I suspect that like most people who read the site you appreciate a balanced diet. Our job at this digital websheet isn’t to treat you, our readers, like foie gras geese, shoving one type of music down your gullets. Instead, we’re here to act as a conduit for artists who, in this grim year of 2017, have been pushing boundaries, opening hearts, expanding minds. The past 12 months have been the most exciting we’ve known since we came up with the idea for the site in that other world, musically and politically, that was the winter of 2007. And yes, we do say that every year but it doesn’t mean it isn’t true.
For first time since we’ve been going it’s started to feel like the underground is increasingly managing to consolidate, organise, and start kicking hard against the mediocrity and bad vibes of our strange times. We’ve started calling this amorphous movement New Weird Britain, and you’ll have read about its sounds in Noel Gardner’s Foul House column on these pages and John’s recent Vice article. The rise of New Weird Britain is due in part to the decline of London as a powerhouse of underground culture, as rents rise and even sex clubs are being driven out by a gentrified, commodified appropriation of the leftfield. As I wrote in this Guardian article, this is helping scenes around the UK, such as the Trans-Pennine Underground, thrive.
What is New Weird Britain, you may well ask. The joy of it, in our eyes, is that it’s a loose term, a celebratory one, and one that travels. In our chart it might represent the sometimes queer and sticky seediness of Lone Taxidermist’s trifle, Moonlandingz’ gloryhole in a northern suburban park, or Total Leatherette’s latexed fingers in your body. It might also be Richard Skelton’s Inward Circles, Snapped Ankles, Richard Dawson, Teleplasmiste, Kemper Norton and Laura Cannell redefining our landscape away from a place of whimsical retreat to something far more foreboding, yet also a place of resistance. Of course, speaking of the land – we’re not Brexit round these parts and see New Weird Britain as merely one outpost of a global explosion of vital musical art. You’ll be able to see that there’s plenty of New Weird Poland and New Weird Iran, for instance, in our chart below.
Of course, this torrent of great music isn’t going to continue flowing unless you invest in it. That’s why we hook up with Norman Records to give you an easy and reasonably priced way of buying records on this list, and include Bandcamp links wherever possible, rather than Spotify or YouTube embeds. SUPPORT THE ARTISTS YOU LOVE. Remember too that this goes beyond paying for records – it’s been a tragedy to see that the Fat Out and Supernormal festivals, core incubators for New Weird Britain, are having to take a rest, just as we were gutted by the cancellation of the Safe As Milk festival earlier this year. Seriously, if you want the future to be more than just smooth jamz indie bros dressed like toddlers, you need to put your hands in your pockets to make it happen.
Which, finally, brings me to the most pleasurable part of this tenth Quietus albums of the year list – the massive THANK YOU. Although this has been a hugely positive year for our ears, The Quietus’ ability to survive has been seriously undermined by the horrendous state of online advertising. With Google and Facebook floating through cyberspace hoovering all ad spend like some bastard child of Blackbeard the pirate and the Borg, it’s become impossible for sites like ours to survive on ad revenue alone. When we launched three appeals for funds via our donation page this year we were overwhelmed by the response from people out there who give enough of a shit about the service we provide to give us money to help us survive. We’re working on new revenue streams – such as the new collaboration with the lovely people of Lush on the returning DAY OF RADIO and At Leisure film series, but we still need your help to survive. If you can afford to donate, our bosoms will always be warm to you – HERE is the best place to do it. If you find an album that you really love from this end of year list, please consider slinging us the cost of a pint, a glass of wine or a very fancy coffee as a way of saying thanks and helping us continue so we can do the same next year.
We hope you enjoy the music in the list below as much as we have over the past 12 months. We all need something to keep our souls free of despair in this bonkers and brutal age, and this music, we know, can be both medicine and weapon against the grim and banal. Thank you for reading The Quietus – here’s looking forward to a shitload more music from New Weird Britain and beyond in 2018, our tenth birthday year.
TetragrammacidePrimal Incinerators Of Moral MatrixIron Bonehead
Primal Incinerators of Moral Matrix, the debut album proper by Indian black metal band Tetragrammacide, is no Typhonian Wormholes (their 2015 EP, which was the sonic equivalent of watching everyone you have ever met melting like the Nazis at the end of Raiders Of The Lost Ark) – but then, what is? This is still a sickening edifice of existential trauma, a sonic artefact of a world balanced on the lip of catastrophic vacuum decay… but with slightly higher production values.
The Bug vs EarthConcrete DesertNinja Tune
The record is in Martin’s mind a companion piece of sorts to his 2008 album London Zoo (tQ’s number one favourite album of that year), in that it somehow captures the vast, intimidating expanse of the city, distilling its unique atmospherics into sonic form.
AkatomboShort Fusealt.vinyl
This latest album may well be his best to date. It’s a work of multiple, oblique atmospheres, visual in its muffled evocations – Kirk is also a filmmaker – its layers of samples and field recordings undergirded by grinding, pneumatic beats and broadsides of carefully calibrated noise.
Cardi BGangsta Bitch Music, Vol. 2
Bronx-born rapper Cardi B is a former stripper and former reality TV star – she was on VH1’s series, Love & Hip Hop: New York (other cast members have included Remy Ma and Felicia Pearson) – and she’s been making waves the past couple of years with a string of mixtapes, notably with her track ‘Lick’ featuring Offset. Hip hop is, of course, very much a male-dominated genre, and trap especially so – which is why it’s especially fantastic that Cardi B identifies as a feminist, and her output hasn’t been sugar-coated with cloying, poppy marketing. Tara Joshi
Simon Fisher TurnerGiraffeEditions Mego
Simon Fisher Turner’s sense of fun is evident from the off in Giraffe, a collection of sounds and music from all sorts of people and places encountered on his travels – from an old cinema in Porto to a park in Andalucia and a theatre in Tokyo. There are fragments here too from the Elysian Quartet’s strings as recorded for Isaac Julien’s poignant cinematic tribute to the great Derek Jarman, as well as Mumbai night dogs and Turner’s own family. It’s all eloquently coordinated into a collage that’s amusing and beguiling. As ever with Turner’s work there’s a sense of an outsider to the sound art canon throwing himself in with a boyish enthusiasm and gusto – when he sticks his neck out, it’s impossible not to be charmed.
Rose Elinor DougallStellular
A forward-thinking and often thrilling ride of angular beats, imaginative production and sparkling songs, Stellular is one of 2017’s early essential purchases.
ActressAZDNinja Tune
Some of the album’s finest moments come in Cunningham’s embrace of orchestral suites, coming off the back of his collaboration with the London Contemporary Orchestra last year. Aside from the strings that guide ‘UNTITLED 7’ just a minute into the album, ‘Faure In Chrome’ reimagines Gabriel Fauré’s ‘Requiem’ across six gorgeous minutes. Parts of the composer’s arrangements are heavily processed, underpinned by harsh glitches that come off like an AOL dial-up internet connection circa 2000. It still bears hangovers of the producer’s past work, not least in the digital interference that runs throughout, but the elements are far less cloaked than before, the serene strings emerging above all else.
MogwaiEvery Country’s SunRock Action
Unlike so many bands that have spent years – or, in this case, decades – in each other’s company, Mogwai actually sound reinvigorated here, pushing at sonic barriers not so much by force as by subtlety and restraint. Which isn’t to suggest the slipping on of comfortable footwear and the lighting of a pipe by a roaring fireplace, but a desire to keep exploring new sounds and possibilities.
VivienneSTUD
Beautiful new music on Lara Rix-Martin’s Objects Limited label: “Emotional longing and apathy and hatred disgustingly writhing alongside a sexuality that relies entirely on traumatic experience and feeds on dangerous situations and bodily functions.”
Hannah PeelMary Casio: Journey To Cassiopeia
This new album further builds on the complexity of our imagination. It is an instrumental record, and a concept album of sorts. Hannah informs me that Mary Casio is an 86-year old inventor, who lives in Barnsley and dreams of space travel. As ever, Peel has researched thoroughly, talking to neuroscientists and cosmologists about the parallels between space and the human mind. She’s even uncovered a 90-year-old recording of her chorister grandfather, which appears on the album’s sweeping final track. This poignant narrative is played out by Peel’s twinkling synths and the glorious, portentous brass band. Mary Casio: Journey To Cassiopeia sounds like lift-off to a new sonic solar system.
King Gizzard The Lizard WizardMurder Of The UniverseFlightless
Picture yourself on a boat on a river. It’s leaking. The spectre of Jethro Tull’s Ian Anderson has just fed you some DMT. He then puts Van Der Graaf Generator on one beaten-up tape-deck, and a heady hardcore punk classic on another. The sky turns purple and begins to slowly glide towards you. You have entered the realm of King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard’s new record. You decide to ignore the leak.
MhysafantasiiHalcyon Veil
A number of the tracks eschew any kind of specific beat structures, with MHYSA’s voice instead left to carry proceedings through ‘Glory Be Black’ and ‘Siren Song’ with nothing but some cleverly employed reverb for company. It’s equal parts haunting and gorgeous. Elsewhere, fantasii goes into banger mode on ‘Strobe’, a short, sharp shock of energy built around trap claps and MHYSA’s sing-rap delivery, while ‘BB’ is a luxurious R&B ballad that maintains the oddball edge at its centre that is so crucial to fantasii’s success as a record.
Laurel HaloDustHyperdub
The funky-but-muted electric piano and mournful sax lines on ‘Who Won?’ (very 1975-era Miles Davis) serve to highlight that Dust is an electronic album only in the vaguest possible way. Halo’s use of beats is often polyrhythmic in an almost jazz sense, while at times, such as on ‘Koinos’, she deploys effects and minimal sound sources like a downtown NYC loft artist circa 1978.
WireSilver/LeadPinkflag
Whether you look to the opener’s underlying sea of searing guitar lines, the processed tonal swells of the stirring final track or the whale-song patterns of ‘Brio’, Newman and co continue to exhume new sonic ground in recognisable landscapes. In an industry all but dictated by kneejerk changeability, there’s something thoroughly comforting in just considering the existence of Wire, who – as they mark their 40th year – must now be recognised as one of the most consistent British bands of all time.
Mario BatkovicMario BatkovicInvada
Mario Batkovic is a Bosnia-born, Swiss virtuoso solo accordion player whose self-titled LP is a rich, opulent delight. Classically trained at the Hochschule für Musik und Theatre in Hannover, Batkovic finds an immense strength in nothing but his one instrument, plumbing stunning depths that are sometimes mournful, sometimes unsettling, and sometimes sublimely beautiful.
Daniel OSullivanVeldO Genesis
While Veld is at heart a pop album, it is also possessed of a cosmic awareness of how people relate to their environment and each other, whether among the thronging masses or deep in the heart of the woods. There’s magic(k) aplenty here, in references spoken and hinted at, in the dub trails and reverses, among the angelic choirs that slip between evidently human and the oddly Mellotronic, from Cocteau Twins to Fovea Hex and spaced-out parts in between, not least those that show a kindred ear for a hook and sit well with O’Sullivan’s membership of both This Is Not This Heat and Ulver.
Part ChimpIVRock Action
Their modus operandi is carved into granite and scraped into skin, so it should come as no surprise really that their fourth album doesn’t really vary the template. They have nothing to prove; from the onset the record is a guided tour into the myriad depths of aural destruction. The vocals are clearer here than previously thought possible, space inexplicably found for everything where before the caterwaul cast Cedar’s voice into subterranean depths. He has always resonated, an esophagus-stripping howl from the nadirs of gnashing-teeth nihilism, yet it always felt the severity of the death march drawl meant there was no place on this battleground for the organic, the living. The sonic brute force trauma hasn’t been downgraded, however – instead the mix has spread the blasted landscape wide open.
M.E.S.H.HesaitixPAN
There is a vastness and complexity to this sound environment, and a jarring effect from stapling together dissonant sounds. The Berlin-based electronic producer makes soundscapes fraught with tension and sharp edges, on top of which the beats turn relentless.
AquasergeLaisse ça êtreCrammed Discs
Opening track ‘Tour Du Monde’ is rhythmically buoyant, lit up by blasts of brass and Manon Glibert’s clarinet, and further enlivened by whoops and games of vocal tag, with individual syllables shared out between different singers (a device which recurs on the album). It’s the cue for an album that’s miraculously uncluttered and fleet of foot, but which still finds room for exquisitely melancholy progressions, sudden left-turns and pataphysical humour.
Bargou 8TargGlitterbeat
Bargou 08 frontman Nidhal Yahyaoui collected songs for the project from the area where he grew up in the northwest of Tunisia, near the Algerian border. The inspiration for the album followed a vision Yahyaoui had of Moog synthesizers being found in the valley of the Bargou mountain region and what music could have been created on their discovery as a result.
StillIPAN
‘Nazenèt (Wasp Riddim)’ dances around irregular time signatures like Mark Fell interpreting modern dancehall, while closer ‘Mangrovia’ finds its footing at a highly danceable 112 BPM tempo, retaining the hard-hitting drums that can be found across the record, as well as the heavily manipulated guest vocals that hint at the album’s grounding in exploring Italian-African colonial connections. It’s yet another reliable release from a label, PAN, that rarely if ever puts a foot out of step.
