You might think we're three years late with this, and you'd be completely correct. For every week of Semester 1, we will be releasing nine places of a list celebrating all of the best albums released over the 2010s, limiting our picks to one album per artist. And as a disclaimer, the list rests as the opinion of our journalist rep. We don’t do objective facts here.
100. A Moon Shaped Pool – Radiohead (2016, XL; art rock, chamber pop)
If you want any kind of indication of the quality of music that the 2010s had to offer, the
fact that Radiohead’s ninth album A Moon Shaped Pool is 100th probably gives you a pretty good idea. From its astonishing string-built lead single “Burn the Witch,” which builds from a barrage of plucking to eventual lapses into screeches and off-key string notes, Yorke and company throw the listener into an instilled confidence and rhythm. Then – instantly afterwards – classic Radioheadesque sobering gloom takes a hold in the form of “Daydreaming.” A track that’s elusive quietness juxtaposes the opener so brutally that the band are able to access notions of loneliness and peace to a more significant depth than ever before.
Contrasts persist between the likes of “Ful Stop”’s nightmarish layering of Yorke’s
deranged chants, harpy-like cries, and eventual laments – heightened through a sharply on-and-off drum presence – and secluded yet buoyantly driven acoustic guitar backbone of “Desert Island Disk.”
Onwards from here, the emotional adriftness of the album translates into smart, melodic
bass (“Identikit”), a quiet optimism in people being the root of power (“The Numbers”), and spiralling arpeggios (“Tinker Tailor…”) to arrive at what is potentially the saddest song the band ever produced.
“True Love Waits” simply pits Yorke – who has certainly sounded more despondent
elsewhere – against a simple, evolving piano backing. This combination accesses a seldom-hit note where defeated lyrics are given with a tone of unbounded acceptance. Where change inevitably leads to loss and, while we sometimes try everything in our power to combat this fact, we are essentially helpless. As the piano gradually collapses in on itself, there’s a reason that true love doesn’t await us.
The calmness and tranquillity of drifting through A Moon Shaped Pool accesses an area
where our anxieties and uncertainties of life are submerged tightly between the lightness of air and the darkest of unknown depths.
99. Citizen Zombie – The Pop Group (2015, Freaks R Us; post-punk, experimental funk)
When it comes to comeback albums, artists may average a decade or so before
returning to the scene. Disregarding any such averageness, Mark Stewart’s The Pop Group waited thirty-five before hitting us over the head with Citizen Zombie. Their return is peppered with earworm after earworm after earworm. With every track tapping into some required feature of modern punk, before turning them all to the max. The title track is lyrically delivered to the listener as a plea for a realisation of the state of non-thinking they’re collectively currently in. It’s loud chorus, frenzying of Stewart throughout, smacking around of guitar, and more gentle interludes of nearly jazz-formulated deep piano and tight cymbals, all culminates into the conclusion that “you’ve got that look of an alien abductee; maybe your mind has been wiped clean.” We then, so to say, wake up to the purposefully dream-like dance cut “Mad Truth.” In a marriage of excellent, funky bass and catchy lyrical deliveries, the album suddenly oozes an easy-going togetherness that has always pioneered punk. From here, the tracklist runs unpredictably through some conception of punk’s history and its necessity. The heavy drums and distortion that builds into “Nowhere Girl” amazingly replenishes the album’s instrumental focus, before “Shadow Child” capriciously touches more on dub, with a neat usage of electronic features to splice into the ever-chaotic production.
In isolation, “s.o.p.h.i.a” fuses everything this project does well together amazingly. It’s a
love song of happy disorder. Its detailing of instantaneous, supernatural love is capable of inspiring anyone. It triumphs in being so incredibly fun but so formally serious simultaneously. And if I could fuck a bassline, it would indeed be this one.
Whatever actually is in “Box 9” is something ugly and mad. But also present in strains
of post-punk heavily embarked on in recent years: movement towards arty jumbles of unanswerable questions. The spoken word wisdom of “Nations” self-destructs as an updated ‘choose life’ passage from Trainspotting. The take-away of the album soon then arrives as “Echelon,” a reminder that a putative meaning exists behind the genre that has continued so hotly from the “We Are All Prostitute” days of The Pop Group’s prime. The punk instrumentals are silenced by cool piano and synthesizer as the track’s meditation reveals all the spite and intelligence and community that flares behind punk to, in fact, produce “the saddest music in the world.” If things haven’t changed since the group’s last album thirty-five years previous, then something is unmistakably wrong with the effectiveness of the music this group has made. Consciousness of such a fact being so overtly painted out makes for a speechless finale.
Irrespective of its decisiveness, Citizen Zombie is an aperture into the inceptive era of
post-punk, given from the hands of the genre’s giants to the new age.
98. Far Side Virtual – James Ferraro (2011, Hippos in Tanks; utopian virtual, muzak)
James Ferraro single-handedly details the futuristic scenes of flying cars and an
individually tailored human condition with Far Side Virtual. The album stems from the inceptive concept of it containing sixteen ringtones, each one revealing more about the unbreachable utopia Ferraro intends to paint out.
With “Global Lunch”’s android waitress fronting a multitude of sitar, synth, and break-
beats and virtual chefs – including a robotic Gordon Ramsey – serving coral reef rolls for £1000 as a consumable and exotic taste of nature amongst the obsolete presence of the artificial on “Palm Trees, Wi-Fi and Dream Sushi,” the vocal snippets and musical structures already procure an uncanny feeling, softened by the warmth of the deep strings Ferraro utilises. This leads to the deliberate muzak-friendliness of much of the rest of the tracklist: standout examples such as “Google Poises” and “Earth Minutes” diving as far into relaxing background airport music as they can. But the numbly simplistic nature of such music is taken advantage of to further reflect humanity’s crawl even deeper into the safety of technology’s embrace.
Nothing has seemed more appropriate than this album’s closer, “Solar Panel Smile,”
dominantly relying on samples of a slowed de-de-duh-duh windows shutdown jingle, Wii start-up theme, and GameCube main menu soundtrack to produce an atmospheric, soothing escape from the rest of the album’s futurism. This refuge is fleeting before we are soon blended in coffee order and breakbeat motifs already present on the album to never really let us leave this de-palm treed vaporwave paradise.
The early vaporwave approaches taken by Ferraro, purposefully dated production
choices, and strange ability to produce a peculiar nostalgia for the modern world we know right now while listening to the album, make Far Side Virtual sonically untouched by and distanced from any human being. It is an early indicator of the decade for how technological advancement would alter the processes and complexion of the music industry.
97. Haru to Shura – Haru Nemuri (2018, Perfect Music; post-hardcore, noise pop)
Distortion – both sonic and social – is the foundation to the J-pop/J-rap music of
singer-songwriter Haru Nemuri, who embraces the distortion of the past and future, generational power hierarchies, and immersive electronically-fuelled production on her debut album Haru to Shura.
With her impassioned stance on allowing rock and roll to continue existing as an artform
to her gathering of inspiration from the likes of Fugazi and Fujifabric, Nemuri instantly summons a vibrant loudness on the opening track “MAKE MORE NOISE OF YOU.” It implores a celebration of the revolutionary human spirit that rests behind true punk themes and ideals – bringing her mission directly to the listener, before exploring criticisms of things that rest externally to them, to firstly celebrate their own power and individuality, something you don’t often hear so markedly in the genre.
From here, distortion is settled as the focal point of the album. Think of the whirling
synths of “Narashite,” that layer with guitar and hypnotically mixed drums to the climax of a repeated ‘distortion, distortion, distortion;’ or the title track’s plucks of bass, eventually caught up in a malfunctioning tape player that generates an even greater speed and urgency to what Nemuri is communicating. Then there’s the first of the “zzz” interludes, which pitches Erik Satie against some gratingly distorted guitar – as harmonious yet contrasting a relationship between tradition and past and innovation and future as the album offers – before gradually fusing the two together with a looping of the piano and mending of noise amongst calls of ‘love.’
“Sekaiwotorikaeshiteokure” is the most intense, expressive, and fun passage on Haru
to Shura’s tracklist. With a pacey, alternating beat throughout, sampled and cut vocal chirps providing its backbone, and its chants of ‘Take back the world’ that get louder and more pressing over each verse. Twinkling keys and stacking guitars back Nemuri as she tackles the Earth being the home of God, or war, or loneliness – with her now frantically rapping – to reach the proud close: ‘So you scream out loud: “I’m living here now”!’
“Rock ‘n’ roll wa shinanai with totsuzenshounen” or “rock and roll will never die” shakes
off the more experimental motivations of its previous tracks and embarks on closing the album with as true a rock cut as Nemuri can rally. With help from the group Suddenly Boyz, classical instrumental rock features serve almost as a remedy to the distortion that has dominated the project and its context, leaving the album’s answers and onward direction as an ambiguous amalgamation of clarity and distortion between bringing past musical conventions forward with us or kicked further back to not affect the world anymore.
This album is intrinsically powerful. Nemuri accepts any of the mistakes that amount
from overambition, yet any such issues are undetectable amid the ferocity of performance and consistently adept handling of society’s pulse, establishing one of the most exciting releases in the Japanese underground of the 2010s.
96. …Like Clockwork – Queens of the Stone Age (2013, Matador; alternative rock)
Taking the opportunity to use a particularly volatile period in their history as grounds for
concentrating on music, Queens of the Stone Age run through the motions of disciplines and basics of a dying rock and roll with a keen precision and efficacy on their sixth album, …Like Clockwork.
“Keep Your Eyes Peeled” ignites the darkness that Queens intend to delve into on the
project, with Homme isolating himself amongst the heavy progressions of distorted guitar, deep, droning bass, and lightning bolts of piano. Lyrically, a coursing paranoia starts to materialise: in seeing omnipresent danger, realising one’s own social conformism, and any idea of “reality” being buried under natural and unnatural fictions and lies. This reaches and encourages a safety in suspension of trust that flows cautiously into the bottom-lip-chewing guitar of “I Sat by the Ocean.” Through its aloof detailing of what love ending brings about in a person, accompanied with, as so much else on this album is, a sharpened influence of ‘70s glam rock, this is indeed a fucking banger.
Over the next few tracks, “The Vampyre of Time and Memory” takes a slower look at
the worry of not playing life properly; the juxtaposition of human being as both cold machine and hedonistic animal is unravelled with the deep breathing of bass and backing vocals on “If I Had a Tail;” the cadence of “My God is the Sun” dramatically paganising the band’s search for meaning with the greatest instrumental urgency of the record thus far.
Delving slightly deeper into Clockwork, “I Appear Missing” is arguably Queens’s best
song to date. It cuttingly confronts the deepening isolation and paranoia that the album has expounded thus far, appealing viciously for passion and perseverance in the face of these issues. Its stumbling guitar sections eventually bite back and scream. The drums eventually deliver an invigorated pounding. Meanwhile, Homme stands within his own serenade, doing anything to be ultimately heard.
Before it, “Fairweather Friends” and “Smooth Sailing” brought together “Missing”’s storm
in their respective reliance placed on ‘gossip, drugs, and snakes’ over people and ice-cold confidence measured over a desert funk backing.
With their nailed-on alt. rock sound – and contributions from Dave Grohl, Elton John,
Trent Reznor, and Alex Turner over the course of the album – Queens blackly illustrate their talents through enlisting a reverence of guitar and maudlin frontman to frame their picturesque character with versatility and consistency. Homme described his dilemma of either running away from or into the issues facing the group on this album. It seems that, for either road taken, things here fell into place… like clockwork.
95. Modern Vampires of the City – Vampire Weekend (2013, XL; baroque pop, indie pop)
With a vibrant self-titled debut and immense sophomore release under their belts
already, Modern Vampires of the City showed that Vampire Weekend were capable of living immortally in the moment, or in a series of frozen moments. Here, eleven songs capture vividly momentary experiences, recounted by Ezra Koenig in sometimes movingly simple and sometimes bizarrely chipmunk vocals.
“Obvious Bicycle” takes place in the fleeting airborne feeling that comes after a
trampoline bounce, the springy sounds of which backing the majority of this track with a great, wholly unique rhythm that eventually allows you to float on choir backing and effectively light piano.
Frozen time warmly thaws with the ballad of “Unbelievers.” With its driving drumbeat
and heartfelt beachfront organ it charmingly paints out lovers doomed to have to accept they love each other, despite each other’s complete lack of belief that such a thing is possible. Its catchiness and empathetically universal experience of the special knowledge that someone loves you – no matter how conditionally or insured – is communicated so well you suddenly feel lucky to have a warm feeling within and outside of the music you’re listening to. Such a thawing sweetness continues into – oh boy oh boy – “Step.” With its Stranglers’ “Golden Brown”-esque harpsichord, the slow-motion grace of the piece flows between autobiography and the one second it clicks for everyone that you’ve ‘grown up.’ And as daunting as this moment is for everyone, “Step” does a pretty good job of calming the worries that you inevitably can’t help and grow to know as adulthood.
The experience of whether “Diane Young” ‘will change your mind’ is as instantaneous
as Modern Vampires gets. How ubiquitous the stunning feeling of having someone who could completely change your life first walk into the room prompts as quick and significant a change in the album’s pacing as it would in reorganising your own life and thoughts, or so most of us will have once experienced. The sped and slowed ‘baby, baby, baby’ bridge adds an unforgettably fun complexion over the poignance of the last three tracks, with the band’s youth beaming out through every note of the track.
The contrasting quietness of pacing and Koenig’s account in “Hannah Hunt;” collaged
string passages of “Everlasting Arms;” and caution to the wind confidence of “Finger Back” build onto the diversity of the project’s isolated analysis of love, being loved, and loving.
Weekend never seem to be able to give up on the listener, as “Worship You”’s stumbling, tongue-twister vocals recreate a head-over-heals blabbering that can always tell you how much you mean to someone else or the reverse.
With the Paul Simon westernised world music reincarnation jokes aside, this album’s
ability to isolate minute characteristics that make up the ungraspable, complete power of love that we will never be able to figure out is a truly accomplishing highlight of the 2010s in music.
94. GREY Area – Little Simz (2019, Age 101 & AWAL; UK hip-hop, conscious rap)
An exciting new generation of UK hip-hop artists came up throughout the 2010s.
Their potential saw a formidable culmination in 2019 with the releases of Dave’s PSYCHODRAMA, slowthai’s Nothing Great About Britian, and, most impressively for the decade, Little Simz’s GREY Area.
As her fourth studio album, it exemplifies the range of sub-genre techniques, pacing of
flow, and cadence of delivery that can pretty much be perfected through a precision in simplicity and bright self-assurance.
With its simple marriage of jazzy bebop drums and synth-bass, ‘Hello, it’s me again’
confidently opens the album with “Offence.” The track is soaked in a youthful yet mature, whimsy yet sharply serious character. In moving from a refreshingly stripped back resonance scattered with panpipes to the playful cartoon samples, Simz is enabled to simultaneously quicken her pace and hurtle out the gate a la Road Runner.
“Boss” then continues the album’s instrumental freshness, building from street protest
megaphone delivery towards a New Wave synth close. With Simz continuing to relentlessly chart her relevance to the potent declarations of being the ‘boss in the fucking dress.’ Immediately from here, the power of these two tracks is shifted on “Selfish” as the question of how best to direct these very present strengths and powers becomes the forefront of the song. With Cleo Sol is enlisted for the song’s barebones chorus, Simz – quieter and less intense – deliberates on the introspective needs of self-love and being more present for friends over the clarity of a piano and clapping bass beat backing.
The impact of arms on youth-focused “Wounds” breaks into the overwrought strings
and liquid flows of “Venom.” With its hypnotically tight cymbal taps, the song brings the issue of sexist oppression in hip-hop directly to its perpetrators. Simz is place in absolute control as she reflects received hate while also showcasing some of the best technical and lyrical arrangements on any rap song over the entire decade.
The candid contrasts that GREY Area engages is starkest with the move into “101 FM.”
Its videogame-style beat sees Simz daydreaming about the simplicity of being young and caring about playing PlayStation with her mates as an escape from the flats of her childhood. As it closes with a very independent-sounding ‘top of the flats’ radio disk jockey, pleased about spinning an early noughties-type indie rap song, the album stands as a goodie bag of diverse approach and steady consistency. If you shake the bag and pull out a few more tracks you’ll find: “Therapy”’s examination of intra-relationship strife and struggle amongst a curiously hazily produced bass, hit with single tambourine and stylophone notes; “Sherbet Sunset”’s inverting and reversing production marking the album’s addressing of the ‘grey area’ of love – whether it exists, whether Simz will ever truly accept it; or the gorgeous mix of Michael Kiwanuka’s R&B, a paradisical jazz-rap backing, and Simz’s most conscious lyrics of the whole project.
No matter how clear it is where Simz intends to take her verses or each of the songs on
this album, they come in a unit package of striking intelligence and build a trust in the processes that her trains of thought lead onto a career that was in 2019 – and very evidently is now – destined for the stars of all-time greatness.
93. Skeleton Tree – Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds (2016, Bad Seed Ltd.; ambient, avant-garde rock)
According to Faith, Hope, and Carnage (2022) – an interview between Nick Cave and
journalist Sean O’Hagan – Cave sees his and the Bad Seeds’s sixteenth studio album Skeleton Tree as a cursed piece of music. The Australian rock legend details how he can’t listen to – hating the album’s very sound – or even think about it. While the difficulty with approaching this album comes through Cave resting in a depressed, despondent state of mind during the conception of the album in 2014, the event that is often partnered with Skeleton Tree is that his fifteen-year-old son Arthur Cave sadly died halfway through the album’s recording. For the project’s eight songs, Cave is thus suspended in darkness.
Immediately this consumes the project as drone distortion and pitched howls of
synthesiser meet the desolation of Cave on “Jesus Alone.” His chorus’s laments of ‘with my voice, I am calling you’ ambiguously rests between calls for the aid of God or an admittedly impossible attempt for a human being to criticise and bring to light the evil that is omnipresent on Earth (Cave focusing on an airplane crash that killed eleven people ten miles from his recording studio in Brighton near the River Adur).
The following two tracks “Rings of Saturn” and “Girl in Amber” reinforce the power of
Cave’s spoken word delivery and the devouring darkness of the instrumentals behind him. Warren Ellis provides backing cries to each track’s respective narration of an abstracted spider-analogised woman trapping Cave in a web spun of confused, demented worship and monotonous, inexorable looping of pain under a black sky of twinkling piano.
The album continues in this discouraged vein to meet a juxtaposing stylistic
transmutation in “I Need You.” With the fragile, heaven-like opening ambience soon being dominated by heavy synth-work and the most noticeable, steady drum work of the album, it is here that Bad Seeds epitomise darkness’s cloaking of light. Not solely through this juxtaposing sonic arrangement that takes the listener away from any light of optimism, but arguably Cave’s most distressed and distressing vocal performance. He shakes off meaning and possession (‘I don’t need a lot of things, I can get by with nothing’), all for the elusive presence of the project’s personified ‘you.’ No matter how hard it’s attempted, nothing matters.
“Skeleton Tree,” the redemptive, almost optimistic closer to the album that sees Cave
sonically and spiritually moving onwards from the album’s world of darkness, was the only track written after Arthur died. It’s a stunning fact. Although its sound and the progressive and accepting sound of Cave transcend the album, this new piece of information puts the album, and Cave’s mental state prior to his son’s death into stark perspective.
While hopelessly honest and sorrowful, every harrowed and minimalised branch of
Skeleton Tree is mythologised through an insidious scope Cave and company could have only produced under some of the most unforgiving and unworldly circumstances a human being can be placed under.
92. Blonde – Frank Ocean (2016; Boys Don’t Cry; R&B, neo-soul, avant-garde pop)
For the entirety of the 2010s, there might not be a more generationally significant
album released than Frank Ocean’s Blonde.
It’s difficult to appropriately attempt to analyse each track. How each one provides
separate, intimate contributions to chronicling Ocean’s emotional state and how he’s able to lay out thoughts. So, I’ll instead attempt to highlight some of the aspects that make this album such an incredible and important moment in the history of music.
Duality and contrast grounds the concept of the sophomore release. This can be seen in
as basic a difference as the vocal effects present on “Nikes” – the artificial Ocean possessing a disregard that gifts much more power to the eventual true vocals’ vulnerability and cutting clarity – or in the now famous structural manifestation in the precise 3:30 switch-up on “Nights,” precisely thirty minutes into the project and thus precisely halfway through. But contrasts are also explored on more complex and implicit levels. “Pink + White,” under lush vocal arrangements and summery piano, details a lack of strength in Ocean: being unable to change the colour of the sky. It exemplifies the acceptance of human weakness the artist has. Not solely in nature’s continuation outside of ourselves, but in identifying a natural imperfection in being able to control everything we feel, or see, or do. As the song’s chorus suggests, love, among other emotions, should be embraced with other things not under our control.
Pitch the album’s two interludes against each other – “Be Yourself” and “Facebook
Story.” Frank’s mum providing loving advice against losing himself to drugs and thus numbing his personality contrasts against French musician Sébastien Akchoté recounting a relationship ending through the barriers technology and social media place between human beings. Two very different manifestations of the same love and care for someone in a situation where you’re very sure you know what’s best for someone else.
The tracklist runs in this vein of overlapping ideas and reiterating motifs explored
throughout, eventually reaching the visionary closer of “Futura Free.” As its lyrics divulge the effects of success, the production plays around with nearly musique concrète collaging of field recorded sounds and vocals, exemplified in the mixing of “Interviews.”
And while I can point to some of the superficial expressions of internal and external,
sonic and lyrical opposition and contradiction, how deeply and effortlessly this album reaches into the depths of its artist’s psyche is very difficult to do justice to in a written account.
With Blonde, Frank Ocean became one of the most important artists in music. Even if
the piece now likely rests as a final gesture from Ocean to the world of music. One that will be forever pertinent and contain lessons for every one of its listeners.
91. The Suburbs – Arcade Fire (2010, Merge, City Slang; indie rock, baroque pop)
When it comes to indie rock, Arcade Fire may well be the most important band of the
century so far. And while Funeral stands as their monument to music as a whole, it is the band’s 2010 release The Suburbs that encapsulates the glories of music’s most ubiquitous genre.
Over the project, Fire sentimentally reconstruct the places and memories of their youth.
The dreams of Houston that torment an internal, private prison of no friends within a “City With No Children;” the aimless car journeys, remembered through a lens where music was the most divisive barrier between friends (“Suburban Warfare”); the difficult realisation that our ideas of past “Wasted Hours” were completely misplaced and in fact signified a deep freedom that evolved into the ‘life that we can live.’
While illustrating these modern cave paintings, the band build some spectacular
music behind them. The stunning violin that flutters through “Empty Room” alongside its yawning guitar; the heavier riffs and panting drums of “Month of May;” or “Sprawl II”’s supernatural bass notes, profound piano, and waves of synthy keys; all of which helps to resonate a deeper longing for distant, simpler summertimes we’ll never experience again.
Instigating the whole album, “The Suburbs” – in its jaunty piano, shots of percussion,
and latent strings – is one of music’s warmest comforts from the decade. We collectively grow up through generations and can’t believe that we’re losing the inspirations and curiosities of youth. The song’s unsteady relationship of past, present, and future further map out this breathtaking mid-life crisis of identity and personal history.
The Suburbs maintains a bittersweet revisitation of individual past, and appropriately
conjures the same partly home-sick, partly big-fish-small-pond reception in every listener.
90. Fuck Off Get Free, We Pour Light on Everything – Thee Silver Mt. Zion Memorial Orchestra (2014, Constellation; post-rock, experimental rock)
As one of the myriad off-shoots of legendary post-rock titans Godspeed You! Black
Emperor, Thee Silver Mt. Zion Memorial Orchestra laid out the schematics for last-hope revolution on their final album Fuck Off Get Free We Pour Light on Everything.
The album’s opener “For the Island of Montreal” begins to pen the group’s riotous
plans. Each member is given time to voice their instrumental presence: Amar, a hard, deliberate bass; the violins of Trudeau and Moss snaking through each other with a dual-vibrance; Menuck distorting and firing guitar; and Payant channelling a fighting drum work and percussion underneath. In addition to this array, the quintet, unlike even their own previous material, construct Fuck Off with one additional item that has never existed in Godspeed’s arsenal: vocals. Menuck’s delivery, like much of his solo work, is largely ugly and discordant. That’s if you’re looking at them as superficially as someone who is expecting an artist who has been anticipating the end of the world for his whole career to sound rosy. But just as these vocals cease, the second half of the track begins to haunt the first. Its progression intensifies into jet-engine guitar, spacey percussion, and even more sharply dejected strings. All leading to the eventual martyrdom of: ‘hold me under bright water, never let us end (Our! Dreams! Are! All! Of! Us! Until the end!)’.
More viscerally than ever, you cannot mistake the intrepid anger of these individuals for
anything other than sonic power and emotional universality.
Next, “Austerity Blues” (one of the very best songs of the entire decade, for me) thickens
the political inspirations behind Menuck and company’s composition. Strangled strums of acoustic open to the more tunefully direct lyrics of Menuck. The five members marry perfectly (again) onwards. Noised distortions topple to each violin’s swift, almost impenetrable purposing. The tank-like bassline grumbles on over the ground. The playing is of a desperation that they are calling upon within the listener.
You are listening to human beings putting everything they can behind a message:
‘Lord let my son live long enough to see that mountain torn down.’
“Take Away These Early Grave Blues” builds on some of the repetitive conventions of
the genre: the drumming accelerates around as a hurricane; the violin screeches to its highest points; and the more tempered guitar all instigate an expulsion of the blues that have sapped the latent power of not just the band members, but those they write for. Namely, you.
A brief childhood visitation through “Little Ones Run” provides a compact, piano-tinkled piece before “What We Loved Was Not Enough” compassionately generates an urgency and reality around the importance of action. It’s string-led constitution holds Menuck’s most enchanting vocal performances – partnered by gorgeous backing vocals – and waves of eloquent and particularly candid five-piece instrumentation. To realise your own capabilities before ‘the day [comes] when we no longer feel’ is paramount – and Mount Zion very successfully aid you in feeling that strength.
The project’s closer, “Rains Thru the Roof at the Grande Ballroom” – dedicated to
Brooklyn rapper Capital Steez – disturb the ascending brilliance Fuck Off has instituted so far. The unearthly string effects and wandering pacing of bass abstract from the firm beliefs and grounding of the rest of the album to a less riotous, less certain, less authorising halt.
Fuck Off hardens a transcendence away from succumbing to the world’s horrors.
Instead, its non-traditional post-rock (if such a thing exists) and orchestral punk moves our collective strengths and worries tantalisingly closer to the end of times as we know them.
89. Mess – Liars (2014, Mute; Anti-Dance, New Rave)
Multi-instrumentalist and Liars mastermind Angus Andrew entangles the threads of
weirdo dance on his band’s seventh studio album Mess.
The wool-seeping-out-of-your-speaker design motifs instantly come to strangle you with
an attacking opening two tracks. From the earth-quake synthesizers that back the “Mask Makers”’s liking of your face and imperatives of ‘smell my socks,’ the album embarks on what seems a perpetually-layering barrage of drums, synths, coiled vocal passages set around and around – from interruptive coughs to Andrew’s distant whines to the “Mask Maker” –, more drums, and more synths. It’s a cataclysmic opener. And just as we start to cool off, the deft mixing of “Vox Tuned D.E.D” emphasises Andrew’s all-in approach to electroclash.
The intensity very briefly calms with the reverberations that open “I’m No Gold,” drawing
a sharp and sudden burst into drunken obsession and electronic delusions. It doesn’t feel like it but you can cut some pretty mad shapes to these songs.
This runs (essentially) true to the loud detonations after loud detonations of “Pro Anti
Anti.” It tangles heavy percussion, a plethora of Andrew’s vocal undertakings, the melodic and cool key-base that is obliterated by noisy distortions and the closest thing you’ll get to electro-harp, and a lyrical exposition fuelled by death and paranoia. Another such smashed-together amalgamation of a banger exists in the album’s lead single “Mess on a Mission.” Through the BPM metronome synth notes to the obvious calls of ‘facts are facts and fiction’s fiction,’ the anxiety that seeps with the messy wool of the project really gets under your skin and provokes the kind of frenetic, worrying, I-didn’t-know-I-could-move-like-that movement that the chorus’s screams of ‘in isolation’ guides you to.
The then sludgy and creaking “Darkslide,” shivering and demented “Boyzone,” and
easier staccato structures of “Dress Walker” lead us to an oddball journey through “Perpetual Village.”
From start to finish, you might pick up on how the tracks gradually get darker and
more estranged. “Mask Maker”’s booming introduction feels like a long time ago and you’ve taken a few wrong turns in Mess’s maze of wool to the epitomisation of dismal, contrasted quietness in the closer “Left Speaker Blown.” For the first time on the project, there is a fathomless lack of noise. With the slowing of pace and full-toned beats, trying to find the unlit exit sign from the anti-dance chaos of the previous tracks creates a staggeringly unsettling experience. It’s something like an empty club, infused with the gaping echoes of the music it had just been playing.
Liars are a strange band and this is a strange album. But Liars are also a fucking
brilliant band and this is a fucking brilliant album too. With its very confident and almost instinctual electronic progressions, Mess delves into the loud and quiet that can plague an anxious or uncertain mind. It might be the most imperfect, human-like representation of the 2010s’ rave scene.
88. Little Dark Age – MGMT (2018, Columbia; synth-pop, neo-psychedelia)
A multitude of musical responses followed the fear and uncertainty that a four-year
Trump-led USA meant after the 2016 Presidential Election. But no one else quite grasped the concept as adeptly as MGMT did on their fourth album Little Dark Age. They symbolise the result as the height of the impressionability, media-dependence, and cynicism towards the Other not just of a generation of U.S. voters, but of human beings everywhere.
The duo, consisting of Andrew VanWyngarden and Ben Goldwasser, construct a
restless dystopia of synth-pop. Throughout, the drums are pert, electric-currents hover, rich psychedelic production consistently glows, whimsical vocal arrangements become eerie, and there’s usually a hidden buzz of synthworks. You are confused in the world and LDA sets out to disorientate yourself even more until you realise the extents of the rabbit hole you’re down.
Each component of the tracklist stresses this. With “TSLAMP,” you are most likely
listening to the album through phone’s streaming, while scrolling through your phone. You’re most likely reading this article through your phone. And just like that – Black Mirror-esquely – your awareness is spiked. But you’re not going to do anything about it. You’re excruciatingly conscious of Time Spent Looking at [Your] Phone while using it.
Or you have the brainwashing ‘you want to feel alive’ advertisement of “One Thing Left
to Try” which, albeit the most energetic and positively sounding track on the album, posits you the morbid temptation of doing-it-all by dying; or you’re currently feeling the push and pull misanthropy explored in “When You Die;” or strangers know more about you than you do yourself (“James”); or, “When You’re Small,” you’re powerless: sometimes taking comfort in this unimportance and sometimes feeling the shadow of the ‘Big’ person’s boot coming to crush you from above.
There’s the brothers-in-arms comradeship that runs futily in “Me and Michael” and
there’s the uncanny knowledge that the days you’re living in a period of wasted time (“Days That Got Away”).
“She Works Out Too Much” pulls at the strings of the ever-online new generation. With
our mechanistic dependencies on the technology in our hands, over our ears, that we commute to work in, that we jog on, blitz a smoothie in, or watch Netflix on, there starts to materialise a hyper-activity with such interactions that become obsessive and never fully allows you to not work and just switch off a bit. This continues into the superb title track. Now unfortunately – and quite ironically – employed by the alt. right, the overwhelming contingencies of world events, references to inevitable violence, and the corruption of law, entertainment, and beauty all concatenate to form a horrifyingly true picture of the world that concentrates the rest of the album perfectly.
And if you’re unsure about any of this, you can always “Hand It Over.” “It” signifying you.
After all: ‘It’s yours and it’s mine…’
It’s this tight packaging and direct pointing of Little Dark Age that immortalises the
album in one of the most turbulent historically significant events of the 2010s.
As similar to the geological term Little Ice Age (a North Atlantic regional cooling that
took place for three centuries), VanWyngarden and Goldwasser’s collage of post-millennial limitation places us, with technological advancement in-hand, back into the dark ages.
87. The OOZ – King Krule (2017, True Panther; art rock, trip hop)
In a more aggressive and diverse way than his debut 6 Feet Beneath the Moon, The
OOZ provides a non-windowed torture room for Archy Marshall. Outside of it, the sounds are nocturnal and lit only by a very isolating moonlight.
Conceptually, its an atmospherically lonely listen. And through this frame, Marshall is
able to extend his heart as a self-critical, alienated ‘space cadet’ voyaging through his humdrum and consuming surroundings. Early in the project, he weaves between less than predictable changes of painfully driven vocals (“The Locomotive”); slang-filled pictures of nu-jazz and dreamy guitar that compound to make “Dum Surfer;” and the utterly downcast and worthless ‘nothing is working with me’ contemplation of “Slush Puppy.”
Marshall consistently pulls the instrumentation wherever he is emotionally capable of
going. The waiting room muzak of “Logos” waits overhead of a meditating Marshall, whose deeper resonance carries an even more pessimistic burden, as a ticking clock.
There are, however, times that Archy steps fully into the moonlight and invigorates The
OOZ beyond expectation. Providing an answer to his own call for help on “Emergency Blimp,” Marshall deploys a rockier cut whose pacier tempo allows the issues of drugs and past love to be analysed with a greater bitterness than elsewhere in the album. We start to gain the sense that things cannot pull Marshall away into his own darkness. “Half Man Half Shark” – with its illustrative impact of half of an Archy Marshall alone forever inside of a shark’s stomach, ‘only two fighting hands’ punching from inside to get out – continues in this vein, with manic backing shouts of the song’s title and an oceanic, funky bassline showcasing the other side of King Krule on the album. Both as a lone lover and a lone fighter.
And it’s true: The OOZ is lonely and Marshall rests – sometimes with , sometimes
with – lonelily on it.
86. Frozen Niagara Falls – Prurient (2015, Profound Lore; noise, power electronics)
There is a phenomenon where Ontario’s Niagara Falls, under especially cold
temperatures, forms a thin layer of ice over the waterfall’s rushing cascade. Under such circumstances, it can appear that the whole waterfall has stopped when, in fact, everything is carrying on as usual underneath.
This state of affairs is – in scope of power electronics and noise – also the case on
Dominick Fernow’s 2015 double album Frozen Niagara Falls.
Under the plagues of noise – tense apexes of contorted electronics over a
conducively nocturnal synth layer – you can hear a lyre-like plucking through “The Myth of Building Bridges.” The following “Dragonflies to Sew You Up” continues such brittle and light notes underlying the industrial pummelling of a drum machine and barking, incoherent vocals. Both tracks mutually achieving a deeply unsettling resonance through these loud and quiet juxtapositions.
Committed to the ‘noise of the physical,’ Fernow utilises natural noises of destruction in
his production for Niagara Falls. Constantly behind the brutal and piercing applications of electronics, there can be the booming splitting of rocks, or scourging licks of intensified fire. These unique applications of phonographics make this dedicated noise album inducingly listenable.
“Traditional Snowfall” exemplifies these electroacoustic equilibriums. It shrieks, it’s
off-putting. It has this developed compilation of tormented vocals, pulsing static, and pounding crunches, it’s mesmerising. Or “Greenpoint,” with its river-flow under hovering, death ambient pieces. Its vocals calm and accordant to the solemn production. Suddenly, the sheer scale of emotional rigorousness that these ‘meer’ noises are capable of reaching are completely astounding. But maybe, as a bit of advice, turn down the volume of your headphones before the strident, twisting peaks of noise on “Wildflowers.”
The closing song “Jesus Amongst the Broken Glass” allows the usage of natural
field recordings to go full circle and not rely on distortion or noise to be stimulating.
Although the static surface of Frozen Niagara Falls seems fixed, underneath, the
pulsations of applied phonographic and electronic noise move freely.
85. Saturation I, II, & III – BROCKHAMPTON (2017, Empire; pop rap, alternative R&B)
Deciding to redefine “boy band,” as well as pop-rap while they were at it, in 2017,
BROCKHAMPTON produced three of the slickest, and most hip-hop albums of the entire decade.
Each member contributes crucially. So here’s a few moments that showcase each one
over the three albums.
Kevin Abstract
Abstract’s kicking off of Saturation III on “BOOGIE” with the breakfast-time questions he
has for an unsupportive and censoring mother – ‘what are the words I’m forbidden to say?’ – over ‘WOO WOO’ loops and cartoonish sax samples.
Dom McLennon
Potentially the best single from all three albums, “GOLD”’s first verse navigates a lazily soothed delivery that allows McLennon to drift around to bars like ‘I got bipolar confidence; wake up like “shit” then I feel like the shit; So I guess I’m the shit.’
Kiko Merley
Saturation II’s “SWEET” has this snake charmer calling, pointed synth bass, and falling-down-a-staircase drum-cuts beat courtesy of Merley.
Romil Hemnani
Hemnani’s production finds a distinctly psychedelic inflection on “BLEACH.” It’s gentle trap beats and bursts of disk jockey record scrambles make up one of the group’s most emotive cuts.
Russell “Joba” Boring
“GUMMY” opens Saturation II with Joba’s best offering as producer. The fairy-tale orchestral build up is cut off abruptly to make way for stylophone passages, droning woodwind, and malfunctioning, clucking electronics.
Jon Nunes
Well, what’s a boy band without its manager?
William “Merlyn” Wood Jr.
‘Now I’m sad, everybody wanna suck my willy’ to ‘She’s twerkin’ just like she Hannah Montana; head was clean, Tony Fantano.’ Yeah, that sounds like Merlyn.
Ciaran “Bearface” McDonald
Personally, my favourite Bearface contribution over Saturation comes in the first half of the trilogy’s final track “Team.” In its ability to loop around to the start of the year and in such a way call back to pre-famous times, its imploring to ‘Evanie’ harnesses one of the most unshielded vocal performances over the three albums, excellently representing the softest, most gorgeous extents of BROCKHAMPTON’s music.
Robert “Roberto” Ontenient
From ‘me llamo Roberto’ all the way through to the last call devout prayer of “CINEMA 3,” we all come to love an appearance of Ontenient.
Matt Champion
The bloodthirsty introduction to Saturation – “HEAT” – showcases a number of members of the ground, but Champion’s sly confidence in delivery helps him standout on the track. His sinner-saint self-conception grins through any issues you might have to take with him.
Jabari Manwa
Slightly later on Saturation I, “STAR”’s new celebrity culture is detailed over a creatively brass-centric beat provided by Manwa.
Ashlan Grey
Think of each album cover, the band’s website, and each saturated and colour graded music video, then thank videographer Ashlan Grey.
Ameer Vann
Probably when he left.
Thirteen guys. Three albums. Holy shit.
84. Capacity – Big Thief (2017, Saddle Creek; folk rock, indie rock)
Adrienne Lenker is potentially the greatest songwriter to come out of the 2010s.
Her band Big Thief’s sophomore album Capacity captures the substance behind such
a claim quite nicely.
Each of its eleven songs matures an elegant and visceral folk poetry. “Mythological
Beauty” draws on whatever we refer to by ‘human spirit.’ That tackling relentless struggle makes you glow. That we are born from and return to the earth as strange creatures with vivid lives trying our best. Furthermore, from the lyrical power of the title track against its assorted instrumental (Think “Do what you want with me; Lost in your capacity; Learning capacity; For make-believing everything is really hanging on”) to “Watering”’s comparative accessing of a deeply disturbing, methodical account of intrusiveness and compulsion, the re-surfacing contrasts between purity and animalism augment excellently over the project.
But Big Thief are still much more than just Lenker’s writing. The combination of Buck
Meek, Max Oleartchik, and James Krivchenia instrumentally is ever impressive over the project. Take the plummets of bass, snaps of drums, and almost aqueous clean guitar that help “Great White Shark” to swim. Similarly, cutting away from otherwise calm indie folk, the vigorous guitar and rush of drums that opens “Shark Smile” The production purposely alters over the project too. “Coma” feels homespun in how Lenker’s vocals are mixed into the dreamily distant guitar. The group introduce a transcendent ambient structure through “Mary,” widening further how adaptive Big Thief are to bring these words to life in the sonic world that they conjure in us.
Big Thief’s second album acts as an excellent indicator for the consistency of humane
and emotive folk music that the group are most capable of fortifying.
83. Flying Microtonal Banana – King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard (2017, Flightless; psychedelic rock, microtonal)
Finally, it’s time for me to write about King Gizzard. And from the fifteen (!) releases the
band oversaw over the range of this list, their vast and accomplished exploration into microtonal tuning on Flying Microtonal Banana is the most essential opening into the ardently deranged world of the Gizzverse.
The motivations for the project are best spelled out by using the vinyl’s synopsis of
the album:
“Nothing is sacred in our western music. Over hundreds of years our music de-evolved
to feature less emphasis on rhythm and more attention to harmonic imperfection.
Our ancestors endeavoured to create a system based on perfect 5ths yet we ended up
with a series of severely out of tune 3rds and wonky harmonies. Bach composed in something closer to just intonation.
Modern pianos are tuned sharp at the top and flat at the bottom. Violinists instinctively
bow perfect harmonies in orchestral arrangements.
Barbershop quartets instinctively sing perfect harmonic 3rds and 7ths. They are right.
We are wrong. Trust your instincts.
We continually dumbed down the rhythmic complexity in favour of harmonic
entanglement. Harmonies that are out of tune. Nothing is sacred! And neither is this album. 24-tet everybody. Wronger than wrong.”
King Gizzard – with this harmonic fixation – take the listener on a mesmeric microtonal
magic carpet journey through dark landscapes and depraved character stories that they are graphically able to delineate.
Mackenzie’s custom-made ‘microtonal banana’ guitar is put into practice soporifically as
a lullaby on “Sleep Drifter,” a crumbing, heavy guide through “Doom City,” and enchanting summoner of the “Rattlesnake” over the simple harmonics of recurrent bassline and distinguished, repeating lyrics.
The dual drumming of Michael Cavanaugh and Eric Moore punctuate the
cumbersome cruise through “Open Water” and cymbal-clatter that bleakly focus the “Melting” down of the world. “Anoxia” is the Joey Walker cut of the album, and he puts the banana into its most extensive use of the project.
“Billabong Valley” and “Nuclear Fusion” rest as the two most creative explorations of
Banana. The first, headed by Ambrose Kenny-Smith, depicts a Western-type outlaw named Mad Dog Morgan who is hunted over gradual and smooth microtonal guitar, saloon piano, and the law force buzz of zurna – which frenzies to an even greater extent on the closing title track. The second – “Nuclear Fusion” – progresses from the noooooooooclllleeeeeeaarrrrr foooooooouuuuuusssssiiiiooonnnn that precedes some slick bass, tensile guitar, vibrant keys, and slapping drum design to an extraordinarily manifold instrumental concoction.
There are nine stark and elementary explorations into the reaches of the band’s
illustrative and sonic range, and no matter how prolific they continue to be, FMB will forever be one of their most unique and characteristic instalments.
82. Get to Heaven – Everything Everything (2015, RCA Victor; art pop, indietronica)
Very few projects provide as summery and playful a listen, while staying so innovative
and exciting in the pop sphere, as Everything Everything’s Get to Heaven.
The album is peppered with memorable and immensely idiosyncratic pop cuts: think of
“To The Blade”’s famous bursts of ‘where you’re TRAAAPED; in the moment you met;’ or how Higgs harmonises with himself over these funny quips of worrying where you parked your car when you finally get to heaven on the title track.
The range of the group’s progressive pop seems unbounded when you properly dive
in. There’s the more soulful “Regret,” building rhythmic backing calls of the title alongside a neat tambourine-drum combination. The sudden passing of time is anxiously reflected upon on “Spring/Sun/Winter/Dread.” A track that culminates in an exercising of guitar, off-beat funny lyrics, and melodic drums. Furthermore, starting with warm drums, fidgety synths, and mad backing vocals, “The Wheel” soon soothes into the ‘Is it in the way he calls your name?’ chorus before dropping all of its complex instrumental layering for the sole voice of drum machine hits and a hollowed, more shaken backing. The song really highlights the diversity of ideas and the crisp consistency of production that makes the album so enjoyably special.
Higgs constantly demonstrates his strengths as frontman. His remarkable falsetto
vocal abilities are most prominent on “Fortune 500.” From the siren-like arcade beat, his sociopolitical conscious paranoia is mused on through impeccable pitching. Some authority is telling you ‘I’ve won, I’ve won, they’ve told me that I’ve won,’ but with no prize in hand. But then on “Blast Doors,” the speed of guitar enables the frontman to start almost rapping as the bass slides around. The jitters of guitar make Higgs progressively more apprehensive about his surroundings throughout.
Some of the experimental motifs that recur throughout under Everything
Everything’s manufacture are encased in the manipulation of vocal effects on “Zero Pharoah”. Thereafter, “No Reptiles”’s ambient build up, bounces of synth percussion, and intrusively deep piano all lead to a heaven-bound ascendance of strings and electronics.
With “Warm Healer” – a fucking unbelievable closer – it’s good to acknowledge how big
a part of this project is down to the fluid, demanding, yet unworried basslines of the album. On top of this, the stunning vocal performance, heartful lyrics, and pinnacle of production all round off the album excellently.
Get to Heaven feels something like never wanting to die on a perfect summer day
surrounded by your best friends. And, in these fleeting moments, resting on the knife-edge of being crushed by the worries of morality and personal politics and being the most powerful person on the planet.
81. AIA: Alien Observer – Grouper (2011, Yellow Electric; ambient, drone)
In 2011, Liz Harris released her most cutting, secluded, and exquisite project under the
name of Grouper.
The title track “Alien Observer” uses light guitar effects that resonate limitlessly.
Harris’s vocals are, in this dark infinite space, painfully beautiful. Although this album rests in no way on lyrical substance, the ideas of revisiting the stars in your tiny space ship as an alien observer from your present position becomes markedly, sadly profound.
The next track is left behind with the “Vapor Trails” from Harris’s ship. It’s all about the
nearly tangible space this album auditorily doesn’t explore. Everything feels so distant, so helplessly and scarily far away. And when the mixing brings an electronic thread of cosmic sound closer, it’s as if approaching a planet. Being put in the place of a cloud as you fly past one.
With “She Loves Me That Way,” it becomes difficult to even discern the instruments
now producing the spacious, lonely dream. Be it strings or guitar, the song is recorded at the other end of the galaxy. As if Harris’s small ship is having interference with Earth and is losing its connection. The blackness outside of the ship’s window is still, however, pierced by the both pretty and harsh chimes of “Mary, On the Wall” as dazzling and scary twinkles of stars. Minute points of inspiration that soon break for Harris to resubmerge in a poignant sadness for the arrival of “Come Softly.”
The underbelly of fragile ambience is made light. Harris’s compact, brave spaceship is
lost in the distance and as it escapes view, it leaves behind emotion-like fragments without sound.
80. Your Queen is a Reptile – Sons of Kemet (2018, Impulse!; afro-jazz, jazz-funk)
Your Queen is a historical pursuit that reaches wider in attitude than the bounds of a
typical jazz record.
My Queen is…
…Ada Eastman, the great-grandmother of Sons of Kemet’s saxophonist Shabaka
Hutchings. Over the heartbeats of brass and saxophone and woody percussion, Joshua Idehen soon delivers the most explicit marriage of tradition and nuance: from IKEA furniture to ‘fuck the Tories’ pertinence, from Queen Kasoon to Big Ben. There is the inescapable reminder for the former British Empire that ‘I’m still here.’ That colonialism’s horrid shadow has not allowed for the celebration of real, bestowed-by-God royalty. And instigating this with Hutchings’s great-grandmother gets the ball rolling excellently.
…Mamie Phipps Clark, PhD who focussed on the development of self-consciousness
in black children.
…Harriet Tubman, an abolitionist who, having escaped slavery herself, made thirteen
rescue missions for a total of seventy slaves.
…Anna Julia Cooper, black liberation activist. Here, there is a more thoughtful sax
exposition which, partnered with more subtle percussion, achieves a mindful edge.
…Angela Davis, marxist and feminist activist. The bustle and struggle of this track is
vivid. Compositionally, the shift from traditional music to modern frames becomes more noticeable.
…Nanny of the Maroons, leader of the Windward Maroons, who fought a guerrilla
war against British authorities in Jamaica. This Queen is developed more calmly. In stealthy notes of bass, patters of drum, and hushed saxophone, it’s as if you’re crouched with Nanny in waiting. Intelligent and prognostic.
…Yaa Asantewaa, Queen Mother of Ejisu in the Ashanti Empire.
…Albertina Sisulu, South-African anti-apartheid activist.
…Doreen Lawrence, OBE and member of the House of Lords. Who raids a shop
and leaves the loot behind?
The women and heritage that this jazz odyssey simultaneously celebrate – and in
what fucking fashion they’re able to do it in – make it a no-brainer appearance on this list.
79. Process – Sampha (2017, Young Turks; alternative R&B, neo-soul)
While Sampha’s highly-anticipated Mercury Prize-winning debut has no central
conceptual basis, it showcases some of the best soul and R&B genre exploration of the decade.
It opens with a detailing of the anxiety and suspicion that is rife in modern UK
communities. A palpable panic becomes very literal and emotional as Sampha can’t see the faces of passing hoodies who he is sure can smell the “Blood on Me.” The artist’s vocals are impeccable and able to be layered with range. It’s no surprise how important Sampha had been to the R&B musical community prior to releasing an album of his own.
But then there is certainly respite from these early tracks’ worry. “(No One Knows Me)
Like the Piano” is an ode to individual music. A piano you’ve had a relationship with since you were three years old becomes a family member. And its dedication to human-instrument endeavour is easy and fascinating.
Or in addition to this, there are standout songs that hold no exterior anchor. “Reverse
Faults” has glistening production and a unique lyrical content that truly justifies the unmistakable stamp Sampha places on the music he makes and appears on. “Timmy’s Fault,” co-written by Kanye West, aches as love lost reflection. To the tune of drawn back bass and hints of keys maybe forgotten about.
No one quite impacts on a track like Sampha does, and finally having an entire album
on which this happens is a gift not to be taken lightly.
78. Itekoma Hits – Otoboke Beaver (2019, Damnably; hardcore punk, riot grrrl)
Although Otoboke Beaver’s debut is a short, breathless take on progressively more
intense hardcore punk conventions, the group set out to dismantle systemic sexist oppressions from Japanese and global contexts. With no such thing as hesitation.
This is guitar-wielding, vocal ferocity, non-stop bass, and some of the best drumming in
world hardcore. This is tackling issues through “Binge Drinking Binge Eating Bulimia”’s instrumental cacophony and fuck you screams of ‘you are not mine!’ This is a mixture of traditional guitar construal and a brand-new outlook on inter-cultural punk song-building. This is an album that speaks for itself.
While many other hardcore groups have maintained this short-track burst of punk
approach, many over the decade ended up feeling contrived and cringe. Otoboke Beaver breath life into a male-dominated genre in a male-dominated context, to voice: fuck this domination, we’re doing our thing in a way that can quite literally take punk by the shoulders and shake until something clicks and changes.
They’re quite successful in getting this across by using the medium they have chosen.
77. Los Ángeles – Rosalía (2017, Universal Spain; flamenco nuevo, contemporary folk)
Every artist who is destined to take the world by force has to start somewhere.
Rosalía’s debut Los Angeles does this through a series of flamenco cantes in which
death is centripetal.
Her voice and vocal performances are astoundingly touching.
The contrast they get from backing acoustic – the darker drive of “De Plata” to the
lighter, graceful usage on “Nos Quedamos Solitos” – or strings lends itself to an even more spellbinding level.
Leaving her native tongue on “I See a Darkness,” the album ends in a westernised
death-ballad. The flamenco doesn’t change instrumentally, but her translation of dark beauty is immensely powerful.
The piece accesses a darkness that is rarely approached with such earnestness in the
pop sphere.
It’s a listen I, and hopefully you also, feel very grateful for.
76. Crumbling – Mid Air Thief (2018, self-released; psychedelic-pop, folktronica)
There was no lovlier, more transfixingly dream-like pop trip to be had from the 2010s
than Mid-Air Thief’s 무너지기 (Crumbling).
With the vocal aid of singer-songwriter Summer Soul, Crumbling went from being a
small South Korean indie project to becoming one of the most fabled works of psychedelic-pop/-folk from across the world. Attempting to distinguish and pull apart its tracks wouldn’t seem right: from the free-falling “Why?” to the nearly ten-minute long constantly-generative folkscape of “Crumbling Together,” the album is constructed holistically in a creative dream space of its own.
What Mid-Air Thief build is an experience best had for yourself with as little blabbering
on my part. For many over the decade, Crumbling became an unlikely found and world-shakingly surprising listen.
75. Feelin Kinda Free – The Drones (2016, Tropical Fuck Storm Records; art punk, experimental rock)
It’s no small fact that I think The Drones are the best Australian band of all time.
And it’s also no small fact that before their potentially never-reforming hiatus, they went
out with one of the biggest, most you’ll-never-take-me-alive swan songs in music history.
Feelin Kinda Free is the end-of-times judgement day for an entire nation of music.
Frontman Gareth Liddiard is on the edge of the political sphere, on the edge of morality,
on the edge of the world. Think of the hairline trigger guitar string heartrate monitor plucks of “Taman Shud” – a track based on the ‘Somerton Man,’ a still unidentified body that washed up on the beaches of Adelaide with only the persian note taman shud (“is over”) found on his person (which is the cover art of the album). Think of the inept Aussie cop single cover art. Or, more appropriately, the opening “Private Execution” that dispatches the Drones into the forgotten skip-heap of punk no longer appropriate for window display. The noisey guitar, the deadly-expressive lyrics, and foreboding synthesizers. Better to take your downfall with a pinch of salt and ‘fuck this’ attitude.
Liddiard is even more potent on “Boredom.” The high-note guitar and drum-switches
provides a base for the frontman to start (almost) rapping over. Comparing the album’s trajectory to any previous Drones release is becoming more and more surreal: ‘That thing with ‘W’, don’t let it trouble you; It’s all a distant hen’s night anyway; I hear ‘em screaming for a Chippendale; That looks like Eminem, it must be 2:00am; And it’s like nothing here is even real…’.
The group’s kick-ass bassist Fi Kitschin has her staple vocal track in the form
of “Sometimes.” An unsettling, hypnotising combination of fronted drums and spacey, droney synths. This unnerving pushing against the mainstream tide is also present on “To Think That I Once Loved You” in its similarly spaceous backing and lack of noise – so unlike what the Drones have been comfortable with doing in the past. It’s an anti-love song because if the Drones are going out of business, they’re taking anything remotely like a love song down with them.
This album is superb and most certainly worth your time. As are the band that brought
it to us. Just don’t let it slide that far into any kind of forgotten obscurity, please.
74. Virgins – Tim Hecker (2013, Kranky; dark ambient, electroacoustic)
Virgins is Tim Hecker’s masterpiece.
From its opening sounds of a maelstrom of light – “Prism” – that are allowed to spin and
cut in and out of the listener’s reference as a result of the mixing through the “Virginal I”’s piano notes – each one dropping by themselves, as if each has been recorded separately and not by a person playing collectively at the piano – the album takes on a powerful experiential ambience stimulated by pools of drone and crystalised instrumental soundscapes.
Soon, distortions start to tear through the prism’s apertures. “Live Room” makes its
impact in cold, jagged piano. Tearing sounds, scraping sounds, both accompany as Hecker diagetically morphs simple notes into a film-projector reel of grainy-detail and oddly present emotional register. Gatherings of noise and deft production help to reinforce this.
As “Live Room Out” retreats through the soundscapes with a strongly tragic
movement, “Virginal II” relapses some of the album’s motifs and darkens its scope even further.
Later on in the project, “Amps” attempts to create a softer atmosphere and “Stigma I”
and “II” amalgamate busy walls of ambience, momentary loops at inconsistent intervals, and a static interference that become a fusion of failed connections.
“Stab Variations” closes Virgins as viciously as it opened. Harder, more direct
electronics persist as the lighter woodwind passages become farther and farther away. In its dancing, in its control of the sheets of light that have glimmered previously, the sonic conflict and violence comes to an eerily still rest.
Its resilience is marble and a triumph is made tangible.
But when the music of Virgins stops its spinning, the quiet left in its wake is immeasurable.
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