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DOT ALLISON
HEART SHAPED SCARS
(SA)
The first album in a decade from one of the UK‘s finest singers (first with the sadly short-lived Scots trio One Dove and since as a solo artist) is a thing of magical soap-bubble delicacy, closer to ambient folk than the electronica with which she made her name.
THE ANCHORESS
THE ART OF LOSING
(Kscope)
One would not wish on an enemy what Catherine Anne Davies has gone through to get here, but the results are extraordinary: a dramatic, ornate record, full of horror and beauty; and a study, fiercely and coolly realised, of how grief, pain and fear become interchangeable. A knockout.
BESS ATWELL
ALREADY ALWAYS
(Real Kind)
A cool, assured LP, residing in the musical near-neighbourhood of Phoebe Bridgers, marked out by Atwell‘s ear for a phrase and her talent for enclosing those phrases in music that can pierce the heart, suffused with a kind of wise sorrow.
MYKKI BLANCO
BROKEN DREAMS & BEAUTY SLEEP
(Transgressive)
Half a century after Ziggy Stardust arrived from Mars, no one is presently playing with ideas of identity, gender and sexuality with quite the kamikaze glee and bravado of Mykki Blanco, whose uproarious second album is a delicious, doolally, heartfelt pop record that also happens to be very funny.
LINDSEY BUCKINGHAM
LINDSEY BUCKINGHAM
(Reprise)
The classic Fleetwood Mac line-up‘s one outright visionary (don‘t @ me) makes another excellent addition to his strong and under-regarded body of solo work, bringing a pared-down, new wave-ish intensity to tunes blessed with sweet immediacy, and creating an idiosyncratic, avant-garde AOR unreplicated anywhere else.
CLEOPATRICK
BUMMER
(Special)
This Ontario outfit have the freshest take on the guitar-plus-drums garage duo format in years, crackling with youthful energy, saturated with a driven, frazzled melodicism reminiscent of early Dinosaur Jr and Nirvana, and shot through with an instantly engaging character all its own. A blast.
XHOSA COLE
K(NO)W THEM, K(NO)W US
(Stoney Lane)
Even in another banner year for new jazz on both sides of the Atlantic, the 25-year-old saxophonist from Birmingham stands out. Drawing on the African American bop greats, his music is airy, fresh and imaginative, and his playing a deft marvel, swooping and skylarking.
NEIL COWLEY
HALL OF MIRRORS
(Mote)
With his eponymous trio, pianist Cowley has been at the forefront of the UK‘s jazz renaissance. Now solo, he‘s jettisoned that bright, lively sound for a voyage into a wider world of atmospherics, still governed by his supremely delicate touch on the keyboard. An intimate, imaginative, exquisite record..
DAVE
WE‘RE ALL ALONE IN THIS TOGETHER
(Neighbourhood)
The outstanding young South London rapper has a big subject – trauma. He details how everything he‘s experienced, both personal and social – poverty, discrimination, criminality, family separation – feeds into it. His moody and measured second album rises above nihilism and despair, and transmutes anguish into powerful art.
RICHARD DAWSON & CIRCLE
HENKI
(Weird World)
Newcastle‘s magnificently peculiar avant-folk bard and the veteran Finnish heavy metal experimentalists make perfect foils on seven proggy, fearsomely intricate tracks averaging nine minutes apiece. What makes it gripping is Dawson‘s way with a story, and his always human narrative scale.
DELGRES
4.00AM
(Le Label/[PIAS])
Named for a revolutionary anti-slavery leader, this trio play a form of Caribbean blues that links main man Pascal Danaë‘s Guadeloupe heritage to the sounds of New Orleans and his native Paris. Their second album is a fascinating, non-stop adventure, rolling through ever varied rhythms and textures.
DRY CLEANING
NEW LONG LEG
(4AD)
Frontwoman Florence Shaw puts the “dry” in Dry Cleaning. Her deadpan spoken-word delivery and oblique, anecdotal lyrics are an irresistible counterpoint to the tense and wiry post-punk instrumentation, and this is a remarkable debut LP.
NOGA EREZ
KIDS
(City Slang)
Delicious, dazzling pop from Israel‘s sure-to-be international star, full of fizz, swagger, variety and pitch-black humour. Kids is an absurdly catchy, ferociously inventive set of despatches from a frontline both metaphorical and literal, crackling with ideas and livewire danceabilty, flashing winks and grins and death stares.
ALEX HENRY FOSTER
STANDING UNDER BRIGHT LIGHTS
(Hopeful Tragedy)
Canadian post-rock artist Foster‘s extended concert performance of his 2018 solo debut album, Windows In The Sky, is little short of monumental. Foster personalises the genre, makes it both intimate and impassioned, brings to it elements of biography (specifically, his father‘s) and beat poetry. An astonishing record.
STEPHEN FRETWELL
BUSY GUY
(Speedy Wunderground)
Once an earnest everybloke folk-popper, Fretwell has returned after 14 years with an album that stands at roughly equidistant tangents to Nick Drake and early Leonard Cohen – and it‘s in no way diminished by comparison to either. This is a discreetly mesmerising record, with songwriting of the highest calibre.
FOXX BODIES
VIXEN
(Kill Rock Stars)
The music is sturdy Nineties-tinged alt-rock, but Vixen‘s power to flatten you comes from Bella Vanek‘s lyrics, which illuminate with jaw-dropping insight how abuse suffered in childhood becomes self-replicating and follows the survivor into adulthood.
GAZELLE TWIN & NYX
DEEP ENGLAND
(NYX Collective)
Masked electronic dissident Gazelle Twin and female drone choir NYX combine to create an uncanny state-of-the-nation record – a beautiful, terrifying oratorio, digging down into ancient blood-and-soil paganism and connecting it to a digital future with no agreed reality. A possessed, post-apocalyptic work for a human-sacrificial Last Night Of The Proms.
CORY HANSON
PALE HORSE RIDER
The frontman of Los Angeles lo-fi psych crew Wand has an eccentric solo persona: a cheesy, besuited cod-showbiz figure grinning through a pink painted face. The music, though – that‘s deep, tender, haunted alt-folk, with delicate melodies and tremulous, strung-out instrumentation. His softly apocalyptic second album is plain terrific.
HARD FEELINGS
HARD FEELINGS
(Domino)
Yes, it‘s strongly reminiscent of Róisín Murphy‘s magnificent Róisín Machine LP – for which singer Amy Douglas, here teamed up with Hot Chip‘s Joe Goddard, wrote the stand-out Something More. And that‘s no bad thing. Hard Feeling channels the dominatrix spirit of Grace Jones, at once icy and sexy, into rippling tech house and proto-garage.
THE HELICOPTER OF THE HOLY GHOST
AFTERS
(Kscope)
Billy Reeves of indie-pop act theaudience wrote most these songs before a horrific car crash wiped his memory of them. Retrieving the demos after 20 years, he assembled something of an indie supergroup to record them – one of whom has since been outed as an alleged serial abuser of women. The record itself stands as a discreetly lovely, gentle English prog-pop album.
JOAN AS POLICE WOMAN/TONY ALLEN/DAVE OKUMU
THE SOLUTION IS RESTLESS
([PIAS])
The extraordinary suppleness of Allen‘s unique drumming, which always managed to be somehow both precise and irregular, and Okumu‘s sense of timing and texture, make an ideal fit for Wasser‘s own sinuous way with a song. The result is sublime.
KUUNATIC
FULL MOON SPREE
(Glitterbeat)
This Tokyo tribal-psych trio exemplify the Japanese knack for taking everything that is eccentric about other pop cultures, running it through their own peculiar filters, and rendering it so life-affirmingly bonkers that you can‘t help but love it. Their spooky and joyous debut LP bristles with mischief, creativity and defiance.
LORAINE JAMES
REFLECTION
(Hyperdub)
The term “intelligent dance music” at once slights other electronic forms and makes itself sound unappealingly snooty. But there‘s no disputing the sheer brilliance of this liquescent yet precise melange of IDM with contemporary black music forms to produce a record perfectly evocative of 21st-century London.
CHUCK JOHNSON
THE CINDER GROVE
(tak:til/Glitterbeat)
These five beautiful and blissfully drawn-out ambient pedal-steel tracks have a vibration and a texture any electronic source would struggle to replicate. The only addition here is strings, and Sarah Davachi‘s elegant piano. It‘s a lovely thing.
LITTLE SIMZ
SOMETIMES I MIGHT BE INTROVERT
(Age 101)
Her 2019 breakthrough, Grey Area, was a furious miracle of compression and invention. Now Simz has launched herself into full-on stardom with a record that stretches itself in every direction. Deeply soulful, by turns meandering and dazzling, with producer Inflo (Sault, Adele) on superb form, when Introvert hits the heights, it truly soars.
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LONDON GRAMMAR
CALIFORNIAN SOIL
(Ministry Of Sound)
The Nottingham trio‘s third album, and their finest yet by a mile, joins Massive Attack‘s Protection and One Dove‘s Morning Dove White in the first rank of dramatic, melancholic, electronic British pop. Shiny on the surface, deep as a well below, beautiful throughout, it‘s not just a record, it‘s a whole mood.
LOST GIRLS
MENNESKEKOLLEKTIVET
(Smaltown Supersound)
With long-time collaborator, multi-instrumentalist Håvard Volden, Norwegian artist Jenny Hval augments and extends her recent trancey technoid style, her Laurie Anderson-ish spoken vocals and her soft croon. The longest two of these five tracks, especially, are wonderfully structured, building across successive peaks.
LOTIC
WATER
(Houndstooth)
(Smaltown Supersound)
J‘Kerian Morgan chose her stage name to reflect fluidity – a lotic organism is one that lives in fast-moving water. Her second album is experimental and soulful, its deconstructed loops and rhythms reshaping themselves into novel and often intimate forms, until it starts to feel as welcoming as it is challenging.
LOW
HEY WHAT
(Sub Pop)
In three ever inventive decades, the veteran Minnesota indie/slowcore duo have surely never made anything quite as weird and gripping as this – a juxtaposition of confrontational, jarring, staccato electronic minimalism and distortion with rapt melodicism, marked out by their characteristic eerie tandem vocals.
MOGWAI
AS THE LOVE CONTINUES
(Rock Action)
This one leans, by Mogwai‘s lights, to the poppier side, featuring the closest post-rock gets to toe-tappers. 25 years, and somehow it‘s the same old spellbinding thing, inexplicably varied and new. They‘ve always sounded as if they could keep on playing forever. On this evidence, they‘re welcome to.
NOUS, LARAAJI & ARJI OCEANANDA
CIRCLE OF CELEBRATION
(Our Silent Canvas)
This three-way collaboration between composer Christopher Bono‘s NOUS ensemble, outsider ambient artist Laraaji, and “sound healer” Arji OceAnanda is at once epic and immersive. At times it all but dissolves into liquid ambience. At others it grooves wickedly. At others still, it feels like a distant field recording from the rites of a hitherto undiscovered tribe.
GENESIS OWUSU
SMILING WITH NO TEETH
(House Anxiety/Ourness)
Born in Ghana, raised in Canberra, inspired by America, Owusu makes music that ricochets between worlds and genres. Smiling With No Teeth calls to mind André 3000, Prince and Thundercat, among others, but can wrongfoot you with a pugnacious mutation on Kenny Loggins‘ Footloose. It buzzes with ideas and variation, hurls new things at you at every turn.
ARLO PARKS
COLLAPSED IN SUNBEAMS
(Transgressive)
There‘s no shortage lately of serious, introspective young women whose creative backgrounds centre more on poetry than pop. So why is Parks so instantly and refreshingly different? Maybe it‘s straight-up talent and charisma; maybe the way her bedroom-pop snapshots from a teenage life feel immediate, credible and natural.
PARQUET COURTS
SYMPATHY FOR LIFE
(Rough Trade)
The scratchy, spiky NYC indie group‘s seventh LP is a real sea change, embracing the fresh (to them) potential of groove – pulsing and dynamic, sleek and idiosyncratic, with electronics woven threadlike into the sliding, roiling guitars. This riveting album may be their most accessible work yet.
PEACE FLAG ENSEMBLE
NOTELAND
(We Are Busy Bodies)
This experimental outfit from Saskatchewan meld the spirits of modal jazz (the shades of early Miles Davis and John Coltrane are ever present), of looping, arithmetic American minimalism, and of ambient. Far from being overcomplicated, the result is blissed-out balm for the ears.
TAMIL ROGEON
SON OF NYX
(Soul Bank)
Violin/viola player Rogeon starts with bebop and layers upon it, with unfailing dexterity, lounge music and elements of cosmic jazz. Son of Nyx runs the gamut of tempos. It‘s unfussy, inventive, and there isn‘t a sluggish or dull moment on it.
REY SAPIENZ & THE CONGO TECHNO ENSEMBLE
NA ZALA ZALA
(Nyege Nyege Tapes)
The debut album from Congo-born, Kampala-based rapper and producer Sapienz hinges upon minimal, metallic electronic beats, at once tribal and futuristic, with a sinister John Carpenter-esque edge. Even if you speak neither Ligalan nor French, the vocals convey through tone and atmosphere an aura of menace, anguish and grim humour.
ANNA B SAVAGE
A COMMON TURN
(City Slang)
An intense contemporary folk record, rolling like a river through meanders and rapids. That the hyper-imaginative William Doyle was involved in producing it is no surprise, but its character and impact are Savage‘s alone.
SELF ESTEEM
PRIORITISE PLEASURE
(Fiction)
Rebecca Taylor‘s vivid, livid, lurid art-pop persona is on a mission to affirm her own feelings and trample her anagonists‘ into the dirt. Her ferociously inventive DIY tunes draw on a host of current styles, nodding to hip hop, experimental soul, bops and indie balladry. This is the sound of an artist unmistakably coming into her own.
SENYAWA
ALKISAH
(Phantom Limb)
This Indonesian duo belong to the “WTF?” category – music that is gloriously, invigoratingly novel and indefinable. Their mix of traditional Javan sounds with the tension and attack of metalcore, the menacing undertones of dark ambient, straining-at-the-leash percussion, and vocals that call to mind tribal incantations, radiates tremendous occult energy. Alkisah is altogether off its swede.
SERPENTWITHFEET
DEACON
(Secretly Canadian)
Baltimore-born Josiah Wise turned early in life to gospel music as means of channeling his black and gay identity, and has since developed that fixation into his own distinctive form of R&B – languid, melting and bathed in a kind of inquisitive tenderness. Deacon hums and chimes with affection and imagination.
SONS OF KEMET
BLACK TO THE FUTURE
(Impulse!)
Shabaka Hutchings has been much involved with the renaissance of British jazz as a vital and increasingly popular force, both with jazz-rockers The Comet Is Coming, and as leader of the Ancestors and of Sons of Kemet. The latter‘s fourth album is yet another corker, a high-octane cocktail of Afro-futurism, rap, dub, beat poetry, radical polemic and free jazz experimentalism.
EMMA–JEAN THACKRAY
YELLOW
(Movement)
Onetime teenage Yorkshire brass band member, now leader of a jazz/soul/funk collective, Thackray has made a debut album of such assurance and virtuosity it might have dropped fully formed out of the American fusion scene of the early Seventies. Throw in hip hop influences and you have spiritually inclined, musically omnivorous acid jazz par excellence.
VARIOUS ARTISTS
ESSIEBONS SPECIAL 1973 – 1984//GHANA MUSIC POWER HOUSE
(Analog Africa)
This fantastic selection of Ghanian highlife music from the mid-to-late Seventies explodes with as much creative zest and raw kinetic energy as if it were recorded yesterday. A reminder that all great music is essentially fusion music, it melds colonial brass bands, Ghanian traditions, Western funk, jazz and psychedelia, Latin horns and rhythms, into the most marvellous and varied whole.
VIS-A-VIS
OBI AGYE ME DOFO
(We Are Busy Bodies)
Another glorious slice of Ghanian highlife, from 1977, and a most welcome reissue. From the first seconds of its opening, Latin-inflected title track onwards, it‘s a blast of life and joy, sunlight pouring in upon a closed and gloomy world. The rhythm section glides, jump and sashays; the guitar, synth and horn solos perform graceful and dazzling acrobatics; and when the vocals come in, you find yourself grinning along. It‘s a tonic.
THE WEATHER STATION
IGNORANCE
(Fat Possum)
When is an indie singer-songwriter record not an indie singer-songwriter record? When it‘s this exquisite item from Toronto‘s Tamara Lindeman and her band, melding the languour, drift and space of prime Talk Talk and The Blue Nile with the jazz-fusion sensibility of mid-Seventies Joni Mitchell. Just gorgeous.
JANE WEAVER
FLOCK
(Fire)
The Liverpudlian stalwart inhabits the same kosmische realm as Stereolab and labelmates Vanishing Twin, but follows her own singular orbit. She seldom releases anything that‘s less than generous and captivating, and her latest homespun exotica is a particular pleasure, at once warm, weird, wry and scintillating.
W. H. LUNG
VANITIES
(Melodic)
This very Mancunian outfit revel in the legacy of their home city without being stifled by it. You can hear a lot New Order in there, but Vanities has a mood and a mode to itself. A marvellous set of dancefloor-directed synth-pop tunes, at once austere, intense and emotive, sent cloudborne by singer Joe Evans‘ distinctive countertenor.
SVEN WUNDER
NATURA MORTA
(Piano Piano)
Another perfectly raised soufflé from the aptly named Swede, whose work lands somewhere between the hip “library music” of the early Seventies, lounge jazz, and early Air. As it globetrots around an idealised past, Wunder‘s music captures the spirit of Sehnsucht – nostalgia for things that never were.
XIU XIU
OH NO
(Polyvinyl)
The influence of Scott Walker in his later decades is writ large on the latest from Jamie Stewart‘s electronic San Jose outfit – and like Walker, Stewart evidently sees “experimental” as a mandate rather than a style. Oh No features fifteen duets with an impressive assemblage of guests. It teems with sudden switches and extraordinary ideas, and shows an unmistakable desire to push them as far as they can go, then further. A brooding, blazing triumph of a record.
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