‘Best In Show!’ by Lisa Cradduck
You could be forgiven for thinking that this chart is pointless. I sympathise if you do and in fact, a few months ago, I came very close to pulling out of having anything to do with it. Why does a site that doesn’t believe in scoring music even have an Albums Of The Year Chart? The act of giving marks to an album is symptomatic of the pretence that there is an objective truth about music based on a chimerical idea about immutable good taste and never changing aesthetic principles, and the ranked album chart is merely an extreme extension of this.
This way of thinking serves to flatter us that we have a scientific understanding of music that runs much deeper than mere fashion. And when enough people form a consensus along these lines it also flatters us that anyone who doesn’t agree with us is wrong. And the more pseudo-scientific the method of scoring the easier it is to see how flawed this principle of belief is. The 100 point system, for example, is clearly unhinged. Without digging into what it is that separates a 7.2 rated album from a 7.3 rated album, one only has to look at how many of Pitchfork’s early reviews have now been surreptitiously rescored for reasons of fashion in order to see how base this system is. The supposed objectivity of the reviewer who always performatively puts their feelings to one side so they can selflessly tackle this week’s biggest releases courtesy of the biggest record labels who have the biggest budgets for promotion, is like the dazzling white smile of a tele-evangelist or the persuasive patter of a door to door salesman with a tray full of mop heads and dishcloths to unload.
But ranking albums is even worse in some respects and I’ve always suspected that people who have a pathological need to rank things are remarkably afraid of dying. The overwhelming and slightly demented need to impose order onto a world that is essentially chaotic and constantly shifting. “I will make sense of it all and define my place in it before I go!”
I was forced to question the way this site thinks about and approaches criticism this summer during an enforced break from listening to music. In August I went back to my childhood home in Merseyside because my Dad was dying. Before and during the event it wasn’t appropriate and afterwards I couldn’t face it. When I arrived home for the final time a hospital bed had been installed in my childhood bedroom where my Dad was determined to see his time out. But the bed had been assembled in a rush and something was preventing the raising mechanism from working, the frame emitted a juddering clanking instead of producing any movement when the handset button was deployed. Despite my Mum pleading with him at length, my Dad carried on angrily making a fuss until his tools were fetched from the shed. He knelt by the bed, attached to several drips and tubes, unscrewed a plate, rearranged the internal mechanism and closed it back up again. He got back into the now working bed and stayed there until he died five days later. My father lived a long life, even if it wasn’t, by any sane standards, a particularly happy or pleasant one but he approached the leaving of it like he tackled all of the big events of his days: with a grit-toothed determination to get it done in an orderly manner on his own terms, with as little help from other people as possible. It’s as much as many of us can hope for. But even so, it was a reality-altering experience for those left behind.
The enforced silence - the first I could remember in decades - lasted for a fortnight until the spell was broken by Perry Como’s ‘It’s Impossible’, played discreetly as we left the crematorium. I’d been ambivalent about this song as a kid but on that day it bore me aloft with its swell of strings and sense of almost cosmic loss. I realised viscerally that this music wasn’t cheap but extraordinarily potent and my feet barely touched the floor on the way out into the rain. Would all of the unopened new albums by Richard Dawson, Kim Gordon and JPEG Mafia sitting waiting for me at work touch me in the same way when I finally played them? No, of course not.
At first this presented me with what felt like an insurmountable problem. If my whole system of criticism embraced subjectivity and rejected objectivity, then what could one honestly say and do during a Summer when Perry Como packed a punch like Scott Walker fronting Joy Division and the new Richard Dawson album was too irritating for me to get through one song? I thought long and hard about packing it all in - for a couple of months at least, I was convinced that it was simply dishonest of me to carry on if I wasn’t feeling it any more - but then one afternoon, senselessly ploughing through a list of streams, waiting for something to click, I alighted on Ecstatic Computation by Caterina Barbieri and suddenly everything changed again.
If, like me, you can see the elegance of design in the sub-atomic order of things and truly awe-inspiring majesty at the astrophysical scale but struggle to understand why nearly everything between those two extremes happens quite as it does or why anything at all even exists in the first place, then perhaps you too use music as a proxy religion or spiritual analog. For me, after four decades, it’s now ingrained quite deeply and not that easy to slough off, even in the most stressful of periods, but like any religion, it does demand some faith in return. Music, should you allow it to, will eventually help ease your troubles; and that piece of music will probably be unconnected in any serious way to consensus ideas of worth, critical fashions masquerading as immutable taste, large numbers of units shifted and popularity among certain advertiser-attracting demographics.
If taking my first unplanned break from listening to music in the history of this site, taught me one thing, it was to chill out slightly and trust in music more. Having (thankfully) gone back to it recently, now that the harshest stages of grieving are over, I actually find myself in the first flushes of infatuation with 2020 by Richard Dawson. Do I think it’s an album for the ages? I don’t know - ask me again in several years if you like, as a few weeks isn’t long enough to judge and at this stage I don’t care if it is or not. That isn’t why I listen to music. All I can be sure of right now is that this album and most of the chart below create a vivid social and cultural snapshot of a year of great upheaval.
I’m thrilled Lorraine James’ For You And I is our number one album. I was one of several staffers who put it very high in their ballot and it’s the nearest we’ve come to an office consensus on an album in a long time but what I personally think is more important is the fact that when I listen to it I can sense a complex picture of the times we live in emerging rhizomatically from the multiple juxtapositions of this album with 2020, Eaton Alive, The Age Of Immunology, Héroïques Animaux De La Misère, Analog Fluids Of Sonic Black Holes, Psychopposition / The Limit Experience and so on. And then after such an intense audio investigation, I can seek restorative vibrations and healing tones in the shape of Life Metal, Ecstatic Computation, The Reeling, The Utopia Strong, I Was Real and even further afield.
So you could be forgiven for thinking that this chart is pointless but I’ll have to beg to differ - as I’ve had my faith restored. This album chart doesn’t reflect any particular fashion or philosophical approach to criticism; it doesn’t make any sense financially; it’s messy and contradictory; and doesn’t even really claim to faithfully show what music will weather the tests of time but it is honest, exciting and gives me hope for the future. And I feel emboldened enough to say that if you spend some time with it you will come away having discovered new music that you love.
It would be remiss of me, at this exact point, not to draw attention to the following non-sequitur. I’m about to ask you for a small amount of money. It has nothing to do with developments in my family story and is only tangentially related to the rest of what I’ve said up to this point. But without an injection of cash to pay for essential site upkeep, we are in immediate danger of closing, as we have been during the last four winters (and a few other grim periods here and there). The amount of money that you, our readers, donate toward the site has grown steadily during the time we opened the donate function and if it keeps on going in the same direction, we will be able to get by on donations alone in about five to ten years’ time.
But before that, the severity of the winter advertising drought - or Seasonally Affective Death-sentence - means I have to keep on rattling the old tin from time to time. If you’ve really enjoyed anything you’ve read on the site this year; if you’ve been introduced to any new music that you may have missed otherwise; or even if you just appreciate that the cultural ecology we’re a small part of will be damaged if we go, please consider giving us a tenner or setting up a monthly sub for a fiver. (This year we lost Drowned In Sound and Red Bull Media, much bigger and well-established music titles, so the threat for us is all too real. I was very sorry to hear just this morning that fellow independent music magazine, the 405, who started just months before us have decided to call it a day.) But please don’t put your hand in your pocket if you’re a student from a low-income household, on benefits of any kind, drawing a state pension, out of work at the moment or in any way strapped for cash - it feels like it’s often the people who can afford it least who want to chip in the most. But if you can afford it, please help us as this cash genuinely is our short to medium term lifeline and we will close without it.
John Doran
This chart was voted for by Jennifer Lucy Allan, Robert Barry, Tristan Bath, Louise Brown, Patrick Clarke, John Doran, Christian Eede, Noel Gardner, Ella Kemp, Sean Kitching, David McKenna, JR Moores, Luke Turner and Kez Whelan. It was compiled by Doran, who also wrote the essay, and built by Clarke and Eede. Some really good suggestions turned up after it was completed by Richard Foster but we like to think he influenced the chart via temporal slippage
This way of thinking serves to flatter us that we have a scientific understanding of music that runs much deeper than mere fashion. And when enough people form a consensus along these lines it also flatters us that anyone who doesn’t agree with us is wrong. And the more pseudo-scientific the method of scoring the easier it is to see how flawed this principle of belief is. The 100 point system, for example, is clearly unhinged. Without digging into what it is that separates a 7.2 rated album from a 7.3 rated album, one only has to look at how many of Pitchfork’s early reviews have now been surreptitiously rescored for reasons of fashion in order to see how base this system is. The supposed objectivity of the reviewer who always performatively puts their feelings to one side so they can selflessly tackle this week’s biggest releases courtesy of the biggest record labels who have the biggest budgets for promotion, is like the dazzling white smile of a tele-evangelist or the persuasive patter of a door to door salesman with a tray full of mop heads and dishcloths to unload.
But ranking albums is even worse in some respects and I’ve always suspected that people who have a pathological need to rank things are remarkably afraid of dying. The overwhelming and slightly demented need to impose order onto a world that is essentially chaotic and constantly shifting. “I will make sense of it all and define my place in it before I go!”
I was forced to question the way this site thinks about and approaches criticism this summer during an enforced break from listening to music. In August I went back to my childhood home in Merseyside because my Dad was dying. Before and during the event it wasn’t appropriate and afterwards I couldn’t face it. When I arrived home for the final time a hospital bed had been installed in my childhood bedroom where my Dad was determined to see his time out. But the bed had been assembled in a rush and something was preventing the raising mechanism from working, the frame emitted a juddering clanking instead of producing any movement when the handset button was deployed. Despite my Mum pleading with him at length, my Dad carried on angrily making a fuss until his tools were fetched from the shed. He knelt by the bed, attached to several drips and tubes, unscrewed a plate, rearranged the internal mechanism and closed it back up again. He got back into the now working bed and stayed there until he died five days later. My father lived a long life, even if it wasn’t, by any sane standards, a particularly happy or pleasant one but he approached the leaving of it like he tackled all of the big events of his days: with a grit-toothed determination to get it done in an orderly manner on his own terms, with as little help from other people as possible. It’s as much as many of us can hope for. But even so, it was a reality-altering experience for those left behind.
The enforced silence - the first I could remember in decades - lasted for a fortnight until the spell was broken by Perry Como’s ‘It’s Impossible’, played discreetly as we left the crematorium. I’d been ambivalent about this song as a kid but on that day it bore me aloft with its swell of strings and sense of almost cosmic loss. I realised viscerally that this music wasn’t cheap but extraordinarily potent and my feet barely touched the floor on the way out into the rain. Would all of the unopened new albums by Richard Dawson, Kim Gordon and JPEG Mafia sitting waiting for me at work touch me in the same way when I finally played them? No, of course not.
At first this presented me with what felt like an insurmountable problem. If my whole system of criticism embraced subjectivity and rejected objectivity, then what could one honestly say and do during a Summer when Perry Como packed a punch like Scott Walker fronting Joy Division and the new Richard Dawson album was too irritating for me to get through one song? I thought long and hard about packing it all in - for a couple of months at least, I was convinced that it was simply dishonest of me to carry on if I wasn’t feeling it any more - but then one afternoon, senselessly ploughing through a list of streams, waiting for something to click, I alighted on Ecstatic Computation by Caterina Barbieri and suddenly everything changed again.
If, like me, you can see the elegance of design in the sub-atomic order of things and truly awe-inspiring majesty at the astrophysical scale but struggle to understand why nearly everything between those two extremes happens quite as it does or why anything at all even exists in the first place, then perhaps you too use music as a proxy religion or spiritual analog. For me, after four decades, it’s now ingrained quite deeply and not that easy to slough off, even in the most stressful of periods, but like any religion, it does demand some faith in return. Music, should you allow it to, will eventually help ease your troubles; and that piece of music will probably be unconnected in any serious way to consensus ideas of worth, critical fashions masquerading as immutable taste, large numbers of units shifted and popularity among certain advertiser-attracting demographics.
If taking my first unplanned break from listening to music in the history of this site, taught me one thing, it was to chill out slightly and trust in music more. Having (thankfully) gone back to it recently, now that the harshest stages of grieving are over, I actually find myself in the first flushes of infatuation with 2020 by Richard Dawson. Do I think it’s an album for the ages? I don’t know - ask me again in several years if you like, as a few weeks isn’t long enough to judge and at this stage I don’t care if it is or not. That isn’t why I listen to music. All I can be sure of right now is that this album and most of the chart below create a vivid social and cultural snapshot of a year of great upheaval.
I’m thrilled Lorraine James’ For You And I is our number one album. I was one of several staffers who put it very high in their ballot and it’s the nearest we’ve come to an office consensus on an album in a long time but what I personally think is more important is the fact that when I listen to it I can sense a complex picture of the times we live in emerging rhizomatically from the multiple juxtapositions of this album with 2020, Eaton Alive, The Age Of Immunology, Héroïques Animaux De La Misère, Analog Fluids Of Sonic Black Holes, Psychopposition / The Limit Experience and so on. And then after such an intense audio investigation, I can seek restorative vibrations and healing tones in the shape of Life Metal, Ecstatic Computation, The Reeling, The Utopia Strong, I Was Real and even further afield.
So you could be forgiven for thinking that this chart is pointless but I’ll have to beg to differ - as I’ve had my faith restored. This album chart doesn’t reflect any particular fashion or philosophical approach to criticism; it doesn’t make any sense financially; it’s messy and contradictory; and doesn’t even really claim to faithfully show what music will weather the tests of time but it is honest, exciting and gives me hope for the future. And I feel emboldened enough to say that if you spend some time with it you will come away having discovered new music that you love.
It would be remiss of me, at this exact point, not to draw attention to the following non-sequitur. I’m about to ask you for a small amount of money. It has nothing to do with developments in my family story and is only tangentially related to the rest of what I’ve said up to this point. But without an injection of cash to pay for essential site upkeep, we are in immediate danger of closing, as we have been during the last four winters (and a few other grim periods here and there). The amount of money that you, our readers, donate toward the site has grown steadily during the time we opened the donate function and if it keeps on going in the same direction, we will be able to get by on donations alone in about five to ten years’ time.
But before that, the severity of the winter advertising drought - or Seasonally Affective Death-sentence - means I have to keep on rattling the old tin from time to time. If you’ve really enjoyed anything you’ve read on the site this year; if you’ve been introduced to any new music that you may have missed otherwise; or even if you just appreciate that the cultural ecology we’re a small part of will be damaged if we go, please consider giving us a tenner or setting up a monthly sub for a fiver. (This year we lost Drowned In Sound and Red Bull Media, much bigger and well-established music titles, so the threat for us is all too real. I was very sorry to hear just this morning that fellow independent music magazine, the 405, who started just months before us have decided to call it a day.) But please don’t put your hand in your pocket if you’re a student from a low-income household, on benefits of any kind, drawing a state pension, out of work at the moment or in any way strapped for cash - it feels like it’s often the people who can afford it least who want to chip in the most. But if you can afford it, please help us as this cash genuinely is our short to medium term lifeline and we will close without it.
John Doran
This chart was voted for by Jennifer Lucy Allan, Robert Barry, Tristan Bath, Louise Brown, Patrick Clarke, John Doran, Christian Eede, Noel Gardner, Ella Kemp, Sean Kitching, David McKenna, JR Moores, Luke Turner and Kez Whelan. It was compiled by Doran, who also wrote the essay, and built by Clarke and Eede. Some really good suggestions turned up after it was completed by Richard Foster but we like to think he influenced the chart via temporal slippage
100. Scorn -
Cafe Mor
(Ohm Resistance)
This is the first album since 2010's Refuse; Start Fires and sees Mick Harris returning to his sonically contemptuous, imperious, snide, scornful best. The album progresses from crushing digi-dub ('Elephant' and 'The Lower The Middle Our Bit') into heavier more industrial zones, arguably reaching its peak with 'Talk Whiff', a track featuring Jason Williamson of Sleaford Mods.
John Doran
John Doran
More: Buy from Norman Records
99. Alameda 5 -
Eurodrome
(Instant Classic)
Concerned with generating and maintaining grooves and hypnotic rhythms through co-operation and playing on each others’ strengths, Eurodrome is a stunning collection of music that frequently challenges, seduces and beguiles. Sometimes all at the same time. Consequently, the ten-song journey is best experienced with time on your hands, distractions left at the door, and a desire for some intense empathy.
Julian Marszalek
Julian Marszalek
More: Album review
98. Matana Roberts -
Coin Coin Chapter 4: Memphis
(Constellation)
This is another incredible addition to Roberts’ Coin Coin project, and one can only assume that when the 12-album cycle is completed, it will be regarded as a singular masterpiece of twenty-first century sonic and narrative art.
Sean Kitching
Sean Kitching
97. John Zorn -
Tractatus Musico-Philosophicus
(Tzadik)
John Zorn continues to put out so much quality music of such enormous variety that it's often hard to choose a single release over the others from any given year. He doesn't even play on many of the best of his recent albums any more, choosing instead to write, arrange and produce the material. Tractatus Musico-Philosophicus, on the other hand, is 100% pure solo Zorn, working his magic alone in the studio. Drawing from a range of influences including the occult, philosophy, avant-garde cinema and drama, Tractatus is a single piece of 37:50 duration, that sees him wielding Sax, Vocals, Fender Rhodes Piano, Prepared Piano, Guitar, Drums, Bass and samples to surprisingly listenable and painterly effect. His imaginative use of space at least allows the listener in, before springing an assault of electronically altered game calls upon them. Beware of that part.
Sean Kitching
Sean Kitching
96. Mega Bog -
Dolphine
(Paradise Of Bachelors)
For all of Dolphine’s cuteness - every crying spider, wind chime, and faerie - there’s an equal and opposite: a trollish man touching a woman without consent, a steaming dirty nappy, another murder. And so Birgy takes matters into her own hands; that her explorations of grief, white supremacy, bodily autonomy, and the plight of the planet might not be taken notice of is challenged head on, when on ‘Truth in the Wild’ she talk-sings saccharinely, tongue firmly in cheek: "Never smother the mystical song that rests deep inside you". Dolphine’s songs are mystical, yes - but by no means are they not also tough, topical and profound.
Diva Harris
Diva Harris
95. MoE/Mette Rasmussen -
Tolerancia Picante
(Conrad Sound)
When Denmark's most adventurous improvising saxophonist teamed up with Norway's dirtiest experimental rock band, the results were unsurprisingly fierce. Tolerancia Picante is a sludge-drenched scaly beast of a record, an angry behemoth, a monster of epic proportions. It's a little bit of The Ex, a little bit Sex Swing, haiunted by the ghosts of AMM and Albert Ayler. Wild-eyed, unshackled and deepest red in tooth and claw.
Robert Barry
Robert Barry
94. Warmduscher -
Tainted Lunch
(The Leaf Label)
Clams Baker Jr. was always an eccentric frontman, but never before has he sounded so comfortable with his weirdness. On Tainted Lunch he is a charismatic commander of some irresistibly wonky rock 'n' roll, cut through with a delectable pump of disco funk, and topped off with Kool Keith rapping about a Wetherspoon's.
Patrick Clarke
Patrick Clarke
More: Buy from Norman Records
93. Laura Cannell & Polly Wright -
Sing As The Crow Flies
(Brawl)
The compositions of this project were created in a gorgeous and lulling state of liberation as Cannell and Wright agreed to place no limitations or rules upon themselves, beyond the simple restriction of allowing no instrumentation. The resultant force is a spacious flow of wandering melodies refusing to give in to any rigid structure, but instead insisting they must freely float in amongst each other’s breathy voices.
Jo Higgs
Jo Higgs
More: Buy from Norman Records
92. Fenella -
Fenella
(Fire)
In the context of Weaver’s musicianship, after the meditatively expansive Loops in the Secret Society, the recent ambient re-work of her recent catalogue, Fenella represents a further sonic exaltation and refinement of her craft, going further into the sonic realms of atmospheric abstract cosmology blissfully morphed with the mythopoetic.
Danijela Bočev
Danijela Bočev
91. Gum Takes Tooth -
Arrow
(Rocket Recordings)
Arrow grabs you by the back of the neck and proceeds to electrocute you from inside out, hissing “do you see?” in your ear every 30 seconds. From the artificial heartbeat and shattered, sinuous vocals of opener ‘Chrome Cold Hearts’ to the outer-space metallic maelstrom of ‘House Built On Fire’, Gum Takes Tooth make sure that this is not escapism, but a shackling to the Hellmouth that we have all helped to create.
Brendan Telford
Brendan Telford
90. The Membranes -
What Nature Gives… Nature Takes Away
(Cherry Red)
Listening to The Membranes has always felt like sitting in a runaway JCB lumbering its way down a scree slope, watching references pass by in a dizzy blur. And What Nature Gives...Nature Takes Away is a Membranes LP in the grand tradition, chronicling ruminations about rooks, starlings, death, classical myth, Victorian gothic, prog, flowers, cunning women, Japanese monkeys, the North Sea, and West Lancashire. Sonically, the listener can actively map the band tramping the soggy Marches between prog, psych and punk. Maybe you can detect a brief nod to Joy Division too.
Richard Foster
Richard Foster
89. Meemo Comma -
Sleepmoss
(Planet Mu)
Sleepmoss is an album that takes a position in an ongoing uncurrent of British music that critique and warp long held social and political traditions about the British landscape, to open up a world that is at times weird and oneiric, occasionally caustic and grotesque, but is never still. Sleepmoss is an expressive, alluring, occasionally disconcerting album that paints the natural world of forests, hills and wooded areas as one of a hidden and heterotopic terra fluxus outside of the norm, where rogue intelligences and imaginative capabilities are reconfigured according to the seasons.
Bob Cluness
Bob Cluness
88. Thurston Moore -
Spirit Counsel
(Daydream Library)
"We all fell for Jon [Leidecker, AKA Wobbly] during an unforgettable moment on the platform of the train station in rural Denmark as we stood beside him with other passengers and witnessed in awe as he and his hand-held electronics conducted an extensive conversation with the local crows. Suddenly all these birds flew in and surrounded him on the train platform and began singing with him."
Thurston Moore
Thurston Moore
More: Buy from Norman Records
87. Carl Gari & Abdullah Miniawy -
The Act of Falling from the 8th Floor
(Whities)
Over the last five years, Whities has become one of the UK's most consistently interesting labels for electronic music, responsible for a steady stream of 12's, strange and intoxicating in equal measure. The Act of Falling from the 8th Floor brings together German trio Carl Gari with Egyptian poet and musician Abdullah Miniawy for a suite of six songs united in their strange intensity and otherworldly atmosphere. This is dark and heady stuff, dreamlike in its vividness, unsettling as a late night drive without lights through unfamiliar territory.
Robert Barry
Robert Barry
86. Carter Tutti Void -
Triumvirate
(Conspiracy International)
Carter Tutti Void’s third album was recorded in Chris Carter and Cosey Fanni Tutti's Norfolk studio, with Carter laying down the rhythms over which Tutti and Void interlaced their guitar, vocals and effects. It sounds like the best thing the group have yet done, all warm blood pulsing eroticism and hypnotic, narcotic fizz.
Luke Turner
Luke Turner
More: Buy from Norman Records
85. Meatraffle -
Bastard Music
(Delayed)
On sinister, marching opener ‘The Cyclops’, the band paint a grim, expressionist picture of the nationalist-capitalist enemy at hand, before a defiant chant of ‘¡No pasarán!’. On ‘Meatraffle On The Moon’, they envisage a future lunar society, still under the thumb of capitalist oppression. On ‘The Day The Earth Stood Still’, they pose a scenario in which every worker on Earth goes on strike, and the cataclysmic effects thereof.
Patrick Clarke
Patrick Clarke
84. Sote -
Parallel Persia
(Diagonal)
It’s dazzling and dizzying in its unification of acoustic string instruments and hypermodern digital composition: Arash Bolouri plays the santour, Pouya Damadi the tar, Ebtekar reframes their poignant melodic qualities via technoid landscapes varying from elegantly sparse to furiously complex, often within the same piece.
Noel Gardner
Noel Gardner
83. Félicia Atkinson -
The Flower And The Vessel
(Shelter Press)
Listening to The Flower And The Vessel, I’m reminded of my excursions into the deeply quiet, of the relief of long cicada drones or lone bird calls, of how sound is often a lifeline in an unfamiliar space. Those sounds resonated around my brain's memory centres, turning unfamiliarity into something else. Something - if not exactly familiar - that I could connect with, nonetheless. Those things that broke the near-silence were impossible to ignore. The noise they made lingered long after they were gone. In this way, Félicia Atkinson makes loud - sometimes exceedingly loud - music.
Bernie Brooks
Bernie Brooks
82. Kate Tempest -
The Book Of Traps and Lessons
(Fiction)
"When we first started thinking about this album, Rick Rubin was trying to get me to take everything that made me feel secure and peel it off and put it away. He wanted me to break every single convention that I had and get rid of it. So whether that was narrative technique, or rhythmic flow, or stuff that made it OK for me to put my lyrics out there because it was so technical - no one can really argue with the technicality of sustaining a narrative over the length of an album because it allows you to hide. What he was interested in me doing, was pushing the lyric right to the front. He wanted me to stop rapping. He wanted me to go with the flow of the lyric instead of the flow of the beat. He wanted to have the beat there but for me to walk alongside it and for me not be reliant on it or in service to it. I'd spent 15 years learning to stay on the beat, it was nearly impossible to unlearn."
Kate Tempest
Kate Tempest
81. King Midas Sound -
Solitude
(Cosmo Rhythmatic)
It's perhaps the most melancholic offering of any of Kevin Martin's projects - sparse, sombre and at points, overwhelming in its bleakness. Set against haunting, nightmarish drones, Roger Robinson - whose voice sounds like it was created for no other purpose than poetry - tells wounded tales of loss and regret, illuminating the shattered emotional landscape of a man reeling from a perished, destructive relationship.
Adam Quarshie
Adam Quarshie
80. Bill Orcutt -
Odds Against Tomorrow
(Palilalia)
Any day there’s a new Bill Orcutt out is a good day. Listening to him twanging those strings is like being smacked in the face with a tin plate loaded with meat from a carvery serving up nothing but manly emotions. Orcutt’s guitar tone is clear and lustrous, and radiates a prickly heat. It sounds here like expensive hand cream in winter; like a freezing plunge pool after a sauna; like fur coat against bare skin. I could continue, but I ought not to. I probably lost you at ‘hand cream’.
Jennifer Lucy Allan
Jennifer Lucy Allan
79. Oliver Coates -
John Luther Adams’ Canticles of the Sky / Three High Places
(RVNG Intl.)
In this age of cultural whiteout, every year there's a record that you'd have completely missed had it not been for a kindly intervention, and so thanks to Quietus writer Ed Gillett for mentioning this on Twitter a while back and thus encouraging me to backtrack and give it a listen. I'm glad he did for this, the cellist's finest work to date, is a pure tonic for these times, an often emotional, beautifully constructed layered solo recording of the work by composer John Luther Adams. Stunning and transportive.
Luke Turner
Luke Turner
More: Buy from Norman Records
78. Rakta -
Falha Comum
(Nada Nada Discos)
A band from São Paulo who make psych-y garage that borders on gothic, these ladies know how to create a spooky, captivating atmosphere that seems to draw people in. Spacey, immersive percussion, a dark, dissonant edge and a discernible vitality to it all: this is very impressive music.
Tara Joshi
Tara Joshi
More: Buy from Norman Records
77. Sharon Van Etten -
Remind Me Tomorrow
(Jagjaguwar)
Sharon Van Etten’s fifth album presents her richest emotional palette yet, a record that is delightfully varied but tied together by the force of the musician’s talent. At times its subtly hypnotic, at others brilliantly brash, poppy and direct - Van Etten casts the same shadowy spell over it all. A towering achievement.
Patrick Clarke
Patrick Clarke
76. Ana Roxanne -
~~~
(Leaving)
Water runs throughout this project, finding tribunes in each track. As a sonic theme it permeates the project as a reminder of the fluidity of life and the potential for change. In the final cut, ‘In a Small Valley’, a river is splashed in amidst - and often over - the instrumental, asserting its importance. Ringing metallic chimes play a wondering melody, soon infiltrated by a small church choir. This gradually grows in presence before once again falling away and drowning in the stream, before sparse chimes re-emerge to strike an unsure duet with the semi-melodic gargles of a baby.
Jo Higgs
Jo Higgs
75. MY DISCO -
Environment
(Downwards)
An exercise in rigorous minimalism, Environment employs a necessarily limited palette. After 'Act', you'll have heard nearly every sort of sound, tempo, and approach you can expect to. What saves the album from being unbearably austere or monotonous is the way MY DISCO attack with nearly every single sound they employ. If not exactly violent, each carries with it the threat of violence, and with that comes tension.
Bernie Brooks
Bernie Brooks
74. Tyler, The Creator -
IGOR
(A Boy is a Gun)
Tyler’s songwriting has continued to progress since his last album, Flower Boy. ‘RUNNING OUT OF TIME’ and ‘GONE / GONE, THANK YOU’ demonstrate his ability to deftly abut on hip-hop, pop, and jazz through complementary shades of convention and experimentation.
Aaron Skates
Aaron Skates
73. Whistling Arrow -
Whistling Arrow
(God Unknown)
It begins with a tinkling and the soft blow of a recorder. But then the beat kicks in, and then the guitar and the air starts coming down hard on the double recorders and then the beat changes and the recorder doesn’t keep time and it doesn’t go where you think it’s going. Laura Cannell’s recorder isn’t conjuring an avian tone like the title suggests, but something more pressing and useful like a medieval work song or ancient woodland march. You wouldn’t have ever thought that music like this had been made before, but in his liner notes, Stewart Lee suggests that ‘Cuckoo’ sounds a bit like The Fall’s ‘Hip Priest’ and actually, he’s pretty spot on.
Lara C. Cory
Lara C. Cory
72. Headie One -
Music x Road
(Relentless)
The Dengie Hundred with Gemma Blackshaw
Wolfgang Tillmans 
Pet Shop Boys
Rosie Tee
Luci 
Couch Slut 
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