If 2020 was a drunken, depressed stupor, and 2021 the evacuation of the morning bowels, then 2022 was the inevitable hangover, an entire year of groggy uselessness. Everyone has been sick, repeatedly. The evil mega-death has not so much gone away, as been normalised into the rancid trench of modern life, a permanent blight on the human condition. Nothing works. Everyone is on strike. The world is still run by rich idiots, screaming hysterical banshees; cruel, sadistic men and women taking us all for a ride without even the temerity to go the scenic route. And against this sorry backdrop, we arrive once more at the end of everything, the gross indecency of the end-of-year list.
I have, in truth, stumbled through the last twelve months. I’ve not paid attention, barely able to raise my poorly head from the comfort of my unwashed navel. But here we are. For reasons beyond you and I both I am compelled to scrabble together the fragments of popular culture that have moved me most, as if sharing the fragile respites that have salved an otherwise excruciating year might offer some service to a beleaguered, broken world. Oh the melodrama.
To that end, this is the list to end all lists, the end-of-year list that all other end-of-years-lists endeavour to be, the apex predator of seasonal music journalism. As we all know, music is a competition, and below you will find the sixteen demonstrably, scientifically proven best albums of the last year - if your albums not on here, then you are sub par, and should probably give up on music and become an accountant or something.
Guido Möbius - a million magnets (and more)
I never read the linear notes and am not going to start now. I don’t know what this album is all about nor if ‘Guido Möbius’ is a person or a collective. It doesn’t matter. This is an album of wonderfully rhythmic deviation, a meeting point of almost samba-ish percussion and a broken printer, a transcendent horizon decorated by urgent drones and affected voices. Someone somewhere may have just discovered the ‘reverse’ effect on their fx pedal, but its used to perfection, melding with the post-linguistic nature of the voice, the surprisingly perky drums, and the aforementioned printer, to produce a startlingly alien soundscape. ‘a million magnets (and more)’ manages to be both pleasingly restrained and utterly distinct, drawing upon a surprisingly narrow palette to produce an album of such defined character that it appears to operate in its own dimension entirely, without ever completely abandoning expectation.
Tove Lo - Dirt Femme
Best appreciated in the carrier of its superb 40 minute minimalist music video montage - in which our hero dresses as a scorpion, courts a robo-dildo, and rides a literal dragon - Tove Lo bounces back from 2019’s disappointing ‘Sunshine Kitty’ with an album of exquisite pop production. Music tech nerds will choke on their coffee when they listen to the frankly unparalleled welding of multiple, radically different reverbs, a veritable instrument in its own right. And whilst the rest of us might balk at the suspect lyrics, surface aesthetics aside ‘Dirt Femme’ is phenomenal. Minimal, emotive, and conducted with clinical precision, Tove Lo demonstrates that mainstream pop music can be quite good after all. Detractors might want to check out single ’No One Dies From Love’, which is basically one long evolving chorus of increasingly complex vocal harmonies, or ’True Romance’ which takes side-chain compression to its logical extreme, a breathing, thumping filter opening and closing over a ultra-repetitive bass-line, whilst Tove Lo warbles on about love or some shit.
Duster - Together
Speaking of taking a shed-load of DMT, Duster have a new album out. As we all know, there are but two kinds of people in the world - those who correctly identify Duster as the greatest band of all time, and everybody else. ’Together’ doubles down on everything that makes the band great, offering a hazy world of suitably unbalanced, fluttering tape reels and perfectly formed riffs, all drenched in a considerable wash of melancholy. In 2022 Duster are bleaker than ever - at times almost too bleak - their music ripe with lethargic irony as they trawl through their own back catalog to produce a mosaic of half-finished ideas that don’t so much progress as wither on the amplifier. As always, the beauty lies not in the individual songs, great as they are, but in the flow of the album as a whole, buoyed by its uncanny production. Plodding dirges of distant Indi-rock give way to a wall of erratic distortion that was hiding in plain sight, the downbeat tread of half-speed chord progressions suddenly bursting into the optimistic, the anthemic - a respite from the overwhelming moroseness of it all that serves to make the whole thing all that much more depressing. It’s like listening to a record you vaguely remember from your youth played at the wrong speed through the wall of you neighbours house whilst you're emerging from the tail-end of a hallucinogenic binge, a meandering soundscape to long nights round the fire ruminating on the fragility of your own impoverished existence.
Mathoms - Woe Trumpets
The trouble with ‘ambient’ music is that it mostly just sounds like its creator has recently stumbled upon the Valhalla reverb plug-in and figured out it can make any old shit sound nice. To that end, most ambient music is awful, a compositionally barren plain of insufferably dull affected ‘niceness’. Thankfully, Mathoms buck that trend, creating an album that despite broadly fitting into the ambient camp, manages to be actually good. It helps of course that there is some actual rhythmic interest, its glacial plains populated by brittle fractured arpeggiations, or the sudden appearance of rising canyons of noise and borderline aggressive industrial scrapes. There is an awful lot of movement for something that seems ostensibly quite static, and yet little redundancy - instead, ‘The Woe Trumpets’ walks back and forth between ambient niceties and horror-movie drawls, an album of contemporary electronic music that seems to borrow more from the obscure and overlooked rarities of the 80’s industrial scene than from the more saccharine tropes of its peers.
Chihuahua - Crythor Du
Chihuahua are so committed to the ruinous heap of disappointment that is 2022 that they broke up between me first hearing about them and subsequently checking them out online, thus adding them to the already unwieldy list of awesome bands I’ll never get to see live. Spouting kraut-like, sax-heavy noise-rock, Chihuahua revel in the sort of raw aggression that rock music often aspire to but largely fails to achieve these days. Crythor Du channels the much under-rated Laddio Bollocko (another band who broke up before their time) and throws them together with a Discord comp, a vaguely Nation of Ulysses aesthetic made all the more aggressive by the raspy Welsh voice that fires incessantly over the top, a language that seems built to be shouted at you by an inebriated chap at an all-night petrol station (a crude stereotype I am no doubt projecting from my own youth, growing up on the wrong side of the Newport / Bristol punk rivalry). Admittedly, theres some spoken word stuff I don’t love in the second half, but overall it is mesmerising, transcendent, aggravating stuff, and by far the best new ‘rock’ band I’ve come across in the last few years.
anrimeal - Skin Deep: A Study On Human Skin And Concert
This is, I think (see my above dedication to avoiding linear notes) some form of sound diary documenting a single month in spring - which sounds like a potentially horrible endeavour but is pulled off with aplomb. Skin Deep nods to the ‘dainty’ singer-songwriter tropes that are all the rage these days, but spends just as much time subverting them, casting a dense backdrop of unkempt states where field-recordings and miscellaneous chatter bleed, sometimes seamlessly, sometimes sharply, into loose percussion and clouds of reverberant harmonies. The album progresses by way of a self-aware commentary that walks the listener between the staging posts of an off-the-cuff audio diary and Neo folk sing-a-longs, its conflicting (or perhaps emergent) narratives framed by the dream-like production, in which disparate spaces drift together, the casual thrum of bedroom pop drowning in the droning din of abstracted street noises and humdrum ghost stories. Guitar, harmonium, synths and vocals all coalesce in pursuit of half-remembered songs, short refrains that drop off halfway through, abandon the point and wander instead down the threadbare hill of some transient train of thought, a willing tangent enveloped in ambient washes of splendid nothingness.
Sirom - The Liquified Throne of Simplicity
Sirom return with an incredibly ambitious ‘The Liquified Throne of Simplicity’, a double album offering over 70-odd minutes of their signature experimental folk. It’s incredible to think that this veritable orchestra of sound is produced by just three people, albeit by way of a couple of hundred different instruments. Sirom seem to conjure semi-improvised clouds of instrumental expression, with long, evolving passages of viola or hurdy-gurdy framing both elaborate song-structures and tumbling passages of abstract noise-making. Nothing is every rushed in the world of Sirom - each sound, each riff is explored to its fullest, teasing out all manner of timbral evolutions and sonic possibilities. I appreciate I am committing a mortal sin of music journalism by invoking the term, but its all very ‘organic’, with plucked and struck acoustic sounds jostling against one another, pulled along by the rising, almost kraut-like progressions of the guitars and strings - chanting, submerged vocals drifting over increasingly frantic performances. Tracks like ‘Prods the Fire with a Bone, Rolls over with a Snake’ do exactly what prog would do if prog wasn’t shit, pummelling the listener with layer after layer or logical thematic development, moving to radical new frontiers over 18+ minutes without ever feeling forced, trite, or overcooked.
Miya Folick - 2007
That Miya Folick is a little selfish. Not only has she accrued the vast majority of the worlds songwriting talent for herself, but she insists on hoarding most of its choruses too, leaving precious little hooks for the rest of us. Each song on '2007' starts with a melody so catchy you swear it must be the pinnacle of the EP, only to be followed by another, then another, until the listener is bathing in a sea of perfectly formed ditties, forced to singalong whether they like it or not. It is the sort of release that makes it almost impossible to choose a favourite song - each fresh listen reveals further character and nuance, new melodic peaks and lyrical splendifities. Currently 'Cartoon Clouds' is the best song, but last week it was 'Nothing to See', and prior to that 'Oh God'. Throughout them all perfectly executed melodies dance with simple but incredibly effective lyrics performed with a sense of tired honesty typically lacking in the glossier end of pop, a disparity born perhaps of Folick's willingness to embrace more lo-fi indie stylings from time to time. The title track is case in point, lamenting that ‘I don’t want to be afraid / of ageing or gaining weight / I want to take up space / I want to get up early and stay up late / I want to smile real big / I want to fucking live’ - words that whilst not poetry on their own, are executed to perfection within the contours of the pop tradition. Anyone with even a passing interest in the craft of pop music should really being paying attention, not least because it still feels like Folick is in the formative stage of her career, and I would put good money on her next release being better still.
Witch on Horseback - Bambience: Electronic Diversions for Peculiar Children
An album for people who are ‘sleepy, but not sleepy enough’, as well as anyone with a ‘spare seven dollars’, 'Bambience: Electronic Diversions for Peculiar Children' is, I think, a sort of modern take on Raymond Scott's 'Soothing Sounds for Babies' - though it is hard to believe its creators are particularly wed to the concept beyond the initial gimmick. Instead, the album focusses on a sort of minimal synthesis in the vein of mid-era Tangerine Dream, a series of meandering square waves and synthetic warbles that would sound quite at home on impossibly cool labels like Ghostbox or Castles in Space. It’s very, very silly, and I am fairly confident an artist called Witch on Horseback is in on the joke, a wry amusement made all the better for the superb quality of the compositions within. This might be a work of parody, or at the very least pastiche, but it is conducted with obvious love for the form, a passion that easily makes tracks such as ‘Celestial Pancake’ or ‘Outer Space Ambulance Repair’ or ‘Autobiography of a Balloon’ as valuable as the work of any of their more poe-faced peers.
Pan Daijing - Tissues
If I am being completely honest, there's only one contender for ‘album of the year’, and it came out in January. Tissues is basically everything I like about late period Scott Walker but done really, really well, and then combined with some of the finest drone and experimental classical composition in existence. Exquisite operatic vocal (note - not opera-like, but proper, ‘I actually like opera’ virtuosity) mingle with thunderous bass tones and alienesque spoken-word, richly textured fragments of post-human sound-design that destroy the boundary between the organic and the synthetic. Honestly, I spend half the album wondering if I am listening to a close-miced oboe or the destruction of life on earth as we know it, and I’m still none the wiser. Best of all, Pan Daijung gives zero fucks what you want to hear, and follows through with the most face-punching sonic experiments way past the point of boredom - a good 15 minutes of the album is basically an opera-singer shouting ‘Hey!’ whilst the deepest fucking bass you’ve ever heard growls methodically in the background. This is difficult music however you slice it, and I can’t think of a single work that even comes close to the sense of unbridled nihilism it permeates, an overwhelming aesthetic amplified by some stellar production and a complete disregard for genre or expectation. I don’t mean to beat a dead horse, but if you don’t like this, we’re no longer friends.
Simon McCorry - Mouthful of Dust
Wielding overlapping lines of cello so fragile they feel as if they might actually break, eternally prolific Simon McCorry knocks it out the analogical park with this stunning release for the Polar Seas label. Rather than courting the pretty ambience of his neo-classical peers, McCorry here invokes a more laboured restraint, all scraping strings and delicate, half-written melodies, always falling inwards, as if the end goal isn’t beauty, but self-preservation. Glacial changes are conducted with palpable reluctance, as if the composers is fearful of straying too far from home, and does so now only under duress. Thematic development occurs on a macro level - the balance between the raw timbre of the strings and the more artificial walls of frozen reverb pushing things beyond the sort of pretty easy listening to which ambient works are so often wed. 'Mouthful of Dust' may indeed be a very pretty thing, but its gentle face is rife with real wounds, a work cast in human imperfection, resulting in a genuinely emotional listen.
Siavash Amini & Eugene Thacker - Songs for Sad Poets
Yet another exquisite album from Slavish Amini, this time working with the poetry of Eugene Thacker as his source material and in the process producing his best album yet. Amini has long operated in the domain of ‘proper’ composition, even whilst being erroneously labelled as a drone or ambient artist. 'Songs for Sad Poets' spends its best moments having more in common with the likes of Ligeti or Penderecki than it does with Eno - and though it nods to the comfortable aesthetics of burbling abstract synths and long-held tones, it is in its approach to sound-design and timbral/harmonic complexity that that album truly shines. Clusters of closely-related notes rise from an additive din, a psuedo-singing-bowl seamlessly evolving into an atonal orchestra. Amini lingers in the cold and the quiet, then dashes from it, exposed and howling, each wave of dynamic intervention experienced as a threat. Animalistic scuttles parade across the foreground, whilst haunting voices creep from the rear, a morbid, depressing, suffocating sound-world that offers emotive expression in a way most electronic composers find unachievable. In many ways, 'Songs for Sad Poets' is both less ambient and less noisy than Amini’s other albums, and as such defies easy categorisation. It is an unsettling album whilst rarely being unpleasant, precise but never clinical, willing to submerge its listener for extended periods within a morbid horizon that offers little relief, and in doing so promotes an uncomfortable encounter with the sort of buried truths we are more likely to want to bury than to face head on.
Spider God - Black Translations
If you had told me 12 months ago that a comedy black metal covers album would be any good, let alone one of the best albums of the year, I would have scoffed in your general direction, overcome by incredulity. Yet here we are. Clinging on to the tail-end of a 2 year stretch both cruel and ridiculous, it turns out that listening to Spider God fire though some of the cheesiest songs ever written at a thousand miles an hour is exactly what I need. The success here lies in the bands total commitment to both treating their very silly material with a surprising degree of respect, and managing to turn it all into entirely serviceable - in fact, rather excellent - black metal without exerting even the slightest effort. You’ll spend most of the album wondering how you never noticed ‘I want to dance with somebody’ or ‘hit me baby one more time’ are actually black metal songs in disguise, or how it is possible to turn something so insufferable into something so brilliant. Even Spider God’s silliest ’translations’ - that biscuit probably goes to their take on No Doubts ‘Don’t Speak’ - are bizarrely effective, and I defy anyone to not admit that the Spice Girls ‘Vivas Forever’ isn’t at least as good as anything in the wider black Metal back catalogue.
Distant Animals - Everything is Fucked and We are All Going to Die
No one is a big enough egotist to stick their own album in their end of year list. No one that is, except me, and probably Bono, and I don’t care - ‘Everything is Fucked and We are All Going to Die’ is a perfect distillation of British life in 2022, and since the wider world has completely failed to pick up on how fucking awesome I am, I’m going to help it along. Look - the opening track sounds exactly like my head sounds whenever I hear a Tory speak, and track 2 is a collage several broken and slightly shit things over-lapping without due care and attention, just like modern life. I’ve even chucked in some bona fide pop music, complete with my beautiful singing voice run through a ropey vocoder. The whole thing is doused in clever-clever knowingly lo-fi production, and ‘Piss off, Odey’ has the sexiest synth riff ever recorded. Just go and buy it. If you don’t you're definitely a Tory. If you don't you fancy Liz Truss. If you don’t I’ll have to take my freezing children to the food bank and swap them for a tin of past-date beans.
ਚ ੈ ਨ ਲ KAANAL च ै न ल R Á Ð ע ָ ר ו ּ ץ - Charlemagne Palestine, Oren Ambarchi & Eric Thielemans
My longstanding love for everything Charlemagne Palestine, alongside my longstanding ambivalence towards all things Oren Ambarchi, makes this record a little like hearing He-man team up with Skeletor (or perhaps, in fairness, Mer-man). It’s not that I dislike Ambarchi’s work, but rather that he’s been a mainstay of albums I should, on paper, love, but then just couldn’t get into (save perhaps for ‘The Pendulums Embrace’ and that one with the guitar fan, both which are pretty alright). Yet here he is, alongside Palestine and Eric Thielemans, producing an album that is everything I’ve always wanted from 40 minutes of meandering improv-drone. The albums charms comes from how much space its players ceed to one another - though by virtue of its drone aesthetic it courts the ‘always on’ aesthetic somewhat demanded by the form, the only real constant is Palestines minimalist piano, with Ambarchi and Thieleman weaving delicately around the vast and expressive timbral and dynamic changes therein. Theres a certain jazz-like quality to the proceedings, a push and pull against the trance-state conjured by Palestines other work, with an overall narrative arc of surprising definition. The meandering gives way to the ambient, the ambient to the rhythmic, impressive free-jazz drum work-outs driving an increasingly erratic piano towards the domain of music proper, all vaguely Ayler, before the whole affair comes crashing down to reveal the delicate drawl of Palestines formless vocal utterances. Its the sort of album where I both assume it is improvised and simultaneously struggle to believe there wasn’t some meticulous planning in regard to the overall structure, such is the sheer perfection by which the music proceeds - a breathtaking, beautiful journey of expansion and contraction, like a living, breathing creature.
Pup - The Unravelling of Pup the Band
Confession time - earlier this year I went to see Pup play live, one of a handful of late 30’s men in a sea of teenage girls, spilling my over-priced beer in the first circle of a sweaty pit, and they were fucking awesome. On the surface, Pup play super annoying American pop-punk (hence the teenage girls), perhaps even with a touch of the dreaded emo, but if you can push past that admittedly dreadful aesthetic (ok, I'm being cool, I'm a sucker for it really), there is a genuinely brilliant band underneath. No four bar section ever seems to be entirely the same as the last, and most songs have multiple time signatures, despite almost always drawing upon fist-pounding sing-a-long choruses. I can only imagine the time it takes to write this stuff, with the bands golden triptych - the singers perfect mastery of the underplayed melody, the guitarists love of thematic variation and the drummers sheer virtuosity - serving to produce an album entirely deserving of whatever accolades I am lazily presuming it must be getting. That ‘The Unravelling of Pup the Band’ is loosely-speaking a meta concept album about a punk band courting the mainstream, and the internal struggles born of the process, makes it all the finer, with the lyrics reflecting on the limits of band-democracy in the face of selling out, the desire to learn the piano in order to break up the album with some heartfelt interludes, and a rather lovely song written from the perspective of the singers guitar, exploring its developing abandonment issues.
Kate Carr - Resurfacing
I can think of no more fitting reflection on the last few years than an album consisting entirely of recordings of a road being resurfaced outside the front window. Having enjoyed the fruits of several boring lockdowns amidst the heightening fear of our impending demise, focussing on the humdrum distractions we can experience without leaving the sofa is somewhat inspired, a deft conceptual parry supported by what amounts to some entirely lovely recordings of very little. Beeping trucks and workers hollers, the abstract sound of some distant machine or other, colours that coalesce to form an enticing, mediative backdrop, a bustling world interspersed by another sound entirely. Carr offsets this external circus against some insular, close-mired scuffle, as if rubbing a finger against the window pane, emphasising a beautiful disparity - the activity outside contrasting with the static life that perceives it whilst cooped up at home.