"Take a good look at my face, and if my smile looks out of place, then you could do worse than have a listen to my tracks of the year" - sing it, it scans pretty well.
34. Chairlift - I Belong In Your Arms
This may be another thing that got me into Fleetwood Mac, seeing a review of this that said it sounded like a Christine McVie song. So I listened to her songs off Tango in The Night and it really does, but with more of a John Hughes film vibe mixed into it too. Terrifying thing - the 80's revival has lasted longer than the 80's at this point. Even scarier, the 50's has been revived even longer. The second it goes, it gets revived, but I'm wondering what from the 2010s will be revived and revisited - possibly there'll be loads of stuff that sounds like Burial. Simon Reynolds is right again, but you all knew that. Retromania writ large. All that aside, what really matters is that this is a fantastic, wintry sounding synth-pop song, and I love it. There's an abundance of great hooks crammed into it's short running time; I hate the term "perfect pop" but if such a thing exists (and it doesn't) this is a great example of it.
33. Aht Uh Mi Head - Shuggie Otis (from Inspiration Information)
Another most certainly not from this year but it really sounds like it could be, doesn't it? All I knew about Shuggie Otis up to the point of listening to it was that he was an early adopter of the drum machine and you can hear a primitive drum machine sputtering away on this one along with an almost toy like organ sound. If you brought a track that sounded like this out now it would still sound fresh, and that could be said if it came out any year since 1974 when it originally did. There's a run on theme in these last two choices of sorts that's painful to write out but simple to just realise - Aht Uh Mi Head sounds both AHEAD of it's time and OF it's time. Just as with the Disco Inferno choice before, you get the impression that if Shuggie was making this record now he'd use the technology and equipment available to him, not engage in pointless retro fetishism, but even if he did his voice is soulful as all hell so you'd forgive him.
32. Usher - Climax (from Scream)
Ugh. "Alternative R&B". What an oxymoron - it has been the mainstream, the mainstay of the charts for years now. I can see the Reynolds argument that some of it is so sonically inventive you can't help but like it, and in a few cases I agree. A good pop song is a good pop song, and there are plenty of artists like James Blake, The Xx, How To Dress Well and the like for who R&B was a big influence on their work, and know what it's been a big influence on mine too, it being inescapable as it is. I just can't help but think that while artists should be kicking against the pricks what they seem to be doing is in fact slobbering all over them. Good pop is good pop, good music is good music but a lot of it isn't good music, it's just Guetta shite with ill thought out misogynistic drool all over it. Homophobia from the mouths of preening manicured vest wearing tarts. And frankly, who needs that?
My problem with a lot of the so called R&B stuff coming out now is there's no blues anymore in there, the soul influence is pretty much dead replaced with a mix of the worst novelty hip hop records and the worst (and there are very few good ones) in sidechained chart dance music. There's no blues, just a wall of neon, the blues replaced with a dead behind the eyes hedonistic nihilism. Which is fine if you sound good but it doesn't, it's designed to be the soundtrack to predatory men cornering lonely cokehead girls on the dancefloor, same in every town.
But this record you do need in your life. That strain of R&B-influenced post-dubstep stuff influenced this R&B chart smash, and it really is good. There's a strain of melancholy in a lot of this stuff that's quite easy to pick out - "Dance like it's the last night of your life", anyone, but this takes it to another level. The vocal performance and production are great - not a spot of Autotune, tasteful use of falsetto, gentle dubstep-esque rhythms in the chorus. I've not liked many of his tracks but this one is excellent.
31. Cocorosie - Beautiful Boyz (from Noah's Ark)
Not a new one. I'm going to stop saying that before every track that isn't, this one was new to me. It features Antony Hegarty, which improves most things - here he sings the chorus which passed the litmus test for a great pop song by lodging in my head whenever the song is mentioned. The woman from Cocorosie who sings and whose name I don't know is really good too, her delivery mirroring Antony's in its unhinged beauty. The song is about Jean Genet, apparently, a writer who I also investigated this year to see what the fuss was about and I found him quite interesting. In a parallel universe this would've went to Number One and stayed there for ages when it came out, a sane universe that is. I found this through How To Dress Well's Live Yourself mix, so thanks to that guy.
30. Whitehouse - Cut Hands Has The Solution (from Bird Seed)
I've not actually checked out much Whitehouse, what I have done I've liked but it falls into the trap a lot of noise acts do of the output being pretty homogenous. Which is fine if you like it but it's something I can take or leave. The problem I have with a lot of art that is aimed at challenging and shocking me is I just find it really funny and actually quite conservative in the way that it goes for the easy mission of "winding up liberals" which A) is like shooting fish in a barrel and B) having the same homophobic, misogynist, racist attitudes as the ruling classes isn't exactly a blow against the status quo, is it? On the other hand, in the interest of balance, you could make the point (as I sometimes do somewhat optimistically) that by juxtaposing these outdated attitudes with references to far-right politics, rape and serial killers, these artists are actually pointing out how harmful these mainstream but ugly views are. In the case of people like William Bennett and Dominic Fernow, I'd think this is actually the case as they're obviously very intelligent people.
Cut Hands Has The Solution does not fail, because with very few ingredients (I like cooking metaphors) it engenders a reaction in me which I found very surprising. Just one monotonous plodding drum beat trudging on, and on, and on, some whirring electronic tones and a voice alternatively shouting and speaking in a calm but slightly terse manner. The text read out mixes the language of self-help with references to self-harm and strange methods of torture, and as with the best records it's hard to explain why it's good. It just is. It may not be to your taste. It may be your taste. But I'll tell you, it's helping, I'll tell you, you're doing the right thing.
29. Holy Other - Touch
Again, I find it hard how to explain why I like this, but as with Burial, Holy Other is not a cult of personality act, just a guy anonymously making great music and manipulating (presumably) the sampled voice of others to speak his message. In a way this idea is another way of the listener projecting their own preferred meaning onto a text, whether it be a song or a photo or a literal text, inventing their own backstory and a whole inner life of the song. In this case the only lyrics are "I've been looking for your touch", and "Everything you touch" sang in that same androgynous alien cut-up way as the voice on Burial's Archangel (or loads of other Burial songs).
Holy Other's name read aloud is also Wholly Other and he both is and isn't. Loads of people are doing stuff like this, it's just they're not doing it on a trendy well promoted label (spot any bitterness?). To be fair, nor are they doing it as well as he does, presumably. There's got to be some kind of limit on music this transcendent. It's all build, build, but when it switches and gets more 2-steppy it's a real eargasm moment. Slinky and spooky, like the best in electronic music.
28. Grimes - Oblivion (from Visions)
The soul and R&B thing's big this year, eh? It certainly fed into Grimes, who listed two of her biggest inspirations as Mariah Carey and Marilyn Manson - but she's better than both of them, so that's okay. Oblivion is a lovely, sighing helium-high falsetto pop song that reminded me more than anything of something Annie would do when I first heard it. The wisps of alien backing vocals and self harmonies here make me a bit jealous, and if I sang along all the nearby dogs would join in with me. The R&B influence is less obvious than on, say, How To Dress Well but it's there in the inventive percussion and melismatic vocals it just happens that here it's accompanied by synths that could be from a peak era Depeche Mode track. Definitely not a bad thing at all.
Makes perfect sense that Grimes is signed to 4AD, there's a kind of continuity between her vocal style and that of Elizabeth Fraser, where the words are almost secondary. Here the phrase "See you in the dark night" flits around and refuses to leave your head. Litmus test for a great record passed - it's staying in your head whether you like it or not.
27. The Weekend - XO/The Host (from Echoes of Silence)
From a free mixtape last year but re-released with added tracks as part of the Trilogy album, XO/The Host is the extended prog-R&B centerpiece of the Echoes of Silence tape from around this time last year (you've gotta love it - release three great free albums last year then reissue them "remastered" as a physical release. The remasters sound worse than the originals too). The lyrical content of this one is pretty standard, unabashed victim blaming, misogyny and cash-flashing as you'd expect. It's a world I want nothing to do with but The Weeknd makes it interesting by acknowledging the ugliness of it all. Technically it's lyrically well crafted and Abel Tesfae has a great voice, but it's all about the production for me.
The stabs of distorted guitar, wavering synthetic strings, semi-dubstep drum programming (soon to be R&B's new tiresome trope but for now it still works), ghostly backing vocals and that segue into the The Host section where the regular drums drop out to be replaced by a slow, intermittent tattoo, that's what it's about for me. In this production what could be the thing of a tiresome Chris Brown stupid-fest takes on a whole new dimension, but the importance of Abel's phrasing and nuanced delivery definitely helps. It was hard to pick just one Weeknd track for me, so there'll be another later, as the House of Balloons and Echoes of Silence tapes are fantastic.
26. Scritti Politti - The Boom Boom Bap (from White Bread and Black Beer)
See, this guy knows where I'm coming from. Green Gartside, another reason to be proud of having Welsh roots, went from post-punk to producing lushly produced soul/R&B with lyrics a step up from the usual R&B fare (like "true as the Tractatus"), before getting more and more into hip hop and collaborating with hip hop. Part of the appeal for him could easily be the same as my own aesthetic attraction to The Weeknd and stuff of that sort - it's exotic, because you know that you'll probably never go there yourself. Green is also pretty heavily into folk music, and of course hip hop was a late 20th century form of folk music, one not as beloved by the real ale and beard stroking crowd but folk music nontheless just the same as punk was and dubstep is.
The Boom Boom Bap is lushly produced and I recoiled from it on first listen, that late 90's/early 2000's R&B sheen combined with his androgynous tenor made me think of some boyband atrocity. Then as the song progressed the real, beating heart of the song emerged. The lyrics are, again, excellent: "The yes yes y'all was the siren call to come around to our life", progressing through a verse consisting of Run DMC songtitles (Hard times, Sucker MCs) to the closing lines "I love you still, I always will". It's open to your interpretation I guess who that's addressed to. Is it addressed to hip hop; is it addressed to the listener, or someone he knows; or is it addressed to music itself? I don't know. It doesn't matter.
25. Julian Cope - Roswell (from Psychedelic Revolution)
The thing I like about Julian Cope is the same thing I like about The Fall and hip hop. I like prolific artists who weed things out less, who don't abide by the one 10 - 13 track album every 3 years schedule. With more and more artists releasing independently there's less and less need to stick to the release model of a rapidly fading industry. Well, it pretends it's fading, the sales of the Adele album and some others recently speak for themselves. Albums don't outsell Dark Side of the Moon in a time when people aren't buying music, people! Some people are still buying music - just a shame record company employees are being sacked to make up for the funds lost and shops are closing instead of the executives taking fewer holidays and living in, say, just one house. Downloading is a convenient excuse to behave like an avaricious pig.
Now onto talking about the artist. Julian Cope is a great singer and songwriter, and this gets overlooked in favour of talking about his madness. He reminds me a lot of Bowie, which isn't because he sounds a lot like him but because they have roughly the same two big prominent influences - Scott Walker and Iggy Pop, even if he doesn't like Scott much anymore. As important as Cope's madness is to his work, the fact he's a stone cold genius is too often ignored. I think the reason a lot of critics ignore him is that not only is he an immensely talented artist but he does their job better than them too! This track reminds me a bit of a more meditative Safesurfer which can only be a good thing, but here he keeps a less is more approach right until the end. Whatever I wrote about this song itself wouldn't do it justice, so just play it.
34. Chairlift - I Belong In Your Arms
This may be another thing that got me into Fleetwood Mac, seeing a review of this that said it sounded like a Christine McVie song. So I listened to her songs off Tango in The Night and it really does, but with more of a John Hughes film vibe mixed into it too. Terrifying thing - the 80's revival has lasted longer than the 80's at this point. Even scarier, the 50's has been revived even longer. The second it goes, it gets revived, but I'm wondering what from the 2010s will be revived and revisited - possibly there'll be loads of stuff that sounds like Burial. Simon Reynolds is right again, but you all knew that. Retromania writ large. All that aside, what really matters is that this is a fantastic, wintry sounding synth-pop song, and I love it. There's an abundance of great hooks crammed into it's short running time; I hate the term "perfect pop" but if such a thing exists (and it doesn't) this is a great example of it.
33. Aht Uh Mi Head - Shuggie Otis (from Inspiration Information)
Another most certainly not from this year but it really sounds like it could be, doesn't it? All I knew about Shuggie Otis up to the point of listening to it was that he was an early adopter of the drum machine and you can hear a primitive drum machine sputtering away on this one along with an almost toy like organ sound. If you brought a track that sounded like this out now it would still sound fresh, and that could be said if it came out any year since 1974 when it originally did. There's a run on theme in these last two choices of sorts that's painful to write out but simple to just realise - Aht Uh Mi Head sounds both AHEAD of it's time and OF it's time. Just as with the Disco Inferno choice before, you get the impression that if Shuggie was making this record now he'd use the technology and equipment available to him, not engage in pointless retro fetishism, but even if he did his voice is soulful as all hell so you'd forgive him.
32. Usher - Climax (from Scream)
Ugh. "Alternative R&B". What an oxymoron - it has been the mainstream, the mainstay of the charts for years now. I can see the Reynolds argument that some of it is so sonically inventive you can't help but like it, and in a few cases I agree. A good pop song is a good pop song, and there are plenty of artists like James Blake, The Xx, How To Dress Well and the like for who R&B was a big influence on their work, and know what it's been a big influence on mine too, it being inescapable as it is. I just can't help but think that while artists should be kicking against the pricks what they seem to be doing is in fact slobbering all over them. Good pop is good pop, good music is good music but a lot of it isn't good music, it's just Guetta shite with ill thought out misogynistic drool all over it. Homophobia from the mouths of preening manicured vest wearing tarts. And frankly, who needs that?
My problem with a lot of the so called R&B stuff coming out now is there's no blues anymore in there, the soul influence is pretty much dead replaced with a mix of the worst novelty hip hop records and the worst (and there are very few good ones) in sidechained chart dance music. There's no blues, just a wall of neon, the blues replaced with a dead behind the eyes hedonistic nihilism. Which is fine if you sound good but it doesn't, it's designed to be the soundtrack to predatory men cornering lonely cokehead girls on the dancefloor, same in every town.
But this record you do need in your life. That strain of R&B-influenced post-dubstep stuff influenced this R&B chart smash, and it really is good. There's a strain of melancholy in a lot of this stuff that's quite easy to pick out - "Dance like it's the last night of your life", anyone, but this takes it to another level. The vocal performance and production are great - not a spot of Autotune, tasteful use of falsetto, gentle dubstep-esque rhythms in the chorus. I've not liked many of his tracks but this one is excellent.
31. Cocorosie - Beautiful Boyz (from Noah's Ark)
Not a new one. I'm going to stop saying that before every track that isn't, this one was new to me. It features Antony Hegarty, which improves most things - here he sings the chorus which passed the litmus test for a great pop song by lodging in my head whenever the song is mentioned. The woman from Cocorosie who sings and whose name I don't know is really good too, her delivery mirroring Antony's in its unhinged beauty. The song is about Jean Genet, apparently, a writer who I also investigated this year to see what the fuss was about and I found him quite interesting. In a parallel universe this would've went to Number One and stayed there for ages when it came out, a sane universe that is. I found this through How To Dress Well's Live Yourself mix, so thanks to that guy.
30. Whitehouse - Cut Hands Has The Solution (from Bird Seed)
I've not actually checked out much Whitehouse, what I have done I've liked but it falls into the trap a lot of noise acts do of the output being pretty homogenous. Which is fine if you like it but it's something I can take or leave. The problem I have with a lot of art that is aimed at challenging and shocking me is I just find it really funny and actually quite conservative in the way that it goes for the easy mission of "winding up liberals" which A) is like shooting fish in a barrel and B) having the same homophobic, misogynist, racist attitudes as the ruling classes isn't exactly a blow against the status quo, is it? On the other hand, in the interest of balance, you could make the point (as I sometimes do somewhat optimistically) that by juxtaposing these outdated attitudes with references to far-right politics, rape and serial killers, these artists are actually pointing out how harmful these mainstream but ugly views are. In the case of people like William Bennett and Dominic Fernow, I'd think this is actually the case as they're obviously very intelligent people.
Cut Hands Has The Solution does not fail, because with very few ingredients (I like cooking metaphors) it engenders a reaction in me which I found very surprising. Just one monotonous plodding drum beat trudging on, and on, and on, some whirring electronic tones and a voice alternatively shouting and speaking in a calm but slightly terse manner. The text read out mixes the language of self-help with references to self-harm and strange methods of torture, and as with the best records it's hard to explain why it's good. It just is. It may not be to your taste. It may be your taste. But I'll tell you, it's helping, I'll tell you, you're doing the right thing.
29. Holy Other - Touch
Again, I find it hard how to explain why I like this, but as with Burial, Holy Other is not a cult of personality act, just a guy anonymously making great music and manipulating (presumably) the sampled voice of others to speak his message. In a way this idea is another way of the listener projecting their own preferred meaning onto a text, whether it be a song or a photo or a literal text, inventing their own backstory and a whole inner life of the song. In this case the only lyrics are "I've been looking for your touch", and "Everything you touch" sang in that same androgynous alien cut-up way as the voice on Burial's Archangel (or loads of other Burial songs).
Holy Other's name read aloud is also Wholly Other and he both is and isn't. Loads of people are doing stuff like this, it's just they're not doing it on a trendy well promoted label (spot any bitterness?). To be fair, nor are they doing it as well as he does, presumably. There's got to be some kind of limit on music this transcendent. It's all build, build, but when it switches and gets more 2-steppy it's a real eargasm moment. Slinky and spooky, like the best in electronic music.
28. Grimes - Oblivion (from Visions)
The soul and R&B thing's big this year, eh? It certainly fed into Grimes, who listed two of her biggest inspirations as Mariah Carey and Marilyn Manson - but she's better than both of them, so that's okay. Oblivion is a lovely, sighing helium-high falsetto pop song that reminded me more than anything of something Annie would do when I first heard it. The wisps of alien backing vocals and self harmonies here make me a bit jealous, and if I sang along all the nearby dogs would join in with me. The R&B influence is less obvious than on, say, How To Dress Well but it's there in the inventive percussion and melismatic vocals it just happens that here it's accompanied by synths that could be from a peak era Depeche Mode track. Definitely not a bad thing at all.
Makes perfect sense that Grimes is signed to 4AD, there's a kind of continuity between her vocal style and that of Elizabeth Fraser, where the words are almost secondary. Here the phrase "See you in the dark night" flits around and refuses to leave your head. Litmus test for a great record passed - it's staying in your head whether you like it or not.
27. The Weekend - XO/The Host (from Echoes of Silence)
From a free mixtape last year but re-released with added tracks as part of the Trilogy album, XO/The Host is the extended prog-R&B centerpiece of the Echoes of Silence tape from around this time last year (you've gotta love it - release three great free albums last year then reissue them "remastered" as a physical release. The remasters sound worse than the originals too). The lyrical content of this one is pretty standard, unabashed victim blaming, misogyny and cash-flashing as you'd expect. It's a world I want nothing to do with but The Weeknd makes it interesting by acknowledging the ugliness of it all. Technically it's lyrically well crafted and Abel Tesfae has a great voice, but it's all about the production for me.
The stabs of distorted guitar, wavering synthetic strings, semi-dubstep drum programming (soon to be R&B's new tiresome trope but for now it still works), ghostly backing vocals and that segue into the The Host section where the regular drums drop out to be replaced by a slow, intermittent tattoo, that's what it's about for me. In this production what could be the thing of a tiresome Chris Brown stupid-fest takes on a whole new dimension, but the importance of Abel's phrasing and nuanced delivery definitely helps. It was hard to pick just one Weeknd track for me, so there'll be another later, as the House of Balloons and Echoes of Silence tapes are fantastic.
26. Scritti Politti - The Boom Boom Bap (from White Bread and Black Beer)
See, this guy knows where I'm coming from. Green Gartside, another reason to be proud of having Welsh roots, went from post-punk to producing lushly produced soul/R&B with lyrics a step up from the usual R&B fare (like "true as the Tractatus"), before getting more and more into hip hop and collaborating with hip hop. Part of the appeal for him could easily be the same as my own aesthetic attraction to The Weeknd and stuff of that sort - it's exotic, because you know that you'll probably never go there yourself. Green is also pretty heavily into folk music, and of course hip hop was a late 20th century form of folk music, one not as beloved by the real ale and beard stroking crowd but folk music nontheless just the same as punk was and dubstep is.
The Boom Boom Bap is lushly produced and I recoiled from it on first listen, that late 90's/early 2000's R&B sheen combined with his androgynous tenor made me think of some boyband atrocity. Then as the song progressed the real, beating heart of the song emerged. The lyrics are, again, excellent: "The yes yes y'all was the siren call to come around to our life", progressing through a verse consisting of Run DMC songtitles (Hard times, Sucker MCs) to the closing lines "I love you still, I always will". It's open to your interpretation I guess who that's addressed to. Is it addressed to hip hop; is it addressed to the listener, or someone he knows; or is it addressed to music itself? I don't know. It doesn't matter.
25. Julian Cope - Roswell (from Psychedelic Revolution)
The thing I like about Julian Cope is the same thing I like about The Fall and hip hop. I like prolific artists who weed things out less, who don't abide by the one 10 - 13 track album every 3 years schedule. With more and more artists releasing independently there's less and less need to stick to the release model of a rapidly fading industry. Well, it pretends it's fading, the sales of the Adele album and some others recently speak for themselves. Albums don't outsell Dark Side of the Moon in a time when people aren't buying music, people! Some people are still buying music - just a shame record company employees are being sacked to make up for the funds lost and shops are closing instead of the executives taking fewer holidays and living in, say, just one house. Downloading is a convenient excuse to behave like an avaricious pig.
Now onto talking about the artist. Julian Cope is a great singer and songwriter, and this gets overlooked in favour of talking about his madness. He reminds me a lot of Bowie, which isn't because he sounds a lot like him but because they have roughly the same two big prominent influences - Scott Walker and Iggy Pop, even if he doesn't like Scott much anymore. As important as Cope's madness is to his work, the fact he's a stone cold genius is too often ignored. I think the reason a lot of critics ignore him is that not only is he an immensely talented artist but he does their job better than them too! This track reminds me a bit of a more meditative Safesurfer which can only be a good thing, but here he keeps a less is more approach right until the end. Whatever I wrote about this song itself wouldn't do it justice, so just play it.
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