A well-worn path of criticism in the twenty-first century has been to decry popular culture as a – at best lazy, at worse non-existent – reflector of the politics of modern life: let’s take economic, race, gender and privacy as a broad four examples. In turn, this is seen to be the symptomatic just deserts of a generation that values displays of conspicuous consumption in the ever-aspirational “club” to pounding pavements.
Of course, if you’re trekking through the Official Chart Company’s day-glo jungle – the floor of which is littered with Beats headphones and strange-deformed fauna which survive off the dregs of jägerbombs and Sam Smith’s tears (the nutrients for the constant collaborations and features with one another in one industry-wide circle-jerk culminating in fucking Bandaid fucking 30) – you’re largely not going to find anything to change your mind.
As always though, it’s in largely uncharted waters that it feels as though tides have turned in 2014. In a year simmering with righteous anger from Syrian refugee camps and Ukranian crop-fields to Ferguson sidewalks and UK foodbanks, the notes being struck by artists in the last 12 months have finally felt, at least to me, to recognise a modicum of that present trauma and capture some sense of the necessary urgency needed as a response within popular culture.
This trend is epitomised by the rush-release after 14 years of D’Angelo’s Black Messiah, but you can register it in music ranging as drastically in sound and tone as Perfect Pussy, Young Fathers, Father John Misty and Wild Beasts. When balanced out with the rest you’ll encounter in this list that champions a message of hope and mobility via self-respect, action and awareness, it can’t help but stitch into a tapestry of a promise that – against cynical expectations – problems are being recognised and people are being mobilised.
So whether your bag is mournful post-internet isolation or a riotous, tension-release of rage or somewhere in between there’ll undoubtedly be something for you in this list. Open your minds. Open your doors. See you in 2015.
CSHARPE
100 Mo Kolours // Mike Black
99 Perc // Galloper
98 Big K.R.I.T. // Mt. Olympus
97 Seinabo Sey // Younger
96 Vince Staples // Blue Suede
95 Sylvan Esso // Coffee
94 Neneh Cherry // Naked
93 Hamilton Leithauser // Alexandra
92 Dean Blunt // PUNK
91 Phoria // Emanate
90 Ibeyi // Oya
89 Death From Above 1979 // Trainwreck 1979
88 Isaiah Rashad // R.I.P. Kevin Miller
87 Bombay Bicycle Club // Luna
86 Ben Frost // Venter
85 iceage // The Lord’s Favorite
84 Real Estate – Talking Backwards
83 Action Bronson – Easy Rider
82 Tinashe – 2 On
81 Girl Talk, Freeway, Waka Flocka Flame – Tolerated
80 Container // Complex
79 Interpol // All the Rage Back Home
78 Banks // Goddess
77 Grumbling Fur // All the Rays
76 Years & Years // Real (LeMarquis Remix)
75 Eno Hyde // Daddy’s Car
74 Fear of Men // Alta/Waterfall
73 Ariana Grande, Iggy Azalea // Problem
72 alt-J // Hunger of the Pine
71 Rustie // Raptor
70 Gidge // I Fell In Love
69 Ages and Ages // Divisionary (Do The Right Thing)
5 // DANIEL AVERY – DRONE LOGICSincerity fucking sucks. Or, maybe fairer to say is that the kind of sincerity you meet in most contemporary music fucking sucks. There are too many examples of artists who seem to work with the idea that the primacy of their voice and the ‘authentic’/’wholesome’ aesthetic and/or instrumentation that comes alongside this is sufficient material for the assertion that their emotional clout is at once distinctive and unique, yet still entirely necessary to communicate to the slumbering masses devoid of banjo and waistcoat. This aesthetic conceals a myriad of sins – from unendurably shit music to ideological complicity with some of the more po-faced violences of 2013/14’s politics to, again, some horrendously poor music.
In spite of my definitely valid and not at all irrational disdain for this current brand of sincerity, there is a beauty to Drone Logic that I only seem to be able to describe as sincerity. And this seems to me to stem from the album’s thoroughgoing humanity and warmth. That doesn’t make it a sentimental album. At times Avery flirts so closely with club music vibes that sentimentality seems genuinely to be one 4/4 beat around the corner but one of his main skills on Drone Logic is embracing the joyous qualities of that driving club aesthetic before throwing a guitar pedal feedback loop or squelching synth line that carries on a euphoric melody but at a pitch or tone antithetical to any of nostalgic 90s fist bumping that might punctuate a night at Fabric. The kind of experimentation on display is an affirmative playfulness and openness. The surprises come more in the way of loops or sounds that throw away expectations but that make the results all the more rewarding. There is gratification aplenty, as there should well be with such beat-driven music, but the gratification never feels cheap or forced. Water Jump offers 3 or 4 such rewards throughout its 8 and half minutes without ever employing a predictable drop or malignant trope of Guetta euphoria. Knowing We’ll Be Here is about as close to a utopian impulse in 2013’s eclectic (and sometimes magnificent) vomit of club music – the voice seems rootless and able to appear at once and disappear just as easily but it is always willing you in, and when the beat reaches a boat-party, sun-drenched, melody-line climax Avery draws back to the bareness of the melody line and an increasing feedback-formed background to drift with us to the end of the record.
This all seems very cuddly and soppy. It is. That is because my fear of sincerity is not a fear of a display of emotion or a dislike of an art that actively attempts to engage the listener as an affective agent in their own right. It is because this album seems to manage to manoeuvre a display of these genuinely affecting gestures that seem to be so lacking in contemporary music whilst so much of this contemporary music breathily-and-oh-so-truly-fucking-honestly tells us it is making said gestures. Drone Logic invigorates some of the aesthetics of inclusivity so flaunted by those who experienced early rave culture without becoming nostalgic for that time in itself, seeking to re-engage club music’s ability to genuinely move and gratify its listeners whilst being very willing to throw in some surprises and to engage with materials and techniques not of the traditional club music ilk. For me this means it sits perfectly alongside some of my other favourite records of 2013. Whilst some of those records discomfort and unsettle, Drone Logic comes alongside them to offer the moments of respite that give you the energy to engage with the uncomfortable and the alienating.
CHRIS BLEWITT
4 // KANYE WEST – YEEZUS
How best to talk about Yeezus has been troubling me for quite a while. At its best, it is an album of the sublimely brash. At its worst, it is an album of the sublimely brash. So how to proceed with talking about an album that seems to be driven by its inherent contradictions has been causing me some (admittedly infrequent and incredibly context-specific) unease.
There could well be a book about the contradictions of Yeezus (hopefully as an accompaniment to David Harvey’s on the contradictions of Capital) but that book would probably be shit. The contradictions are numerous and visible but they really are what makes this such an enthralling album; I tried to summarise them all but stopped at sex/wealth brags vs. racial politics because you really don’t need me to tell you that it might sit uncomfortably for most to listen to album that openly and aggressively (and sometimes articulately) attacks the persistence of racism in a supposedly post-race society whilst at the same time being told that Kanye would like to combine oral sex with Asian women and a certain orangey-red sauce.
The important thing for me then, is to understand that the contradictions are perhaps the most obvious and immediate element of an album that denies the listener much of the cathartic and/or vicarious value that is expected of much mainstream hip-hop. It’s claustrophobic, relentless and West is sure as fuck willing to let us know that there is no listener-wish-fulfillment here – this is very much his outrageous life, and, unless you’re explicitly invited along, you’re expected to wait outside with his Benz (which you also may not look at for more than 5 seconds, and most definitely must not touch).
The production is impeccable, as would be expected of the gang West assembled for the album, and the album’s allure owes a lot to their work. It is not so much the much-referenced and not really actually-appearing minimalism that makes the production noteworthy. Rather, I would say that it is the boldness of structure. Of course there are plenty of interesting sounds flying around but they are hardly ground-breaking; the ambitious denial of comfort or catharsis comes from the beats’ circularity and repetition, alongside the structures in which the variety of samples appear. Send It Up is a perfect example. Sonically it seems like one of the less interesting tracks on the album, but the contorted, pitch shifting siren that runs throughout on the same melody makes it a thoroughly circular piece. King Louie’s perfectly malevolent monotone helps too, as we are caught with a repetitious robotism – forever on loop, always threatening to lead to some sort of Skrillex romp, always returning to the same melody, always maintaining the threat of what might come next, before a 25 second burst of a sample that has no aural trace or precedent in the previous 2 and a half minutes pulls the track to its end, of course with the looping melody still in tow. The same kinds of affects are induced in the insistent low-end throbs of I Am a God, for example, as well as that track’s skipping, stuck-in-purgatory beat that re-emerges throughout. Then of course there are the screams and gasps that punctuate the album, acting as the signifiers of a profound discomfort which articulate only that: a feeling, an unease, without feeling the need to explain themselves. Herein we find what is for me perhaps the greatest facet of the album’s denial of catharsis: it is an album of feeling and exclamations that is almost entirely devoid of explanation. And every hint of space or rest-bite is immediately undercut, Justin Vernon’s or Frank Ocean’s delightfully auto-tuned r’n’b emotivities are themselves too de-humanised to offer full emotional engagement, and when Ocean is allowed loose for those few seconds in the final minute of New Slaves it quickly fades away into the distanced, low-end rumble of Hold My Liquor.
Of course there are an abundance of contradictions that do actually need to be considered and discussed. The brazen assertion of masculinity is defiant and pretty idiotic, for example, and cannot be excused by me simply saying ‘oh, but it’s the contradictions and the (relative) discomfort that make it such a good album’. The point is best understood that the abundance of exclamations without explanations is what make the album uncomfortable to its core, and therein lies its power.
CHRIS BLEWITT
3 // VAMPIRE WEEKEND – MODERN VAMPIRES OF THE CITY
“…the gamut is once again being well and truly run sonically and thematically. Irish-folk inflections, reggaeton grooves and even a post-internet psychobilly freakout are all on the cards, alongside the high-necked riffery, Brooklynite balladry, vocal pitch-shifts, and harpsichord jams previously stocked in their locker.
Each new angle is approached with the same measured control which ensures that even if a certain aspect isn’t quite the right fit, it never upsets the whole. This is epitomised by the arabesque Worship You which incessantly shifts gears from break-neck to stratospheric between verse and chorus, gloriously straddling its middle-Eastern backing cries, frenetic synthesised guitar solo, and even moments of Joshua Tree-esquegrandiosity, via the incessantly rumbling bedrock of marching drums throughout. There’s a freedom in their experimentations, which suggests that they’ve finally warded off the bug-bear of faux-outraged critiques of cultural colonialism (though they might have replaced this with furious SAAB enthusiasts). In fact, the sheer confidence with which they’ve continued extending this melange of genre, without losing the singularly important strength of writing the song as a song, has been one of the strongest and most rewarding elements of the band’s continued output.
However, the most significant aspect of this confidence is translated in Koenig’s lyrical work. He maintains his almost FLARF-poetry aspect at points, notably on tracks like Finger Back and Step: the canny lyrical switch-ups which are occasionally conceived of as smart-aleck witticisms, the alternately ubiquitous and obscure reference-points critiqued as solely designed to throw off people like Chris Baio’s “long-lost cousin” Steve Buscemi. But this time round, more strikingly and powerfully than on their previous LPs, these idiosyncrasies are equally matched and even usurped by moments of pure directness, typified by the emotionally-shattering chorus of Hannah Hunt: “If I can’t trust you then damn it Hannah, there’s no future, there’s no answer.”
3. In The Absence Of A god
Where admiration firmly falls into the great ball-pit of the besotted though are Vampire Weekend’s ventures into spirituality. Themes of faith, death and after-life recur throughout, but they’re fully consecrated on the album’s (and perhaps thus far the band’s) crowning achievement Ya Hey. […] The band set about capturing a deep-set existential grief, a contradiction that works away at the heart of both the personal and international, with a celestial magnificence and an utter lack of pretence that Time magazine is trying to deny Generation Y.
The Ivy League bozos who once rapped about “wack calzone” weren’t supposed to be able to sing with such nuanced supremacy about a world that fell out of love with God.
Pitting These New Puritans against the rescinded promise of a pop album wasn’t the smartest idea Jack Barnett’s ever come up with. Though he did manage to go back on it well prior to the creation of the Southenders’ third studio album, the inconsistency of suggesting uber-accessibility and then delivering fifty four minutes of orchestral sprawl dogged Field of Reeds for most of last year – even as it swept up general critical reverence, and waltzed to Drowned in Sound’s Neptune Award with hands firmly in pockets. Alienated Hidden fans griping in YouTube comment sections far and wide can attest to how difficult a piece of art it is, but ask anyone on the other side and they’ll tell you (flirting quite happily with music crit cliché) that Field of Reeds was one of the most immensely, intensely rewarding listens of 2013. Yes, you do have to revisit this album persistently – you have to play it at home before you go to bed, or use it as the antidote your commute – but only because it’s been made for precisely that kind of consumption. The convoluted song structures, the mechanically low drone of Barnett’s vocals, the palpable ambition of every brushstroke – rather than being problematic, these traits are precisely what lend Field of Reeds its power, building mighty structures of sound from that initial tread of piano in The Way I Do.
This is an album that you open up and explore, and the landscape within is wholly and utterly enriched by the size and complexity of everything about Field of Reeds. It’s this ultimate selfishness which make it such a stunning listen from start to finish, because the album only cares, really, about sound and composition. Barnett is a cryptic, laborious writer of music, and you can feel it in the shape of the LP – that each song was made to collaborate with the tracks around it, with little to no regard for actual listeners. Even the most tightly choreographed, overtly accessible, track on the LP, Organ Eternal, is a slave to its position in Barnett’s grand scheme, providing the first graspable entry point to a record that’s otherwise gorgeously devoted to itself.
JOSH SUNTHARISIVAM
Field of Reeds will lead you astray. An archaic heft colours These New Puritans‘ neo-classical behemoth, old light coming through to the present, hanging heavy like the air of rooms that have been long left unopened. Though surrounded by the ostensibly warmer elements of the orchestral or choral, there’s still a sense of sparse, circumlocutory cold, embedded in the keys of the resonator piano and crooked fragility of Jack Barnett’s voice, evidenced to the utmost on the album’s core V (Island Song) in particular. Consequently, even within the most accessible moment Fragment Two, the remit remains a kind of graceful oppressiveness, borne from the intimidating and yet enrapturing heart of darkness that lies within the album’s bounds. It’s a record possessed of simultaneously transporting but paralysing beauty, reaching deep into your heart and psyche whilst remaining somehow always outside of reach, alien to full comprehension.
CTS
1 // JON HOPKINS – IMMUNITY
Immunitysounds like the Hadron Collider in the hands of the Old Testament god. It deals in awesome hammer-strikes of physicality amidst enveloping swathes of ethereality. Songs revolve around phrases like frozen moments in time, each revolution revealing something, casting new light and unearthing new perspective in the strange buoyancy of the space between punch and floor.
A key turns and we’re off. We Disappear serves as the album’s Rosetta stone – running the gamut from hard to soft, from stratospheric to granular – an ultra-condensed 4:50 microcosm by which we can glimpse if not yet fully understand all that will follow. Then Open Eye Signal (which as you know, we love an inconceivable amount) comes into being like a machine-made sunrise coursing through the veins of the morning, and all the more biblically awful for it.
Breathe This Air teases with all-out enormity before dissipating into breathless, peaceful chimes, before Collider takes on the mantle of that abandoned enormity and enters the boxing ring. Jangling with nervous electricity it drowns the stifled sexuality of its vocal samples in ever-building, ever-pounding polyrhythms and encompassing, enrapturing production. It’s scrambling, it’s titanic and it’s all too much: the record topples under the weight of this central moment of collision and collapses into a rare moment of silence.
Amidst this seismic fracture emerges Abandon Window in all its finely-tuned warmth, opening the door to the space of practically perceptible peace which dominates the latter half of the record. Throughout these tracks especially – though it serves to retroactively heighten its presence in the preceding tracks also – the classical roots that have allowed Hopkins to grow to such heights are foregrounded. The atmosphere of Form By Firelight, Sun Harmonics and Immunity is simultaneously sparse and yet holistically possessed of all his song-craft, using the gorgeous, resonant poetry of those titles as both guide and canvas for the elements in that atmosphere to weave their magic. Titanic keys, undulating throbs, spine-chilling chimes, percussive stutters and heart murmurs, hymnal vocals, soaring tides of static – all expertly packed in and on one another, extending and elevating the overarching kaleidoscopic mood-scape.
Immunity is a reconciliation, the fruit of a 34 year old explorer’s 9 months of recording, a record of a somehow meagre sounding 8 tracks running for a transcendent 60 minutes. It’s a reflection and a fulfilment of all that Hopkins has been – from the early disillusionment and eventual abandonment of his early work through to the roles he wears so lightly today: sublime soundtracker, Eno contemporary, Coldplay and Creosote collaborator, possessor of a monolith of truly modern electronic music. It contains multitudes of endless subtleties; your impulsive, uncontrollable movement constantly rearticulating between aggression and beauty; moments of peace that hint at storms in the distance. It’s android music, ushering forth compelling, utterly human emotion through supposedly cold machines. It’s Jon Hopkins’ finest work so far and a promise of so much more to come.
CHRISTOPHER T. SHARPE
Being preposterously overdue on the AOTY lists has now become a weird tradition at Arbiter of Taste. It ends now. Thank you for your patience x
Debut mixtapes as intriguingly co-signed and exquisitely ambitious as that of Kelela Mizanekristos are few and far between. Whilst her vocals are elegant, coasting over her backing with subtlety and innate nous whilst proffering lyrics that are intimate and occasionally jarringly earnest, the real star here is the production. Drawn from the Fade to Mind and Night Slugs stable – with the likes of Nguzungzu, Kingdom and Jam City in particular shining – sonically Cut 4 Meis a constantly engaging listen, alternatively sparse and intricate, simple and dense, cold and lush.
19 // BEYONCÉ – BEYONCÉ
As power plays go, surprise releasing your music as an iTunes only release accompanied by 17 music videos is about as patently obvious a move Mrs Carter could have made. In hindsight. Dropping it in December is unorthodox, but exclusive releases are industry promotion bread-and-butter (though the monopolising hasn’t half hacked off Amazon and Target). She’s even done the video schtick before with B’Day, though this time round it’s even more in line with the way we consume music now – smartphones tilted landscape. Dropping it without any specific promotion at all though – 2014 additions to her world tour aside – is just not the kind of move popstars make. That doing so generated more fervent and immediate buzz than months of careful marketing could ensured that it paid dividends, with the result that Ghost’s ad-libbed line “Probably won’t make no money off this, oh well” seems rather hollow now that Beyoncéis the fastest selling album of all time on iTunes. Now that the surprise has faded and the din of digital tills has silenced somewhat though, the real power of Queen Bey’s fifth solo record becomes easier to discern. Its substance. Production from blockbusters (Pharrell Williams, Ryan Tedder) and relative unknowns (Chairlift’s Caroline Polachek and Boots) alike, attention-grabbing in its attentiveness, varying between idiosyncratic and enormous often with the same track. Even more pressing are the records themes though: romance, sex, female empowerment, beauty, children, the music industry, death and more dealt with – if not always the greatest refinement – brazenly unapologetic frankness. As Anderson Cooper put it “It is Beyoncé’s world and we are just living in it.” All hail.
18 // MELT YOURSELF DOWN – MELT YOURSELF DOWN
The constantly refreshing timeline of new music – 5% of which you’ll actually get your teeth into, 15% you’ll do your darndest to, and 80% you’ll never/hopefully never realise ever existed – can be exhausting, alienating, confusing and even tedious. Just when you’re about to pack it in and fire up Remain in Light for the umpteenth time though, a tonic is just round the corner. In case of emergency, smash the glass and reach for the debut record from Melt Yourself Down: a vibrant, exhilarating afro-jazz-punk-funk concoction that’s the perfect medicine for the new music greys. Whether going all out for the jugular on the blistering We Are Enough, or teasing you with the downtempo hand percussion driven funk of Free Walk, this is a highly intelligent, texturally diverse record capable of eliciting immediate primal gratification and careful rewarding close-analysis, fuelled by a consummate sense of merry abandon.
17 // FUCK BUTTONS – SLOW FOCUS
Fuck Buttons are two men who build acres of atmospheric playground. Slow Focus– with this level of consistency for the first time – makes that playground readily available for all who find the entrance. Though bludgeoning from the off – the first half of the record dominated by the likes of Brainfreeze, The Red Wing and Sentients: alien titans that crash and wallop across intergalactic mountain ranges – that bludgeoning’s function is to drag the listener into the state of ascendant otherness rather than simply numb submission. Music that can seem impossible to enter at first, ultimately proves seemingly impossible to leave. By the time the final transcendent, coursing notes of Hidden XS ring out you’ll never want to.
16 // FACTORY FLOOR – FACTORY FLOOR
Factory Floor boasts ten tracks of glistening physicality: music which painstakingly builds a towering sonic Siduhe between forebears-cum-collaborators Carter Tutti and the legions of the DFA which Factory Floor now call family. Compositionally, the band thrive on propulsive, enervating structural assonance, trapping listeners in a mesmeric web, glued in place as the melancholy vocal arachnid that is Niki Void circles ever closer. Listen to this record until your ears bleed. Then dance until your feet match.
15 // DARKSIDE – PSYCHIC
An expectation of intricacies of intimate, expansive dark space invariably has come to be bound up with the very name Nicolas Jaar, due to the impeccable body of work he’s turned his Midas fingers to over the last few years. This unexpectedly Americana-inflected, deeply groove-laden collaboration with Dave Harrington though, might well be his finest work to date though. An exercise in somnambulant urgency over canvases large (Golden Arrow),and small(Sitra),Psychicoozes a simultaneously ancient yet very modern sensibility, like the streetlights of a desert town impossibly nestled in amongst the canyons and plains. On the staggeringly gorgeous core one-two punch of Paper Trails and The Only Shrine I’ve Ever Seen, there’s a sense of primal ambience akin to the “evening redness” Cormac McCarthy made his name upon. It’s a record of carefully refined textures, tempos and moods, which reach out their tentacles, hook onto your neural tissue and hold you deep, just as mesmerising as the title suggests.
14 // FOALS – HOLY FIRE
“Crucially, with this increasing repertoire and refinement comes a sparer use of any individual aesthetic. Facets of all the elements of their sound old and new, instead rise and fall to prominence throughout an album that operates like a Galileo thermometer, fluctuations in mood and temperature instigating appropriate shifts in song-writing and production. There’s a developing sense of freedom, and an artful awareness of their abilities and craft that marks Holy Fire out as highly-accomplished transmission – resounding if not necessarily earth-shattering – on the level of the instrumental in particular.”
“No amount of deference to post-punk influences like Joy Division and Bauhaus, or vocal evocations of Patti Smith or Siouxsie-Soux, could render this record unimaginative or irrelevant. The cacophony of guitars, the palpitating bass-line of Shut Up, even a sultry downtown venture into Marshal Dear, all collude to constitute a well-timed slap in the face to today’s buzz bands and their gaggle of fans, experiencing their live performances through the hi-res screens of their smartphones.”
Pearl Mystic feels like rising up out of the rain and through the troposphere. Grey to white to bright, hell, purgatory and heaven absorbed into a few short moments of confusion and blindness. Then clarity. Water droplets on windows suddenly filled with sunlight.
It’s a record of precision, perfectly structured and flowing and yet its fuelled by a sense of expansive freedom, capturing that very moment of emergence, and yet its fuelled by a sense of expansive freedom. It’s glistening and blistering in equal measure and utterly, brilliantly triumphant.
11 // QUEENS OF THE STONE AGE – …LIKE CLOCKWORK
If they’ve stopped making rockstars – at least ones the ones who don’t start off on the very pretence of being a rockstar – the last off the conveyor belt might well be Josh Homme. Though flanked, as-ever, with a band of stupidly talented musicians – typified by the capacity to replace long-term member Joey Castillo mid-recording with Dave Grohl as a stop-gap and then Jon Theodore as one hell of a touring drummer – QOTSA is, and always will be, the 6′ 5″ Carlo Von Sexron. Appropriately …Like Clockworkfeels the most personal work of his career. Musically it encompasses and expands upon elements of the full-range of his musical output – from Screaming Trees and Arctic Monkeys to Eagles of Death Metal and Them Crooked Vultures – and then executing them to the utmost. It’s thematically though that the personal edge really strikes home though. My God Is The Sun is essentially a romantic manifesto of musical and personal being, whilst I Appear Missing and The Vampyre of Time and Memory take on depression and loneliness with a poetry, grandeur and gravitas that suits the band down to the ground – whilst simultaneously pushing them into veins they’ve never mined with such excellence before. Stoner rock that’s sexy, dirty, gritty and utterly lucid.
10 // THE NATIONAL – TROUBLE WILL FIND ME
“Enervating blood ties, romances won and lost, marital adversities, fading bonds of friendship: perhaps more than any other contemporary band The National’s very artistic make-up is predicated on the nuances of human relations. Such a nexus of interrelational trials and tribulations once again rears its head on their eagerly-anticipated sixth LP Trouble Will Find Me.
The build-up to this record saw the release of Mistaken for Strangers, a tour-documentary which inadvertently turned into an exhaustive portrait of the brothers Berninger, bringing another fraternal pairing into the band’s field of consciousness alongside founding sibling-sets the Dessners and Devendorfs.
It is in that vein that opener I Live In Salt arrives. Typically for the band it’s less of a kicking-down-the-door affair, more of an unexpected call at two in the morning. Wine bottle empty and heart full, the voice at the other end is possessed with the sort of earnest, deep-set confession to a loved one that ultimately came out of the documentary process: “I should live in salt for leaving you behind”. In their repertoire of album catalysts it’s not as enrapturing as Secret Meeting, as stately as Fake Empire, or as resoundingly titanic as Terrible Love, but even with the switch in tonal tact its measured, powerful build ensures that it’ll take a heart of stone not to ultimately melt.
This conflation of the subdued and gut-wrenching proves to be the underlying essence of the record. Where their peers might have been drawn towards the overblown – a concept album here, a gospel choir there – The National appear to have responded to their growing success by turning, more than ever, into and towards themselves.”
Most simply of all, even several months after listening to it for the first time, there are still layers and tiny revelations to be unearthed during repeat listens. Whether it’s a particularly sharp lyric suddenly making its significance felt, or the recognition of motifs and melodies being mirrored and reshaped, it’s extraordinary to witness just how seamlessly the album flows as a whole. It’s a cyclical, theatrical tale of power struggles, which gradually circles itself to form a satisfying arc, whose familiar, repeated elements serve to accentuate the gradual, subtle changes in both sound and style. (For one example, consider how the frantic guitar runs of Take the Night Off and I Was An Eagle compare to the closing passages of Little Bird and Saved These Words.)
But it’s not just an exercise in symmetry. There’s a whole host of devices at work here, with emotions swelling, dipping and soaring throughout with no real conclusions or blunt points. The revelatory moments which are painstakingly constructed are, in isolation, barely distinguishable. Yet upon arriving during a full listening experience, they are cause for true delight. The quaking chills of Devil’s Resting Place and the unity of Where Can I Go? are but two examples; their polar catharses crafted atop the groundwork laid by previous tracks. Yet even then, no one track is dull in of itself. Thanks to Marling’s ever-flowering literary nous and her ways of pulling potent melodies from skeletal components, Once I Was An Eagleis able to keep its listeners completely absorbed for its entire 63-minute runtime.
Post-punk was born to be this poetic. Throughout, whether delivered by Andrew Savage or Austin Brown, Light Up Gold’slyrics are droll and resonant – equally comfortable in realist romance (“My girl’s a borealis-lit fjord […] My girl is a beer, freshly poured”) or reflections on the dystopic contemporary employment landscape: (“There are no more roles on TV shows, there are no road-cone dispensing jobs […] but there are still careers in combat, my son”). They’re rich at their most prosaic (“I was debating Swedish Fish, roasted peanuts or licorice”) and abstract (“I saw, while squinting, the hidden layer in those lost-era grain elevators”), and they’re the main reason to bookmark this band and return to this record. Tracks like ‘N Dakota’ and ‘Yonder is Closer to the Heart’ are almost better read as prose poems in fact, managing to register an authentic experience of Americana in a style reminiscent of both Jonathon Richman and the Beat poets, but all the same strikingly current and refreshingly individualist.
Ambitious, imaginative and immaculately produced to the nines – from the cover art through to the harmonies, ukuleles and hand percussion – The ElectricLadyeasily equals and even surpasses 2010’s The Archandroid.Case in point: accusations of a lack of direct human connection beneath the gorgeous layers of sheen (although this arguably speaks to an emotional incapacity on the part of critics. For serious, did you even listen to Cold War people!) are answered in spades. Suite Vin particular seems to make the riposte to this criticism its very raison d’etre. A romantic, down-tempo but quietly experimental affair in the most-part, showcasing Monáe’s gorgeous panache for a slow jam (What An Experience and Can’t Live Without Your Love to name two)and ensuring it would hold up as an album in its own stead.
As it is though, it somehow stands only to serve as a delicious dessert to the real treats that make The Electric Ladyso damn essential. Case in point: the entire opening half of Suite IV. In particular, the run from the opening overture through to the Solange featuring title-track contains the finest work of Monáe’s career thus far. It’s an all-out, breathless declaration of her birth right to super-stardom: a series of feminist, queer, funk-ridden, poetic, intensively worked-through, Prince and Erykah Badu featuring excerpts of audacity.
The only real negative to the whole affair, is that it once again raises the ever-frustrating question of Monáe’s lack of enormity. But as I say, Cindi Mayweather can’t and won’t be stopped. The scale and refined eclecticism on display are incomparable amongst her peers. She’s working towards Purple Rain, What’s Going On, Voodoo, Miseducation of Lauryn Hillstatus on a stupidly consistent basis. She’ll get there. She’ll dance on your desks. She’ll walk your tightropes. She’ll cut your rugs to shreds. She’ll be back with Suites VI and VII.
06 // APPARAT – KRIEG UND FRIENDEN
Apparat, aka Sascha Ring, was approached in 2012 by German theatre director Sebastian Hartmann with the lofty task of soundtracking a stage adaptation of Tolstoy’s War and Peace. Out came Krieg und Frieden, a forty-five minute landscape of rangy drone interspersed with Ring’s haunting vocal lines. All these whirs and clicks and little cuts of desolation don’t make for the easiest listening, but so far as atmosphere goes, Krieg und Frieden is a near-perfect exercise in scope, tension and continuity.
Juxtaposing obscure lyricism with a direct hotline to your feels is Justin Vernon’s trademark. Reading him on a poetic level ensures that moments of outright clarity are few and far between, and his work with Volcano Choir when sojourning away from his good winter has often proved even more eccentric. Yet Byegone,the lead single from that collective’s second record, mustered one of the simplest, driving statements of Vernon’s musical career thus far to utterly essential effect: “Set Sail!”
Four times over, it’s the heart-in-hand, screaming into the void outcome of a steady, powerful build both in the song and Vernon’s career. Seemingly endlessly creative and collaborative it’s also almost Vernon’s credo, the driving essence behind his progression from Deyarmonymity to Bon Ubiquity. It’s a statement of progress and adventure in all things, deeply personal but maximalist in appeal.
That he then ends the song by singing “Tossing off your compliments wow, sexing all your parliaments” – possibly a convoluted reference to Chaucer’s Parliament of Foules and the ability to discern the gender of birds, which acts as a symbol of the subject of Vernon’s lyrics (either a friend, lover, or perhaps himself) lack of “confidence” despite their “competence” – is an immensely reassuring return to the incomprehensible norm.
19 // MODERAT – BAD KINGDOM
Bad Kingdom is lyrically all about best-laid plans going awry, whilst its sonic delivery is all about a plan being executed to perfection. Though driven by the elephantine in both the scale of that throbbing bass line and that literal trumpeting burst, the track’s sway is equally held by Sascha Ring’s gorgeous vocal delivery and the rising enveloping harmonies and swell of strings. It’s an exercise in balancing the gigantic with the delicate and the results can’t be argued with.
18 // THESE NEW PURITANS – ORGAN ETERNAL
On an album full of sprawling constructions and almost gratuitous experimentation, Organ Eternal was something small, and tight and steadfast to grasp onto. Where elsewhere, Field of Reeds is all meandering seven minute compositions, its first single instead revolves around a simple repeated melody, embellishing it with odd little echoes, string interludes, and These New Puritans’ trademark nonchalant vocal lines. It’s an elemental piece of music and, because of its tight structure, evokes the transformative more than any of the other tracks on the album. You can almost feel the time pass as you’re listening to Organ Eternal, washing over you with every new turn of its melody. This is These New Puritans creating their version of a single – a track perfectly constrained and immediately accessible, but also crammed full of the beautiful flourishes and ambition that characterised the very highest points of Field of Reeds.
17 // YEAH YEAH YEAHS – SACRILEGE
An absolute diamond amidst the rough and middling Mosquito, Sacrilege is all about power, whether it be the sexual politics of its utterly brilliant video, or the gospel choir which doesn’t just ignite a slow-burner but douses it in petrol and empties a box of matches.Karen O is the conductor – her electrifying performance directing the track’s momentum – on finest loud-quiet, monster-angel form, but this is undoubtedly the whole band at their finest, each element initially contained and steadily building within the trio before finally unleashing into the maximalist.
16 // THE KNIFE – A TOOTH FOR AN EYE
Totally unyielding and often unwieldy, Shaking The Habitualis an intensely powerful, passionate record, driven by and occasionally undone by the central question of its lead single: “When you’re full of fire, what’s the object of your desire?” The Knife have so much to say, and it’s so vital that they say it, that when the potency of their messages gets diluted – either by the simplistic iconography of wealth that adorns the album’s physical package, or the endurance test of quiet obscurity on tracks like Old Dreams Waiting To Be Realised – the disappointment of a missed opportunity feels all the keener.
A Tooth For An Eye is the antidote to all those worries. Karin and Olof set about using “dance as weapons” and the outcome is an exquisite amalgamation of their punk and electronic roots, colourful and charismatic, engaging and empowering, intelligent and invigorating. Their scattergun approach elsewhere is here at its most incisive: from the title’s inversion of the biblical phrase to highlight injustice, to the video’s two cents on gender stereotypes, to the lyrics which take aim at socio-political inequality, corrupt governance and property ownership in a manner far more concerned with the poetic as political than simplistic sloganeering.
15 // JAMES BLAKE – RETROGRADE
For a man whose introspective music feels like mercury is constantly in retrograde, garnering the Mercury for an album containing a song entitled Retrograde feels far too well planned. The track itself sees Blake picking over the contradictory impulses that accompany love.
The distinctive production and vocal delivery encapsulate these contradictions and binaries: soaringly intimate, expansive and sparse, subdued yet interstellar. Lyrically they’re even more pronounced and confused, “Ignore everybody else, we’re alone now”, is both a necessity and an impossibility – no man or woman is an island – but the attempt to find solidarity and contentment in isolation is seen as vital to both personal and romantic growth. His position to the subject is to move on and make something new together whilst being true to the person you used to be… which is even more confused when seemingly derived from both naïve and mature impulses, selfless, patient attempts to help another and the selfish desires which inform those attempts. I give up.
14 // PHOENIX – ENTERTAINMENT
Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenixwasn’t just a hard act to follow, it threw the kind of gauntlet down that most band might never be able to match again. Case in point, even before we get into the patient euphoria of Love Like A Sunset or Rome‘s delicate treatise on romantic melancholy and memory through the lens of collapsing empires, its armed with not one but two instantly classic singles straight out of the blocks. The distillation of four albums worth of consummate song-writing and Gallic poise into breathless three-minute pop songs granted us the sophisti-bounce and John Hughes sugar-rush of Lisztomania then 1901 in immediate riposte, fuelled by its transcendent multifaceted refrain, melding pre-chorus, chorus, post-chorus into a single musical megazord.
Tracks like those elevated the band to dizzying, Coachella-headlining heights in the years between their current magnum opus and Bankrupt!Equally, away from the stage lights, the band saw a time to reflect on success and contentment, musically and maritally. Entertainment is the ideal single to encapsulate all these elements: recapturing the attention of the masses after four years away, the challenge of matching let alone topping your previous work, reflecting on where your life has taken you, and moving on from the past. It takes each of those elements on step-by-step. Exhibit A, the impossibly shrill stacatto of the central chiming riff, capable of migraine inducing bobble-headedness, which is as arresting and memorable as anything the band have ever penned. Exhibit B, its simultaneous status as a fusion of and a development from those aforementioned towering singles, their equals in function and yet refreshing distinct in form. The integral part though is Exhibit C, the vocal and lyrical heart of the track. Entertainment finds Thomas Mars in a deeply meditative mode amidst his borderline manic synth-pop surroundings. He uses the celebrity industrial-personality complex as both metaphor and reality in matters of the his heart and through that holds his relationships present and past together, cynicism turning to self-empowerment as he ultimately realises that he’d rather be alone than have to live through the latter any longer. Phoenix knocked it out of the park this year. Again.
13 // FUCK BUTTONS – HIDDEN XS
On an album that deals with rising tension, cacophony and dread throughout – crashing, hammering, blistering, sinister as is its want – for it to close on ten minutes of such euphoria is like that first breath after emerging from under the water, aircraft landing, the final scene of Gravity,a summit reached. Building from a blissed-out twinkling template it encapsulates all of these – in essence, the simple glory of being alive – and moves ever outwards, constantly developing, rising, falling, encompassing and expanding until truly epic in the entirety of its scope. Hidden XS is anxiety dissipating, transfixing, transcendent, utterly glorious music, performed by two artistis at the top of their game.
12 // AUTRE NE VEUT – PLAY BY PLAY
Sat prettily on the front end of Anxiety, Play By Play was the perfect introduction to Arthur Ashin’s second album as Autre Ne Veut if only because it so perfectly embodied the titular feeling’s overwhelming restlessness – all that twinkle and bluster, the twitching drum beats, the semi-stutter of Ashin crooning “Baby”. However – maybe because it’s by far the best track on Anxiety – you always felt as though Play By Play was best consumed on its own – as the five minute slice of pop bravado and posturing that it really is, built from the ground up with layer upon layer of hooky, glorious R&B.
11 // KANYE WEST – NEW SLAVES
Kanye West is many things: hyperconscious and ignorant, crude and erudite, vapid and ambitious, ridiculous and brilliant. New Slaves isall of these things. It’s everything he’s been and done the last few years all at once: Yeezus, Swift-gate, Coachella, Air Yeezys, stage rants, Twitter diarrhoea, 808s and Heartbreak, the Zane Lowe interview, the Jimmy Kimmel interview, losing his mother, becoming a father, Runaway. It’s sparse and industrial. It seethes with hate received and given. It grows manic and breathless. It drops the mic. It erupts into a soulful, orchestral close sampled from a Hungarian rock band and featuring vocals from Frank Ocean. Obviously.
Most significantly though it’s a shot in the dark heard around the world. It’s one of the most famous, definitive human beings of our time not taking it anymore, trying to strip away the bullshit that surrounds and oppresses us all – even and especially his own – and fully lets loose on the institutions that facilitate and maintain that bullshit and oppression, whether it be in prisons or fashion houses, your neighbourhood or the White House. Kanye West is many things, but most thrillingly of all he’s a warts-and-all, leather kilt-wearing, God-complex possessing, extreme talent-having human being.
10 // NILS FRAHM – FOR – PETER – TOILET BRUSHES – MORE
Where Screwsmight have been all about rebuilding through limitation, Nils Frahm producing music that worked around a broken thumb, Spacesis all about swelling creative expansiveness, integrally melancholic but possessing glorious vitality. This composition is perhaps the finest distillation of all those elements, encountering Frahm as it does in perfect balance between classical patient stateliness and contemporary urgency. Stretching out to the utmost, venturing through a series of shorter sections but managing to be utterly compelling through them all – with the driving experimentalism of the Toilet Brushes portion particularly attention-seizing – this is an utter delight.
9 // DARKSIDE – PAPER TRAILS
Cold desert. A pronounced sense of longing. A quiet sense of dread. From the far horizon light creeps by, two moons chasing after one another in their quiet cat-and-mouse, and I wonder when the third will arrive in this long night. I’m surrounded on all sides by intoxicating space, space you can die in. I place one boot in front of the other.
The chill further sets in when I look at the canopy of stars above, the implacable, distant sentinels watching, judging. I think of the cleansing, violent flames I left behind me and the endless nowhere ahead of me. I pull my backpack closer to me and see my breath float upwards. So much space. So much potential now. “I told you I would find a place to go.”
8 // MOUNT KIMBIE – MADE TO STRAY
The first single from Cold Spring Fault Less Youth has been following me around all year. It was forged in late springtime and then foamed upwards and around my summer, bubbles popping at appropriate moments – mountains, radio studios, desks, road-trips, festival tents. It followed me to Bristol in November, where two bodies ushered it forth until it was snaking its way around The Fleece’s pillars and the corridors of my conscious. Now it’s at the top table it was always destined to reside.
It’s fuelled by this distinctive percussive core, this buzz that’s halfway between a heartbeat and that strange alien chirrup you get from speakers when a signal is incoming. In a way those are both instigative forces – physical and social – equally possessing an innate compulsive force, motivating interaction, action, movement. Made To Stray is all about instigation: the “reckless tracks of impulse” and codes of behaviour that drive us forward. Especially when the vocals kick in halfway through, it sounds like the duo recognising the entrapment of the artistic life they’ve chosen, the life of the road and “rough coasts” they find themselves in. On another reading, it sounds like a description of any drifter born into a post-anything lost generation, slaves and strays all at once. Mainly though, it sounds like the tinnitus I’m getting from listening to this song too much and too loud.
7 // JANELLE MONAE – Q.U.E.E.N.
In the videos of her breath-taking performance from Later… earlier this year, a white-suited Janelle Monáe skids round that all-too-familiar London studio with visceral energy, pitching every note of her sophomore LP’s flagship tunes – Dance Apocalyptic and Q.U.E.E.N – to polished perfection. Though such onstage attack might seem at odds with the fact that Monáe (alongside contemporary and collaborator Miguel) is responsible for some of this decade’s smoothest, most soulful RnB, the Atlanta-based Electric Lady has always seemed to take dismantling preconceptions as a personal responsibility – whether in her vocal support of individuality offstage, or in her track themselves. It’s precisely this which makes Monáe such a great writer of pop music, and there’s little doubt that Q.U.E.E.N is one of the loftiest peaks in a loftier-than-your-average discography.
The track’s signature spring-loaded guitar wobble is released from its cage almost instantly, then controlled and choreographed to perfection as the song evolves, sometimes teasing, sometimes entreating, but never once even considering the possibility of losing purchase on your earlobes. More layers build up above it, yes, but Q.U.E.E.N is never blatant or manipulative. It relies on its own infectiousness to do the dirty work – finding that part of you, however small or well-disguised it may be, that really wants to dance, before proceeding to feed it with soulful sound.
Sonically, there are all sorts of virtues here that could whip the ground out from beneath you, especially what with the way Monáe can blend throwback R&B with orchestral arrangements and seriously retro-sounding flourishes on the keys, barely pausing to catch her breath. Q.U.E.E.N. is as dynamic as the Electric Lady herself– at once both ecstatic and immaculately presented, switching from expansive string breakdowns and passionate rap to the playful and tongue in cheek – however, what really makes the song so damn special is that not only is it a further realisation of the Cyndi Mayweather concept that Monáe’s been pursuing since her first EP and a polished bauble of 24 carat pop, but that it’s also the most feminist, pro-individuality, pro-equality pieces of music to have ever got anywhere near 8 million YouTube hits.
At more than a few moments it can feel as though Q.U.E.E.N. is the embodiment of that strut Monáe seems to own so well, which lets you know she’s forever the ruler of her realm. This track is almost a manifesto for everything that Monáe wants to change about the world – whether that be the demonisation of the ‘other’, judgment, infringement upon people’s human rights – and it’s the fact it pulls off this idealism without a hint of self-congratulation that’s so very important. The sound of preaching has never been sweeter.
6 // LOCAL NATIVES – COLOMBIA
No band has spoken quite so intimately about loss in the last few years than Local Natives. On Gorilla Manor,a characterful, captivating, gorgeously harmonised number called Airplanes with lyrics about chopsticks and encyclopedias, flattened me totally one day when it finally struck home that it was about Kelcey Ayer’s grandfather. I’d somehow missed it.
Perhaps subconsciously I’d blocked out its true meaning due to the loss of my two grandfathers in the year the song was released. Both gone within the same year, both in a manner where I felt like I could and should have done more before they went, at the very least been more present. Similarly Airplane is a celebration of a man’s life, but it’s a celebration weighed down with sadness that he wasn’t better known to Ayer, buoyed by the knowledge that “when I leave my body for the sky, the wait will be worth it”.
There was however, no such block in place for Colombia though. This is an even more personal a song, Ayer outright naming his late mother Patricia and using the first person pronoun in his response to her every line of the song. Yet, despite being even more private, it’s even more direct in its deep connectivity. Now it’s not just about the loss of a person, it’s about the realisation that when that person has been lost, what that person did in their lifetime, who they were and how they were, can only live on as a part of yourself and others they leave behind. Memories of their grace create a legacy to uphold and live up to, and it’s impossible to know that what you’re doing is worthy of that legacy: “Every night I ask myself – am I giving enough?”
5 // EAST INDIA YOUTH – HEAVEN, HOW LONG
The waveform of Heaven, How Long shows a song that’s constantly growing, reaching ever towards the summit. It opens in synthesised ripples, initially gentle butterfly wings beneath a steadily-paced, reflectively-toned vocal delivery. It’s a sequence which continues to reverberate throughout the track, but the effect of those wings is that they incite the hurricane of noise that envelops the close. As Doyle reaches the central moment, an arms in the air, lung purging moment as he repeatedly asks “heaven, how long?” – a cry alternately spiritual, romantic, artistic – the growing urgency and noise rising up beneath him provides the song’s answer at the very least: now. Having growing ever-louder, ever-more layered, ever-more powerful and enrapturing, it eventually erupts into manic euphoria, which swoops in, carries you away and finally drops you flat on your arse.
4 // APPARAT – PV
So far as atmospherics and mood-setting go, nothing this year could compete with the bleak, shifting landscapes of Apparat’s Krieg und Frieden. Even Sascha Ring’s overwhelmingly popular collaboration with Modeselektor was eclipsed by the sheer quality both musically and conceptually of the German producer’s first foray into soundtracking theatre, which not only managed to stand as an album totally removed from the production of War and Peace it was originally written for, but to rush over vast cinematic spaces and considerable palettes of sound with fluidity.
PV, the song at the centre of the LP, actually represents something of a microcosm of Krieg und Frieden, and Ring’s unusual willingness to push listeners way out of their comfort zones is on full show here. From the moment its whir cuts deep into the afterglow of Blank Page, PV starts slowly panning over the disquiet of which Ring has become a master choreographer. It’s one of the most uncompromising pieces of music to have been released this year. And when the four-minute mark arrives, PV suddenly lurching forwards, you’ll struggle to pay attention to anything else.
3 // ARCADE FIRE – REFLEKTOR
Reflektor rattles into being with a distinctive sound: the sound of one of the world’s biggest bands firing the engine up once again.
This is not the same hurdy-gurdy wielding launcher of a thousand imitators that burst out of Montreal in 2004. It’s Grammy-award-winning-Arcade-freaking-Fire, crashing back to earth out of the aether (or carefully executed, just shy of-ubiquitous, borderline irritating marketing campaign, depending on your tolerance for these things).
It’s a release first properly interacted with via a subversive, Google-collaborative interactive video set in Haiti that involved you wave your phone at your webcam like a right dickhead. Oh, and then putting out an Anton Corbijn directed, black-and-white disco-ball fixated bobble-headed weird-fest for good measure.
It’s a song made up of the sort of component parts – 7 minutes upwards of James Murphy-produced, Bowie-featuring, bongo and horn-laden, orchestral disco about the corruption of our capacity for legitimate interconnection in the internet age – that only they could pull together and still get played on the radio. Fuck yeah.
2 // VAMPIRE WEEKEND – HANNAH HUNT
Often even worse the break-up itself is the realisation of the decline beforehand, of sand slipping through your fingers, moments becoming lost in the rain, memories blowing away in the summer breeze. You look back to when the rot set in and you find it goes back even further than you thought: the weeks become months become years you could have changed. You review incidents that meant nothing at all at the time in a new light, and suddenly find them to be crucial turning points. Whilst the exterior was being kept intact, the inside was steadily eaten away. Then it all caves in.
Ezra Koenig tells a story of road-trips, mistrust, and heart-break that’s carried by a woozy, strange and transportive kind of bliss at the out-set. It’s a trap. Those spare delicate rhythms, atmospheric sound and harmonies drop out all of a sudden and then the dams burst. Drums break through, floods of piano erupt, and with them Ezra’s voice breaks, the production making it feel as though he’s singing from somewhere far away but at the very tippest top of his voice. Then it’s all gone again, fading out as the seeming suddenness is shown to be the final act of inarrestabile decline. Now there’s nothing left at all.
Hannah Hunt, might well be the purest, most sophisticated track the band has yet written. They’ve never been more subtle, and yet they’ve never been more purposeful and direct than the emotionally shattering second repeat of the line: “If I can’t trust you then damn it Hannah, there’s no future, there’s no answer.” It still kills me every time eight months later.
1 // JON HOPKINS – OPEN EYE SIGNAL
Open Eye Signal deals in tides of physicality, in frenetic energy, in the pulse of the crowd coursing through you.
The titlerefers to the effect that opening feedback has upon you. It’s the sunrise – whether the one that awakens you from slumber or the one that emerges indifferent to your existence at the end of an all-nighter – and with it the primal, pagan innate response that accompanies it. Despite your bleary eyes, it’s the moment when you feel the world awakening, a new day in your veins.
From there it builds through its buzzing, low-end MS20 riff and rattling percussion, steady and incessant as its surrounding atmosphere becomes adorned with angelic vocal samples and abstract drones.
When the tempo shifts up another notch at the 6-minute mark and that pummelling, deafening throb kicks in even harder there’s nothing else you can do. You’re already transfixed, you’ve made it this far, but now you’re not even present, a puppet, your head, heart, hips, and hooves all perfectly in sync with the mercy and will of Hopkins.
Open Eye Signal is the keystone to the record it lays at the centre of. The first track Hopkins finished recording, it encompasses all the elements, waves and brushstrokes – ambient, urgent, hypnotic, enthralling, sonorous, cage-rattling, loud, quiet, high, low, epic, spontaneous and euphoric – that make Immunitysuch vital, magnificent listening. It’s also utterly distinct, a fusion of light and dark matter, electronic sophistication and human ingenuity that meant, in a year that has been positively oozing with brilliance, it still shone even more radiantly than the rest.
This is why we’re all here. The cause of the buzz in your eardrums, the ache in your feet, the tears on your cheeks, the smile on your face.
These capsules of life in sound, finite in length and yet seemingly infinite in number and possibility. Whether borne from Deafheaven or Devendra, Parquet Courts or Pusha T, this list aspires to contain 100 of the very best of them, the cream of the crop, somehow rising to the top in a year absolutely heaving with spectacular music of all shapes and sizes. This is the first 50.
Discover or rediscover. Find solace or set the roof on fire. Rekindle an old flame. Break your heart. Fall in love all over again.
ARBITER OF TASTE 