When
it comes to Kendrick Lamar, I’m a pathetic fanboy who froths at the mouth at
every guest verse, every live performance, every interview. He can do no wrong,
can Hip Hop’s saviour. So, these first impressions may not exactly bear the visage
of objectivity. How does it hold up compared to Good Kid M.A.A.D. City, my favourite album of the decade so far? Here’s
what I think after my first listen.
It’s
as intense as Good Kid, though not in
the way you’d expect. Firstly, it’s not
as immediately personable as his sophomore record. His perspective is broader
and looser, a kaleidoscopic indictment, where it’s sardonic wit rather than idiosyncratic
narratives which hit hard. The funkadelic ‘King Kunta’ is powered by an
insatiable beat and a fervently energetic flow recalling early 00s Eminem. He
patronises the shit out of the politically lethargic on the aptly distressing ‘Hood
Politics,’ corroborated by sinisterly tangled instrumentation. The four-minute
bout of irreverence that is ‘You Ain’t Gotta Lie’ ridicules the idea of indiscriminate
political, economic and legal systems. Kendrick includes himself as one of the egocentric
on the self-abasing ‘How Much a Dollar Cost’. The gargantuan ‘Mortal Man’
directly confronts the listener, ‘when the shit hits the fan, is you still a
fan?’ This is not a question from Kendrick alone, but his namechecked
Martin Luther King Jr, Nelson Mandela, and even Moses. Kendrick doesn’t elevate
himself to their stature, but asks the legitimate question of whether activism
for change, political or otherwise, is realistic in a visibly apathetic and
self-absorbed society. ‘Mortal Man’ concludes with a conversation with someone
unexpected where he finally reveals the significance of the Butterfly image. I won’t spoil it, but
fuck me it’s powerful. The respite of the self-celebratory ‘i’, the penultimate
track, is certainly vindicated.
George
Clinton introduces To Pimp, and you’d
struggle to employ someone more proper. Not only is his presence symptomatic of
the 70s-esque political radicalism and upheaval affirmed by the album, the influence
of Funk and Soul legends is apparent in the production. An unsettling
dissonance saturates the more explicitly political tracks, freeform jazz
clarinets and trumpets confound rigid beats and a tight multiplicity of resigned,
disaffected voices of which Kendrick is only the arbitrator. Mellifluously
chilled synths establish a pensive solemnity not divergent from What’s Going On? or Doggystyle, where expressions of anguish in the foreground are hazy
and immaterial by association. Dissonance monopolises everything; there’s
clinkety piano, unflustered percussion, and ethereal samplings. It’s tough to
categorise it even as Hip Hop, such is the extent of its Soul metamorphosis. Kendrick
isn’t Killer Mike or Chuck D, rather than venomously spitting cold-cut fury he
dispassionately describes his understanding of the metropolis, and it’s
horrifying.
To Pimp a Butterfly
could be a
synthesis of Marvin Gaye, James Brown, Snoop Dogg, and even Eminem, but it is
still manifestly Kendrick. The vulnerable sobbing in the second half of ‘u’; the
‘Smooth Criminal’ paraphrasing flourish on ‘King Kunta’; the glimpses of comic
relief exemplified in the achingly rhetorical question ‘what if these walls could talk???’ on ‘These
Walls’ being bluntly answered ‘sex,’ a gloriously basic subversion of government
paranoia. This consequently turns into an enchantingly seductive conflation of anti-totalitarian
politics, a sigh of the ambiguity of the modern identity, and sexual
neuroticism. One of the best songs on the album.
It
doesn’t always work. ‘For Sale?’ is an operational continuation about the consumerist
gentrification of identity, but it isn’t particularly original or interesting,
thematically or musically. ‘i’ is great, but feels displaced from its appropriate
place on the album, disharmoniously transplanted within the heartrending final
triumvirate, and not in a good way. I feel shifting it between ‘How Much’ and ‘Complexion’
would remove the dichotomy while still retaining relevance.
Between
tracks Kendrick’s voice stands in omniscient solitude, communicating to – I’m
not sure who. America’s white patriarchal plutocracy? The African American
community? Each and every listener regardless of creed or colour? It’s unclear,
and this is why it’s effective. We’re all culpable in an oppressive state,
whether we subjugate, or habitually submit to subjugation. Kendrick repeats
with cold detachment; ‘I remember you was conflicted/misusing your
influence/sometimes I did the same/abusing my power full of resentment’. It’s
all rather intangible; at least, until near the end. His attacks on the state
are frequent, but his colossal, best-song-on-the-album second single ‘The
Blacker The Berry’ inverts this in the cleverest of manners. How can you castigate
a government for violence and prejudice when the public perpetuates a transparently
violent and prejudiced society? ‘Hypocrite’? We’re all fucking hypocrites. As
MC Eiht purported on ‘M.A.A.D. City’, it’s time to wake our punk asses up.
Poignantly, ‘Mortal Man’ ends on a more hopeful note. Kendrick, enabled by his conversation,
escapes his solipsistic introspection and realises that everything that has
happened to him has been for a reason; that he as a public figure holds a
responsibility to inspire change towards a more peaceful and egalitarian
America. He must act quickly, after all he, like his friend in conversation, is
only mortal.
To Pimp a Butterfly is very, very different from Good Kid, but only time will tell if it’s
just as good. The first listen inspires optimism.
LCD Soundsystem’s farewell album
is enriching, piercingly genuine, and inescapably sad. From the grooving purge of ‘Dance Yrself Clean’ to the resolutely confident, pertinently
titled closer ‘Home,’ there’s a pervasion of ending, of the realisation of
outgrowth. James Murphy and his human soundsystem came late to the party as
international Popstars, and their overwhelming popularity frightened them. They
appeal to millions because they’re countercultural with a brain. They rage
against both the machine and hipster twee but realise they do so in vain, and
that’s okay. In the end it doesn’t matter, as long as you’re content with
yourself. It’s a comforting thought, but that doesn’t mean they don’t want to
have fun. They go out with a euphoric bang, with all the funkadelic
synthesisers and infectious beats they can muster. They’re my second favourite
band for a reason.
9. Channel Orange - Frank Ocean
When you hear the acclaim ‘genius
singer-songwriter’, you’d be forgiven for picturing a scruffy, chain-smoking
folk singer rather than a weedy, introverted R&B idiosyncrat. But Frank
Ocean is a genius singer-songwriter,
and this is coming from an initial sceptic. Dwelling under the
attention-drawing Hipster-Hop behemoth that is Odd Future, Ocean’s sensitivity,
humanity and talent could flourish in stark contrast with his groupmates.
Following on from his terrific debut, Nostalgia
Ultra, Channel Orange is an opus
of human emotion and social critique. As ambitious as it is, both thematically
and musically, it’s Ocean’s personal direction, his endearing modesty, which
really hits home. Robert Christgau summarises this elegant restraint better
than I ever could; ‘when he's the sole composer Ocean resists making a show of
himself—resists the dope hook, the smart tempo, the transcendent falsetto
itself.’ It’s the humbling easiness of his meditation which vindicates him.
8. Bon Iver, Bon Iver - Bon Iver
Okay, Justin Vernon didn’t
cathartically confine himself to self-imposed isolation in some backwater cabin
with a guitar, a pen, some paper, and presumably a fuck-ton of soup, but I
think Bon Iver is even better than For Emma. Vernon expanded the project by
inviting in external parties, but while horns and steel drums are introduced, the
record can’t be reduced to some pigeon-holing music industry cliché such as
‘natural progression’ or ‘sideways move’. As critic Josh Jackson agreeably observes, ‘it retains the beautiful melancholy of For Emma, but in nearly every way, it’s just more.’ As the title
itself intimates, it’s exactly the same, only it isn’t. For this is still
Vernon’s voice; the thunderous brass on ‘Perth’ or breezy horns on ‘Beth/Rest’
supplement his echoey waver and hazy guitar. Forgetting comparisons to previous
work, Bon Iver, Bon Iver triumphs as
an incandescently forlorn poem, illuminated in flowery synths, cryptic, moving
lyrics, and the most gorgeous harmonies you’ll hear this decade.
7. On The Impossible Past - The Menzingers
My favourite Punk album of the
decade, Greg Barnett’s lyrical pattern follows the Americana-glossed storytelling
of Brian Fallon and The Gaslight Anthem. But boy do they surpass it. I mean
sure, there’s still anecdotes about sitting glumly in Philadelphia bars,
sobbing over break-ups, and dancing like you don’t care, but there’s also the ominous
stench of mortality and excruciating reminiscence which drenches everything.
Whether it’s the jaw-dropping confessional ‘The Obituaries’-‘Cause I've cursed
my lonely memory with picture-perfect imagery’-or the impudent shrug of ‘I Can’t
Seem To Tell’-‘Remember the days when I had a conscience? Yeh me neither’-it’s
a gut-wrenchingly earnest work of admission. Death envelops the album,
especially in its assessment of memory; its illusoriness, its deceptive
falsehoods, and its aura of future possibility. It’s music of yearning
nostalgia and bitter remembrance, of hope and despair; a lyrical masterpiece, handsomely
augmented by aggressively emphatic riffs and soul-raising choruses.
6. Southeastern - Jason Isbell
What makes Southeastern a great album? At the time I made my end-of-year list
even, my favourite album of 2013? Is it the effectually sparse chordwork? Jason
Isbell’s graceful yet quietly booming vocals? It might be, but it’s probably
his conceit. For in each of his songs, Isbell adopts the persona of a
different, incredibly flawed American male, and opens up their humanity. He
plays an ex wife-beating alcoholic on ‘Live Oak,’ and a womaniser-turned-carer
for a dying woman on the incredible ‘Elephant.’ After exposing the fragility of
human relationships, existence and our arbitrary concepts of morality, he
concludes with a scathing indictment of first world problems on ‘Relatively
Easy,’ asserting that, essentially, we’re worried about the wrong stuff. It’s
soothing, tranquil, cold, jagged, tender, and indispensable. It’s simply one of
the best Folk records in a long, long time.
5. The Greatest Generation - The Wonder Years
I never had an Emo phase. I had an 80s phase instead. I
thought My Chemical Romance and 30 Seconds to Mars and Paramore and all that
undulated stud-belted angst was a bit silly. It’s only been in last two or
three years I’ve realised that there’s good and bad Emo in the same way there’s
good and bad British Indie; there’s a Wonder Years and Brand New for each MCR
and 30STM in the same way there’s a Bloc Party or Los Campesinos for every The
Enemy. Underneath the indubitably catchy riffs and driving one-liners of
Pop-Punk is a uniquely introverted, nostalgic, almost solipsistic voice. Some
of the best lyricists working today deal in the oft-vilified realm of Emo, and
possibly the best of all is The Wonder Years’s Dan Campbell. It’s
tried-and-tested territory; invocations of heartbreak during teenage summers,
confrontations with mortality in suburbs, but Campbell’s flair with
turn-of-phrase reveals a conflicted disposition which both demonises and
glorifies our ‘generation,’ and stresses the consequence of our adolescent
upbringing. Will we be the ones to destroy our world or save it? Campbell
doesn’t have answers, but he’s determined to find them in his, and our, past. The Greatest Generation is ultimately
about the most Emoey of things; that interminable, desperate search for an
identity. Campbell flirts with the frontier of the personal, national and
humanist identity, and their expected paradoxes, and that’s why it’s so
amazing. It’s about everything and absolutely nothing. One of the greatest
Pop-Punk albums of all-time; fuck it, it’s my favourite.
4. My Beautiful, Dark, Twisted Fantasy - Kanye West
While it’s not quite my favourite
album of the past five years, in my honest opinion, My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy is one of the greatest artistic
statements of the decade so far. It is, essentially, Kanye’s pathological megalith,
appropriating him as a singular extreme of the human condition – pride,
insecurity, and the dangers of self-reflection. MBDTF depicts Kanye at his most alien and relatable, a living
personification of postmodernism’s headache, self-veneration, and complicitly
self-destruction; the emptiness of the dream of corporate Eden. With all this
heady subject matter, the most amazing thing is that Kanye appears entirely
self-aware, entirely transparent. Every track offers something different. The hostile, toxic ‘Monster’ (dat verse from Nicki tho), the
exhausted anxiety which props up the album’s opening and ending in ‘Who Will
Survive In America’ and ‘Lost In The World’; Justin Vernon’s ethereal wail the
impeccable companion in relaying this loneliness. In the indomitable, rumbling,
intricate centrepiece, the brilliant ‘Runaway’, Kanye breaks down and builds
himself up again arbitrated by the simplest, blandest piano chord. It’s the
best song he’s ever recorded. MBDTF works
as a thrilling, moving, terrifying essay on the inextricability of self-worship
and self-loathing.
3. Benji - Sun Kil Moon
I know it’s been out for less
than a year, but Benji is one of my
most treasured albums. A series of wistfully told excerpts from Mark Kozalek’s
weary, loosely fatalistic autobiography, accrue in one vividly sprawling canvas
of the inaccessibility of life. I’m not sure whether it’s the elegant
simplicity of the melodies, the sighing expectancy of Kozalek’s growl, or
the neutrality of the lyrics, but it touches me in ways the vast majority of
music can’t realise. Crackling with childhood nostalgia and a near-overbearing
sense of mortality, Benji’s existential
haughtiness is tempered by moving devotions to family and friends, and
genuinely funny and profound recollections about fame (‘Ben’s my Friend’) and
sex (‘Dogs’). The impassivity of the words is disarming at first, but it
implores a resounding universality; in Kozalek’s stories we find ourselves and
our own thoughts and emotions and passions and fears and sorrows and joys.
2. Celebration Rock - Japandroids
Celebration Rock is a fairly non-sequiturial album name; I mean
sure, it’s triumphant in a carefree, belligerently philanthropic sort of way,
but this celebration is more defiantly, spiritedly decadent, than just
flippantly decadent. ‘Mortally Urgent Celebration Rock’ would be a more
appropriate title. Japandroids aren’t focussed on Japandroids, and all its
synonyms of 30s mid-life crisis, anymore. Nah, now they’re obsessed with that
most gargantuan ubiquity of living, as well or as shittily as you possibly want.
Brian King implores that how you live is irrelevant to actually living. My
favourite song is LCD Soundsystem’s All
My Friends because it captures perfectly the transubstantiation of
friendship, experience and situational ephemerality, the best of active living.
This is an entire tracklist of that. Celebration
Rock, with its irreconcilable guitars, translucent drums and
unapologetically Punk-Pop ‘Woah Oh Ohs’ roars living with a resonant,
air-punching clarity.
1. Good Kid, M.A.A.D. City - Kendrick Lamar
Section.80 defines flawed masterpiece, a rambling mess invaded by
frequent flexes of utter genius. Good Kid
M.A.A.D. City is more rapt and lucid, a tightly woven narrative simmering
with ideas and emotions held together by Kendrick’s intensive musicality. His flow
and production is predictably immaculate, so we’ll move on from that. The
autobiography is one of the most common subsidiaries of the ‘Concept Album,’
with Pink Floyd’s groundbreaking The Wall
still holding rank as its definitive ideal. Somehow Good Kid feels more personal than even The Wall, more deep-rooted. The very title explicates the record’s
central dichotomy; the ‘good kid’ struggling in the ‘M.A.A.D. City’. The frayed
portrait of gang existence on ‘M.A.A.D. City’ and ‘The Art of Peer Pressure’ illustrate
a fragile boy desperately trying to survive in violent conditions. It’s powerfully
inventive, the transition in ‘M.A.A.D. City’ announced by the ‘WAKE YO’ PUNK
ASS UP’ soundbite a microcosm of Kendrick’s terrible epiphany. Conversely, the
album is peppered with familial warmth, humour and affection, whether it’s a
voicemail with his uncle yelling at him about a Dominos pizza or his mum warbling
a genuinely heart-warming plea to be better. Sure he raps about pussy on
‘Sherane,’ but only to convey teenage Kendrick’s self-conscious, perturbed
sexuality. Sure he raps about having bags of dolla on ‘Swimming Pools,’ but
only to express his anxiety over how extreme opulence will corrupt him.
‘Backseat Freestyle’ is ripping the absolute piss out of the Rap culture
teenage Kendrick adulated. That it’s a banger with the sultriest of beats is a
bonus. In ‘Real’ he croons that ‘none of that shit made me real.’ True that. It’s a celebration of the power of
family, music and self-empowerment, and a devastating subversion of the
frivolity of New-School Rap. Not only my favourite album of the decade so far,
but my favourite Hip-Hop album of all-time.
Songs
20. Ill Manors - Plan B
19. No Black Person is Ugly - Lil B
18. The Devil in my Bloodstream - The Wonder Years
You could call Death Grips
avant-garde; experimental; even progressive, but that’d be an artifice. Yip,
they’re unique, but that’s not why people love them. They’re unabashedly,
comprehensively mental. The Money Store is
their most naturally commercial output, with some faint echoes of melody and
traditional songwriting structures, but it’s still bonkers. The sultry bass of
‘Blackjack’, the flaring synths of ‘I’ve Seen Footage’, the manic paranoia of
‘Punk Weight’, the gleeful turpitude of climax ‘Hacker;’ it’s one hell of a
journey. Nothing more to be said really.
19. Halcyon Digest - Deerhunter
The notorious eccentric Bradford
Cox had been producing some of the most interesting Art-Rock of the noughties
but 2010’s Halcyon Digest showed
Deerhunter as something refined, complete, and eminent. Allegedly a chronicle
of ‘queer’ familiarity, it charters various elements of factual and fictional
gay experiences, from Art, and from Cox’s own understandings. It’s sweeping,
documenting the fall from grace of a fashion designer into gay pornographer in
‘Helicopter,’ and the effervescent wheeze of ‘Sailing’ identifying a inimitable
idea of inaccessibility. And it’s all done with the cleanest, most
sophisticated compositional accompaniment. A record of comfort, for anyone who's ever struggled with loneliness. So everyone.
18. Carry on the Grudge - Jamie T
On Carry on the Grudge, Jamie Treays is evidently suffering from an
early-life crisis. Post-adolescent disillusionment, even depression, is a topic
barely touched upon in media, ostensibly because the idea that young, healthy
people could be cynical and exasperated is ridiculous; what could we possibly
be dissatisfied with? Treays gives a voice to this silent underground, one
which is sophisticated, articulate and concerted. There’s still an undercurrent
of juvenile hedonism. There’s still allusions to boozing and shagging, but he
does so with a heavy heart. His songwriting is tighter and more focussed, and
his lyrics more relatable for their protracted heft. It feels like Jamie’s
first cohesive record, rather than a collection of great songs.
17. Modern Vampires of the City - Vampire Weekend
Vampire Weekend take their
avant-garde Pop sensibilities into bold thematic territory in Modern Vampires, tackling actuality,
religion, faith and the incomprehensibility of love; all in relation to the
equivalence of an omniscient, omnipresent God. It approaches philosophy and
theology with the excessive eagerness of an undergrad, but Ezra Koenig handles
it with maturity and a pleasing dispassion. Alongside all this heavy
speculating, their happy-go-lucky enthusiasm for music and artistic potential
still resonates brightly. Furthermore, New York’s hipster prince Ezra Koenig
proposes the idea that joy and sorrow are inextricable, the fun ‘Diane Young’ a
weirdly apposite twin for the dystopian ‘Hudson.’ After all, all life is
superimposed.
16. Hurry up, We're Dreaming - M83
I honestly doubt there is a more
epically orchestrated Pop album than Hurry
Up, We’re Dreaming. M83’s Anthony Gonzalez has always had a flair for the
melodramatic taste of the future, like a House-club Vangelis, but Hurry Up revealed a vastly improved
songwriting style which added lyrical fusion, tempo and a structured pacing to
the discharging canvas of synthesisers and guitars. From the majesty of ‘Midnight
City’ (is there a more apt representation of our decade’s optimism and parochial
narcissism?) to the hazy luridness of ‘Steve McQueen,’ there’s a definable
emotional journey established for the hearer. Thankfully though, this is not at
the expense of some of the most listenable soundscapes ever produced.
15. Present Tense - Wild Beasts
The Line of Best Fit called Present Tense ‘the most intelligent,
involving and profound record since OK Computer'. A pretty bold claim.
But it is fantastic. To my discredit, I’d always appreciated Wild Beasts more
than I enjoyed them. To me they were talented and interesting, but the
disharmony of Thorpe’s alto and Fleming’s lower register always recorded as a
bit twee for my taste. Not on Present
Tense. Within three minutes Thorpe sneers ‘don’t confuse me with someone
who gives a fuck,’ setting the tone pretty well. There’s nothing twee here,
just a satisfyingly direct, and immensely compelling, approach to the link
between consciousness, sex, class politics and philosophy.
14. The Idler Wheel - Fiona Apple
The Idler Wheel is something special. The entire 45 minutes seems
distilled from studio gentrifications and inauthentic overproductions. It’s
positively putrid of reckless honesty. She has no pretensions of Popstar or cult
Folk-hero; she herself simply remarks ‘what I am is what I am, and I does as I
does.’ In manner with her sentiments her percussion is teasingly sparse and
esoteric, a lot of bottle taps and boot clomps. And fittingly, her percussion
is her piano’s solitary friend. That is, of course, except for her storyteller
voice. Proudly defiant, yet shakingly insular, she pokes and prods at
identifiable situations with alarming clarity considering they’re disguised in abstruse,
provocative, and tender allegories.
13. Old - Danny Brown
‘They want that old Danny
Brown/to bag up and sell a whole pound,’ Danny kindly explains to us on his
title track. The title of the album itself is a dichotomy; it’s a reference of
his diffidence towards the fans campaigning for a return to the smart meta-Hop
of his discography pre-XXX, and also a reference of his, well, ageing. It’s
productively solid across a variety of Rap angles and subgenres, exemplifying
shrieking synths and rapturous kick-drums, selective sampling, and even an
oddly chillwave undertone spills through on the existentially inquisitive ‘Lonely’
and ‘Float On.’ but it’s Brown’s poignant self-awareness, and willingness to
mature and grow, that really appeals.
12. Bloom - Beach House
Beach House are the
quintessential Dream-Pop band, and Bloom is
them at their unparalleled finest. Their overtly synthesisers-circulated assembly
caresses almost as serenely as Victoria Legrand’s angelic chorus. She speaks of
‘momentary bliss’ and ‘the moment when a memory aches,’ somehow fusing emotional
entanglement and unflustered commentary. They’ve been criticised previously for
being overproduced and frigidly clean, but I challenge anyone to not fall in
love with the silk-coated sheets of Bloom’s
melodies, their strikingly opulent sound evokes a very real sense of time
and place-of joy, sadness, love-and the necessity to appreciate its transient splendour.
For Beach House are obsessed with the progressive disintegration of everything,
but also its eminent bloom.
11. RTJ2 - Run The Jewels
Petrifying, vitriolic,
malevolent, misanthropic, and entertaining as hell, the second harvest from
El-P and Killer Mike’s collaborative mind-fuck is superb. This time their
target is ‘fuck boys,’ who I can only assume, based on their colourful
descriptions, to mean absolutely everyone, ever. The beats and hooks are
frantic, fraught and frighteningly filthy, the production is an onslaught of
furious fun. The wordplay is even better, contaminated with some of the wittiest
and most vile insults and boasts I’ve ever heard in a rap song. It’s
indescribably tough to pick my favourite line, but I might have to settle with
‘you can run backwards naked through a field of dicks.’ This is Hip-Hop more violently splendid than you've ever heard it.
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.
Songs
60. Throw me in the River - The Smith Street Band
59. Wolf Dix Rd. - Iron Chic
58. Rapping 2 U - Das Racist
57. Wildest Moments - Jessie Ware
56. Anywhere But Here - Killer Mike
55. Phosphorescence - Tall Ships
54. Honey - Torres
53. We All Try - Frank Ocean
52. Yonkers - Tyler, the Creator
51. Kill For Love - Chromatics
50. Black Skinhead - Kanye West
49. Heavenly Father - Bon Iver
48. Use Me - Miguel
47. Destroy This Poem - Hallelujah the Hills
*No Video on Youtube. Listen to it though. Honestly it's good.
