SINNER GET READY by Lingua Ignota
To get something out of the way right now: this is album of the year. This is an extraordinary thing. And more than that. Given her interview with Fantano and the document she released about her past year, the things she’s suffered, the record becomes a testament to her extraordinary strength of character, her power.
To live in a world abandoned by God. To suffer without hope or promise. To believe and simultaneously know that there is nothing to believe in. Faith, in that way, is a movement not a proposition. It’s not quiet obedience or acquiescence but a constant, painful oscillation between despair and hope. And there will be no moment in which that comes to a rest. ‘All my pains are lifted’ she chants on the final track. ‘Paradise is mine’. What is faith in God more than a desire for everything to be alright in the end?
In the final track she samples a woman interviewed leaving a church, the perplexed interviewer castigating her for mingling with others. ‘Aren’t you concerned you could infect other people if you get sick inside?’ he says.
And she’s not. There is no world in which her Christ abandons her. We are too steeped in that blood now to turn back, have waded too deep. To have one’s horizon shaped like that. To be so sure of the way the world bends towards your feet. To know that upwards is filled with promise.
I read a review on Pitchfork which claimed the album was mocking that sort of faith, derisive of it. I don’t believe that. I sort of think the opposite of it. I think it’s a sort of awe; an awe at that total, blind commitment to a deity who so often seems to be oozing blood and violence and torment. That hopeless addiction. The record takes God seriously, takes faith seriously, takes religiosity seriously. There’s no mockery here. It’s too important for that, she thinks.
A Beginner’s Mind by Sufjan Stevens and Angelo de Augustine
Sufjan has been my top artist of the year for the past three years. I have been in his top 0.5% of listeners for the past three years. I’ve literally listened to Sufjan probably than I have almost all other people this year. Maybe, in a way, I am always listening to Sufjan. If I’m not listening to Sufjan maybe I’m thinking about listening to Sufjan. Comparing other people to Sufjan. Maybe I should write to Sufjan.
There’s a Sufjan for everything. There’s a Sufjan for the summer, when you’re moving house driving in a big van with your mate (Illinois!). There’s a Sufjan when it’s winter time and you feel like there’s not any point continuing (Carrie and Lowell baby!). There’s a Sufjan when you want to look cool in front of your new mates (Age of Adz is his best they say).
And now there’s a new Sufjan. It’s got all the Sufjan that you want without veering too deep into sadness or too high into joy. Back to Oz for dancing in the kitchen. Murder and Wine for crying in the bath. The whole album is easy-breezy Sufjan stuff. It’s a Sunday morning Sufjan. A Sufjan for when you’re making breakfast. Have a little dance around the table. Have a little despair with your eggs. That’s the Sufjan Sunday Morning Breakfast Routine. The Sufjan Sunday Morning Sufjan Routine. The Sufjan Sunday Morning Sufjan Sufjan. The Sufjan Sufjan Morning Sufjan Sufjan. The Sufjan Sufjan Sufjan Sufjan Sufjan. Sufjan Sufjan Sufjan Sufjan Sufjan Sufjan Suf-
Picnic by Picnic
There is something alive here. He captures that strange liminal moment before the beginning of a moment. The sense of waiting, grass underfoot and the smell of bark. God I could sink into the textures here. Those pulsing guitar plucks. The rustling, arachnid crawl on the surface. I wrote so much to this album, letting that brimming energy infect me where it could.
Luminol by Midwife
The tracks here have this uniquely soundtrack quality to them. You can almost see the faces – Olivia Coleman maybe, Idris Elba – harrowed at some painful murder, flinging a chair against a wall, desperately sprinting to reach the end of the film in one piece. That tonal constancy is effortless. I don’t have the word for it. The searing guitar chords. The compressed vocals. The way each track builds slowly with such weight; lithe, steady steps. The album cover says it all, in lots of ways. A faceless Laura Palmer staring back in strange, Lynchian mystery.
Conflict of Interest by Ghetts
Grime’s not dead. He opens himself up to us, carves out different faces, memories of himself, holding them all together in one electric canopy. On Fine Wine he travels back to the house he grew up in. On Hop Out he remembers pulling up next to school teachers in a convertible. The vibrancy of the storytelling here, the ability to flit from focussed storytelling to heady philosophising is on the same level as Kendrick. And the level of maturity: God this album is wise. The braggadocio tempered by self-awareness, cognisant always of the nights he spent writing with his daughter trying to sleep upstairs. He cracks open the ugly parts of himself, offers them out to us, lets his ex string out his problems with intimacy on Dead to Me. There’s so much to reward deep listening here. To have his timeline stretched out like this is such a brave thing.
Jubilee by Japanese Breakfast
The first album I listened to this year in which I didn’t want to skip a single track. The production is so crisp, so sunny, so open. And isn’t she so generous with her time? The thoughts she offers up, the little windows in are so carefully placed, so gently intimate. The way those peppy guitar lines celebrate her voice on Sly Tackle, the orchestration painting her feelings onto a canvas over vast expanse. She allows us such unadulterated joy. And then something crushingly sad on those lovely, thick chords on Posing for Cars. Closing out the album with all the heaviness of a car leaving one tired chapter behind, only half-sure the horizon they’re driving towards is better than the past.
Space 1.8 by Nala Sinephro
The attention to detail, held within this broad expanse. She works with these cosmic melodies, harp and keys rising over this swirling, effervescent ambience. The thing seeps into your bones, soothing blood and muscle. The drums on Space 3 by the way, the control of that bustle, the perky little drive in and out of that bubbly little synth line. God this thing is so warm, so spacious, so lovingly textured. Ambient jazz doing exactly what you want and more. Something to lie back and let in if you can. If you’ve got the time, that is.
LP! by JPEGMAFIA
There’s this wildness here; something febrile and violent veering from one direction to the next. That’s always been what made him so idiosyncratic as an artist. But on LP! there’s something else: an earnestness; a vulnerability. The spoken, ritualistic words over THOT PRAYER. The brash, impassioned bars on REBOUND. And that captured conversation on [. ], an overhead conversation, positioning us as eavesdroppers. That combination of power and tenderness made this a useful album for the moments I felt angry this year. The times I needed to exercise frustration then look for my own vulnerability underneath. There was a need for that this year, more so than usual, I think.
Never the Right Time by Andy Stott
Andy Stott is the one. I spent so much time digging through this man’s discography this year, like some grubby little fox in his backyard. The sounds he works with are so thick and so menacing and bouncy. It reeks of Manchester, of dark spaces, bodies close together, joy and violence intertwined. There’s a lighter touch on Never the Right Time, something gentler. And then in the middle comes that blast of warmth and light and energy. When It Hits is when I fell in love with the record. This searing, sincere blast which just grabs you in your heart and yanks the strings. And then straight into the rustling drums of The beginning, Alison Skidmore’s cough-drop vocals over the top. As if we’ve opened a new door and found ourselves somewhere else, blistering in the sun. What a time to be alive, he thinks.
Fiat Lux by Tarta Relena
This was a late entry. Like a really late entry. Like I listened to this album for the first time yesterday late entry. Those voices clambering over each other, escalating along these monastic harmonies. On Stabat Mater there’s this strange, alien sound that flutters behind them, as if blooming, as if avoiding notice. It’s part of a tapestry of sound here that’s actually a little un-nerving, the sense of something inhuman emerging. I just love how this thing makes me feel: off-kilter, unfocussed, out-of-joint.
Overflow by Rival Consoles
Overflow is in here on it’s own terms but it’s also in here because I loved last year’s Articulation so much and I didn’t write a list that year. There’s such an earnestness here, which when applied to those gruff, industrial textures creates this brooding, wonderful majesty. The thing feels electronic, mechanical but simultaneously alive, vibrant. It revels in emotion, throwing up waves of sound like sand-dunes. This is ambient techno which eschews that slight self-seriousness others hold onto in the genre, rejoicing instead in obtuse emotion.
Jade by Pan Daijing
This is a dark thing. I saved this one for the late nights alone at my desk trying to summon up something close to creativity. And in the end I mostly just frightened myself. These ghostly vocal lines that sound like a summoning. The sense of something terrible brought back to life. The sounds she’s working with, those clanging metallics and the throbbing, alien pulse. And then on Tilt that glitching, corrupted voice. I suppose if artificial intelligence were to take over it would speak in a language that we wouldn’t understand.
HEY WHAT by LOW
Did a full review of this elsewhere on the blog but fuck me isn’t it cool that LOW are like a billion years old and are still this exciting? I think it is. Very exciting indeed.
Blue Banisters by Lana Del Rey
So you thought the other record she released this year was better? Yeah nice one normie. I just can’t get over how extraordinary she is. Lyrics that carve out these hyper-specific moments of realism, set within these gross, gauche, lounging scenes of sepia nostalgia. That’s been the jig for her entire career and yet the thing still tracks. What made this the album for me rather than Chemtrails… were the bizarre, fascinating breaks from the standard routine. That vocal performance on Dealer, completely unlike anything she’s done before. Where will she go next? Probably more of the same, honestly. But god Lana could keep writing songs like Blue Banisters and Text Book and Arcadia and I would be happy to listen until I’m in the grave.
CONFUNDIDA by Tomu DJ
These winding little avenues of sound. When I want to think properly I lie on my bed and throw this green bouncy ball up and down in the air. Sometimes I catch it but sometimes it hits me on the face. Sometimes it falls behind my bed and I can’t get it out. There’s so much to find in the foliage here, bustling away. Sometime it winds its way through quiet, rustling synth lines and other times the thing blooms, unfurling in scatty, nervous break-beat. She dips her toes into the same woozy, stoner grooves you might find on an old Ratatat record but doesn’t go the whole way, carving out her own path instead by patch-working from electronic scene around her. It’s been a good album to think to or look for a little green ball under the bed to. When there was thinking worth doing anyway.
Mythopoetics by Half Waif
The tracks tiptoe around the edges of pop. She crafts these gorgeous, sticky hooks and vocal lines but eschews straight structure, building instead to her own idiosyncratic blueprint. Party’s Over is a masterclass in that – the way the production glistens, her voice weaving in and out. And there’s a folkloric forlornness here – something epic and intimate at the same time. Almost as if we’re supposed to be imagining her singing from some tall tall tower in the deep dark woods.
Me and Ennui are Friends, Baby by Sarah May Chadwick
I’ve listened to this album all the way through twice this year. It is an extremely hard album to listen to. Just her and a piano. Her voice has this creak to it, this pain that lingers at the corners, so you can see her head hanging over the keys. The detailing she finds in the lyrics are so sad, so heavy, so familiar. She trades in surface observation, resisting metaphor for stark expression. On Always Falling:
‘I’m a sucker for anyone who’s distant and aloof, most of all / I’m always falling into other people’s worlds / You never adore me, but I’ll chase it til I die, or you die, whatever comes first’
The way she adds codas onto each thought, confusing that boundary between singing and speaking. We feel as if confidants, but know as well that there’s nothing we can do, no hand that we can reach out. This is a dark thing, this record, but it feels necessary. Like someone working a knot out of their back. Pulling a tooth that’s gone bad. I still have the teeth that I’ve lost somewhere. Pulled out when I was a child. I don’t remember the pain, but I remember the gap they left behind, how the gum felt underneath my tongue.
Life, and Another by Mega Bog
I wrote a review for this and used the word ‘febrile’ there which I think is a brilliant word. I’m only loosely conscious of what it actually means.
Moot! by Moin
Also did a review of this one. Started writing it on holiday in Cornwall with my mates and then forgot about it. It was nice to be reminded that there’s value in writing something very few people will read. I’m living life in the slow lane at the moment and enjoying it.
Una Rosa by Xenia Rubinos
Xenia Rubinos was new to me this year. The moment Sacude hit that chorus, her voice powerful, swelling out of these thick electronic pulse, was the moment I knew Una Rosa was going on this list. These tracks have such electric charm, such a sense of superior wit. Just as you feel you’ve got her figured she pulls back, veers off, laughs that you thought it would be so easy. She pulls on Latin sounds, R&B, pop to forge this totally unique sound, one step ahead of us on each track, barely looking back.
Honest Labour by Space Afrika
I left Manchester at the end of last year. Call me nostalgic but there’s something about this record, about a lot of electronic music that comes out of Manchester actually that feels Mancunian. Something broody about it, something listened to whilst stomping down a dark road in the drizzling rain. It’s ambient at its best, hovering in this liminal space between atmosphere and construct. It’s a hazy meditation on love, on exposure, on intimacy. The words scattered across the thing, whether captured interviews or bars, veer from insecure questioning, unsure anxiety to certainty, direction, comfort. The sound-work they’re operating with is so unique, so textured. There are hints of Burial here, voices looming in the mist before being whittled away. There is so much doubt about the possibility of love, and yet so much to gain, to live towards. I left Manchester at the end of last year. Call me nostalgic but I miss the rain sometimes when it gets too sunny here.
Pluperfect Mind by Dear Laika
God, the opening to this album. The way it buries you. The whole thing, the whole weight of the record rushing over you in the first thirty seconds, like a good shower at the end of a bad day. She captures something ineffable about time, the sensation of it, something lived through and encountered both as memory and hope, as immediacy and eternity. And in doing all that she moulds a new sense of time, one uniquely queer. What I am. What I was. What I had been, always. At times the sound over-exposes itself, the strings brushing so hard up against the outer limits of the track that they’re crushed into static noise. As if they’re spilling over the bounds, rushing to discover limits and how to overflow them. There’s something of Arca here, of SOPHIE, transposed into the world of neo-classical sound. It’s that same restless disregard for boundaries, the music enervated by this drive to dig fingers into cracks and see how hard you have to push before they give.
Doran by Doran
There’s something ancient here. Which is not to say dead or forgotten but rather something sort of eternally human, perpetual. A constant undertaking, inseparable from our instincts. I got very interested in pre-historic times towards the end of this year. Reading about hunter-gatherer societies hacking out existence in the last thousand years of the Ice Age. In 20,000BC communities from Siberia migrated over land into modern-day Alaska. By 10,000BC they’d spread over the Americas, driving the mammoths to extinction. In 1483 Columbus landed. And so it goes.
Voices lifting up together, usually unaccompanied. Something simple, pure and unadorned. There are some anthropologists who think that singing might go back to the Neanderthals. The act of singing originating in ritual, in work, in contact with the land. I spent a lot of this year on my own, staring at a laptop screen. The thing that I call work involves me sitting on my own a lot, quite far away I would say from ‘land’ in the traditional sense. Nobody needed to write an Arts Council application in 10,000BC. Not that we know of any way. You never know I guess.
KicK iii and kiCK iiiii by Arca
The future is here. She releases four albums on one day, in one moment. KicK iii is a continuation of what we’ve seen before, maximising the surface area, colouring in as much and as violently as possible. The creativity on display here is so astonishing. The detailing to the production, the taps and whirrs that you find hidden on a third listen, hiding underneath that barrage of noise. The sound of a track like Morbo! That blustering, violent, destructive underneath these perfectly positioned cracks and squeals over the top. There just isn’t anyone else doing it. And then KicK iiiii as this beautiful thing, this soft thing, this gentle thing. I love the way Estrogen echoes that synth line from Mequetrefe from KiCK i. The sense in Arca’s discography that things exist in a coherent universe, that what we’re witnessing aren’t discrete tracks but signals from the same shared galaxy, communications from some holistic plane which speaks a language bizarre to us but transparent to them, ideal.
a softer focus by Claire Rousay
I have done so little this year, looking back. Sometimes that makes me sad. There are days my phone tells me I’ve been looking at its screen for eight hours, though I can’t tell if that’s because I have to keep a sitcom playing at night these days just so I can get to sleep.
A softer focus. A gentler touch. From the minutiae of daily life spring the deep highs and lows which we’ll look back on one day and call our lives and how we led them. The strings on the final track merge with the world outside, sonically refusing distance between the found-sound of a life lived and the musical accompaniment. The delicacy here is so brave, so utterly profound it leaves you reeling in its quietude.
I have done so little this year. And maybe that’s not worth writing about, after all.
vandal 