Ah, 2021: The longest and strangest of years since 2020. A dark, heavy blanket – damp, probably made of Shetland wool – drawn tight for months on end, followed by an all-too-brief flash of skin in the sunshine, and then back to the blanket whether you were ready for it or not. As usual, music accompanied me through the seasons, though I found myself less driven to seek out new albums and more content to find solace in old favourites, whether because listening to long-dead/long-minted artists is less depressing than listening to new ones struggling to make a buck in the dystopian present, or simply because I needed a comfortable pillow for when I was under that blanket.
Still, I did manage to find 10 I thought were pretty neat.
Sweet Trip – A Tiny House, in Secret Speeches, Polar Equals
A new album released over a decade after a band tore up the rule book on some unsuspecting genre can go one of two ways: it can be a The Sciences or a Black Messiah or a Slowdive, where the musical baton is effortlessly picked up once more and we realise genius doesn’t fade with time, which leads to the other realisation that we ain’t never gonna have what they have. OR it can be a spinal column in a bap like Indie Cindy, and it hangs over the band’s oeuvre like a Victorian miasma forever. Thankfully, Sweet Trip’s 2021 comeback is the former. Waves of positive, glitchy, MIDI-trigger noise, with shades of K-pop and Flaming Lips and My Bloody Valentine with the reverb and crushing overdrive turned off. This is what I imagine AIR would sound like if AIR had a heart instead of a Casio calculator inside its chest. Maybe the perfect album to listen to while driving toward some sun-gilded coast and then speeding headlong into the sea with a beatific grin plastered on your fizzog.
Highlight: Chapters
Black Country, New Road – For the First Time
Talk about a strong debut. This album sounds like a band which is deep into their mid-phase, returning with a mature-but-not-yet-pretentious concept record after taking a time-out to drop acid in Goa and embark on a flurry of white-phosphorous romantic encounters. That mixolydian-tinged, staccato-drummed opener (kind of) sets the tone for what’s to come: six tracks, all assured as hell, asking questions about existence, exploring the boundary between cynicism and hope. I wouldn’t be surprised if the guys were spinning Spiderland and Leaves Turn Inside You on repeat while recording this. Bonus: When I hear the singer, I imagine that he looks like a haunted Cillian Murphy staring at a plate of avocado toast.
Highlight: Sunglasses
Mastodon – Hushed and Grim
Let me just say this: I have slept on Mastodon for too long. Even when Crack the Skye came out and non-metalhead hipsters everywhere were stroking their moustaches and saying “oh yah, not bad for a metal band”, I ignored them, content to flex my boy muscles to Rust in Peace and Show No Mercy for the millionth time. But in the past couple of years – aided by the YouTube algorithm – ya boys Sanders, Hinds, Kelliher and Dailor have forced their way into my metal rotation and now I’m having a Mastodon moment. Hushed and Grim is ambitious: nearly 1.5 hours of progressive riffs, shared vocals, out-there guitar solos, breakdowns, build-ups and sludge. Maybe it’s too long. But also maybe it’s just right for those times when you’re working away like a 4-am-Murakami and you don’t necessarily already want to have to start thinking about the next album you’re gonna put on after 20 minutes. Also compare this to what Maiden didn’t achieve in the same span of time with Senjutsu, and it leads to an all-new layer of appreciation.
Highlight: More Than I Could Chew
Squid – Bright Green Field
“What if we put the dynamism of David Byrne, the annoying parts of LCD Soundsystem, the vocal tics of Fred Schneider, the smarts of Car Seat Headrest and the jaggedness of Parquet Courts in a blender?” thought those dudes from Squid one day probably. What I am digging about Bright Green Field is: the non-masturbatory saxophone, the slinky bass, the relaxed drumming and the ability to find new ideas in musical territory that has been raked over to death. Take that rising guitar line in Narrator, for example: it’s like Tom Verlaine meets Steve Howe, but playful. I think that’s what stops this album from falling into ‘annoying and trying too hard’: it’s self aware. At least I hope it is. I mean, look at those lyrics from G.S.K.: As the sun sets on the GlaxoKline / Well, it’s the only way I can tell the time / Bright neon bikes on the hillside / Mosquito nets, they cover the buildings. If you heard that in an Interpol song you’d laugh. Here, though, it sounds like Anton Pearson knows how close it strays to pretention, which is why he goes into full-on B-52s mode when he delivers it.
Highlight: Narrators
Mare Cognitum – Solar Paroxysm
Heavy, heavy, heavy, like a wooden box of records you get stuck carrying up five flights of stairs when your 38-year-old mate who is still too much of a manchild to pay for the services of a removal firm moves house. I’m not sure how one goes about composing music like this. It’s a wall. An inexorably advancing wall of brutal. Like, which brick do you lay first? When you’re producing something this dense, how do you know when it’s finished? Did the riffs start out as something much slower and were then force-fed cocaine? How does the drummer survive their live shows? Questions for the philosophisers.
Highlight: Frozen Star Divinization
Lana Del Rey – Blue Banisters
Lana’s songs are a cocktail with three ingredients that, when mixed right, taste great and send you temporarily to that honeycomb reality where nothing’s gonna kill your buzz for at least 15 minutes, not even that drunk Dutch guy on the sofa in the corner constantly swiping greasy locks of hair away from his Hovis-shaped forehead. Ingredient 1: Whispered verses with soaring melancholic choruses. Ingredient 2: Tickled piano chords. Ingredient 3: Some variation on ‘boy/man’ or ‘California’ with a ‘goddamn’ thrown in every minute or so. Done. Blue Banisters doesn’t come close to Norman Fucking Rockwell or – I think – Chemtrails Over The Country Club in terms of hazy gorgeous elegance, but it does leave you feeling like you’ve just listened to the soundtrack to a dream where the only thing you remember is a girl lying in a boat on a river with her hand trailing in the water and she’s just told you she doesn’t think this is gonna work out after all.
Highlight: Wildflower Wildfire
Darkside – Spiral
Nah, it’s not Psychic, but what is? Eight years after a debut that sounded like nothing else around – and which wasn’t supposed to receive a follow-up – Nicolás Jaar and David Harrington reunite to bring us something which is…nice. Thanks, guys! Is that enough to make it into a top 10 list? In this case: yes. For me, it isn’t too far off a standard Nicolás Jaar album, and I wish the controlled dissonance of Harrington’s guitars (vital on the first album) would make more of an appearance on Spiral, like in the philosophical ‘I’m the Echo’ or the Thom-Yorke-with-a-backbone ‘The Limit’. Still, it is a trip when you listen to it from start to finish and let it wash over you. Just make sure you have a Persian rug to lie on and a manky copy of Leaves of Grass within arm’s reach for maximum impact.
Highlight: The Limit
BROCKHAMPTON – Roadrunner: New Light, New Machine
The production on every BROCKHAMPTON release is like those 90s Tango ads with the orange naked guy slapping the hell out of a Mark Hollis lookalike. It’s a fusion of Dre’s G-funk, Run the Jewels and all mid-2000s RnB. I will always be on board with an album that starts with a guest appearance from Danny Brown and a sample of an early Nas track. For the most part it’s smart and forward looking and off-kilter in all the right places, but even big-chorus, radio-friendly tracks like ‘Count on Me’ and ‘Old News’ are pretty charming (contrast with something like the cynical trash ‘Summer on Smash’ from Nas’s otherwise solid Life Is Good). Also, ‘What’s the Occasion’ would be right at home on My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy. Now I’m reminded of that Jay-Z verse where he raps about Frankenstein. Sweet.
Highlight: The Light
Dry Cleaning – New Long Leg
I should probably hate this, but other than ‘More Big Birds’ I can’t get enough of it. It’s that band of floppy-haired coathanger boys you saw once at a jam night at the student union that was obsessed with Gang of Four and Television. You were sipping your two-quid pint of Foster’s, minding your business, when suddenly this tall girl in an oversized cardigan put down her copy of Too Loud A Solitude, stood up and started reciting her poetry over the band’s music. The whole time she was looking at this point in the middle distance and you found that you couldn’t take your eyes off her even for a second, which caused you to miss your mouth when you went to drink and spill beer down your snazzy jumper. By the time she finished the poem, like eight minutes later, you were in love, but instead of going up to her and striking up a conversation you just finished your pint and shuffled off home to listen to some Kate Bush in the dark. I’m not saying this happened to me, yeah.
Highlight: Her Hippo
Koreless – Agor
Until Lone releases a new album, this is tiding me over in the 90s-electronica, lilac-sunset, nostalgic-for-a-time-I-never-experienced-in-any-meaningful-way department. There’s not much to say about an album that explores that sweet interstice between Selected Ambient Works and Lifeforms, other than it is perfect for blissing out to in the bath, on top of a Greek mountain and everywhere in between.
Highlight: White Picket Fence
The most honourable of mentions:
Rochelle Jordan – Play With The Changes
Idles – Crawler
Adrian Younge – The American Negro
Little Simz – Sometimes I Might Be Introvert