‘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
John Doran
Alameda 5EurodromeInstant Classic
Matana RobertsCoin Coin Chapter 4: MemphisConstellation
John ZornTractatus Musico-PhilosophicusTzadik
Mega BogDolphineParadise Of Bachelors
MoEMette RasmussenTolerancia PicanteConrad 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.
WarmduscherTainted LunchThe Leaf Label
Laura Cannell Polly WrightSing As The Crow FliesBrawl
FenellaFenellaFire
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.
Gum Takes ToothArrowRocket Recordings
The MembranesWhat Nature Gives… Nature Takes AwayCherry Red
Meemo CommaSleepmossPlanet Mu
Thurston MooreSpirit CounselDaydream 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."
Carl Gari Abdullah MiniawyThe Act of Falling from the 8th FloorWhities
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.
Carter Tutti VoidTriumvirateConspiracy 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.
MeatraffleBastard MusicDelayed
SoteParallel PersiaDiagonal
Flicia AtkinsonThe Flower And The VesselShelter Press
Kate TempestThe Book Of Traps and LessonsFiction
King Midas SoundSolitudeCosmo 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.
