Deluxe Issue Fifteen

BRINGING YOU THE BEST M U S I C B‘Bragg O Operforms KS OF THE YEAR a real national service: illuminating a moment all too easily lost.’

The Sunday Times

FA B E R SOCIAL ‘First Time Ever is funny, incisive, and affecting.’

Financial Times

BRINGING YOU THE BEST MUSIC BOOKS OF THE YEAR

An explosive story of abuse, revenge, graffiti, gold teeth, shotguns, car crashes, hot yoga and redemption through reality TV.

find out more at fabersocial.co.uk

‘Beautifully paced, vivid, informative and compelling.’

Observer

Deluxe.

Welcome to Deluxe.

As is tradition, the last issue of the year always turns focus away (although never too far) from the bricks and mortar record shops and instead sheds light on the last twelve months’ worth of releases that have been filling our racks. We have compiled our annual top 100 albums, plus essential reissues and compilations, some words on EPs, a few points of interest and even things just landing that we’ve fast grown fond of.

An increasingly big part of our year is now tending to our Sea Change Festival. A high number of the 2017 performing artists released new music and feature in this list. We’ve marked them with a little logo, it really highlights - to us anyway - what a miraculous lineup we assembled this summer. We’re working hard on the 2018 edition and can’t wait to start sharing details with you. Above all else, have faith that we’re going to melt your minds.

We were thrilled to catch up with Michael Head and talk about his new album in this issue. We interviewed him just minutes after Everton lost their fourth consecutive game (taking just three points from the last eleven twelve games in the process), and as a staunch lifelong Liverpool fan, kudos to the man for not sticking the knife in. Never meet your heroes? We did and even risked talking football.

We had a longlist of well in excess of 300 new albums this year, it was a wild ride trying to corral them into a list for you and perhaps the hardest we’ve ever found it. A clear indication of what great times we are in for new music, long may it last. Hope you enjoy reading all about it and find yourself something new.

A great guy.

Interviewed, edited and compiled by The Drift Record Shop.

Sub edited by Louise Overy Printed by Newspaper Club Distributed by Forte Music Distribution www.fortedistribution.co.uk / 01600 891589

Whilst every care has been taken in the preparation of this newspaper, the publishers cannot be held responsible for the accuracy of information or any consequence arising from it.

Published in Devon by The Drift Record Shop. ©2017

100 Perfume Genius No Shape No Shape is the fourth album from Perfume Genius, nom de posterwraith of musician Mike Hadreas.

The album was recorded in Los Angeles and produced by Blake Mills who we also like a lot. There is an amazing balance between the fragile and evocative vocals and the pounding production. He’s lived an extraordinary (and extraordinarily tough-sounding) life which tends to make his songs hard to listen to, as you know that there will be elements of truth and experience running through them. That said, No Shape is arguably his most euphoric listen and is definitely one of the year’s smartest pop albums.

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98 Antibalas Where The Gods Are In Peace For the last twenty years, Brooklyn’s Antibalas have been ripping it up live and splitting minds with an exhilarating live experience of beats, jazz horns and vibes. Where The Gods Are In Peace is as overtly political and urgent as they have ever sounded. They explain it as “searching for solace from American political opportunism, greed, and vengeance.” Across the three tracks there are some excellent Fela Kuti shapes and it flows together as one piece beautifully. Smart, controlled fury.

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Hurray For The Riff Raff The Navigator

(Sandy) Alex G Rocket

Alynda Segarra - for she predominantly is HFTRR - is one of the most unique and singular voices recording today. The Navigator is not so much of a departure from their ramshackle country roots, but an organic progression through a euphoric Springsteen sort of rock and roll, dragging in elements of New Orleans, the Bronx and an imagined version of her ancestral Puerto Rico. The Navigator is a concept album about modern day America, division, cultures, and clashes. It is smart and avoids all the pitfalls of generalising and dumbing down. The place is in a mess, it’s complicated and so is this record.

Rocket is the Philadelphia-based artist’s eighth full-length release, an assured statement that follows a slate of humble masterpieces, many of them self-recorded and self-released. He is one of the very rare exceptions, in that he is both prolific and always fascinating. The production here is a big step up (whilst still sounding intimate), but the songwriting is super smart and coherently brings in a lot of varied influences... sometimes even in the same song. There are some amazing narratives here, well recommended you listen carefully past the addictive pop jams.

96 Hannah Peel Mary Casio: Journey To Cassiopeia Mary Casio: Journey To Cassiopeia, the Northern Irish artist and electronic composer’s third album, is a sevenmovement odyssey composed for analogue synthesizers and full, traditional 29-piece colliery brass band. The narrative very much is about endless possibility (there are as many neurons in our brains as there are stars in the galaxy), but it feels tight and driven rather than endlessly pondering. The tones are lush and the brass has quite some wallop.

95 Will Stratton Rosewood Almanac We were so taken with Will, off one song and a nudge back last year, that we booked him for the 2017 Sea Change festival and had no regrets. His sixth album is a work of fragile magic, a hypnotic combination of beautifully breathy voice and exquisite lyrical imagery, gorgeous melodies and similarly soft-spun instrumentation. He is a really gifted finger picker, but one of his strongest assets is not over-fussing, the guitar is melodic without needing to be over-smart.

There is much serenity, it’s such an exquisitely measured album of subtlety.

94 Arca Arca Self-titled, Arca is the third full-length album from the Venezuela-born, London-based artist who has produced for Björk, Kanye West, and FKA twigs amongst many others. The production is the key here, a glorious hybrid of incredible breathy intimacy and cavernous, cathedral-like depth. It enables some of the most incredibly experimental pop music and demands attention throughout, but with a fragile grasp. Distant, hazy electronic sketches with his stunningly fragile voice cutting through, like a beacon through the fog. Quite a spiritual listening experience.

93 Susanne Sundfør Music For People In Trouble Fifth studio LP from the Norwegian singer-songwriter, and one of most striking voices in this year’s list. A huge victory here is how simply she plays it - whereas she has framed herself before with bleeps and beats (to great success incidentally), Music For People In Trouble is ALL about her vocal right in the middle of the mix, clean as a bell and exquisitely controlled. Some snow smoked jazz in her voice, never doing unnecessary flips and curls, delivery is just brilliant. The last track Mountaineers (with guest vocals from John Grant) is a beautiful send-off.

92 Soccer Mommy Collection Quietly catchy, Collection is the debut hook-packed minialbum from 20 year old Nashville native Sophie Allison.

It’s a set of long songs, all about toxic relationships and infatuations, all home recorded and initially released to an ever-growing Bandcamp network. She is a musical wunderkind, it is all played out as gloriously melancholic

91 Los Campesinos!

Sick Scenes The sixth studio LP from the mighty Los Campesinos!

It’s an album that provides a great perspective on these troubling times, no overly sentimental judgment, it’s about carrying on. That might have been their mantra for the last ten plus years, they exploded out of the MySpace wave and it’s testament to their songwriting (and production and live ability and utter charm frankly) that they are still not only delighting their diehard fan base, but growing it with each record. They are creators of some of the most powerful and finessed pop and this latest collection is really euphoric. Lyrically it is super smart, poignant and dead funny. It’s about those epic builds. Hell of a band.

90 Michael Chapman 50 The new studio album by the iconic, legendary, welltravelled and always essential Michael Chapman. After five decades of recording and touring, the veteran British songwriter and guitar sage has finally made what he calls his “American record,” and the aptly titled 50 now stands as his late career masterwork, a moving legacy statement by a legend. It’s a collaborative effort (certainly in terms of the production) with Steve Gunn. There will be few albums released this year that achieve such a sense of both British and American pastoral, and also few that evoke such introspection if you really dial into it. For all its laidback jams, 50 actually has plenty of despair, transatlantic woe... and rightfully so.

sunny pop songs, and her dreamy vocal delivery is sweet but plenty knowing enough to avoid ending up sounding saccharine. Her biggest asset is she is so honest and so relatable, they sound just as much like diary entries as songs, and that intimacy is pretty special.

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UMFANG Symbolic Use Of Light

Lowly Heba

Beach Fossils Somersault

Emma Olson’s stripped-back techno under the UMFANG name.

Bronx born, Kansas raised and now based back in Brooklyn, she is the Discwoman (NYC collective, curators and booking agency) cofounder. Symbolic Use Of Light is a real masterclass in subtlety, it’s very much about what space she leaves in alongside the drive she puts into each track. It’s so immersive whilst remaining primal and primitive, it’s not like each track builds up, it has its own pace and vibe and sticks to it with a puritan persistence.

Debut album from Danish pop wonders Lowly. The quintet make the most dreamy and intricate pop we’ve heard in ages, absolutely mesmerizing, one of our weekend highlights down here in Totnes during Sea Change. For all the decadence and control, they describe their sound themselves as “noise, pop, and everything in between”.

The songs have a very human maudlin element to them, a lot of feeling in the digital pulses, synth tones and shuffling drums. The big stand-out point - and perhaps the most accomplished factor here - are Soffie Viemose’s vocals, confident and understated jazz hums that ground all of this as a band of people playing music. They sound like no one else, very rare indeed for a debut.

Somersault is the first release on their own Bayonet imprint and sounds very much like a band creating light rather than bouncing around in the darkness. Over the years they have made quite different sounds, from super lo-fi through grunge, and this incarnation as high-jangle shoegaze.

Still very much a “bedroom” band, but using the aesthetic to add more depth to what they’re doing, it is full of sunshine guitar jams with some blissful melancholic pop. Guest vocal from Rachel Goswell of Slowdive is a brilliant moment in an album of brilliant moments.

88 Lapalux Ruinism Stuart Howard’s third album as Lapalux and a continuation of his sonic explorations into the spaces between things. His first two records – released, like Ruinism, on the mighty Brainfeeder label - have been based between jazz, hip hop and experimental dance music, gradually becoming more abstract. This third outing is the most exploratory, abstract sounds colliding and blurring against one another. The textures here (recorded and sampled instruments) make for some incredibly rich depths, a woozy and hallucinatory experience.

86 Penguin Cafe The Imperfect Sea Penguin Cafe have evolved into something of their own at the hands of Arthur Jeffe, who started the band in 2009 with the continuation and homage to his father’s legacy, the late Simon Jeffes’ Penguin Cafe Orchestra. It is the most elegant music, deeply considered and perfectly constructed, but with passion and a very human flow to it. It includes covers of works by Simian Mobile Disco, Kraftwerk, and even Penguin Cafe Orchestra, all finding their own space as tranquil, imaginative and really gratifying.

84 Forest Swords Compassion Dark, mysterious and hugely creative, Merseyside-based producer Matthew Barnes returns as Forest Swords. The climate in 2017 has produced a lot of work with political tension and overt political reaction, but few are as subtle and as focused on the feeling. Compassion is dense in texture and sounds, but there is a lot of opportunity in the mix for the listener to fill the spaces… or the blanks. In lesser hands this could have been muddy and lacking direction, but this is really brilliantly measured and brilliantly directed.

83 The Weather Station The Weather Station Self-titled and self-produced, The Weather Station is the most fully realised statement to date from Toronto songwriter Tamara Lindeman. There are some really sublime touches on this record and more than a few gestures towards Joni Mitchell. Whereas other people have got close to channelling the sound, Lindeman has channelled the feeling, and that takes some doing. It is a brilliantly imaginative record and highlights that this is very much the fully formed band just coming into full flight, where she goes next is entirely her call. Thirty has been one of our most favourite tracks of the year, gutsy and addictive listening.

80 Endless Boogie Vibe Killer The return of a band synonymous with musical onomatopoeia. There was a great phrase in Paste magazine about their last album: “Take grimy electric blues licks, stretch ‘em across some relentlessly steady rhythms, and play in perpetuity.” I guess that’s the point of the band, no deviation, they are jamming and they are really into what happens.

Vibe Killer is a lot of fun, snarling with chugging riffs, and it is deeply hypnotic from the first beat to the last wail of feedback.

82 Jesca Hoop Memories Are Now Produced by Blake Mills (Alabama Shakes, Jim James), Memories Are Now has some brilliantly off-kilter moments and very smart, inventive production... but this album is all about Jesca right in the middle. Her delivery is amazing, her phrasing is really engaging and lyrically she is both surreal and autobiographical in one flow. Is it modern Americana?

Roots-inspired experimentalism?

Very exciting in that it’s so hard to categorise. Also, one of our favourite WTF moments of 2017 was the revelation that “She was encouraged to start a musical career by Tom Waits and Kathleen Brennan, after they employed her as a nanny.”

Released back in February and we have been playing this regular still in October, a good sign of a great LP.

79 The Afghan Whigs In Spades With some breaks and reunions in the middle, The Afghan Whigs have been doing their own thing since 1986, not that In Spades would necessarily give that away. There is a brashness to what they do that comes only with experience, but there is also an alchemy and kinetic energy that suggests they are still very much experimenting and testing themselves. Greg Dulli sounds superb with his aging rasp, and the band mix stadium-esque synth sounds against the clashing guitars of their grunge roots.

81 Liars TFCF An abbreviation of “Theme From Crying Fountain” from the now mostly solo project of Angus Andrew. Liars have always been hard to pin down other than in their endless creativity: punk/funk, a weirdo rock band, synth pop or droning dance music. TFCF sort of touches on all of them across its 33 minutes, but it’s held together in that it has one idiosyncratic author and he is totally in command, even if it is not all that clear where he’s going.

Sombre and at times downbeat, even that isn’t clear amongst the explosive synth parts and banging great drums.

78 Soulwax From Deewee Those crazy guys taped the whole damn thing in one go. It was recorded with the full touring band in one take at the Dewaele brothers’ Deewee Studio in Ghent, Belgium on February 7, 2017. The tones are lush, it is an album of great noises and all the more… well, incredible really that they attained such twinkling layers of complex bleeps without a lot of time tinkering about in post-production. They have spent the last 20 years acquiring synths and are evidently something of experts in making them sing, especially in harmony.

77 Songhoy Blues Résistance Formed in exile from their native Mali, there will always be a sadness in the music Songhoy Blues make, it’s just layered deep at the core of the most infectiously joyous hybrid of desert blues, funk, rock and all-night party bangers. The delivery is super tight, post-disco levels of funk production. Easy to lock into, impossible not to jiggle about too. Iggy Pop even turns up singing about pizza.

76 British Sea Power Let The Dancers Inherit The Party Nobody manages to get close to the emotional intensity, swooning instrumentation, loosely controlled euphoria and sheer fun that BSP pack into their albums. This new album is a classic in their collection: beautiful, charging and full of pop fizzle. It’s a more svelte album than they’ve made in a while, it’s full of singles, with less of the sonic wigouts getting them from A to B. For our money, one of the most consistent bands these isles have ever produced and we’re damn lucky to have them.

75 Big Thief Capacity The band’s sophomore album is a real slow burner, an intricate telling of trauma, bleakness and life with very smartly produced folk-rock. Brooklyn-based, they sound like they could be the house band for the bar in any number of weary backwater towns, where these ballads chart each and every day. Adrianne Lenker is a really captivating vocalist, just the right amount of drawl with no artificiality. Dark should not be this addictive to listen to. Hell of a band.

74 This Is The Kit Moonshine Freeze Recorded with John Parish, Paris-via-Bristol songwriter Kate Stables and her band (Rozi Plain, Jamie WhitbyColes, Neil Smith and Jesse D Vernon) headed into the studio and even wired in Aaron Dessner of The National on six of the album tracks. The album is hazy with beautiful pacing, a seriously accomplished record. Everything is in its right place and it flows like a daydream. Her vocal delivery and phrasing has reached the levels that only years of practice and experience bring, she’s someone you want to spend all day listening to.

73 Seamus Fogarty The Curious Hand It is his first album for Domino and follows his acclaimed debut full-length God Damn You Mountain. In terms of structure he’s from the folk world, maybe the alt-folk world, but on this new LP it’s his willingness to experiment sonically that really highlights what a smart and adventurous songwriter he is. The album was produced by Fogarty and Leo Abrahams (Brian Eno, Wild Beasts), who also plays on the album, as does multiinstrumentalist Emma Smith (Hot Chip, Jon Hopkins) across a plethora of instruments. It is weird, lots of ambience and strange sonics. It’s never distracting, it just stretches the songs into a fascinating sort of 3D.

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Jakuzi Fantezi Muzik

Alex Rex Vermillion

We mean this as a high compliment...

Jakuzi don’t sound like any other band out there right now. They are so far out of left field, but there is something really amazing going on here. Forged in Istanbul, they are seriously adept at crafting super accessible, radio-friendly singles, but it’s the weirdness that locks you in. The album opens with one of their many hypnotising synth hooks, then nearly a full two minutes in it rips into some of the year’s finest krautrock. Across the album there are sax solos, crooning and hymnal organs. A mixed bag and hugely enjoyable for it.

Alex Neilson is one of the most original writers of songs and words that we know, and his drumming work for both Trembling Bells and a dizzying roll call of others highlights him as an artist of extreme understanding. Vermillion is his debut solo album as Alex Rex. Hot dog, it is superb. His songwriting is faultless and his delivery is a psychedelic strain of vintage showmanship.

Think Lee Hazlewood... seriously!

71 Proper Ornaments Foxhole Proper Ornaments is the project of James Hoare (Ultimate Painting, Veronica Falls) and Max Oscarnold (Toy, Pink Flames). New LP Foxhole is loose and lovingly taped, it’s got the warmest tones and all hangs off psych-pop bones. Runs at such a great pace and you can pick up loads more on repeat listens. It’s all very simple, but that’s just testament to how well they’re playing it. If you spend your whole life trying to pin down who sounds like who, you can easily miss out on who sounds great.

69 Pixx The Age Of Anxiety An absolute scorcher of a pop record this. Very accessible, somewhere between full TV pop, glacial electronic shapes and experimental indie guitars, it is from the get-go in full control of your attention... ours anyway. Hannah Rodgers is only young, but this is a seriously accomplished and fully formed debut and we’ve been playing it a lot. The Guardian nailed it with their five star review, “riveting, cliche-free electropop joy”. Heck yes it’s joyous.

A bright bright future.

68 Mogwai Every Country’s Sun The ninth studio album from the ever so mighty Mogwai, another fine addition to the second part of their career, contemporary composers of huge scope. Less extreme and loud-then-quiet-quiet-then-loud than their younger selves, but their judgement here and of late is faultless, really quite affecting music that can be threatening, graceful and euphoric all at the same time.

67 Laura Marling Semper Femina An intimate, devoted exploration of femininity and female relationships.

There was a moment of amazing phrasing on her previous LP - Once I Was an Eagle - that was for us a true coming of age and artistic arrival; one part Joni Mitchell, one part Bill Callahan... she was loud, clear and fully formed. This new LP is almost perfect in its grace, the delivery on this set of songs is just beautiful.

She has only just turned 27... that is fucking mind boggling.

66 Laurel Halo Dust Recorded over two years at the EMPAC performing arts centre in upstate New York, Dust features a host of collaborators (including Julia Holter, Maxmillion Dunbar, $hit and $hine’s Craig Clouse and experimental percussionist Eli Keszler). The other collaborator is way more unlikely, Hatsune Miku, a 16-year-old pop star with calflength blue hair who fills stadiums in her native Japan. Miku also happens to be a humanoid — an animated character who appears onstage via 3D projection and was originally designed to sell a synthesizer application. High ambition and impeccable delivery. Dust is a hazy, glitchy and super dreamy record with an amazing soundscape of textures that is hugely evocative and moving.

Give it time, such a sonic treat.

65 The Cairo Gang Untouchable We love Emmett Kelly and - as ever - he is on fine form on new LP Untouchable. He’s always been a huge part of the sprawling LA scene - production here by Kelly and Ty Segall and released on Ty’s God! label - and this is an effortless collection of chiming pop gems, testament to Kelly’s subtlety. He is a fantastic singer and that is the main event here, melancholic but endlessly charming and a perfect foil to the soft fuzz 1960s production.

Gestures to The Byrds, Love and countless other deep cuts from the psych underground, with a distinctly Anglophile twist to it all. Brilliantly distinctive, it is a hugely satisfying and irresistibly jangly half hour.

62 63 Katie Von Schleicher Shitty Hits Record title of the year… call off the search! It’s her debut full-length (following on equally brilliant almost full-length release Bleaksploitation) and it is a beautifully constructed album inspired by bright, sunny radio burners of the 1970s. Such superb vocals, endlessly listenable.

Great songs, sensitive production, a pretty glorious record if you ask us.

Kelela Take Me Apart Highly-anticipated debut album on Warp from Kelela. Man, she is marvelous, everything about her is so addictive. Although her debut, she’s already so incredibly selfassured and delivers her vocals with a supreme confidence and decadence, it’s almost jazz phrasing but really at one with the production. Very complex and loads to come back to on repeat listens. Sonically arresting and technically stunning RnB.

64 Hiss Golden Messenger Hallelujah Anyhow As ever, the main event with HGM is MC Taylor’s wonderfully distinctive voice, but that is not to ignore what is a beautifully balanced and impeccably delivered set of songs.

All sorts of country soul, ballads, laments and ambitions all skilfully told. There is a hopeful tone across it that makes it feel like the sort of optimistic antidote we need to all these dotards in charge right now.

One of the few guys out there that can listen to a box of records, get inspired, make music and not rip anyone off.

61 WALL Untitled An album that moves around exquisitely. Across its tracks are some of the most trashing postpunk and choppy rhythms of the year, right through to the drawnout hypnotising drones of River Mansion... a track of the year if ever we’ve heard one. Be fascinated to know how many times we played that track. So much to find in the darkness, which makes the fact that the band decided to break up rather heartbreaking. Timeless and immaculate, not a bad legacy.

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60 Bicep Bicep Debut LP from the Irish duo.

Beautifully built on very vintagesounding gear, it’s rooted in house, but the duo have been soaking up IDM, italo, techno, electro, jungle and everything in between, they channel ten years of playing records all around the globe as revered DJs. Hints of psychedelia, it’s all so easy to get into and plenty of fun… you get the impression that these guys know exactly how to make fun.

Warm Digits Wireless World

The Surfing Magazines The Surfing Magazines

The third album from the North Eastern duo is based around the balance between technological (over) reliance and natural destruction, and they pull off these epic themes admirably. Influences in post-rock, kraut and synth pop are all given their own distinct spin and play out rather like a soundscape to a film. The instrumentation is fairly simple, but the complexity gives this loads and loads of depth, plus great guest vocal appearances from Field Music’s Peter Brewis, Saint Etienne’s Sarah Cracknell and Devon Sproule.

It took less than three seconds for us to get hyped on this LP. The Surfing Magazines are a garage rock supergroup - one half of Slow Club and two thirds of The Wave Pictures.

Dominic Brider, who has played with many local bands and is an extremely groovy dude, completes the lineup on drums. This is an addictive record, full on Velvet Underground strutting and some smart and thoroughly fun lead lines will lock it deep between your ears. Love it.

57 59 Snapped Ankles Come Play The Trees We went pretty wild back in the summer for the band’s The Best Light Is The Last Light EP, so we were eager ears for their debut Come Play The Trees. It’s one of the most successful marriages of fuzzed up motorik and rolling synths that we’ve heard in ages. A lot of its success - for us - is the way in which it propels you along, it touches on all sorts of things but it feels like part of a journey.

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Algiers The Underside Of Power Explosive second studio album from Algiers. They are a hell of a band (their 2015 debut was our best buds at Resident’s album of the year no less!) and they have really sculpted and delivered something pretty special here. Recorded largely in Bristol and produced by Adrian Utley (Portishead) and Ali Chant, mixed

by Randall Dunn (Sunn O)))), with post-production by Ben Greenberg (The Men, Hubble, Uniform).

There are loads and loads of styles, thoughts, ideas and directions, but the coherence across the album really does highlight them as quite a singular force... we’re backing this, their first big step to the stadium.

55 Real Estate In Mind Fourth studio LP from Long Island’s finest and back in March they all sent US a cake… bless them. After a change in personnel, they weirdly sound like a band reinvigorated and even more Real Estate-y than ever?! The guitars very much jangle, and whereas the melancholy of 2014’s Atlas sat as a slightly bitter bedfellow to the increasing neurosis in the songs, In Mind is rooted in laidback grooves.

It’s not to suggest the album is vacuous or idle, there is just a supreme comfort and confidence to sound entirely like themselves. Pitch perfect sunshine pop. Nobody does it better.

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Japanese Breakfast Soft Sounds From Another Planet

The War on Drugs A Deeper Understanding

The second studio LP from Michelle Zauner is a rich tapestry of ideas, sounds, tones and textures. Drum machines and off-kilter sax solos build with the synths and her vocals (sometimes autotuned) and some pretty serious bass shapes. Even with so much in the mix, the coherency is key, everything makes sense and sits together beautifully. An album with plenty of fuzzy melancholia, one that you’ll want to go back in on.

Adam Granduciel - for he primarily is The War On Drugs - is notorious as an almost self-destroying perfectionist.

The painstaking levels of production and detail (at one point watching his speakers tremble to check whether the vibrations were up to scratch) have always correlated with the awareness and interest in the band, in many ways fanning the flames of his madness. This fourth LP is PERFECT, a timeless rock and roll record with gestures towards the great emotional stadium bands of the last forty years. The biggest victory is the subtlety, the vocals are never strained, always super present and dynamic, only really broken up by the occasional piano rattle or guitar lightning strike. The secret weapon might be - we think - the drums. Motorik, they just lead everything along like a heartbeat without ever distracting from the density of the songs and the gloriously maximal production.

53 Gnod Just Say No To The Psycho Right-Wing Capitalist Fascist Industrial Death Machine People often buy albums at Drift because of the artwork.

With its bold black print on a fierce tone of red, Salfordbased krautrockers Gnod have been one of the year’s most frequently requested listens. Man, it is full on. Just five tracks (running at 40 minutes) it is thrilling stuff, political, aggressive, vindicated and delivered with real guile. There are still moments of classic drugged-out psychedelia, but it’s the pumped svelteness of this LP that’s kept us going back and back.

51 Girl Ray Earl Grey North London three-piece - Poppy, Iris and Sophie with doubtless one of the most assured and fun albums of the year. One part 60s pop, one part britpop revival and one part indie pop sensitivity. Although presented as naive (they’re all only just out of their teens - their debut single was recorded on what would have been their final

Fifty.

Cigarettes After Sex Cigarettes After Sex The self-titled LP arrived back in June with much fanfare and was one of our biggest pre-sellers in 2017, a funny juxtapose to how subtle and equable the music is. The band is an internet word of mouth phenomenon, their debut EP has racked up tens of millions of plays on YouTube (earning them hundreds of pounds I’d imagine).

It’s dreamy and pop sensitive, whilst very downbeat. Love songs played out at a crawl, real time emotions almost.

It’s a real low boiler but looks like one that’s going to keep bubbling away for some whiles yet.

day of school), the arrangements and hooks here are so smart… they really get into your head. There is a very clever understated element to the production that frames up the band’s personality, lyrics, phrasing and harmonies.

Hugely likeable and full of gloriously unexpected curveballs.

CARGO RECORDS BEST OF 2017 ULRIKA SPACEK Modern English Decoration

TOUGH LOVE LP / CD

LAUREL HALO Dust

HYPERDUB LP / CD

JANE WEAVER

Modern Kosmology

OMNI

Multi-Task

TROUBLE IN MIND LP / CD

JLIN

Black Origami

PLANET MU LP / CD

JAKE XERXES FUSSELL What In The Natural World

FIRE RECORDS LP / CD

PARADISE OF BACHELORS LP / CD

GODSPEED YOU! BLACK EMPEROR

HISS GOLDEN MESSENGER

Luciferian Towers

CONSTELLATION LP / CD

GNOD

Hallelujah Anyhow

MERGE RECORDS LP / CD

Just Say No To The Psycho Right Wing Capitalist Fascist Industrial Death Machine

BEACH FOSSILS

IDLES

THE CULTS

BALLEY RECORDS LP / CD

SINDERLYN LP / CD

DO MAKE SAY THINK

ANGELO BADALAMENTI

CONSTELLATION 2LP / CD

FIRE SOUNDTRACKS LP

Somersault

BAYONET LP / CD

ROCKET RECORDINGS LP / CD

Brutalism

Stubborn Persistent Illusions

WWW.CARGORECORDS.CO.UK

Offering

Blue Velvet

DOUBLEs. We wanted to draw particular attention to three artists who have released not one, but two albums this year that we’ve been really knocked back by. In the instance of King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard, here are three albums of a potential four or five that have proved them to be highly prolific whilst never pumping out the filler.

King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard Australia’s King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard arrived in 2017 off the back of two complex albums of pounding psychedelia, with 2015’s Quarters - with all four sections lasting exactly the same time - and 2016’s Nonagon Infinity - an album that forms a perfect and infinite loop.

They are clearly artists who like to provide restrictions in place to further challenge their creativity. So 2017, at least four new and entirely different albums. Alarm bells have to go off with that sort of prolific output, but the most remarkable achievement is simply that they are all interesting, challenging and markedly different in style and substance. Part one is Flying Microtonal Banana, hurtling into life with the hugely gratifying Rattlesnake, but across its nine tracks it found more of a laid-back groove than its direct predecessor. The band used microtonality (intervals smaller than a semitone), and it creates a hypnotic modern raga sound. Album two is Murder of the Universe, a 21-track concept LP concerned with the downfall of man and the death of the planet.

It starts with a Thriller-style spoken-word exposition, prefacing the album’s three movements. There is less mystery, this is all about grabbing hold of your seat and enjoying the ride. Thrilling jolts between heavy metal, stoner, garage, jazz, psych and glam rock, utterly hypnotic stuff. Sketches Of Brunswick East is 2017 part three, joined on this occasion by Mild High Club - and it is so chill, nothing like the burnt out frenetic jams, this is the band sonically returning from holiday in North Africa on a strict diet of jazz records. It rolls along brilliantly, a testament to their musicianship and also their willingness to turn their hand to whatever they damn well please.

With Polygondwanaland and possibly another due to land before the end of December, the band are becoming more and more diverse, and more and more essential.

Shabazz Palaces Quazarz: Born On A Gangster Star and Quazarz vs. The Jealous Machines Ishmael Butler’s free-form hip hop project continues to defy convention with a pair of companion albums that view contemporary America as though it were a strange and hostile planet. I mean, from the viewpoint of an outsider, it is a strange and hostile planet. Although thematically linked and released simultaneously, they were actually recorded separately, with Jealous Machines constructed alongside producer Sunny Levine over months of Butler’s visits to Southern California, whereas Gangster Star was made at home in Seattle with Erik Blood in a little over two weeks. It is a thoroughly modern take on free-jazz rap, made with samplers, sequencers, and drum machines. The narratives are hazy and lines and whole sections are improvised, in many ways they invite their audience to make its own connections and draw its own conclusions. Progressive and challenging music that is deeply immersive.

Moon Duo Occult Architecture Vol. 1 & 2 Released as two distinct volumes, Moon Duo explored the different elements of their sound this year with their fourth and fifth studio albums, Occult Architecture.

The first part is very much scripted from the Moon Duo psychedelic formula, clicking motorik beats and interweaving keyboards and guitars that erode into a sort of dub hypnosis. It is sexy and swaggering, indebted to Alan Vega more overtly than ever before. There is something distinctly sinister lurking around, like the pumping soundtrack to a 70s slasher flick. Comparing the two as partners, Volume 2 is positively ethereal, breezy and very much about a blissed-out take on shoegaze. The two long instrumentals are real chillers, soundtracks to meandering sunny afternoons with nowhere to be. Not all dreamy, there are some moments of crunch, but as a double play it is - as ever - really irresistible stuff.

For a limited time, we have special edition represses on unique white and red or white and blue swirl vinyl.

EP’s Another way we can cheat and tell you about more releases is to pull out all of our favourite EPs from the top 100 list and create this new section. We are expecting to have albums on the horizon from all of these cats, betting we’ll go wild for them.

Amber Arcades Cannonball EP The Cannonball EP is the first new music from Amber Arcades (the moniker of Dutch-born musician Annelotte De Graaf ) since the brilliant Fading Lines debut. Smart layers of jangling guitars, and dreamy doesn’t even come close, fully-formed ethereal pop nuggets. The chorus on It Changes is pure adrenaline, and the duet with Bill Ryder-Jones too is pretty much perfect.

Kamasi Washington Harmony of Difference EP You will all remember how wild we went for Kamasi Washington’s cosmic and mind-bending opus The Epic... we’re naturally super excited to have him return with a new EP on Young Turks. Harmony of Difference is centered around that musical technique known as “counterpoint,” which Washington defines as “the art of balancing similarity and difference to create harmony between separate melodies.” It starts off with a slow jam and through the six tracks winds up to pure euphoria via the strings, the choral interjections and the FLAMING HORN!!! He is a tireless creator, searching into uncharted waters with great ambition.

Earlham Mystics Truth EP / Waters EP Luke Abbott went “back to basics” and as close to his house roots this year with a new alias - Earlham Mystics - and two EPs on Gold Panda’s perfect Notown label.

They are actually part of a trilogy we believe, so thrilled at the prospect of another landing on us soon. They perfectly articulate Abbott’s ability to make the most spiritually captivating electronic music, dancefloor ready but rich in texture. The sampling is so smart, ghostly voices that contort against the beats. The last few seconds of Waters is almost to perfect to take in. Pretty sure he’s a genius.

Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever The French Press EP Melbourne’s Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever are one of those special bands that arrives, seemingly out of nowhere, with a fully realised aesthetic. They have soaked in the Go-Betweens waves (who didn’t) but they have got some serious post-jangle chops of their own, reminiscent of The Feelies for example, but sounding not so much like them, more what they, and others, could have evolved into. There is a tightly wound tensity to the riffs, but there is so much euphoria under the surface it never drags. Mellow moments too, but it has to be said they are one of the most exciting bands around if you ask us.

Everything Is Recorded Close But Not Quite EP / Mountains Of Gold EP Everything Is Recorded is the new collaborative artist project from record producer and XL Recordings head Richard Russell. Featuring guests: Sampha, Giggs, Obongjayar, Warren Ellis, Infinite, Mela Murder, NYC rapper WIki, LA jazz titan Kamasi Washington, and Green Gartside plus some wonderfully selected samples and textures. This project really had us hooked on the first play, a dense and immersive experience, like walking

through other people’s dreams. These collaborations are all snippets of total creative freedom. They never dwell on the privileged position they are in, they just get on with testing themselves out. “There are all these strong characters – and I’m a strong character – and I think everyone got something from this that’s beyond each individual.” - Richard Russell

REISSUES With every opinion piece about vinyl culture, stories about the rise and rise of the format, radio bits about 30 year highs and dickheads like Sainsbury’s cashing in (let’s call a spade a spade here, they are cashing in… we can only imagine the sort of sad act who has actually purchased a vinyl from a supermarket) it all becomes more and more nauseating doesn’t it? We could go pretty hard on this, but let’s keep things evangelical… vinyl is a format, and that is a delivery of music, Drift are music people, vinyl sounds best, with all this awareness we can get more music, both new and old, on vinyl. Yay! Every week of the year we’ve been stunned at the beautifully delivered (more often than not) reissues of long lost gems and freshly revisited classics. Brian Eno’s enchanting 1974 debut Here Come The Warm Jets, his follow up Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy), 1975’s iconic Another Green World and 1977’s Before and After Science all received half-speed remasters at Abbey Road Studios and honestly sound amazing! We have also been spending a lot of time with the following…

No.1

Midori Takada Through the Looking Glass

Originally released by RCA in Japan in 1983, percussionist Midori Takada’s sought-after and timeless album of minimal ambient music Through the Looking Glass is considered a holy grail of Japanese music by many. It is a truly captivating four-song suite, deep quests into traditional African and Asian percussive language, exploring contemplative ambient sounds with an admirably precise use of marimba.

It belongs in the pantheon alongside Brian Eno, Steve Reich or Terry Riley’s most notable works. She was a member of the groundbreaking percussion trio Mkwaju Ensemble; unable to financially sustain the ensemble, she disbanded it and entered the studio to set about actualising the music she wanted by herself. Over just two days, she recorded to analogue tape all four of the extended performances that form Through the Looking Glass, as well as laying down the overdubs, producing and mixing (with help from an engineer) the album in its entirety. It is some of the most

beautifully controlled music we’ve ever heard. Ethereal yet vibrant, minimal yet sonically rich, precise yet incredibly atmospheric. The “We Release Whatever The Fuck We We Want” label are fast becoming favourites of ours at Drift, guessing that we’ll very much be stocking whatever the fuck they release.

Neil Young Hitchhiker Hitchhiker marks a pivotal moment in Neil Young’s ongoing series of archival releases. Whereas the releases to date have been beautifully presented live sets, this is a buriedtreasure mother lode, ten newly unearthed studio recordings, cut in one acoustic session on August 11th, 1976. One of Neil Young’s “lost” albums, capturing the Canadian at his most intimate – just him, slightly stoned, his acoustic guitar and the odd burst of harmonica. It is a snapshot of Neil Young’s creative process, captured at a time when he was crafting music strong enough to last his whole career.

Graeme Miller & Steve Shill The Moomins One of our favourite releases of the year this one, such wonderfully weird music lovingly brought back to circulation by the sublimely mad Finders Keepers label. They explained it beautifully themselves: “Imagine, if you will, a foreboding homemade electro-acoustic, new age, synth driven, proto-techno, imaginary world music Portastudio soundtrack for a Polish-made animated fantasy based on a Finnish modern folk tale and created for German and Austrian TV, composed in 1982 by two politically driven post-punk theatre performers from a shared house in Leeds!” The tones are so lush, warping tapes, bleeping domestic synths and just as much charm as any of the inhabitants of Moominvalley.

Lal & Mike Waterson Bright Phoebus This 1972 folk-noir masterpiece has long been recognised as one of British music’s legendary lost records. Following the parting of ways of The Watersons and freed from the structures of folk orthodoxy, Lal and Mike Waterson’s love of words allowed them to serve the needs of their songs in ways that weren’t possible when singing already-written songs.

Once considered too weird for the folk crowd and too pastoral for the rock crowd, this obscure gem gets a long-overdue reissue, a testament to its creators’ faith, perseverance, and genius. Under the supervision of David Suff (Topic) and Marry Waterson (daughter of Lal), the album has been remastered from the original tapes and it sounds pretty incredible. It’s far from easy going, both Lal and Mike have often brash and quite jarring voices, but it is so full of realness; life, love and death.

PROPER BEST OF THE YEAR

proper

www.propermusicgroup.com

Link Wray Link Wray Recorded in a shaky makeshift chicken shack in rural Maryland, Link Wray’s eponymous 1971 solo album is an idiosyncratic and compelling piece of Americana. Along with his brothers Vernon and Doug, Link recorded raucous early rock’n’roll, country, and rockabilly. His guitar tone was so menacing it was banned from radio play, yet still inspired the likes of Jimmy Page, Neil Young, and Pete Townshend to pick up the six string.

This self-titled LP is vastly different from his previous work, foregoing instrumentals entirely and delivering an honest blend of country, rock and roll and gospel with fuzzing guitars, booming percussion and a voice of raw emotion. Left with only one lung following a bout of tuberculosis in 1956, Wray’s delivery is your quintessential outsider country voice, full of gravel, spit and vinegar, it just doesn’t get leaner or more primal than this. Carefully remastered, this stunning reissue will take you right back to that chicken shack in 1971 and to sessions so electric you can feel the atmosphere shaking the boards.

David Bowie A New Career in a New Town (1977-1982) Arguably no period in David Bowie’s career is more curious than the trilogy of albums he recorded in the late 70s while living in Berlin’s artsy Schöneberg district. The trilogy of Low, Heroes and Lodger have been pored over and over, written about and theorised no end and are generally considered to be one of Bowie’s most ultraviolet purple patches. A New Career in a New Town focuses on that time, with remastered editions of Low, Heroes, Stage, Scary Monsters (And Super Creeps), Lodger and Re:Call 3 (non-album singles, single versions and b-sides). So much thought has been going into these amazing Bowie reissue boxes, and New Town is no different. The box set’s accompanying 84-page book features rarely seen and previously unpublished photos by photographers including Anton Corbijn, Helmut Newton, Andrew Kent, Steve Schapiro, Duffy and many others, as well as historical press reviews and technical notes about the albums from producer Tony Visconti. It is only when you really dial into little sections of time that you realise just how prolific and experimental he was. Although the box includes singles in Heroes and Sound and Vision, none of the albums really did the sort of business that Bowie was becoming accustomed to. But did that stop him? Did it fuck, as this time period closed, he was about to start working with Nile Rodgers, not to mention Tin Drum and Jareth the Goblin King are both on the horizon.

Nutter.

Thelonious Monk Les Liaisons Dangereuses 1960 In 1959, Thelonious Monk recorded selections from his songbook for the soundtrack to French director Roger Vadim’s film Les Liaisons Dangereuses. The lost tapes were never released and became an iconic phantom album, until released as a box set back in April for Record Store Day (followed by this full CD/LP release), very much the archetypal release that the day should be championing and be celebrated for. The album features Monk’s 1959 all-star band of Charlie Rouse, Sam Jones and Art Taylor, plus special guest saxophonist Barney Wilen. It was via Wilen that these takes were discovered, producers found them while combing Wilen’s archives in search of unreleased material the Frenchman might have left behind. Monk sounds nimble and full of dexterity as he gives his own compositions a full workout, improvising new space and life into the songs.

Radiohead OK COMPUTER: OKNOTOK 1997-2017 20 years on. Damn. That has been the most common response to this album this year, damn… “has it been 20 years?” Ok Computer was a genre-breaking, era-defining album. It’s a critique of globalisation and consumerism, it’s about alienation, and it’s funny to think back that it was released in a world where the internet wasn’t really a thing yet, certainly not the neurotic Orwellian future that OK Computer itself hints at. Never artists to do anything casually, the band have revisited those sessions and present remasters from the original analogue tapes. “Rescued from defunct formats, prised from dark cupboards and brought to light after two decades in cold storage…” OKNOTOK features the original OK Computer 12 track album alongside eight B-sides and the Radiohead completist’s dream: I Promise, Lift, and Man Of War. Original studio recordings of these three previously unreleased and long sought-after tracks finally receive their first official issue. Expanded artwork too from Thom Yorke and Stanley Donwood makes for a very special revisit to a really seminal album. Kid A was released in October 2000… Now that is your 2020 project.

Compilations The Smiths The Queen Is Dead Surely a year late as we take a 31 year look back in time at The Smiths’ seminal The Queen Is Dead album. A remaster of the original 1986 releases, a disc of demos, alternate takes, and B-sides as well as a disc called Live In Boston which was recorded at the Great Woods Center For The Performing Arts on August 5, 1986. The extra material really shows a band at the very peak of their powers, if not at the height of their commercial pull. History has been kind to The Smiths, they were neither hugely commercial or critically successful, especially around this time period, but history does always favour the winners, and the alchemy at work here is quite extraordinary.

The always unsung Andy Rourke and Mike Joyce create the strongest melodic foundations for Johnny Marr to arguably take center stage, overflowing with ideas and fizzing sonic gestures. Morrissey’s words and delivery were never more successful in creating rich and moving assessments of the world they found themselves in.

F.J. McMahon Spirit Of The Golden Juice Originally pressed in a small quantity and scattered along the California coastline in 1969, F.J. McMahon’s first and only album, Spirit Of The Golden Juice, is a spellbinding blend of singer-songwriter emotion and spiraling guitar accompaniment with a raw, adventurous character all its own. It is often cited as a protest album connected to the Vietnam war, although there is nothing overt to directly suggest such, it is world weary and full of a sunbathed melancholy. Reissued a number of times over the years, it has always found a new audience, and as it approaches its 50th anniversary there is no reason to think this slow burner won’t keep spinning, soundtracking the disaffected. The simple notes on the back of the album still say it best: “F.J. McMahon is an artist with something to say and he says it in a simple earthy style.”

Compilation records are more than mere mixtapes or samplers, they are restoration projects that often become hugely important parts of reappraisals of artists, movements, scenes and whole genres. As ever, this section is dominated by Light in the Attic of Seattle, Washington, The Numero Group of Chicago, Illinois and David Byrne’s Luaka Bop label, all titans of musical archeology.

World Sprituality Classics 1

No.1

The Ecstatic Music of Alice Coltrane Turiyasangitananda

Our Compilation of the Year for 2017. From 1968 to 1978, Alice Coltrane was a hugely prolific composer, pianist, and harpist, releasing at least an album per year, culminating in the double album Transfiguration in 1978.

Shortly after its release, she disappeared from public life almost entirely (returning to recording only for her final album Translinear Light, just a few years before her death in 2007) to devote her life and time to religious pursuits. In 1975, she established the Vedantic Center, an organization for the study of the ancient Vedic religion of India and “spiritual wisdom and insight from all faiths.” She took the name Swamini Turiyasangitananda, which translates from Sanskrit as “the highest song of God”. In 1983, she relocated the centre to a sprawling 48-acre complex in the Santa Monica Mountains outside Los Angeles, renaming it the Sai Anantam Ashram and inviting a group of followers to live and study there.

This remarkable new compilation from David Byrne’s Luaka Bop label collects highlights from Coltrane’s ashram period and releases them publicly for the first time. Coltrane self-released the songs on cassette, producing only a few hundred copies of each for ashram members: 1982’s Turiya Sings, 1987’s Divine Songs, 1990’s Infinite Chants, and 1995’s Glorious Chants. The label worked with Coltrane’s children Ravi and Michelle and her longtime engineer Baker Bigsby to secure and remaster the original tapes. Coltrane, performing with ashram members, illuminates Hindu devotionals with meditative Indian instrumentation, a sparkling Oberheim OB-8 synthesiser, droning Wurlitzer lines, and fullbodied singing evoking the Detroit church choirs of her youth. The music is immensely powerful in its euphoric devotion. Although looking in it is hard to get a sense for the true spirituality of the music, it is doubtless a hugely rewarding listening experience and feels like quite a privilege.

Acetone 1992-2001 The very essence of slow burning, the most glorious understated set of songs from the enigmatic Acetone.

They were a band that we’d heard people talk about, we’d even heard a few tracks we think... but with a full reappraisal out on Light In The Attic, we’re gone head over heels for them this time for sure.

At a time when the “indie scene” was fragmenting and evolving at unprecedented speeds, it is easy to see how the band became overlooked with their gentle flowing desert sounds, impossible to grab hold of, like water flowing through the grains. They were revered by their contemporaries and toured with Oasis, Mazzy Star, The Verve, and Spiritualized, whose Jason Pierce noted that “Acetone are into it for what they get out of it. Their music reflects who they are, and that’s so rare in music today. It’s a soul music thing.” Though few heard them, their recordings are time capsules of who they were, how they lived, and where they came from. The timing for the compilation is apt and syncs with Sam Sweet’s Hadley Lee Lightcap, a non-fiction novel that traces the backstories of the three members in Acetone. Guitarist Mark Lightcap, bassist Richie Lee, and drummer Steve Hadley played together for a total of 15 years, disbanding in July 2001, when Lee committed suicide in the garage next to the house where the trio practised. Rolling Stone ran a short obituary, commenting that Acetone’s albums were “well received” but “failed to make any waves.” Tragically, it was the first and only time they were featured in the national music press.

Various Artists Even a Tree Can Shed Tears: Japanese Folk & Rock 19691973 Even a Tree Can Shed Tears is a 19 track compilation of Japanese folk and rock music from between 1969-1973, featuring songs from Yellow Magic Orchestra’s Haruomi Hosono, Maki Asakawa, Sachiko Kanenobu, Ryo Kagawa, and a wealth of other artists to get lost in. A mellow collection of slow burning folk and psych jams that act as a beautiful comparison to what was happening some five and half thousand miles away in Laurel Canyon. It focuses its attention on the music movement that sprang up in Tokyo’s Shibuya district in the aftermath of Beatlemania (and later became known simply as “New Music”). Exclusively sung in Japanese, there is something otherworldly to it all (seeing as we don’t speak Japanese) and you really dial into the vibe. It’s weirdly familiar whilst being mysterious, and a beautiful window into a time period. It is a bit like discovering a bunch of deep cuts from artists you thought you knew inside out.

Album closer Otokorashiitte Wakaru Kai by Dylan II is actually a rewrite of Bob Dylan’s I Shall Be Released using his melody, otherwise this is a stunningly new collection of motifs, melodies and songs that we’ve hardly stopped playing this autumn.

Hüsker Dü Savage Young Dü Crate diggers and curators extraordinaire Numero Group were neck deep into a fascinating and pretty thrilling project when the very sad news broke that Hüsker Dü’s Grant Hart had lost a long and difficult battle with cancer.

The Minneapolis band, which Hart formed with fellow singersongwriter Bob Mould and bassist Greg Norton in 1979, was one of the leading lights of the American independent-rock movement of the 1980s. Savage Young Dü is a full appraisal of everything the band released from 1979 to 1982, when they were still a feral young punk band, just figuring out the possibilities of their sound. Most strikingly, the set includes 47 unreleased tracks and a book with some stunning art and photos that chronicles the band’s evolution. The audio has all been remastered from original soundboard tapes, demos and session recordings. Originally released on SST Records, the band’s recordings were supervised by the label’s in-house producer Spot, who achieved only muddy results. “Spot was a lousy engineer,” explains Ken Shipley of Chicago’s Numero Group, “they didn’t have the money to make their records sound good.”

Cleaned up and ready to meet a new generation, no one who loves punk should live without the Hüsker Dü catalogue.

We’ve always said, music has its own lifespan, and Acetone were arguably never of their own time. Thankfully those songs remain and will doubtless find a new audience and a new set of appreciators. The Midnight Cowboy cover is pure heartbreak, hearing that track for the first time on a warm summer’s evening was magically, completely transcending time. It doesn’t matter where and when they recorded it, just that they did and we got to hear it.

BADBADNOTGOOD Late Night Tales Canadian quartet BADBADNOTGOOD turned curators this year for the longrunning Late Night Tales series, with their own take on the soundtrack.

The strength of the series continues to be in the hands of the curators, and BBNG have proved themselves adept mixtape makers, with a collection of tracks as eclectic and uncompromising as you would expect from the genre-breaking four piece. Out of the leftfield and less-dug-crates are Velly Joonas’ Estonian version of Feel Like Makin’ Love, Kiki Gyan, Les Prospection, Admas and Francis Bebey alongside cuts from Stereolab, Boards Of Canada, Charlotte Day Wilson, The Beach Boys and Thundercat.

As is tradition, the band themselves also contribute, with an exclusive Andy Shauf cover. 10/10 for putting Donnie & Joe Emerson’s Baby in the set too - as Ariel Pink pointed out years ago, it is the first track on any mixtape worth listening to.

Beach House B-Sides and Rarities Beach House are one of the most meticulously precise bands around, incredible and painstaking detail goes into every second of the albums they produce, present and sequence, all hidden under the layers of swooping dreamy music. It seems surprising that they would have any extra gestures or tracks at all, but they did, and this year compiled them with B-Sides into this collection.

The vast majority of the material here has been available in one form

Warfaring Strangers Acid Nightmares The Warfaring Strangers series is our favourite part of the Numero catalogue. From the long-forgotten folksy singer-songwriters of the Ladies From The Canyon, to the jacked-up roots of stoner rock in the Darkscorch Canticles and last year’s amazing Cosmic American Music, explorations into the lost cuts of the affluent desert rock and roll, they are always essential. Acid Nightmares charts the days and long nights as the hippy movement hurdled towards its ultimate demise, and bad vibes infiltrated the rock world. Tainted LSD, loud motorcycles, and a series of brutal deaths spawned inspiration for guitar-wielding teenagers across the globe. Lifted from the ashes of the acid rock hell fire are 18 distorted tales of dope fiends, pill poppers, and the baddest of trips. It all plays out like the alternative soundtrack to Easy Rider, it’s the house jukebox from some dangerous biker bar off in the background.

As we’re going to print, we notice that the next edition will be Private Yacht, investigating the blue-eyed harmonies of Hall and Oates, the cocaine-dusted Fender Rhodes of Michael McDonald, and the combover strums of James Taylor. We cannot wait for that.

or another across their decade as a band, but having it in one place is the perfect accompaniment to their studio albums, and fills in some of the missing pieces in one of the most consistently strong repertoires.

Various Artists Pop Makossa: The Invasive Dance Beat Of Cameroon 1976-84 The Pop Makossa adventure started in 2009, when Analog Africa founder Samy Ben Redjeb first travelled to Cameroon to make an initial assessment of the country’s musical situation. He returned with enough tracks for an explosive compilation highlighting the period when funk and disco sounds began to infiltrate the makossa style popular throughout Cameroon.

First popularised in the west by saxophonist Manu Dibango, with his unexpected 1970s hit Soul Makossa, makossa is one of the great dance styles of west Africa. The songs that form this collection have a wide base of influences and styles from jazz through dance, but they are all underpinned by the most addictive bass on ANY record this year. They all have an utterly hypnotic low end swirl, and although recorded anywhere between 30 and 40 years ago, they all sound ludicrously fresh.

Can The Singles This unique collection is the first time the iconic experimental German rock band’s singles have been presented together, and it shows the breadth of their influential career, from well loved tracks like Halleluwah, Vitamin C and I Want More to more obscure and soughtafter singles such as Silent Night and Turtles Have Short Legs. They are all presented in their original single version, many of which have been unavailable for many years and not presented outside of the original 7” release.

Laid out logically and chronologically, it highlights what a genuinely innovative force they were, enigmatic in their sonic explorations. Whereas they are perhaps most synonymous with their sprawling mind-bending jams, it’s easy to overlook that their creative lightning bolts could just as easily generate stunningly concise pop jams. A great introduction point for the uninitiated and a fascinating curated listen for the diehards.

So sad to have lost both Jaki Liebezeit and Holger Czukay this year, they shifted the plates and changed everything for those who followed. An amazing band.

Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds Lovely Creatures: The Best of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, 1984-2014 Compiled by Nick Cave and founding member Mick Harvey, this massive, 30 year retrospective paints a dark and awe-inspiring portrait of the band’s catalogue, from the sex and drugs and rock and roll, to the elder statesmen with swooning strings and the densest poetry.

The last few albums have really seen both Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds elevate into the pantheon of the greats Leonard Cohen, Bob Dylan - that they have long held in awe.This career appraisal doesn’t exactly offer anything new, but listening to 30 years’ worth of material in a few hours really hammers home what an inimitable talent they all are.

Late

on.

We inevitably fall head over heels with an album right as we’re sending the magazine off to print, happens every year. All of the following are superb albums released in 2017 and therefore very much part of the magazine more broadly, it’s just that by October we’d already listened to 300 odd releases numerous times and all carefully voted and correlated the top 100 list… you have to acknowledge the administrative work involved here folks?! So here are a dozen of so albums that we’ve really been feeling in the darkening autumn/winter evenings. That’s the great bit about being us, 2017 is just a chunk of time, we’re always open, we’re always listening. As we’re sending this off to print, new albums will be landing imminently from Charlotte Gainsbourg, Thor & Friends, Björk, Bitchin Bajas, Karl Blau and the final Sharon Jones & The DapKings album, Soul of a Woman.

Courtney Barnett & Kurt Vile Lotta Sea Lice Courtney Barnett & Kurt Vile throw their hats into the great artist duet album conversation with their utterly charming Lotta Sea Lice LP. As you’d expect, it’s brilliantly understated, with them taking turns to slur and drawl out very candid lines about... well, pretty much the everyday life of international touring musicians. Funny and very endearing, nothing feels over-thought and over-baked, it’s full of premium jangle.

St. Vincent MASSEDUCTION New studio LP from Annie Clark as St. Vincent. Man she is a smart cookie. For our money, we don’t think anyone is making such brilliantly addictive and exciting pop music whilst successfully pulling in themes of love, lust, death and sex. Everything about this is high gloss, but it still has loads of heart and she is an arresting storyteller, brave enough to do it in the first person.

Less of the crunching riffs that smashed through the mix so exquisitely on her previous (self-titled) LP, but the shimmering production here is full of perfect pop earworms, and it’s one of those albums where there are so many gratifying moments across it that it’s almost impossible to pick a favourite track. She is simply magnificent, and this is another elevation in a quite remarkable career.

Baxter Dury Prince of Tears Big moments of orchestral pop, pounding basslines, the slickest pop production and Baxter sounds SO INTENSE. His delivery is just perfect, he is able to be brutally honest, unflinchingly aggressive and brilliantly funny (he’s had us cackling) from track to track, verse to verse and even line to line.

Imagine Serge Gainsbourg rumbling that he’s a “fakkin Maserati”. Guest appearances are great (we’ll save the surprises for you) and it’s an album you want to go right back in on as soon as it’s done. Matthew Drift nominated it as one of his albums of the year after about 0.75 listens... it’s that kind of LP!

William Eggleston Musik Debut LP from 78-year-old William Eggleston. He is of course well known as one of the most revered modern day photographers (“the Pioneer of Color Photography” NY Times.) and an icon in our world for shooting the Big Star Radio City sleeve, with his work gracing hundreds of other sleeves since. The wonderful surprise this year is that Eggleston has been sitting on a vast archive of compositions, having first began recording in the 1980s using a Korg OW/1 FD Pro synthesiser, storing his work on handfuls of floppy discs. Musik is taken from sessions clocking over 60 hours that have been digitized for this and hopefully future releases. Musik (in the German spelling in honour of “his hero” Johann Sebastian Bach) is a set of 13 pieces that cover a sort of lo-fi contemporary classical, through experimental and ambient. Intimate, serene and really engaging. Been driving around to this a lot in the car, he’s really captured some amazing headspace.

Margo Price All American Made King Krule The OOZ We got really excited to hear Archy Marshall again early this year when he added guest vocals to the brilliant Mount Kimbie LP, and his return under his King Krule nom de plume this year on XL sure didn’t disappoint. It’s a really big album, dense and full of ideas and in his dreamy, hallucinatory drawl he is hugely successful in keeping it all together. Feels like the soundtrack to the King Krule story, all of his influences whipped up and chewed out in his truly inimitable style.

Quite a pioneer, brilliant stuff this.

Lost Horizons Ojalá The debut Lost Horizons LP on Bella Union, a project lead by Simon Raymonde and Richie Thomas with an utterly wild roster of guest vocal contributors. Besides founding the Bella Union label, Simon was, of course, a pivotal member of Cocteau Twins, so the dreamy nature of this record holds little surprise.

Musically it results from an improv collaboration with Richard Thomas (formerly of Dif Juz and Jesus and Mary Chain) and the mixing is lush, loads and loads of texture that provide such a good base for vocals from Marissa Nadler, Ghostpoet, Liela Moss and former Midlake frontman Tim Smith amongst many others.

All American Made cements Margo Price right at the very middle of the modern country music scene. After ten years roughing and scraping, her second LP follows her 2016 breakout debut and has all the hallmarks of a country great. Drink, misdirected love, depression, honky tonk, a pedal steel and Willie bloody Nelson!!

Very charming and full of life.

Julien Baker Turn Out The Lights Turn Out The Lights is the highly anticipated second album from Julien Baker. Her stark and stunning debut arrived exactly two years back, and in the passing time she’s really carefully developed her writing and delivery whilst remaining an arresting voice. Not as primitive as her debut, but still delivered simply and without any fuss.

Beck Colors To say Beck has one of two modes would be hugely oversimplifying it, but his wonderful back catalogue can be divided into two themes: explorative singer-songwriter and shimmering pop wizard. Colors is Beck’s thirteenth studio album and very much falls into grande pop wizardry. On first listen, there are a few tracks that had our eyebrows doing weird things, but on repeat listens we’ve been really feeling the pop bangers. A strange combination of instant gratification and easy to miss gestures, subtle primetime pop?

Yeah, he can do that.

Photographed by John Johnson

Interview:

Michael

Head

As a songwriter, Michael Head is held in the highest regard, cherished as “a genius” by artists like Noel Gallagher and Richard Hawley, and lauded for his work in the 1980s and 90s with The Pale Fountains and Shack. This October he released his first album of new material in over eleven years, an evocative set of songs that attain that rare bittersweet spot of melody and melancholy.

We spoke to him about how it all came together.

Deluxe: How do you feel about the record being out there now? Were you anxious to get it released once you had finished work on it?

Mick Head: Not really, no. We were glad. It took quite a while to do, but we knew it was going to take its time because we were all working around each other. We had said early doors, that’s the way we’re going to do it, and then once we had finished it, once it was recorded, it mixed itself really to an extent. We weren’t too precious on the mixes and I was glad to just finish it. I love it. I think the playing on it is fantastic, I am very proud of it.

D: I watched a video of you talking to John Doran and I had a hunch that if I asked you a straight question (laughing) like, are you proud of it?

You’d give me a straight answer.

MH: (laughing) You know, I am really proud of the playing on it. In the past I have maybe said to John or one or two people, that in the past

I have always just moved on when I have done an album. Never really listened to it a lot. By the time we had finished it, the albums in the past, we were working on the next lot. So there was never really time for reflection, but on this one, I don’t know, there has been a lot more time afterwards to reflect on it as well.

Not going straight into work on something new, which was what we have normally done.

D: Do you feel pressure to move on to something else?

MH: I think that with the bands I have been with in the past we didn’t really have any restrictions from the record company. Not restrictions – pressure. They were not saying, let’s get this finished and let’s get onto the next one. There was never that, but for me personally as a songwriter I was always writing all the time.

What I found, a couple of albums in, to keep the excitement going in the studio when you are recording, it’s good to have new ideas on the boil if

you like, because you know the songs that you want to record inside out.

It’s always good to have something fresh to concentrate on as diversions and distractions really.

D: How about pressure you put on yourself?

MH: I have put the pressure on myself in a way in the past, where I would just be writing all the time.

You would be in the environment where you would just fall into starting rehearsing again. Whereas, this time there’s no set band, it’s just a collective of people, so I have the time to reflect on it I suppose.

D: I am always interested whether artists are more into the recording side or more into the live side of their music and I have always thought of it as the two things, but I sense that you are actually into the phase the precedes them, the writing part?

MH: Yeah, you are right. In the past

I have got to admit that I’ve loved recording, because of the environment... You probably know yourself, you go into a studio, there’s no windows, it’s enclosed. You don’t know what time it is sometimes, you don’t know what day it is. That’s great because you are busy. It was great and exciting when I was in the Paleys (The Pale Fountains) when I was a kid. Over the years, as I got more proficient, for lack of a better word, with my writing, I started enjoying it more. This time I enjoyed the studio process because, I don’t know, I was more on a bit of a mission because it was just me and the engineer. It wasn’t a band situation. With the bands, when it came to the producing I enjoyed it more than I had in the past really, because there was a lot of fun that went on in the studio in the past. I don’t know how it equated. A lot of work but also lots of fun as well.

D: Feels to me like you had one of your strongest sets of songs going into the session.

MH: Yeah. For me personally, I had had a couple of conversations with people who had said they had known these songs for quite a while. And I agreed, it had taken me quite a while to finish some of them. I just did not have the lyrics. I just thought I would put it to the side until it was finished. So I have had a bit of unfinished business with songs. So I had the environment and the players around me, and the opportunity. It’s like all the planets aligned at the same time, with the band that formulated, with the people who were available, and the studio that was available. I was in a better place within myself, so it was a good time to get stuck in. We did a gig in Sefton Park and Steve Powell, the album’s producer, was at the gig and his son was playing bass for us with his mates. It was a good gig. So when Steve said “Why don’t we strike while the iron is hot?” I bit his hand off really.

So earlier when I said we were a bit more adult, it was like we had an opportunity really.

D: Lots of people talk about you and your ability as a songwriter with so much reverence, how do you feel about that? Does that ever seem inhibiting?

MH: I always think – who are the judges? and the judges always change any way. There are no judges. For me personally it does not bother me at all because I just write songs. I know that’s an easy answer… no that’s not an easy answer, that’s the basic simplistic answer to it really. Since I started I’ve got better I think at writing songs. I think I am getting better all the time and I love it. When people bandy that about, it’s a crazy thing to say really isn’t it?

Some people take offence when you say, you know what I mean, you are this or you are that. There’s no fucking judges! (laughing) Who is the fucking judge?

D: I agree with you in terms of how you have progressed, but do you feel different inside as a songwriter to when

you were, say 18 or 19, is your approach different?

MH: Honestly, even to this day, I am always writing.

Pass a piano and you can’t help but play it. From when I started writing I just do what I can do and try and improve on it. I never sit down and practise to write songs or to get better at the guitar, it’s just a natural evolution that’s come. With the songwriting, I think it comes with age, it’s got to. I can only put it down to that. You obviously learn a few tricks here and there, you know what I mean, when you are playing with guitars and things like that. Lyrically your imagination has a lot more in there to play around with. I personally am enjoying what I am doing, songwriting. It’s hard not to blow your own trumpet when you are enjoying something isn’t it?

D: One thing I picked up on and find interesting is when you say “imagination” and “vivid” when talking about the lyrics. I found Adios Senor Pussycat a very direct, open and conversational record, and though it was very brave in that way. Are there any parts of it that you think “Oh fuck, I’ve said that out loud”?

MH: No not at all. Out of all my albums I am probably more proud of the honesty on this album. In the past there have been some questions I have shied away from, some songs I have written where I have thought - you don’t really want or need to know that. But with this one, it’s all there in the lyrics isn’t it. Most open, most honest, and one of the least ambiguous lyrical albums I have made. Sometimes as a songwriter you can mess around with ambiguity, do you know what I mean? If it’s guitarbased and you can go more psychedelic.

D: As a Liverpudlian, I wonder how supportive it is as a city and how much you feel you have been influenced by the scene?

MH: Always felt influenced by the scene since we were kids. It’s always been there. Liverpool city centre itself is small, you can walk across it. I think it sounds bigger than it is. Because it’s so small everybody knows each other. Invariably people are borrowing each other’s amps and guitars and everybody has, in some way or another, been involved with each other. I was playing a gig in Glasgow with Phil and Tom who play in the band. Tom plays bass and Phil plays drums, they are kids in their 20s and a couple of months ago they said to me “Our uncle loves you. He got us into The Paleys and Shack”, so I was saying “Oh, good one”. Over the weeks they were saying - our uncle said this, and our uncle said that. So I am thinking – he sounds great your uncle. (laughing) Someone who’s into the Paleys, sounds like a diamond, know what I mean? So we were in Glasgow and had finished a gig, sitting in the back of the van next to Phil, waiting for people. This fella pops his head in and Phil says – here’s my uncle, and I realise I have known him

for years. Known his face for 30 years. So that’s what I mean, it’s so small in Liverpool I had seen him hundreds of times without knowing it was Phil’s uncle. The music scene has never really been segregated in Liverpool, seems to me there always seems to be bands on the go.

D: How about record shops?

MH: Yes, of course.

D: So what impact have record shops had on you?

MH: From day one… massively, because there was a record shop in Kensington where I used to live called Edwards, that had been there since, I don’t know, the 50s? the 60s? It was there when I was a kid in the mid 70s.

It was an old record shop, but it was famous for having these boards outside that displayed what he had inside his shop. There had to be thousands of records on this board. He and his wife painstakingly did it. So basically if you were looking for something obscure you would look on the board and if it wasn’t on the board you would go in and ask him. And then he had a back room too that was full of books. So, yeah, shops like that would fascinate me. There would always be, not a queue, but jockeying for position. Even in the pissing down rain they would put cellophane over the boards so you could still stand outside the shop and see what they had inside.

It was always chocka. So we had record shops like that.

Obviously I have seen them come and go, I was thinking about this the other day. The record shops in Liverpool never really got rid of the vinyl. The vinyl was always there in the shop, just no one was going near it over the last 20 years. Obviously now they have knocked the odd wall down to make the vinyl section bigger. Or the upstairs, or the basement, which is fantastic.

D: Do you remember your very first record shop experience?

MH: My first record shop purchase would have to be… my Dad bought me Aladdin Sane, a complete fluke. I don’t know why as he was a Teddy boy, I don’t think he knew what he was doing, it was pot luck. But good on him (laughing), it could have been fucking anyone!

D: (laughing) That is a pretty fortuitous start though…

MH: So after that, through that, I bought Ziggy Stardust.

Or vice versa, he got me Ziggy… No he got me Aladdin Sane. What was the one after that?

D: Ziggy Stardust was the album directly prior to Aladdin Sane.

MH: To tell you the truth, my first single that I bought for myself though Queen, Seven Seas of Rhye. So that was

“Just getting it into a fucking record shop, there’s just something magical about it, isn’t it?” my first single. My first experience was being given a Bowie album and then going on to buy another album, but my first single was Queen.

D: How did it feel to be going into a record shop and being like “I am being part of this scene”?

MH: When I was buying for myself it was like doing something you hadn’t done before, and yeah, it was exciting.

D: Regarding your new record, how supportive have record shops been?

MH: I can only talk about Liverpool really, but in Liverpool, massively. Matt who runs Violette Records is sweetened, he is very happy with the way it’s going. The whole release though, there’s just something about it.

When me and Matt were talking a couple of years ago, he was saying, what do you want to do? Just getting it into a fucking record shop, there’s just something magical about it, isn’t it?

D: Yeah, definitely, we’re biased though.

MH: In the Paleys we used to treat it like a work of art.

We’d think to ourselves the sleeve has got to represent what’s on the inside, so we don’t really need anyone to do our artwork, because we know exactly what’s in the lyrics inside. We treated it like a little bit of a work of art. You’ve got to treat them with a little bit of respect haven’t you...

D: Well, put it this way, you can tell when people care.

MH: Well of course, exactly, when people have put a bit of thought into them. When people respect the fact that other people are going to respect the fact of what you have put into it. I used to cherish my records.

Drift, illustrated by Chris Gordon - www.chrisdgordon.com

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48

Mario Batkovic Mario Batkovic

The National Sleep Well Beast

One of the most arresting and captivating albums we’ve heard in ages. Mario Batkovic is a Swiss virtuoso solo accordion player born in Bosnia, and his self-titled debut album on Invada Records is like nothing else you’ll hear this year.

Invada’s Geoff Barrow (Portishead) began working with Batkovic in the studio, encouraging him to write in new ways and opening doors for new musical directions. There are no loops, no effects... just a microphone and an accordion. It took a full year just to work out how to play it that way. In one way minimal, but in its intensity it is a hugely gripping and immersive listen. He covers the lower timbres almost like a multi-tracked drum and the Philip Glass-eqe lead lines fly through the air. Masterful and extraordinary.

Seventh studio LP from The National. Everything about it is beautifully delivered. The tone is rich, wistful, and offers moments of hope and moments of bleak introspection (that no other band seems able to command so effectively?). Even the artwork has such a well thought out brief, The National really understand what it is to project themselves. It sounds instantly and completely like “a National LP”, but successfully introduces some lush new instruments and tones (practice well spent on that ace LNZNDRF album.) It is no surprise that this was the band’s first number one record, their grandest statement to date and immaculately produced. It will delight their existing supporters and also find plenty of new friends in its grand scope and Matt Berninger’s ever-present rich baritone.

46 Chris Forsyth & The Solar Motel Band Dreaming In The Non-Dream A new four track LP of explorative guitar essays from one of our favourite sonic explorers. The band are in explosive form, unified and pumped, in total control and with a seasoned simpatico that is only attained with hard work like a black belt. Predominantly instrumental, they convey complicated emotions and politics with flair, the guys project sonic feelings. They are so genuinely different to everyone else

around right now, perhaps we’ll only realise in hindsight what a smart and exciting band these guys are.

The LP was released on the day they came to play for us at the festival and it was an experience that will long live with us.

47 Nadia Reid Preservation Nadia’s debut Listen to Formation, Look For The Signs (2015) stopped us dead in our tracks, a remarkable debut with some of the most beautifully delivered and honest laments in yonks. This new LP is a clear step forward for an artist developing her craft as both a writer and a performer. Everything is carefully constructed so that there are no wasted gestures or breaths. It is quiet, but don’t mistake that with fey, it deals with love, loss and some big emotions. There is much sadness and it is weary also, but there are some brilliantly off-kilter moments that give you a moment to re-focus... that’s when you really catch how brilliant she is.

45 Alvvays Antisocialites The Toronto-based Alvvays make a very welcome return with their sophomore LP Antisocialites.

Whereas their (brilliant) debut was about cascading guitar tones, this new LP is all about the synths.

For anyone who spent any time at all growing up in the 1980s, this is going to stir up some huge feelings, they’ve made the best John Hughes soundtrack ever I think? Banging pop tunes, still plenty of guitar growl and pounding bass lines and Molly Rankin’s vocals sound amazing. Lots of band manage to nail a sound, but Alvvays have gone one further and nailed down a vibe.

Hugely evocative, it’s hard not to get completely swept up in. A belting record.

44 Jen Cloher Jen Cloher Melbourne singer–songwriter Jen Cloher is one hell of a writer and one hell of an observer. Her fourth album is ambitious, smart, funny, and brilliantly formed from a wide-reaching record collection of references. It sounds like The Velvet Underground, The Triffids, SleaterKinney, PJ Harvey, The Rolling Stones, Patti Smith… honestly, it’s a brilliant use of stylistic tones and miraculously indebted to none of them. Her partner Courtney Barnett plays the guitar and lends some of that Antipodean lilt, it chugs along gloriously with some hugely rewarding changes of pace in its more maudlin moments. Bravely honest and highly articulate without letting the content dictate the delivery.

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42 Stormzy Gang Signs & Prayer The debut full-length studio release for the British grime artist who has single-handedly won the year, going from much hyped to breakout blockbuster star before the summer was through. There has been a certain “right time, right place” logic to the scale of Stormzy’s success in 2017, but his abilities are undeniable. His turn of phrase is wildly inventive and his disses are pretty hysterical, but that is only half of the man. He clearly has a broad social conscience and he has written affectingly about depression amongst other topics. The production is absolutely jacked up and frames this much deserved star perfectly. When in full flight he is unstoppable.

Andrea Belfi Ore Berlin-based drummer and percussionist Andrea Belfi debuts the FLOAT label with a real statement of intent: challenging and thrilling new music. The drums are the very centre of the record, complex, hypnotising and hugely innovative patterns that play against electronic textures.

Remove any preconceptions about what drums have to do, intricate flicks and brushes combine with epic and booming crashes in ever more complex rhythms, the sonics that he creates are pretty breathtaking and hard to comprehend. The ambience

is quite haunting and provides such an absorbing space to highlight the incredible dexterity Belfi has. Mary Anne Hobbs nailed it, “You have no concept of just how much a lone kettle drum can blow your mind until you’ve heard Andrea play one.” A genuinely thrilling record, make sure to give it your full attention.

41 Daniel Brandt Eternal Something Daniel Brandt, co-founder of Germany’s electro-acoustic ensemble Brandt Brauer Frick, joined the Erased Tapes family this March with his solo debut album Eternal Something. It really is superb, a deeply addictive album of human sounding beat music, pulling in elements of ambient and classical.

It sits very comfortably on the esteemed label, it has much of the contemporary classical about it, moments of silence and moments of dense and complicated interweaving.

Clearly highly skilled musicians, there is an extraordinary force to the music when in full flight, like chamber music they layer up parts with different timbres at it creates intense and quite sensory music. Straddling both dancefloors and concert halls is never easy to accomplish, but they have here with flair.

B E ST

HERE LIES MAN ‘Here Lies Man’

O F

OH SEES ‘Orc’

Riding Easy LP/CD

Castle Face 2LP/CD

Erased Tapes LP/CD

HEADLAND ‘True Flowers From This Painted World’

W H AT ' S N E W…

Headland LP/CD

Castle Face 2LP/CD

MOLLY NILSSON ‘Imaginations’

MEATBODIES ‘Alice’

Night School LP/CD

Stickman 2LP/CD

Riding Easy 2LP/CD

BED WETTIN BAD BOYS ‘Rot’

SUN RA & HIS ARKESTRA FEAT. PHAROAH SANDERS & BLACK HAROLD Superior Viaduct LP

FLAT WORMS ‘Flat Worms’

ELDER ‘Reflections of a Floating World’

MONOLORD ‘Rust’

OCS ‘Memory Of A Cut Off Head’

PENGUIN CAFE ‘The Imperfect Sea’ Erased Tapes LP/CD

CHASTITY BELT ‘I Used To Spend So Much Time Alone’ A WINGED VICTORY FOR THE SULLEN ‘Iris’ Hardly Art LP/Ltd LP/ CD

201 7

RIP Society / Agitated LP/CD

UT ‘S/t & Confidential’ Out Records 2x12" / CD

Castle Face LP/CD

In The Red LP/CD

NADINE KHOURI ‘The Salted Air’ One Flash LP/CD

VARIOUS ‘Heed The Call!’

Vostok 2LP/CD

FLYING SAUCER ATTACK ‘In Search Of Spaces’ VHF 2LP

info@fortedistribution.co.uk

40 VENN Runes A glorious debut of expansive krauty-inspired sonics. The album was recorded at the Total Refreshment Centre in London

by Kristian Craig Robinson (aka Capitol K) of The Archie Bronson Outfit and Loose Meat. For us one of the most exciting facets of this album, and indeed band, are the different elements they bring in and make their own without over dwelling. There are sections of cinematics, plenty of motorik beats, post-punk space and some glorious layering of synth tones and clattering guitar shapes. Loads of innovation to create something very exciting and not directly derivative of anything necessarily. They’re not trying to find their own take on post-punk, they’re just doing their own thing. Runes is also hands down one of the best in-car albums of the year, we’ve done some miles together.

39 Jake Xerxes Fussell What in the Natural World Second album from the entrancing guitarist and singer Jake Xerxes Fussell. He was raised on the traditional music of the GeorgiaAlabama border, joining his folklorist father Fred on his trips to document local bluesmen and basket-weavers alike. On What in the Natural World, his delivery is superb. Nothing lasts too long, nothing is overthought, nothing is overproduced and not one second is under delivered. Whether he’s singing about the supernatural, the everyday and even the mundane, there is always something else going on and you pick up more and more on each listen, it really is a treasure trove of an album in that way. It flows like a great American river, a trip through the modern and not so modern South, with winning lap steels and gently plucked strings.

As with all fine songwriters, Jake is a storyteller and this album is about his impeccable delivery and brilliant songs.

37 Temples Volcano Doubtless one of the county’s finest young bands really hitting their full stride. Whereas their debut was about the rich psychedelic guitar tones, on Volcano the Moog is key. This second album is a big step forward in terms of their experimentalism and willingness to play against what they do as a band, a big shift into a dynamic space where they are all driving the song

forward collectively. The leading lines are sung, they are rattled off on the frets, the are pounded on the drums and they are painted on the synths in a rich analogue palette. It is ridiculously addictive, this is honestly some of the most joyous psychedelia in years. It has been on repeat on the turntable, on repeat on the radio and on repeat between your ears.

38 Fleet Foxes Crack-Up Crack-Up ends a six-year hiatus and you’d well believe it has taken them the entire break to construct this. It is a masterfully created record, intricate and staggering in its grandness. Maybe because they became so big so fast, we know that some folk like to rag on the Foxes, but we’re going to play it straight...

We love their sound, always have and this LP continues to bring in all sorts of influences whilst retaining a strong identity and those glorious, cavernous harmonies. Crack-Up is a slow burner, it requires time and attention, but it is a hugely satisfying LP. We’ve found over the year that we have favourite sections and moments rather than songs necessarily, that’s got to be a sign of a capturing a vibe right? The album starts with a low humming whisper and a distinctly lower than normal timbre of harmony, it’s a sure fire classic for getting people out of their seats and unnecessarily adjusting the speed up to 45rpm… False alarm, it’s 33 man, cue the Fleet Chipmunks.

Good gag.

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34

Floating Points Mojave Desert

Sampha Process

Sam Shepherd is one of the most subtle and skilful producers around. He returned this year with the maximal and swirling Floating Points in conjunction with a short film from director Anna Diaz Ortuño. It is, in fact, less “him” these days and equally now about the band of exceptional musicians he helms in his ensemble, taking influence and inspiration from the rocky landscape of the Californian desert. Like all great progressive and jazz music, Mojave Desert is winding, searching and sonically fascinating. The understanding and sympathy between the musicians is extraordinary, everyone with a responsibility and also ample space to experiment with dexterity and collaboration. It is thrillingly explorative music and has been a wonderful place to get completely lost in.

The Mercury Music Prize winning, highly-anticipated ten-track debut album from Sampha. First thing here, the production is utterly amazing. He worked with Rodaidh McDonald on it, and it’s clear he’s just put his all into it, there is such intensity. His voice is instantly recognisable, bruised and straining under the deeply personal emotion of this record. Vocally he’s one of the most important guys of the last five years and he’s really saved his A-game for his own album. He is an excellent songwriter and he applies himself across genres with great aptitude here; across its 40 minutes it covers a lot of ideas and textures, but it’s super coherent. Process is an album of catharsis, honesty and intimacy. It is a privilege to be welcomed in and to be able to enjoy on whatever level you want to take from it.

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33

The Moonlandingz Interplanetary Class Classics

Crescent Resin Pockets

Debut album from the supergroup of Lias Saoudi and Saul Adamczewski of Fat White Family, plus Eccentronic Research Council’s Adrian Flanagan and Dean Honer. They began life as “a fictional band from a fictional town”, but with the arrival of Interplanetary Class Classics they’re very much real, they even attracted guest appearances from Slow Club’s Rebecca Taylor, Yoko Ono and (we shit you not) the Cowboy from VIllage People. It’s a glorious mess of genres, glam rock, squealing art school sax and pounding synths, and it all works so well, directed by such deliciously unhinged narratives. It’s smart, muscular production and supports a really superb set of driving pop songs that chug along.

Really good - definitely one of the year’s most fun albums.

Honestly now, this knocked us sideways when we first heard it. Matt Jones returns as Crescent on The Pastels’ Geographic Music imprint. It’s his first album in ten years, predominantly performed by Matt in collaboration with his brother Sam, and it’s a bit special. The nine songs were recorded indoors and outdoors, in everyday spaces. There is a glorious ramshackle that reminded us of Grandaddy, Pavement, David Pajo, Palace Brothers, Sparklehorse, Smog and a world in-between. Early morning melancholia, little gestures that are so pretty you could cry. It’s a really brilliant collection of songs the delivery is so beautiful balanced, everything is in its right place. Without going over the top here, Resin Pockets is a low fidelity masterpiece and we’ll be playing this for a long time.

32 Richard Dawson Peasant One of our favourite artists, but even we’d concede that Richard Dawson’s records are not easy listens, one of the most distinctive and wildly creative voices we have.

Broadly it is a concept album set in the medieval north, “a song cycle based on the lives of inhabitants of Bryneich – a kingdom in Yr Hen Ogledd, or the Old North”, but it is seriously experimental, mixing in dreams and folklore.

By using such a specific location and time for the album, he is able to channel the weirdness, superstition, violence, hopelessness and utter fucking bleakness of the early middle ages. Hugely dense, with jarring and discordant sections against both primitive and progressively complex rhythms. It’s not always coherent, but that is one of the strings to its bow, it is so thrilling and utterly like nothing else that you find yourself drawn right into the middle of it… and that can be frightening. Tense and far from easy going, but essential listening and quite brilliant.

31 Bonobo Migration Sixth full-length release from Los Angeles-based British DJ Simon Green, aka Bonobo. Across the last fifteen of so years he’s created music that is evocatively fuzzy whilst still driving along with great interest at downtempo.

Broadly, he makes electronic music that is highly engaging for the EDM audience, but welcoming and a brilliant entry point to minimal and ambient music for the unacquainted. The guest vocalists are great contributions, but the most euphoric moments are in the perfectly operated instrumentals. Migration is his most complex and sophisticated LP yet. Plenty of jazz and experimentalism to create the space and mood, but very listenable - his judgement is spot on for a hugely accessible LP.

30 Wand Plum Guided primarily by Cory Hanson, Wand have come up through the LA garage scene, contemporaries of and collaborators with White Fence, Ty Segall, Mikal Cronin and sharing the feverish work ethic, with albums Ganglion Reef (2014), Golem (2015) and 1000 Days (2015) all recorded and released in a 13-month gallop. After a two year period of re-grouping (including a Hanson solo LP and personal changes in Wand) they return with Plum and the time away has put them into sharp focus, artistically delivering the LP of their already fine career. Their early work was joyous, throw-away lines, songs and even albums delivered with a casual abandon. Although always deeply melodic, they touched on sludgy stoner rock and the thrashing part of garage, and delivered neo-psychedelic bangers. It’s not to suggest that Plum is sedate, as it certain has some drive and plenty of pulse, but they have quite clearly spent the time away structuring the music they want to make and take great care in delivering an LP with a huge base of references. The songwriting is key and their ability to shift gears is hugely impressive, some of the tracks are real delicate, subtle gems. It is a psych-pop album and it owes much to 70s prog-rock, but it never falls into the trap of unnecessarily complicating things. If you want to add layers and layers to a pop song and you want it to change time signatures and incorporate smart production techniques, you have to make sure it’s damn catchy, and Plum is certainly one of the most addictive and gratifying albums of the year.

2017

LIARS • TFCF Limited Deluxe Edition / Vinyl / CD includes Cred Woes & Staring At Zero

CAN • The Singles New compilation on Triple Vinyl / CD original single versions, including Spoon, Vitamin C, Halleluwah and Future Days

ERASURE • World Be Gone Limited Edition Orange Vinyl / CD Includes Love You To The Sky, World Be Gone and Just A Little Love

LIFT TO EXPERIENCE The Texas-Jerusalem Crossroads Double Coloured Vinyl / 2 CD Definitive release of the seminal concept album

LEE RANALDO • Electric Trim Double Vinyl includes lyric book / CD Debut Mute release from Sonic Youth co-founder

BEN FROST • The Centre Cannot Hold Limited Edition Blue Vinyl / CD Recorded with Steve Albini Includes Threshold Of Faith & Ionia

GOLDFRAPP • Silver Eye Deluxe Vinyl / CD Includes Anymore, Systemagic and Everything Is Never Enough

A CERTAIN RATIO • All albums reissued Deluxe vinyl / CD Entire catalogue re-issued.

Box sets of unreleased material in 2018

Available from Drift Record Shop or visit mute.com for more information

29 Father John Misty Pure Comedy Third studio album from Father John Misty and there are simply no half measures, this is a goliath. Across its 70+ minutes, Josh Tillman questions everything, a gruelling and intense odyssey through every aspect of his life, his worth and the value of entertainment. His previous LP - I Love You, Honeybear - was an unflinching portrait of love and masculinity, and in many ways Pure Comedy covers the antithesis of those themes; these are grubby, fucking vacuous times. Not long before the album’s release in April, America elected a property tycoon as its President, a man who was best known as a stooge on a reality tv show; that narrative is impossible not to attach to Pure Comedy. Why do we place such value on entertainment? Why must we raise people only to crush them? Even in the short lifetime of Father John Misty (Tillman has however released numerous solo albums since 2003 and was also part of Fleet Foxes), the prominence of the internet, news values and latterly fake news have irreparably changed the climate of making, releasing and performing music, it would seem impossible not to be impacted by those huge changes. He can be a divisive character, questioning everything and doing so unapologetically. “I’m not bamboozled by the fact that people are disgusted by me,” he explained to the Guardian. “I’m not my biggest fan either. The criticisms that people have of me now are the same criticisms that my teachers, parents and pastors had of me as a child: that I talk too much, that I’m loud, that I’m self-obsessed.

It’s the same shit.”

Why use one line when five will do? Hyper-eloquent, he is all about ambiguity and the colours between black and white, the statements between right and wrong, the human. He is an old-fashioned confessional singersongwriter, self destructive and brilliant like Harry Nilsson and as captivating as a pre-superstardom Elton John. Sarcastic lines about bedding Taylor Swift will be the headline grabbers, but this epic double album has a thirteen minute centerpiece in Leaving LA that give you the whole picture, everything, he lays it all out on the line. A quite remarkable songwriter, and Pure Comedy is an epic album of the grandest scale, a truly brilliant album.

28 Slowdive Slowdive After a 22 year absence, there was always going to be quite some anxiety about what the band would sound like if and when they returned. From the very opening moments, Slowdive clearly understand their own legacy, their own sound, and this self-titled LP is a surprisingly joyous return to the fray. What they have really captured brilliantly is the mood, it sounds undeniably like themselves, but older versions of themselves bringing in new experience whilst still adhering to the shoegaze rules and conventions they helped craft. Everything has its right place and the confidence they have is both euphoric and hugely comforting. Neil Halstead and Rachel Goswell both sing brilliantly, always understated but committed, and they accompany one another beautifully.

With Slowdive there are always waves of swirling sounds, but on this LP the attention to detail is quite brilliant, there is so much going on without ever sounding muddy or over-cramped.

“When groups reform, it can take years to negotiate the chasm between what we want from them, and what they’re capable of delivering.

Most never manage it.

Slowdive, however, now sound powerful, confident, the band they always wanted to be”

27

26

Binker and Moses

LCD Soundsystem American Dream

Journey To The Mountain Of Forever There was a time not too long ago when jazz, on a more mainstream level, fell into one of a few condescending categories. Radio 2 and the ever well-meaning Jamie Cullum, imitation Blue Note Record sleeves, the perennially overlooked but mandatory “Jazz” finalist in the Mercury Prize or most damning, John Thomson’s “...nice” catchphrase on The Fast Show’s Jazz Club. In the last decade there has been a seismic shift, spearheaded by music makers forging their own scenes in the underground and exploding back into public consciousness. Binker Golding and Moses Boyd are a semi-free jazz saxophone and drums duo. They are among the frontrunners of a loose yet interconnected group of London-based jazz musicians who are influenced by the music that surrounds them, including grime, hip hop and electronica as well as traditional jazz structures. Like their US counterparts, they’re connecting with a new, younger audience.

The duo’s tracks are intense and full of a deep understanding. The larger group sets up some of the most exciting and explorative jazz records we’ve heard in ages. It is an ambitious, progressive jazz journey.

Our September Record of the Month was this year’s biggest return.

In April 2011, LCD Soundsystem played a lavish and utterly perfect “last ever gig” at NYC’s Madison Square Garden, the perfect end to one of our generation’s perfect bands. But they did come back.

The band themselves found the prospect a hard thing to grasp, but a stern talking to from David Bowie - assuring them that they should indeed be uncomfortable and that was a positive thing - was the nudge they needed. So with our hearts in our mouths, in September we dropped the needle for the first time on American Dream, and we felt euphoria. Why would we doubt it?

LCD Soundsystem are back because they need not ever have gone away, they have something to say and they sound like a band still at the height of their powers. We never should have doubted it, they would not risk their own legacy, they knew they had the songs and it has been a joy to welcome them back. In American Dream, there are moments of quite fragile introspection, but then there is a thrilling shift to full on disco bangers and pounding stadium rock pop, not to mention drifting off into space with pianos and bleeps. LCD can LCD stood on their heads, but the most thrilling parts are the less trodden paths, opener Tonite sounds like Alan Vega via John Hughes, a mid tempo slow burner under James Murphy’s croon. Tonite is an instant classic ,and the epic How Do You Sleep? is as vital and poisonous as they have ever sounded. As the closer Black Screen fades out to nothing after some 12 minutes, you get the sudden pang, “fuck, I sure hope they aren’t going away again… we need them”.

25 H. Hawkline I Romanticize There is something about the Welsh and psychedelic pop music that intrinsically links them, the timbre of the voice, the curl of the language and presumably something in the water. As H. Hawkline, Huw Evans makes funny, inventive and really addictive pop music, with this year’s I Romanticize on Heavenly Recordings being his most fully realised to date. He’s a musician of great sympathy and understanding, playing alongside Cate Le Bon, Kevin Morby, Sweet Baboo, White Fence and many others, not to forget his latest turn (including at Sea Change) in Aldous Harding’s band. Recorded at Samur Khouja’s Seahorse Sound studio in Los Angeles, I Romanticize is an utter joy.

Brilliantly weird and addictive pop music with the cleverest rhythmic changes. Huw is right in the middle of it all as a very fitting leading man, his understanding of how to control his vocals is really quite masterful.

Wistfully poetic and sounding rather like no one else which is a rare feat.

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24 Angelo De Augustine Swim Inside The Moon As 2017 started, all we knew of 24-year-old Angelo De Augustine was that he writes and records music in Thousand Oaks, California, a suburb north of Los Angeles, where he grew up. It is doubtless one of the albums we have played most this year, revisited often and more often than not, sold off the turntable as we play it. There is something really special about Swim Inside The Moon that, delicate as it is, made it stand out in a summer of huge releases. It’s released on Sufjan Stevens’s Asthmatic Kitty label and there is a whispering, hazy Sufjanshaped shadow over proceedings.

The songs are really smart in their structure and he is a fine writer, but the delivery and arrangement are so brilliantly uncluttered. The vocals for the album were all recorded in his bathtub using a reel-to-reel machine and a single Shure SM57 microphone. “I noticed that when you sing off a reflective surface you hear two voices. I was compelled to isolate that voice and bring it more to the front of the songs because in many ways I feel more connected to and comforted by that voice following me.” Its evanescence is strikingly beautiful, like smoke in sunlight. Beautiful, understated songs that made us genuinely think of Elliott Smith, Karen Dalton, Nick Drake and Vashti Bunyan. Heaping praise like that on it is a rare thing, a really special album, very highly recommended.

Mount Kimbie Love What Survives Long-awaited third studio album from duo Mount Kimbie and one that reanalyses not just what music they want to make, but also what electronic music means to them. The first thing that hits you here is that they sound a long way down the road from where we first met them.

They have really evolved their own approach to how they construct the music, beyond the parameters of their first two albums. They have long been compared to label mates Boards of Canada, but with their third LP they have moved further away from a hazed electronica and into a sharper focus. Love What Survives sounds very much like a band album, the irony being that they are now split by the Atlantic ocean (and then some), with Dominic Maker based in Los Angeles while Kai Campos is still rooted in London. So they swap ideas and files in the same way you’d meet and jam out songs, dipping and diving through myriad musical worlds. The continuation of that band sound is also down to their expertly chosen guest collaborators, with vocals across the album from Andrea Balency, King Krule, Micachu and double helpings of James Blake, all of them in fine voice and stretching out the sonics into even more vivid horizons. It’s not just about the guests, the instrumental tracks have some beautiful ambience but also some serious urgency, timbres on the synths sounding like the early 80s coldwave. They have successfully retained their identity whilst stretching their wings.

22 Ulrika Spacek Modern English Decoration Much like their debut album released in early 2016, Ulrika Spacek chose to record, produce and mix the entirety of the record in their shared house – a former art gallery called KEN, so named because of a cryptic inscription found above the front door. Not just a studio and home, KEN is essentially the band’s hub, a space in which the surrounding ephemera of videos, artwork and even band photos are all created.

There is a lot about Ulrika Spacek that we love, they place a lot of emphasis on guitar tone, leading the songs with loud, prickling riffs that recall Chad VanGaalen’s production or a grubbier take on Television.

The vocals swim in reverb, there are touches of Sonic Youth and MBV. The rhythm section drives the songs with a smart motorik beat, both bass and drums willing and able to rip through and cut out of the mix when they see fit. But most of all, for all of the “sounds a bit like” and “RIYL” tags, they have taken a wide range of influences and crafted something that rattles along in its own space and under its own steam. A great set of songs pretty impeccably delivered.

21 Oh Sees Orc One of three new long players this year from John Dwyer. Thee Oh Sees are dead, long live Oh Sees. The band formerly known as Thee Oh Sees (and The Oh Sees and OCS and Orinoka Crash Suite and Orange County Sound for that matter) waste no time in racing headlong into nightmarish battle with the mighty Orc. The album starts like waking falling down the stairs as the muscle memory kicks in, half awake, instantly pumping with adrenaline as you start off at a sprint. The drums are pounded like they are trying to run out of the room, the pedal boards make the guitar scream like a village on fire and Dwyer’s howl ranges from commanding to wildly threatening. It doesn’t let up, Orc is breakneck, full of rich, churning riffs that sound both like no one else and the golden age of rock. It’s the first new material since our 2016 Record of the Year, A Weird Exits, (and its equally bitchin’ companion release An Odd Entrance) and the band’s 19th album in one form or another. For fans of the band and the recently acquainted, there is much of 2016’s dual release about Orc, but tracking how those albums evolved, Orc only testifies how much further they have left in their journey. He is sonically exploring; the drums are deeply hypnotic and his vocal work across the album is intense, arpeggios, whoops and deep growls.

The clearest indication of their willingness to move around through their rich bed of influences is not better articulated than with Keys to the Castle in the middle of the LP, a song that has all the hallmarks of a jacked-up Oh Sees cut, only to dissolve into a mesmerising prog epic with woozing synths and winding strings right out of the mid-catalogue Led Zeppelin arsenal. At any moment they can pick up the gauntlet and rip through the power chords, but the second half of the album offers up more than few moments that sound like an acid-battered soundtrack to a 60s biker B-movie.

And then as if he wasn’t prolific enough as it is with whatever variation of Oh Sees he likes, in March Dwyer released Bunker Funk, a woozing one-man take on Can, under his Damaged Bug name. It is flat out wild how good this record is, full of grooving basslines and bubbling synths that sound one part under control and one part left to their own devices. It is pure sonic experimentalism but with bags and bags of charm. The track listing in itself is pretty hysterical with Bog Dash, Ugly Gamma and Mood Slime stand-out tracks and standout titles for sure. Spooky and otherworldly, really quite a head space.

And you want more? There is always more and it is always surprising. With all the muscularity of Oh Sees and the explosive experimental jams of the last 18 months, it might come as some surprise to know that OCS was a rather hushed affair. To mark their 20th year (and 100th release on his Castle Face label), John Dwyer presents the 20th album and it is a mellow, slow burning amble.

Memory of a Cut Off Head was co-written with longtime collaborator and vocal counterpoint Brigid Dawson. If your knowledge of Dwyer is all about pounding drums and distortion pedals, you are really going to lose your mind here, it is an album of delicately constructed songs that owe more to baroque ballrooms than moshpits.

As the reverby vocals counts you in, you can hardly believe your ears when the harpsichord starts up. There are beautifully executed strings throughout, courtesy of Heather Lockie’s fine arrangements, with equally swooning horn arrangements from Mikal Cronin. They even have a singing saw. Memory of a Cut Off Head is a smart and thoroughly inventive set of songs that will leave you in blissful reverie. All three of 2017’s albums highlight John Dwyer as arguably the most consistent writer making music right now. What ever will he do next.

“Dwyer’s crew are oft-cited as the world’s most exciting live rock band; they’re also making some of its most exciting rock records.”

20 Jlin Black Origami Black Origami is the long-awaited second album from Jerrilynn Patton under her Jlin alias. A percussion-led tour de force, it’s a creation that seals her reputation as a unique producer with an exceptional ability to make riveting rhythmic music. It’s dark and brooding, a mysterious album that gives little away about its chief architect, but the production is thrilling... like, seriously thrilling stuff. The tones and timbres are so organic and full of life, and exactly in the right place at the right time, mechanised organics. It is fiercely sparse at times and blindingly dense at others, and simply stands out from all other rhythmic electronic music as being genuinely different. There is a funny thing we noticed with Black Origami. It is an album that we have played a lot and revisited often, finding new little gestures on each occasion (in particular going between speakers, cars and cans), listening harder and trying to follow. But for all the more obsessed we became, nothing will top the first time you hear this LP in all its wild and exhilarating detail. A rare beast.

19 Dirty Projectors Dirty Projectors Our February Record of the Month was the quite remarkable self-titled Dirty Projectors album. We’ve had previous albums Swing Lo Magellan, Bitte Orca and the Mount Wittenberg Orca collaboration with Björk in the lofty heights of other editions of this magazine, they are one of the most progressive and thrilling bands in the last decade, no doubt. There has been a seismic change in the band, their eighth studio album is all about break-ups.

Thematically about the separation from girlfriend and former band member Amber Coffman, creatively from fellow vocalist Angel Deradoorian and more broadly from the explosive and rich tropical low-fi high-fi shapeshifting gear crunching and highly addictive music they make. In the classic sense, this new LP is archetypal Dirty Projectors, it’s all about ideas and percussive elements framing David Longstreth’s vocals, but now flying solo it is very much about him, and starkly about him. A sort

of futuristic RnB, it is one of the smartest pop albums we’ve ever heard, a symphony of highly contorted sounds. We have always loved this band, and for us a big part of the heartache is knowing it’s likely we won’t have those incredible harmonies again. We feel sadness and that starting place left us even more receptive to the heartbreakingly honest, bare and very intense content.

All truly great break-up albums need one line to spell it out, to be totally honest, clear and present about the intentions and the content. Albeit through a heavily digitized vocal, the album starts off “I don’t know why you abandoned me. You were my soul and my partner”, this is unguarded, all about healing. The album is also all about one protagonist and one director, and the production is just dazzling. At its breakneck speed and incredible scope, it might be the sharpest and tightest album that Dirty Projectors have ever produced. The intensity has been projected into the most ambitious and most meticulously produced music. In an album layered with miraculous moments, Little Bubble is pretty much perfection.

18 Kelly Lee Owens Kelly Lee Owens Like many people, we first heard Kelly Lee Owens’ vocals on Daniel Avery’s seminal Drone Logic LP. She possesses not only a beautiful clarity of voice, but also more than a little of the aetherial, the ambience she creates is hugely evocative. Her subtlety is key on this album, it is a very beautifully constructed album of low tempo electronic music and a testament to what a brilliant set of ears she has. The pacing across the album is really special, you do not feel like you are being carried along and you certainly do not notice the changes in pace, but man does she dictate every beat. We spoke to her earlier in the year about her debut: “Mixing was hard for me at first because I was handing over [what I perceived as] an almost already mixed album! So for it to be taken apart again in order for it to be brought together in a better way was SO difficult. At first I was sat there 12 hours a day next to the mix engineer (who’s my good friend David) and inputting and feeling anxious and annoyed - then we had a huge chat, I communicated my feelings, and we decided to re-start the entire album. There were a million revisions also per track because I’m such a perfectionist but the detail matters so much to me.”

An album of electronic music with a very human feel and a great deal of sensitivity.

17 Ty Segall Ty Segall We always go hard for Ty Segall, whether he’s on his own, producing, in Fuzz or most recently GØGGS, he is prolific, consistent and subtly evolving. We’d have to count backwards, but we’d wager you that Ty Garrett Segall has appeared in our end of year lists more than anyone else over the last five years.

This new self-titled LP fully articulates his ability as a songwriter, as producer and performer.

Confusingly, Ty Segall is the second self-titled album in his discography (after his 2008 eponymous debut) but beautifully paints a portrait of the man, the many subtleties and capabilities of an endlessly creative producer. This is like a compilation of the best of Ty Segall in the last few years, only the songs are all new.

There are some gnarly moments, but it is much more sculpted in the warm fuzz of organs. There is a beautifully antique psychedelia going on, much like Tim Presley (as White Fence) on For the Recently Found Innocent (that was recorded in Ty’s garage incidentally...), there is also a distinctly British tone to it all, an eccentric weirdness. At the start and end of the album there are some brilliant double vocal/double guitar play-offs that rip through the gears with great ease, but the most exciting thing is the middle section of this record where he experiments wildly but with cohesion, drive and some of the most addictive jams of his illustrious career. A decade or so into his career, the only thing you can count on is he will be back. He truly is the undisputed king of the garage.

15 16 Mac DeMarco This Old Dog Mac Demarco’s rise has been meteoric over the last four or five years: from the psychedelic lo-fi mini-LP debut with Rock and Roll Night Club, Mac has released three albums in quick succession and quickly become a genuine headliner and a much referenced and imitated star in his own right. A big part of this is he is undeniably charming.

Self-deprecating and self-aware, his personality is at the front of everything he does, from the promo videos and images, singing his own address in My House by the Water and constantly reaffirming that he is above all else chill. The danger is only that you might think he is joking, with all the good natured frat party humour, it is easy to grin and sway without clocking that he is a subtle and brilliant songwriter.

Alongside his band, he is also one of the scene’s most talented musicians.

We saw the band recording a radio session about five years back and they got bored, so bored that they decided to play Dave Brubeck’s Take Five and they did so pretty much faultlessly. So the vibe for his fourth full length album - This Old Dog - is very much about his development as a songwriter of honesty and great sensitivity. The production is again classified best as “expert bedroom recordings”, cheap or antiquated sounding organs fuzz and wooze as covers broad narratives on life and love. His vocals are his best set of deliveries yet, confident in his modern day mellow and introspective Harry Nilsson.

Aldous Harding Party Party is the second studio album (her first with 4AD) from New Zealander Aldous Harding. Produced by John Parish in Bristol, a world away from her New Zealand home, Party introduces a new talent to the stark, dramatic realm where Kate Bush and Scott Walker reside. John Parish’s long association with PJ Harvey is a reference point, but Harding is very much her own woman, inimitable and so intense she fills every corner of this album. It very quickly becomes apparent that Party is about overpowering intensity. The close mic’d breathiness of opening track Blend never gets beyond a hush. By the start of second song Imagining My Man, it’s like she doesn’t have the strength to carry on, audibly buckling under the pressure and emotion. But then, halfway through the song she suddenly wails… and it is stunning. She opens up and the power she harnesses is incredible; pain, relief and desire in one long, crystal clear note. Spiritual and totally arresting. The production is masterful, it just sonically surrounds Aldous. Cymbal brushes like sighs, pianos and wind instruments catch her and hold her up for the next verse. Although the production is relatively straightforward and the arrangements relatively primitive, these are thoroughly modern songs and there have been few albums or performers quite as captivating as here. There will be an army of imitators confusing the delivery for styling, having seen her live we can testify there is simply no profiling, she is just letting it all flow out.

Really quite brilliant.

14 Four Tet New Energy

13

New Energy is producer Kieran Hebden’s ninth fulllength and is a masterclass in subtlety and hypnotic music making. It is as wide ranging as any music he has made before and touches on his own back catalogue for influence, connecting the lo-fi warmth of his early work and the experimental club music he has become so revered for. Since founding his own Text Records in 2001, Four Tet has very much become about his own set of rules and his own terms. The logistics of the release are a fine example, no press copies, no advance streams, no tie-ins with brands, no over-baked press release, often the same press photo that he’s used for the last decade or so and no compromise. To herald its arrival we tweeted a picture of the title and tracklist, then simply followed a few days later that “new album out tonight”.

The unceremonious approach puts the music into sharp focus. So with New Energy, it is clearly a very personal work. There is a meditative quality to the songs, sections of ambience and layered textures that recall incredible new age pioneers like Michael Stearns, Gail Laughton, Laaraji or Constance Demby. It comes as little surprise that modern synth maestro Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith appears on LA Trance, “additional synthesiser programming” that adds to the sense of light and travel. There are so many textures and timbres and they are all cohesively sculpted into a beautifully organic flow, the sincerity and the appearance of almost hand-crafted fingerprints across the album. When it steps up to a pace it is beautifully measured, with incredible pacing; the harps and hang drums are pretty exquisite. He is a conductor, sculpting each track, leaving just enough space and giving us breathers in between each downtempo workout. We don’t know Kieran Hebden but this album made us think we got pretty close to it.

Omni Multi-task The frenetic and hugely gratifying second full-length release from the Georgia trio. Plenty of albums this year have rattled along at a pace, but Multi-task flies out of the traps and sustains the most ridiculously joyous pace till its last breath. They are very much on the poppier side of post-punk, but Omni use those post-punk shapes and tones to distinctively arresting effect to create an urgent and tense atmosphere. There is a lot of nervous energy - guitarist (and former Deerhunter member) Frankie Broyles, bassist/vocalist Philip Frobos and drummer Doug Bleichner create quivers and spasms, every moment filled with wiry guitar chords, thrusting basslines, and jolting beats. It’s an album about being young, being broke, being restless and above all else, questioning the world around you. They have honed their sound so perfectly that it is hard to imagine them not taking abrupt turns or hitting sharp stops. To that end, there is much about them that recalls Wire, Devo and even Talking Heads, albeit with a more subdued and understated vocal than the manic yelps of Mark Mothersbaugh or the idiosyncratic tremble of David Byrne. That deadpan delivery is the perfect calm counterpoint to the musical storm. The subtlety is a good point to bear in mind, with so much going on it is easy to miss the smartness in the small gestures, but then miniatures are what this band does best, thoughtful riffs and lead lines that take the whole palette into exhilarating wider choices, it’s full of understated swagger. Speaking as both massive fans of the Trouble in Mind label and Omni, we’ll admit to being less than impartial, but it’s our job to get you all switched on to the good stuff… and hot dog this is the good stuff.

Anyone who was knocked sideways by Light Up Gold back in 2012, meet your new favourite band.

“Switchback rhythms and artfully tangled melodies make it hard to pin them down.”

12 Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith The Kid October’s Record of the Month, and one we fell totally and absolutely in love with with. The Kid is utterly sublime, ethereal, dreamy soundscapes with huge amounts of emotion and detail. Kaitlyn is a contemporary composer, using a variety of modular synths to frame her vocals and blur the lines between people and computers.

With each new album - and she is pretty prolific - she folds more of her voice into the kaleidoscopic electronic music she makes. The Kid is a hugely ambitious record in its thematic scope, a four-part structure with each quarter representing a different emotional stage of the human lifespan. It is the early stages that are perhaps the most poignant, effervescent and optimistic, so celebratory and graceful. We had the great pleasure to speak to her this summer (for the previous issue of this paper), where we talked a little about dreams. She explained that she “just got a really big urge to create music that sounded like one gigantic frosted shredded wheat”, and bonkers as it sounds, she might well be the first person to have tried and succeeded in doing so on her trusted Buchla 100 synthesiser. Fascinating and quite overpowering, it is a beautiful thing to hear the human urges and impulses she articulates.

11 Godspeed You! Black Emperor Luciferian Towers Luciferian Towers is the third release from the sprawling Montreal ensemble Godspeed You! Black Emperor since they reunited in 2010 after a near ten year hiatus. It is their sixth album overall, a hugely complex eight track LP with two multi-piece suites that is “a thing we made in the midst of communal mess, raising dogs and children, eyes up and filled with dreadful joy”.

Even without this opening caveat, Luciferian Towers is clearly an album inspired by and very much rooted in the worldwide political climate of 2017. To oversimplify things, broadly speaking GY!BE have two settings.

One is the sound of pure desolation, the sounds that dwell deep at the base of the blackest soul. Long stretched-out pieces with almost crippling emotional intensity and bleakness. The other one is the polar opposite, as intense, but the sound of sunlight exploding everything around it into the most euphoric

“as challenging as this avant-garde music is, it’s also warm, absorbing and gorgeous”

of glows. There is an incredible intensity to the album that conveys anxiety, anger, dejection and in the burning embers, hope. To quote their own t-shirt, there are “More of us than them, Amen.” So who would have thought that against the backdrop of social, political, economic and environmental disasters all around us, the Montreal ensemble would deliver an album that is arguably their most melodic and is certainly one of optimism and pure white-knuckled joy! There’s a section right in the eye of the tightly wound hysteria (at the end of the first side) that sounds like that punchy intro to Joe Cocker’s take on With a Little Help from My Friends... god damn it’s some powerful stuff.

We are fans and we are disciples, but Luciferian Towers is damn good, even by their lofty standards.

ten.

Jane Weaver Modern Kosmology After her huge break out hit 2014 album The Silver Globe, Jane Weaver has returned with an album of huge scope, a forging of psychedelic ideas and textures into a perfect and otherworldly LP. We chickened out of telling her to her face, but Is Everyone Happy? for our money is the most perfectly written song of the last decade. In fact all of the Cherlokalate LP is lush, but that’s hardly the point here and hardly surprising, she’s always lush and she is a brilliant songwriter. Having cut her teeth in bands Kill Laura and Misty Dixon, Jane Weaver has consistently released brilliantly individual music, a deeply idiosyncratic solo artist whose work has bounced around from acoustic balladry to avant garde electronics and improvisation.

Across her 20 plus year career, she has constantly pushed herself, experimenting with styles and a wide range of sonic textures. Her creative restlessness has reaped huge reward, not many artists in these throwaway times get the opportunity to have such a career, let alone start to reach their artist and commercial heights at this stage of it. Modern Kosmology refines the sonic blueprint she set out on its predecessor, it is a genuinely psychedelic album of krautrock enthused pop songs. One of our favourite pieces of the puzzle is the wide and varied time signatures. There is a lot of drive, but also plenty of subtle and brilliantly off-kilter changes of pace: a shuffling waltz-time arrangement to the title track; and then the drums abandoning the beat-making all together on The Architect, with the manically pulsing synth holding time. Modern Kosmology deals with big themes (for one, Can’s original vocalist Malcolm Mooney delivering a voiceover about the transitory nature of human existence), it feels very much like the questions are being asked without any direct aspiration to answer them. This album is about the journey not the destination and it is a beautifully structured trip. Her ability to forge together familiar influences into something wholly new and fresh is thrilling, she has alchemised her dusty source material into cosmic pop music. These days motorik will still

have the same effect it has always had for those first few halcyon moments, but without deviation and exploration it can become as tired and hackneyed as any other overploughed musical furrow. Modern Kosmology is an album of hugely gratifying paths from an artist of great sensitivity and creative maturity; joyous, it sounds as fresh on the fiftieth listen as the first.

“It doesn’t sound anything at all like Jefferson Airplane or Syd Barrett’s Pink Floyd, but it does what they did on White Rabbit and See Emily Play respectively, delivering music that sounds like it’s transmitted from the outer limits in sharp, concentrated, accessible doses. All the unearthly power, none of the excess.”

A GREAT RECORD IS NOT JUST FOR CHRISTMAS

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girl ray Earl GrEy Moshi Moshi Records

tHE surFinG MaGaZinEs JaKuZi tHE surFinG MaGaZinEs FantEZi MÜZiK City Slang Moshi Moshi Records

the apocalyptic dance music of Blanck Mass’s ‘World Eater’ is a reaction to the world consuming itself. there is an underlying violence and anger throughout the record, even though some of these tracks are the closest Benjamin John Power (Fuck Buttons) has ever come to writing ‘actual love songs.’

Kelly lee owens has previously worked with techno producer daniel avery and self-released two EPs. Her critically acclaimed debut solo album is owens’ vision, a record that exudes a startling level of intimacy even in its largest-sounding moments - a percolating mixture of looped vocals, dark gorgeous techno and rustling rhythms. Jenny Hval appears on the album’s lead single, anxi.

“a record to cherish” Q ****

“a a vintage-yet-modern rock ‘n’ roll classic” record collector ****

Floating Points rEFlEctions - MoJavE dEsErt Pluto

alice coltrane World sPirituality classics 1 Luaka Bop

EarlHaM Mystics v/a WarFarinG stranGErs: trutH EP Notown acid niGHtMarEs

‘Reflections - Mojave Desert’ was made last year, as Floating Points travelled with his band to the Mojave to record the first in a planned series of environmental recordings. the music mirrors the landscape: soaring and vast, dynamic and intimate, centred on two longer works and shorter pieces that create a singular and seamless experience.

during d uring 1982-1995, alice coltrane turiyasangitananda self-released four brilliant cassette albums. these cassettes contained a music she invented, inspired by the gospel music of the detroit churches she grew up in, and the indian devotional music of her religious practice. originally only available through her ashram, they are her most obscure body of work, and possibly the greatest reflection of her soul

as a s the hippie movement hurtled towards its imminent demise, bad vibes infiltrated the rock world. tainted lsd, loud motorcycles, and a series of brutal deaths spawned inspiration for guitarwielding teenagers across the globe. short-lived stoner bands pressed their lysergic experiments in microscopic quantities before blacking out entirely. lifted from the ashes of the acid rock hell fire are 18 distorted tales of dope fiends, pill poppers, and the baddest of trips.

drift’s #2 album of the year!

Big thieF caPacity Saddle Creek “capacity is a remarkable record” - Pitchfork “Funny, propulsive, queer, dissonant, and utterly intoxicating, it is a record to put on next time some stooge tells you indie rock is dead… adrianne lenker is a romantic folk-rock poet of the first order.” – rolling stone

“impressive…. totally alluring” MoJo *** the debut album from london 3-piece Girl ray, a band whose songs document the dramas of adolescence with a wit and wistfulness far beyond their years.

the debut album from super-group The Surfing Magazines, consisting of two-thirds of the Wave Pictures and one half of slow club. includes the singles ‘new day’ and ‘lines and shadows’

“sublime” Mojo “it’s pretty much perfect” loud & Quiet “Jakuzi truly stand out” crack Magazine this technicoloured and dramatic debut from istanbul diy synth/weird-pop group is a magical, emotional and romantic journey that exhibits a true punk spirit.

Numero Group

Earlham Mystics is the techno alter-ego of the acclaimed electronic producer and performer luke abbott. His ‘truth’ EP is four concise tracks of mesmeric, symphonic, beats, offering up his most accessible work since his cult classic Modern driveway EP. lead track ‘stolen Hearts’ is instantaneous; piling on layers at a rate of knots before stripping clean with a shuddering, infectious synth line that makes it quite possibly the most “pop” thing he’s ever done and the eponymous track ‘truth’ is as anthemic, smart and sharp as they come.

thanks to DriFt For sUPPorting inDePenDent laBels check www.rePUBlicoFMUsic.coM

nine.

Kevin Morby City Music June’s Record of the Month is a slow-burning gem, a love letter to idle wanderlust and what the metropolis means. Using cities as a focal point, it is of course as much about the people and the times as anything else: “It is a mix-tape, a fever dream, a love letter dedicated to those cities that I cannot get rid of, to those cities that are all inside of me,” he explains. How often is it said that the feel of a city has changed? The subtleties of social planning and gentrification underpin migration and the tide of housing, work and societies; the city is a living thing and City Music is about the memories and bonds that form around places that are otherwise entirely arbitrary. Contrary to City Music’s theme, the album was actually made on the beach in California, in a studio with an ocean view. Richard Swift’s production is masterful, thematically it has all the hustle and bustle of the city, but there is plenty of space and the instrumentation never gets more complicated than the trio of guitarist Meg Duffy and drummer Justin Sullivan (former bandmate of Morby in the Babies). On his fourth album, Kevin Morby proves himself to be a songwriter of great subtlety and a performer of great confidence. The pacing is superb, super confident and really beautifully delivered. They are not afraid to amble, it’s all part of the journey and it also adds an exciting juxtapose to the occasional jolt, change of pace. It is never better delivered than on the title track, cascading guitar riffs that meander for a good five minutes only to hurtle to a scampering conclusion as he yelps “Oh! That city music! Oh! That city sound!” Plenty of Velvet Underground without ever really sounding much like them, it’s just got that kind of swagger. There is a wry shade of knowing to his naïve delivery. In the same way that Dylan sounded inimitably like Dylan, Kevin Morby sounds uniquely like himself. A brilliant set of songs from one of the most interesting performers about.

“It’s not hard to hear City Music as a lament for lost innocence, a pledge to maintain optimism and humanity at a time when those qualities don’t just feel like vestiges of youth, but of some better civilization that’s rapidly disappearing. In his best album yet, Morby makes a prayer out of the squall.”

eight.

Mount Eerie A Crow Looked At Me Phil Elverum has been prolifically making music and art for the last 20 years, firstly as The Microphones and latterly as Mount Eerie. His music often explored solitude, always emotionally candid, singing in a hushed monologue like a stream of emotional consciousness.

This latest LP is one of the most genuinely affecting sets of songs we have ever heard, every moment is emotionally crushing. Haunted by literal death, grief on record.

Elverum’s wife, Geneviève Castrée, died last year. Castrée and Elverum were new parents when Castrée learned that she had stage-four pancreatic cancer. Their daughter was a year and a half old when Castrée died. In the months after her death, Elverum used her old instruments and recorded the album in the room where she died.

Every breath is so real. The anguish palpable in every strum, beat and muted piano chord. It is a remarkable privilege to hear this kind of honesty and grief, like being placed as an emotional support for someone grieving and being told all you can do is listen. It is all so unsettlingly private. There will be many people that can’t see the appeal of opening yourself up to this. Our only warning is not to do so casually, this isn’t something to just interject into your day, it requires the time and emotional space to process. Elverum himself told Pitchfork (in one of the most extraordinary profiles we have ever read) that A Crow Looked At Me “…is barely music. It’s just me speaking her name out loud, her memory.” An album of unbelievable courage and quite extraordinary gravitas.

The album opens:

Death is real Someone’s there and then they’re not And it’s not for singing about It’s not for making into art When real death enters the house, all poetry is dumb When I walk into the room where you were And look into the emptiness instead All fails

seven.

James Holden & The Animal Spirits The Animal Spirits Released later in the year than anything else in this list, our November Record of the Month is an astonishing album that we’ve had the pleasure of getting to know well these last few weeks. James Holden is someone we have held in the highest regard for a long time - a genuine pioneer in electronic music and its crossovers with minimalism and jazz. While it’s a million miles from the techno of Holden’s earlier career, its rhythms and hooks are infectious. His newly-expanded band The Animal Spirits transport us with this third album: a bold new set of synth-led folk-trance meditations, fusing elements of psychedelia, krautrock, world and spiritual jazz with Holden’s usual propulsive melodic vigour. The album opens with cavernous echoes, choral textures that blur with the synths so that you can’t tell which is which. It acts as a beautiful introduction to Spinning Dance, which overlays Alice Coltrane-esque rattling percussion with the same shamanic drones. At the point the flute begins to run flourishing improvised lines it is all well and truly underway. Pass Through The Fire brings in references to north African gnawa music (Holden, alongside Floating Points, Biosphere and Vessel, was among a group of European musicians in Morocco in 2014 as part of a collaborative project organised by the Dar Al-Ma’Mûn centre for artistic residencies), the hypnotic patter and buzzing organs reaching an immense drive alongside the interweaving synth and saxophone. Stylistically the album is diverse, flowing perfectly as a whole but really quite different from track to track. The Beginning and End of the Earth has the mutating time signatures of Steve Reich, and sits as a brilliant counter-balance to the feversome Thunder Moon Gathering in the middle of the LP, with its swirling and surreal psychedelic haze. As a whole, it is seriously ambitious, brave enough to be minimal and very subtle as part of the journey that builds up and up to music that is overwhelming in its scale and complexity.

The experimentation is underpinned by smart and addictive hooks. The basslines are foundation enough to drive any texture and sonic and that is its key, it is hugely gratifying whether spiralling high or in the moments in between the fever. All recorded under one roof by the expanded five-piece, and you can feel the sonic alchemy in the room, you can feel it becoming something more than its parts. Quite brilliant, some of the most immersive music of the year and very spiritual indeed.

six Bing & Ruth No Home of the Mind Bing & Ruth is primarily a vehicle for composer David Moore to extend his compositions out to an audience beyond academia or those already acquainted with contemporary classical music. It has been such a joy to play these wonderful pieces over the shop stereo this year to a room where people are already disarmed, conducive to hearing something new. It doesn’t matter what genre it is or what the beautifully abstract artwork hides, it has been very much about emotional connection, and this is some seriously emotional music. A pianist from Kansas, Moore studied at the New School for Jazz and Contemporary Music (other alumni include John Cage and Steve Reich) in New York’s Greenwich Village. It is minimalist ensemble music with beautifully swooping filmic gestures. It was composed on 17 different pianos across North America and Europe over numerous sessions and tours, and the pieces channel the idiosyncrasies and respective limitations of each instrument like different timbres of voice. The album was recorded in just two days at a repurposed church in Hudson, NY in the fewest takes possible, an attempt to capture the immediacy of classic session-style musicianship. One of Moore’s composition signatures is to turn the piano into a drone instrument, using rapid clusters of repeating notes to create a complex, hypnotic and beautiful set of meditations. With tape delays and overlaying - almost percussive – long-form piano motifs, the tracks flow one into the next, which further accentuates the connections between them and makes the album feel like a single piece. It really is beautiful, much to explore. No Home of the Mind has been our favourite headspace this year.

five Julie Byrne Not Even Happiness Julie Byrne’s second studio album is a work of supreme grace; nine songs about life, love and taking inspiration from the subtle and from the awe-inspiring. Not Even Happiness landed on only the second new release Friday or the year, Friday 13th January, and it is an album we have played perhaps more than any other this year. We said at the time, it feels very much like an album we’ll be talking about as one of our most favourite of the year, a bold projection for week 2/52, but sometimes you can just tell, can’t you? The instrumentation is sparse, a beautifully picked guitar throughout, with just a few other subtle gestures of a second guitar, a second vocal, a flute and some string flourishes. It might not sound like much of a compliment, but one of Byrne’s greatest strengths is truly mastering the simple, it does not need anything else. Adding unnecessary clutter would detract from her vocals, which are evocative and vivid without ever really getting up much beyond a hushed breath. Because she is leading her songs with just a vocal, there will be countless suggestions about who she sounds like, or which part of whose catalogue she is channelling, but it hit us quite early that she sounds rather not like anyone else in particular. She is a modern day siren, she sings about love and the world around her and it is truly captivating - it is impossible not to be spellbound by her voice. There is much of the spiritual world about the songs, odes to the pastoral influences that Byrne has picked up on her (many) travels. She is also able to sing directly and honestly, love is two-sided and never as straightforward as it might seem. In Follow My Voice she sings: “I’ve been called heartbreaker, for doing justice to my own”, one of the most arresting couplets we heard this year. It is a delicate masterpiece, an album of extreme intricacy and subtlety. No wasted gestures, it is perfect in that way.

“This second album might not hang together were it not for the fact Byrne herself appears immersed within the worlds she sings about - there’s something pleasingly organic about the way she almost seems to exhale the melodies.”

four Thundercat Drunk The third studio album from the mighty Thundercat, an artist who has been omnipresent in our most listenedto albums over the last few years. Drunk is his grandest statement yet, a 23-song set with a diverse and enthralling set of guest contributors who all suitably act as support for the man – jazz head and bass player extraordinaire otherwise known as Stephen Bruner - who has very much arrived as a superstar and grand cosmic conductor in this sprawling odyssey. Everything about Drunk is elaborate - the LP version is delivered, for example, in a four piece 45rpm set on red vinyl, featuring sleeves for each side with artwork created by his friend, Atlanta illustrator and comedian Zack Fox. The sleeve image itself is quite remarkable, a partially submerged Thundercat appearing from, or sinking into Flying Lotus’s swimming pool.

“It felt totally natural,” Thundercat says, “It felt good.

Like… searching for someone.” Pharrell, Kendrick Lamar, Michael McDonald (yep), Kenny Loggins (yep), Wiz Khalifa, Flying Lotus and Kamasi Washington all appear on this album, some of the leading lights in the resurgence of contemporary spiritual jazz (with the exception of Messrs McDonald and Loggins, who time travel from a powder dusted Miami yacht). All the 23 tracks are short, rarely going over the three minute mark, they are stylistic snippets and gestures that come in and out of focus. The main event is Thundercat’s untouchable jazz credentials, he is so good you don’t even notice what he’s doing until you really listen, the fluidity and dexterity at which he plays is astonishing - across the album he toys with jazz, hip-hop, stoner psychedelia, funk, soul and 80s soft rock without breaking a sweat or missing a beat. His soulful falsetto is masterful and his role as chief narrator is addictive, singing about the irreverent, from losing your wallet and your life at home with cats to the poignant, contemporary America and police brutality. Track to track he is whimsical and sombre, funny and meaningful. There is so much sincerity with Thundercat and that is why it all works, none of this is style over substance, it is the many facets of his character in full sonic widescreen. He is a child of 60s flower-power and equally of the dorky Nintendo generation, and that hybrid is utterly charming. Drunk is one of those rare albums you can return to again and again and continue to discover new things.

“Drunk’s oddball soul confronts the challenge of just trying to live life.”

“It takes a special kind of artist to create a sound both familiar and groundbreaking.

Thundercat continues his upward trajectory in that regard here.”

three.

Kendrick Lamar Damn.

With a full week’s warning – a relative lifetime these days – Kendrick Lamar released his fourth LP back in April, and remarkably he managed to meet head on the most eager of all anticipation with a broad and searching new album. Whereas To Pimp a Butterfly was his awakening to genuine genre-breaking jazz influences, Damn. is more subtle in its make up. Funk and soul are arguably the backbone with James Brown, The 24-Carat Black and Billy Paul amongst the samples, painting a rich collage with inspiring rich harmonies - but there is a lot of rap history revisited, and Damn. is very psychedelic as an album, like he has thumbed through a record collection.

Some of the stereo panning and sonics are as smart as they are trippy. Across the 14 tracks there are plenty of guests, from Rihanna and Zacari to production from BADBADNOTGOOD and James Blake, alongside Kendrick’s chief conspirator in Terrace Martin. They not only add great changes of tone, they guest in the best possible way, augmenting Kendrick Lamar as the narrator and navigator. Damn. is as overtly spiritual a record as he has embarked upon, broadly about influence and inspiration and also directly about Jesus, Israel, the Book of Deuteronomy and many subtle narrative references where life is imitating scripture.

The really interesting thing here is that his work to date has always had an incredibly strong narrative. Although Damn. would seem to have the same focus on journey and story (again highlighting what a peerless storyteller Lamar is), shortly after the release he acknowledged that it was his intention that the album could be played either forward or in reverse order. “I don’t think the story necessarily changes, I think the feel changes. The initial vibe listening from the top all the way to the bottom is... this aggression and this attitude. You know, DNA. and exposing who I really am. You listen from the back end, and it’s almost the duality and the contrast of the intricate Kendrick Lamar. Both of these pieces are who I am.” In many ways, Damn. is about the vastness of everything and the futility of trying to affect any aspect of it. Depending on the order in which you listen to it, it either starts or dramatically ends with a random act of violence from a stranger, with the other end of the listen echoing it with a tape warping premonition or echo. Life is looping and continuing regardless of what you do, is that the message?

It is easy to see why Lamar always becomes so embroiled in the highly toxic political climate in America, whether that is his intention or not. Reading more into the guy, it would seem that the burden of becoming the flag bearer

for fighting civil inequality sits uneasy with him, he has the opportunity to be heard but – on Damn. especially – he is talking about Kendrick Lamar. He is not talking about being a man, a person, an American or specifically about being a black man. On YAH he proclaims “Interviews want to know my thoughts and opinions” and “I’m not a politician, I’m not about a religion” and “Don’t call me Black no more, that word is only a colour, it ain’t facts no more.” Being profiled as a modern day Marvin Gaye or Sly Stone is one thing (and his ability to articulate injustice in every day life is extraordinary), but anything more than that is missing both the point of the movement and also the point of what Kendrick Lamar is laying out.

He even flat out said it to the NY Times, “To Pimp a Butterfly was addressing the problem. I’m in a space now where I’m not addressing the problem any more.”

An album with quite dreamy sections, it feels like it all flies past in minutes. I think the only bit we didn’t get was the fairly consistent “Kung Fu Kenny” reference (something to do with Don Cheadle’s character in the second Rush Hour film?) but to be fair to the guy, he even had U2 guesting on the track XXX. and not only did they not suck, the track is a late album thriller; when he lists his family, it is full on exhilarating. Damn. is an album that feels uneasy instead of aggressive, but in that way the sense of trouble is more resonant and more palpable.

Lamar gives up so much of himself on Damn., a thrilling album that pulls in all of his influences in jazz, funk, soul and rap, exploring his own faith and personal beliefs.

“DAMN. is a widescreen masterpiece of rap, full of expansive beats, furious rhymes, and peerless storytelling about Kendrick’s destiny in America.”

two.

Blanck Mass World Eater World Eater is the third full length album from Benjamin John Power under his Blanck Mass identity. It is an album of hugely complex music, equally terrifying and euphoric and the best bit as the play-off between those two emotions. Opener John Doe’s Carnival of Error hints at much of what is to come. It is playful in its almost music-box melody, the ambience forms around it, at first calming but building to a sinister hiss, whispers and threats in the distance. The pace then doubles and the whole song changes complexion entirely, a euphoric lift-off that sounds as close as he’s come individually to Fuck Buttons (he is one half of the duo). But it is all a perfect opening disarmament, the nine minute Rhesus Negative that follows is a relenting industrial floorshredder, the backbone of the album in many ways in its awesome scope. It feels very much like being caught in the headlights. Then, very much like someone has tripped over a plug, it all just stops and there is silence.

A return to light, Please is the rising or setting sun in the Balearics, tones and chopped samples that is as spiritually powerful as Aphex Twin’s Windowlicker. The Rat flirts again with the more industrial side of his music, especially in the hammering drum beat that punctuates the song.

With as stark an introduction as anything this year, Silent Treatment is like a scene in A Clockwork Orange. Piles of samples, layers and layers of disembodied choral vocals before ripping into the album’s most intense mechanical BPM. Across its seven minutes, it moves around exquisitely with equally spooky vocal samples and tones as it provides space to recover from the unrelenting first break. The three part Minnesota / Eas Fors / Naked is the album’s most experimental and recalls industrial pioneers Nine Inch Nails amongst the sound of metallic rain and ambience. As it all begins to dissolve away, the song plays

out with a breezy synth track under the fuzz, gloriously out of place like a ghost left on a recycled studio tape.

Closer Hive Mind is for everyone who has come through the journey, it is a euphoric unifier, all of the parts of the album distilled into an emotionally tense and glorious eight minute shower of textures and tones. World Eater - for us - is all about extremes, it is about difference.

On its release, Power explained that “the problems that arise when we don’t communicate, we often grow apart when we don’t understand each other. Being left in the dark can lead to fear.” World Eater is arguably both simultaneously his brightest and darkest album yet.

Challenging as it enters the worlds of noise and extreme, but so deft in how it conveys emotion. Makes you dance, makes you wince, makes you think. Really brilliant.

“World Eater is a brutal record, but there’s humanity in it, because Power is drawn to melodies: even at its most pummelling it offers sweet spots and moments of instant gratification.”

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record

of

the

year

Protomartyr Relatives in Descent Our 2017 Record of the Year is Relatives In Descent by the Detroit, Michigan four-piece Protomartyr, and it is exactly the smack around the head that we’ve been looking for.

We’ve spoken about them loads before, in fact their last two albums have both placed well in our 2014 and 2015 albums of the year lists. Protomartyr are a band we like... a lot. They are one of the most genuinely unflinching bands around. Highly charged, they are politically venomous in the sense that they talk about everything and how it affects everyone. Singer Joe Casey’s delivery is more often than not a diatribe on the wretchedness of

those in power or those given power, the awful fucking things we do to each other; it never becomes leaden or pedantic, it is vital. His delivery alternates between a dejected croon and a feverish bark, he is a captivating leading man and as unique as any we’ve come across in years. He has the talking punk intensity of Parquet Courts’ Andrew Savage, the overwhelming potency of Nick Cave at his most fist-clenching, or perhaps even

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just a really pissed-off Matt Berninger of the National.

He is all of those and none of them, he is rare and inimitable and most amusingly people just can’t stop trying to pigeon hole the man. There is a website called ‘Descriptions of Joe Casey’ (www.descriptionsofjoecasey. tumblr.com) that we’ve visited often this year, the only one common thread is that you just can’t look away.

All of this is not to suggest that Protomartyr are background to Casey, wherever the band can get a word in edgewise, they are as gripping. Sonically Relatives In Descent is this year’s most emotive album, it’s why we just can’t stop going back to it. It is primal and it really makes you feel something. Greg Ahee’s guitar lines are paralysing, they are like spits of electricity that both lead the songs along and prowl menacingly in the background only to return and saw into the most chaotic and out of body crescendo. Drummer Alex Leonard and bassist Scott Davidson form a rhythm section that’s agile and adventurous - they remain sharp and propulsive throughout, with a deep understanding of what they are doing. Each track on the album is different and equally enthralling, a sure fire mark of an instant classic. Everything about the band and this record is fully formed, they are legit and they are unstoppable. Few bands offer up quite as much as Protomartyr do, it is like they have given away part of themselves. They have one of the darkest and most affecting shadows of any band around right now, it is hard, relentless, passionate and very special music.

Interview: Deluxe: How important a part of Protomartyr is being a live band? Does playing live feel like a different part of songwriting?

Joe Casey: The band started and was for a long while just a live concern. We didn’t have any plans to record besides a vague idea to put out a seven inch sometime in the future. Now recording feels like meticulously building a full-sized airplane out of matchsticks and playing shows is when you take that rickety plane out of the hangar and hope that it can fly.

D: Maybe it’s just a thing that people in the UK talk about, but the “Detroit Scene” is often made reference to. What is Detroit to you?

JC: Detroit has a small town feel to it, compared to places like New York or London. Until recently, you didn’t really have people moving here - just people moving

“The Detroit foursome’s fourth album is, like every Protomartyr album before it, a loose-lipped, allusionloaded saga, the sound of a scarily smart dude plunging the vast recesses of his mind, looking to make some sense of an increasingly senseless world.”

Joe

Casey

out. I think the true legacy of Detroit musical history, whether that’s Motown, techno, the hardcore scene, etc., is the idea of putting in the work in bars and clubs without any unrealistic dreams of “making it”. The idea of success here is probably similar to a lot of other places though. Detroit folk tend to look down on overt careerists or big egos. Just like anywhere else, scenes come and go as people get old or move away. But a small, committed group of people can and do foster a fairly supportive scene here.

D: The writing process for Relatives In Descent, how quickly did the album come together?

JC: The band, minus myself, put in hours of writing and refining right after the last big tour around the last album. Greg (Ahee) brought in a clear sense of what he wanted to try this time musically. Because of this, we avoided a lot of the frustrations that can arise from

hours of endless jamming and blind alleys. I could come in a bit later and hear bits of songs the band was happy with. That freed me up to write lyrics to songs that we all knew would definitely make the album. In the past I might have wasted time writing lyrics to songs that barely anybody enjoyed playing. They’d be my little pets I would still try to coddle and feed long after they had died (laughing).

D: Did anything surprise you in the recording process?

JC: What surprised me during recording was hearing the ideas that Greg and the band came up with in a noisy, acoustically-challenged practice space become these really powerful tunes. Recording an album can be like throwing paint at a wall and hoping it looks like a beautiful portrait at the end. To see all the planning we did ahead of time actually pay off made me proud.

D: The sonics on Relatives In Descent feel… maximal? Does it feel like a different album to you then your last few?

JC: Well, all four of our albums feel very different to me. I can pick and point at some threads that connect them together, but I’d rather save all that explaining for my bestselling memoir. If there’s anything “maximal” about Relatives In Descent I guess it must come from our attempt, as always, to improve on what came before. The attempt is often more rewarding than whether it was a success or not.

D: Do you feel like you captured something in the ether? Or maybe something in the current climate?

JC: I have a hard enough time understanding my own feelings and adjacent environs. I wouldn’t say we captured anything out of the gases or particularly nailed the current climate. Lyrically, it was mostly down to me shifting through the

confusing thoughts I had over the past year or so and trying to find meaning in them. I think it’s a good thing for any intelligent person to realize they are also a complete and utter moron flailing around in the fog with everybody else.

D: What would you ideally want someone to take away from Relatives In Descent?

JC: The belief that we are musical geniuses that can do no wrong and deserve country houses and piles of cash? (laughing) I don’t really know the answer to that. I would hope they would like the album well enough and not feel like that they’ve been cheated by listening to it.

I would also like all the illegal downloaders to feel a deep sense of shame.

D: Your artwork and visual identity has always managed to feel unified, how important is the visual side of releasing music to you?

JC: I try to handle the artwork for all the albums, singles, and a few important flyers. Alex does most of the t-shirts. I always loved bands that put in the effort to have a unified visual theme to go along with their music, so it was exciting for me to attempt that when we started the band. I try and approach it the same way I do my singing role: without any deep understanding of the art and with limited ability. If it works then I’m lucky. If it doesn’t look good I can say, “What did you expect?”

D: What has been a source of inspiration for you recently?

JC: I’m enjoying watching Andrew Savage from Parquet Courts really take to the artist’s life and produce some amazing things, whether that’s his solo album, his fine art, or his collaborations. All of it is fascinating to me. I’m awaiting his first acting role or stand-up record. I’m sure

anything he touches will turn to gold. Besides that, the view out of the touring van, wherever it may roam, has been particularly inspiring lately.

D: Okay, how about this to close out, how important to you individually and as a band are independent record stores?

JC: Record shops (the dusty kind with out of stock curiosities and eccentric clientele and staff) are where I spent a lot of time in my younger years. I had terrible tastes back then, for sure. I guess record store clerks are good when they helpfully point out sounds that might expand a young person’s mind without being a dick about it. It’s bad when they’re dickish to the young kid that just wants to buy crappy ska records (laughing). To be fair though, I can see the perverse joy in picking on clueless dorks. But being a softly chiding but kindly suggester of taste is probably the best way to go.

D: Where would you particularly recommend?

JC: We have a handful of great record stores in Detroit (Hello, People’s, Hybrid Moments) that I can recommend to the interested traveller.

D: What is your most memorable record shop experience?

JC: My first memory of cool record shops was looking for U2 bootlegs and cool t-shirts to impress my non-existent circle of friends and not being completely laughed out of the store. So I have to thank that nameless clerk that was so kindhearted to this wrong-headed boy. I remember the first two vinyl record purchases were The Ramone’s Rocket to Russia and a Gangster Fun LP.