the semi-obligatory album of the year type thing (2022 edition)

 

It’s been a few years since I did an ‘album of the year’ post here, because in general I have to write them for other places and get a bit bored with the process, but this year I thought I’d do something a little different.

But first: albums of the year 2022

My album of the year, by a big margin was Diamanda Galás’s extraordinary Broken Gargoyles. I’ve written about it at length here and here, and had the privilege of discussing it with Diamanda herself here, so won’t say too much about it, except for one observation. People usually use the phrase ‘life-affirming’ to describe records that are joyous, uplifting or leave you with feelings of positivity and contentment. All good things, but Broken Gargoyles is not that album. Instead, it’s life-affirming in the sense that it heightens the sense of being alive and even interrogates the idea of what it really means and how it feels, to be human. It’s thrilling and sometimes beautiful, but also harrowing; and how many musicians even attempt anything like that?

My other favourites this year included Shiki by the Japanese avant-garde black metal band Sigh. It follows in the eclectic footsteps of their past few albums but whereas they blended bits of black metal, prog rock, jazz and so on with sometimes great, sometimes patchy results, Shiki blends them in a far more cohesive and successful way where every song is everything and not this genre-with-a-bit-of-that.

I also loved Beth Orton’s Weather Alive, which I wrote about here, and a very late entry in the AOTY stakes (I literally heard it this week for the first time) is Hjartastjaki by Isafjørd. One genre I have very rarely liked or understood the appeal of is post-rock, but this – a collaboration between Addi of Sólstafir (who I do like – they played one of the best sets I’ve ever seen by anyone at Eistnaflug Festival in 2011) and Ragnar Zolberg – gripped me from the first listen and I currently can’t get enough of it. Even though it’s not at all like it in any way, something about it – maybe just the epically mournful atmosphere – reminds me of Disintegration by The Cure, which is never a bad thing.

So much for 2022. But how much importance should one place on the album of any given year? Albums, like movies, books or any other form of entertainment stay with you if they are any good, and your feelings about them change over time. And some of my favourite albums of all time were released before I was even born, so their context presumably doesn’t necessarily contribute to their impact, on a personal level at least. I’ve been writing for myself since I first started my old blog in 2012 so for a kind of half-assed ten-year anniversary I thought I’d revisit my older albums of the year and see which ones had staying power for me. I’ll limit it to a few from each year so it doesn’t get out of hand.

Strangely I didn’t do one for my own site in 2012 and I don’t have the list I did for Zero Tolerance magazine that year to hand so let’s go from 2013 to 2019, since 2020 is only two years ago and ‘the test of time’ hasn’t completely been passed or failed yet…

2013

My favourite album of that year was Ihsahn’s Das Seelenbrechen, and it’s still one of my favourite albums. I rarely listen to it all the way through at the moment, but various tracks, such as Pulse, Regen and NaCL are still in regular rotation

Others:
David Bowie – The Next Day: I loved this at the time and it felt like a return to form of some sort, but now, though there are some great tracks, it feels a middling Bowie record
Ancient VVisdom: Deathlike – good kind of pastoral black doom/blues (!?) album but haven’t listened to it probably for years at this point
October Falls – The Plague of a Coming Age – very nice, interchangeable with any other October Falls record. They are all nice, I don’t listen to them very often
Sangre de Muerdago – Deixademe Morrer No Bosque: I still play bits of this dark Galician folk album from time to time. It’s great but I’ve never got around to listening to any of their other stuff
Manierisme – フローリア I LOVED Manierisme, and the atmosphere and noise of it still really isn’t like much else. But it’s so harsh in its peculiar way that I rarely listen to it now
Beastmilk – Climax: worth mentioning this because Finnish post-punks Beastmilk (who changed their name to Grave Pleasures and lost their appeal for me pretty quickly) were a much-hyped band that year. It still sounds like a pretty good gothy post-punk type of record, but I had to check it out to remind myself of that

2014

My favourite album of 2014 was Mondegreen by the avant-garde string quartet Collectress and I still love it and listen to bits of it quite often
Most of 2014’s list are just names to me now, though I’m sure they are pretty good: I quite liked Scott Walker & Sun O)))’s Soused but have never revisited it. I thought Mirel Wagner’s When the Cellar Children See the Light of Day was great but don’t really remember it – must check it out again. Nebelung’s Palingenesis has some really nice songs on it that I listen to occasionally.

2015

My album of 2015 was Life is a Struggle, Give Up by Oblivionized. Putting it on again for the first time in ages, it’s still an invigorating, unique semi-grindcore album. Also kind of harsh and draining, so not a frequent listen, but an album worthy of rediscovery nonetheless.

Much easier to listen to but at the time outside of my top ten is the great Hustler’s Row by

surprise sleeper – Hustler’s Row by Gentlemens Pistols

Gentlemens Pistols. I would not have predicted that this would be one of the records that I’d keep returning to but it is: people who love 70s hard rock of the Deep Purple/Rainbow type who haven’t checked it out are missing a treat.

Otherwise, loved Jarboe and Helen Money’s self-titled album, but it’s not very strong in my memory now. The Zombi Anthology by Zombi still sounds great but I rarely listen to it. Ratatat’s Magnifique still gets an outing every now and then, but SUN by Secrets of the Moon and Syner by Grift, both of which I really loved and still think are great, seem kind of hard going to me now.
I went through a phase of really loving Venusian Death Cell (and still do, but don’t listen much) and Honey Girl, “released” that year may be my favourite of his albums. Tribulation’s Children of the Night is fun too, in a very different and probably more accessible way

2016

I wouldn’t necessarily say I was aware of it at the time, but 2016 was a great year for music. My album of the year was Wyatt at the Coyote Palace by Kristin Hersh (which I enthused about here) and it became, as I thought it might, one of those albums I can still listen to at any time, pretty much: it’s great.
Otherwise, Zeal & Ardor’s Devil is Fine still sounds great (and is still my favourite Z&A release). I liked Komada by Alcest but now think it’s pretty dull. I was excited by some EPs by Naia Izumi too, but haven’t really checked out their work since then. I am, outrageously, still the ONLY person I know who likes Extended Play by Debz, and it’s still a unique little record and I love it.
I still think Das Ram by Rachel Mason – my other contender for AOTY that year – is great, but as with a few other things, it slipped off of my listening list at some point and I had to remind myself of it

surprise sleeper – Kaada/Patton’s Bacteria Cult

Kaada/Patton’s Bacteria Cult (Ipecac Recordings) is the Hustler’s Row of 2016, only in the sense that it entered my forever playlist without me expecting it to. I’m not sure a week has gone by since then that I haven’t listened to a song or two from this masterpiece

Honorable mentions

David Bowie – Blackstar 
Leonard Cohen – You Want It Darker 
Iggy Pop – Post Pop Depression
Jozef van Wissem – When Shall This Bright Day Begin
Japanese Breakfast – Psychopomp
Schammasch – Triangle 
De La Soul – …and the Anonymous Nobody…
Kate Carr – I Had Myself a Nuclear Spring
Jeff Parker – The New Breed

2017

2017 had fewer standouts for me but my album of the year, the self-titled debut by Finnish alt-rock band Ghost World, which I wrote enthusiastically about here, still sounds fantastic. That said, though I was less enthused by the 2018 follow up, Spin at the time, that album is the one I listen to more now. But the best songs from Ghost World are still energised grunge-pop classics.

Otherwise, I liked Quinta – The Quick Of The Heart and a few of its songs are still played quite regularly.
I gave Invocation And Ritual Dance Of My Demon Twin by Julie’s Haircut a great review at the time but don’t remember it now, whereas I didn’t think Tarrantulla by Islaja would have much staying power, but bits of it still pop into my head and therefore onto my stereo every now and then.

2018

I was hugely surprised in 2018 to find that my album of the year was an electronic one, Swim, by Phantoms vs Fire, a cinematic masterpiece full of woozy retro-futuristic sounds and melancholy atmospheres. Even more unexpectedly, it’s gone on to be one of my favourite albums of all time and something that I regularly listen to. All of the other Phantoms vs Fire stuff is fine, but for me at least, this is the one.

I was much taken with As Árvores Estão Secas e Não Têm Folhas by the Portuguese dark folk band Urze de Lume at the time but though I could still happily listen to it, I haven’t for a while.
By contrast, songs from all of these have unexpectedly been in regular rotation over the past few years: Ghost World – Spin 
Just Like This – Faceless 
Orion’s Belte – Mint
Oh, and Burn My Letters by William Carlos Whitten has been revisited far more than I expected and I expect his “Poor Thing” will remain in rotation for the foreseeable future

2019

In 2019, I loved another Collectress album, Different Geographies but it didn’t replace or match Mondegreen in my affections. I can’t seem to find my album of the year strangely, but it might well have been Youth in Ribbons by Revenant Marquis, still my favourite of that prolific artist’s releases.
I also loved but rarely if ever listen to Cryfemal’s Eterna oscuridad, Emma Ruth Rundle & Thou’s May Our Chambers… and Ulver’s Flowers of Evil, but the sleeper of the year was Henrik Palm’s Poverty Metal which I liked fine, but didn’t expect to still be listening to as regularly as I am.

surprise sleeper – Henrik Palm’s Poverty Metal

On the whole it seems to have been a year of songs rather than albums for me – I like the title track of Viviankrist’s Morgenrøde probably as much as anything from that year and bits of Cellista’s Transfigurations still sound great. But lots of the most-praised stuff of the year, albums by Alcest, Cult of Luna and so forth just don’t register with me now: still, can’t like everything.

 

Inevitably, the releases of the year 2017 (part one)

 

I’ve been thinking about the releases of the year for the past few weeks and made some (naturally very similar) lists for various places, so I thought I’d begin my countdown of releases of the year (as usual, in no order) here with some worthy things that I somehow overlooked/forgot about when compiling my other lists. So just to start…

Quinta – The Quick Of The Heart (Peeler Records)

Quinta – The Quick of the Heart

Released back in July, The Quick Of The Heart is a beautiful and magical album that took a while to grow on me, but that has stayed with me through the many ups and downs of a year that was often not much fun. Quinta is a multi-instrumentalist and member of the experimental string quartet Collectress (whose superb 2014 album Mondegreen was my release of the year back then) and this album ranges from minimalistic piano pieces to lushly arranged songs, all with their own unique, delicate atmosphere. The album is more song-oriented than I expected, and the fresh, breezily unorthodox tunes are both accessible and unusual. The Quick Of The Heart is one of those albums that creates its own discrete sound world, quite unlike anything else I can think of; a lovely, refreshing record.

Recommended track: A Tutorial For Little Karen

Julie’s HaircutInvocation And Ritual Dance Of My Demon Twin (Rocket Recordings)

Julie’s Haircut – Invocation And Ritual Dance Of My Demon Twin

This great album was released back in February, far back enough, in fact that I thought it was out last year. While I like some psych/spacerock/krautrock type stuff, the problem with the genre (if you can call it that) for me is that it can be completely immersive and thrilling or, if not feeling it, extremely boring. Italian band Julie’s Haircut are not immune to the latter kind of non-hypnotic meandering, but when they are good they’re great and there is far more good stuff on this album than filler.

 

Recommended track: Zukunft

 

Jesca HoopMemories Are Now (Sub Pop)

Jesca Hoop – Memories Are Now

Again, released at the beginning of the year and so escaping my lists until now, Jesca Hoop’s latest album is a superbly focussed set of songs grounded in folk, Americana and experimental pop. Any way of describing it makes it sound more complicated than it is, and the most obvious points of comparison (she occasionally sounds a bit like Kate Bush) are a bit misleading; but it’s a really good album.

 

 

Recommended track – Unsaid

Zeal & Ardor The Devil Is Fine (self-release)

Zeal & Ardor – the Devil Is Fine

Z&A’s black metal-infused blues or whatever you want to call it is one of the strangest-sounding (as a description), but at the same time most accessible (as music) melanges of styles I’ve come across; unholy gospel music that gets better and stranger every time I hear it.

 

 

 

 

Recommended track: Blood In The River

IslajaTarrantulla (Svart Records)

Islaja – Tarrantulla

I didn’t really realise I liked this album a lot until songs from it kept popping into my head at random times after I’d given it a few listens. Over the last few weeks though, the slightly queasy mix of experimental synth pop, honking sax, Blade Runner-atmospherics and alternately fragile and vocoder-heavy vocals has proved extremely addictive; I like it a lot.

 

 

 

Recommended track: Sun luona taas

 

and more later…

Play For Today – Current Playlist 26th June 2017

 

As seems so often to be the case, I am  & have been working very slowly, with many distractions, on various relatively substantial bits of writing, but playlists are easy and fun to do, so here’s a sort of roundup of some of the stuff I’ve been listening to so far this summer, which, now that I look at it, makes summer 2017 seem a somewhat bleak and haunted time. Ho hum.

One of the key points of this playlist is that, in an effort to make myself listen to different things rather than the same old stuff, I filled my mp3 player with things I either didn’t know or hadn’t really listened to, with very mixed results. Inevitably, I ended up removing most of the stuff and replacing it with things I definitely like, but some of the things in this list are survivors from the experiment.

Pekko Käppi & K:H:H:L – Matilda (Svart Records)

pekko-käppi-matilda-cover

This is mostly a pretty cool dirty psychedelic rock album by Finland’s foremost player of the bowed lyre, Pekko Käppi and his band, but although I enjoyed it, it mostly washed over me until one track, Hullu Tyttö (‘crazy girl’, or so Google informs me) popped up in a shuffle at a low enough volume that I couldn’t tell that the vocals were in Finnish. A beautifully mournful and soothing bit of rained-on, hungover sounding Americana (I thought maybe something by The Band or, at a push a late Byrds track I didn’t remember had snuck onto my playlist. But it turned out to be Pekko Käppi & co, and in fact, out of the context of heavy psychedelic garage rock his lyre playing (sonically very much like a hardanger fiddle on this song) really shines. The whole album is good, but Hullu Tyttö is by far my favourite track on it.

Staying with Finland (and indeed Svart Records), I’ve been listening to this since the beginning of the year and as I’ve lived with it, it’s gone from being a good album with a couple of great songs to one of the best albums I’ve heard this year:

Ghost World – Ghost World (Svart Records)

Ghost World

Again, an album I like despite the fact that it’s not really my cup of tea. It’s not that I didn’t like grunge the first time around (I liked quite a lot of it early on, especially Babes in Toyland, Mudhoney and Screaming Trees, early Soundgarden  plus odd songs by Sebadoh, Afghan Whigs, Buffalo Tom etc), but there are few genres or fashions that I have gone off of so quickly and feel so little nostalgia for. But if there is a category that Ghost World fits into, it’s grunge. And it’s great, if noisy, catchy, adolescent-sounding angsty rock is your thing. It’s not my thing, but I love this anyway; it’s like Dinosaur Jr with a female singer (Liisa, vocals/guitar,) who is utterly fantastic.

Televisio – Televisio (Ektro Records, releases July 14th)

Televisio-_Televisio_3000px

Yet more Finnish music, Televisio’s slightly primitive and clunky electronica is made by the duo I. Larjosto (synths/drums) and Jussi Lehtisalo of Circle (synths) and, in the manner of primitive electronic music since the dawn of time, it has a strangely soulful quality.

https://soundcloud.com/ektrorecords/televisio-kakkonen

Thy Worshipper – Popiół (Introibo ad altare Dei) (reissue, Arachnophobia Records)

thy-worshiper-popiol-introibo-ad-altare-dei

From Finland to Poland, Thy Worshiper’s 1996 classic is pretty much everything that haters of mid-late 90s black metal hate; as melodic as it is heavy, replete with acoustic passages, symphonic bits, female vocals etc etc; and it’s great. They may not be as big as Behemoth, or as notorious as Graveland, but Thy Worshiper have great tunes, excellent musicianship and above all, intensely melancholy atmospheres that make this album a perfect showcase for the virtues of grandiose, late-blooming 90s black metal.

Blue Öyster Cult – Spectres (Columbia Records, 1977)

BlueOysterCultSpectres

I got the Blue Öyster Cult Complete Columbia Albums box set a few years ago without having to pay for it. At 16 discs, it’s a whole lotta BÖC and it’s fair to say I’ve never really gotten to know it all yet, to say the least. Having the albums on my mp3 player, naturally their songs started to pop up on shuffle all too often, but occasionally in a revelatory kind of way. I always quite liked the band and knew a handful of their songs quite well. But one day the song Fireworks – a supremely catchy and – as is their way – slightly creepy piece of shiny rock that should have been a single surprised me and I decided to check out its album, Spectres in detail. It turned out I already knew the intentionally moronic-but-fun anthem Godzilla, the even more moronic but less fun R.U. Ready 2 Rock and a couple of the other tracks. None were quite as good as Fireworks, but most had some of its baleful charm. Bearing in mind the disclaimer that I like 70s hard rock bands like Black Sabbath and Kiss, this is a brilliantly polished album that combines the intelligence, goofiness, mystery and riffs that gave the BÖC their own distinct aura and charm. It’s a good one.

Wreche – Wreche (Fragile Branch Records)

wreche - cover

One of the strangest, but strongest debut albums I’ve heard for a long time, US duo Wreche manage to take the guitars out of black metal (and replace them with a piano), without losing any of the essence of the form. An intense, evocative, disturbing and in its way, desolately beautiful album, perfectly realised.

And that may be enough for now.