| THE TOP TEN (as featured in Metro, Wednesday 21/12/2022)
1. EZRA FURMAN: ALL OF US FLAMES (Bella Union)
Thought rock has no new stories to tell? Here comes Ezra with a queer underground Born To Run – a blazing, excoriating masterpiece whose creator belongs in the first rank of American heartland rockers.
2. BEYONCÉ: RENAISSANCE (Parkwood Entertainment/Columbia)
Marshalling a horde of collaborators yet somehow remaining an undisputable auteur, Bey stomps through the last three decades of alternative dance music as if she owns it – and she does, now.
3. WEYES BLOOD: AND IN THE DARKNESS, HEARTS AGLOW (Sub Pop)
Maybe nothing so concerned with fear and alienation should envelop you with so much velvet and stardust as Natalie Mering’s lush and deeply mysterious AOR classicism, beautifully turned and updated.
4. SPIRITUALIZED: EVERYTHING WAS BEAUTIFUL (Bella Union)
Jason Pierce cranks up the orchestrated maximalism on a Spiritualized album for the ages. It is, as ever, formal, even mathematical, yet by turns strung-out, hypnotic and rapturous.
5. FABLE: SHAME (Naim)
Fable has a fierce talent, star quality to burn, a grasp of the past, and a vision of the future. Her knockout debut channels David Bowie, Kate Bush, trip-hop, psych-rock and more with stunning individualism.
6. DANGER MOUSE & BLACK THOUGHT: CHEAT CODES (BMG)
Plush 70s soul textures from producer Danger Mouse. Authority and complexity from Roots frontman Black Thought. An absolute monster of a rap record, a non-stop rush of verbal creativity and sonic luxury.
7. TAYLOR SWIFT: MIDNIGHTS (EMI)
The outstanding lyricist, scene-setter and story-teller of big-time pop brings on the synths, drum machines and nocturnal neon for a tremendous set of razor-sharp, feline songs set in the small hours.
8. LADY AICHA & PISCO CRANE’S ORIGINAL FULU MIZIKI BAND OF KINSHASA: N’DJILA WA MUDJIMU (Nyege Nyege Tapes)
Tribal punk-funk on home-made instruments from Congolese slums, plus Lady Aicha’s incantatory chanting, add up to music that could be from two centuries ago or two centuries from now. Bonkers. Brilliant.
9. SPECIAL INTEREST: ENDURE (Rough Trade)
The third album of digitally infused post-punk/no wave from this New Orleans quartet is exciting as all hell – loaded with whirling energy, sexual charge, narrative detail and focused polemical rage.
10. xPROPAGANDA: THE HEART IS STRANGE (ZTT/UMC)
This revived iteration of a great and underrated 80s synthpop group have struck gold on their return: all metropolitan Teutonic cool and aching romanticism, plus a frisson of the sinister, of lamplit danger.
And the 40 remaining albums from the longlist, in alphabetical order (compiled from excerpts from my reviews over the year):
404 GUILD: FALSE DAWN (Dirty Hit)
Tricky and Martina Topley-Bird are the parents not only of late band member Mina, but also of this record’s muttering, slumberous, eerie aesthetic. False Dawn is a world entire within itself, one as redolent of the poets of the mystic and the divine as it is of video games and fantasy fiction, and it holds together as a remarkable piece.
ALAI K: KILA MARA (On the Corner)
Tribal techno was largely an inventive British approximation of how music from Africa and Oceania might translate into the techno idiom. Now artists from those places have taken up the form, and are doing things that first wave never could have imagined. Kenya-born, Berlin-based Alai K is a case in point; this album is variously frenetic, liquid, eerie, funky – and exhilarating throughout.
MARISA ANDERSON: STILL, HERE (Thrill Jockey)
What Wales’s Gwenifer Ramond is to fierce, percussive avant-bluegrass, Oregon’s Anderson is to fluid, lambent ambient Western: a virtuoso visionary of the guitar instrumental, Still, Here is perfectly titled, a beautful, tranquil presence with alluring depths to explore.
BOB VYLAN: BOB VYLAN PRESENTS THE PRICE OF LIFE (Ghost Theatre)
Bob Vylan are highly punk-literate (and literate generally), they dabble in grime, hip hop and reggae, they are mad as hell, funny as f***, and full of surprises. Above all, they grasp that if politicised pop isn’t as galvanising and as entertaining as this, it’s nothing.
CHRISTINE AND THE QUEENS: REDCAR LES ADORABLES ETOILES (Because Music)
Louche, melancholic, soulful pre-war Parisian cabaret meets the glistening, darkly romantic synth-pop of the early 1980s. If Françoise Hardy had fronted Roxy Music at their most elegant and immaculate, or Visage at their most exotic and mysterious, it could not have been silkier or more intoxicating.
CMAT: IF MY WIFE NEW I'D BE DEAD (AWAL)
Dubliner Ciara Mary–Alice Thompson’s sound is a refreshing indie-country hybrid reminiscent of the late Michael Nesmith’s adventurous approach; her persona, a prematurely jaded dysfunctional minx who could give Jenny Lewis a run for her money; her songs, loaded with bright tunes and delicious, knowing turns of phrase.
RICHARD DAWSON: THE RUBY CORD (Domino)
There is nobody in music like prog-jazz-folk storyteller and quasi-satirist Dawson, turning in his own eccentric orbit. The third album in his past-present-future worm’s-eye-view history of England is as funny, weird, fascinating and at times maddening as its predecessors.
DECIUS: DECIUS VOL. 1 (The Leaf Label)
If you put together one of Warmduscher, a couple of down’n’dirty dance DJs, and the singer from Fat White Family, it would sound exactly like this – because that’s what it is. Throbbing, sleazy, sinister acid house and mutant disco, at once danceable and, in the best way, horrible.
DOWDELIN: LANMOU LANMOU (Underdog)
The Lyon quartet bill themselves as “Creole Afro-Futurists”, and their music is indeed an invigorating hybrid of Afro-Caribbean sounds, jazz-funk and modern experimentalism. Their second LP brims with energy and ideas, shooting off sparks as it rolls along a never predictable path.
ECKO BAZZ: MMASO (Hakuna Kulala)
The Kampala MC mixes up rat-a-tat-tat machine-gun delivery with slow, ominous flow over minimal, metallic backing tracks from the likes of Kenya’s Slikback and Japan’s Berlin-based DJ Die Soon. You may not understand a word, but you will feel every syllable.
ELECTRIBE 101: ELECTRIBAL SOUL (Electribal)
Recorded over 30 years ago, unreleased until now: imagine a record that fuses early Massive Attack, the as-yet undreamt-of Kleerup/Robyn hit With Every Heartbeat, the dramatic force of an Adele matched with the sensitivity and agility of a Roberta Flack. A masterwork of extraordinary range, sophistication, and feeling.
FLOHIO: OUT OF HEART (AWAL)
Sometimes a debut album presents you with a talent of such fully formed vision you need to go looking for your knocked-off socks. This British-Nigerian rapper has a tight yet languid, whip-smart delivery with inventive, borderline pyschedelic backdrops. Just tremendous.
JOSEPHINE FOSTER: GODMOTHER (Fire)
Folk is by its nature a music tenanted by ghosts. Foster is something beyond that. She’s a mystic. An occult priestess. At first take Godmother resembles a rediscovery from the peak of psychedelic folk some 50 years ago. It’s strange, and radiant, and divinely eccentric.
GGGOLDDD: THIS SHAME SHOULD NOT BE MINE (Artoffact)
A stark, traumatic, claustrophobic passage through the sexual abuse memories of the Dutch sextet’s vocalist, Milena Eva, set to harsh, electronically manipulated art rock, the lyrics a Pandora’s box that reveals, in the end, hope at the bottom.
GWENNO: TRESOR (Heavenly)
The delightful third solo album from Gwenno would surely be magical regardless of its Welsh and Cornish lyrics: a sparkling jewel box of melodic electropop whose undoubted debt to Stereolab in no way mars its freshness, variety and imagination.
|
|
|
|
And the 40 remaining albums from the longlist, in alphabetical order (continued):
JANIS IAN: THE LIGHT AT THE END OF THE LINE (Rude Girl)
The insight which made Ian so prodigious an observer of the sorrows of youth back in the 1970s has only grown with maturity. Her latest album – and so she says, her last – is a first-rate set of songs, simmering with a quiet power that can rock you back on your heels.
JOCKSTRAP: I LOVE YOU JENNIFER B (Rough Trade)
Art-pop duos are ten a penny, but you don’t get many like this to the pound. Jockstrap dismantle a confounding range of styles (psych-folk, jazz, avant-electronica, lounge) and reassemble them in head-bending new forms, underpinned by splendid songwriting.
PIERRE KWENDERS: JOSÉ LOUIS AND THE PARADOX OF LOVE (Arts & Crafts)
Mixing lilting contemporary Afropop and Congolese rumba with Western art-pop, Kinshasa-born Canadian Kwenders croons, wiggles, grooves and slides in four languages, and thrills in all of them.
KENDRICK LAMAR: MR MORALE & THE BIG STEPPERS (pgLang/TDE/Aftermath/Interscope)
If To Pimp A Butterfly was Lamar linking the environment that made him to the wider narrative of America, and DAMN a personal reckoning with his country, then this is his therapy record, full of insight, rage, tenderness and anguish, both harrowing and dazzling.
LIZZO: SPECIAL (Atlantic)
The language of self-actualisation can become a little exhausting, a tad rote and formulaic. But not with Lizzo, it doesn’t. She makes the whole business such glorious, joyous fun. Special may effectively be Cuz I Love You take two, but when it’s this good, who cares?
TUMI MOGOROSI: GROUP THEORY: BLACK MUSIC (Mushroom Hour/New Soil)
Mogorosi, who British jazz fans may know as the drummer of Shabaka And The Ancestors, writes himself into the rich history of South African jazz, bringing together dramatic choral vocals with sweeping Afro-futurism and beat poetry.
THE MOVERS: VOL. 1 – 1970–1976 (Analog Africa)
We could really use a word to describe nostalgia for bygone things we only just found out about – “novostalgia”, say – because that’s exactly what it feels like to hear the raw purity of Johannesburg’s The Movers for the first time. An exhilarating blend of American influences with homegrown, Jamaican, and central and western African styles.
JEB LOY NICHOLS: UNITED STATES OF THE BROKEN HEARTED (On-U Sound)
Wyoming-born, Missouri-raised, Wales-based Nichols is an undersung master of American roots. This is a marvel of soft, spare folk-soul, capturing not just the feel but the radical fire of its sources. One day the world will catch up with his music. But why wait?
NOVA TWINS: SUPERNOVA (Marshall)
The pop-rap-cyberpunk hybrid never gets old, because each new generation’s brash young upstarts put their own twist on it. Nova Twins add rave, metal, black consciousness and feminism to the formula, in a ferocious, jubilant, rip-snorting big-up of their own fabulous selves and tear-down of everything else.
HINAKO OMORI: A JOURNEY… (Houndstooth)
A delicate, meditative ambient/synth record, which chimes with the current digi-nature trend in London-raised Omori’s native Japan. Inspired by the practice of “forest bathing”, it really does feel like basking in quiet, warm sunlight over which the shadows of leaves slowly ripple. Lovely.
ONE MORE GRAIN: BEANS ON TOAST WITH PYTHAGORAS (https://onemoregrain.bandcamp.com)
Daniel Patrick Quinn’s eccentric, experimental group could be described as an unlikely meshing of the spirits of Penguin Café Orchestra, The Avalanches, Ultramarine, Lemon Jelly and Half Man Half Biscuit, but that barely opens the door to the strange and captivating world within their fourth album. You need to hear it in order to believe you didn’t dream it.
PROSPECTOR SOUND: RED SARGASSO (The Ambient Zone)
Prospector Sound is Richard Talbot from Marconi Union, the Manchester trio who have (in every sense) quietly become the outstanding ambient act of the last 20 years. This solo collection is swathed in slow mystery, superbly evoking a series of empty, eerie land- and seascapes.
ROSALÍA: MOTOMAMI (Columbia)
The Catalan flamenco artist never plays it safe. This is a quite doolally avant-pop/rap LP, fragmentary, like a collage or a mosaic. Each of these peculiar little vignettes has its own needle-sharp focus, darting between the traditionalism in which Rosalía is steeped, and the futurism to which she successfully aspires.
RICH RUTH: I SURVIVED, IT’S OVER (Third Man)
Ambience is Ruth’s canvas, but jazz is his palette, and instrumental virtuosity his brush. He is closer in technique and spirit to British cosmic electro-jazzers The Comet Is Coming than to the post-Eno texturalists who dominate the genre. This is a straight-up masterpiece.
ŞATELLITES: ŞATELLITES (Batov)
Hailing from Tel Aviv, and steeped in the multifarious history of Turkish pop, Şatellites imagine, then realise, a music in which that history, ranging from Anatolian folk to West-facing psychedelic funk and moody indie dream-pop, all happens at once, in a wonderful mélange held together by a sense of enchantment.
SRSQ: EVER CRASHING (Dais)
Kennedy Ashlyn has a clear and commanding soprano that hits every note as if it were a bell. She brings conviction, intensity, and sheer radiance to shoegazy dreampop, a torrent of shining sound and chiming melody that feels like being blasted with gold leaf in a wind tunnel.
STORMZY: THIS IS WHAT I MEAN (#Merky/0207 Def Jam)
Hardly a rap record at all, in the familiar sense, more an expansive, rap-infused soul/R&B record, often nourished by the same sources as Sault. A mightily impressive piece of work, dense, intricate and moving; distinctively of its time and place yet unconstrained by them.
SUN’S SIGNATURE: SUN’S SIGNATURE (Partisan)
Elizabeth Fraser is quite simply the most singular, the most exquisite singer produced by these islands in her time. New projects from her rank somewhere between papal elections and comet sightings. This one is a kind of gentle sorcery, channeling the elements, and the cycles of nature.
TELEFÍS: A DÓ (Dimple Discs)
Cathal Coughlan, who died in May, was one of the outstanding lyricists and compelling personalities of left-field pop. This dark, droll, ferocious electro/new wave colloboration with acclaimed producer Jacknife Lee makes a fitting coda to a superb, wide-ranging ouevre.
TEARS FOR FEARS: THE TIPPING POINT (Concord)
Here’s Tears For Fears’ distinctive dad-rock in excelsis, close to what’s long seemed their ultimate destination: a kind of post-therapy Pink Floyd, with thoughtfulness and wistfulness the keynotes, in place of bitterness. A deep, glossy, luxuriant record that draws you further in with each hearing.
TENO AFRIKA: WHERE YOU ARE (Awesome Tapes From Africa)
You might take this for an unheard deep house treasure from Eighties Chicago. It’s really South African amapiano, created by a 22-year-old, and it is lovely: featherlight in construction, deliciously bassy, with the subtlest topnotes of loungey jazz and township jive.
WARMDUSCHER: AT THE HOTSPOT (Bella Union)
Sordid, cantankerous underground mutoid disco-funk, driven by the sleaziest bass since Jean-Jacques Burnel’s Stranglers prime, brimming with menace, its sandpaper stubble and paint-stripper breath far too close your ear. It is nasty. It means you harm. And it is ace.
WET LEG: WET LEG (Domino)
We all know that pair of friends who are essentially a two-girl gang. A spooky sub-culture to themselves, with their own inscrutable vernacular and jokes. Their deadpan indie-rock, sturdy yet skittish, taps with mordant élan into something generational.
WHATEVER THE WEATHER: WHATEVER THE WEATHER (Ghostly International)
Loraine James’s Reflection was one of last year’s outstanding albums. Here, working in ambient form, she brings something fresh and eye-opening to the most familiar of British subjects, with music somehow both glitchy and fluid. A quite literally atmospheric album, one that freezes and melts on you.
YARD ACT: THE OVERLOAD (Zen F.C./Island)
The newest recuits to the sprechgesang gang deliver a state-of-the-nation piece devoid of grandiosity: narratives rather than philippics; trenchant in one breath, empathetic in the next. Deeply serious, acutely funny, phrased and assembled with a masterful eye and ear.
|
|
|
|
