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As part of our ongoing celebrations of a decade of The Quietus, we asked our dozens upon dozens of fantastic contributors to pick their favourite albums of the site's existence. Below is their top 100, with an introduction by tQ staff writer Patrick Clarke
It has now, as you will no doubt have seen, been a decade since The Quietus first came into existence. The celebrations have been emboldening to see, tQ alumn Daniel Dylan Wray’s excellent piece in Huck on the history of the site, for example, or this special show on BBC 6 Music, or Krent Able’s brilliant new Quietus merch.
What makes tQ truly the greatest music website on earth (something I thought long before John Doran offered me a job here after I cornered him in a Butlin’s), goes far beyond our tiny, tireless crew of office staff. Our greatest strength lies in the network of extraordinary writers scattered around the globe, writers young and old, established and new, who provide some of the most genuinely authoritative and deeply passionate voices on a colossal array of music, art, film and opinion.
As the newest and most junior member of tQ’s core staff, I’ve seen first-hand just how devoted this website is to fostering those voices. It was heartening as an intern to see my writing treated with the same scrutiny by my editors as it would were it written by one of modern music journalism’s undisputed greats, many of whom have also written here. Through the revolving door of interns and pitches, I’ve seen that same philosophy extended time and time again as rafts of young writers join our ranks; no matter how experienced or what their taste, if they’re good enough tQ has found them a place. To speak personally, having been told time and time again that long-form music journalism is no longer a viable career, the Quietus bucked that trend and gave me a foot in a door that it had seemed was shut for good.
It is part of my job here to assemble our regular writers’ top 40 features, and while it is often administrative hell to wrangle the final text onto our malformed CMS, it is always a pleasure to sift through the submissions we get back, to gain their insight into our writers’ favourite books about music, or their favourite genre compilation albums, for example. I end up learning just as much about music as I hope our readers do.
It felt only right, then, to celebrate our contributors with a definitive top 100 records of The Quietus’ decade of existence, which you can read below. While you’re at it, please do consider purchasing them from our pals at Norman Records, whose links are after each entry where available, and please also consider making either a regular or one-off donation to help keep this wonderful website afloat. The best place to contribute is right HERE.
Please note, that this was not compiled in the way that our albums of the year lists are. While those are compiled chiefly by the core office crew, this time we threw the polling out to anyone and everyone who has contributed to the site. As a result there’s a few surprises in there, bands and artists that you might not have otherwise expected to make it into a chart compiled just by the five of us.
What you can see below was compiled, in alphabetical order, by Kiran Acharya, Teju Adeleye, Jeremy Allen, Aida Amoako, Aimee Armstrong, Elizabeth Aubrey, Joe Banks, Angus Batey, Tristan Bath, Denzil Bell, Tom Bolton, Lottie Brazier, Bernie Brooks, Jenny Bulley, Cal Cashin, Patrick Clarke, Stevie Chick, Joe Clay, Brian Coney, Russell Cuzner, John Doran, Christian Eede, Olamiju Fajemisin, John Freeman, Dustin Krcatovich, Noel Gardner, Diva Harris, Phillip Harrison, Nick Hutchings, Veronica Irwin, Tara Joshi, Julian Marszalek, Joel McIver, J.R. Moores, Jazz Monroe, Ben Myers, Lucy O’Brien, Lior Phillips, Ned Raggett, Pete Redrup, Chris Roberts, Barnaby Smith, Stewart Smith, Aug Stone, Adelle Stripe, Harry Sword, Eden Tizard, Luke Turner, Ian Wade, Wyndham Wallace, Kez Whelan, Anna Wood and Mollie Zhang.
Replica, then, marks a kind of transition. It finds Lopatin moving away from these huge, propulsive productions towards a more fragmented and sprawling approach, although those expertly judged, eerie atmospherics remain intact.
It’s a record that demands to be noticed and taken seriously, a slab of bruised, melancholic and throbbing rock that cannot be ignored. Just when it seemed that straight-up guitar music was dead, The Horrors have managed to wring a few more drops of life from it, and in the process prove that first impressions aren’t permanent.
Potent and full-blooded next to their debut’s amorphous, blurry post-rock, Your Mercury crafts a distinctive alloy of transcendental juju and Noise’s junk art sensibility, toughened with marauding sci-fi Brit-prog, and occasionally blessed by minimalist ambience in the 80s post-Cluster vein.
Titling the opening track ‘Turn It Up’ is no empty instruction – and there’s a predatory, serrated edge that’s absent in most of the house contemporaries you might otherwise file it alongside. In fact, it’s one of the more sinister dance records I’ve heard in a while, precisely because everything you might expect to hear in a DFA club track is present and correct, but used in a way that feels harsher, starker and slightly sadistic.
The Kesh exist to tell us (in the words of the late great Jim Bowen), “Here’s what you could have won” – but it’s an encouragement rather than a bitter solace. Part of what’s amazing about this album is just how deeply good it feels to listen to it. In the book, Le Guin writes that “All we ever have is here, now,” but in every note of the album we are reminded that (to quote various anarchists, although Jim Bowen would doubtless have agreed) another world is possible.
“Breakup album” seems a trite term, a genre too trivially mopey to fit this unflinching, devastating exploration. That sounds melodramatic, but Vulnicura is so intimate in its agonies, so clinical in its dissection that your brain, listening, tries to hide from it as if the pain was its own; and, as if the pain was its own, cannot.
The first new studio LP from the Oumou Sangaré to be released outside of Mali since 1996 (2001’s Laban was promoted only in her home country), Seya proves an affirmation of the sheer prowess that the so-called ‘songbird of Wassoulou’ posseses. Sangaré’s stunning voice dominates the record but in a variety of ways, equally stunning on propulsive and confident opener ‘Sounsumba’ as it is on the album’s more meditative moments.
Dreamlike to its core, sounds are amplified to their breaking point, leaving them unrecognisable. Musing on themes of existentialism, Sakamoto utilises the Glass House to its fullest extent, scraping rubber mallets across its mic’d up glass walls and producing a dread-inducing wail through digital processing.
A lightening of the sonic load that jettisons the muddied tans and ochres of 2006’s Return To Cookie Mountain in favour of a technicolour template which frees the band up to explore some of their most funky and direct songwriting to date. It’s also a record that wears its heart on its sleeve more prominently than before, broadening the band’s emotional range to embrace the cautiously optimistic as well as the browbeaten, the rapt and the splenetic in one fell swoop.
On her second album, Sudanese-Italian singer Ameira Kheir doubles down on her extraordinary, semi-improvised blend of jazz, soul, and traditional music from Sudan. Topped with an exquisite voice and an unceasing eye for experimentation, Alsahraa is her essential release.
Unafraid of discord, they break so many rules for rhythmic music here. They slow down and speed up, they knowingly stumble and break out of time, they play themes for a little too long or a little too short period of time – but the compositional precision and sheer intent is incredible, and makes the entire thing work. It’s a colossal achievement .
After making their return from a 10-year exile with 2004’s Love Songs For Patriots, The Golden Age sees the pioneers of so-called slowcore cement their return by bettering that first comeback record. A glistening, expansive and emotional piece, bolstered by some of Mark Eitzel’s finest songwriting to date, it ranks among the band’s absolute best..
With each passing release, Le Bon’s being labeled as a folk artist becomes ever more confounding, and threatens to pigeonhole her as something far more bucolic and traditional than she actually is. She’s already on her way, but here’s hoping Le Bon can one day shuck off the trappings of “freak folk” by becoming that real rarity – a 21st century career artist.
The debut album from Ólafur Arnalds and Bloodgroup’s Janus Rasmussen’s collaborative project Kiasmos rewards a patient listener with a single, gorgeous weave of ebbing, emotional electronics, inflected with ambience, strings, and yearning mid-tempo beats.
Slower, grimmer, prone to slipping into sidereal currents but still repping a spumescent avant punk noise blowout versed in the temporal black magic of experimental electronics and dub, this isn’t what many would want but this is what many deserve. An unholy and timely acid test for the Trump era. The soundtrack to signing out, getting blasted and letting your head melt.
By the time the disk has finished, each musician gracefully dropping out to leave the omnipresent sinewave to fade alone, you realise how affecting the journey’s been and how sharpened your hearing has become by the experience. A distant road, birdsong, an aeroplane, the refrigerator and your own bloodstream all seem to conspire to continue the flow for a while
There’s a lot of density to this record and sometimes I worry that it’s too dense. The arrangements are very simple, in my opinion. I kind of just write them out and there wasn’t a lot of changing, just a little bit of improvising.
On its release, Lulu was deemed by tQ to be “a candidate for one of the worst albums ever made.” Now the dust has settled, we can all agree that this radical meeting of minds is not only a grower but a post-metal tour de force. As David Bowie put it to Laurie Anderson, “This is Lou’s greatest work. This is his masterpiece. Just wait, it will be like Berlin. It will take everyone a while to catch up.” There will never be another Lou Reed. And there will certainly never be another album quite like this mad swansong.
82.
The BodyI Have Fought Against It, But I Can’t Any LongerThrill Jockey, 2018
Despite shedding metal’s generic trappings almost completely, The Body have created some of the heaviest and most intense music we’ve heard this year, a devastating multi-faceted gut-punch of a record that asks you to come face to face your most primordial, deep-seated fears, acknowledge and accept your failings and emerge from the experience a stronger person.
This album represents the outlandish innovation and fun that defines so many of the UK’s independent arts and music collectives, and does so with a smile on its face and a sharp wooden tongue driven firmly into its cheek. Snapped Ankles, and many more like them, whether they would care to admit it or not, stand for that which enriches the blood of our wonky creative corners. Long may the likes of them clatter.
Black Messiah is part ‘What’s Goin’ On’, part ‘Let’s Get It On’, and well worthy of sitting alongside D’Angelo’s brilliant back catalogue. Here’s to his future and, by God it is good to have him back.
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