CircleTerminalSouthern Lord
Every aspect of the six-man machine that is Circle is firing on all cylinders, but even this veteran admirer was astonished by the title track and its breathtaking raid on the territory of The Stooges. The infinite nature of riff-making can summon the most elemental solutions – Terminal is one such beast, a glorious retooling of ‘I Wanna Be Your Dog’ as a 21st-century motorik classic, a brilliant transformation of a rock cornerstone into one of the most immediate and enchanting pieces Circle has ever created.
Jane WeaverModern KosmologyFire
What makes Modern Kosmology such a joy is that it comes as sharp and welcome relief to so many of the serious and po-faced purveyors of cynically cosmic vibes. This is music that simultaneously celebrates and explores, that takes pop as its foundation and then builds a multi-layered space on it that welcomes one and all. But it also establishes Jane Weaver as a formidable talent whose ongoing musical journey promises to make some interesting stops and deviations from established routes.
GnodJust Say No To The Psycho Right-Wing Capitalist Fascist Industrial Death MachineRocket
GNOD join the ever growing list of musicians concerned with personhood, dehumanisation and physical deterioration. But their approach is different – they are distinctly non-fantastical in their presentation of people, their lyrics capture everyday details such as the state of someone’s nails, their hair, their work failures and private behaviours. Where other artists provide an implicit, ominous reference to dehumanisation through visual means, GNOD are explicit in their references, picking out situations and conditions of human exploitation and obscenity.
Laura CannellHunter Huntress HawkerBrawl
Cannell’s violin is alive and has strange powers. She uses it to conjure ghostly entities from the ruined church, using it like a stone tape to replay the people and animals of the long lost past. She rides horses through woods and across fields, she leads them to be shod and out to gallop, she channels their energy, panic and relief, and she turns the spirit of the place into sound. Cannell casts a spell through her music that makes us feel we have spent half an hour in the East Anglian fields, among the relics and ruins of lost places and their vanished people.
Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs PigsFeed The RatsRocket
Feed The Rats is essentially three tracks – two gargantuan bolshie dirges bookending the four-and-a-half minute ‘Sweet Relief’. So let’s start there, with the meat in this fetid sandwich. The name could be a play on Black Sabbath’s ‘Sweet Leaf’ – for a band clearly indebted to the Birmingham icons it bears a modicum of sense. But there is relentlessness here, a flayed aggression, which Ozzy et al could never muster. Matt Baty’s vocals howl, echoing over the cacophony like a mythic warlord and mischief-maker, both from the heavens and from the bowels of the earth. And what a cacophony it is – the guitars come at you predictably but with a juggernaut force that rattles the ribcage. This is classic 70s heavy metal deep-fried in iron and blood.
Snapped AnklesCome Play The TreesLeaf
On their debut LP for The Leaf Label this band of anonymous hedge-folk have taken their DIY determination, obsession with film and observational lyricism and put together a collection that is devilishly playful, suitably daft and absolutely belting. In doing so, they speak to the kinetic communities that, in the face of being wheedled out or shut down, may still rise to be the most inventive, vibrant and diverse parts of any city. Come Play The Trees is both an analysis and an invitation. It’s the embodiment of the weird, wonderful and true ecology of it all, presented by a bunch of folks dressed like ditches.
Call SuperArpoHoundstooth
Seaton’s second album sees him continue further down a path previously touched on in past work, in which jazz and techno form natural bedfellows. His father, Dixieland player David Seaton, provides clarinet accompaniment to some of the album’s most arresting tracks, such as ‘Arpo Sunk’ and closer ‘Out To Rust’. Having carved out a distinctive place in the dance music scene for himself in recent years, Seaton once again uses the album format on Arpo to play to all of his strengths.
LottoVV
Five tracks from the Polish trio, the follow up to last year’s Elite Felines, further exploring the outer reaches of trance. “There’s always this brief period when we start pondering about the direction of our music but usually it turns out to be completely unnecessary. Whatever we may plan ahead, our playing always takes us the other way round,” says guitarist Łukasz Rychlicki. “You just need to be very patient and there’s always something that will make things moving forward. We never look back.”
LiarsTFCFMute
TFCF is markedly different from its predecessors. Recorded by Andrew alone in his new Australian home, it’s the sound of someone blinking their eyes open in a new reality, as if he were a Robinson Crusoe working out how to survive with the means at his disposal on the shoreline. It feels not only like a man trying to find his musical feet but perhaps himself too, in returning to the country where he was born. Just look at those track titles, all nervously putting stepping into new ground, uncertain at what might be there – ‘Cred Woes’, ‘The Grand Delusional’, ‘Cliche Suite’, ‘Staring At Zero’. There’s no concept to this Liars album, perhaps for the first time, aside from Andrew obviously, viscerally at times, trying to make sense of who he is and what he does, and why.
OxbowThin Black DukeHydra Head
If Oxbow albums are snapshots of the lives behind them, it’s clear that Thin Black Duke – the band’s first album since The Narcotic Story in 2007 – finds Robinson and bandmates Niko Wenner, Dan Adams and Greg Davis in very different skins than before. The music suggests composure, and, as far as you might find in Oxbow, a kind of elegance. The kind that comes only after accepting that life is made of fifty shades of entropy and more or less perpetual disarray.
Lone TaxidermistTrifleMemeTune
While Trifle is an album that delivers squelchy, cheeky fun and frolics on a budget, its take on sexy pop times is more honest and refreshing than much of the overwrought earnestness that passes for ‘fun’ popular music. What makes it especially powerful as a pop record is not its brashness or its queerness (and there’s plenty of that), but that it displays no hint of fear, hesitation or subtext. It lays out all the messy entanglements of fun, sex and pleasure, and invites you to come on in and put some rubber gloves on.
Princess Nokia1992 DeluxeRough Trade
Princess Nokia’s debut album is oscillating, introspective and at times chaotic. It serves to complicate rather than explain or define the New York rapper’s own identity. She is an urban feminist, a ghetto bruja, an Afro-Latina, a New Yorker. She is all this and more. 1992 Deluxe confirms Princess Nokia’s versatility and wide-ranging musical education – the thematic range is matched by the eclecticism of the sonic influences here. On opening track ‘Bart Simpson’, she demonstrates masterful restraint and stamina, but on the confrontational ‘Kitana’ she spits fire over a hard-as-nails trap beat: “I step in this bitch and I do what I want / I don’t give a damn and I don’t give a fuck!”
James Holden The Animal SpiritsThe Animal SpiritsBorder Community
It’s quite a feat to create something so universal, something that uses so many influences to push outside of time and place, without erasing any of the specifics. There are risks with magpie-ing other people’s musical cultures, and Holden has talked about them: “Do you take this foreign music and squash it into your paradigm? Is that okay to do that? … No, it would really disrespectful… It has to be a meeting in the middle… Otherwise, it’s going to be something offensive, exoticism.” And on this album it works – this is a meeting of so many people, ideas, energies, “maximum individualism within the framework of spontaneous egalitarian interaction,” as jazz musician George Lewis wrote, and it is wonderful.
KelelaTake Me ApartWarp
This is a record that deals frankly with relationships and sex – ‘S.O.S.’, for example, finds her texting a lover asking them to come around (“I could touch myself babe, but it’s not the same if you could stop and help me out”). There’s a visceral rawness to the whole thing, but none of it feels overbearing – instead, it’s delicate, deliberate, and highly curated. It’s telling that some of the songs on Take Me Apart have actually existed for years, but are only coming out now – with striking prescience, as early as 2013 Kelela knew that she wanted tracks like ‘Enough’ and ‘Jupiter’ for an album, not the tape or the EP (“I knew when some things were born they just weren’t ready to be shared, because it didn’t fit the trajectory – this is not first season, this is deep in!”).
Nadine ShahHoliday Destination1965
Heavy topics don’t have to be delivered heavy-handedly, and Nadine Shah’s third album is deft in dealing with uncomfortable subject matter and the vexed issue of how we treat our fellow human beings. As a second-generation immigrant – her father is Pakistani and her mother is English of Norwegian descent – Shah is well placed to tackle these thorny issues head-on, offering a refreshing take from a perspective that rarely gets a look in. For this second-generation immigrant, there’s a moment of air-punching validation on ‘Out The Way’ when Shah hits back at those detractors and trolls: “Where would you have me go? / I’m second-generation don’t you know?” Holiday Destination isn’t easy listening but nor is it uncomfortable. Shah is smart enough to apply nuance along with light and shade. This doesn’t feel like a jab to the chest or an empty slogan barked from a megaphone, but the start of an ongoing and developing dialogue. Consequently, the album’s joys and rewards open slowly and incrementally, and with each repeated visit come new rewards.
The MoonlandingzInterplanetary Class ClassicsTransgressive
Right from the first song, ‘Vessels’, there’s filthy motorik stomp, grabby synth riffs, soaring swirling B-movie sci-fi electronics and just a lot of very very good songwriting. Saoudi’s voice is sad and sinister, fuzzy; often he’s screeching and yowling, occasionally he has a touch of Vic Reeves’ club style or the R White’s secret lemonade drinker, then there’s that arch Nick Cave spookiness, then he is plaintive, desperate, appalled and fascinated by human proclivities. As with Fat White Family, there’s plenty of prodding at open wounds and a disdain for social propriety. ‘Lufthanza Man’, for example, is a singalong tune about the Germanwings pilot who crashed his plane into the Alps, killing 150 passengers and crew; it manages to look straight at the mindboggling horror of it with a kind of sweet melancholy, as well as an excellent scuzzy riff that sounds a bit like Wings’ ‘Live And Let Die’ and retro space-travel beeps and swooshes.
Fever RayPlungeRabid
Karin Dreijer’s second Fever Ray album transforms lust into something radical and liberating. On the jittery ‘This Country’, she goes as far as to imagine herself as a sort of flesh-seeking freedom fighter, her libido flattened by a tyrannical state that “makes it hard to fuck”. She battles back with S&M (“Gag me, awake my fighting spirit”) and utopian turn-ons (“Free abortions! And clean water!”), boiling down her resistance into a simple manifesto: “Every time we fuck, we win.” We can overcome, in other words; we can come.
ZimpelZioekZimpel/ZiołekInstant Classic
The forces of nature manifest themselves on Zimpel/Ziołek through a sort of organic, sequiturial logic, snaking from one moment to the next like a vine clambering up the side of a house. Several of the arpeggios and looped phrases the duo use are almost childishly simple, even if they’re then rearranged and deployed with increasing rhythmic complexity. It brings to mind the mathematical logic visible throughout the natural world – the Fibonacci sequence in a tree’s branches, the fractals in a fern, the symmetry of a snowflake.
Richard DawsonPeasantDomino
Dawson has described Peasant as “a panorama of a society which is at odds with itself and has great sickness in it, and perhaps doesn’t take responsibility – blame is going in all the wrong directions.” The community portrayed on the album is certainly imbued with a sense of fractiousness, but it’s clear that the potential for change is always there. The album’s bleakest lines are always mirrored by unremittingly positive counterparts. On ‘Soldier’, “I am tired, I am afraid, my heart is full of dread” alternates with “My heart is full of hope”; on ‘Ogre’ the refrain of “When the sun is dying” is offset by the lyric “when the sun is climbing”. While we may be beggars, prostitutes or ogres, there is always the potential for change.
- 1: Richard Dawson – Peasant
- 2: Zimpel/Ziołek – Zimpel/Ziołek
- 3: Fever Ray – Plunge
- 4: The Moonlandingz – Interplanetary Class Classics
- 5: Nadine Shah – Holiday Destination
- 6: Kelela – Take Me Apart
- 7: James Holden & The Animal Spirits – The Animal Spirits
- 8: Princess Nokia – 1992
- 9: Lone Taxidermist – Trifle
- 10: Oxbow – Thin Black Duke
- 11: Liars – TFCF
- 12: Lotto – VV
- 13: Call Super – Arpo
- 14: Snapped Ankles – Come Play The Trees
- 15: Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs – Feed The Rats
- 16: Laura Cannell – Hunter Huntress Hawker
- 17: GNOD – Just Say No To The Psycho Right-Wing Capitalist Fascist Industrial Death Machine
- 18: Jane Weaver – Modern Kosmology
- 19: Circle – Terminal
- 20: Rûwâhîne – Ifriqiyya Electrique
- 21: Man Forever – Play What They Want
- 22: Madonnatron – Madonnatron
- 23: Endon – Through The Mirror
- 24: Algiers – The Underside Of Power
- 25: Justin Walter – Unseen Forces
- 26: BNNT – The Multiverse
- 27: $hit & $hine – Total Shit!
- 28: Nicole Mitchell – Mandorla Awakening II: Emerging Worlds
- 29: Vanishing – Vanishing
- 30: Vince Staples – Big Fish Theory
- 31: Björk – Utopia
- 32: Arca – Arca
- 33: Thurston Moore – Rock N Roll Consciousness
- 34: Re-TROS – Before The Applause
- 35: Jlin – Black Origami
- 36: Kemper Norton – Hungan
- 37: Chloe x Halle – The Two Of Us
- 38: The Granite Shore – Suspended Second
- 39: The Caretaker – Everywhere At The End Of Time – Stage 3
- 40: Teleplasmiste – Frequency Is The New Ecstasy
- 41: Botanist – Collective: The Shape Of He To Come
- 42: British Sea Power – Let The Dancers Inherit The Party
- 43: Al-Namrood – Enkar
- 44: LCD Soundsystem – American Dream
- 45: Visible Cloaks – Reassemblage
- 46: Perc – Bitter Music
- 47: Gazelle Twin – Kingdom Come
- 48: Gary Numan – Savage
- 49: Errorsmith – Superlative Fatigue
- 50: Alan Vega – IT
- 51: Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith – The Kid
- 52: Deaf Kids – Configuração do Lamento
- 53: The Inward Circles – And Right Lines Limit And Close All Bodies
- 54: I, Ludicrous – Songs From The Sides Of Lorries
- 55: Japan Blues – Sells His Record Collection
- 56: Powertrip – Nightmare Logic
- 57: Riddlore – Afro Mutations
- 58: Chastity Belt – I Used To Spend So Much Time Alone
- 59: Godflesh – Post Self
- 60: Davy Kehoe – Short Passing Game
- 61: Total Leatherette – For The Climax Of The Night
- 62: Electric Wizard – Wizard Bloody Wizard
- 63: Rainforest Spiritual Enslavement – Ambient Black Magic
- 64: Colleen – A Flame My Love, A Frequency
- 65: J Hus – Common Sense
- 66: Unsane – Sterilize
- 67: Ryuichi Sakamoto – Async
- 68: SZA – Ctrl
- 69: Lee Gamble – Mnestic Pressure
- 70: MXLX – Kicking Away At The Decrepit Walls Til The Beautiful Sunshine Blisters Thru The Cracks
- 71: Siavash Amini – TAR
- 72: Yossarians – Fabric Of Time
- 73: UUUU – UUUU
- 74: Hey Colossus – The Guillotine
- 75: Sleaford Mods – English Tapas
- 76: Sote – Sacred Horror In Design
- 77: Laraaji – Bring On The Sun
- 78: Stormzy – Gang Signs & Prayer
- 79: Laibach – Also Sprach Zarathustra
- 80: STILL – I
- 81: Bargou 08 – Targ
- 82: Aquaserge – Laisse ça être
- 83: M.E.S.H. – Hesaitix
- 84: Part Chimp – IV
- 85: Daniel O’Sullivan – Veld
- 86: Mario Batkovic – Mario Batkovic
- 87: Wire – Silver/Lead
- 88: Laurel Halo – Dust
- 89: MHYSA – Fantasii
- 90: King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard – Murder Of The Universe
- 91: Hannah Peel – Mary Casio: Journey To Cassiopeia
- 92: Vivienne – STUD
- 93: Mogwai – Every Country’s Sun
- 94; Actress – AZD
- 95: Rose Dougall – Stellular
- 96: Simon Fisher Turner – Giraffe
- 97: Cardi B – Gangsta Bitch Music, Vol. 2
- 98: Akatombo – Short Fuse
- 99: The Bug Vs Earth – Concrete Desert
- 100: Tetragrammacide – Primal Incinerators Of Moral Matrix
