Albums of the Year 2023

Anna B Savage - in|FLUX

Ghost of Vroom - 3

Bixiga 70 - Vapor

Califone - Villagers

Lankum - False Lankum

Blue Aeroplanes - Culture Gun

Fever Ray - Radical Romantics

boygenius - The Record

Superchunk - Misfits & Mistakes

Brìghde Chaimbeul – Carry Them With Us

Fun Boy Three - The Complete Fun Boy Three

The National - Frankenstein / Laugh Track

Hack-Poets Guild - Blackletter Garland

Young Fathers - Heavy Heavy

Le Cri du Caire - Le Cri du Caire

Laurel Halo - Atlas

Creation Rebel - Hostile Environment

Bruce Brubaker - Eno Piano

Johnny Flynn & Robert Macfarlane - The Moon Also Rises

Mary Lattimore - Goodbye, Hotel Arkada

Arooj Aftab, Vijay Iyer & Shahzad Ismaily – Love in Exile

Tamsin Elliott & Tarek Elazhary – So Far We Have Come

Vox Clamantis - Music by Henrik Odegaard

Unthank Smith - Nowhere and Everywhere

Samuel Blaser - Routes

Albums of the Year 2022

Butthole Surfers - 22 Going On 23

WHAT Butthole Surfers - 22 Going On 23
WHEN Leicester - October 1989

I’m so, so scared…

At college my friend Alan had the best hi-fi and the best musical tastes of anyone I knew. He introduced me to Le Mystère des Voix Bulgares, Otis Redding and Durutti Column.

He saved up the Butthole Surfers' “Locust Abortion Technician” until he thought I was ready. The band name, the title, the album sleeve - all or any of these should have been clues. He turned out the lights, set the record playing and things immediately got wonky. Most albums start with a good strong single. Locust starts with “Sweatloaf”. I mean, what even is a ’sweatloaf’? 

"Daddy?"
"Yes, son?"
"What does regret mean?"
"Well, son, a funny thing about regret is that better to regret something you have done, than to regret something you haven't done. And by the way, if you see your mom this weekend, be sure to tell her SATAN, SATAN, SATAN!!!"

After that, it’s one absurd, disturbed moral failing after another (who calls a song “Kuntz”?). And they save their master stroke until the final track.

“22 Going on 23" is a sludge slow nightmare which mixes a woman's sexual abuse confession on a radio talk show into an all-consuming soundscape. The final guitar solo is terrifying, ecstatic and nightmarish. I still can’t decide if it’s exploitative or cathartic. It is f***ing massive.

At the end of the album I'm sweating / shivering from the force of this initiation. It's the musical equivalent of a bad trip. Fetid, warped and hallucinogenic, “Locust Abortion Technician” is still a shock to the system. Approach with caution.

(If you are intrigued by “Locust Abortion Technician”, I would recommend reading David Stubbs’ great in-depth article for The Quietus celebrating its 25th anniversary. It goes through the album track-by-track and puts it and the band in context)

Peter Gabriel - No Self Control

WHAT Peter Gabriel - No Self Control
WHEN Cwmbran Gateway Supermarket - May 1980 

Imagine coming across this record sleeve as a 12 year old in a department store. It’s stuck between David Essex and UK Subs, next to the small electrical appliance department. Then imagine hearing the song that’s inside. In retrospect, it probably explains a lot about how my tastes were going to develop… 

“No Self Control” is a downright creepy song. It's different to the shock & awe creepy of the Butthole Surfers or the cartoon menacing creepy of Nine Inch Nails. It's vulnerable, desperate and self-aware. It sounds all too possible. 

“You know I hate to hurt you
I hate to see your pain
But I don't know how to stop
No, I don't know how to stop”

Those are some nasty lyrics to be rubbing shoulders with David Essex and home furnishings. Musically, its got an off-centre structure and warped tension which you can’t imagine charting in the 21st century. And it’s got a xylophone. Yeah. A xylophone. Olly Murs doesn’t have a xylophone.

This vintage Top of the Pops performance with its oh-so-jaunty Dave Lee Travis introduction gives an idea of how out of place it now seems.

And since then, Peter Gabriel has remained a constant. He was one of the first live shows I ever went to, he introduced to me music from across the world and he still strives to be relevant and provocative in his mid 60s. And you can’t say that about UK Subs or David Essex.

Big Black - Kerosene

WHAT Big Black - Kerosene
WHEN Leicester - Autumn 1989

Like Hüsker Dü, this was a sound in my head that existed before I heard their records. And it’s not a very nice sound.

Big Black are the stripped head on a musical screw when everything has been wound too tight. Dense, claustrophobic and aggressive, Big Black’s purpose is to make you feel uncomfortable. They’re the over-amplified sound of nails running down a blackboard. This felt like the sound in my head.
 
No one - I mean, NO ONE - makes a guitar sound like Steve Albini. The best description for “Kerosene” is that it sounds like he’s playing broken glass. It clangs away destroying the upper end of your hearing before pummelling you with industrial distortion. Combined with the group’s use of a primitive drum machine, their songs have an unrelenting, jackhammer ferocity. This is music that dominates the listener. It doesn’t want dialogue. It wants submission. 

"There's kerosene around, she's something to do
There's kerosene around, find something to do
There's kerosene around, she's something to do
Kerosene around, set me on fire"

“Kerosene” is about twice as long as any other Big Black song but still only has 40 unique words. Even The Beatles’ “She Loves You” has 57 unique words. Big Black are the Masters of Terse. They say blunt things bluntly (and I guess if you’re calling your album “Songs About Fucking” you’ve made the headline all about cutting to the chase).

The original sleeve notes to “Kerosene” read: “In small towns, there are few forms of amusement. Two prominent ones are easy sex and arson. When simple exercises lose their bang, new combinations develop”. Most of their lyrics are cold, observational statements on what passes for normal off Main Street but I don’t think that they’re as amoral as some folk think. The disgust in "Jordan, Minnesota" or “Bad Penny” is vivid and pointed. And yet behind the battering ram, “Kerosene” has a singalong riptide hook as it bulldozers its way into the chorus. It's a pop song’s DNA. It’s just one that’s been cruelly modified by locking it in a cellar with a cocktail of steroids, meth and disappointment. 

As their t-shirt used to say: “From Chicago’s Finest Forges, Power Where You Need It”. Breathtaking stuff. Still. 

Arvo Pärt - Spiegel Im Spiegel

WHAT Arvo Pärt “Spiegel Im Spiegel”
WHEN Surbiton - 13 August 2010
 
There was a time when you just couldn’t avoid this. It was like the world’s commissioning editors has gathered together and said it had to soundtrack every tragic or epic moment in all films, theatre and dance performances. (The Guardian at one time asked for a Arvo Armistice).

And yet… 

I played it at my grandmother’s funeral. Its peace and dignity hasn’t been diminished by its overuse. In the apparent simplicity, there is something fundamental, an essence, which is a rare thing to create in the last years of the 20th century. It can still stop me in my tracks. 

Alison Watt’s "Still" at Old St Paul's Church in Edinburgh has the same impact on me. It is a remarkable 12 foot square painting commissioned in 2004 for their 1926 memorial chapel. It's an unworldly building in the historic heart of a city centre and to find a bold, yet sympathetic, work of contemporary art located there is a real shock. When you visit I would recommend reading Revd Canon Ian Paton’s “Being Still” insightful notes on the painting's creation process (unfortunately they don't seem to be online).

For me, as an atheist, both “Spiegel Im Spiegel” and “Still” are spiritual, compassionate and comforting. They signify grief, loss and remembrance but also that it will be OK.

It will be OK.

Nirvana - Sliver

WHAT Nirvana “Sliver”
WHEN Leicester - 15 June 1991

Just after I finished college I was living in a house with someone diagnosed with rapid cycling bipolar disorder. It turned into a year of self-harm, self-medication, attempted suicides and enforced hospitalisations. 

"After dinner, I had ice cream
I fell asleep, and watched TV
I woke up in my mother’s arms

Grandma take me home
Never take me home
Grandma take me home

Wanna be alone"

At the end of 1990, “Sliver” was a goofy fun time Sub Pop single that gave a handful of us a two minute high. Its adolescent rush is the DNA of great noisy pop songs - "Can't Buy Me Love", "Teenage Kicks", "Song 2" - a breathless, giddy verse-chorus-verse memory firecracker. 

By the end of the next summer, “Smells Like Teen Spirit” was a global Geffen commodity to over 10 million people (true story: I realised how far and fast Nirvana had gone two months later when I heard it coming out of a bedroom window next to the Tower of Pisa). The gear shift predictably ripped the guts out of it and less than three years later it was all over. 

Where did all the good times go?

Barbra Streisand - Wet

WHAT Barbra Streisand - Wet
WHEN Glascoed Royal Ordnance Factory Social Club - Summer 1980
 
Endless summer nights at 'the Club'.
Coke in classic bottles. 
Pub crisps.
And it felt like this tape was playing all the time.

This was the end of an era. It was the final summer I spent in our tiny village primary school (70 pupils) before transferring to the much larger comprehensive school (1100 pupils). We also moved that summer from the Factory’s on-site ‘married quarters’ (population 200) to the village (population 2000). New house, new school, new friends, new music.

Listening to it 36 years later is, predictably, a mixed bag. The UK might have been punk for three years but that hadn’t reached Streisand’s Malibu bunker. It has the sticky sheen of West Coast music biz glossy excess plastered over it. You don’t have to call in Time Team to date it. 

A concept album based around water? OK! A soft porn hot tub album cover? Yes! Car crash arrangements of flabby disco being choked by wigged-out guitar solos and sickly string sections? Uh huh!  The version of “Splish Splash” is excruciating. But…   “Wet”, “Kiss Me in the Rain” and “No More Tears” (with Donna Summer) can still hold their heads up. A decent cover version by the likes of Feist or Rhiannon Giddens could rehabilitate them for less decadent times. 

Parts of this album are still scored deeply into my brain. If you say to me “It’s raining, it’s pouring…”, my follow-up line will always be “my love life is boring”, not “the old man is snoring”. Thanks Barbra. Who knows what other pinko liberal mantras she’s planted deep in my subconscious?

Now the Glascoed Royal Ordnance Factory Social Club is shuttered and decaying. Barbra’s tape looks like it’s gone through the wars. Time moves on.

Hüsker Dü - Makes No Sense At All

WHAT Hüsker Dü  - Makes No Sense At All
WHEN Newport Market - 1988
A sound that I had in my head before I heard it. Their combination of noise and melody was seemingly imprinted in my brain and it just needed the right record to unlock it and everything else followed. Hüsker Dü were my entry drug to a whole new world of music, behaviour and ideas that didn’t exist in my small village. In a pre-internet world, all of this came just from the records, not Googled interviews, Facebook fandom and Twitter exposés. To get copies of "Zen Arcade", "New Day Rising" and "Flip Your Wig", I had to travel 14 miles to the punk record stall upstairs in Newport’s Indoor Market. The stall holders were at the whims of the ramshackle international distribution of independent record labels and classic albums of that time - Swans, Dinosaur Jr, Fugazi, Butthole Surfers. Meat Puppets - would sometimes be unavailable for months at a time. All this now seems unbelievable in a world where music is ubiquitous. It was scarce, precious, valuable.  

“Makes No Sense At All” is two and half minutes long, 61 words, 18 lines, job done. And yet in that brevity, it has doubt and confusion.

“You concern yourself with evidence
It’s evident to me
Well, you say you’ve got the tiger by the tail
But I don’t see these things that way”

Despite the insistent guitar buzz, Hüsker Dü were the antithesis of didactic, confident guitar rock. Their songs are vulnerable and all about the shades of grey. They’re littered with real world failures about good love gone bad, broken friendships and ageing parents. It is domestic, bruised and compassionate. Their final recorded track is called ‘You Can Live At Home Now’. It’s a  pretty far cry from ‘We Will Rock You’.

By the time Hüsker Dü became a part of my life, they’d already split up. That’s a good thing. I never want them to reform. They will never, ever disappoint me.

Godspeed You! Black Emperor - F♯ A♯ ∞

WHAT  Godspeed You! Black Emperor - F♯ A♯ ∞ 
WHEN The Lemon Tree, Aberdeen - 27 March 2000

“The car is on fire, and there’s no driver at the wheel
And the sewers are all muddied with a thousand lonely suicides
And a dark wind blows

The government is corrupt
And we’re on so many drugs
With the radio on and the curtains drawn

We’re trapped in the belly of this horrible machine
And the machine is bleeding to death

The sun has fallen down
And the billboards are all leering
And the flags are all dead at the top of their poles”

Who the hell opens their debut album with a spoken word piece from their own abandoned film script? From their first recorded moment, Godspeed You! Black Emperor set out their stall and everyone else can go fuck themselves. Serious, dystopian and uncompromising, "F♯ A♯ ∞" is almost underdone by its own solemnity, but its steely self belief holds it together. With wandering guitar lines and lush string sections, it creates a progressively darkening dream-state that ladles out feelings of paranoia, dread and impending apocalypse.

Compared to Swans’ pummelling beat-downs or Big Black’s blunt force trauma (both of which I love), "F♯ A♯ ∞" is a masterclass in playing the long game as it inexorably overwhelms you in its very, very bleak now-world. I first saw them live supporting Sigur Rós in Aberdeen which was a bit like sending Nick Cave to open for Kylie Minogue... they were almost invisible onstage - hidden behind a set on a obscure projections - and never spoke. Mystery maintained.

Lock the doors, turn out the lights, be scared.

Alpha - Come From Heaven

WHAT Alpha - Come From Heaven
WHEN Bristol - 28 April 1998
This is so Autumnal you can practically hear the leaves falling off the dreams. It’s a record that sounds like a season changing and ebbing away. Hypnotic, lush and intoxicating, it’s cast in the softest of light like the golden hour before sunset or a room lit by candles.

Alpha got pegged as part of the trip-hop scene - they were signed to Massive Attack’s Melankolic label, came from Bristol and had fuzzy beats - but over the last 18 years I think they’re proved that they’re so much more than that. For a debut album, “Come from Heaven” is audaciously fully formed and has stood the test of time.

“Sometime Later” is the slow burning classic at the centre of the album which takes the spirit of, and samples, Lee Hazlewood’s “My Autumn’s Done Come” and repositions as a post-club implosion. About five minutes in - when Martin Barnard sings “Something, something tells me that you have something” - it marks a turn in tone and temperature as it begins to soar, spiral and then unravel. Alpha’s masterstroke is their use of vocals whose intimacy and fragility create an soulfulness that marks it out from most humdrum electronica. 

In 2015, Alpha released a new double album Loving Nobody which shows them continuing their own sweet way without seemingly giving a damn about what other people are doing. Seek them out at www.alphaheaven.com and make your world a little bit better.

Mark Eitzel - Songs of Love Live

WHAT Mark Eitzel “Songs of Love Live”
WHEN The Borderline, London - 17 January 1991

This was the first time I'd see Mark Eitzel live and I had no idea about the legend that would grow around this gig. It's one of the very few times I can say ‘I was there’ and even rarer to say that the experience was as good as its mythic status. 

The Borderline is the essence of a music venue - 200 people in a dark room with a small stage, a working bar and no frills. You can find an endless supply of them around the world. This one’s timely policy of programming alt-country/Americana in the early 1990s and the Central London location got it into the habit of hosting legends like R.E.M. (as Bingo Hand Job) and Crowded House. Right place, right time. 

It was a strange day. That afternoon I'd seen Carter USM start a minor riot in the HMV on Oxford Street and now was about to see a guy who was already had a cult-like aura growing around him. A lot has been written about the gig by better writers than me and there’s no point in repeating it here (the liner notes by Andrew Smith nail it and there’s an interesting description of how the recording came to pass in Sean Body’s book “Wish the World Away”). It was a raw, harrowing confessional that became part therapy session, part high wire act. He just let it all hang out. There was tears, there was laughter, but mainly there were just desperate, desperate tears. If you start songs with lines like “The hospital wouldn’t admit you” or “When no one cares for you, you’re made of straw”, you kinda know there’s little chance of an emotional U turn. 

So, 20 years on, why is this a great recording that’s worth listening to and not just voyeuristic rubbernecking of one man’s public breakdown? It’s difficult to quantify but I think you can still feel/hear something very powerful between the artist and the audience. There’s no background chatter, no mobiles, no heckling. There is reverence. There is trust. There is compassion.

Mark Eitzel and American Music Club definitely did not become pop legends, regardless of how many of their gigs I travelled to see them play. You’d think that the big label money and blanket critical praise of The Greatest Living Songwriter should have turned them into mega stars but sometimes that peg isn’t going to fit that hole (NB my spell check is hellbent on turning ‘Eitzel’ into ‘Outsell’… oh, the irony). Then - as now - they seem to be a cult interest. I last saw Mark Eitzel live in October 2013 in another blacked-out room with about 200 people. I keep seeing him because it's based on habit, community, history, faith, heart. I go there because that’s where I go.

My Bloody Valentine - Glider EP

WHAT My Bloody Valentine - Glider EP
WHEN TJs, Newport - August 1989

It’s difficult to describe what hearing “Glider” was like the first time. Woozy, brutal, intimate, dislocated, catatonic - it just didn’t sound like anything else, then or now. 

I was at their Reading Festival warm-up show at TJs in Newport in August 1989. It was a small, sweaty black box of a venue (sadly now lost to the sanitised world of property development) and my memory of it was like being inside a forge. They used a genuinely frightening amount of volume backed by an metronomic percussive brutality which probably did permanent damage to my hearing. It was like standing behind a jumbo jet that was taking off in your front room. It was also totally euphoric. They seemed to be grappling with the far edges of what you can achieve with volume and structure and "Loveless" was what emerged after the comically long recording process (2 years! 19 studios! It’s worth reading the Wikipedia description of the sessions to get a sense of how far off the reservation they wandered). 

“Loveless” somehow manages to be completely tight but simultaneously totally out of focus. It often sounds like they’ve either played the master tape at the wrong speed or they’ve dubbed a couple of other songs on top of a finished track.  It’s disorientating, experimental and unapologetically ambitious.

1991 did produce some albums which have stood the test of time - "Blue Lines", "Out of Time", "Spiderland", "Laughing Stock", "Still Feel Gone", "No Pocky for Kitty" - but "Loveless" still feels exceptional and futuristic. 

(A note about the photo for those interested: it was made by using a self-timer, a long exposure, setting steel wool on fire and then spinning it around. Looks fantastic, isn't 100% safe. Probably should involve a friend and a fire extinguisher next time...)