The Quietus Albums Of The Year So Far Chart 2023 (In Association With Norman Records)

19.

Young FathersHeavy HeavyNinja Tune

As is the case with all their work, Young Fathers’ Alloysious Massaquoi, Kayus Bankole and Graham ‘G’ Hastings adopt an open-ended lyrical style on Heavy Heavy. Individual lines can be very clear and striking, but pull all the lyrics of a song or the album together, and the semantics are lost. Meanings can be multiplied and personal, but the music will embolden whatever you take from the album. Almost as a reaction to the sparseness of previous record Cocoa Sugar and the big cloud of events in between that album and now, Young Fathers find joint ecstasy on every track, but it comes in different forms. Be it a poppy hook that buckles your heart the second you hear it, a corona of voices and instruments, or a grand display of noise that feels like mountains crashing into each other. Even ‘Be Your Lady’ does it in its own way, starting as a spotlit piano ballad before detonating into a cacophonous display of splashing drums. The band wring the potential out of every song while avoiding the trappings of triteness.


18.

HeartwormsA Comforting NotionSpeedy Wunderground

At Heartworms’ Lexington headline gig earlier this year, they delivered an absolutely spellbinding cover of Sisters Of Mercy’s ‘Dominion’ that, in its corrosion with cello and Orme’s unexpectedly brutal screaming, became very much their own. This modernist take on the gothic is all over Heartworms’ debut EP, from the Portishead atmospherics of ‘A Comforting Notion’ through to ‘Consistent Dedication’ and ‘Retributions Of An Awful Life’, which is essentially a rattling monologue over anxiety drums, synths and noise, but infernally catchy with it. It’s also the best release this year to come with a limited edition Airfix kit – a Spitfire with Heartworms’ own decals. Chocks away!


17.

JellyskinIn BrineWrong Speed

Jellyskin’s debut album is an electro-experimental, futurist elegy for all things aquatic. Across nine tracks, it flits between glacial goth pop (‘Marmalade’) and abrasive techno (‘Bringer Of Brine’), much like the variable nature of the ocean itself. Coastal imagery pervades, but not quite in the balmy, sunlit way you’d expect. Instead, it’s sullen blue-black and abyssal. Imagine, if you will, Broadcast doing a techno banger about a solitary whale and you’re halfway there. An inspired debut, the nautical mysticism of In Brine elicits an exhilarating playfulness that’s at odds with the repetitive uniformity of much modern post-punk. By coalescing pop and experimental formulas through a decidedly contemporary lens, it inhabits a strange, but brilliant, world of its own.


16.

James Ellis FordThe HumWarp

On The Hum, the bass lurches and swaggers from one bar to the next, carving out the character of the record beneath the veneer of modular atmospherics and ethereal Frippertropnics. Tape loops are just as integral, with the title track and ‘Tape Loop #7’ like palimpsests surreptitiously left there to provide clues. There’s a persuasive uncanniness to this album, and you suspect it’s James Ellis Ford’s ability to shapeshift that makes him such a sought-after producer. He manages to imbue a sonic fluidity that invariably brings a touch of class to the projects he’s working on, though he’s not one for imposing recognised motifs or rebuilding from the bottom up. Such subtlety and nuance is atypical where superproducers are concerned, and even labelling him with such an epithet feels slightly daft.


15.

KelelaRavenWarp

Recorded over a fortnight-long period in Berlin, Raven is rich with invention, a deeply immersive experience that skips between UK garage and 2-step, jungle, breakbeats, and more, ultimately paying tribute to dance music’s Black, queer roots. Across the record, Kelela transports her enticing part-electronic, part-R&B sound to new spaces, opening with the glittering, reverb-drenched pads and soaring vocals of lead single ‘Washed Away’ and moving through a number of dancefloor-indebted cuts, such as the mellow, dancehall-tinged rhythms of ‘On The Run’ and breakbeat-fuelled ‘Happy Ending’. Combining dense, synth-filled R&B melodies and the funky components of tech-tinged, breaks-heavy dance beats, the connecting thread that binds Raven is twofold: the visceral feeling of a night out, expressed beautifully through the glossy, soaring soprano vocals that have become Kelela’s hallmark.


14.

MemorialsMusic For Film: Tramps! / Women Against The BombThe state51 Conspiracy

A double album of two movie soundtracks, Music For Film: Tramps! was composed for Kevin Hegge’s 2022 film of the same name, a decidedly non-nostalgic documentary of the faces and designers at the New Romantic vanguard from the end of the 1970s onwards, while Music For Film: Women Against The Bomb accompanies Sonia Gonzalez’s inside story of the Greenham Common camp, also released last year. Comprising the multi-instrumentalist duo of Electrelane’s Verity Susman and Wire’s Matthew Simms, MEMORIALS themselves have the experience and imagination to let the albums stand apart from the films, but the context enhances them. From the caustic to the cuddly, this is a debut of impressive breadth, at once alien and human, fusing their talents for the sake of the collective.


13.

PoiL UedaPoiL UedaDurt Et Doux

PoiL’s latest adventure finds them teaming up with Japanese singer and satsuma-biwa (a type of Japanese lute) player Junko Ueda to form PoiL Ueda. Born in Tokyo but based in Europe as far as I can tell, Ueda is steeped in the epic storytelling style associated with the instrument, and this debut collaboration with the French band is based on the 13th-century text The Tale Of The Heike (or Heike-Monogatari), about rival clans vying for power. No such struggles are apparent in the music though; this new pairing seems like a marriage made in heaven. PoiL’s usual jazzy heaviness anchors the music but there are many moments of delicious disorientation, as you lose your bearings in the whooshing and rattling transition from ‘Kujô Shakujô – Part 1’ to ‘Part 2’, or the passage in ‘Kujô Shakujô – Part 3’ when the tricky-but-lithe groove and reptilian riffs suddenly give way to a blizzard of bleeps and wubs and rattling percussion, before the track ascends to a Magma-like climax of massed vocals.


12.

JAAWSuperclusterSvart

Considering the sonic territory that they’re navigating, this will inevitably draw comparisons with fellow discordant supergroup Holy Scum. Sticking with the cinematic correlation, JAAW are like the older sibling who would let you stay up late with them watching films like The Toxic Avenger and Street Trash, whereas Holy Scum would more likely inflict Salo or Irreversible upon you. Both supergroups have their merits. If you’re looking for a deep exploration of the dark night of the soul, you might not find what you’re looking for with Supercluster but, if a rollicking good time, formed from sheet metal guitars, a powerhouse drummer gone spasmodic, and barrelling bass lines strapped to the overclocked engine of a runaway rollercoaster sounds like your sort of thing, JAAW are an army of four willing to go to war for you.


11.

La TneEcorcha / TailléeLes Disques Bongo Joe

Ecorcha / Taillée is La Tène’s most engaging album to date. When I spoke to the group’s Alexis Degrenier for a past interview, he was keen to point out that La Tène’s music isn’t fundamentally about improvisation – rather the focus is on incremental change within a strict framework. You can hear this immediately on ‘Ecorcha’, which starts as a wheezy waltz, like a dusty clockwork mechanism springing to life, draped with ribbons of drone and with Lacroux’s 12-string (I think) picking out an endlessly cycling eight-note motif. New elements drop in as the piece progresses, the rhythm is filled in and cabrettes (bagpipes) start to lead the dance. New territory is opened up by ‘Taillée, it’s Rosalía-inspired reggaeton beat gelling perfectly with plangent folk instrumentation. At under 15 minutes, it’s as close to ‘pop’ as La Tène have got so far, and it’s also a stroke of genius.


10.

Annelies MonserMaresHorn Of Plenty

Mares exists in a hinterland somewhere between La Nòvia in France and Discreet in Gothenburg, and I don’t just mean that because it’s from Belgium which is literally in between those two places. Sonically it draws on traditional folk styles, with occasional mediaeval-sounding melodies, but does it from a sometimes miserable, sometimes hopeful, but always fog-filled landscape where layers upon layers of haar-dense atmospherics are built from various drone-ish sources. It’s got a cover of folk standard ‘Sally Free And Easy’, which I guess is a manifesto for where it’s coming from, but its best moments are in the densest, most eerie sections, which come from a combination of keyboards, accordion, and harmonium. ‘Shells’ is a macabre standout.


9.

Colin StetsonWhen We Were That What Wept For The Sea52Hz

When We Were That What Wept For The Sea originates from an entirely different place to its predecessor, 2017’s All This I Do For Glory. It is an urgently composed, nearly spontaneous dedication to Colin Stetson’s father, who recently died somewhat unexpectedly. A disruption in the musician’s otherwise systematic and organised creative process. A lengthy piece that lasts more than 70 minutes, it’s divided into 16 tracks without any written introduction or justification.


Stetson leads us on a voyage of reminiscence and grief, much like a marine adventure, full of suspended moments, foggy hazy shores, and battles against the stormy sea. A Romantic Sturm und Drang work where beauty and horror, fear and longing can exist at the same in the sublime of nature. Dark abysses open after airy and dilated moments; breathes, touches, and mechanical sounds counterpart abstract movements. The spoken lyrics of ‘The Lighthouse V’, which put the musical images into words and inspired the album’s title, follow a crescendo that rises until ‘The Lighthouse IV”s explosion, where all the tension and misery find their desperate shout.


8.

YaejiWith A HammerNinja Tune

Yaeji’s on the move. With A Hammer sees the Korean-American producer leave her house roots behind for an incredibly satisfying blend of pop and R&B. The titular Thor-grade smiting tool of the cover – complete with cheeky graffiti face! – preemptively smirks at anyone preparing to call her voice diminutive. Her singing tones are as light as a breeze, and perfect besides, yet this music is heavy as all hell, an innovative rendering of anger transformed into perfect dance pop which, variously, brushes up against funk, ambient, acid house, jazz, drum & bass and synthpop. The hammer blow makes contact when the words hit home and woe betide those not fully braced.


7.

James HoldenImagine This Is A High Dimensional Space Of All PossibilitiesBorder Community

James Holden is one of those rarified artists who can really only be compared to themselves. Though there were records in between and since, his last two ‘proper’ LPs, The Inheritors and The Animal Spirits, are monumental landmarks on both the post-rave and modular synth landscapes. The Inheritors is a riotously pagan thing, greyscale, almost feral; The Animal Spirits is a deeply psychedelic descendent of spiritual jazz and renegade synthesists past – it’s pagan as hell, too, but brighter, in Technicolor. On both, there are these odd, almost Renaissance Faire undertones. Like I said, Holden is singular. And on those two records, dude was unstuck in time working some kind of otherworldly folk magic.


Imagine This Is A High Dimensional Space Of All Possibilities, on the other hand, trades in something else. While no less worthy or beautiful in its way, it is perhaps more obviously beholden to linear timelines and histories, however personal. Holden has called it both "a dream of a rave" and "a dialogue with [his] teenage self," which I think says a lot, maybe all you need. There’s an element of nostalgia at play here, but no corresponding retrograde thinking. Each track is inevitably a wild combination of memories, ideas, and influences – midi-fied sacred harp singers clash with squiggly synthesis, fiddle collides with the most absurd funk bass. Meanwhile, the spectre of prog is everywhere and the club is never far away. Amazingly, it all works.


6.

Brghde ChaimbeulCarry Them With UsTak:til

Carry Them With Us is mostly instrumental, but its tracks tell stories. ‘Banish The Giant Of Doubt And Despair’, for example, is a reel that starts quick and spins out of control, reflecting the tale of the princess of an underwater kingdom and the giant of the Western Isles who cannot stop dancing to her song, faster and faster until he falls into the sea and drowns. Melodic cascades flow from Brìghde Chaimbeul’s pipes as though she can barely restrain them, while a bass drone and subtle, breathy saxophone, courtesy of Colin Stetson, combine seamlessly to set the scene. Despite the unconventional pairing of instruments, they often seem to make a single sound.


Some songs are improvised, the two musicians working together with consummate ease. On ‘Uguviu (ii)’, for example, the trance-like pipe drone nags at the back of the skull while pipes and horn duel over the top, somewhere in the clouds, exchanging repeating, minimal phrases. It is a complete world, gone before you know it. ‘Pilliù: The Call Of The Redshank’ and ‘Pìobaireachd Nan Eun: The Birds’ are both inspired by the singing of birds. Chaimbeul’s singing, rarely heard on this album, is a delicate, intricate sound which demonstrates why she believes birdsong is close to the Gaelic language. Traditional tunes tell of repetitive reality as well as wild myth. ‘That Fonn Gun Bhi Trom: I Am Disposed Of Mirth’ is a walking song, sung by Scots women as they beat cloth – repetitive work which spawned a genre of its own. It is music with rhythms as predictable and varied as the weave itself. Chaimbeul and Stetson make it flutter and break free from its earthy origins.


5.

SurgeonCrash RecoilTresor

Anthony Child forged Crash Recoil from the improvisational approach of live performances. The record frequently mimics the flow of a Surgeon DJ set, structured around measured builds, momentum and surprise. He’s no stranger to live tech experimentation. Decades of sticky nights at Birmingham’s House Of God — not to mention an opening slot for Lady Gaga — stand testament to Child’s reputation as a titanic, often almost theatrical DJ. His studio releases have been equally exploratory, whether he’s recording rainforests, consulting an astrophysicist, or referring to the Tibetan Book Of The Dead. Then there were the three albums he released in the late 1990s on Berlin label Tresor (re-released as a compilation in 2015) that put him on the international dance music map.


The eight six-minute tracks of Crash Recoil, also released on Tresor, contain all the hallmarks of those Surgeon classics: the discipline and precision his alias suggests, amid a relentless skitter of programmed drums. He labours under the usual adjectives — industrial, brutalist — but that fails to acknowledge his ability to coax lightness out from percussive pummel. Opener ‘Oak Bank’ is typically fleet-footed, moving from tinny bounce to sweaty-room techno. Equally satisfying is the tactile clatter of ‘Metal Pig’.


4.

Shit And Shine2222 And AirportThe state51 Conspiracy

To fresh-faced Shiners, this might sound scuzzy, rough and ready but, if you’ve already acclimatised to Craig Clouse’s maximal, clipping-as-a-way-of-life approach, 2222 And Airport will appear relatively buffed, chamois-ed and gleaming. Previous works have run the gamut from grindcore treachery to kosmische techno equipped with gently fuzzed edges like the soft eyes of a hung-over lush. Clouse’s releases from the past few years can usually be split between one of these states: those of a more metal bent, and those drifting towards the dance/electronic spectrum, whilst never settling comfortably in either the mosh pit or on the dance floor. This one definitely leans towards the latter, dripping layers of funk, techno, acid house, big beat, electro, and all manner of intentions, references and happy accidents into the overflowing cauldron.


Of course, whilst those are pseudo-helpful touch points, it also sounds like none of the above. It sounds like Shit And Shine. Which is perhaps best summed up as the chunkiest and most hell-wrought bass playing from Lightning Bolt’s Brian Gibson shucked over a steroid-plunged Prefuse 73 set. Or, in shorter hand, the Bacteria Bitch remix of Nurse With Wound’s ‘Cruisin’ For A Bruisin”.

3.

Patrick WolfThe Night SafariApport

As Patrick Wolf told me in an interview for The Guardian, the past decade of relative silence was a personal hell, involving familial grief, bankruptcy and a battle with alcohol and drug dependency. These years of musical exile shaped the five tracks of The Night Safari, alongside a return to DIY self-dependency and, crucially, some of the instrumentation that made his early music so good. It veers between glorious dramatics on ‘Dodona’; Michael Nyman via Warp Records cracked electronics in ‘Acheron’; shuffling modernist crooning on ‘Nowhere Game’; and, to finish off, ‘Enter The Day’, all rolling piano and optimism.


During a show he played at London’s Village Underground earlier this year, Wolf prowled the stage in his rather fabulous self-made clothes and was, by turns, honest, witty, bleakly funny ("you’re all going to die… sorry, I am told I am too mean to my audience") and filthy (‘Tristan’ introduced with an ad lib apparently about fisting), and best of all sung in the finest voice of his life. I used to always think that it would only be in another world less tainted by commerce, algorithms and laziness that Patrick Wolf could be a pop star, but I realise I was wrong. He now seems perfectly happy to do popstar as he wants to be, and for that world to be his very own.


2.

KhanateTo Be CruelSacred Bones

When Khanate convened with producer Randall Dunn at Strange Weather Studios in Brooklyn to mix To Be Cruel, it was the first time the four of them had been in the same room at the same time for at least 15 years, and the suggestion seems to be that socialising perhaps got in the way of the mix. Whatever the reason, the band weren’t happy, but the process was then further interrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic. The final mix was undertaken by Dunn, Stephen O’Malley and James Plotkin in summer 2021, and the band were blown away by the results.


To Be Cruel is an incredible record, with three tracks of 20 minutes each pushing the Khanate template outwards in weird and affecting new ways. The production is exquisite. Having had the luxury of living with it for several weeks, I realised that I came to subconsciously appreciate it much in the same way I appreciate a dub record recorded at the Black Ark such is its depth and spatiality. It is a record of fractal depth that bristles with detail at the very borders of perception. But most importantly it achieves all of this without short changing listeners on caustic vitriol, despondent awe and unquenchable agitation.


1.

LankumFalse LankumRough Trade

There has been much talk over the last year or two of a ‘revival’ in modern folk music. This ignores the fact that boundary-pushing, experimental, avant-garde approaches to traditional songs have been present under the surface for as long as the songs themselves. Experimentalism, in fact, is integral to them. It is what has kept them alive through the centuries. Exciting as it is, the current scene is undergoing less of a ‘revival’, more a moment of attention from the music world at large; a lifting of a rock to reveal the life that has long been thriving underneath.


The astonishing False Lankum has received a hitherto-unseen amount of mainstream acclaim, but it is also the result of many decades that the band’s members have spent exploring the outer limits of folk and trad music, whether as a foursome or in their individual practises. Its vast swings of emotion have always been present in their work to some degree, the juxtapositions more and more pronounced with each record (not least thanks to the influence of producer John "Spud" Murphy). Here – from the overwhelming gothic horror of ‘Go Dig My Grave’ and the tempestuous melodrama of ‘The New York Trader’, to the swooning romance of ‘Newcastle’ and the gorgeous melancholia of ‘Lord Abore And Mary Flynn’ – they supercharge that aspect, taking their music to unparalleled levels of extremity.


The risk, of course, is that extreme mood swings often come at the expense of consistency across an LP. Lankum, however, avoid that pitfall. Recorded in a Martello Tower off the coast of Ireland, they’re tied together by a running theme of the ocean that emerged subconsciously in that location, as well as by a number of abstract instrumental ‘Fugue’ pieces dotted throughout. Cut from the same lengthy experimental jam session, instruments clatter and float around as if suspended in mid-air, providing a binding agent as they gradually arrange themselves into the shape of whatever song comes next. The immediate experience of listening to False Lankum is intense; one minute you’re barraged like a raft in a tempest, and the next floating along serenely in a stretch of calm, warm water. Zoom out, however, and you’ll find a record that captures the sublimity and scale of an entire ocean.

The Quietus Albums Of The Year So Far 2023

  • 1: Lankum – False Lankum
  • 2: Khanate – To Be Cruel
  • 3: Patrick Wolf ­– The Night Safari
  • 4: Shit And Shine – 2222 And Airport
  • 5: Surgeon – Crash Recoil
  • 6: Brìghde Chaimbeul – Carry Them With Us
  • 7: James Holden – Imagine This Is A High Dimensional Space Of All Possibilities
  • 8: Yaeji – With A Hammer
  • 9: Colin Stetson – When We Were That What Wept For The Sea
  • 10: Annelies Monseré – Mares
  • 11: La Tène – Ecorcha / Taillée
  • 12: JAAW – Supercluster
  • 13:PoiL Ueda – PoiL Ueda
  • 14: MEMORIALS – Music For Film: Tramps! / Women Against The Bomb
  • 15: Kelela – Raven
  • 16: James Ellis Ford – The Hum
  • 17: Jellyskin – In Brine
  • 18: Heartworms – A Comforting Notion
  • 19: Young Fathers – Heavy Heavy
  • 20: MC Yallah – Yallah Beibe
  • 21: Kate NV – WOW
  • 22: Wacław Zimpel – Train Spotter
  • 23: Polobi & The Gwo Ka Masters – Abri Cyclonique
  • 24: Oleksandr Yurchenko – Recordings Vol. 1, 1991—2001
  • 25: Bruxa Maria – Build Yourself A Shrine And Pray
  • 26: Rắn Cạp Đuôi Collective – *1
  • 27: Nabihah Iqbal – Dreamer
  • 28: Philip Jeck & Chris Watson – Oxmardyke
  • 29: Fire-Toolz – I Am Upset Because I See Something That Is Not There.
  • 30: Mandy, Indiana – I’ve Seen A Way
  • 31: Autechre & The Hafler Trio – ae³o & h³ae Box Set
  • 32: Babybaby_explores – Food Near Me, Weather Tomorrow
  • 33: Free Love – Inside
  • 34: Desire Marea – On The Romance Of Being
  • 35: Benefits – Nails
  • 36: Fever Ray – Radical Romantics
  • 37: Natalia Beylis & Eimear Reidy – She Came Through The Window To Stand By The Door
  • 38: Skull Practitioners – Negative Stars
  • 39: Squid – O Monolith
  • 40: Cicada The Burrower – Blight Witch Regalia
  • 41: Sleaford Mods – UK GRIM
  • 42: Overmono – Good Lies
  • 43: House Of All – House Of All
  • 44: Paszka – Lapton
  • 45: A.P.A.T.T. – We
  • 46: Otto Sidharta – Kajang
  • 47: Ruth Anderson & Annea Lockwood – Tête-à-tête
  • 48: Pere Ubu – Trouble On Big Beat Street
  • 49: Synthfreq – Vol. 1
  • 50: Marta Salogni & Tom Relleen – Music For Open Spaces
  • 51: Lunch Money Life – The God Phone
  • 52: Martyna Basta – Slowly Remembering, Barely Forgetting
  • 53: 3Phaz – Ends Meet
  • 54: Upsammy – Germ In A Population Of Buildings
  • 55: Sourdurent – L’Herbe De Détourne
  • 56: Billy Woods & Kenny Segal – Maps
  • 57: The Stargazer’s Assistant – Fire Worshipper
  • 58: Bell Witch – Future’s Shadow Part 1: The Clandestine Gate
  • 59: DeVon Russell Gray / Nathan Hanson / Davu Seru – We Sick
  • 60: Lia Kohl – The Ceiling Reposes
  • 61: Godflesh – Purge
  • 62: Yossari Baby – Inferiority Complex
  • 63: Yfory – Yfory
  • 64: Crimeboys – Very Dark Past
  • 65: HMLTD – The Worm
  • 66: Lana Del Rabies – Strega Beata
  • 67: Šarūnas Nakas – Ramblings
  • 68: BIG|BRAVE – Nature Morte
  • 69: Sheng Jie, aka gogoj 盛洁 – Review
  • 70: KASAI – J/P/N
  • 71: Left Hand Cuts Off The Right – Free Time/Dead Time
  • 72: Fire! Orchestra – Echoes
  • 73: Hermann Nitsch – Das Orgien Mysterien Theater
  • 74: Rezzett – Meant Like This
  • 75: Bulbils – Map
  • 76: Shirley Collins – Archangel Hill
  • 77: Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs – Land Of Sleeper
  • 78: JPEGMAFIA & Danny Brown – Scaring The Hoes
  • 79: Sabrina Bellaouel – Al Hadr
  • 80: Katie Gately – Fawn / Brute
  • 81: Rosso Polare – Bocca D’ombra
  • 82: Jacques Puech – Gravir / Canon
  • 83: Seaming To – Dust Gatherers
  • 84: 23wa – Rorschach
  • 85: Richard Skelton – Selenodesy
  • 86: Jam City – Jam City Presents EFM
  • 87: Unperson – Spiritual™
  • 88: Wallowing – Earth Reaper
  • 89: Poison Ruïn – Härvest
  • 90: Paul St. Hilaire – Tikiman Vol. 1
  • 91: Wolf Eyes – Dreams In Splattered Lines
  • 92: Aksak Maboul – Une Aventure De VV (Songspiel)
  • 93: Oozing Wound – We Cater To Cowards
  • 94: Liis Ring – Homing
  • 95: Little Simz – NO THANK YOU
  • 96: Rian Treanor & Ocen James – Saccades
  • 97: Karlowy Vary – La Femme
  • 98: ABADIR – Melting
  • 99: Historically Fucked – The Mule Peasants’ Revolt Of 12067
  • 100: Liv.e – Girl In The Half Pearl

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