40.
TUTTI feels retrospective in the sense that Cosey Fanni Tutti doesn’t introduce anything strikingly unfamiliar to her sonic palette here, with its ambient closing tracks a retread back to Time To Tell. TUTTI though is essential in that it marks Cosey Fanni Tutti as the auteur of her own sound world, as well as being a strong facilitator, artist and collaborator.Cosey Fanni TuttiTUTTIConspiracy International
39.
While the higher end of the guitars and electronics ring in your ears, the bass notes are hitting at your central nervous system, stimulating your fight or flight response. It’s not to say that the music sounds panicky, but Four Bibles has energy. It has frazzled electric undercurrents, as on ‘(Decompression)’. Some of the tracks, like ‘Confession Bay’ and ‘Babes of Plague’, combine that frazzled energy with traditional enough song structures to play at being pop songs that could blot you out with noise at a hairpin turn.Hey ColossusFour BiblesALTER
38.
On Ghosteen, Cave leads us on an obsessive, almost desperate pursuit of the wondrous, and so strong are his creative powers that he finds it in a myriad of places, collecting and presenting them together as a singular work of art, a kaleidoscopic vision that is unlike anything he’s done before. But for all of this it would be too simplistic to view the record as just a catalogue of transcendent moments. He takes care to lace the work with reminders that these images and stories are, for all their brilliance, still fantasies.Nick Cave The Bad SeedsGhosteenGhosteen Ltd
37.
Each one of the tracks feeds off one another, trade processing power for instinct, make mistakes and rectify, awaken spirit within another. It’s a beautiful, worrying thing to witness – a machine that often knows more about us than we do ourselves beginning to find their own interpretation of its small world of human stimuli. But if PROTO’s central question is what are we heading toward, the answer must be a coming together.Holly HerndonPROTO4AD
36.
The few constants in the Family Drone’s history remain. There is still their wry sense of humour, for example, as seen in their incessant punning (final track ‘Jehovah’s Wetness’) and the name of the record itself – persuasive they are, gentle they certainly ain’t – and at its core this record is every ounce a sonic bludgeoning of the highest degree, as per. But what’s most enthralling about Gentle Persuaders is the way in which they harness their innate chaos, in particular the role that James Allsop’s baritone saxophone has come to play.Sly The Family DroneGentle PersuadersLove Love
35.
The Practice of Love reveals the sensitive humane core that was always behind Hval’s practice of enlightened dissent. The album develops an elegant approach to solving the existential problems of love, care and intimacy from the position of otherness. Hers is a margin taking over the centre. For all its epic signalling, the romantic immediacy of love as a disruptive big bang-like event is here missing, the title proving to be a bait. Instead, Hval harnesses the subversive power of gentleness.Jenny HvalThe Practice of LoveSacred Bones
34.
Originally composed in 1967, The Tiger’s Mind is one of Cornelius Cardew’s strangest and most elusive compositions, the work of a composer in the midst of transition from the post-Stockhausen complexity of his early work to the freer, more open-form work that emerges from his period with AMM and the Scratch Orchestra. It is a work rarely performed (and even more rarely recorded). Who better to take the piece on than Csrdew’s own biographer and one of his longest-standing collaborators and interpreters. Here he combines his tenderest piano playing with sounds of water, birds, fire, and so on. The results are as enchanting as Cardew’s own highly poetic score.John TilburyThe Tiger’s MindCubus
33.
Yao Bobby Simon GrabDiamonds
32.
It’s hard to listen to Alexander Tucker’s peculiar new album without Grumbling Fur’s most recent opus, Furfour, coming to mind. It’s his voice – whether multitracked as a solo artist or melded with Daniel O’Sullivan’s as part of Grumbling Fur. Tucker is blessed with a singular croon, one that manages the remarkable feat of being both deadpan and laced with emotion. Equally, there is a clear musical DNA in common between Furfour and Guild of the Asbestos Weaver that sets Tucker more clearly in the continuum of weird British electronica than O’Sullivan’s recent albums.Alexander TuckerGuild of the Asbestos WeaverThrill Jockey
31.
I Was Real is a tough record to summarise quickly. There’s jazz, blues, post rock and folk at least. There’s distinctly non-Western strands, a tranced, shamanistic fury to everything, and a deft application of different kinds of harmonic distortion. Yet, it’s not so demanding to hear. In fact, it’s pretty accessible. Nothing here is troubling, nothing jars or feels incongruous. I Was Real feels like an exercise in embracive multiculturalism, trans-historicism, and focussed, intense musicianship. Slippery to define or place, and all the better for it.75 Dollar BillI Was Real
Johnny Lamb
30.
I envisage Errant Monks as a kind of loose, all-hands-on-deck affair; beyond Charms, the Monk most likely to be familiar to readers is Neil Francis, also of Gnod and Terminal Cheesecake. The former of those bands are, to an extent, a signpost to Errant Monks’ own conviction, reinvention and anti-(music)-establishment politics, but more in a ‘if you like that try this’ way than an implication of one outfit hovering in the slipstream of another.Errant MonksPsychopposition / The Limit Experience
Noel Gardner
29.
Teeth of the Sea have excelled themselves on this highly rewarding record. Their collaborators – Chlöe Herington and Katharine Gifford as well as Magaletti, and the production skills of Erol Alkan – has given them a new polish, a sophistication, even. While there was never any doubting their psychedelic influences and their way with a groove, Wraith offers something more. Full of variety and unpredictability, like the best science fiction it maps out a dreamworld of our times, a tonic against the deathly thoughts of the small hours.Teeth of the SeaWraithRocket Recordings
28.
The vocals throughout Your Psyche’s Rainbow Panorama are spiritual, and uplifting at times, but this is certainly a mortal man, with mortal feelings. Speaking in the album notes, Njoku says that the record aims to be “experiential rather than narrative”, and this sentiment is felt throughout the entire work. Like the myriad of emotions explored here, the album is itself explorative and ever-changing. The pursuit of these free-flowing artistic values makes Njoku a rarified emblem in the R&B world.Tony NjokuYour Psyche’s Rainbow PanoramaSilent Kid
27.
Where 2016’s A Seat At The Table placed its focus on the black diaspora experience, When I Get Home doesn’t set out its intentions quite as boldly. Moving further away from the jaunty sheen of the True EP that made so many fall in love with Solange’s music earlier this decade, her latest album has more in common with the spiritual jazz of Alice Coltrane. With many of its tracks clocking in at under three minutes, When I Get Home has a collage-like, breezy feel to it with Solange largely eschewing traditional pop structures, weaving in various samples and interludes amongst her glossy vocals.SolangeWhen I Get HomeColumbia
26.
Border Ballads is a rich cartography of cello and viola contours, gentle piano streams that patter forth and dry up, all eddying and surging like a shaft of light piercing ragged clouds to illuminate, however briefly, a landscape in flux. The result is a deeply melancholic, reflective, evocative album that yet again shows the bizarrely marginal Skelton is in a class above and beyond the trite mundanity of most of the modern classical types doing the rounds at the moment, showing them up as the sonic lifestyle accessories they are.Richard SkeltonBorder BalladsAeolian Editions
25.
MSYLMA’s voice drips with sadness, anger, despair and hope, each line delivered in a wash of reverb and echo to make matters all the more otherworldly. To delve into Dhil-un Taht Shajarat Al-Zaqum is to submerge oneself into a dream world, drifting along or swallowed whole by Myslma’s bold combination of ragged electronics, subtle melodies and impassioned delivery. On ‘Li-Kul-i Murad-in Hijaa’, this explodes into a cosmic vortex as free-form drums, crackling guitar and buzzing bass all collide like a hurricane sweeping down on a house.MSYLMADhil-un Taht Shajarat Al-ZaqumHalcyon Veil
24.
It might be tempting to label International Teachers Of Pop escapist, but that does them a deep disservice. This is a deeply English-sounding record, and a clear product of a country that’s sinking further into despair; just because they don’t make some lame attempt to capture our complex national decline, that doesn’t mean they’re burying their heads in the sand. The joy on this record is a defiant one, a call to dance in the face of depression, in the knowledge that though nothing can be fixed, we can still have an excellent time when we all get together.International Teachers of PopInternational Teachers of PopDesolate Spools
23.
Listening to tracks like ‘Cuz I Love You’, ‘Exactly How I Feel’ featuring Gucci Mane – a welcome surprise – and ‘Better In Colour’ left me pretending I was in a modern rendition of Dreamgirls, hairbrush and all. A match made in thicc heaven, ‘Tempo’ features hip hop royalty Missy Elliot, two of the most notable artists to preach self-acceptance, telling negative individuals to do one while twerking. “If you see a hater, tell ‘em quit” is something we all need to hear and practice.LizzoCuz I Love YouNice Life
22.
The Comet Is Coming have been pushing jazz beyond its limits since their inception. However, on Trust in the Lifeforce of the Deep Mystery, the group seem to have finally broken through the atmosphere and are now soaring in uncharted territory. There’s no denying the importance of Alice Coltrane or Sun Ra as influences on the album but rather than being weighed down by those legacies, The Comet Is Coming have turned them into fuel, accelerating their sound, and with it, the sound of jazz today.The Comet Is ComingTrust in the Lifeforce of the Deep MysteryImpulse!
21.
FKA twigs’ music has always embodied the complexities of human sexuality. On earlier records, twigs framed eroticism as a tangled web of desire and repulsion, recklessness and anxiety, and tension and release. But by personalising the thematic content of MAGDALENE, she is able to wax lyrical on the productive forces that flow through sexuality and that sexuality flows through. Twigs still finds ferocious power in her music, her femininity, and her sexuality. But on MAGDALENE, she tempers that ferocity with a radical sensitivity and vulnerability that indicate a broader maturation in her artistic development.FKA TwigsMAGDALENEYoung Turks
