Kieran's Pretentious Crap: Favourite Albums/Songs of the Decade #30-21

Albums

30. Kill for Love - Chromatics

A sonic painting of a dense, futuristic but graspable cityscape. Textured nearly to the point of insipid perfection, it clogs every sense with a deep impassioned timbre. Tired synths and distant guitars float along Ruth Radelet’s disengaged, machinelike voice, troubled by the sinister social cessation of this nameless epoch. This is a world in which only pop music can be used to emotionally communicate; subsequently a world where Chromatics are kings. An enveloping atmosphere of longing for connection and tireless ardour, it’s a science-fiction noir-romance epic exploding through my speakers, and I love every second of it.

29. Ill Manors - Plan B

One of the best British albums of recent years is also one of the most (pleasantly) unexpected. I’d always associated Plan B with inoffensive Soul-Pop, largely ignoring everything he’d ever done before. Then Ill Manors pops up, and one thing it does particularly well is grab your attention. Following the aftermath of the London riots, Ben Drew’s patience with the demonization of the urban classes had withered. Loud, brash beats underscore Drew’s venomous, vilifying spits. Parallels can be drawn with his contemporary Killer Mike, but this political indictment hits closer to home. It’s Hip-Hop angrier, and more scathingly powerful, than I’ve ever heard it.

28. Kaputt - Destroyer

When people talk about the vast genre behemoth that is Indie Rock they generally ignore the jazz-infused Romantics which populate it. You know the bands, Dirty Projectors, Lambchop, and of course Destroyer. Since the late 90s Destroyer have been commanding this underappreciated niche, their wistful jaunts as memorably soothing as they are dissonantly critical. Kaputt bears an oracle’s wisdom, on, of all things, decadence and hedonism. The reverbed brass and mystified synths wander into the acid-dropped distance, leaving behind Bejar’s bemused pontification on the disappointments of superficial pleasures. The final track is suitably titled ‘Bay of Pigs,’ a reference to the hapless US invasion of Cuba in 1961, suggesting the vanity of excessive overambition.

27. Father, Son, Holy Ghost - Girls

Girls’s presence in music remains mythological, an ephemeral phase of modernised classic rock which vanished as inexplicably as it popped into existence. Everything from the Stones, to Zeppelin, to Deep Purple, are invoked in its stoically old-fashioned song-structures. There’s massive guitar solos, impeccably adjusted backtracks, flutes, organs, everything you’d expect from an album hypothetically classified under Rolling Stone’s ‘best rock records of all time.’ Father Son is no anachronistic elegy to the ghost of guitar music though, it might not be quite as thoughtful or as layered as Album, but Doug Boehm’s words are eloquent, provocative, self-aware, and occasionally they completely hit the spot.

26. Obsidian - Baths

Baths is one of the rarest of things in musicians; someone whose work can be legitimately categorised as poetry. A breathing contradiction, his overt Anime fanboyness on Twitter discords with his deeply morbid, obsessively erotic, beautifully expressive music. A malign product of Weisenfeld’s spat of E. Coli in 2012, he concocts something terrifying and interminable and gorgeous. The clinks of minimalistic percussion, the whispers of spectral piano, the glint of a reclusive violin, all balance Will Weisenfeld’s uncomfortable reflections, tainting them with requisite sympathy. For all his references to overtly sexual images, it’s his brief instances of agonising meditation which last; he comments, ‘I was never a poet.’

25. England Keep my Bones - Frank Turner

You can’t keep Frank Turner down. There’s not much subtlety to him, he bears his politics emboldened on his chest, and his reverence of rock’n’roll is celestially tattooed on his voice. England Keep my Bones is something slightly different (though ‘I Still Believe’ is probably the most explicit tribute to rock there’s ever been), an uplifting yet pensively sad testament to England. And here’s where the subtlety comes in. There’s patriotism in his glorifications of England’s landscapes and cultures, his venerations of its social institutions and traditions. However, there’s also the idea that something of England’s soul has been lost, that Turner actively trundles its landscapes in search of spiritual affirmation and simply can’t find it. It ends on a bizarre if interesting celebration of unilateral secularisation.

24. Sunbather - Deafhaven

In a curious defiance of the laws of sound, Deafhaven string together elements of Shoegaze, Post-Rock, and Heavy Metal to form something puzzlingly mellifluous and even beautiful. Sure it’s just rapid-fire drumming, screaming, and heavily dubbed guitars, but fragments fit the whole so well that it births melody, and I’m by no means a Metal fan. I can only put this discrepancy down to spotless song structure, a near perfect cohesion of isolated instrumental parts. So, what happens when you correspond the frantic magnetism of Metal sound and sincere musical melody? You get something that feels absolutely significant, that I have to listen to each chord and syllable with utter attention, even though I haven’t a bloody clue what he’s on about.

23. The Suburbs - Arcade Fire

The Suburbs is a rich eulogy of Arcade Fire’s formative years, and they’re lavished with a quadruple coat of nostalgic whimsy. It captures the excitement, the imagination, the boredom, the disappointment, the unbridled passion and austere disenchantment of childhood. It’s about how you could build a majestic empire from sticks and bricks in a day and then forgetting about it the next morning. It’s also about how this is gone, and gone forever. This naïve exuberance can never be reconciled, and it is just about as heartbreaking as anything. Right until the philanthropic, all-encompassing epic ‘Sprawl II’ sounds out Butler and Cos cavalcade of adolescence in a blistering, triumphant, and yes, elegiac march.

22. LP1 - FKA Twigs

FKA Twigs had been bubbling under the surface for much of 2013, the release of her single ‘Water Me’ had the internet converging in on itself, you know, because it was unprecedentedly good. Her first LP, suitably titled LP1, was anticipated so extremely that editors were complaining about the number of emails from staff writers begging to be the one to review it. So there was hype. Does it live up to it? More or less. Her uniquely pained vocals invoke an achingly vulnerable intimacy; she details sexual neuroses and catalogues romantic anguish. The album is essentially the diary of a dysfunctional teenager, but it works. Her quirkiness intoxicates rather than infuriates, a fascinating, haunting psychological study.

21. Trouble Will Find me - The National

One of The National’s greatest strengths is their consistency, their ability to produce pensive, emotionally charged, bitterly honest music ceaselessly. But on Trouble Will Find Me, which can sort of be construed as a break-up album, they out-do themselves. Whether it’s the Rocky surges of anger and frustration in ‘Sea of Love’ and ‘Graceless,’ or the achingly heartfelt ‘Heavenfaced’ and ‘I Need My Girl,’ Trouble Will Find Me is entirely regulated by turmoil of love. Each song is a singular appropriation of Berninger’s index of despondencies and successes, but ‘Pink Rabbits’ is possibly the best song Berninger has ever written, and one of the best break-up songs, well, ever.