The Quietus Albums Of The Year So Far Chart 2022

SOON often feel like a conversation made music. Both face each other when playing live, often keeping eye contact throughout each track. In a live setting, this set-up can be charming to witness, but also hard to watch after a while, given the energy is mainly being transmitted between the two players. On record, though, this sort of interaction pays dividends as the sound is intense and committed, and revealing very little slack. Better, this intensity has created the sort of widescreen, filmic music that would grace a flick from the mid 1970s. You can imagine Nixon, Hunt, Liddy and Haldeman all furtively bugging each other to the tracks on here.

Haling from Maine, Robert Stillman lives in Margate, has been settled in England since the early 2010s, and, while quietly operating outside commercial constraints, creates rather extraordinary things. What Does It Mean To Be American? comprises six instrumental pieces and an opening song, ‘Cherry Ocean’, sung with a distracted quaver by Stillman over slothful piano and opiated clarinet. It reminds me of ‘We Dance’ by Pavement, and is arguably one of the more structurally conventional parts of this album, even while Stillman (who played and produced nearly everything here) tickles the belly of his birth nation’s 20th century popular canon.

“There is no single word evocation of a place, of the situation, of its people,” says Clare Archibald on ‘Excavate Of Other (The Unknowing)’. It serves as a frisson-inducing modus operandi for her collaboration with Kinbrae. The tape sees the trio use poetry, fragments of testimony and a lilting soundtrack of strings, brass and earthy atmospherics to decode what turns a space into a place. The place in question is currently known as St. Ninians, in East Fife. It’s had various names and uses, from mining community to site of a postmodern art installation, and most recently an eco-wellness centre. The album paints a vivid picture of a land as time and people move through, its identity shifting as generations leave their mark.

More than heavy, the sole collision of Cheb Terro’s rubber-tongued, staccato flow and DJ Die Soon’s venomous grind goes hard as hell. Rapping mostly in Arabic, Terro’s occasional English outbursts come across as emphatic punctuation – exclamation points in the form of ‘FUCK MONEY’ and ‘FUCK THE POLICE’ that more than get the point across for those of us who don’t speak his native language. Released a year after Terro’s untimely passing, there’s a real sense of snuffed talent here. The dude was special, his chemistry with Die Soon equally so. Maybe I’m selfish, but I want volume after volume of this. Thankfully, this slim LP is nothing if not endlessly replayable – an essential transmission from a truly unique artist gone too soon.

Some doom metal detectives may have put two and two together when Thou unexpectedly enlisted the help of Mizmor (along with past collaborator Emma Ruth Rundle) to cover Zola Jesus’ classic ‘Night’ for Sacred Bones’ Todo Muere SBXV compilation, but for the most part this collaboration seemed to spring right out of the blue. It’s a combination so compelling it makes you wonder why it took this long to happen, with both bands’ styles gelling fantastically across this sprawling 73-minute opus. In some ways it feels like a continuation of the mournful, desolate doom of Mizmor’s last album, Cairn (albeit with an even more robust and powerful rhythm section), but truthfully, neither band pulls too far in their own direction.

What has been setting Pusha T apart of late is his ability to trim every ounce of fat from his albums, to present his music as spartan shocks to the system that hit you direct in the chest. After hitting a career-high with his Kanye West-produced last record, Daytona, which just 21 minutes long, the half-hour It’s Almost Dry is in fact fairly expansive by comparison. The amount Pusha fits into this slender runtime is seriously impressive. From the pumping soul of ‘Dreaming Of The Past’ (another link-up with West) to the raw aggression of ‘Let The Smokers Shine The Coups’, it’s clear that Pusha’s purple patch is showing no signs of fading.

Philadelphia-based Lucy Liyou navigates the ferocious nature of care on Welfare / Practice: how familial obligations can invigorate as much as they can suffocate, curiously expressed through its distinctive play with the voice. On Welfare, the terrifyingly humanistic inflections of text-to-speech soundtrack Liyou as they turn over stone after stone, recounting memories haunted by threats and degradation in search of love. Practice tests Liyou and the lessons learned on Welfare, primarily accompanied by lush pianos, as their mother undergoes a two-week quarantine in Korea to see their grandmother before she passes. It’s an album that balances the giddy exhilaration of experimentation with necessary heart and soul. Astoundingly empathetic in tone, yet uncompromising in its vision.

There is a moment on this album where under the choir – who sing firm and in full voice like muscles flexed – strings pour in like mist under and around the women singing, lifting them upwards as if they were all on a cloud transcending into the heavens. The emotional dynamics of this moment are so intense I found myself shedding a tear while shopping for shampoo. This record is full of these moments of reflection, or lament, or the sadness of recognition; the flights of the heart and the toils of the mind. Even behind a language barrier, there is a deeply moving narrative bound into this album.

​​Geezers from three of my favourite bands in the last decade playing oily-denim tankard-raising riff mania that’d make the meekest wallflower want to crush a grape? Inject Left To Rot into my marrow! Erupt are fronted (and guitarred) by Al Smith, also of psychedelic hardcore lords Geld, and the rhythm section comprises Alessandro Coco, whose star turn for my money was in the brief, glorious Gutter Gods, and Kyle Seely, best known as a member of Philadelphia’s Sheer Mag. All those bands are fun as fuck and I’d be willing to bet this one is funner, to play in, than the lot: there’s nowt goofy about Erupt’s type of punk metal, even when the instrumental breaks approach upturned-baseball-cap crossover thrash territory. It’s just a dream assignment for anyone situated on extreme metal’s grimy fringes.

La Colonie De Vacances are something more than a supergroup; they’re actually four mathrock, noise and hardcore-centric bands – Papier Tigre, Electric Electric, Pneu and Marvin – in one. Each band is explosive in its own right but their collective, quadrophonic show is exhilarating. The audience are required to stand in the centre of the venue, surrounded by the four acts on four separate stages who trade taut licks or pummel you in unison. ECHT is the first studio album in their ten-year existence. Conveying the dizzying energy of the live shows was always going to be nigh-on impossible but, on its own terms, ECHT is a work of brutal beauty and lyricism. Bernard Herrmann stabs are rendered as rock riffs in ‘Multitude Of Snakes’, ‘Z.Z.Y.’ sounds like a duet for cement mixer and rubber hosing, ‘Spectral’ reaches a gorgeous, chiming finale and ‘Alex Weir’ maintains its fevered, galloping momentum for eight glorious minutes.

The title Everything Was Beautiful hails from Kurt Vonnegut’s evergreen novel, Slaughterhouse Five. The book is spiced by an unworldly and illuminating air where the horrific and comedic make unlikely bedfellows and time travel excursions are irregularly spliced into the text. The same might be said of this album which, as one has grown to expect from Jason Pierce, is a captivating and haunting beauty which shocks and soothes and seems to have landed from some parallel universe. The album is one of the most assured and curiously emotive in Spiritualized’s impressive canon. The tracks drift by and seem to fold into each other, probing for new levels – deeper insights, perhaps? Becoming lost to this melodic flow is nothing less than a joyful experience.

W​​ith Targala, la maison qui n’en est pas une, experimental folk artist Emmanuelle Parrenin has completed the ‘house’ trilogy that began with 1977’s Maison Rose. Released in March, it deserves a lot more attention than it has had so far, because it is at the very least the equal of Maison Rose. Were it just to feature the billowing, raga-ish folk of ‘La Rêvelinère’ and ‘Entre Moi’, which are woven from the same flaxen thread as much of the 1977 material, it would already be a wonder. But there are also signs that the techno experiments over the years (which include a collaboration with Etienne Jaumet, who also appears on the album) have left their mark – there’s an increase in bass weight in places, while ‘Delyade’ is run through with a steady synth pulse – and she gives free reign to her psychedelic impulses on ‘Epinette Noire’, with its spiralling sax and backwards-sucked percussion.

American Rituals is about as up my strasse as it’s possible to be – bare bones vocal constructions and vernacular post punk influenced by deep listening, and minimalism, basically. Consider that this might appeal to fans of Steve Reich, Michelle Mercure and Ut, and you should start getting the picture of the sound world contained. There’s something deeply foundational about the instruments Cheri Knight uses, and the lexicon in particular – primary colours, prime numbers – that assemble the tracks’ structures. There’s also nothing extraneous. Knight made the tracks on this album, which have previously been scattered among a variety of compilations, in the early ’80s. At this time she was part of the lesser-known DIY scene around Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington, where she studied composition. She worked with Pauline Oliveros, performance artist Linda Montano, and later in the alt-country band Blood Oranges, before moving into flower farming. She also keeps goats.

I love a bit of head-nodding, beard-stroking contemplation with my music as much as anybody but every now and then I start to drift off, maybe forgeting how electric and thrilling it can be. Super Champon is the latest wake up call from Kyoto’s incredible Otoboke Beaver. Offering invigorating, light speed garage-core that scorches a smile onto your idiot face making everything else feel redundant for its terse twenty-odd-minute runtime, it presents a wonderful balance of melody and ferocity. Their tunes tap into a wide-eyed joy at the heart of their rage. Serrated guitar noise and complex vocal parts mix with an adrenaline-rush rhythm section in concentrated blasts. It goes straight to your head.