakeman features only four group compositions due to time and budget constraints at the time, the remaining five tracks are solo pieces, one from each member.

Those 5 solo pieces demonstrate just how much talent the band contained, and it’s remarkable that 5 such individually creative people could work together in a way that created something that was actually surprisingly modest. Opener Roundabout is a Yes favourite, and a great demonstration of their ability to create progressive music that is accessible despite it’s penchant for tons of different sections and time signatures. All the solo contributions are welcome breaks from the more lofty band recordings, but it’s Steve Howe’s Mood for a Day that’s a particular highlight, a beautiful instrumental acoustic guitar piece that twitters like exotic birds in the Sun.

Fragile doesn’t feel as important or weighty as the later Closer to the Edge, but there’s a real charm in its surprising sprinkles of simplicity, and the closing track, Heart of Sunshine, is a perfect segue to the aforementioned album, with Anderson’s belted out vocal foreshadowing his vocal style on a lot of its songs.

Song Picks: Roundabout, Mood for a Day, Heart of Sunrise

8.5/10

Aretha Franklin.jpg — 8. Amazing Grace (1972)

Aretha Franklin

Amazing Grace, Franklin’s 1972 live album, was recorded at the New Temple Missionary Baptist Church in Los Angeles, with Reverend James Cleveland and the Southern California Community Choir accompanying her. It remains Franklin’s best-selling album, and the best-selling live gospel album of all time.

One of the finest vocal performances ever committed to tape, Aretha’s every word seems to soar like a beam to the heavens. The backing choir provide the bed for Aretha to bounce off, and bounce she does, providing quite probably the decade’s most energetic and iconic vocal performance. It’s warbling and over-sung at points, things I’m not generally a fan of, but here it sounds like Aretha’s soul exploding with joy, and that is quite the thing.

I’m not even remotely religious, I don’t think there’s anything waiting for us after death or that there’s any meaning to our lives beyond those for a spider or a mouse, but I don’t think you need need that kind of belief to enjoy this. There’s a undeniable sense of history, soul and weight to the whole thing that doesn’t require any faith in its subject matter for it to affect you rather deeply. That said, you definitely have to be in the mood for it!

Song Picks: Mary, Don’t You Weep; How I Got Over, Amazing Grace

8.5/10

7. Buzzcocks (1979)

Singles Going Steady

As a compilation, it’s debatable as to whether this belongs here, but Pitchfork named it the 16th best album of the 70s so I’m including it. Singles Going Steady was intended as an introduction to the band for an American audience, where it was the band’s first album released. It was eventually released in the UK in 1981, after it became a successful import. The album features the band’s 8 singles from 1977 up until Singles Going Steady’s release followed by the B-sides to each of those singles in chronological order.

Put simply, Singles Going Steady is a trip, destination Bangertown. As Jason Heller of Pitchfork puts it, it’s "a paragon of songwriting about the pain and joy of love that stands as one of the most endearing, intimate, and impeccably crafted batch of earworms in either the love-song or punk-rock realm". It’s hard to disagree. The record shows Buzzcocks for what they were, one of the best singles bands we’ve ever had, and certainly the best pop-punk singles band to ever grace our ears.

Song Picks: Ever Fallen in Love (With Someone You Shouldn’t’ve),

9/10

Janis Joplin - Pearl.jpg — 6. Pearl (1971)

Janis Joplin

Joplin’s second solo studio album was released three months after her death due to an accidental heroin overdose. It was the final album released that she directly participated in, and was recorded with her final touring band. Paul A. Rothchild, who also produced The Doors, was given production duties here, and creates Joplin’s most polished sounding record. Rolling Stone ranked it 112th on their best albums of all time list.

Pearl is a magnificent display of what a vocal talent Joplin was. Her trademark raspiness extends to both her powerful (My Baby), and more delicate vocals (Me and Bobby McGee). She’s one of those rare vocalists where her tone, timbre and character mean that pretty much everything she sings has a gorgeous, intangible soul to it. The acapella Mercedes Benz is a perfect example of this. There’s not many vocalists who could carry an acapella performance so perfectly, and the fact it was the last song she ever recorded makes it all the more poignant. Joplin was due to record the vocals to Buried Alive in the Blues on the day of her death, and the instrumental, backing track sound feels like a hole in the middle of the album, a touching reminder that Joplin passed away during its creation.

Rothchild’s production and Joplin’s band back her perfectly, keeping the emphasis on her otherworldly vocals, while providing enough interest and edge to make sure things never get stale. Joplin was an incomparable talent, and Pearl is a beautiful goodbye. There’s no doubt she would have gone on to record a whole host of amazing records, but this is certainly a powerful one to finish with.

Song Picks: Move Over, Mercedes Benz, Cry Baby

9/10

plastic ono.jpg — **5. John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band (1970)**

**John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band**

John Lennon’s debut solo album was released at the same time as his wife’s album, titled in the same way, Yoko Ono/Plastic Ono Band. Heavily influenced by Lennon’s recent primal scream therapy, it focuses largely on Lennon’s personal problems, including those from his upbringing.

Songs on John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band are incredibly simple, rarely featuring more than three chords and a few instruments, and often have a repetitive, almost trancelike quality to them. There’s a clean honesty to all the material here, and it’s one of those albums that is perfectly encapsulated by the cover. It sounds like the musical equivalent of what might go through your head if you were to sit under the peacefulness of a tree and meditate on your life. There’s beautifully quiet moments such as the piano led Love, and rockier - more Beatles-esque - moments like the fabulously gritty sounding Well, Well, Well - where the primal scream therapy influence becomes evident in Lennon’s unrestrained screams - but the common thread that holds the whole thing together is a wonderful sense of spontaneity and freedom. This is something particularly evident in the penultimate track God, where Lennon lets go of everything, even the Beatles.

Song Picks: Love; Well, Well, Well; God

9/10

Maggot Brain.JPG — 4. Maggot Brain (1971)

Funkadelic

Funkadelic’s third album was ranked the 14th best album of the 1970s by Pitchfork, and is the last to feature the band’s original lineup.

The album opens with the title track, a 10 minute guitar solo by Eddie Hazel, and the album’s most famous song. The band’s leader George Clinton was apparently high on LSD and asked Hazel to play as if his mother had just died The rest, as they say, is history. There’s no doubt in my mind that Maggot Brain is the finest guitar solo of all time, backed only by the odd sound effect and an arpeggiated guitar (apparently there was more playing along, but Clinton faded them out in the mix to keep the focus on Hazel’s guitar), Hazel delivers a stratospheric solo that says more than a lot of albums, books and people without saying a single word. It soars with its Jimi Hendrix inspired fuzz and wah effects, reverbed to sound as if they’re coming from some hole in the ground. I can’t remember the last time I was so completely floored by a song, it skitters and roars, howls and screeches, all in melodies that seem to stop the passing of time. It is, as one critic puts it, “an emotional apocalypse of sound,” and it might just be my favourite song of the 70s.

The rest of the album could never compete with something as stupendously powerful as that opening track, but it doesn’t fall all that far behind. Featuring a slightly more conventional psychedelic funk the band proceed to entertain the hell out of whoever is listening with some of the funkiest riffs in town (Hit It and Quit), bass lines that could make a gravestone groove (You and Your Folks, Me and My Folks) and yet another Eddie Hazel masterclass on the musical steamroller Super Stupid.

Quite honestly, I’m struggling to think of a more consistently entertaining 36 minutes of music in the entire decade.

Song Picks: Maggot Brain; Super Stupid; Hit it and Quit It; You and Your Folks, Me and My Folks

9.5/10

3. There’s a Riot Going On (1971)

Sly & the Family Stone

The soul and funk band’s fifth album was named as the 4th best album of the 70s by Pitchfork and it’s title is an answer to Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On, released six months earlier. Regularly cited as one of the most influential albums of all time, it’s recording process was by all accounts a huge mess, with Sly Stone fraying to drug abuse, and the band falling apart around him.

You can practically smell the marijuana, hear the cocaine snorts, and feel the mental fog emanating from all 12 of the album’s tracks, where the drum machines sound as if they’ve been used because they’re the only thing that couldn’t succumb to the drugs flying around, and would thus be able to hold the band together somewhat. The band plays loose and hazey, but this is hands down the funkiest album I’ve ever heard. Every track grooves with a crackled genius, Sly’s vocals often sounding so laid back it’s no surprise that he recorded some of them lying on a bed with a wireless microphone. The album lays out the cold, dark truth about America, both lyrically and sonically, but it does so in a way that’s soulful and enjoyable in a manner completely devoid of kitsch and cheese. There’s a Riot Going On is an album where I have real trouble picking my favourite tacks, everything fits the mood, everything is perfect.

9.5/10

2. Loaded (1970)

The Velvet Underground

The Velvet Underground’s fourth album was the final album recorded featuring founding member Lou Reed, who left before it was released. By the band’s next release, Squeeze in 1973, all but Doug Yule had left and thus this is often considered the ‘last’ album by the band. The album’s title alludes to the fact that they were asked by their record label (Atlantic) to produce an album ‘loaded with hits,’ a request which leads to this being the band’s most accessible release. Reed wasn’t pleased with the album on release, unhappy with the incorrect songwriting credits and the edits that had been made to the album’s song and running order without his consent. Nevertheless, the album is very much regarded as one of the 70’s best, with Pitchfork ranking it at #14 for the decade.

Loaded is a gem of enjoyable melodies, breezy productions, and a vibe not unlike peak 60s Dylan. Below that thoroughly enjoyable exterior, lies some incredibly intelligent songwriting. With hits like ‘Who Loves the Sun’ conveying a flat pessimism, which contrasts with both its poppy melodies and instrumentals as well as other pop songs of the time. The album’s other hit, Sweet Jane, is a bona-fide banger, with a sing-along chorus and engaging verses featuring evocative lyrics, again with more than a hint of Dylan to their delivery.

Loaded is the result of asking an incredibly talented band to make pop hits against their will. It’s catchy, easy-breezy and brilliant, and yet hides an intriguing bitter sarcasm at its core. Sometimes the true test of a band’s mettle is how well they can tread paths that have already been trodden. In the case of the Velvet Underground the answer is fabulously, creating a record that works both as a collection of pop hits, but that still has the band’s stamp of ingenuity, wit and intellect all over it. Sometimes pushy, money driven record labels genuinely lead to masterpieces.

“Oh, all the poets they studied rules of verse
And those ladies, they rolled their eyes”

9.5/10

acabou chorare.jpg — 1. Acabou Chorare (1972)

Nocos Baianos

We’ve had quite a lot of Brazilian music from the 70s on this list, and it’s all been a delight, so I’m delighted to be able to throw another one in. Voted as #49 of the 70s by rateyourmusic users and coming in at #1 on a list of the best Brazilian albums by Rolling Stone in 2007, Acabou Charare (No More Crying in English) is Novos Baianos’ second studio album.

Listening to some Brazilian music is always a refreshing change from the mainly Western music in these lists. I suspect once this challenge is complete I’ll look at doing some sort of ‘best albums from each country’ challenge to widen my horizons a bit in that regard.

Acabou Chorare is an absolute delight, the energetic hit Brasil Pandeiro and fan favourite Preta Pretinha start the album off perfectly. The former demonstrates the band’s flawless combining of male and female vocals, gorgeous, jolly guitar riffs, and melodies to make even the coldest of hearts sing. The latter is musical honey, Moreira’s vocals are so effortless, calm and tuneful and they blend with the samba of the nylon guitar like the ingredients of some timeless meal. The energetic guitar solo skitters and sparkles like a thousand butterflies in the blue sky, one of the prettiest songs of the 70s. I’m trying to keep these reviews shorter, but rest assured the album is littered with such brilliance, Swing de Campo Grande and the title track are some further highlights.

Acabou Chorare is an album that I think I’ll be turning to to lift my mood whenever I need it, along with some of the other Brazilian greats of the decade. Acabou Chorare is the musical Sun, an album of such positive energy and life that I cried the first time I heard it. As the Arial font of an e-mail blurred to some strange splodged painting, I felt the kind of joy of discovery that has been so hard to come by in the groundhog day lockdown shroud.

Song Picks: Brasil Pandeiro, Preta Pretinha, Swing de Campo Grande

10/10

1970s - Best of the Decade

And now, having reviewed over 130 albums from the 1970s, it’s time to rank my favourites of the decade. I’m upping the list from 25 (as in the 60s) to 30, as it was just too hard to cut it to 25. Here goes:

#1 Stevie Wonder - Songs in the Key of Life
#2 Miles Davis - Bitches Brew
#3 Pink Floyd - The Wall
#4 Bob Dylan - Blood on the Tracks
#5 Novos Baianos - Acabou Chorare

#6 Pink Floyd - Animals
#7 Miles Davis - Get Up With It
#8 Jorge Ben - A Tábua de Esmeralda
#9 Joy Division - Unknown Pleasures
#10 Bob Marley and the Wailers - Exodus

#11 Joni Mitchell - Hejira
#12 Joni Mitchell - Hissing of Summer Lawns
#13 Milton Nascimento & Lo Borges - Clube Da Esquina
#14 Fleetwood Mac - Rumours
#15 Pink Floyd - Wish You Were Here
#16 David Bowie - Low
#17 Pink Floyd - Dark Side of the Moon
#18 Simon & Garfunkel - Bridge Over Troubled Water
#19 Yes - Close to the Edge
#20 Bruce Springsteen - Born to Run

#21 Sex Pistols - Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols
#22 David Bowie - The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust
#23 Pink Floyd - Meddle
#24 The Velvet Underground - Loaded
#25 The Clash - London Calling
#26 Sly & the Family Stone - There’s a Riot Going On
#27 Stevie Wonder - Innervisions
#28 Joni Mitchell - Blue
#29 The Stooges - Raw Power
#30 Led Zeppelin - Physical Graffiti

What a decade it’s been. The artist of the decade award has to go to Pink Floyd, with no less than five records in the end of decade top 30 list, something that I’m not sure will be beaten for the remainder of this challenge. Joni Mitchell comes in second with three records on the list, with an honourable mention to Miles Davis who got two entries into the top ten.

And so it’s time to get back in our time machine, and move to the decade of shoulder pads, neon colours, and oversized jumpers, the 80s. See you there.

1978 - Clive's Top Albums of Every Year Challenge

March 04, 2021 by Clive in Clive's Album Challenge, Music

It’s good to be back, having taken a month off to partake in February Album Writing Month. I’m looking forward to continuing to move through the years.

So, 1978, the year that Jim Jones’ cult followers committed mass suicide in Jonestown, the Panama canal treaty was signed agreeing to give possession of the canal to Panama by the year 2000, Sony introduced the first Walkman, and the first transatlantic balloon flight was made.

As for music, the following are rated as the top five albums of 1978 according to our lovely rateyourmusic.com users.

#1 Steve Reich - Music for 18 Musicians
#2 Kraftwerk - Die Mensch-Maschine
#3 Wire - Chairs Missing
#4 Sun Ra - Lanquidity
#5 Bruce Springsteen - Darkness on the Edge of Town

We’ve got our first entries from Steve Reich and Sun Ra, and three returning artists. I’m also throwing this lot into the mixer from further down the list:

#7 Rush - Hemispheres
#8 Elvis Costello - Next Year’s Model
#9 Talking Heads - More Songs About Buildings and Food
#18 Kate Bush - The Kick Inside
#19 Blondie - Parallel Lines
#25 Brian Eno - Ambient 1: Music for Airports
#62 Rolling Stones - Some Girls

Let’s see which of these 12 heavyweights comes out on top in probably our tightest contest yet.

Die Mensch Maschine (The Man Machine in English) is the seventh album by the German electronic band. As stated on Wikipedia, ‘it sees them moving to more danceable rhythms and less minimalistic arrangements’.

The album kicks off with Die Roboter (The Robots), the album’s first single. “We’re charging our batteries / and now we’re full of power” the song repeats, along with very few other lines, creating a slightly sinister, industrial feel. The track is repetitive and features the usual simple synth melodies following the almost spoken word vocals. What’s particularly notable is how the synthesised bass pounds in a way that I’ve not experienced from anything electronic up to this point. It’s a good indication of what’s to come.

I prefer the tracks that don’t rely as heavily on the slightly cheesy sounding synth melodies present on the first track, and that create more interesting soundscapes. Spacelabs is such an example, where the synths combine with electronic drums to create something that wouldn’t have been out of place on a 70s sci-fi film. An intricate, and still very danceable track that is both memorable and haunting.

As with Trans-Europe Express there’s definitely an industrial beauty in the simplicity to the songs here, and their influence on future electronic music is evident. The pulsating electronic lines repeat over and over creating a trance-like atmosphere, punctuated with simple melodies by a variety of synth sounds and vocoder infused, metallic vocals. In Das Model Kraftwerk came up with the first purely electronic banger, and in Die Mensch Maschine they came up with an album that seemed like a distillation of everything they’d been creating up to that point. I can’t see myself coming back to it all that often, but it’s an enjoyable look into the birth of electronic music.

Song Picks: Spacelab, Das model

7.5/10

Costello’s second album, and first with the Attractions, made it to number 98 on Rolling Stone’s top 500 albums of all time. The English singer-songwriter was born out of the pub rock scene in the early 70s, which was to be a major influencing factor - due to its emphasis on cheaper recordings and independent labels - on the punk rock movement of the later 70s.

This Year’s Model is full of catchy, high energy songs that bounce along with an infectious happy-go-lucky attitude. Instrumental touches such as the spritely organ on You Belong to Me and the futuristic sounding vocoder vocals that kick off Hand in Hand make the album just as much as Costello’s saturated, catchy vocals and his simple and yet effective lyrics.

(I Don’t Want to Go to) Chelsea, written in the office Costello worked at once everyone had gone home, is a great demonstration of everything Costello and the Attractions do so well here. They pick one instrument to drive the track, in this case the bass; Costello keeps his melodies within a small range; and uses lyrics with few adjectives, forcing you to fill in the blanks somewhat in a way that changes the songs a little each time you listen to them.

The album’s closer Radio, Radio is, well, an absolute banger. The perfect bass part and celebratory organ punctuations accompany Costello’s drawled vocals like cheese complements wine as he rants about Radio’s unwillingness to play many of the era’s punk rock tunes, and their ‘anaesthetise(d)’ take on music.

It’s hard to imagine anyone disliking This Year’s Model, it sounds fresh, fun, was clearly influential on a lot of British music and yet, at a time when many bands were pushing for more complexity, revels in the simple.

Song Picks: (I Don’t Want to Go to) Chelsea; Radio, Radio; Pump it Up

8.5/10

10. More Songs About Buildings and Food

Talking Heads

Talking Heads’ second album is their first of three produced by our man Brian Eno, seeing them shift to a more danceable style, driven largely by Tina Weymouth’s superb bass playing. You might expect the addition of Eno as producer to have led to a more atmospheric and dense production, but in fact it leads to a more focused, bass and rhythm oriented sound which massively plays to the band’s strengths.

The album opens with Thank You for Sending Me an Angel, a song about a parent who is grateful for their child. It’s a great opener, building with it’s repeated drum shuffle and guitar part to a sudden ending, before Tina Weymouth’s tour de force starts on With Your Love, where her fluttering bass riff defines the verse. Throughout the album, her fun, simple, melodic, and clearly Motown inspired bass parts combine perfectly with Chris Frantz’s on the beat drumming to create a very danceable and bouncy rhythm while David Byrne’s nervous bursts of vocal help add some unpredictability.

This combination works a dream on all the album’s tracks, but peaks on a few tracks in particular. On The Good Thing, the rhythm guitar plays beautifully with Weymouth’s bass and Byrne’s melodies are some of the most relaxed on the record, including a chorus that has an almost anthemic quality created by the backing vocals. The bass in the bridge leads the ragged guitar skitters beautifully, like a straight flying bird guiding scattered butterflies.

Found a Job is perhaps the album’s most popular song - besides the great Take Me to the River cover, and as soon as you hear Weymouth’s iconic bass riff which sounds like the life of the party, it’s clear why. The song is essentially about a couple being bored of what’s on TV and thus creating their own show, which makes them happier. The final verse gives a direct instruction to the listener, and it’s undoubtedly an oversimplified message, but it’s a nice one to hear now and again, particularly when coming from a band making music as fun as this.

So think about this little scene, apply it to your life
If your work isn't what you love, then something isn't right
Just think of Bob and Judy, they're happy as can be
Inventing situations, putting them on TV

In fact many of the album’s lyrics are refreshingly honest, I particularly love Byrne’s cries of “I don’t have to prove I’m creative” on Artists Only, a song where the bass has an almost haunting quality to it. I’m Not In Love is almost moshable anti-love song with its speed and bounce, and again features some great, on the nose lyrics.

More Songs About Buildings and Food is as unpretentious as its title and as straight and grid like, yet odd and creative as its cover art. It’s a great advertisement of just how inventive and singular the Talking Heads were.

Song Picks: The Good Thing, Artists Only

8.5/10

Rush’s sixth album is another prog rock tour de force, and perhaps the most prog-rock of any of their albums I’ve heard so far - which is saying something. We’ve got arrangements that have clearly been thought out to the finest detail here, and one of those arrangements is a whopping 18 minutes long.

Said 18 minute whopper is the opening track CygnusX-1 Book II: Hemispheres (quite the catchy title). The song, in classic prog rock fashion, is about the Greek gods Apollo and Dionysus and is a journey through endless cleverly thought out sections of music. Starting with a few heavily reverbed guitar stabs and bass drum thuds, it soon evolves into a flowing cascade of impressive musical skills. Lee hums along on his bass guitar, with that classic Rickenbacker grit, while drummer Peart is so unable to be thrown out of time by even the smallest margin that you’d be forgiven for thinking that he’s a super hero who’s origin story involves him swallowing a clock and becoming time itself. Lifeson’s phased and reverberating guitar is the prime driver for the song’s massive sound, though the minimalistic synth parts also help. I lost count of how many different sections the song had after only 4 minutes or so, but I will say that they were all a delight. Geddy Lee’s dramatic rendition of an impressively ambitious lyric fits among its musical surroundings perfectly, cutting through the mix with his high pitch, while never getting irritating. The song is the constant to-ing an fro-ing between sections that seem to glide along like a magic carpet, and others that stab like lightning from the sky. It keeps you on your toes, never gets boring, and, most impressively of all, builds to an incredibly satisfying conclusion, a rather touching and unexpected acoustic guitar outro.

Circumstances, at a mere 3 minutes and 40 seconds, feels like a ditty in comparison. It crams an un-standard amount of sections into its fairly standard running length and depicts Neil Peart’s struggles to make it as a drummer in London. Something that is rather perplexing considering how stupidly good he is, switching between tempos, time signatures, and styles with an ease I’m not sure anyone has ever replicated since. This is followed, in classic Rush style, with a song about trees. The Trees was chosen as a single along with Circumstances - probably because they’re the only ones short enough to be played on the radio - and is a particularly great demonstration of Lee’s talent for vocal melody as he sings about a conflict between oaks and maples, centred around the oaks taking up all the light. Only Rush could pull it off, and I mean that in the best possible way.

At this point, we’re left wondering why we’ve had two songs in a row that are a reasonable length on a Rush album. But this is soon rectified with the nine and a half minute closer, La Villa Strangiato, the band’s first instrumental song. Once again the band are unable to sit with a concept for more than 20 seconds and dart from section to section until they seemingly exhaust themselves around the halfway mark, where we’re blessed with relaxing bass decays and a scintillating guitar solo from Lifeson. Things build again to a riff led melee of noise so pounding it’s easy to forget that it’s being created by only three people, before we finish with bass and drum solos.

Hemispheres is another testament to Rush’s prog-rock brilliance, pushing the boundaries of how many time signatures a song should contain, but in a way that is still thoroughly enjoyable to listen to.

Song Picks: CygnusX-1 Book II: Hemispheres, The Trees

8.5/10

prallel lines.jpg — 8. Parallel Lines

Blondie

Blondie’s third album reached number 1 in the UK charts, and led to their breakthrough in the US, where it reached number 6. The album features many of the group’s most famous songs, including Hanging on the Telephone and Heart of Glass.

Debbie Harry’s vocals are superb throughout the album, going seamlessly from a growl on the punchy One Way or Another; to more gentle and melodic on Picture This, where her trademark rasp appears during the song’s rather massive climax, aided by some great guitars from the group’s co-founder Chris Stein; to almost dreamy on the country inspired Fade Away. She even goes slightly Patti Smith in the opening of the Brooke Shields inspired Pretty Baby.

The band gets rather heavy at times, Stein’s cataclysmic riff on I Know But I Don’t Know wouldn’t be out of place on a Black Sabbath album, and Harry’s glassy vocals juxtapose well with the din created by the rest of the band while Clem Burke’s cymbal averse drumming - until the bridge - helps stop it leaning too much into ‘metal’. Stein’s guitar solo is a delight of chaotic, careering fuzz.

Before we get to the jewel of the album’s second side we discover 11:59 and Will Anything Happen, two songs that again demonstrate the band’s talent for catchy melodies, and the way they’re able to fill out the sound spectrum with a fairly straightforward rock sound that’s somehow much more interesting than that. The stair-like jitters on the latter are a good example of how the band know exactly when to mix it up to keep things interesting without overdoing it. Sunday Girl is a rare song where they seem to fail to do this and the piece sounds a bit more formulaic than other tracks on the album, though it’s still well written and enjoyable enough.

The jewel of side two is, of course, the masterpiece Heart of Glass, the band’s most famous song. Opening with a bass and guitar riff as iconic as anything ever written, things reach even headier heights once Harry’s perfect glassy vocal enters. It feels like the first real ‘club banger’ we’ve come across in this challenge. It sounds massive, with that iconic melody worming it’s way into your brain via Harry’s vocals and that mountainous synth in the bridge. The production on the piece is some of the best I’ve heard on anything so far, with tastefully added double-tracks, hummed sections, vocal ad-libs and that prophetic synth adding to what is already a tune with a whole lot going for it. 5 minutes and 50 seconds hardly seems enough time to contain something so brilliant.

Parallel Lines is a truly great and influential pop album. Harry’s happy to try her hand at a whole host of vocal styles, sometimes within the same song, and the band follows suit with performances and ideas that help make sure things never grow stale. It has a bit more of a ‘collection of songs’ feel than an album to me, which is what holds it back slightly, but when the songs are this good, that’s not much of an issue.

Song Picks: I Know But I Don’t Know, Hanging on the Telephone, Heart of Glass, One Way or Another

8.5/10

7. Darkness on the Edge of Town

Bruce Springsteen

Bruce is back with his fourth album, and first since 1975’s masterpiece Born to Run. While 1975’s effort usually outshines it in terms of popularity, Darkness on the Edge of Town was ranked by Rolling Stone as the 91st best album of all time, and received pretty much only positive reviews on its release. It continues to be a fan favourite, and features songs that remain mainstays of Bruce’s live sets today.

The album is less commercial than its predecessor, and also less energetic in general, though plenty of Born to Run’s vivacity is evident in the meteoric opener Badlands - a perfect segue from Born to Run’s messages of escape, to Darkness on the Edge of Town’s more introspective tone. Springsteen explores the characters that don’t fit in - as he has during much of his career - and nowhere is this clearer than on the ‘ballad of the black sheep of the family’ Adam Raised a Cain, which features one of Springsteen’s rockiest backdrops. Something in the Night takes a gentler turn, and seems to be referencing Bruce’s lawsuit with his manager in the verse:

Well you're born with nothing
And better off that way
Soon as you've got something they send
Someone to try and take it away

It’s another song about a freedom, with plenty of car imagery as you’d expect. In an album full of captivating vocal performances, this is perhaps one of the best, full of long notes and seemingly performed straight from the soul, it sounds like the crumbled American dream itself is singing to you. The chorus rings with both despair and the triumph of having finally hit the bottom from where there’s no way but up. The same could be said for Racing in the Street, another affecting song of freedom hung on a simple piano part that’s one of the most beautiful things on the album, or indeed on any of these albums. Springsteen’s vocals are as sad as a lonely night, but with the melody of someone who sees the beauty in it all.

It’s not until Promised Land that Bruce regains some energy, which he combines with perhaps his most powerful hook “Mister I ain't a boy, no I'm a man, And I believe in a promised land” to create another powerful anthem of escape, and one I’d argue is perhaps his most brilliant. Clemons’ sax solo is as free as a migrating bird, and harkens back to his meteoric performances on Born to Run.

The title track, which closes the album, is one of Springsteen’s masterpieces. A song that meditates on how we spend our lives distracting ourselves from dealing with the darkness in ourselves, in a similar way that society ignores the ‘darkness on the edge of town’. The laboured way the song’s title is sung in the chorus contrasts perfectly with the more explosive vocal parts in the song, representing, to me, how our dreams and thoughts are often so far detached from the dark reality.

Darkness on the Edge of town is another great album about the existential struggle of the working man, something Bruce has made a career out of. And when you see the artistry, poetry, and earnest performances that grace this album, it’s easy to see why.

Song Picks: Promised Land, Badlands, Racing in the Street, Darkness on the Edge of Town

9/10

Created by layering tape loops of differing lengths, Eno’s sixth album sees him moving firmly into the ambient genre he was to pioneer. As the title suggests, this was designed to be played on a loop continuously in airports, an environment Eno felt could do with becoming less stressful. Eno himself described the idea of ambient music as being “as ignorable as it is interesting” and that it would “induce calm and a space to think”.

As someone with a busy brain that isn’t always my friend, I’ve always had a soft-spot for ambient music as a way to ‘induce calm’ as Eno says above. Though this isn’t the first release that could be described as ambient music, it is the first album to explicitly label itself as that, and thus to me is undoubtedly the birth of the genre.

1/1 opens the album with soft and slow interweaving piano lines that are repeated throughout, backed by gentle atmospheric synths. It’s minimalistic in the extreme, but it’s ability to relax you is quite something, and despite its simplicity, there’s enough gentle creativity and beauty in the track for it to work both when listening intently, or when half-listening. The following 2/1 features vocals backed by a synth. Again, the piece is just a series of loops repeating themselves to a timescale that means they never come back into sync. With that, it continuously feels very familiar and safe, while never sounding the same. A masterstroke that again tricks the brain into feeling completely at home, while never getting bored. The second side continues much like the first, with gorgeous repeating melodies being played out at different times creating a cloudy, dreamy atmosphere.

Ambient 1: Music for Airports, is remarkable in that it achieves exactly what it sets out to do, and proves once again the amazing effect music has on our brains. It’s an audio version of a port in a storm, and they really should start playing it in airports.

Song Picks: 1/1, 1/2

9/10

The title of Wire’s second album apparently refers to the British expression “he’s got a few chairs missing in his front room”, one which I’ve never heard but that reminds me of the Swiss expression “he’s missing a few glasses in his cupboard”. The album sees the band experiment with more developed song structures and adds synth and keyboards to their arsenal.

There’s a darkness to the songs here, something evident from the opening track Practice Makes Perfect, which the bass tries its best to make jolly, but is made rather haunting by the reverberated laughter that appears in the second half of the track. Lyrically, the song is about waiting to go up to Sarah Bernhardt’s - a French actress from the 19th century - room. The following French Film Blurred is more difficult to decipher, and sets the tone for an album that is both rather weird, and yet completely fascinating. Glimpses of the punk from their debut re-appear at times. Such as the catchy bass part on Men 2nd and the bouncy guitars on Sand in my Joints, but they’re generally blurred by the dark, ambient soundscapes the band is now creating.

Marooned features probably my favourite lyric, one that seems to portray a complete loneliness that is perfectly emphasised by the distorted guitar that sounds as if it’s coming from miles a way and the bumbling bass that seems like it’s trying to comfort our singer, who mumbles his way through the pretty and desolate word picture he’s built. Being Sucked in Again is the perfect mix of the more catchy nature of their debut, and the darker, more intriguing nature of this effort. The riffs and chants of ‘being sucked in again’ worm their way into your ears, while some of the effects on the instruments create an atmosphere that makes the song endlessly more interesting than the simple one it is on the surface, with that almost underwater bass sound being particularly brilliant. The album’s highlight though is perhaps Mercy, a six minute tirade of blaring, crunchy, guitars that make Colin Newman’s vocals almost inaudible, finishing with a Robert Gotobed (what a surname) smashing the drum kit with some robotic quarter notes as the guitars threaten to swallow him whole. It’s probably the most ‘post-rock’ track I’ve heard so far on this challenge.

Chairs Missing is a mood; dreamy, dark, mysterious and untouchable in equal measure. It’s not often I describe an album as fascinating, but I think Chairs Missing is just that.

Song Picks: Marooned, Being Sucked in Again, Heartbeats, Mercy, Outdoor Miner

9/10

Sun Ra was a bit of a character. He abandoned his birth name in the 1940s, taking the name Le Sony'r Ra, shortened to Sun Ra (after Ra, the Egyptian God of the Sun). He also claimed to be an Alien from Saturn on a mission to preach peace and denied any links with his previous identity.

Musically, he’s known for avant-garde, jazz inspired music with extensive use of his synthesiser playing. A prolific artist, Sun Ra had already released well over 30 albums by the time Lanquidity was released in 1978.

Lanquidity opens with the suitably sci-fi title track. The horns gently breathing like an alien life-force as nostalgic twinkles and echoes accompany them to create an otherworldly, mysterious, and slightly gloomy atmosphere. The album comes back to planet Earth with the groovy Where Pathways Meet, a song that’d make a perfect companion to marching elephants in a grittier remake of the Jungle Book, with it’s clunking percussion, and broad brass lines accompanied by some virtuoso guitar twiddling. That’s How I Feel continues the more accessible feel, built on a simple rumbling bassline that grounds the otherwise relaxingly free sax, piano and guitar parts that sound as if they’re discussing world peace in the language of music.

Sun Ra’s synth work on Twin Stars of Thence is probably the album’s most magical moment; playing perfectly off Richard Williams’ bass walk he scatters notes into the ether like an unstoppable, gentle firework as the piece builds slowly to John Gilmore’s solo, and finally Disco Kid’s superb guitar twinkles. It’s 9 minutes of pure jazz bliss. Everything closes with the infinitely weirder, but also strikingly pretty There are Other Worlds (They Have Not Told You Of), which puts you back on the planet we visited in track one, filling out some of the details. Sketching the wind with warm saxophone blasts, and the stars with subtle xylophone taps. The spoken words whisper in either ear, absorbing you fully into this weird world as surprisingly calm screeches and creative synth sounds fill out this rather magical sound experiment.

Lanquidity is surprisingly accessible for how experimental it is, and it’s one of those rare records that creates a mood very much its own.

Song Picks: Where Pathways Meet, That’s How I Feel, Twin Stars of Thence

9/10

The Stones’ 14th British, and 16th American studio album is the first to feature Ronnie Wood as a full time member and sees them take a more disco direction, inspired by Mick Jagger and their decline in popularity since 1972’s Exile on Main Street.

The turn to a disco influence was a good one in my books, as Jagger’s energy, Wyman’s grooving bass lines, and the more rock ‘n’ roll nature of Richards’ guitar work and Wyman’s drumming make for an infectious blend of the two genres.

The album is injected with a great playfulness and fun that is evident from the first bass notes of Miss You - quite probably one of my very favourite bass parts. The “oooh oooh oooh” parts glide perfectly over Wyman’s impossibly groovy bass as Jagger energetically talks of feelings of longing. It’s the kind of song that immediately gets me dancing about, much like the following When the Whip Comes Down - which features yet another infectious bass part from Wyman, and which has a bouncy feel despite it’s rather dark and tragic story of a gay drifter. Just My Imagination features some classic Keith Richards noodling before his blurry riff helps create yet another winner of a chorus.

Some Girls saw the Stones getting rather controversial again. Their label wanted them to cut the song, which essentially talks about what women of various nationalities and races do. Jagger refused, saying that the song was a parody of racist attitudes, something he’d have probably had an easier time selling if his delivery didn’t sound so frolicsome in most of their other songs too. Far Away Eyes is a personal favourite of mine. A perfect tongue-in-cheek country song with lines like the below that always make me laugh:

And the preacher said, "You know, you always have the
Lord by your side"
And I was so pleased to be informed of this
That I ran twenty red lights in his honour

Some Girls is very Rolling Stones, Jagger hasn’t grown up, but he continues to give vocal performances that are as engaging as any from the time, with a bristling energy and immediacy to them on every song. Combine that with great melodies, groovy as hell bass parts, and the general feeling of a band having a good time - similar to that on the classic Exile on Main Street - and you have a winner of an album. You can’t take it too seriously, but then I doubt the Stones want you to.

Song Picks: Shattered, Far Away Eyes, Miss you

9/10

The English singer-songwriter’s debut album includes her number one hit in the UK, Wuthering Heights, and reached number 3 in the albums chart. It was critically acclaimed across the board on release, and has continued to receive universal praise since. The album was produced by David Gilmour’s friend Andrew Powell, and executive produced by David Gilmour himself, who funded Bush’s very first demos having been impressed by them in 1972, when Bush was just 13.

Things kick off with some whale song on the opening track, Moving, which was a hit in Japan. The song is a perfect introduction to Bush’s considerable talent. Her vocals start impossibly high and perfect, gliding over the soft piano like some ethereal being. The chorus melody is gorgeous and elevated by a production that doesn’t have too much going on, but is still very full sounding. Bush’s floating vocals - which probably have the largest range I’ve ever heard in a vocalist - are certainly the hallmark of the album, bringing to life the angelic melodies of Strange Phenomena and many more, but let’s not forget the rest of the music shall we? David Paton’s bass guitar on Kite provides the perfect counterpart to probably Bush’s highest vocal on the album, and it’s as if it’s mumbling agreement with Bush’s calls to “come up and be a kite”. The song is fun, bouncy, and impeccably performed on all fronts, with variations in tempo keeping things fresh.

It’s hard to listen to the album without getting the feeling you’ve been blessed by some angel from the heavens, and songs that could easily have been a bit boring, like The Man with the Child in His Eyes are elevated to being wondrous because of Andrew Powell’s dramatic arrangements and Bush’s soaring vocals.

Wuthering Heights is, of course, the album’s most famous song and it’s now rather perplexing that Bush had to press for it to be released as the first single, as her record company were pressing for Jesus and the Cold Gun. Kate Bush turned out to be right obviously, and it remains Bush’s most successful single to this day, spending 4 weeks at number 1 on the British chart. The song features one of the most recognisable and unique chorus melodies ever written, one that sounds as if it was composed by some musically talented birds longing for the return of the sun. Ian Bairnson’s understated guitar solo is the perfect ending. A song about the novel after which it’s named, it’s one of the best songs ever written, completely incomparable to anything that has come before or since.

The second side opens with perhaps the album’s most by the numbers track, the aforementioned James and the Cold Gun. The vulnerable, and beautifully simple retelling of a sexual encounter on Feel It is particularly memorable, and is followed quickly by the fun and endlessly interesting Oh to Be in Love, featuring rare male vocals, which provide a great foundation to Bush’s, in a chorus that’s one of the most enjoyable on the record. The album’s final four tracks continue to display Bush’s endless vocal talent and the tasteful and interesting arrangements, maintaining the feeling that you’re listening to something that’s just dropped from the sky.

Song Picks: Kite, Wuthering Heights, Strange Phenomena, Oh to be in Love

9/10

Music for 18 Musicians, a work of instrumental minimalism first premiered in 1976, but a recording of the piece wasn’t released until 1978. Reich’s first attempt at writing for larger ensembles, the piece is based on a cycle of eleven chords, with pieces of music based on one chord effortlessly flowing into a short piece based on another etc.

The album is made up of the single 56 minute title piece, which swells and sparkles from chord to chord putting you into a relaxed trance state. It feels like a quicker, livelier version of something like Eno’s Ambient 1: Music for Airports, with repetition creating a homely familiarity within the subtle, slow changes in the piece. Although there’s a whole host of instruments playing here, such as pianos, marimbas and xylophones, there’s rarely more than 2 of each instrument, creating a sound that maintains its intimacy, something the fact nothing is electronic here also helps add to. The real masterstroke however is Reich’s decision to focus on the breath of his musicians, instructing them to create pulses present throughout the piece by repeating breaths in the same time intervals for as long as their lungs would let them. This makes the piece feel like a living, breathing entity, and it becomes more than just music, but something you swear you could touch. When this idea reaches its climax with a female voice creating pulses using the same idea, I could have sworn I entered a parallel universe for a fleeting moment.

I’ve always been a big believer in certain albums coming to life in certain situations, and Robert Christgau’s claim that the album ‘sounds great in the evening by the sea’ has me rather excited to try that one day. For now though, I’ll just have to listen its intricate pitter-patter melodies and gorgeous minimalism and imagine the waves lapping the pebbles by the sea, the wind pressing my baggy shirt against my skin, and the seagulls nesting noisily in the cliffs, all given new vibrant colours through the lens of Reich’s magnificent creation. It’s all rather easy to imagine when listening to something so majestic.

9.5/10

2020 - Clive's Top Albums of Every Year Challenge

January 18, 2021 by Clive in Clive's Album Challenge, Music

While I decide on my favourite album from every year in the past in this challenge, I’m also going to keep track of my favourite albums in years as I live them. This will be done a little differently to my other lists, mainly in that there’ll be more albums and less writing, but I’ll still review and include the top 10 albums according to rateyourmusic.com’s users for at least some consistency. I’ll also be sure to include any of the most critically well received albums, by grabbing the top rated albums from albumoftheyear.org; any that come high in my favourite online music reviewers’ estimations that aren’t already included; as well as, of course, anything else that I’ve enjoyed. Essentially, we should have a pretty solid list of what’s had the most buzz in 2020, both from critics’ and more general listeners’ perspectives.

Well 2020 was a year wasn’t it? But let’s not talk about all that, let’s focus on the music. So before we go onto the full list, here’s what our lovely rateyourmusic.com users rated as their top 10 albums of 2020:

#1 The Microphones - Microphones in 2020
#2 Ichiko Aoba - WIndswept Adan
#3 Fiona Apple - Fetch the Bolt Cutters
#4 Clipping - Visions of Bodies Being Burned
#5 Jessie Ware - What’s Your Pleasure?
#6 DJ Sabrina the Teenage DJ - Charmed
#7 Moor Mother & Billy Woods - Brass
#8 Run the Jewels - RTJ4
#9 Oranssi Pazuzu - Mestarin Kynsi
#10 Charli XCX - How I’m Feeling Now

Those ten will be thrown into the mixer with 27 others. Let’s see who comes out the victor shall we?

What'sPleasure.jpg — 37. What’s Your Pleasure?

Jessie Ware

Undeniably well written and produced, and with plenty of catchy songs. It just didn’t feel exciting enough to keep me interested for its over 50 minute duration, often losing my attention by the final third.

Song Picks: Soul Control

6.5/10

Perhaps a little twee, but this is refreshingly positive, vocal led electronic music to warm the soul.

SP: What If, Ring, Free

7/10

Visionsofbodiesbiengburned — 35. Visions of Bodies Being Burned

clipping.

Clipping’s follow up and second part to 2019’s There Existed an Addiction to Blood creates another memorable horrorscape, which at times is more clever than affecting. You’ll be kept on your toes for the album’s 52 minute length, which features some truly memorable, at times cataclysmic moments (that pounding percussion on Something Underneath for example), but at times its doors are so meticulously crafted and complex it can be hard to work out how to get in.

Song Pick: Say the Name, Something Underneath

7/10

**34. Charmed**

**DJ Sabrina the Teenage DJ**

A three hour trip through a gently euphoric land of colourful sweets and sherbet. At times unflinchingly cheesy and repetitive, but always charming. A chilled trance hug that’ll help replace that sad mist with a happier, yet equally unclear one.

Song PIcks: Pool Party, I Want You 2 Know, How Did You Know?, Charmed Life

7/10

Fleet Foxes’ fourth album is as pleasant and calming as the lapping of the sea on your toes at the beach. It blends into the background among some of the year’s other releases as it’s not the most memorable record, but there is an inescapable warmth to the sound and songwriting here.

Song Picks - Wading in the Waist-High Water, I’m Not My Season, Quiet Air/Gioia

7/10

The Strokes are back with their most enjoyable record for a while. Those warm fuzzy vocals, those catchy melodies, that breezy guitar sound. It’s all had a bit of a 2020 refresh, but the early 2000s soul is still there.

Song Picks: The Adults are Talking, Brooklyn Bridge To Chorus, Bad Decisions, Not the Same Anymore

7.5/10

The New Zealand extreme metal band’s sixth album is technically astounding, has so many time signatures you’ll find yourself in a perpetual state of confusion, and roars like a beast having a rather intense fit. It growls, it pounds, it thunders, but it never breaks, walking off again at the end of this spectacular 60 minute display unharmed, as if that earth-shattering display was simply in its DNA. It’s as challenging and full on as that description sounds though, so not for the faint hearted.

Song Picks - Stare into Death and be Still, Drawn into the Next Void , Dissolved Orders

7.5/10

Nicolas Jaar’s livelier side project continues to walk the tightrope between danceable and intriguing, never quite falling off to either side. Infectiously inventive.

Song Pick: Fantasy, You (forever)

7.5/10

saint cloud.jpg — 29. Saint Cloud

Waxahatchee

Waxahatchee’s fourth album already feels like a country and folk classic, an album with a beautiful, polished sheen. Nothing is done which doesn’t aid the song. Things are kept simple, straight and honest, and it’s fitting that an album about recovering from alcoholism should leave you feeling so emotionally cleansed. Nigh on impossible as it would have been, I just wish the latter half lived up to the first.

Song Picks - Oxbow, Can’t Do Much, Fire

7.5/10

The debut album by Canadian Micah Visser is an album he himself has said is about “growing up, moving on, and everything that happens in between”. The lyrics are simple and relatable and musically it’s full of thick synth lines with the attitude of distorted guitars. These are songs you can imagine playing as university students stand arm in arm in the middle of the dance-floor, eight £1 pints down, singing their lungs out, staring at the lights in the ceiling.

Song Picks : Keeping Up, Dear Megan, Your List, Making Peace with Suburbia

8/10

Rapper Billy Woods and activist/poet Moor Mother combine to create a dark, mysterious record that floats outside of definition. Rumbling along like a lost woolly mammoth the pairs’ words and sounds conjure up an image of a lost past.

Song Picks: Furies, The Blues Remembers Everything

8/10

The Swedish electronic duo have created quite probably the year’s most euphoric release. There’s nothing all that new here, but it’s a brilliant distillation of hand raising synth lines, electronic music tropes and melodic dreams, seemingly hoovering any negativity from your body like a despondency Dyson.

Song Picks: Portland, Attic, Arresten

8/10

FutureNostalgia — 25. Future Nostalgia

Dua Lipa

As the title suggests, this is a very current take on nostalgic genres such as disco, funk, synth-pop etc. Dua Lipa focuses on catchy songs about ‘dancing and having fun and being free and being in love’ while also making sure the whole thing has a cohesive feel. Needless to say, she’s succeeded, the sound palette is varied enough to keep it interesting while still sounding like a neat package. It’s rammed with bangers, and for its 37 minute duration you do indeed feel rather free.

Song Picks: Don’t Start Now, Cool, Physical, Love Again, Boys Will Be Boys

8/10

Un Canto por Mexico.jpg — 24. Un canto por México Vol. 1

Natalia Lafourcade

You sure as hell can’t fly to Mexico this year, but this gets you stupendously close. Lafourcade’s collection of covers and new versions of her older songs shines with all the joy and beauty of the sun on a cobbled Mexican street; bursting with life, melody and history.

Song Picks - Veracruz, Y No Vivo por Vivir , Mi Tiearra Veracruzana, Cucurrucucu Paloma

8/10

Mac Miller died two years ago as the result of an accidental drugs overdose in 2018. Circles was being worked on at the time. Posthumously completed and released by Miller’s producer, Jon Brion, the album is tastefully done, with perfectly subtle production to match Mac Miller’s relaxed sound. With a voice as smooth as polished marble, it’s the perfect lazy Sunday listen. A quietly sad and introspective goodbye from a true talent.

Song Picks - Circles, Blue World, Good News

8/10

Japanese folk singer-songwriter Ichiko Aoba’s seventh album ebbs and flows, flickers and enchants. The vocals hum like angels and the dense instrumentation sparkles as clearly and crisply as a mountain stream. Windswept Adan is rather hard to put into words, and the picture on the cover does it as much justice as anything. It’s a journey through a mysterious underwater world, where your exhalation becomes more than the exiting of oxygen, but the temporary glitter of a passed moment.

Song Picks: Dawn in the Adan, Sagu Palm’s Song

8/10

It’s difficult to call something so lo-fi a ‘wall of sound’ but within it’s limited frequency range Im Wald is a relentless storm by the Swiss one man band determined to make a racket. 2 hours in length, it sucks you into its ‘landscape of Winter’ with a sound that ceases to become a load of instruments playing as loudly as possible and seamlessly becomes one mass of emotionally affecting noise. Im Wald is an unforgettable ambient black metal experience, one that screams so loud it cleans your soul.

Song Picks - Uber den Baumen, Stimmen im Wald

8/10

setmyheartonfire — 20. Set My Heart on Fire Immediately

Perfume Genius

Perfume Genius’ fifth album feels both humongous - thanks to the engrossing depth of the production - and intimate - thanks to Hadreas’ wavering, delicate vocals - a combination that at times is so beautiful it somewhat buries the significant substance contained underneath. Set My Heart on Fire Immediately is the musical equivalent of a flowing and captivating interpretive dance.

Song Picks - Whole Life, Nothing at All, Some Dream

8/10

Named after his daughter’s favourite word, Suddenly is the first album to feature Dan Snaith’s vocals on every track. It’s danceable and yet relaxing, and surprisingly introspective. Snaith’s knack for hooks and melody is here in spades, and his vocals add a great intimacy to the songs. The production, as you’d expect, is as smooth as the finest silk.

Song Picks: Sunny’s Time, Home, Like I loved You

8/10

18. Alfredo

Freddie Gibbs & The Alchemis

Freddie Gibbs and the Alchemist combine to create a 35 minute gem packed with bars so quick it’s hard to understand what’s said, but it hardly matters when the flow and rhythm are this good. The production is as slick as an ice-rink, combining with the syrupy smooth raps to create one of the year’s most immediately enjoyable albums.

Song Picks - God is Perfect, 1985, Something to Rap About

8/10

oranssipazuzu — 17. Mestarin Kynsi

Oranssi Pazuzu

The Finnish black-metal band’s fifth album is a dark journey into the belly of a giant orc. Atmospheric, gritty, doomed, and utterly disgusting, it growls with the anger of someone dying a prolonged and pointless death.

Song Pick: Ilmestys

8/10

purplemoonlightpages — 16. Purple Moonlight Pages

R.A.P. Ferreira

Rory Allan Philip Ferreira works with Jefferson Park Boys to create an intricate jazz fuelled hip-hop album. Segal, Carmack and Parvizi’s perfect productions are old-school in their sound, but very much new-school in their alluring complexity. Ferreira’s raps lack the urgency common in the genre, but it’s refreshing to listen to someone behind the beat, someone relaxed, someone not pushing for the mainstream but happy to drift along in a tributary.

Song Picks - LAUNDRY, GREENS, CYCLES, RO TALK

8/10

Swift’s eighth album, and first of two in 2020, is a gentle, constantly catchy, and just rather gorgeous step into storytelling for an artist that has tended to be autobiographical. Lyrically, she’s able to paint with fine brushstrokes, while her pictures are framed by a singular ability to craft endlessly pleasant melodies. A little one note perhaps, but what a lovely note.

Song Picks - Exile, the last great American dynasty, August, this is me trying, epiphany

8/10

Charli XCX’s fourth album, recorded during lockdown, is a serotonin coated glitch wave of pop-gems. Immediately accessible, and yet sparkling with abstract intrigue. A party of a record in a year without parties.

Song Picks - forever, claws, detonate, anthems, c2.0

8.5/10

A Hero's Death — 13. A Hero’s Death

Fontaines D.C.

The fast paced punk of their debut has largely gone, repalced by dreamier, slower and more atmospheric tracks filled out by a massive sounding distorted guitar. Sometimes this humongous sounding production adds a layer of mystery to a beautifully simple song - such as on Oh Such a Spring - other times it makes the whole thing explode through your headphones as in Televised Mind. Catchy and angry, it feels endlessly important.

Song Picks: I Don’t Belong, Oh What a Spring, Televised Mind

8.5/10

The Big Thief lead vocalist and guitarist’s sixth solo album is a record so delicate that it feels like it might crumble under my attempt to describe it, much like a dried leaf will break with the slightest touch. In a year where hugs have been hard to come by, Lenker provides one in the most beautiful musical form, with melodies and acoustic guitar lines as soothing and comforting as a warm fire.

Song Picks: two reverse, anything, half return, dragon eyes

8.5/10

roughnrowdyways — 11. Rough and Rowdy Ways

Bob Dylan

Dylan’s 39th album is probably his best since 1997’s Time Out of Mind. Perfecting the quietly growled vocal he’s had on his last few albums, he weaves lyrics as engaging as any he’s written for some time - and which are the best on any record this year - while backed perfectly by minimalistic and pretty instrumental melodies that never distract the attention from his meticulous poetics. The 17 minute closer, Murder Most Foul, is the year’s best song in my books, and one of the most affecting things Dylan has ever written.

Song Picks - Murder Most Foul, I Contain Multitudes, My Own Version of You, I’ve Made up my Mind to Give Myself to You

8.5/10

Blackis — 10. (Untitled) Black Is

Sault

The mysterious British collective’s third album is their first of two 2020 releases. They don’t interact with the press or on social media, and it’s pretty hard to find out who they are, other than that Inflo produces them. Released a month after George Floyd’s murder, (Untitled) Black Is seems to have been recorded entirely in response. This is music of the resistance, and not the burst of anger Rage Against the Machine variety, but the kind that is always there, simmering beneath the surface. Mixing disco and r&b with the more vintage sounds of blues and soul, all 56 minutes of this album sound timely and yet timeless, classic and yet modern, accessible and yet labyrinthine.

Song Picks: Hard Life, Wildfires, Monsters, Miracles, Pray Up

8.5/10

Run the Jewel’s fourth album is potent mix of raps that flow like gnarled treacle, with lyrics as serrated and sharp as a rambo knife and beats like a bulldozer smashing through a wall (and not the polystyrene type, Boris). A non-stop march of irresistible, infectious anger.

Song Picks - yankee and the brave, ooh lala, holy clamafuck, JU$T, a few words for the firing squad

8.5/10

ewomeninmusicpt3 — 8. Women in Music Pt. III

HAIM

Haim’s third album is another collection of 70s inspired pop gems. The three sisters incorporate new genres, while never losing their characteristic approachable catchiness. Women in Music Pt. III is the kind of album I imagine anyone would like. It’s not at all challenging, but it holds up to deep listens due to its creative production, infectious melodies, and grainy warmth. It’s 2020’s best comfort record.

Song Picks: The Steps, I Know Alone, 3am, I Don’t Wanna

8.5/10

heaventopatorturedmind — 7. Heaven to a Tortured Mind

Yves Tumor

Experimental electronic artist Yves Tumor’s fourth album perfectly mixes the vintage with the modern. It’s concise and yet expansive, soaking up every genre on earth and spitting out the complex mess of what results into surprisingly digestable songs. Heaven to a Tortured mind seems to sparkle in a separate universe, refusing to be defined. Like the superstars of old, Yves Tumor is ploughing his own path, creating a sound completely his own. Quite the achievement in 2020.

Song Picks: Gospel for a New Century, Kerosene

8.5/10

Marling’s other albums, for one reason or another, have always passed me by. Songs for our Daughter however grabbed me immediately. There’s a wonderful depth to her vocals, lyrics and the production. It feels like the album of a woman who’s found herself, and that’s a pretty remarkable thing to listen to. One of the year’s most confident efforts, her delicate vibrato seemingly opening a door right into her soul, which she’s happy to lay out on the floor in one of the best minimalist folk albums for quite some time.

Song Picks - Alexandra, Hold Down, Fortune, For You

8.5/10

Phoebe Bridger’s second album is a journey of melancholoy, delicate, and reverb-drenched beauty. Occasionally exploding to anger from its general sadness, it’s a triumph of affecting and unforgettable songwriting. A musical version of that introspective night you spent alone in the corner of your room on the verge of tears, before waking up the following day with a paralysing numbness to the world.

Song Picks: Garden Song, Kyoto, Halloween, Chinese Satellite, Moon Song, Graceland Too

9/10

The Japanese-British songwriter’s debut sounds like the result of someone throwing nu metal, 2000’s and 90s pop, and a whole host of other genres into a raging cyclone. It opens with quite probably the year’s most cataclysmic pop track, Dynasty, which is followed not long after by the best nu metal track I’ve heard for ages, STFU, with a riff that sounds like a mountain coming to life. Endlessly creative and completely unpredictable, SAWAYAMA is surely the birth of our next pop superstar.

Song Picks: Dynasty, STFU, Paradisin’, Bad Friend

9/10

Fetch the Bolt Cutters is an album of creative confidence, one where Fiona has rarely stopped herself and gone, ‘nah, this sounds like a bad idea,’ but rather followed a song’s path to completion, regardless of how unconventional and odd it might sound to begin with. What results is the rarest of beasts, an album as unique as herself, using music that has come before only as smatterings of influence, while never turning them into a template. Put simply, it’s groundbreaking.

Song Picks: Fetch the Bolt Cutters, Under the Table, Drumset, On I Go

9/10

We needed Melee in 2020. With no live performances since March we needed an album that got pretty close to doing the impossible, bringing the energy of a live show onto a record. Soitsiadis’ vocals are endless body-tensed screams - where it sounds as if his voice could crack on any one, never to work again. Grissom’s lead guitar screeches and flutters like his strings are unable to sit still, and Macinski’s bass marches along as Jacob Hanlon’s drumming flurries and thrashes at breakneck speed like an out of control tornado. In Bolivia, it’s not uncommon to end up driving on what seems like a normal straight road that is actually more than twice as high as the highest mountain peak in the UK, you only notice the marvel of what you’ve just experienced when you get back to sea level and can breathe again. On Melee, there’s so little let-up that this absolute typhoon of energy almost feels normal, until it ends and you return to ‘sea level’ and immediately feel less alive, before impulsively starting the record again, in an addictive need for the energy it provides. In a year where I needed a kick up the arse to break the endless monotony, Dogleg’s debut provided just that, and what a marvel it is.

Song Picks: Kawasaki Backflip, Fox, Headfirst

9.5/10

Elverum returns under his the Microphones moniker for the first time in 17 years in a characteristically experimental effort. A 44 minute song comprised of just two chords, it hums with a delicate beauty. Elverum breezes over lines like “The thing I just realised / For probably the millionth time / That walking with my knees trembling / Is the true state of all things” as if they weren’t bloody gorgeous, setting out his stall and struggle with a mumbled bluntness that’s infinitely refreshing. It breaks the fourth wall in such a way as to make you part of the experience of its creation, and to experience this while listening to the end product puts you into a weird state of timelessness. Then, as your guard drops in this void, you realise someone with Phil Elverum’s platform and success is just as lost as your are, and that you’ll probably both remain just as lost forever, and though you don’t know each other and never will, he feels like your brother. And you sit and stare at the ceiling as the song weaves from that double tracked acoustic guitar to the heavily distorted segments and back out like a boat navigating a sporadic storm, and you realise once again “for probably the millionth time” that you’re just an insignificant piece of sand in a massive universe that doesn’t mean anything, and everything you make will one day be lost, and everything you’ve made will one day be forgotten as if it never existed in the first place. And weirdly this thought makes you smile, because there’s a melancholy freedom in realising “for probably the millionth time” the futility of it all. And you go downstairs and you hug someone in your household. And suddenly their aura feels stronger as you realise, again “for probably the millionth time”, that all that really matters is each other, and that there’s no end, and that sure your search for meaning will never bear fruit, but some fruit will drop from the branches regardless if you just look around once in a while. And then finally, you realise how cheesy that all sounds, but you couldn’t care less. The Microphones in 2020 is 2020’s masterpiece.

9.5/10

1977 - Clive's Top Albums of Every Year Challenge

December 18, 2020 by Clive in Clive's Album Challenge, Music

In what will likely be my final post of 2020 (don’t panic, I’ll very much be carrying on with this cahllenge into 2021 and beyond) we’re going to take a look at 1977. The year the nuclear-proliferation pact, curbing the spread of nuclear weapons was signed by 15 countries, Star Wars hit theatres for the first time, and British Public sector trade unions including firefighters undertook a strike for wage increases.

As usual, here’s what rateyourmusic.com’s users rate as the year’s top 5 albums, using their fancy new algorithm which seems to give a little less credence to how many reviews an album has, meaning less reviewed releases have a better chance of coming high up the lists.

#1 Pink Floyd - Animals
#2 David Bowie - Low
#3 Television - Marquee Moon
#4 Fleetwood Mac - Rumours
#5 David Bowie - “Heroes”

So returns from Pink Floyd and Bowie and first time entries from Television and Fleetwood Mac. Bowie achieves the rarest of things by managing to release two albums in one year that make it onto the list. As usual, five just isn’t enough, so I’m grabbing a few from further down to compete for the coveted title for 1977, including a shameless dip quite far down to grab an old favourite.

#6 Trans Europa Express
#7 Fela Kuti - Zombie
#8 Wire - Pink Flag
#11 Bob Marley & the Wailers - Exodus
#12 Brian Eno - Before and After Science
#25 Martha Argerich - 24 Préludes, Op. 28
#85 Sex Pistols - Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols

Plenty of artists we’ve not had before there, so let’s get these 12 albums reviewed and see who comes out the victor. I know I’ve said this a few times already, but this is absolutely a contender for one of the strongest years we’ve had yet.

Trans-europaexpress — 12. Trans Europa Express

Kraftwerk

Kraftwerk’s sixth album ‘saw the group refine their melodic electronic style, with a focus on sequenced rhythms, minimalism, and occasionally manipulated vocals. The themes include celebrations of the titular European railway service and Europe as a whole, and meditations on the disparities between reality and appearance.’ (Wikipedia). Their Previous album, Radio-Activity, had been their first entirely electronic one, moving away from their earlier krautrock style. Trans-Europa Express is regularly seen as a massively influential album on modern music, and was in fact called ‘the most important pop album of the last 40 years’ by the LA times.

Europa Endloss (Europe Endless in English) is a simple, dreamy song about the band travelling across Europe by train. It’s lyrics are simple and repetitive just like the electronic musical backing. The electronic percussion and synths lull you into a beautiful and yet musically primitive sleep. The simplicity of many of the arrangements was likely born out of how early this was in the development of electronic music, but it is also part of the album’s charm, lending it a slightly post-apocalypitc and industrial feel that is only added to by haunting vocals on songs such as Spiegelsall (Hall of Mirrors in English). “Even the biggest stars, don’t like themselves in the mirror” the vocals say in German repeatedly, with a reverb large enough to make it sound like an observation from god.

The songs on Trans- Europa express tend to hinge on a repeated vocal line and simple synth melody and drum beat. The title track is a great example. ‘Trans-Europa Express’ is repeated regularly through some sort of Vocoder to turn the vocals to mercury, and the skittering electronic drum beat is repeated throughout the six and a half minute track, while the synths fill the gaps with large, almost organ-like chords. It’s another strangely haunting piece, like an abandoned factory with the machinery left on. The beginnings of many electronic genres are here, and the influence Kraftwerk had is undisputable. The record has certainly aged, and its sounds are particularly primitive when compared to all the fancy stuff we can do now with electronic music. But it has aged gracefully, thanks to the musicality and atmosphere at its core, and it’s simplicity really is rather beautiful.

Song Picks: Europa Endloss, Spiegelsaal, Franz Schubert, Endloss

8/10

Chopin’s 24 Preludes, Op.28 were first published 1839, and contained 24 short piano pieces, one in each major and minor key. A Polish virtuoso pianist of the Romantic era, Chopin apparently never performed more than 4 of the 24 pieces in a single performance, and there is still debate as to whether they were intended to be played in order, or indeed written as 24 separate pieces to use as possible introductions to other works, as Preludes generally were. The fact that Chopin ordered the songs using the circle of fifths rather than simply moving up the keys in semitones suggests to me that he had thought about the ordering a little too much for the pieces to be designed for consuming independently however. The 24 Preludes, Op.28 have been recorded and performed by a whole heap of pianists, but it’s Martha Argerich’s version, released in 1977 that makes it onto these lists.

Martha Argerich is an Argentine-Swiss concert pianist, and widely regarded as one of the greatest pianists of all time. Born in 1941 in Buenos Aires, Argentina, she began playing the piano aged 3, eventually moving to Europe in 1955 and later gaining Swiss citizenship. Despite her incredible talent and rather impressive list of accolades (see her Wikipedia page here), Argerich has generally shied away from the spotlight, which would explain why this is the first I’ve heard of her.

Argerich’s performance here is masterful. Though I can’t claim to have heard these pieces played by anyone else, it’s hard to imagine them being performed more beautifully than they are here. Argerich can put dizzyingly fast lines together in a way that still feels very human, while making them sound just as effortless as the slower pieces. Those slower pieces have a delicate wonder to them, like the notes from some sunken ship resurfacing as bubbles on the ocean’s surface. There’s a whole world to get lost in here, and Argerich’s mastery of the instrument coupled with Chopin’s gorgeous compositions has absolutely become one of the piano albums I’ll point people to when they ask for my favourites, sitting proudly alongside with Keith Jarrett’s The Köln Concert.

8.5/10

Fela Kuti’s second album to make it onto these lists caused quite a stir. Hugely popular in his home country of Nigeria, the record angered the government there, which it criticised heavily. It angered them so much that they attacked his commune, murdering his mother by throwing her out of a window, severely beating Fela Kuti, burning the entire commune and destroying his studio and master tapes. Though the re-issue added an additional two tracks, I’ll be reviewing the original 25 minute 1977 release here, which featured just two tracks.

The album opens with the title track, a scathing attack on the Nigerian military, describing them all as zombies who just follow orders without thinking, “Zombie no go think, unless you tell am to think”. The sound is similar to the one on Expensive Shit, but perhaps larger. We’ve got a whole host of driving percussion, a scatty strummed electric guitar, and the two talking saxophones that form the centrepiece of Kuti’s afrobeat sound. Once Kuti starts chanting his political lyrics, it’s not hard to see why he had such a big impact in his home country. The music draws you in with its infinite danceability, and soon has you chanting its simple and yet astute political message along with him.

The second and final track Mr Follow Follow has a similar message, “Some dey follow follow, dem close dem eye”, but is a little calmer in it’s instrumentation, with the bass, guitar and saxes laying down an irresistibly smooth groove like the light-hearted march of a cartoon army. Fela preaches about how everyone follows instructions without questioning them by closing their ears, eyes and ‘sense’. A master of setting a theme or mood before introducing any lyrics, it takes Kuti around 7 minutes to start singing here again, and by the time he does, you’re so entranced by the groove that you’ll agree to anything he says, thankfully his message is one that we could all do with hearing.

Zombie is musically and thematically cohesive, an album that is incredibly enjoyable in itself, but which becomes even more remarkable when you know the context of its recording. It’s difficult to imagine how Kuti feels about the album that inadvertently led to the death of his own mother, but to me, this is a perfect example of the power of music to unite, to spread a message by both being accessible and revolutionary.

Song Picks: Zombie, Mr Follow Follow

8.5/10

The English band’s debut album was received well critically, but didn’t sell well. Widely seen as one of the most influential albums of the 70s, its footprints can be seen on many hardcore, punk and alternative albums since. The record features 21 songs over its 35 minute duration, focusing on short, punchy songs that get to the point quickly and never outstay their welcome.

I’m sure I’ve mentioned a lot of times how big a fan of Guided by Voices I am, I’ve always loved their immediacy, how their songs seem to be captured at the point of inspiration, rather than when they’ve been thought out endlessly in the studio, and there’s something attractively raw about that to me. Pink Flag gives me the same vibes. Many of these songs could quite easily have been turned into 3 minute radio hits, but they’d have lost something. There’s a real magic to the rawness here.

With so many songs to talk about, it’d be folly to try and cover them all, so I’ll just talk about some of my highlights. Here goes. Ex Lion Tamer seems to have single-handedly invented Brit-pop, well before that genre was to dominate the charts. The chorus is as catchy as a song about sitting in front of your TV waiting for things to change could be, an anthem for the procrastinator. Lowdown is a great example of how great Colin Newman’s vocals sound when he throws caution to the wind, while Brazil’s guitar sound is so filthy you feel as if you’re being dragged backwards through a rubbish dump. So Obvious features the kind of major chord riff that could have easily been turned into a rock classic, but was instead seemingly played into a washing machine for 50 seconds, recorded, and then left there. Surgeon’s Girl features the lines “Said you weren't a tuna fish, put in a tin / They're very big, ha-ha” while Straight Line includes another fabulous riff that gets played for 44 glorious seconds and is then cut short. Mr Suit is the perfect anti-establishment punk song, something it achieves in only 1:25 seconds with a chorus that says ‘fuck the system’ like no other, “no, no, no, no Mr Suit”. On the grungy Strange, the band decide to play for a whole 4 minutes, with a riff so fuzzy and brilliant that you feel like you’ve just stuck your head straight into the world’s warmest tube amp. The lyrics are simple but performed by Newman in a way that makes them bounce against the guitar riff gloriously. The album’s final two track end things in a blaze of glory, Gimme Love is so drawled you can barely understand what’s being said and 1 2 X U is the ultimate bounce around punk song, but with drums that sound so thin it’s like they’re being played on a load of plastic cups, and guitars that are so loud they’ve gone full circle and ended up quiet again. Chaos.

In a genre that often gets repetitive, Pink Flag is an outstanding album that’s unpredictable, inspired, has the attention span of a gnat, and is completely brilliant.

Song Picks: Strange, Ex Lion Tamer, Lowdown, So Obvious, Gimme Lov

9/10

Beforeandafterscience — 8. Before and after Science

Brian Eno

It’s been quite the decade for Brian Eno, both in terms of his own albums and his contributions to those of others, and his fifth release is another remarkable one. As usual, a whole host of musicians collaborated with Eno on the album’s material, and the it also includes Eno’s final examples of rock music, before he was to head in a more ambient direction. Notably, over 100 songs were written for the album with only 10 making the cut.

Once again, Eno’s lyrics are more about a mood than meaning, which is clear on the opening No One Receiving, where they paint a bleak, industrial picture perfectly backed by the machine-like and yet gently funky backing of the plethora of percussion driven along by the song’s ever-present guitar riff. It’s another perfect example of Eno’ ability to create a world very much his own, something that he was to excel at in his later solo ambient recordings. Backwater displays Eno’s perhaps underrated ability for simple and infectious melody, sounding like Eno’s interpretation of a light hearted sailor’s song. Once again the synths and instrumental create a musical palette that’s both unique and infinitely interesting. Eno’s emphasis on the sound of words rather than their meaning is further explored on the enigmatic Kurt’s Rejoinder, inspired Kurt Schwitters, a prominent figure in the dada movement, which you can read more about here. We see Eno’s ambient work begin to creep in on the eerie and beautiful Energy Folls the Magician and the opening side ends with King’s Lead Hat, a song inspired by the Talking Heads, who Eno would go on to produce multiple albums of, and who’s name the title of the song is an anagram of. For me, it’s one of the album’s highlights, with it’s bopping bass line and drums, topped with an irresistibly catchy melody performed in Eno’s characteristic style. It’s a track that screams ‘fun’, and fills me with joy whenever it comes on.

Side two takes a more introspective turn, with Here He Comes setting the tone nicely with its slightly withdrawn and mumbled vocal backed by some gorgeous lead guitar work. It’s a late night drive kind of a song, sparkling gently like the stars as you exit the air pollution of the city. The gorgeous, twinkling guitar work continues on Julie With… and the gentle night-time ride continues until the album’s end with Spider and I, a song that makes you feel like you’re floating into the most beautiful cosmos, with nothing but your best friend in company.

Before and After Science is very much an album of two halves. The first half perhaps more perfectly encapsulating what Eno had been trying to do with rock music than any of his previous work, and the second half beautifully slides us into his more ambient catalogue. It’s a perfectly documented turning point.

Song Picks: No One Receiving, King’s Lead Hat, Here He Comes, Spider and I

9/10

Bowie’s twelfth album and second of 1977 continues in similar vein to Low, which we’ll get to later in this list. The middle album of Bowie’s ‘Berlin Trilogy’, Heroes was the only one actually recorded in Berlin. Bowie rejoined Tony Visconti and Brian Eno, who he’d worked with on Low, and much of the other personnel remained the same, with the notable addition of Robert Fripp on guitar. The majority of the tracks were recorded spontaneously in the studio and, perhaps most remarkably, Bowie had no lyrics written before he started recording. It continues the theme of having the opening side dedicated to to more conventional songs, with the second side being given over to predominantly instrumental tracks. It was commercially successful, and the most well received of Bowie’s ‘Berlin Trilogy’ initially, though Low is now largely seen as his masterpiece.

The album comes storming out the gates with that familiar insdustrial sound on Bowie recordings since Station to Station, including the brutal machine-like drum sound, which pounds along as the rest of the musicians bounce energetically and Bowie’s lyrics remain largely impenetrable. It combines haunting and dancy in a way that only Bowie can. On the following track Joe the Lion, a tribute to Chris Burden, Fripp’s influence becomes obvious, his riff is another corker, making this one of Bowie’s best rock songs in my books. Fripp effortlessly switches between riffs and solos as Bowie’s howls create another cataclysmic song to lead us into the more gentle Heroes. There are songs that become so famous that they become very much their own thing, and can sometimes stick out when listening to an album purely because of how much more familiar you are with them than the rest of the record. Heroes could easily be such a song, and yet it fits in seamlessly, yes I’ve heard it 3000 times more than any of the other songs here, but this very much feels like the song’s home. Fripp’s guitarwork is yet again what raises the piece from great to amazing, adding in endless depth and texture to a song that could easily have become boring with its simplicity. Bowie’s vocal performance is singular, metallic, and brilliantly unrestrained, getting more shouty as the song progresses, and as Visconti moved the mic further and further away from Bowie. The song tells of a doomed relationship, enjoying it “just for one day” inspired by an affair that producer Tony Visconti was having at the time. Sons of the Silent Age is essentially about ‘average Joes’ living lives that Bowie clearly thinks are rather boring. The first side closes with Blackout, a return to the dancy, industrial sound of the opening track.

The largely instrumental second side is dominated by the three tracks that flow into each other at its core, Sense of Doubt, Moss Garden and Neuköln, the former has a similar dark, haunting and desolate atmosphere to the instrumental tracks on Low, perhaps with some added menace, while Moss Garden is beautifully relaxing, apparently written to recreate the feeling of sitting in some moss gardens in Japan. It makes me want to go and do that immediately. Neuköln brings us back to a slightly darker mood, and features Bowie on saxophone before we finish with Secret Life of Arabia, a warm disco inspired tune, topped with a dusky vocal.

I find Heroes quite hard to separate from Low, and I give the edge to Low purely because it was more groundbreaking, while Heroes was very much a continuation of what Low had started. I think Heroes does everything just as well, there’s just a little less of that intangible magic there that I can’t explain. It may simply be because I listened to Low first.

Song Picks: Beauty and the Beast, Joe the Lion, Heroes, Moss Garden

9/10

Marqueemoon — 6. Marquee Moon

Television

Television’s debut landed to widespread critical acclaim. The band had grown in prominence following their residence at the Lower Manhattan Club and Brian Eno, who seems to have his fingerprints on so much music of the 1970s, produced the band’s first four demos in 1974. The band were eventually signed to Elektra Records, who released their debut.

I’ve mentioned a few times now how one of my favourite things about this listening challenge is discovering an album that seems to invent a genre out of nowhere, this is especially remarkable when that genre is one that played such a big part in my own youth, the 2000s indie-rock revolution of The Libertines, The Strokes et al. Marquee Moon, to me, is the birth of that movement, as well as so many more closer to its date of release.

The album opens with See No Evil, a song propelled by a snake-like guitar riff in one channel accompanied by a basic off-beat chord riff in the other channel. This is all backed by some great jazz inspired, and yet straight, drumming and a vocal that cuts right through the mix with a high frequency, nasal quality that forces you to pay attention to the lyrics. Lyrics that, in this case, are about knowing one is being controlled by desires, and yet seeing the beauty in those desires. It’s the perfect indie-rock song, catapulting the album onto the scene with a number that’s both accessible and revolutionary.

Televison stand apart from other acts of the period for their mix of genres. There’s elements of punk rock, particularly in Tom Verlaine’s deliberately unrestrained vocal, of jazz in Billy Ficca’s intricate drumming, and of a combination of rock and jazz in the guitars, which use more interesting chords in one song than Status Quo probably did in their entire career. It’s a remarkable meld of musicality that’s progressive not for the sake of being progressive but because the sound created is so damn enjoyable. There’s a breeziness to it, an irresistible energetic Sunday morning feeling, a feeling that all is right with the world while music like this is being created.

The album is full of great moments. Among them the great off-kilter guitar work on Friction, which gives Mac DeMarco a run for his money - indeed the competing guitar solos throughout the song belong to the album’s many highlights. The great title track is another one, an 11 minute jam which was apparently the first take, and the engineer initially thought was a rehearsal, testament to just how well well these musicians gel, it sounds perfect. A perfect mix of instrumental intrigue, interspersed vocals, and lyrics that keep you engaged. Not least the majestic closing couplet:

I was listening
Listening to the rain
I was hearing
Hearing something else

By the time you reach the closing track Torn Curtain, which contains perhaps the album’s most affecting chorus and a cracking guitar solo by Tom Verlaine, you’re left feeling like you’ve been blessed by something completely fresh sounding, a refreshing musical shower under a mountain waterfall.

Song Picks: See No Evil, Marquee Moon, Torn Curtain

9/10

5. Never Mind the Bollocks Here’s the Sex Pistols

The Sex Pistols

The band had already been banned from playing in various parts of Britain and fired from two record labels by the time their only album was released by Virgin Records, and the controversy didn’t end there. The title meant many stores refused to stock it and some charts refused to display its name. Regardless, and probably because of this, it debuted at number 1 on the UK album charts. If you were to somehow measure which albums have influenced the most music since their release, I suspect Never Mind the Bollocks… would end up near the top. Sure we’d had punk before, notably with Ramones in 1976, but it had never been this chaotic, this free, this simple and giving this few fucks.

The album opens with Holidays in the Sun which explodes into motion following the marching bass drum and an explosive riff from Steve Jones on guitar (he also plays bass on most of the album). It’s important to note that the Sex Pistols achieved their sound not by using some sort of amp designed for distortion, oh no, they turned up the gain and volume so high on a predominantly clean amp so that it lead to the distorted racket they’re famous for today. Rotten’s lead vocals are pretty much the birth of the kind of half-sung half-shouted, theatrical vocal that became common on the punk scene after this album was released. It’s sneering, loud, bursting with a cocky attitude, and just generally bloody fabulous. The song also shows their often underrated ability to come up with a catchy hook.

Bodies, the only song to feature Sid Vicious, has a chorus that is so jubilantly cathartic it juxtaposes with the fact the song tackles abortion in such a head on and unflinching way that it appalled many people at the time. It’s probably the heaviest, most gut punching song on the record.

God Save the Queen is obviously monstrous too. Rotten shouting “God Save the Queen - fascist regime!!” and sarcastically belting out “we love our queen!” is quite probably the single most influential punk song of all time, along with the equally boisterous Anarchy UK later on, which a generation of Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 2 fans (me included) have seared into their brains. It’s these two songs which perhaps influence in a foundational way, 50% of my own music. The Sex Pistols taught me to shout my head off, to make my thoughts heard, and to not care whatever anyone else thought. The Sex Pistols taught me freedom

Never Mind the Bollocks… says “We’re the Sex Pistols, and this is what we sound like. Deal with it.” and it’s the best statement of individuality, not caring what anyone thinks, and freedom that there’s probably ever been.

Holidays in the Sun, Bodies, God Save the Queen, Anarchy UK

9.5/10

Bowie’s 11th album is the first of his so called ‘Berlin Trilogy’. A trio of albums produced by Tony Visconti on which Bowie collaborated with Brian Eno. Though recorded after Bowie’s move to West Berlin following the drug addiction that had been apparent throughout the recording of his previous album, the album was actually mostly recorded in France. Low divided critics on release, and received little promotion. Nowadays though, it’s pretty hard to find any greatest album of all time list without Low near the top.

The album delves further into the electronic approach toyed with on Station to Station and is also probably Bowie’s least vocal album, with it’s entire second side featuring instrumentals, and the opening side featuring songs that don’t have much singing either.

Speed of Life bursts into an infectious guitar riff backed by synths and a distinctive punchy drum sound achieved by Visconti using a Eventide H910 harmoniser. It’s a relatively simple electronic track that puts Bowie’s knack for catchy melodies perfectly into an electronic context. Carlos Alomar’s serpentine lead guitar opens up Breaking Glass, on which we have our first Bowie vocal, which sparsely calls to the listener in three short verses over the top of a buzzing bass line, more gated drums, and the aforementioned guitar part that very much makes the song. It’s only on Sound and Vision that we reach our first Bowie ‘hit’. One of my very favourite Bowie songs, it’s once again lifted by a brilliant lead guitar part, this time by Ricky Gardiner, in what has to be one of the simplest and catchiest riffs ever written. Bowie’s vocals speak of an isolation in his blue house, or as Bowie puts it, “I was going through dreadful times. It was wanting to be put in a little cold room with omnipotent blue on the walls and blinds on the windows.” Bowie duets with himself, one version singing in his characteristic melodic tone, the other mumbling with a vocal that has been saturated so much it sounds like your own conscience. It’s a masterpiece of infectious mystery, and perhaps the closest song to what we had on Station to Station.

Always Crashing in the Same Car is a humble song about always making the same mistakes and never learning from them. The vocal performance is a resigned mumble, the guitars a fatalistic hum, and the synths try to break through the wall of sound like a sparkle of that good habit you should probably start cultivating. Be My Wife, the album’s second single is thought to be a final plea to his wife at the time to save their crumbling marriage, they divorced in 1980. It’s a classic, catchy Bowie number that’s followed expertly by first side’s closing track, A Career in a New Town. A song that contains some of the most heartbreaking harmonica ever cut to tape, like a cry for help from someone curled up on the floor.

As mentioned earlier, the album’s second side features purely instrumentals which open with the haunting, chilling Warszawa, a song that brings to mind a post-apocalytpic hell-scape of a city with empty houses, broken windows, crumbling walls, and faded dreams. Art Decade and Weeping Wall create similarly cold atmospheres. The latter hinting at some warmth with a percussive xylophone part that has a lovely intimacy to it. The synth melodies, however, are crushing. We finish with the masterpiece Subterraneans, its layers of synths like ages of man lost to the wind, which closes out a side of music that is as transcendental as anything I’ve heard in this challenge so far. We’ve already learnt that Brian Eno and David Bowie both made some of the best music of the 70s, but here they combine to create something untouchable, a desolate landscape of destroyed beauty, from which a flowering phoenix rises. Astounding.

Song Picks: Sound & Vision, Speed of Life, Subterraneans, A New Career in a New Town,

9.5/10

The band’s 11th studio album was famously recorded during a tough time for the band members’ personal lives. To summarise the atmosphere in which it was recorded, Christine (keyboard player and vocalist) and John McVie (bass guitarist) had divorced having been together for eight years and were strictly not talking to each other except for matters of music. Vocalists Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham were in a rather intense on/off relationship that led to lots of heated arguments and drummer Mick Fleetwood had just discovered that his wife and mother of his two children - who was not in the band - had had an affair with his best friend. Essentially, Rumours is the work of a band not really getting on, but making it work for the sake of getting some music out.

Anyway, onto the music, which is glorious. Second Hand News opens the album and very much sets the tone, you’d be forgiven for thinking the song is a happy one based on the sing-along melody and marching bass and drums. However, listen in to the lyrics and it’s clear that this is about a breakup between Nicks and Cunningham, who seems to be singing their thoughts at each other, and it’s that tension which makes this song, and the whole album, so great. Dreams was written by Nicks in a room built for Sly Stone while some more technical things were being done to the album - mixing I presume. Apparently she entered the studio and said “I’ve just written the most amazing song”. That song was Dreams, a perfect breakup song to Buckingham. The acoustic Never Coming Back Again is Buckingham’s response, where his vocals soar beautifully over the picked guitar that is so clear it sounds like it’s being plucked by diamonds. Don’t Stop moves onto the McVie’s divorce, written by Christine McVie and sung by her and Buckingham. It’s a song about moving on, plodding on intently with a straightforward bouncing bass and drum part which the other instruments embelish perfectly. It’s another fabulous pop song before we arrive at the most perfect of pop songs, Go Your Own Way, which, though infinitely overplayed, retains its initial magic when listened in the context of the album. The first side is closed by Songbird, a song that is a completely timeless, beautifully performed, and delicate meditation on love. Has there ever been a more perfect chorus than:

And the songbirds keep singing
Like they know the score
And I love you, I love you, I love you
Like never before

I think not.

I’m finding it rather difficult to not continually use the word perfect in this review, but I’m going to have to use it again here. The Chain perfectly opens the second side with an opening acoustic guitar part as recognisable as anything ever recorded. The song is once again a melodic masterpiece, and the famous finale has to be one of my very favourites featuring a guitar solo that threatens to escape the realm of sound and turn into some swirling snake, I just wish it wasn’t faded out so quickly. I’ll stop gushing now, but the final four tracks of the album, though perhaps less iconic, are still generally pop gems, though I’ve never enjoyed Oh Daddy as much as the rest.

Rumours is an album that I’ve always liked, but never loved, perhaps because all my experiences of it were of other people playing it to me and telling me I had to love it. It often takes listening to an album by myself for me to fully feel it, and that was the case here. I can confirm I’ve been completely wrong to not to absolutely adore it up to now, Rumours is probably the most perfect pop record ever recorded, certainly up to this point in the challenge. Out of endless tension within the band flowered the most brilliant, affecting, and just downright enjoyable record.

Song Picks: Songbird, Second Hand News, The Chain, Never Going Back Again

9.5/10

Exodus is Bob Marley’s ninth album, and was recorded in London after he was exiled from Jamaica following an assassination attempt on him there. Often seen as Bob’s masterpiece, it’s the album that features most heavily on Legend, the Bob Marley greatest hits collection released in 1984. Bunny Wailer and Pete Tosh had left by this point, so this has more of a solo Bob Marley feel to it, though he continued to use the Wailers name on his records. Time magazine named Exodus the best album of the 20th century.

It opens with Natural Mystic where we hear Marley’s reggae stabs and Carlton Barrett’s bass walk fade in gently. It’s a groove that cuts right to your soul, very much like the ‘natural mystic' Marley sings about. There’s a touching tiredness to Marley’s vocal, and his ability to weave a catchy melody and sing it beautifully is as good as ever. So Much Things to Say gets characteristically political, and while referring to specific events it’s essentially about his tiredness of those in power with ‘so much to say,’ while they remain ignorant to what matters. Guiltiness talks of those same people, this time focusing on how many they’ve stood on to get to the top, and how they will one day get their comeuppance, “Woe to the downpressors / They will eat the bread of sorrow”. Marley’s backing singers add a wonderful depth to the melodies on the track, which are once again gorgeous and impossible to resist.

Exodus, one of Marley’s most famous compositions, closes out the political first side of the album, and is one of the most remarkable pieces of music ever recorded. Over seven and a half minutes of music are built over only one chord, with a perfect sense of the march of millions symbolised by the walking bass lines, swirling guitar parts and the odd stab of brass. It’s the march from slavery to freedom of an entire people in musical format, and it’s glorious.

Side two gets much less political and opens with Jammin’, a song which is essentially about having a good time, and the gorgeous Waitin’ In Vain, a personal Bob favourite, which is about waiting for love while not knowing if it’ll work out. The Wailers create a sumptuous bed of music, with Junior Marvin’s warm guitar playing feeling like a hug as Marley spins a web of melodies. I’ve gone on and on about Marley’s vocal ability in a previous review, but it’s particularly evident on this song, where he often provides his own backing vocals, and everything just sounds perfect. Turn Your Lights Down Low is Bob’s Sexual Healing and the album’s two closing tracks Three Little Birds and One Love/People Get Ready are perhaps his most famous of all. The former preaches positivity in the face of adversity and is bursting with so much sunshine it’s a wonder it doesn’t burn to ashes every device that plays it. The latter is another masterpiece preaching togetherness, ‘Let’s get together and feel alright’. As that chorus fills your head, you’re left wondering why something so simple is so difficult.

Exodus is Bob’s mainstream masterpiece, the pinnacle of both his political songwriting as well as his songs of love and acceptance. It shines and preaches in equal measure, and it fills your very soul with an unparalleled humanity.

Song Picks: Waitin’ In Vain, Three Little Birds, One Love/People Get Ready

10/10

Pink Floyd’s tenth album focuses on the socio-political conditions in the UK in the 1970s and continues their liking for long songs, with only 5 of them over its 41 minute duration. The band released no singles from the album, but it was commercially and critically well received. Very much a concept album, the concept is best described by the album’s Wikipedia page:

Loosely based on George Orwell's political fable Animal Farm, the album's lyrics describe various classes in society as different kinds of animals: the predatory dogs, the despotic ruthless pigs, and the "mindless and unquestioning herd" of sheep. Whereas the novella focuses on Stalinism, the album is a critique of capitalism and differs again in that the sheep eventually rise up to overpower the dogs. The album was developed from a collection of unrelated songs into a concept which, in the words of author Glenn Povey, "described the apparent social and moral decay of society, likening the human condition to that of mere animals".

The album is bookended by two short pieces, Pigs on the Wing part 1 and 2, love songs written by Roger Waters for his wife at the time. They’re simple acoustic compositions, with the same melodies and pretty lyrics. They provide a certain contrast to the 3 longer, denser songs that make up the meat of the album.

The first of those longer songs is Dogs, a 17 minute masterpiece about the trying to find your place in world that is essentially ‘dog eat dog’, where those dogs are businessmen, perhaps most darkly summed up by David Gilmour in the second verse:

You gotta keep one eye looking over your shoulder
You know, it's going to get harder, and harder, and harder
As you get older
Yeah, and in the end you'll pack up and fly down south
Hide your head in the sand
Just another sad old man
All alone and dying of cancer

Featuring numerous instrumental breaks that get darker as the song goes on, the piece is also yet another testament to David Gilmour’s majestic guitar playing. His first solo on the song is quite unforgettable. Roger Waters’ final verse couldn’t be more perfect, performed with a detached anger:

Who was born in a house full of pain
Who was trained not to spit in the fan
Who was told what to do by the man
Who was broken by trained personnel
Who was fitted with collar and chain
Who was given a pat on the back
Who was breaking away from the pack
Who was only a stranger at home
Who was ground down in the end
Who was found dead on the phone
Who was dragged down by the stone
Who was dragged down by the stone

Having critiqued capitalism, Pink Floyd moves onto politics in Pigs (Three Different Ones), which tells the story of people caring more about holding onto power than helping those they are there to serve. The catchy repeated line of ‘haha, charade you are’ is endlessly powerful, laughing in their faces as a picture of greed, gluttony and corruption is built up over a soundtrack that includes a whole host of pig noises clearly meant to represent the waffle these frauds are coming out with. It’s a powerful, angry and atmospheric piece of music that crushes the political façade like a giant tank dressed in a clown costume.

Finally, introduced by some gorgeous electric piano and a rumbling, approaching bass line, we enter the last of the epics, Sheep, a song about those that blindly follow commands without question:

What do you get for pretending the danger’s not real.
Meek and obedient you follow the leader
Down well trodden corridors into the valley of steel.

Sheep packs a punch, finishing this pessimistic look at society with a perfect crescendo of guitars and drums that echo off into the distance, replacing the dark synths that dominated the song earlier, before we enter the aforementioned dreamy Pigs on the Wing (Part II)

Animals is a pretty spectacular look at the dark parts of the society and systems we have built. which is just as relevant today as it was in 1977. It broods, preaches and dazzles in equal measure, and it might just be my favourite Pink Floyd album.

Song Picks: All of them

10/10

1962 - Clive's Top 5 Albums of Every Year Challenge

April 29, 2020 by Clive in Music, Clive's Album Challenge

Over what will likely be the next few years I’m going to be ranking and reviewing the top 5 albums according to users on rateyourmusic.com (think IMDB for music) from every year from 1960 to the present. If you want to know more, I wrote an introduction to the ‘challenge’ here.

Before we go all musical, here’s some stuff that happened outside of music in 1962: Soviet missile bases were discovered in Cuba and eventually removed in exchange for the removal of US ones in Turkey, Phil Knight developed the first Nike running shoe, and Ranger IV became the first space probe to reach the moon. When I say ‘reach’, it just crashed on it, but that was what it was designed to do, so it goes down as a success.

Now back to music: Here’s what rateyourmusic.com users rate as the top 5 albums from 1962:

#1 Art Blakey & The Jazz Messengers - Mosaic
#2 Charles Mingus - Tijuana Moods
#3 The John Coltrane Quartet - Coltrane
#4 Charles Mingus - Oh Yeah
# 5 Max Roach - It’s Time

*The observant may notice that the actual rateyourmusic.com list contains a couple of other entries (mainly performances by the Berlin Philharmonic of Beethoven symphonies), but those have significantly less than 500 ratings, so I’m not including them.

So, we have another 5 jazz albums, and I believe this is the last time that will happen, as the jazz slowly peters out before pretty much disappearing by the time we get to the 1970s. So enjoy it while it lasts, yeah? As usual, I’ve had a look at other albums in the top 20 or so, and there’s just lots more jazz, so I’ll stick to these 5 as we’ve got quite enough improvised trumpet and sax playing for one article here.

Off we go, here’s my rankings and views on the above:

Max Roach, one of two jazz drummer bandleaders on our list for this year rather inventively included a backing choir in his 1962 release It’s Time, including such vocals as de da de da, de da bu di bu da, among others.

This is a weird one. I admire Max’s inventiveness, and clearly a lot of people like this, but for me the choir is a bit too much. The jazz is already pretty intense, Max Roach himself is seemingly incapable of playing a single bar of music without throwing in some flair or fill in the opener It’s Time (though he does calm down somewhat later on). He’s absolutely ‘over-playing’, but it’s pretty scintillating to listen to, and I feel the backing choir just distracts from that, and what the rest of the band are doing.

Don’t get me wrong, I still enjoyed a lot of aspects of this, and I can absolutely see why people like it. Max Roach’s drumming is inventive, impressive and has plenty of ‘feel’, the bass has a nice laid back buzziness to it, the piano is smoooooth (see Sunday Afternoon) and the choir, despite generally being too much for me, absolutely adds something on the brilliant Lonesome Lover where the less jazzy and more songy (yeah I know, my vocabulary is spectacular) nature of the song lends itself better to their voices.

Song Pick: Lonesome Lover

6.5/10

ArtBlakey — 4. Mosaic

Art Blakey & The Jazz Messengers

Another album with the drummer as the band leader? Yes please. Mosaic is Blakey’s first with legendary trumpeter Freddie Hubbard, who along with Blakey, plays at such breakneck speed that it’s a technical triumph.

Blakey is on the beat, ferociously fast, and with a surprisingly heavy-handed style for jazz, a genre known largely for light-touch drummers. Just listen to the way he plays in the opener Mosaic: there’s not a beat out of place, which considering the pace the song moves at is a miracle. Bear in mind too this is before someone in the studio could ‘fix’ that one beat you messed up. The drums are an integral part to this album, the way they play off Hubbard’s trumpet lines is marvellous, and they contribute largely to the speed of the whole thing. It feels like Art is pulling everyone along, daring them to go faster,and yet it’s a testament to the quality of musicians here that none of them struggles to keep up. The way he dances on the cymbals, the pinpoint fills, the way he’s laying the foundation while also providing a lot of the excitement, it’s great. Anyway, onto Hubbard: the guy plays the trumpet like a chatterbox, his parts are stuffed full of notes, moving at a pace reminiscent of Coltrane’s sax playing, and yet he knows when to sit back and let someone else have a go too. Arabia is a great example of Hubbard’s impossibly fast playing, like a drum roll on a trumpet, scattering notes everywhere like a musically talented lawn sprinkler.

What keeps this one as very good and stops it going to great for me, and this is very much a taste thing, is that everything feels a bit too under control. I’ve come to rather like jazz, but I like a sprinkling of chaos in there. This one is just lacking a little in that department, which makes it less exciting than other jazz records I’ve listened to. But if you’re after some smooth as butter and speedy as a cheetah jazz, this one’s for you.

Song picks: Mosaic

7.5/10

Having loved Blues & Roots way back in my 1960 article I get a little bit excited whenever I see Charles is on the list again, this time he’s on twice, and oh is that a treat! Charles Mingus knows how to have fun that’s for sure, and although predominantly known as a bandleader and bassist he has a stab at the piano and some vocals here. The piano playing is pretty barbaric at times and the vocals consist of such things as singing ‘eat that chicken’ over and over again. Needless to say, I’m in absolute love with it.

Hog Calling Blues opens with Mingus scatting away and is a track absolutely brimming with the humour that sets him apart from other bandleaders. Rahsaan Roland Kirk’s saxophone honking is hilarious, and sets the tone of what this album is all about. I mean the infectious sense of fun here had me laughing out loud, and that’s not an easy thing for a jazz track to do.

Devil Woman is a more straightforward jazz/blues blend and I rather like Mingus’s vocals at the start of the track, the rest is characterised by some excellent saxophone work, which is a little more serious and soulful than that on the opening track. Other notable tracks are the also infectiously fun and previously mentioned Eat that Chicken and the surprisingly otherworldly closer Passions of a Man, a mess of chanting, incomprehensible talking, thunderous drumming, and rattlesnake sounds, which unexpectedly ends in what The Jam’s Pauls Weller calls ‘a beautiful piano melody that Debussy or Satie would have been proud of’. That solo is only 30 seconds long, and I suspect it’s elevated a few notches by how brilliantly messy what comes before it sounds, but I can see what he means. It’s a mysterious, strange, and bewitching track unlike anything I’ve heard in jazz up until this point.

This whole thing sounds like some seriously good jazz musicians unafraid to good around and push a few boundaries. The whole album sounds like it was a blast to make, and when that comes across, it’s one of my favourite things in music. I’ve no idea what Mingus was like as a person, but in the studio he’s becoming one of my very favourite personalities.

Song Picks: Hog Callin’ Blues, Devil Woman, Passions of a Man

8.5/10

Coltrane1962 — 2. Coltrane

The John Coltrane Quartet

Coltrane’s back with a self-titled album featuring the same quartet that led his 1961 album Africa/Brass. Notably, the track Tunji was written in dedication of drummer Babatunde Olatunji, who also gets a mention in an upcoming 1963 album by Bob Dylan…

Like the cover of the album (oh isn’t it pretty), this oozes sophistication. Coltrane’s playing is a little slower, more calculated and dare I say, more melodic than a lot of what I’ve heard so far (with the probable exception of Africa/Brass). The opener Out of this World here features some wonderful work by the rhythm section that keep things in shape as well as providing plenty of intrigue as Elvin Jones glides over the drums and cymbals like some sort of noisy magician. Coltrane and McCoy Tyner (the pianist) work together well as Tyner creates us some lovely chord bedding for Coltrane to sing those sweet, sweet saxophone blues over the top of. It’s a pretty, pretty piece where the quartet creates a sound that is wider and deeper than it has any right to be.

Soul Eyes is my other favourite here. I’m a big fan of a Coltrane slow-jam (as you’ve probably figured out by now if you’ve read my previous posts) and this one is just as sweet, soulful and majestic as the best of them (yes, even Naima from Giant Steps). Coltrane has a tone that is like floating through the clouds at night. Tyner’s twinkling piano accompaniment is the stars lighting up the sky. It’s another beauty. There’s a dreamy sound to this whole album that’s a sign of things to come...

Song Picks: Out of this World, Soul Eyes

8.5/10

Originally recorded in 1957 but not released until 1962, Tijuana Moods is Charles Mingus’ 21st album as bandleader. Interestingly, he hated the name Charlie, claiming it was ‘a name for a dog’, and so I’m not sure how it wound up on the cover of this album. It was, naturally, inspired by a trip to Tijuana.

Tijuana Moods is a return to the familiar joviality that I experienced in Mingus’ Blues & Roots from 1960. It’s catchy, fun, and full of bounce and energy. The Latin American influences really enhance this and make it stand out among some of the other jazz I’ve been listening to. I love it when two two cultures of music come together and it works (Paul Simon’s Graceland is one of my favourite albums) and that’s certainly the case here.

The most obvious difference on listening is the expert use of castanets, a percussion instrument also known as clackers or palillos, by Ysabel Morel which create the illusion of a very percussive orchestra of crickets on a summer’s day in the Tijuana sun. Or, if you’re in a more sinister mood, the tick, tick, tick of a rattlesnake.

Mingus steers the band expertly with his bass and keeps your toes tapping throughout. I’m coming to love that about Mingus records, the instrument playing and concepts are advanced, but it’s never at the expense of being able to tap your toes to it. Dizzy Moods is a prime example, things speed up and slow down, even change time signatures on a whim, but Mingus’ rock-solid bass is always there, holding everything together. Ysabel’s Table Dance is quickly becoming one of my favourite jazz tracks. The thing is full of energy, constantly changing. Clarence Shaw’s trumpet and Jimmy Knepper’s trombone play off each other brilliantly, scattering notes like short, confidently expressed poems in either ear when you listen on headphones. Ysabel Morel’s very quiet-in-the-mix vocals give the piece a kind of manic feel, and help aid the mental transportation to Tijuana that this album achieves so effectively. The humour of the ending is another example of just how fun Mingus’ records are to listen to. It’s a thing of wonder, and a track everyone should check out.

It’s worth mentioning that on the 2000 expanded addition, the album finishes with A Colloquial Dream, which features an excellent spoken word part by Lonne Elder as he talks us through his love of jazz music, using a scene including a brilliantly sound-designed bar fight. I don’t often feel like later added bonus tracks add much to albums (they usually take something in my view), but this one works, and if somehow the original five tracks of Tijuana Moods have failed to transport you to the lively and colourful scene Mingus evokes so well, then Colloquial Dream will surely do the trick. What a fabulous album, and one that is particularly poignant in lockdown, where you can’t go very far physically, so we require the help of people like Mingus to take us there in our minds.

Song Picks: Dizzy Modds, Ysabel’s Table Dance, A Colloquial Dream

9/10

1961 - Clive's Top 5 Albums of Every Year Challenge

April 22, 2020 by Clive in Music, Clive's Album Challenge

The year is 1961. The Berlin Wall was built and Cuban exiles failed to invade Cuba through the Bay of Pigs. Electric toothbrushes and Barbie’s companion Ken are introduced. But let’s have a look at what our wonderful rateyourmusic.com users rated as the year’s top 5 albums:

#1 John Coltrane - My Favourite Things
#2 John Coltrane - Ole Coltrane
#3 The John Coltrane Quartet - Africa/Brass
#4 Columbia Symphony Orchestra / Igor Stravinsky - Stravinsky Conducts Le Sacre du printemps
#5 The Ornette Coleman Double Quartet - Free Jazz

Are you serious Coltrane? Give these other guys a chance would you? My word. Well it looks like we’re in for another load of jazz and our very first classical entry. A quick look through the rest of the top 15 or so reveals a load more jazz, so I’ll pass on adding any extras for the time being.

Let’s crack on, here’s my thoughts and ranking of the above 5 albums:

Coltrane’s ninth album, which features Spanish influences (like Miles Davis’ Sketches of Spain did in 1960), was the last album he led on for Atlantic Records before moving to his new label Impulse! Records.

This one feels a bit by the numbers for Coltrane, if anything he touches can ever be called such a thing. There’s nothing that jumps out as being distinct from his other work. The soprano saxophone makes a return following its debut on My Favourite Things, which we’ll get to soon, but in a less interesting manner.

There’s plenty here to like, Coltranes’s playing is still impressive, and I particularly like Reggie Workman and Art Davis’ bass work which has a lovely relaxed, melodic feel, interspersed with more aggressive almost distorted sounding segments. The piano work just doesn’t gel as well with Coltrane this time, and it feels as if something indescribable is missing somewhat, perhaps it’s the gaps Coltrane leaves between solos where not all that much happens? I’m not sure.

The traditional slower track here is Aisha, which is a beauty and particularly notable for how well Coltrane and Eric Dolphy’s saxophones play off each other in the middle of the song. Like Marmite and cheese, a dream.

There’s no doubt this is really good, it’s just not quite up to some of his other work for me. But hey, what do I know?

Song Picks: Ole, Aisha

7/10

Coltrane’s 7th studio album is the first to feature him playing the soprano saxophone, the smaller, more high-pitched sax he is playing on the cover. An edited version of the title track, which features the melody from the famous song in The Sound of Music was a hit and was regularly played on the radio in 1961. I presume it was significantly shorter than the nearly 14 minute version here.

Miles Davis purchased Coltrane the aforementioned soprano saxophone on a previous tour and it features on the first half of the album, giving Coltrane’s playing a higher, less sombre tone, which makes these recordings stick out somewhat from others I’ve heard so far.

The opener My Favourite Things anchors itself on the famous melody I’ve already mentioned but also features plenty of Coltrane’s virtuoso soloing during it’s long run-time, which is all the more enthralling now that he’s having a go at a slightly different instrument. It’s a quick, busy track which sounds perhaps as summery as anything I’ve heard from Coltrane. On Everytime We Say Goodbye Coltrane reigns it in and demonstrates once more how he’s just as capable of playing something slow and melodic, as he is fast and chaotic. A beautiful piece where the snare sounds as gentle as sand and the bass plods along unassumingly, giving the whole thing a really relaxed feel. McCoy Tyner’s lovely twinkling piano also deserves a mention here, really adding to the contemplative, meditative feel of the track.

The second half features Coltrane back on the familiar tenor sax, and back to his busy old ways, buzzing around the neck like someone with 53 incredibly well coordinated fingers on each hand. As with most of 1961’s offerings, this one requires attentive listening, Coltrane’s playing is a little too aggressive for background listening. Sit back, close your eyes, and let Coltrane’s whirlwind saxophone playing take you away.

Song Picks: Everytime We Say Goodbye

7.5/10

3. Le Sacre du Printemps

Igor Stravinsky/Columbia Symphony Orchestra

‘The Rites of Spring’ as it’s known in English is a ballet and orchestral work originally written in 1913 by Igor Stravinsky and conducted by him here on this recording from 1960 (released in 1961). I’m not sure classical works like this can really be considered ‘albums’ but there’s so few of them that will appear over the next few years and none after 1965. So I figured it’d be good to review some of them while I can.

As Wikipedia states the work is for a scenario that ‘depicts various primitive rituals celebrating the advent of spring, after which a young girl is chosen as a sacrificial victim and dances herself to death.’

As with a lot of classical music, it’s a very intense listen. I feel like the dynamic nature of classical pieces like this is something that hasn’t fully been explored yet in more modern music. One minute, it’s close to silent, and then it suddenly sounds like everyone on the planet in possession of a relevant instrument has got it out and started playing along, it sounds monstrous, in a way that is quite jarring if you’re not paying full attention to it.

Le Sacre du Printemps is dramatic, and you can certainly place certain parts with common film tropes, aspects of Jeux des Cités Rivales for example sound very much like they could be playing during a chase scene. One of the dramatic moments worth mentioning is in the second half of the piece Le Sacrifice, where things start in an ominously relaxed manner, with the odd relatively relaxed gong hit in there to prepare you for what’s to come. Then, the lovely flute lines fade into violins (I think, I’m no expert on classical instruments) before the whole thing explodes into a loud concoction of timpani and loud brass lines with the odd flute flourish over the top. It’s glorious. The work clearly tells a story, and if you, like me, have never seen any performances of The Rites of Spring (or any ballet for that matter), sitting down and seeing what images this piece brings up is quite the experience.

It’s a tight 30 minutes long, and well worth your time. It stands as an important document of a classical piece of composition, conducted by the man who wrote it.

Highlight: Part 2: Le Sacrifice

8/10

Africa Brass — 2. Africa/Brass

The John Coltrane Quartet

John Coltrane’s 8th studio album, his first on Impulse! Records, and first featuring a big band sound, with 21 participating musicians.

It’s pretty clear that things are different from the opening notes of Africa. There’s a depth to the sound that’s only possible with this many instruments. It sounds like an army of musicians, marching towards an African sunset, led by the ever energetic and noisy Coltrane. The core quartet is still very much here, but there’s a sense of atmosphere and scale added by all these additional musicians that helps this stand out from all the other Coltrane recordings I’ve heard so far.

Africa/Brass feels quite dark, there’s a certain depth and dark reverb to everything, and some of the soundscapes are truly original. Around 12 minutes into the opener Africa all the treble-y instruments take a back seat, and we’re left with the rumbling of drums and what sounds like a viola swirling to create the humming of a small swarm of mosquitoes, which is very effective. Greensleaves takes the melody of the traditional British folk-ballad of the same name and turns it into a virtuoso jazz-piece similar to My Favourite Things, but once again darker. The closing track Blues Minor’s triumphant ending is perhaps the only point in the album where this big band sounds like a true big band, ending the album in a glorious, emphatic blare of horns, before everything calms down to a lovely repeated saxophone line by Coltrane. At only 33 minutes, this is a great showing of what Coltrane does best in a condensed and more accessible package than a lot of his work so far.

Song Picks: Africa, Blues Minor

8/10

1. Free Jazz

The Ornette Coleman Double Quartet

Picture this: Ornette Coleman’s a bit bored, so he decides that for his 7th studio album he’ll assemble not only one band of top name jazz musicians, but two bands, and get them to improvise for 40 minutes in a studio together with practically no idea about what the other band is doing. You’ve just pictured Free Jazz, an album unlike any other I’ve ever heard.

Other than a few brief sections that were pre-determined, this whole thing is just two jazz bands improvising in one room. That’s two drummers, two bassists… yeah, you get the picture. Upon reading this I thought there’s no way this could be anything but a load of jazz noise, and lo and behold, it was just that, a load of jazz noise. My first two attempts to listen to it on headphones led to me aborting mission after around 5 minutes because it was just too much for my ears. An unholy cacophony of jazz noise (one band in my right ear, the other in my left) assaulting my ear-drums in a way they haven’t been assaulted for quite some time. Then, a couple of days later, I put it on on my speakers while cooking up a shakshuka and everything changed…

I was transported back to 1961, I was there with both bands in the studio as they played their instruments, trying to work off each other while playing some very complex stuff, the struggle was real. I had no idea what was going to happen next because they had no idea what was going to happen next. Would Coleman’s swirling saxophone solo end in a bum note? Would the drummer accidentally throw his sticks at someone’s head? Would a chandelier fall from the ceiling and wipe out some of jazz’s finest musicians amid the clatter and crash of glass and metal? It seemed like anything was possible. It was magical. An experience that was truly unique. I’m not sure how many times I’ll actually listen to Free Jazz, but it single handedly invented a genre (the genre free jazz is named after its title), and brought about one of my more memorable musical experiences, one where I felt completely in a moment, not this moment, but one from December 21st, 1960. There I was just cooking up a lovely vegetable and egg dish with Ornette and the gang playing away. I can totally understand why people would hate this, I did on my first two listens. But now I love it. I love its audacity, I love its inventiveness, I love how immediate it is. Give it a go, and you just might love it too. Just make sure you don’t listen on headphones.

In a year where Coltrane pushed a whole multitude of boundaries, Coleman obliterated them, and takes the title for 1961.

9/10

Clive's Top 10 Albums of 2017

January 17, 2018 by Clive in Music

I've never listened to as much music as I did in 2017. I reviewed and rated, in an amateur manner, well over 100 albums, over 80 of which were actually released in 2017. That said, most of my favourite discoveries last year came out in other years. I got into David Bowie, Guided by Voices, Sleaford Mods, The Rolling Stones and Pink Floyd to name a few, and music has well and truly taken over my life. As for 2017 releases, there were lots that I really liked, but few that really blew me a way in a similar way to Bee Thousand and Station to Station. That probably speaks more for the amazing quality of those two albums than it means that the list below is in any way weak however, as I love all the albums below. Before we get into the list it's only fair I mention the albums that have cruelly been missed off and might have made the list on another day. These include Slowdive - Slowdive, Perfume Genius - No Shape, IDLES - Brutalism and Japandroids - Near to the Wild Heart of Life. Should you wish to read all 80 odd of my 2017 reviews you can head over to my rateyourmusic list here. If you'd rather read a slimmed down, better-looking and slightly better written top ten list, then scroll down and enjoy:

The definition of a grower. It takes time to dig out the gentle hooks from the up-front and dominating guitars but it's well worth the effort. It has a really Velvet Underground feel to it. I love how each track subtly builds on the last ending in the, perhaps a little overlong, Reprise with it's excellent, almost raucous ending. They do so much with so little.

Shins - Heartworms — 9. Heartworms

THE SHINS

It seems I'm higher on this than pretty much anyone out there in music reviewing circles. I think it's full of great melodies, interesting production and hooks that stick with you for days. It's an album that has a breezy, happy feeling, but without feeling cheesy. One that I've kept coming back to as the year has progressed, particularly as a morning album, and it more than deserves a place on this list.

ABlackMile — 8. A Black Mile to the Surface

**MANCHESTER ORCHESTRA**

This has a ton of production on it, which isn't always my bag, but in this case it sounds great. It's a really atmospheric and huge sounding album. The songs flow into each other in a way that doesn't make many of them stand out but there's a real cohesiveness to the album and some really massive moments. There is a lyrical theme throughout about a strained relationship with a father and a suicide attempt which is a little cryptic but interesting to decipher should that be your kind of thing. I found the more positive songs about his daughter (The Sunshine, The Maze) a nice change of pace from the very serious and heavy nature of the rest of the album. Definitely one of the most memorable albums for me this year.

WorldEater — 7. **World Eater**

**BLANCK MASS**

My second favourite electronic album of the year. I love how it blends electronic sounds with more organic ones creating a kind of strange squishy, hellish atmosphere that is still infinitely listenable. Full of amazing crescendos.

6. Music for People in Trouble

**SUSANNE SUNDFØR**

I didn't expect to rate this as highly as I do but it just keeps getting better with every listen. Magical vocals and melodies, and a really timeless sound. It's beautifully minimalistic, except for the end of Undercover which is a little overblown, and feels very cohesive as a whole. I like how the more avant-garde tracks (e.g The Sound of War) break things up too. One of the year's highlights and my go to relaxing listen of the year.

5. Oversleepers International

EMPEROR X

I remember seeing this dude live having never heard anything of his before and being a fan of his weird and charismatic performance. This is the first album of his I've listened to and I'm very impressed. Great, interesting lyrics and endless catchy melodies. I pretty much enjoy every song on here and how up-tempo the album is as a whole. Also, his transition from gentle singing to shouting is always great. The production is a little thin but it doesn't take too much away from what is one of 2017's most overlooked gems.

ADeeperUnderstanding — 4. A Deeper Understanding

THE WAR ON DRUGS

It's more of the same - to last album Lost in the Dream - but it's even better in my opinion. Less stand out tracks possibly, but more consistent throughout and I feel it better justifies its running length. Gorgeous instrumental sections, vocals that blend in effortlessly and an even bigger sound than the previous album make this a great experience to listen to. Great as background music, or for an attentive listening session.

ACrowLooked — 3. A Crow Looked at Me

MOUNT EERIE

A heartbreaking album about the loss of his wife. This is achingly sad and not an easy listen. It's so raw that the simple melodies and sparse guitar sound as if they were made up on the spot to enable him to express his feelings, which come through in his painfully honest and simple lyrics. For the 40 minute duration of this album, you're in Phil's shoes and you feel his heartbreak. You're never relieved by some catchy chorus or nice melody. It's not something I'm going to be listening to regularly, it's a little too heavy for that, but it's something that has a massive effect on me every time I listen to it. A truly remarkable album.

I'm kind of in love with it. It never repeats itself, it's crazy and it's one of the few albums that is manic enough to keep my brain quiet. Wacky may be the best word to describe it. It's an electronic album with a difference, you never know quite where it's going to go and no five seconds are the same as the last. Iglooghost has created something that really appeals to my inner child, but in a way that isn't cheesy whatsoever. In fact, it's unlike anything I've ever heard. An endlessly creative, insane journey that is not to be missed. Again, I feel this one has been unfairly overlooked. It's magic.

1. Reflections of a Floating World

ELDER

Wow. This blew my head off in the best possible way even on the first listen. Amazing riffs, a big, expansive sound and some really solid drumming make for a completely visceral listen. It feels like everything has been done to engage the listener and not to show off instrumental skill, which is something that often holds back the prog-rock genre in my eyes. The vocals, though rare, give a nice variation to the generally 10 minute running length of the tracks. Personally, I'd have cut short 'Sonntag' as I feel it's only track that doesn't go anywhere although its interlude type feel does perhaps heighten the impact of the final track, which is a truly emphatic way to finish the album. This album has single-handedly got me back into a variety of genres that I hadn't listened to in a while. It's one of those albums I've struggled to turn off when required because all the songs just seem to get better and better as they go on, just as you think the song has hit its crescendo things build yet further, seemingly impossibly. An amazing album.

Thanks for reading. I'm already excited to think what this list will contain in 2018!

Clive :)