Deluxe Issue Sixteen

Top 100.

THE RECORDS O F TH E YE AR 2018

Issue 16.

Issue 16. www.deluxenewspaper.com www.deluxenewspaper.com

CARGO RECORDS BEST OF 2018 THE CHILLS

VIRGINIA WING

SNOW BOUND

ECSTATIC ARROW

FIRE RECORDS LP / CD

FIRE RECORDS LP / CD

HATER

KRISTIN HERSH

SIESTA

POSSIBLE DUST CLOUDS

SANDRA KERR & JOHN FAULKNER

TRACYANNE & DANNY

THE MUSIC FROM BAGPUSS

TRACYANNE & DANNY

THE LOVELY EGGS

PIGS PIGS PIGS PIGS PIGS PIGS PIGS

FIRE RECORDS LP / CD

EARTH RECORDINGS LP / CD

THIS IS EGGLAND EGG RECORDS LP / CD

FIRE RECORDS LP / CD

MERGE RECORDS LP / CD

KING OF COWARDS

ROCKET RECORDINGS LP / CD

VALUE VOID

FUCKED UP

SENTIMENTAL

DOSE YOUR DREAMS

HOLLIE COOK

HAILU MERGIA & THE WALIAS

TOUGH LOVE LP / CD

VESSEL OF LOVE MERGE RECORDS LP / CD

SUNWATCHERS II

TROUBLE IN MIND LP / CD

WWW.CARGORECORDS.CO.UK

MERGE RECORDS LP / CD

LALA BELU

AWESOME TAPES FROM AFRICA LP / CD

EFRIM MANUEL MENUCK PLAYSHIGH GOSPEL CONSTELLATION LP

2018

ALL OF THIS HAS HAPPENED THIS YEAR, THESE ARE SALAD DAYS AT THE RECORD SHOP.

For this year’s “top 100” edition, we spent the longest possible window re-listening to things and double-checking that coffee, alcohol and chilled combinations of both coffee and alcohol hadn’t given us a warped perspective on how good the riffs are on White Denim’s Performance, the incredible sounds that Nils Frahm managed to record on All Melody, the monolithic weight of the guitars on Sleep’s The Sciences, and ultimately whether we were indeed correct in omitting Natural Rebel from the top 100.

Always go with your guts, but the guts in your ears… you know? It was a lot of fun all getting together and listening to a long list of over 300 new albums and correlating them into this numerical appraisal, our favourite albums, plus some compilations, some reissues and some honourable mentions for titles released in the late autumn that we didn’t have time to include fully.

Written and compiled by The Drift Record Shop Designed by www.atworkportfolio.co.uk Sub edited by Lu Overy Printed by Newspaper Club Distributed by Forte Music Distribution © 2018 Deluxe Newspaper 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.

In the summer we also finally managed to take a conversation that has long been based in the pub and started a new collective of like-minded shops. Dinked was founded by Drift, Piccadilly, Resident and Transmission, four independent retailers coming together and releasing special editions so far from Kurt Vile and John Carpenter, with You Tell Me, TOY and Homeshake all booked in and a lot more to be announced in the coming weeks and months. We’re independent, but stronger together.

We hope across the following pages you find something new, give something a second chance and re-drop the needle on a bunch of great albums that you’ve picked up in 2018, one hell of a year for new music actually.

WWW.DELUXENEWSPAPER.COM

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CONFIDENCE MAN

MOUNTAIN MAN

World’s Strongest Man

Confident Music for Confident People

Magic Ship

Hot Fruit Records / May

Heavenly Recordings / April

Bella Union / September

Confident Music For Confident People is the debut LP and goodtime manifesto from Australia’s Confidence Man. It’s a brazen party album, and one of the most unashamedly addictive records in this year’s list. We had the distinct pleasure to see them live and they are nothing short of electric.

Janet Planet and Sugar Bones up front, choreographed, conducting crowds in waves of euphoria with skillfully distilled pop music. Loads of fun, pounding beats, call and response lyrics, it’s super smart pop music and makes us dream of long summer nights again.

Molly Sarlé, Amelia Meath, and Alexandra Sauser-Monnig released Made the Harbor, one of our albums of the year and still one of the great moments in the impressive Bella Union vaults. Out of the blue and with very little fuss after an eight-year hiatus, we’re thrilled to have them back. With the occasional stomp of a foot and strum of a guitar, they sing close vocal harmonies that are soaring, homespun, intricate and, for the best part, euphoric. They just sound so perfect together, these three wonders’ singing is an absolute joy, and this subtle album really is one to rave and shout about.

World’s Strongest Man is the third solo LP from former Supergrass front man Gaz Coombes, and follows his Mercury Prize-nominated Matador. He’s proven himself again and again as one of the most enduring British songwriters of the last 25 years, so it’s hardly news that this is a subtle and really gorgeously balanced set of songs, only one born out of a country going to the dogs. The big change up is the production, more electronic influences and arguably the most experimental delivery of his career. Expansive layers, full of both big and small musical gestures.

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Joy As An Act of Resistance Partisan Records / August

Joy as an Act of Resistance is the much anticipated second album from Bristol 5-piece IDLES, aka “the UK’s best punk band” says The Guardian… and we don’t have many issues with that. Fiercely relevant, it takes aim at everything from toxic masculinity, nationalism, immigration, and class inequality - all while maintaining a visceral and infectious positivity. Their vulnerability is their greatest strength, this is sparkling honesty, and although covering much bleakness in content, it is delivered as a fiery call to arms. Motorik punk-pop that explodes out of the speakers, it is above all else optimistic.

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PIGS PIGS PIGS PIGS PIGS PIGS PIGS King of Cowards Rocket Recordings / September

Everything about Pigs7 is utterly thrilling. The name, the AMAZING artwork (from Sophy Hollington, whose amazing Tarot deck has been so popular this year on Rough Trade Books) and the mere seconds it takes for King of Cowards to rip open with guitars like chainsaws. This is hard, this is pretty pulverising. Monolithic riffs and howling yells with incredibly intensity... but that’s not to say it is anything other than hugely exciting and really good fun.

Production is utterly brilliant, it is so thick and so dense, but you can really hear the isolation on each instrument which is quite the task. Marvellous stuff.

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SUNWATCHERS II

Trouble In Mind / February

II is the scorching new LP from Brooklyn’s psych ensemble Sunwatchers. Features current and former members of Dark Meat, Chris Forsyth’s Solar Motel Band and more, alongside (former Oh Sees, current OCS) vocalist Brigid Dawson. It is full of jazzinfused psych-rock freakouts, searching music with a really tight sense of drive. Builds up with slow and controlled layers of drone, sometimes euphoric with motorik and psych drives, but also into transcendental bliss and far out experimentalism.

An awful lot going on, from the spiritual to the political, and really quite a sonic trip.

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HAILU MERGIA

KATHRYN JOSEPH

TERRY

Lala Belu

From When I Wake The Want Is

I’m Terry

Awesome Tapes From Africa / March

Rock Action / August

Upset The Rhythm / August

The first new album in nearly two decades from Ethiopian keyboard maestro Hailu Mergia.

You may remember we went totally bonkers for his utterly perfect 2013 Hailu Mergia & His Classical Instrument reissue (originally 1985) on Awesome Tapes From Africa.

Lala Belu shares a lot of the hot hazy Addis Ababa swing - and is instantly and undeniably him - but there is a progression into more frenetic jazz waters. He is known to keep his battery-powered keyboard in the boot of the taxi he drives around Washington DC, and Lala Belu feels like a document of constantly widening parameters and a personal creative journey.

Second full-length release from the Scottish singer-songwriter whose 2015 debut Bones You Have Thrown Me And Blood I’ve Spilled was named the Scottish Album of the Year. It’s released on Mogwai’s Rock Action Records, and there are some magic points of similitude between Kathryn Joseph and Mogwai’s exploits into the cinematic. Haunting pianos that quietly create cavernous soundscapes and place her distinct and yearning vocals right in the middle of the storm.

Dreamlike but with plenty of darker hues in the shadows. Emotionally tense and haunting in its fragility, a very brilliant songwriter indeed.

Released late August, I’m Terry was the third LP in as many years from TERRY, undisputed breakout stars of the much burgeoning Australian underground scene.

Ten tracks in thirty minutes and some of the most addictive punkstraddling-pop released all year.

A big part of their charm is not sounding much like anything else, veering around like a jukebox.

Their collective sensibilities to find a hook are just outrageous, it can be quite difficult squawking music in places, but each track has a jangling radio friendly moment.

And if you want to talk about earworms, this LP is full of them… “nanananananaa… WHIP WHIP!”

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JAMES HEATHER

JIM GHEDI

CONNAN MOCKASIN

Stories From Far Away On Piano

A Hymn For Ancient Land

Jassbusters

Ahead Of Our Time / May

Basin Rock / January

Mexican Summer / October

Stories From Far Away On Piano is the debut LP from contemporary solo pianist James Heather, and its beauty knocked us sideways from the first listen.

We in fact emailed him as soon as we heard it and asked if he’d come to our festival and play it… he only did. The album is an emotive and wonderfully articulate listen, pretty, sad and quite overwhelming track to track, with big themes and big scale but keeping directness. What an honour to have had him come and play it here for us, he made that church sound quite extraordinary.

Last summer we had Jim Ghedi come and play a set at Sea Change, and struggled both to forget the beautiful spells that he cast, and to remember the edges of how it sounded in any clarity. Six months later and the Sheffield trad folk player released his debut - A Hymn For Ancient Land - on the superb Basin Rock label, heartfelt 12-string guitar compositions that took us right back to our church venue and the ghostly haze. It’s a beautifully weird take on the traditional, with the drones and swells sounding modern and progressive, it makes the whole piece (in a very good way) hard to place.

Okay, bear with, don’t want to cock this up. Jassbusters is the name of the band formed by four music teachers in the five-part film Bostyn ‘n Dobsyn, conceived a good 20 years back by Connan Mockasin, who wrote, directed and starred, as well as releasing an album of the same name that features the original music… Once you know this, it plays out like a soundtrack, it creates a haze and never escapes the wooze.

Vocally he has plenty of room to wander as the backing band really lock him in. Funk and soul through the mixer, real mellow slow jams with loads of character.

88 86 84

MARIE DAVIDSON

FLASHER

THE BETHS

Working Class Woman

Constant Image

Future Me Hates Me

Ninja Tune / October

Domino Recording Company / June

Carpark Records / August

A real joy this, tense and kind of dystopian minimal techno and Italo-esque electro rhythms with an utterly hysterical protagonist.

Marie Davidson is such a brilliant conductor, her French-Canadian accent is so addictive as she recounts a handful of the inane things people have said to her after gigs… “Do you have drugs?”.

It is incredibly smart dance-floor music that is sexy and full of weird turns whilst remaining coherent and tightly focused throughout.

Her deadpan humour is brilliant, but she’s not mucking about, pounding beats through to some very subtly constructed tones.

Very highly recommended.

The full debut from Washington, DC trio Flasher. Although they are most resolutely post-punk, a big part of the pull for Flasher, with us certainly, is that these songs don’t necessarily belong to any genre, a healthy mix of punk and post punk but also new wave, shoegaze and some classic rock riffs too.

They are really dynamic as a band with vocals and motifiefs running over one another and keeping the adrenaline pumping throughout.

Lyrics that are oblique enough to imply one of many things, but delivered with sincerity and passion that resonate in these tense and fucked up political times.

The hook-filled debut from Auckland indie rockers The Beths.

Moments of sunny melancholy, and one of the most glimmering and gratifying albums of jangling guitars this year. Elizabeth Stokes (songwriter, lead singer and guitarist) is a brilliant focal point, a deeply likeable narrator, and her New Zealand drawl is pitch perfect. It originates somewhere between guitar pop of the 1960s and 1990s, without sounding directly derivative. It’s suitably humble too, produced by the band’s guitarist Jonathan Pearce.

They’re a young band and it will exciting to see what they do off the back of this excellent debut.

87 85 83 GOAT GIRL

GROUP LISTENING

Goat Girl

Clarinet & Piano: Selected Works Vol. 1

Rough Trade / April

PRAH Recordings / May

Jagjaguwar / April

The absolutely beautiful debut album from Group Listening, a new project by Stephen Black (Sweet Baboo) and Paul Jones.

Clearly, a collection of ambient works – from the likes of Brian Eno, Arthur Russell, Euros Childs and Robert Wyatt – arranged for clarinet and piano. Elegantly gliding between classic and experimental music, the duo have delivered a remarkable album that takes those wonderful works and gives them a new and exquisitely lo-fi new framing. The production is intimate, positively covered in their fingerprints.

It really is a wonderful listen, both serene and exciting.

The fourth LP from the most excellent Unknown Mortal Orchestra, and although not vastly different from their first three, it articulates a creatively restless band exploring their sonic limits - or lack of - and stylistic influences. The UMO hallmarks are there, the occasional burning solo, densely layered vocals, slick pop sensibilities, but the vibe it creates is pure funk, soul, highpop and plenty of sex. One of our favourite UMO traits is their ability to create a headspace and they have again made a perfect expanse to absorb a banging set of songs. The band finish up the year with the release of

The self-titled debut was a real spit in the eye for anyone expecting a rehash of the Libertines or any number of London guitar bands. Goat Girl is a weird album, brilliantly so. There is a lot of tension and bubbling undercurrents of menace, but with a very British sort of wryness to it. It’s equally grubby and disturbing, there is an offbeat energy that keeps it all weird and thrillingly unexpected. Loads of dark humour, but that’s not to make out like they are joking.

There are brilliant moments across the 19 tracks, and they manage to do both sincere and flippant with a load of charm.

UNKNOWN MORTAL ORCHESTRA Sex & Food

album number five in IC-01 Hanoi.

The seven-track instrumental LP was recorded as part of the Sex & Food sessions in Hanoi, Vietnam, and is a real trip. Lush tones and bringing more jazz than ever before into the mix against the scorched psychedelia.

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AMBER ARCADES European Heartbreak Heavenly Recordings / September

One of the many reasons we love Amber Arcades (songwriter Annelotte de Graaf) is her ability to make it all look so carefree and actually… a bit easy. Her brilliant second album, European Heartbreak, even starts with Simple Song, which isn’t… it’s a really brilliantly written pop song with smart production and some very chic gestures, with dense and thoroughly melancholic orchestration. Sets a perfect tone for the following ten tracks, gorgeous ballads of swooning sadness. Whether it’s all overtly or not about Brexit and being citizens of the world, it has captured the mood of apathy and disbelief perfectly. She is a writer of brilliant pop hooks and European Heartbreak - although thematically sad - is rammed full of them.

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CHRIS CARTER Chemistry Lessons Volume 1 Mute / March

really stunning. 25 tracks that play out for just over an hour, miniature pieces, all largely under the three-minute mark and covering the many different directions that Carter has taken throughout his illustrious career.

Fizzing synths, crunching IDM and the roots of techno all create different spells, not once falling into a warm nostalgia. It is an album that is so easy to get lost in, it’s just brilliantly crafted with authoritative experience.

80 78 TIRZAH

ARP

Devotion

Zebra

Domino Recording Company / August

Mexican Summer / June

Devotion is the pretty magical debut album from Tirzah.

Produced by Mica Levi, it’s incredibly intimate and has a constant balance between her utterly perfect voice and how imperfect pop music can be. It is so beautifully constructed, with the tracks gently unfolding and unwrapping themselves from their nexus as short loops and fragments. The scattering club beats on Holding On create a little and glorious change of pace, in that way, it is an album of both glorious micro-moments and an all-encompassing vibe. It’s hazy and almost conversational in its amity.

79 KURT VILE Bottle It In

Matador / October

The first new music in six years from Chris Carter of Throbbing Gristle, and it’s very special indeed. It’s a masterclass in tones, atmospherically it is

career has been distinctly chill, but there is something at play on Bottle It In that feels like he’s truly comfortable with it, or has settled into his own space. Across the 80 sprawling minutes, it rarely shifts out of the bubbling almost conversational directness, whilst remaining suitably ambiguous throughout. Moments of plucking traditionalism and some chuggedout riffs, but it is truly leisurely, it is perfectly content to go nowhere in particular, just enjoying the ride.

Bottle It In is the seventh solo LP from Philadelphia’s Kurt Vile, and it’s a real chiller. His entire

Arp is New York-based producer, composer and multi-instrumentalist Alexis Georgopoulos, and Zebra is his fourth long-player. Without aping anything, Zebra sounds a bit like an ethereal electronic soundtrack, using samples of anything from high production synth wave and Tangerine Dream film soundtracks to Brian Eno’s minimal records.

There is an implied familiarity in the dreamy bleeps and marimba pulses that feels like something you know well, and something thrilling in the woozing synths that you’ve not heard before. Arp blurs the lines between experimental and pop, really quite hypnotic and instantly gratifying.

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DANIEL AVERY

SERPENTWITHFEET

ANNA ST. LOUIS

Song For Alpha

Soil

If Only There Was a River

Secretly Canadian / June

Woodsist / October

The much-hyped debut album by Josiah Wise. A quite extraordinary album and one of the hardest to categorise this year. Avantgarde R&B, gospel, baroque-pop flourishes and the invitation to not so much listen to an album, but be transported into the middle of someone else’s world.

A classically-trained singer, his vocals are just A MAZE ING… not just the old vocal gymnastics, but framing characters and emotions with an almost separate voice.

Progressively produced, his vocal ability is honestly extraordinary and the boldness of his writing is striking. It’s about love, all of it, and it’s overpowering stuff.

If Only There Was A River is the first full-length studio album from L.A (via Kansas City) artist Anna St. Louis. We fell hard for this from the first play, a hushed confidence that is deeply addictive, really beautifully delivered songs with warmth and intimacy. Pastoral and evocative, you can hear it through the whine.

Brilliant production from Kyle Thomas (King Tuff) and Kevin Morby - they keep it simple, it’s all about giving Anna space.

From finger-picked strings to orchestral flourishes, it’s all beautifully complementary to a genuinely idiosyncratic and wonderfully clear new voice.

Phantasy Sound / April

Five years after his critically acclaimed debut Drone Logic, London-based producer Daniel Avery released his second album Song For Alpha. Whereas Drone Logic was about full body response, Alpha is about subtlety and his expanded sonic vocabulary. The tones throw back to the earliest moments of Warp Records, but this is not tribute or re-hack, it’s a brilliantly balanced album that is hypnotic and deeply indebted to the disciplines of techno whilst really quite expansive. He is a hugely skilled producer and this really is brilliantly measured, perfectly controlling the tension.

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MICHAEL RAULT

SZUN WAVES

VALUE VOID

It’s a New Day Tonight

New Hymn To Freedom

Sentimental

Wick Records / May

The Leaf Label / August

Tough Love Records / October

It’s A New Day Tonight is the second LP from Montreal-based rock and roll revivalist Michael Rault, released on Daptone’s new rock imprint Wick Records.

Daptone’s own Wayne Gordon was on production duties, and there is such warmth on this one.

Only a few beats into the opening track I’ll Be There the bass and drums roll down in steps as the guitars chew through glimmering analogue riffs, it’s clearly our kind of record. It’s a proper cruising rock and roll album, with just as much melancholy as bravado.

Some very very good songs and some gorgeous production… the reverb is quite extraordinary.

Szun Waves - the all-star trio of producer Luke Abbott, drummer Laurence Pike of PVT and saxophonist Jack Wyllie - made a very welcome return with the ambitious and deeply searching New Hymn to Freedom. The album consists of six improvisations and creates an extraordinary head space between electronic, jazz and genuinely psychedelic music.

Ferociously busy (and confident) in places, there is a strong sense of gathering pace on the album, the tension builds not in a threatening way, but with everincreasing waves and gestures in swells. There is a spiritual quality to the album, you can feel its power.

Sentimental is the rich and jangling debut album from London (via Buenos Aires) trio Value Void.

As much as they can sound sunny and full of sunset melancholia, they whirl up some pretty brooding pieces with some sinister vibes, psychotic timing on the riffs and a mad-eyed beat. That is one of the treats of this fine debut, it moves around loads with folk and all sorts played out in a very protopunk way beneath ghostly double vocals. No retro styling, they just recorded it onto tape, and the effect makes it hard to place them anywhere between 2018 and 1988.

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BOY AZOOGA 1, 2, Kung Fu! Heavenly Recordings / June

The debut album from Boy Azooga on Heavenly Recordings. Back in 2017 the Heavenly guys told us they had just fought nail and tooth to sign one of the most exciting bands they’d seen in years. It only took us moments to agree, but seeing how far they have come in a year is superb. A band with rock and roll grooves and quite lovely pop sensibilities.

It’s a really cosmic ride, the pounding riffs and deep grooves are instantly gratifying, but they are a smart bunch and it’s just the surface layer of some rather brilliantly constructed pop music, sometimes quite sad and always with its heart on its sleeve.

69 HATER Siesta

Con Todo El Mundo

Fire Records / September

Night Time Stories / May

We have become pretty fast obsessed with Hater over the last year or so. We played the Red Blinders EP a lot at the end of last year and kept riding the waves with them even joining us for Sea Change this summer. Their full debut Siesta really is some of the most gloriously melancholic pop.

It’s brilliantly balanced, optimistic and quietly euphoric, but on the surface at least everything seems maudlin. The vocals are lush, some expert instrumental touches and the basslines are utterly brilliant. We have played this a lot and it’s one of those rare albums that seems to fit around almost any mood. Great stuff.

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MARY LATTIMORE

RYLEY WALKER

Hundreds Of Days

Deafman Glance

Ghostly International / May

Dead Oceans / May

Hundreds of Days is an album of intricate and meditative compositions from harpist and composer Mary Lattimore. The LA native has used the harp as a starting point rather than the only tool, bending, blurring and manipulating the notes with looping pedals. She has created rich and adventurous ambient music that creates an intoxicating bed for the precise and striking harp sound. Loops and experiments on guitars, piano, theremin, synthesisers and vocals combine in ethereal surges, to paint vivid sonic landscapes. Beautifully human and very evocative music.

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KHRUANGBIN

The fourth full-length release from Chicago’s much-wandering son Ryley Walker... and man is it smart.

It’s a proper jazzy album, soaked in Chicago’s much-celebrated experimental scene with complex and dense arrangements interviewing all over the place.

The tones are really thrilling too, chopping through a whole songbook of guitar timbres over the orchestral flourishes and the frenetic drums. Ryley also sings it brilliantly, confident and honest.

This is his grandest statement yet, he is not a troubadour or a retro balladeer, these aren’t jams, this is all very deliberate and quite amazing actually.

Con Todo El Mundo is the second LP from Houston-based instrumental trio Khruangbin. It’s a set of largely instrumental cuts that drift along through vintage funk and soul stylings, using iconic tones and textures whilst finding new space. It’s a warmly psychedelic take on Asian, African and even Middle Eastern music, a bit like a loving compilation of dusty 45s or cassettes; but whereas the narrative wants to point to long lost recordings, there is a freshness in these new cuts.

In lesser hands it could have just sounded like a good curation, but the biggest compliment to Khruangbin is that they truly sound like Khruangbin. Loads of groove and loads of personality.

NILS FRAHM - All Melody Erased Tapes 2LP/CD

WARM DRAG – Warm Drag In The Red LP/CD

OH SEES - Smote Reverser

LA LUZ - Floating Features

Castle Face 2LP/CD

Hardly Art LP/CD

HERE LIES MAN – You Will Know Nothing Riding Easy LP/CD

KIKAGAKU MOYO – Masana Temples HACK AND A HACKSAW – Forest Bathing Guruguru Brain LP/CD

LM Duplications LP/CD

ANNA ST. LOUIS – If Only There Was A River

THE WHITE STRIPES – Complete John Peel Sessions

Woodsist/Mare LP/CD

Third Man 2LP/CD

DANIEL BRANDT – Channels Erased Tapes LP/CD

LAST OF THE EASY RIDERS – Unto The Earth Agitated LP/CD

THE AINTS! – The Church Of Simultaneous Existence ABC / Agitated LP/CD

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Beyondless Matador / May

The fourth studio album from Copenhagen’s Iceage, and it’s a massive creative step into the wild.

Sometimes with truly great bands it’s hard to see how important and searching they are in real time, only looking back at them you can see the intricacies of what they do on both the granular and maximal scales. Iceage are doubtless one of those bands. Beyondless is a beast beholden only to itself, nothing they have hinted at before is used as anything more than an echo, no rules or conventions. A lush palette of saxophones and pianos and strings thrashed about like an apocalyptic orchestra.

Then conversely they invited Sky Ferreira to add guest vocals on Pain Killer, doubtless their biggest radio friendly moment to date. A sonic widescreen of a band who do what they like. Thrilling and brilliant.

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CAVERN OF ANTIMATTER Hormone Lemonade Duophonic Records / March

Cavern Of Anti-Matter (the project primarily led by Stereolab’s Tim Gane) returned this year with their third studio album - Hormone Lemonade on their own Duophonic label.

It’s a glorious exploration of mod synths, antiquated buzzes and home-built drum machines.

As with their previous work, it’s their ability to make loose and groove-based music through

the rigid electronic tools that is so fascinating. The textures are lush and the drive is pretty thrilling. It’s a really immersive listen and a very welcoming trip that, considering the heavily analogue sounds, sounds sparklingly modern.

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LUCY DACUS Historian

Matador / March

Another young voice, and another that we’re super impressed by.

Virginia-based singer-songwriter Lucy Dacus released her second LP Historian this March on Matador and, at the risk of sounding condescending, it really feels years ahead of her.

One of the things that really grabbed us is that she’s got a hugely absorbing delivery, she can whisper a line that someone else would need to scream. The production and instrumentation is actually fairly simple throughout save the odd glorious riff or clash thrown about - and it highlights what brilliant songs these are.

There is an emotional directness here that’s quite disarming, some of the themes are pretty big and it’s easy to forget that gorgeous warm voice is singing about heartbreak and death.

63 BAS JAN Yes I Jan

Lost Map Records / February

Bas Jan are a London-based experimental post-punk trio, built around the remarkable and distinctive voice and songs of multi-instrumentalist and composer Serafina Steer.

Originally conceived as solo material, the project became triangulated through the iterations and now includes Emma Smith (Meilyr Jones, Seamus Fogarty and founder member of the Elysian Quartet) and Rachel Horwood (Trash Kit, Bamboo).

It touches on some of our most favourite moments of outsider art from Arthur Russell in NYC to the Raincoats and Slits in London. Smart and deliciously weird, but above it all full of funk, pop and alt grooves that are hard not to get totally obsessed with. It’s also dead funny.

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Room Inside the World Merge / February

Room Inside the World is Ought’s third album and first for new label partner Merge. It is more subtle than their first two (both albums of the year at Drift) in that there is some serious depth and emotion in the darkness. Musically it is so deep, so many textures and subtle changes of pace, at times like hundreds of microscopic things are happening all at once.

Tim Darcy sounds amazing, more in control than before (including his equally great solo LP), and his delivery with the overall subtlety of what they are doing is hugely expansive. If we do manage to coordinate a tracks of the year list then These 3 Things will be right at the top, the sort of song you listen to three of four times back to back, only to hear something special and magic on the fifth play. An utterly brilliant band expanding their creative horizons.

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STARCRAWLER Starcrawler

they hurtle along at the point of collapsing into chaos. This album takes that kinetic energy and crafts short snappy songs that stay around just long enough to prove their point before bursting into flames. They have a lot to say, it’s just impossible not to get caught up in the instant gratification of the delivery.

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YVES TUMOR Safe In The Hands Of Love Warp / October

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CHILLY GONZALES Solo Piano III

The work of Yves Tumor moves from sultry ambient to future soul, psychedelic pop, and everything in between. His first LP with Warp - Safe In The Hands Of Love - is really quite stunning, it is genuinely borderless and very hard to describe. It’s an album of emotions as much as tones.

In his experimentation he has captured a very special mood, it’s dreamy and vaguely cinematic, but each section in isolation is beautifully constructed. For all its moving about and changing shape, it remains harmonious as a whole. Again, incredibly hard for novices like us to articulate, but it’s a remarkable listen, very highly recommended indeed.

Very highly recommended.

Rough Trade / January

Thrilling self-titled debut album from LA’s Starcrawler. Recorded

by Ryan Adams on analogue tape at his Pax-Am studio, the ten track album (flying past at an incendiary 28 minutes...) channels the Stooges, the Cramps and any number of the more excitingly-unhinged bands of the last 40 years, whilst amazingly avoiding pastiche.

Their live shows are famous as

of the record is fragments, field recordings and tones collected around the world on and off tour, and this gives it an exuberant sense of movement and motion.

The guest appearances add to the mix. Frequent collaborator Holly Walker is sounding pretty lush, and they combine with Khruangbin for the weirdest and possibly best moments on the album. Brilliantly put together this one, it retains the intimacy of their debut but sounds positively kaleidoscopic beside it.

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MARIBOU STATE Kingdoms In Colour Ninja Tune / September

Maribou State returned this September on the Ninja Tune imprint Counter Records with Kingdoms in Colour. The basis

Gentle Threat / September

The return of the maestro, Chilly Gonzales’ third Solo Piano album. To those uninitiated, it is a collection of solo piano meditations from the Grammywinning, Guinness World Record holding, chamber music leading, music school operating, recordproducing, rapping, raconteur that fall into the same world as Grieg, Debussy and Satie. This third collection is about finding new darker tones, experimenting and how this plays against what solo piano can be. It’s packed with references from Bach and Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou to Beach House and Thomas Bangalter of Daft Punk, but you don’t need to know or even necessarily understand the connections, it’s all part of the carefree joy of it all. There’s no sneer, it’s an encouraging wink to get all of us enthused.

It is smart, funny and sublime.

Nobody does it better.

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THE BREEDERS All Nerve 4AD / March

Hot damn... pinch yourself... The Breeders returned this year with the all-new album, All Nerve, the first new material from the band in a decade and reuniting Kim and Kelley Deal, Josephine Wiggs and Jim Macpherson, the line-up behind the iconic and platinum-selling record, Last Splash. A hugely important band for us, but seriously, this is such a strong collection of songs; dark, tense and full of hooks... they are a band who sound commanding and full of life. All Nerve is about confidence and loads of space for Kim Deal vocally, evocative and sometimes surreal lyrics that are at once euphoric and full of mystery.

Moments of bliss, moments of blistering… love this band.

56 APOSTILLE

Choose Life

Upset The Rhythm / July

Apostille is Michael Kasparis, the man behind Glasgow’s amazing Night School Records alongside various duties at the equally superb Monorail Music in Glasgow. Back in July he dropped the absolutely mega Choose Life LP (via the Upset The Rhythm label) and was doubtless the most played at Drift on those long summer nights. Pounding synthpop bangers that positively drip adrenaline. Whereas the synth and drum machine have been the main event before, Choose

Life is a very human record, and it’s lush to hear Michael singing so much as he really does lead Apostille somewhere quite new in that way. Highly addictive stuff.

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GRUFF RHYS Babelsberg

Rough Trade / June

The king of Wales Gruff Rhys released his fifth solo LP Babelsberg - this year and it is an understated gem. Sounding more like Scott Walker than SFA, the album features orchestral scores by Swansea based composer Stephen McNeff and the incredible work of the 72 piece BBC National Orchestra of Wales, the marriage between that full swoon and Gruff’s vocal is pretty much perfect. Its complex, but like all of Gruff’s work, it is full of tremendous heart and intimacy. There is something about the scale of the orchestration that gives the impression of groundedness, but this is an album of psychedelic origin and there is actually quite a lot of darkness under the sunny, glossy tones. A brilliant writer, love the guy, love this LP.

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The Sciences Third Man / April

The day before Record Store Day 2018 (20th April), Third Man Records did the best RSD thing that has ever been done quite possibly, a surprise release that remained secret and was utterly brilliant in conception, narrative and delivery. An object lesson in what RSD could and should still be. Sleep, the American doom metal power trio from San Jose, returned at 4.20 with The Sciences, their first album in twenty years and the first new material since the iconic Dopesmoker. Fears of a needless middle-aged revisiting to the bong were short-lived as The Sciences rips open with monolithic riffs in drones. They actually sound better, the clarity makes them louder, longer and harder. I think Pitchfork coined it best: “a twin ode to volume and weed”. Heavy and essential.

GABE GURNSEY PHYSICAL Phantasy Sound

EDITORS VIOLENCE [PIAS] Recordings

UNKNOWN MORTAL ORCHESTRA SEX & FOOD Jagjaguwar

JOAN AS POLICE WOMAN DAMNED DEVOTION [PIAS] Recordings

EELS THE DECONSTRUCTION Eworks

SUDAN ARCHIVES SINK Stones Throw

KODE9 & BURIAL FABRICLIVE 100 : KODE 9 & BURIAL Fabric Records

SOULWAX ESSENTIAL [PIAS] Recordings

KAMAAL WILLIAMS THE RETURN Black Focus

LUMP LUMP Dead Oceans

DAVID SYLVIAN & HOLGER CZUKAY PLIGHT & PREMONITION FLUX & MUTABILITY Groenland

SHAME SONGS OF PRAISE Dead Oceans

www.pias.com/uk

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ANNA VON HAUSSWOLFF

THE ORIELLES

U.S. GIRLS

Dead Magic

Silver Dollar Moment

In a Poem Unlimited

City Slang / March

Heavenly Recordings / February

4AD / February

Dead Magic is the fourth album from Gothenburg-born Anna Von Hausswolff and it’s pretty special stuff. Recorded with Randall Dunn, the counterpoint to her vocals is the pipe organ from the Marmor Kirken Church, a sound that is striking in its power, foreboding, doomy and utterly grand whilst being both epic and really quite minimal in sections. Amongst the darker textures the little gestures of light and beauty in her vocal and phrasing are really special, makes the whole thing more personal and her blacks even darker. She howls and wails and you just get drawn in. Lush.

My god we love The Orielles... and so will you! Sidonie Hand Halford, her younger sister Esme and their friend Henry Wade have been a big part of our last 18 months, from glimmering pop singles to joining us in town for Sea Change.

Their debut LP - Silver Dollar Moment - is a smart, poppy and jangling collection of songs that feel intrinsically linked to guitar music of the last 40 years... but kinda like none of it! They are competent, creative and wildly idiosyncratic. You can try and pick apart any of the songs, but it’s just too distracting that your hips are swaying and your toes are tapping. Great collection of songs and a band that could pretty much go on to do anything.

Now a decade deep in music, U.S. Girls is the protean musical enterprise of multi-disciplinary artist, Meg Remy. In a Poem Unlimited, her second for 4AD, is so addictive. Big, brash pop songs with killer hooks, but that’s not to say she beats you over the head with it, there is nothing preachy going on. The album features “dark meditations reflecting charged atmospheres that directly precede and follow acts of violence”, big topics but they positively sparkle in high definition pop production. It’s very human in its approach, it’s almost conversational and such a testament to the skill of Remy as a songwriter and performer that you can easily forget the depth of the content - the songs just shimmer.

AUDIOBOOKS Now! (in a minute)

BILL RYDER-JONES Yawn Yawn is the fourth full-length solo release from singer-songwriter Bill Ryder-Jones. Entirely selfproduced (and featuring guest vocals from The Orielles and Our Girl) it’s a beautifully sincere set of songs. Romantic and maudlin, it really does highlight what a superb songwriter he is.

Now! (in a minute) is the debut LP from London duo audiobooks.

Who they? Evangeline Ling - a 21 year old art student and musician from Wimbledon - and David Wrench - one of the most indemand mixers and producers in modern music. Lush balance between bubbling analogue and glistening pop, and Ling is a total revelation. You can’t take your ears off her! Great stuff this.

Late In The Day WE’RE FLAGGING UP SOME LATE AUTUMN RELEASES WE’VE REALLY LOVED THIS YEAR...

In order to correlate, write about and vote on this top 100, we have to put a date cut-off in place and these following albums arrived very much as part of 2018, just slightly after we could count them.

JULIA HOLTER Aviary Julia Holter returns with the grand, challenging and utterly brilliant Aviary. Each second is beautifully considered. Deep and dense like the classical music suites that act as her base palette. It is an utterly epic 90 minutes, with moments of ambience and experimentalism.

We’ll have to listen a few more times to get any real sense of whether we’re actually smart enough to rightfully be enjoying the album this much, but man... she is such a remarkable talent and this LP is a proper treat.

JOHN GRANT Love Is Magic The magnificent John Grant released Love Is Magic in October on Bella Union. It successfully pulls in all of his creative outlets (balladeer, crooner, cabaret, experimentalist and bangers!!) and whirls them into a pretty glorious and utterly idiosyncratic concept album about... well, John Grant! Wildly creative and still intimate, he’s a rare breed.

Late In The Day

PILL Soft Hell Soft Hell is Pill’s second fulllength album, a raucous and thrashing LP that feels soaked in NYC’s rich history of punk, postpunk and outsider art. There is so much drive, each song stumbles into a joyous canter with unhinged (cryptic and hugely funny) lyrics.

Lustrous feedback, screaming and honking saxophones and yelping lyrics. We love this band and Soft Hell is a brilliantly encapsulating statement about the collective din they make.

TUNE-YARDS

– I can feel you creep into my private life

THE LEMON TWIGS – Go To School

PIXIES

U.S.GIRLS

THE BREEDERS – All Nerve

– Come On Pilgrim...

It’s Surfer Rosa

THE NATIONAL

GANG GANG DANCE

THIS MORTAL COIL

– In A Poem Unlimited

– Boxer Live In Brussels

– Kazuashita

2018 – WWW.4AD.COM

– 3 Album Re-issues

Late In The Day

CAT POWER Wanderer Wanderer is a subtle record, fairly primitive instrumentation, but it does a brilliant job of placing her vocal in the foreground, as much in focus as she has perhaps ever been. The big single - Woman - features a guest appearance from Lana Del Rey and is the most radio-friendly, but the real beauty is in the more wistful moments. A real grower - even with the inclusion of a cheeky bit of vocoder - and we’ve enjoyed getting to know this a bit.

Drift_EndOfYear.pdf

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MEG BAIRD & MARY LATTIMORE Ghost Forests Ghost Forests is musical conversations between Meg Baird (Espers) and Mary Lattimore. The songs alternate between extended ethereal instrumentals, gauzy and dreamy pop, blown-out haze, and modern re-imaginings of epic traditional ballads. Both are musicians we like a great deal, but there is something really powerful about this lush collaboration. They are so trusting of one another which makes for a very special listen. Very highly recommended.

16/10/2018

12:26

Late In The Day

NENEH CHERRY Broken Politics New Neneh Cherry LP and she has enlisted the magic hands (and ears) of Kieran Hebden (Four Tet) on production duties.

Broken Politics has a tensity and frustration to it that is beautifully counterbalanced by the pretty flourishes in the production. Lyrically it is a direct and hypnotic discourse, Neneh is engaging and never preachy.

KLAUS JOHANN GROBE Du bist so symmetrisch

THE WAVE PICTURES Look Inside Your Heart The mighty Wave Pictures actually released two albums this year, with the sombre and studio-improvised Brushes with Happiness in June, and the warm and joyous Look Inside Your Heart following in November. Their musicianship (both individually and in unison) is so strong, sailing effortlessly between blues, psych and Afropop.

Blurring the lines between electronic pop, dance music, synthesis and kosmische, Swiss group Klaus Johann Grobe are hard to pin down. A little touch of Metronomy, but they are hugely inventive and made some of the most imaginative bass lead pop this year, all the more impressive as a duo. Du bist so symmetrisch is a real vibe record and they have created something dreamlike and really groovy.

Late In The Day

HEN OGLEDD Mogic Hen Ogledd - founded by Richard Dawson and harpist Rhodri Davies - release their third album Mogic (their first for Weird World), this time joined by Dawn Bothwell and Sally Pilkington.

Ravishing melodies, hallucinatory textures and bonkers rhythms, it is irresistibly catchy, expertly crafted and very weird art-pop.

KIRAN LEONARD Western Culture The wonderfully precocious talent that is Kiran Leonard is still just 23 year old... Damn! The Manchester singer songwriter is prolific too.

He’s already fast approaching 20 odd releases under one name or another and the creativity flows from a rich fount. Western Culture is such a brilliant and brilliantly varied set of songs, pretty and intricate pop through to a wild and swirling rock drone. Legacy of Neglect right in the middle of the album is totally epic, real fire.

IRMIN SCHMIDT 5 Klavierstücke Irmin Schmidt - influential composer, musician and founder of Can - will be releasing 5 Klavierstücke, an album of five piano pieces recorded last year.

Schmidt explains, “The tracks are spontaneous meditations, only played once and recorded simultaneously – no edits or corrections. They are formed from an emotional memory in which Schubert, Cage, Japan (Gagaku) and Can are equally present.”

twenty eighteen

roughtraderecords.com

record label

GOAT GIRL

PARQUET COURTS

SLEAFORD MODS

STARCRAWLER

THE DECEMBERISTS

THE MOLDY PEACHES

- GOAT GIRL -

- STARCRAWLER -

- WIDE AWAKE! -

- I’LL BE YOUR GIRL -

- SLEAFORD MODS -

- MOLDY PEACHES -

GRUFF RHYS

- BABELSBERG -

PRINCESS NOKIA

- A GIRL CRIED RED -

STEREOLAB Switched On (1992)

Reissues ONE OF OUR BIGGEST JOYS OVER THE LAST FEW YEARS HAS BEEN FINDING THE OPPORTUNITY TO REAPPRAISE ALBUMS THAT WE MISSED THE FIRST TIME AROUND. Reissue specialists like Anthology, Numero, Earth, Light in the Attic, Trunk, We Release Whatever The Fuck We Want and others shining a light on long-lost gems and some grievously overlooked works.

Much as a twentieth-anniversary edition makes us wince at the two decades that have passed in the blink of an eye (thinking specifically about Hello Nasty, In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, Good Morning Spider and The Three E.P.’s), it’s been a year with some pretty hefty reissues celebrating fifty years since their debut. 1968 featured (amongst many others): Otis Redding’s The Dock of the Bay, The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society, The Band’s Music from Big Pink, Johnny Cash At Folsom Prison, self-titled albums from Traffic, Soft Machine, Creedence Clearwater Revival and Fleetwood Mac, Small Faces’ Ogden’s Nut Gone Flake ,Scott Walker’s Scott 2, Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks, Simon & Garfunkel’s Bookends, Cream’s Wheels of Fire, The Rolling Stones’ Beggar’s Banquet, The Beatles’ White Album and The Jimi Hendrix Experience’s Electric Ladyland, a good handful of which received deluxe and remastered anniversary editions this year.

Reissues that stood out, in particular, this year...

Refried Ectoplasm [Switched On Volume 2] (1995) Aluminium Tunes [Switched On Volume 3] (1998) Stereolab reissued volumes 1-3 of their Switched On compilation series this year on their Duophonic UHF Disks label. The name is a reference to Switched-On Bach and other easy listening albums from the late 60s that featured heavy Moog usage.

All were remastered and comprise rare singles, splits and EPs whilst retracing the development of one of the era’s most creatively dynamic bands. The period also gets attention with Too Pure reissuing the band’s 1992 debut album Peng! And the eight track mini-album The Groop Played Space Age Batchelor Pad Music that followed the year after. Listening back, it’s fair to cite them as one of the most influential and original bands of the 90s.

PRINCE Piano & a Microphone 1983 Prince’s famous Paisley Park estate will be working to slowly release the incredible body of work he obsessively amassed in secret over the last 35 odd years. The first edition is a starkly raw and intimate recording which took place at the start of Prince’s career, right before he achieved international stardom. The nine track album features a previously unreleased home studio cassette of Prince at a piano. The private rehearsal provides a rare, intimate glimpse into Prince’s creative process as he worked through songs which include 17 Days and Purple Rain, a cover of Joni Mitchell’s A Case Of You, Strange Relationship (not released until 1987 on his critically acclaimed Sign O’ The Times album), and International Lover. The album also includes a rare recording of the 19th century spiritual Mary Don’t You Weep. Powerful stuff throughout and a beautifully bare insight into his process as a writer, an amazing place for the archives to begin.

Reissues

HARUOMI HOSONO

THE BETA BAND

Hosono House (1973) Cochin Moon (1978)

The Three EPs (1997-1998)

Born and raised in central Tokyo (as the grandson of the only Japanese survivor of the Titanic), Haruomi Hosono was (alongside Yukihiro Takahashi and Ryuichi Sakamoto) a founder of the Yellow Magic Orchestra and a prolific solo artist across many genres. Hosono is the central thread that ties together Light in the Attic’s recently launched Japan Archival Series, and this year LITA reissued his 1973 debut Hosono House and the synthheavy 1978 Cochin Moon, conceptually written as the soundtrack of a non-existent Bollywood film. Always melodically rich, he is a phenomenally inventive and emotive songwriter. We are hoping that the albums Philharmony, Omni Sight Seeing and Paraiso will be available in the UK next year.

“Hosono is the auteur of his own idiosyncratic musical world, putting his unmistakable stamp on hundreds of recordings as an artist, session player, songwriter and producer.” - Light in the Attic

COLORED MUSIC Colored Music (1981) WRWTFWW Records put together a deluxe edition of the self-titled album from cult Japanese duo Colored Music.

An incredible mix of cosmic new wave, unconventional disco, avant-garde synth pop, and hybrid electronic funk, Colored Music is enchantingly unique, a sort of experimental and magnetizing take on David Bowie’s Berlin trilogy. From the groovy post-punk glam title track to the protohouse dance floor killer Heartbeat, Ichiko Hashimoto and Atsuo Fujimoto hit all the right (and sometimes not-exactly-right-buttruly-genius) notes to create the odd and beautiful, an unparalleled audio escape to the best elsewhere you can think of.

Be it in their original configuration, their cameo in High Fidelity or the hugely popular and truly evergreen CD compilation, The Beta Band’s Three EPs have had a consistently and huge impact on a whole generation of music makers and sonic explorers. Utterly essential and very much deserving this 20th anniversary remastered celebration. Innovative and singular, their unique musical and aesthetic approach to everything they did set them far apart from their musical contemporaries. Champion Versions, the first and most immediate of the EPs, was released in July 1997; The Patty Patty Sound, arguably the strangest, followed in March 1998 with the musical midpoint of Los Amigos del Beta Bandidos landing in July of the same year. The reissue arrived as CD, LP and also deluxe 4x12” editions including limited facsimile copies of the Flower Press (Vol 1&2) fanzines. The Because Music label have worked with the band to reissue the Three EPs, also deluxe editions of the self-titled The Beta Band debut, Hot Shots II, Heroes To Zeros and The Best of album. We will never tire of sticking on Dry The Rain mid afternoon, it always gets somebody asking. Hell of a band.

“These crackling, chameleonic EPs still seem to hold secrets, surprising and confounding in equal measure.” - Pitchfork

Reissues

REISSUE OF THE YEAR JOHN COLTRANE Both Directions at Once: The Lost Album (1963) How did a major label manage to lose a John Coltrane record? Maybe it really is that simple. Both Directions at Once is a 1963 John Coltrane LP that has, until this year, remained mostly lost and largely unheard. The record is a full set of material made by the John Coltrane Quartet one day at New Jersey’s Rudy Van Gelder Studio in March 1963. With Coltrane on tenor and soprano saxophone, McCoy Tyner on piano, Jimmy Garrison on bass, Elvin Jones on drums, this became Coltrane’s “classic quartet” who would the following year record the iconic A Love Supreme. The answer to the missing tapes is relatively straightforward, Coltrane had been working with producer Bob Thiele to record sessions subversively. “My contribution with Trane was to let him record whenever he wanted, even when the corporate power structure was opposed to it.” The mono audition reels of the session were only recently found in the possession of the family of Coltrane’s first wife, Juanita Naima Coltrane. Impulse! didn’t have the music; the label’s master tapes may have been lost in a company move from New York to Los Angeles. The recordings are surprisingly like a live session, parts of the music sound geared toward a captive audience being conducted through the motions. It’s a most welcome and inevitably stunning missing chapter from one of jazz’s finest quartets and a new set of explosive motifs to obsess over.

“The best-kept secret in the Coltrane archive seems to leap between every stage of his career, like a greatest-hits sampler being improvised in real time” - Uncut “Improv conundrums but with an unwavering spiritual intent, these on-the-f ly Coltrane experiments were part of a 1960s step-change in the evolution of jazz and much else in contemporary music, still making waves from those longgone analogue days to the eclectic present.” - The Guardian “The tunes recorded on 6 March bear no relation to that relaxed and delicate session [with Johnny Hartman]. Instead, they’re much closer to the kind of high-octane material the quartet were pursuing in live performance at the time, albeit with considerably less intensity than could be witnessed on the bandstand.” - Wire

Compilations & Soundtracks Another fine year for compilations and soundtracks tunning new work alongside brilliant curation and some great label appraisals. It was tenth anniversary years for three labels we like a great deal, with Captured Tracks, Erased Tapes and Brainfeeder all turning ten.

CAPTURED TRACKS CT10

ERASED TAPES 1 + 1 = X

Named as the result of confusion around the title of the first Blank Dogs EP (fronted by founder Mike Sniper), Captured Tracks has grown into an unwavering Brooklyn institution of independent music. What followed was a decade of revered releases from a roster that defined the label: Wild Nothing, The Soft Moon, Beach Fossils, Mac DeMarco, DIIV, Craft Spells and more, alongside the new generation of signings B Boys, Lina Tullgren, EZTV, Molly Burch and MOURN. To celebrate the last decade, they’ve produced two budget-priced vinyl samplers that showcase now-classics from a roster of vibrant and varied artists. Plus, they’ve thrown in an exclusive or two … including the supergroup Shitfather!

Originally issued as part of the Record Store Day celebrations, Erased Tapes rounded off a jubilant year of tenth anniversary celebrations with a very special release, 1+1=X, a set of exclusive music from every artist on the label.

Featuring never before heard tracks from Nils Frahm, Kiasmos and A Winged Victory For The Sullen, 1+1=X sees Erased Tapes artists come together to make an album as a collective. Sharing the same space, instruments and each other’s capabilities during a residency at Vox-Ton studio in Berlin, they recorded 20 songs to mark the label’s 10-year history.

“It was important to create something communal and reflective of our time, to capture something of value using traditional recording techniques, experimenting and reacting to each other in real time, sharing the same space.”

- Robert Raths, Erased Tapes.

Compilations & Soundtracks

BRAINFEEDER X Flying Lotus’ immaculate Brainfeeder label marked ten years in the game with X, a 36 track compilation featuring 22 brand new, previously unreleased cuts by Thundercat, Martyn, Georgia Anne Muldrow, mr.oizo, Jameszoo, Dorian Concept, and Iglooghost.

For the last ten years, Brainfeeder has reminded the world that the future is only as far away as it needs to be. It’s less a label than an international conspiracy to conquer clichéd sounds, a glowing neon helix reorganizing the DNA of hip-hop and house, jazz and ambient, techno and soul, funk and footwork and every other strain of beat music that eludes compartmentalisation.

The label has become a sanctified refuge for those who believe that nothing is too weird, genre is largely obsolete, and the wildest style will always reign supreme.

WE OUT HERE We Out Here is a project from Brownswood Recordings celebrating London’s vibrant young jazz scene. Featuring tracks from an amazing roster of new talents: Maisha, Ezra Collective, Moses Boyd, Theon Cross, Nubya Garcia, Shabaka Hutchings, Triforce, Joe Armon-Jones, and Kokoroko.

It’s a vivid snapshot of the scene with an hour of daring and uplifting music - from rebooted spiritual-jazz through abstract experimentation to Afrobeat and dancefloor with gestures to grime, hip hop and funk.

Pretty special stuff.

JD TWITCH PRESENTS KREATUREN DER NACHT Curated by Optimo’s JD Twitch, Kreaturen Der Nacht (“Creatures of the Night”), brings together classics, rarities and oddities from Germany’s original post-punk and DIY scene. It maps a parallel history of German post-punk in the early 1980s, an era when Berlin wasn’t the enlightened European hub of designers, DJs and tech companies it is now, but the still-scarred and Berlin Wall-riven frontline in the Cold War. Raw analogue-produced post-punk through to ambient and often dub or synthesiser-influenced experiments in atmosphere, it’s a pretty special set.

“It is not designed to tell a definitive story of what was going on in Germany in this era, rather, it is simply an arbitrary collection of records I adore from a specific era with a specific attitude that hopefully together sum up some of the musical undercurrents in Germany at that time.”

- JD Twitch

KODE9 & BURIAL FABRICLIVE 100 For the 100th and final instalment of the iconic FABRICLIVE mix CD series (in its current form at least) two UK pioneers in Kode9 and Burial united for a hypnotic 74 minute mix. They are each credited with fostering esoteric, hyperlocal sounds and steering them to global recognition, helping to shape the landscape of contemporary electronic music as we know it. They are also close peers, having influenced each other’s careers immeasurably over many years. A superb farewell, documentation of two of London’s remarkably skilled artists delving deep for an undeniably unique collaboration.

Compilations & Soundtracks

UNUSUAL SOUNDS Anthology Recordings (from the fine folks at Mexican Summer) have been putting out some superb compilations in the last few years with everything from jazz, newage, spiritual and fuzzed-out rock and roll gems. Unusual Sounds, quite possibly our favourite release yet, encapsulates the niche and fascinating subculture of library music. Genres were spliced, conventions dispensed with, and oftentimes hybrid music of astonishing complexity was produced.

Elements of rock, jazz, soul, even twentiethcentury avant-garde composition were all utilised, and no stone was left unturned in the compilation. Tracks that until recently were only available to serious collectors, diggers and music producers who wanted that killer bassline or breakbeat, it’s one hell of a trip.

AFRICAN SCREAM CONTEST II Ten years on from the first instalment, intrepid crate-digger Samy Ben Redjeb unveils a new treasure trove of Vodouninspired Afrobeat heavy funk crossover greatness. Right from the lacerating raw guitar fanfare which kicks off Les Sympathics’ pile-driving opener, it’s clear that African Scream Contest II is going to be every bit as joyous a voyage of discovery as its 2008 predecessor. Like every other Analog Africa release, African Scream Contest II is illuminated by meticulously researched text and effortlessly fashionforward photography supplied by the artists themselves. Some amazing characters and some amazing stories alongside the gut-busting yelps, lethally well-drilled horn sections and irresistibly insistent rhythms.

BASEMENT BEEHIVE: THE GIRL GROUP UNDERGROUND Basement Beehive is a collection of girl group obscurities running behind the pop success of groups like the Shirelles and the Shangri-La’s. A few tracks have been included on compilations or playlists before, but the crate-diggers at Numero go deep and stay there. Beehive is less about an idealized “girl group” genre tag, and more about an early-60s explosion of female pop energy. Which means there’s room for the recording debut of then-14-year-old future funk star Lyn Collins (on Charles Pikes & the Scholars’ driving Unlucky in Love) and Bernadette Carroll (who sings uncredited background vocals on My Boyfriend’s Back) attempting her own Twist-style dance craze on Do the Humpty Dump. Full of explorative energy and unpicks some assumed musical lineages, bloody good stuff.

Compilations & Soundtracks

SPIDER-JAZZ – KPM CUES USED IN THE AMAZING ANIMATED SERIES - THAT WE ARE NOT ALLOWED TO MENTION FOR LEGAL REASONS Way back in 1967, an animated superhero cartoon was released into the world. It was created by Grantray-Lawrence Animation and was based on a web-spinning, crime fighting blue and red dressed character that had originated in 1962, in Marvel Comics by Stan Lee and Steve Ditko. This amazing series (that we’re not allowed to mention the name of for legal reasons) ran on ABC TV in the USA, then Canada, then a few years later started to spread its web further, running here in the UK throughout summer holidays, after school and possibly early mornings at weekends in the late 1970s. The series then got released on VHS video (and probably Betamax too) in the mid 1980s and still continues to spin its animated magic around the world through further broadcasts, YouTube and DVDs. This is a lush, jazzy collection of the cues and background music that made it so groovy.

TED DICKS Virgin Witch (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) Unreleased baroque jazz horror score to controversial lesbian sex cult witchcraft exploitation drama from 1973, composed by the man who wrote the Catweazle theme! Ted Dicks is not that well known as a composer these days, but back in the mid1960s he was composing library music as well penning some of the greatest comedy songs of the era. His work was performed

by Kenneth Williams, Petula Clarke, Bernard Cribbins, Topol and more. But until now, little has been known of his brief flirtation with film music. Virgin Witch was his first brush with film scoring. The film was produced by legendary wrestling commentator Ken Walton (under his Sexploitation pseudonym of “Ralph Solomans”), with the help of Hazel Adair, a woman famed for co-creating the long running UK TV soap Crossroads. Virgin Witch was a racy film, turned down at least once for certification by the BBFC. The score itself is a unique and quite beautiful pop baroque work, utilizing the cimbalom, an instrument more than likely played here

by Ipcress file musician John Leach.

DAVID SHIRE The Conversation This is not a reissue. Remarkably, this is the first time that this brilliant minimal score has been issued on vinyl. A total must-have for sound-oriented cinephiles! This is the first ever pressing of David Shire’s original sound track for The Conversation, a Francis Ford Coppola classic about a wire-tapper in 1970s NYC, brilliantly played by Gene Hackman, and featuring sound design by the living legend Walter Murch.

Compilations & Soundtracks

THOM YORKE Suspiria [Music for the Luca Guadagnino Film] Thom Yorke made his first foray into film scores this year with with Suspiria, 25 original compositions written specifically for Luca Guadagnino’s reimagining of the 1977 Dario Argento horror classic.

Suspirium is a real stunner, a hypnotic piano ballad with his unmistakable vocals front and centre. Across the LP there are some really chilling tones and the sound design is lush, very special indeed actually.

ADRIAN UTLEY & WILL GREGORY Arcadia (Music From The Motion Picture) Adrian Utley (Portishead) and Will Gregory (Goldfrapp)’s score to the quite remarkable Arcadia. Combing through 100 film clips from the last 100 years, lifted from the BFI National Archive and regional archives around the UK, the film explores the changing seasons and the ways in which they affect our relationship with the landscapes we find ourselves in. Two tracks - Lowlands and Bonny Boy - are by the legendary folk singer Anne Briggs, with musical arrangement by Utley and Gregory behind. The pair’s score takes influence from a wide range of genres, marrying classical and folk styles with more experimental electronic elements and even punk.

BERNARD PARMEGIANI Les Soleils de l’Île de Pâques / La Brûlure de Mille Soleils

MOGWAI Kin Although they have previously flexed their muscles with soundtracks for the TV productions Atomic and Les Revenants, also the quite remarkable Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait documentary, Kin is the iconic post-rockers’ first venture into the world of the feature film soundtracks. It is a starkly beautiful suite of music, using their brooding energy in a series of impressionistic sketches that tease at the band’s most notable sonic eruptions.

Two previously unreleased and stellar soundtracks by Bernard Parmegiani for avant-garde films finally surface on Switzerland’s WRWTFWWR label. Sourced from the original reels, and neatly packed together in a gatefold sleeve double LP with English and French liner notes, they’re pressed from original tapes and containing the soundtracks for Pierre Kast films, les soleils de l’île de pâques [1972] and la brûlure de mille soleils [1965].

Compilations & Soundtracks

SOUNDTRACK OF THE YEAR SANDRA KERR & JOHN FAULKNER Bagpuss 12th of February, 1974, and for an audience of small children at 1:45pm, a life irrevocably coloured by the wayward wonderings of one saggy cloth cat. Some 44 years later and Earth Recordings opens the door to Bagpuss & Co. once again, revealing for the first time the original music in all its newly-mastered splendour. Sandra Kerr and John Faulkner’s compositions are so joyous, a patchwork of traditional pieces, improvisations and half-remembered tunes.

Such a beautiful and loving presentation too, beautiful new artwork from Hannah Alice and liner notes from Stewart Lee, Daniel Postgate, Frances Mckee (The Vaselines) Andy Votel and Sarah Martin (Belle & Sebastian). Wonderfully simple music that is so evocative and - for a certain generation - evocatively linked to that saggy cloth cat.

For another, it’s a thrilling entry point to a very special new world.

“Between them Sandra and John could play every sort of instrument from a mountain dulcimer to an Irish fiddle. They knew and could sing every tune in the world and didn’t bother with written music, except as a last resort. They were exactly suited to Gabriel the Toad and Madeleine the Rag Doll and in those roles were happy to play whatever music and sing whatever songs would be needed.”

- Oliver Postgate (in his autobiography Seeing Things) Illustrations by Hannah Alice

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TAL NATIONAL

JON HOPKINS

Tantabara

Singularity

FatCat Records / February

At their very core, Tal National’s intent is to make the people dance. New LP Tantabara on FatCat is a right banger, full of brisk Saharan grooves and hypnotic rhythms. It is full body music that really grabs you with its heavy jamming and trance percussion. It’s a pretty sweet ride through traditional, psych, call and response, stoner jams and some sort of vocoder-neo-modern pop.

Amazing musicianship and gestures towards other classic Malian groups… just much gnarlier! Their ability to lock in then change pace is disarming and really exciting. Like this a lot. Live must be a trip.

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Domino Recording Company / May

Singularity is the fifth LP from Jon Hopkins and his first full-length solo outing since our 2013 Record of the Year, Immunity. The product of an intense two-year process, It’s pretty much the follow-up that everyone wanted. It takes the very nucleus of its predecessor and makes an album that is bigger, denser and even more ambitious. His work as a producer has placed him in the very top bracket, sensitive and thoughtful but able to use emotions in the atmospherics. The tones are stirring, the bass is animalistic somehow and the depth of each composition is as thrilling as it is daunting. It’s an album that has not just successfully connected ambient music and techno but has found its own space. Thought we’d torn a speaker at the end of the title track on the first play... It is proper lush.

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FIELD MUSIC

ROSS FROM FRIENDS

Open Here

Family Portrait

Memphis Industries / February

Brainfeeder / July

February’s Record of the Month was Open Here, the new long player from Field Music, a mosaic of glimmering pop excess and maximalism. Peter and David Brewis are two of the smartest musical minds we’ve known, writers of incredibly tense and ridiculously fun pop music. Their sixth studio album under the Field Music banner (alongside soundtracks, School of Language, The Week That Was and the forthcoming You Tell Me) is the most loving exploration into pop and prog. Flutes and flugelhorn play alongside the synths, saxophones, hyper-pop drums, the cutting guitars and layers and layers of expertly delivered vocals. On that topic, adding Liz Corney (Cornshed Sisters) to the Brewis mix is inspired. Some of the prog world can drag the life out of you into a black hole of smugness, and avoiding this has always been Field Music’s greatest triumph... it’s euphoric in its brilliance, it is ridiculously good fun.

British producer Ross From Friends effortlessly shifts from the world of lo-fi to the world of FlyLo with his debut album Family Portrait on Flying Lotus’ Brainfeeder. Incredible attention to detail.

There are layers upon layers of beats and tones and textures and pulses, but it’s as thrilling far away as it is up close. The sonic palettes are indebted to his bedroom origins, crunching and compressed but enchanting and very intimate. Considering how meticulous it is, it has some of the easiest beats to lock into this year. Very highly recommended indeed... but then, it’s Brainfeeder... what were you expecting?!

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SNAIL MAIL

LAURENCE PIKE

Lush

Distant Early Warning

Matador / June

The Leaf Label / March

Lush is the debut LP from Lindsey Jordan as Snail Mail, and it really is quite a wonder. How boring of us to go on about the poor girl’s age, but she has delivered a very assured and very accomplished debut LP at just 19. Although in principle a lo-fi indie rock record, the more you listen to it, the more you realise how hyper clean it is, it’s almost like a pop record using alt music stylings… all of which is intended as high praise, you can hear every beat, strum and word. Jordan is a brilliant central point, using countless opportunities to reveal her feelings and insecurities, she’s insightful with a very modern ennui. When she steps up the pace or intensity, it’s pretty powerful stuff.

Distant Early Warning is the debut solo album by Australian drummer, percussionist and composer Laurence Pike. We’ve been big fans of PVT (formerly Pivot) and Szun Waves (whose wonderful New Hymn To Freedom we have already discussed), and there is plenty of that same cosmic exploration going on here, but in a more microscopic and minimalistic way.

Originally conceived as a technological and spiritual jazz suite for drums, Distant Early Warning is a series of solo performances for kit and sampler, recorded live in a single day. The basis of the tracks is formed by slowly evolving drones and electronic pulses, which beautifully frame the frenetic drums and the rich tones they can create, from the booming and bending bass echoes to the dancing cymbals and skins. Sublimely dreamlike, you’ll hear something new each time.

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43

HALEY HEYNDERICKX

DUNGEN & WOODS

I Need to Start a Garden

Myths 003

Mama Bird Recording Co. / March

2018 has been a year for wonderful voices, and Haley Heynderickx has stood out as someone we have loved listening to. The Portland songwriter’s full debut was a fraught recording process, with technical mishaps and misstarts destroying confidence and budgets, but tenacity and a really amazing voice dragged I Need to Start a Garden over the line. There is a supporting cast of musicians on rattling drums and strung-out reverbing guitars, but she feels solitary as the voice and the focus point of the album. Unless you listen hard, for the majority it is just her and that amazing vocal… which is exactly what it deserves.

Tonally it feels bruised, and although often sung in metaphors it has a certain optimism in the purity of her voice and the way it winds and holds notes.

Mexican Summer / March

The third instalment of Mexican Summer’s brilliant collaborative EP series, Myths 003 - based around the recording residency at Marfa Myths festival brought together two of our favourite bands, hazy Brooklyn alt pioneers Woods and Stockholm’s psychedelic masters Dungen. Tour mates a decade ago and friends ever since, the two sets of explorers have truly managed to achieve the seemingly impossible on this wonderful set of seven songs they sound not only like Woods, like Dungen, but they also sound like something entirely new, and that is pretty thrilling. The full audio Venn diagram.

All the hallmarks of each band are here, hypnotic rhythms with blurred tones. This is not idle jamming, everything is considered and falls easily into the right space. A real trip, hope we see them all again soon.

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YOUNG FATHERS

SOCCER MOMMY

Cocoa Sugar

Clean

Ninja Tune / March

Cocoa Sugar is the sleek new LP from the Mercury Prize-winning Young Fathers. They are absolute masters of filling their sound with hundreds of tones, textures, lines, thoughts... it’s hectic... but they are so skilled at making the whole thing sound euphoric and utterly charging. As with previous releases, the Scottish trio prove themselves adept at navigating between pop music, R&B, club music and even dub and industrial sounds.

They rap, but suggesting that they are definable by any one (or two, or three) genre is a disservice to the complexity of what they are doing. It’s more overtly religious than before and that energy is palpable, it’s as direct as they’ve ever sounded.

Cocoa Sugar moves between being beautiful and being jacked up, both are pretty glorious.

41 SHAME

Songs of Praise Dead Oceans / January

Released all the way back on the 12th January, what a pummelling way it was to start 2018 off with the brutally addictive debut album from Shame. They’ve long had a reputation as a legit and explosive live band, and perhaps the biggest success of Songs of Praise is that they have captured that thrill on record. There is plenty of scuzz and frenzy, but it is actually very smart, the riffs and production on One Rizla are about as anthemic and emotive as anything British and Guitary in the last thirty years.

They’ve done a brilliant job of putting everything in its right place without over-filtering or losing any of the alchemy that rattles it along, it’s a very vibrant album. Brilliant and exciting post-punk with some really poppy hooks. Right up our street.

Fat Possum / March

Clean is the debut album proper from Nashvillebased, 20 year-old Sophie Allison who records under the name Soccer Mommy. It follows on from the critically acclaimed Collection that you’ll remember as one of our 2017 albums of the year.

Clean is a set of honest, uncomplicated and brilliantly crafted songs that confirm Allison as a fine songwriter and important new voice. The arrangements are plaintive and introspective, but in her honesty, there is a sort of euphoria from common experience, repressions and fears... she’s really tapped into something powerful and in such a beautifully human and articulate way too.

Stylistically it borrows in a very fresh way from alt and grunge, always playing to the directness of the song. She is a brilliant bandleader with a voice we love listening to, sad and important songs.

39 BEAK

>>>

Invada Records / September

>>> is the third album from BEAK>, an LP that sounds like dreams and memories. There are loads of things going on here. Pounding krautrock and motorik beats, tear-jerking woozy guitar riffs, warped tapes, dense harmonies, sinister cinematics... it’s a really beautiful blurry sound.

Billy Fuller, Geoff Barrow (of Portishead) and Will Young (not of X-Factor) have created something that really does not sound like anyone else. An album you can lock into and get totally lost in, >>> is the sort of LP that we’re going to put on at Drift, stare out the windows and just lose time.

A pretty glorious little daze. Thinking about it, It might be called “Greater-than Greater-than Greater-than”, it’s certainly a perfectly eerie little masterpiece that is the sum of its three parts.

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LET’S EAT GRANDMA I’m All Ears

Transgressive Records / June

The wonderfully named Let’s Eat Grandma return with I’m All Ears, an even greater revelation than Rosa Walton and Jenny Hollingworth’s globally acclaimed debut. It is astonishingly smart pop, there is such an unassuming confidence in their creativity. Still teens, they seem totally unaffected by anything and almost entirely oblivious to rules, styles or forms. The moments of grandeur are beautifully balanced by intimate ballads and it all gives grounding to frenetic pop and some pretty outrageous moments. Positively kaleidoscopic production from David Wrench, SOPHIE and Faris Badwan of The Horrors, all adding different gestures to the mix. The most brilliantly fresh-sounding palette of tones from dragging strings, perfect beats to twinkling lights and then they sing... which is really special, innovative and quietly euphoric.

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36 SOULWAX

ESSENTIAL Deewee / June

Soulwax released ESSENTIAL this year, an hour of whirling analogue synths and beats from the brothers Dewaele. It was originally broadcast for Pete Tong’s BBC Radio 1 Essential Mix in May 2017, the first ever entirely original mix. They explained at the time: “We chose to do what every sane human being would do, we decided to lock ourselves into our studio for two weeks and make an hour of new music based around the word ‘Essential’, instead of preparing a mix of already existing music.” Absolute nutters, but it is a fine testament to their ability to create and lock into some seriously squelchy beats. Gone back and back to this all year, it really is a scorcher.

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BINKER AND MOSES

EFRIM MANUEL MENUCK

Alive In The East?

Pissing Stars

Gearbox Records / June

Constellation Records / February

One year on from their highly praised Journey to the Mountain of Forever, Binker and Moses return with a blistering assault on the senses. Ten new tracks featuring a giant wealth of talent alongside Binker and Moses themselves (including UK free jazz legend Evan Parker and one half of Yussef Kamaal), Alive In The East? captures 45 minutes of spontaneity, composition, and quite a bit of magic. Binker and Moses are both collectively and individually a huge part of London’s everexpanding new jazz scene, and their willingness and ability to question traditionalism and bring in effervescent new influences is just the spirit of jazz… for us anyway. Somewhere between free jazz, spiritual and fusions of contemporary and afrobeat textures, it highlights all the players individually and the spells they create en masse.

Pissing Stars is the second solo LP from Efrim Manuel Menuck, the co-founder of Godspeed You! Black Emperor and Thee Silver Mt. Zion. It’s a mysterious and complex record, hugely evocative and the sort of thing you want to try and unpack.

GY!BE have always been able to conjure and conduct strong emotions, and Menuck solo is just as much in control. The contrast to the Goliath-like sound that GY!BE create is to be expected, but that is not to say that Pissing Stars doesn’t have its own intensity and emotional hugeness, just in a much more intimate way, he can make smaller more subtle gestures that only work as a solo artist. It’s far from easy going and gets as close to harrowing as anything this year, but there are moments of light on the second side that give the darkness context.

Threatening, chilling, arresting and really addictive.

New West Records proudly celebrates 20 years of releasing music with integrity. Enjoy our latest releases from 2018 and discover classics from our past

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32

COURTNEY BARNETT

E RUSCHA V

Tell Me How You Really Feel

Who Are You

Marathon Artists / May

Beats In Space / March

Tell Me How You Really Feel is the second full studio album from the marvellous Courtney Barnett. It follows the double EP A Sea of Split Peas, her critically acclaimed 2015 debut album Sometimes I Sit And Think And Sometimes I Just Sit, and a recent top 10 collaborative record, Lotta Sea Lice, with Kurt Vile. She has subtly - and with great credibility and originality - become one of the most important voices around. As ever, she is brilliantly funny, and her laconic delivery is the most disarming way of saying all sorts, and that is the narrative of this new LP. It’s very open, it’s very honest and in giving more of herself she’s taken a very big step forward. People are going to take a lot from this album, because there is a lot there.

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Who Are You is a new collection of free-form, freeflowing music from E Ruscha V, the shape-shifting producer and musician Eddie Ruscha. The album skips about with a real lightness, influences in new age, Balearic, dub and afro rhythms all orchestrated into a very unique sound. It’s such a fun record, one part dreamlike, one part chill, one part jaunty. One of the big components is the use of the Yamaha CS-80 synth, the model Vangelis famously used to shape the Blade Runner soundtrack, and its echoes are like a murky shadow… Who Are You could in sections very well be the soundtrack to an earlier time and summer haze before the Tyrell Corporation shaped the LA gloom. Effervescent ambients, sonic moodscapes and bubbling little pop songs, it’s one of the most sunny 35 minutes you’ll find this year.

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RIVAL CONSOLES

OUR GIRL

Persona

Stranger Today

Erased Tapes / April

Cannibal Hymns / August

When you love the artist and you love the label, it can be hard to offset expectation of a new release and listen with clarity. Rival Consoles returned on Erased Tapes this year with Persona, and whether he is someone we admire a lot or not, it is undeniably a gloriously organic mix of analogue synths, warped acoustic instruments and effects pedals that creates a vivid and diverse album of sonic compositions. For our money, he’s one of the most emotional electronic music makers around.

Moments of introspection alongside some pretty pounding beats, it’s ambitious and hugely smart in its intricate layering and atmospheric spaces. He has created an album that feels totally maximal and almost planet-like, but the real joy is dialling into each track and observing the microscopic and carefully calculated moments that make it all so rich.

Our Girl’s debut LP Stranger Today has been one of the year’s most unexpected treasures. We got passed a copy early on (in no small part thanks to the babes over at Resident Music in Brighton) and we’re so glad we stuck it on. The Brighton-formed, London-based trio make fuzzy, hazy songs and there is something pretty special reverbing around the waves. It’s a very foggy sort of garage-rock, but it’s no idle pedal-stomping and shoe-gazing, the core of the album is the songwriting and it’s very assured for a debut. They worked on recordings with Bill Ryder-Jones who became a guitar godfather and unofficial fourth member of the group, and the production is maximal whilst still giving the songs a gnarled clarity. Primal and hugely powerful without ever seeming out of control, they have a deft touch.

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TVAM

MELODY’S ECHO CHAMBER

Psychic Data

Bon Voyage

Psychic Data / October

Wigan native Joe Ogden is TVAM, and the debut LP Psychic Data (released on his own imprint of the same name) was self-produced and homerecorded before handing over mixing duties to Dean Honer of Moonlandingz, The Eccentronic Research Council and International Teachers Of Pop. It’s genuinely hard to imagine something as deep, ambitious and full of texture being cooked up in his bedroom. Huge moments of synth-pop colliding with crunching kosmische and sections of gloriously dystopian futuristic soundtracks. The sonics are seriously gratifying, totally maximal and somewhere between raves and shoegaze. What really elevated the album for us is the way he has captured such a vibe with Psychic Data as a whole, it is very much an album. The sequencing and pace is pitch perfect, it casts a hazy spell and is totally captivating across every one of its 36 minutes.

Euphoric, and very highly recommended indeed.

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HELENA HAUFF Qualm

Ninja Tune / August

Our Girl’s debut LP Stranger Today has been one of the year’s most unexpected treasures. We got passed a copy early on (in no small part thanks to the babes over at Resident Music in Brighton) and we’re so glad we stuck it on. The Brighton-formed, London-based trio make fuzzy, hazy songs and there is something pretty special reverbing around the waves. It’s a very foggy sort of garage-rock, but it’s no idle pedal-stomping and shoe-gazing, the core of the album is the songwriting and it’s very assured for a debut. They worked on recordings with Bill Ryder-Jones who became a guitar godfather and unofficial fourth member of the group, and the production is maximal whilst still giving the songs a gnarled clarity. Primal and hugely powerful without ever seeming out of control, they have a deft touch.

Domino Recording Company / June

French singer-songwriter Melody Prochet’s selftitled debut album as Melody’s Echo Chamber was a technicolour collection of psych-pop moments produced with her then-boyfriend, Tame Impala’s Kevin Parker. It was released six years ago, and although she started work on its successor almost immediately, that follow-up arrived only this year, following a hazy timeline and a potentially lifechanging injury (all that has ever been made public was it involved exhaustive rehabilitation from a brain aneurysm and broken vertebrae). Through adversity (she actually underplayed the whole experience) the wait is very much worth it though, and her second LP Bon Voyage is a wonderfully eclectic take on psychedelia with its own, distinct voice; the main narrative feels like the journey to find it. Working with her on the album were some notable guest contributors, including Dungen’s Reine Fiske, Gustav Ejstes and Johan Holmegard, Fredrik Swahn of The Amazing and Pond’s Nicholas Allbrook. All of the guests pay off brilliantly to the mix, there are scorched-out sections that have echos of Pond’s burning rock psych, pop sensitive swells that bring The Amazing to mind and a richly autumnal sounding haze (and flute!) that is inescapably Dungen, but suggesting that any of them overpower the clarity of what Melody has constructed would be misleading. As Bon Voyage’s feet are planted in psych French pop we must make the obligatory mention of Jean-Claude Vannier and Serge Gainsbourg, but again, it has channelled them rather than mimicked. Lots of really inventive and downright weird changes of direction with some lush vintage psych shapes. Groovy and genuinely psychedelic. Even a few dozen plays in you’ll start to find weird gestures and little touches, there is density to this that has kept us going back.

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HIEROGLYPHIC BEING

SPIRITUALIZED®

The Red Notes

And Nothing Hurt

Soul Jazz Records / February

Bella Union / September

The Red Notes is the stunning new album from Chicago’s finest electronic futurist Hieroglyphic Being, aka Jamal Moss, on Soul Jazz Records.

An expansive hour-long set of club music that brings in europhic spirituality, progressively using classic Chicago house and acid textures.

A prolific outfit, The Red Notes is in fact one of three releases this year alone, with a collaborative album released with The Configurative or Modular Me Trio on Planet Mu and The Replicant Dream Sequence created as part of the Moog Blue PA14 Series for the brilliant Moog Recordings Library. The Red Notes is built on the fusing of organic and synthetic electronic instrumentation, real-time live instrumentation and over-dubbed technologies, creating a meticulous and hypnotic soundscape with a very human and organic effect, the colliding of analogue and electronic worlds in Hieroglyphic Being’s hands. Born and based in Chicago, Moss’s music embodies two of the city’s cultural foundation blocks and musical lineage.

Originally mentored by House icons Adonis and Steve Poindexter, Moss’s credentials are solid, also running the highly regarded Mathematics label.

Likewise, his work in jazz is bona fide, previously recording with the Arkestra leader Marshall Allen and a host of free jazz players. Both spiritual jazz and Chicago House are perhaps as fashionable as they have been in 30 years, but there is not one moment of hyperbole in The Red Notes’ musical cross roads. It’s an album about musical duality that feels experimental and progressive, whilst also respectful to everything that has inspired it.

September’s Record of the Month at Drift was picked unanimously (and perhaps predictably) as Spiritualized®’s utterly brilliant new LP And Nothing Hurt. Jason Pierce has one of the most revered and feverishly supported discographies in contemporary music as co-founder of Spacemen 3 and at the centre of the Spiritualized universe.

This eighth studio LP as Spiritualized® is as grand as you’d expect, swooning space-rock with fragile but direct confessionals about life, love, regret and finding your own space. He’s long suggested that the project has become bigger than he can bear, acknowledging more than once during its creation that And Nothing Hurt would likely be his last outing as Spiritualized®. It really is maximal, it is the final perfect delivery of a piece that spent years in development, the most musically dense pop music. Whereas Spiritualized® has long felt like the last broadcasts from someone floating further and further away into space, And Nothing Hurt is perhaps the solitary figure making gestures of returning back, the metaphors are less hazy and the lyrics are more grounded in the day to day. A rattling rock and roll gospel, with hymns of self-doubt but also delivered with a gentle belligerence, there is an acceptance that mistakes have been made but the man is who the man is.

The fragile vocal gets stronger on I’m Your Man as he proclaims “But if you want wasted, loaded, permanently folded … I’m your man”. An album that truly matches its own lofty ambitions. Obsessively built, meticulously delivered, it’s a daydream of haze and beauty with moments of frenetic buzzing where it all teeters on the edge of cacophony, you can feel the dark energy and ever-present duality of Spiritualized®… there is no light without dark.

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DANIEL BLUMBERG

OLIVER COATES

Minus

Shelley’s on Zenn-La

Mute / May

RVNG Intl. / September

Minus is the debut album - under his own name certainly - from Daniel Blumberg. His teenage band Cajun Dance Party signed to XL whilst he was still at school, then onto and through the projects of Yuck, Oupa and Hebronix, and still now only 27 years old.

Minus is a fragile and creatively bold piece of work, in many ways a statement of intent from an artist who has found his voice and set his intentions and focus on moving ever forwards. The record weds an improvisational, free-music ethos to the rawest emotional songwriting, rooted deep in the personal turmoil Blumberg experienced whilst making the record. He had previously spent much of the last five years working solely within the radical community of musicians centered on London’s Café OTO, where he has been regularly improvising with a host of forward-thinking, uncompromising musicians. From this community, Blumberg forged a strong creative relationship with violinist Billy Steiger and double bassist Tom Wheatley, and together they crafted a new, singular music centered on Blumberg’s songwriting. There are more than a few touches of the emotional intensity that Talk Talk found through a controlled hush on Spirit of Eden and Laughing Stock, but it is also arresting and progressive in its experimentalism, it feels pretty dangerous at times.

Seven deeply moving songs teetering deliciously on the brink of collapse, Minus was our May Record of the Month and was, and is, an album that has been a strange pleasure to introduce to people.

London-based cellist, composer and producer Oliver Coates released his third solo LP this year, Shelley’s on Zenn La, via RVNG INTL. Regular readers will remember that we raved about his Upstepping and Towards The Blessed Islands albums on the amazing PRAH label, not to forget the stunning Remain Calm collaboration with Mica Levi, so it is little wonder that we were hyped on this one as soon as it dropped. You wanna talk about smart (he studied at the Royal Academy of Music, has been an artist in residency at London’s Southbank Centre, and received the Royal Philharmonic Society Young Artist Award), this is properly brilliant music, it’s certainly fun and actually deeply addictive, and when you really listen carefully it has such a beautiful structure to it all. His classical credentials are pretty stunning (working on Jonny Greenwood’s scores for The Master and Phantom Thread, Mica Levi’s Under the Skin score and making crucial contributions to Radiohead’s A Moon Shaped Pool album), but Shelley’s is actually more about breaking down the lines between classical, club and experimental music, and the fluidity in which he moves between and blurs the lines between the three is worth high praise. It’d be pretty much impossible to talk about Oliver Coates without referencing Arthur Russell, such was the seismic influence that Russell had on the cello, but it would be fair to highlight that Coates has channelled the same searching artistic energy without sounding derivative of Russell… far easier said than done. Guest vocals from Malibu and Chrysanthemum Bear are beautiful counterbalances against the beats and drive, and add further facets to this fascinating and rewarding album.

Honestly can’t recommend this highly enough.

Lee Drift would also like to let you know that ‘Zenn-La’ is the name of Marvel Comics superhero The Silver Surfer’s home planet.

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VIRGINIA WING

22 OH SEES

Ecstatic Arrow

Smote Reverser

Fire Records / June

Castle Face / August

Manchester synth-pop duo Virgina Wing - Alice Merida Richards and Sam Pillay - released their third LP Ecstatic Arrow on Fire Records this year, and it is the most accomplished of their career.

They have always been hugely evocative, but there is something about this new LP that feels like everything has really clicked into place, the sound of a band full of supreme confidence. In many ways they are actually slightly more withdrawn than on previous outings, it feels like they know they don’t need to prove anything, there is no thrusting for attention, people will hear it and people will get it.

It might be pigeonholed as dream pop, but there is both a smartness and a sharpness that brings in complex and quite abstract models and also challenging themes, they’re certainly not afraid to gaze in the mirror and question their own place in the world. Although she’s always been a leading person of great charisma, Alice Merida Richards is a total revelation on Ecstatic Arrow, vocally balancing perfectly a calm androgyny that recalls Broadcast or Stereolab, but also an innately sweet and emotive pop styling that is so engaging. The sense of movement on The Second Shift is so evocative, it’s a throwback to the most avant-garde pop of the 80s but with such a contemporary cleanness. A lot of the album accomplishes this in fact, a sense of familiarity and the excitement of something new.

Hazing beeps, deep reverbs and honking horns, it’s brilliantly delivered. Not without its humour, but most importantly it is politically charged and it is honest.

John Dwyer’s Oh Sees (and other guises) always play a big part in our year, right up there with Ty Segall as our go-to prolific kings of the garage scene. Last year we marvelled at both the gnarly riffs on Orc and the woozing baroque organs on Memory of a Cut Off Head (recorded as OCS). In 2016 our Album of the Year was the mighty A Weird Exits, not to forget the band’s eighteenth studio LP An Odd Entrances that followed it by only three months. So this year, the band remain as Oh Sees and drop their fifth album in (one form or another) in just over two years with the prog metal-inspired Smote Reverser. There is often a theme running through their albums, with subtle gestures towards rock sub-genres, that keeps the unhinged train on the tracks whilst never moving them away from sounding inescapably like themselves… no matter what they are called. Prog rock can and does suck the life out of a good riff faster than anything, but one of the many many victories on Smote Reverser is successfully using the prog styling and language whilst clearly having fun, it’s the pomposity of it all. Noodling guitar licks that wrap around Dwyer’s vocals, the multitudes of pounding drums that keep it jaunty, and noted key-stabber Tom Dolas’ rolling rich organ tones throughout. They play it perfectly, it’s about excess and it’s about maximum gratification. There is plenty of doom going on, the foreboding fire demon ripping up a metropolis on the cover for one, but another of the band’s hallmarks is the ability to just change the rules, change the pace, change the script when they like.

Overthrown is as face-meltingly gnarly as they have sounded in yonks, and precedes a section of quite downbeat “bad acid” jams in the middle of the LP. From there on out they get progressive, they get hard and they drop some serious riffs. A band and a man that are remarkably prolific, they are not treading water, nothing is idle. We’re not worthy.

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BLOOD ORANGE

20 MITSKI

Negro Swan

Be The Cowboy

Domino Recording Company / August

Dead Oceans / August

On his fourth studio album as Blood Orange, Britishborn musical polymath Devonté Hynes has created his grandest statement yet, a dizzying album of glimmering pop production and downbeat R&B cuts.

Hynes has been fairly prolific and varied over the last ten years (formerly as Lightspeed Champion, but also as a member of the band Test Icicles) and, as both Blood Orange and producer for hire (FKA twigs, Haim, Florence and the Machine, Carly Rae Jepsen, Solange), has become one of the most prominent and important voices in pop. His ability to oscillate between bands, outlets and duties marks him out as a fearless and provoking renaissance man. Negro Swan is a complex and very living album, whether it is necessarily all about Devonté Hynes is his question to answer, but it is so deeply honest and vibrant, a mirror held up to examine the biggest concerns of our times: sexuality, race and politics. Although there is an impressive roll call of guests - Chairlift’s Caroline Polachek, ColombianCanadian vocalist Tei Shi, NYC vocalist Ian Isiah, alt-soul singer Georgia Anne Muldrow, actress Amandla Stenberg, Kindness’ Adam Bainbridge and Diana Gordon - it flows beautifully, testament to Hynes’ forward-reaching curatorial ear and also, as producer, his ability to bring all the voices into the fold whilst retaining a coherent and very direct album. Activist Janet Mock appears on five of Negro Swan’s sixteen tracks, adding a social gravitas and context to the narrative, with interludes constructed from recorded conversations. Although there is a real directness from the position of the suppressed and the marginalised, there is vivid imagery, the album’s cover photo - shot by the designerphotographer Ana Kras - plays on one of the main narratives of beauty in ugly and the universal gaze.

From the ambition to dream it up and then the ability to deliver it, Negro Swan is a huge album and a thing of significant grace.

Be The Cowboy is the fifth album from Mitski, a singular songwriter and artist who is doubtless one of the most pioneering and enigmatic artists currently making music. Her ability to use different tones and genres at will seems to hang on her instinctive and expert knowledge of song structure.

All 14 of the complex and warping compositions on this album sound like alchemy, they are perfectly created, and in their immaculate structures they offer up dazzling changes of pace that are thrillingly discombobulating. At a little over 30 minutes, the album has only two tracks that hang around any longer than two and a half minutes, short and sweet and never outstaying their welcome.

It also successfully avoids any notions of brevity, she has found the most pristine way to deliver these big narratives about love, life and loss. A huge statement could be echoed as a chorus, but there is something special about delivering the line just the once, it’s hugely captivating in that way, you listen to what she says like she is telling you directly. Two minutes is ample time for her to melt the most epic themes of heartbreak into their simplest and most concentrated form.

Her vocal is beautiful and perfectly controlled, acting as the consistent point across the album that successfully uses reverbing pianos, bleeping synths, the odd riff and pounding disco bangers.

A formidable album from a mercurial talent.

ˆ

19

CHRISTINE & THE QUEENS

18 ARI ROAR

Chris

Calm Down

Because / September

Bella Union / May

We know it’s hardly like she is underground, not receiving universal plaudits or signed to a huge record label, but Héloïse Letissier is making utterly amazing pop music as Christine and the Queens and she has been someone that we’ve just wanted to talk about all year. Following her breakthrough 2014 debut Chaleur Humaine (re-recorded in English language with some production beefing up, peaking at number two in the charts and becoming the UK’s biggest debut record of 2016), Letissier has worked and toured tirelessly, the rigours of dancing and performing every night making her body tougher and more athletic. Alongside the physical transformation, Chris is an emotional reformatting as the lustful, muscular and masculine “Chris”, her hair in a schoolboy crop and a full reversal in gaze.

It’s a character album, highly sexually charged, and harnesses 80s funk and pop maximalism to talk about gender, identity, adolescence, adulthood and the collision of all those things. The production oozes perfect pop with a positively immersive groove. Chris is for the vast majority self-produced

by Letissier, which in the context of the commercial expectations and scale of this release is hugely brave, everything from drum programming, beats and synths, through to choreographing the amazing physicality of the release. Dâm-Funk guests on a couple of tracks and brings in the slow jam, but Letissier’s decision to follow her own vision (abandoning recording sessions with Mark Ronson and Damon Albarn) is a testament to her bravery and artistic vision. Feels like an album that will be of huge importance to people, it will end up being a friend to many. In a funny way, the sincerity gives it a certain effortlessness - singing the album in both English and French for one - it just flows along, raunchy and brilliantly gleaming pop music.

Calm Down is the debut album from Ari Roar, the moniker of Texan singer-songwriter Caleb Campbell.

Clocking in at just 28 minutes, it’s an album of deliciously lo-fi miniatures, short fragments that crackle and burn in a glorious haze and fade into the memory right in front of you. Its blur really struck us on release, neither primitive nor naive, and not masquerading as anything other than a very sweet set of songs. Vocally he is lush, really wistful and full of cheery melancholia. Reminded us of Harry Nilsson in its filmic sunniness - not to mention some very smart chord changes throughout - and even touches of Elliott Smith and John Lennon with the occasional knock-out line. There are more than a few moments that sound Beatlesque in their arrangement actually, Mellotrons and vintage keys wrapping the space up with warmth, no-frills drums keeping Campbell’s conversational melodies on track. There are some very clever moments, and it has been a consistently revisited album for us because it is such a light joy - a real beauty, the very embodiment of short and sweet, like watching a firework display on a hot summer night.

TY SEGALL

17

NILS FRAHM

Freedom’s Goblin

All Melody

Drag City / January

Erased Tapes / January

16

For any of you who know us, stop past the shop regularly or read any of our weekly emails, you’ll be well aware that we are very big fans of Ty Segall. So full disclosure, we own about everything he’s ever put out and have followed his career avidly for the last five to ten years. Few people match his output frequency (under his own name, as part of Fuzz, GØGGS and production work for Thee Oh Sees, White Fence and Cairo Gang); he averages two albums per year in our annual top 100 (Freedom’s Goblin is one of six albums he’s directly been involved in this year), but what genuinely sets him apart is that with each release you see another part of the guy. It’s a HUGE album. A 74 minute, 19 track, double LP of absolute bangers. It is the second double album of his career, but for the first time it is about the “double album” as a medium rather than the constraints and necessity of sides and time. In the true spirit of iconic double albums, Freedom’s Goblin is a trip, broken into four sections that continue to highlight the different facets of Segall as an artist. There are moments of folk, punk, psychedelic jazz, 1960s post-country-pop, funk, pop swooners, gnarled riffs, garage nuggets, sunshine ballads and a storming cover of Hot Chocolate’s 1978 epic Everyone’s a Winner. Without ever feeling contrived or overly bloated, he has positively crammed a riotous kaleidoscope of genres into the mix. It is ambitious, but both Segall as a songwriter, and also his contributors have been nurturing in plain sight over the last decade and this is just another statement of their creative blossoming whilst retaining the primordial spirit that has kept him as the linchpin of the entire garage rock scene.

The biggest single victory on Freedom’s Goblin is fairly simple, it is that anything goes, a creative free-for-all. It’s an album that is an audio collage of influences, feelings and the ambitions of a man and his collaborators, and by giving it everything and total sincerity, Ty has made - perhaps - the finest album in his gigantic back catalogue. It’s an album of magical moments, from the sublime to the gloriously ridiculous, and, as a whole, an album of great charm.

Contemporary-classical pianist and composer Nils Frahm released his seventh studio album this year on the always essential Erased Tapes label, a 74 minute long album that is an epic statement from both artist and label. All Melody is totally fantastical, it is the meticulously crafted end product of not only two years’ studio preparation, but also a decade or so of constantly exploring creative work. To enable himself to truly capture his grandest artistic vision, Frahm spent two years building his own studio space - Saal 3 - as part of the historical 1950s East Berlin Funkhaus building beside the River Spree.

Deconstructing and painstakingly reconstructing the entire space from the cabling and electricity to the woodwork, before moving on to the finer elements: building a pipe organ and creating a mixing desk, all from scratch, with the help of his friends. The very nucleus of the album is clear from the start, it is about the milliscopic and the maximal and how they interact. The album starts with a bold scene-setter in The Whole Universe Wants To Be Touched, with wordless chorales of London’s Shards choir slowly fading to swell into the cavernous space. It then moves gracefully into Sunson, with other-worldly and perfectly weighted electronic pulses, from the natural to the digital. The building’s pristine acoustics are designed specifically for reverbs and Frahm uses them expertly, as an additional instrument to capture the rich dynamics of the space and the scale of how each instrument can be used. He has talked a lot about how each sound should be interchangeable, using its individual timbre and nuance to fulfill different roles on each track. Alongside the pianos and keyboards, there are synthesizers, pipe organs, marimbas, strings, trumpets, gongs and those swelling vocals, a remarkable fullness of sound.

As an album it is immaculate, one of the first times through we played it unreasonably loud and there are just hidden depths and layers to all of this birdsong, fingers on keys, hammers on strings - it is quite astonishing to hear what has been captured and constructed here. Hugely ambitious and thrillingly explorative, an artist really in his prime.

15

14

AMEN DUNES

YO LA TENGO

Freedom

There’s a Riot Going On

Sacred Bones / March

Matador / March

Sometimes to really get the vibe of an album you need to hear it from a distance and really spend time with it. Sometimes you hear something for the first time and it just knocks you back and becomes inescapably linked to that first listen. Freedom, the new long player from Amen Dunes, was the latter, an album introduced to us with the exceptional Miki Dora (an ode to the iconic outlaw surfer) track that sits right in the middle of this beautifully weighted album and perfectly captures its freewheeling and poignant energy. We played it, and played it, and played it. A few days later we got the LP and played it, and played it, and played it some more.

Infatuated. Slow burning gratification and tightly wound emotional intensity on every track and also more broadly in the smoky shadows that the album as a whole leaves behind. Amen Dunes is led by singer-songwriter and musician Damon McMahon and this new collection is a deeply personal set of songs, strangely timeless and always direct.

There are portraits of masculinity often presented so that the listener can draw its own conclusions rather than acting as judge and jury; Miki Dora being a good example, he was cool as fuck, but also a dick. But it is no navel gaze into manhood, McMahon’s mother who was diagnosed with terminal cancer during the album’s recording is the subject of Believe, making an already beautifully tense track all the more devastating. Vocally the delivery is gripping, intense but never overpushed, and the beautifully purring instrumentation supports McMahon throughout with subtlety and no wasted gestures. A very special album.

There’s a Riot Going On is the fifteenth fulllength studio album from Hoboken’s finest, Yo La Tengo. It has nothing to do with Sly Stone’s 1971 album of the same name. Whenever we talk about bands we love there is always the danger of them, perhaps, becoming “popular” and over saturated in a way that takes them away from us. Does this say more about us than anything else? We feel this danger perpetually with Yo La Tengo, for they are likely the very best band to pick up tools in the last 20 odd years and it is both a mystery and some small relief that they remain… ours?

For the uninitiated, Yo La Tengo are husband and wife (and co-founders) Georgia Hubley and Ira Kaplan with James McNew on bass. They create miniature epics, songs that slowly form and loop out of tiny gestures and remain in a hazing drone as they slowly come to light and fade away. They also create brooding beasts with ripping bass parts and hypnotic rhythms. They also create beautiful throw-away moments of pop bliss. All of this without being prescriptive, and There’s a Riot Going On is a perfect example, an hour of moments and vibes that highlight Yo La Tengo as one of the most consistently brilliant and deeply idiosyncratic bands around. At the tail end of the album, there is a little 90-second cut called Esportes Casual… check it out, it’s as quaint as it is slightly surreal. The number of times since March we’ve stuck this track on the house deck and gazed idly out the window has to be in triple figures alone. There is a sense that the three bodies and six limbs working as YLT are one sentient mind, able to adapt and follow the subtlest of gestures as they collaboratively follow a path. There’s a Riot Going On has long sections of ambience and some moments of very sunny utopia, but as a whole still paints a picture of uncertain times with such grace. They are the very best.

What the hell is a Yellow Tango?

13

12

GWENNO

STEPHEN MALKMUS & THE JICKS

Le Kov

Sparkle Hard

Heavenly Recordings / March

Domino Recording Company / May

Back in the early spring, we already knew that Gwenno would be headlining our Sea Change Festival and her brilliant second album - Le Kov would be a huge part of our year. Regional festival nepotism aside, it was very much our Record of the Month in March and actually an album that we have played consistently all year, and one that has shone in a special and different light in each of the seasons. After using Welsh language for her debut album (2014’s Y Dydd Olaf) she has switched to Cornish, her second mother tongue (yes, English being her third language) for Le Kov (which translates as “The Place of Memory”). The album is about the beautiful panoramas and the stunning landscapes, it’s an album about a place that is based both historically and literally as land under foot. There is meaning and history in the words, but being as there are so few Cornish speakers to really appreciate this, the challenge was to create something musically that is cinematic and atmospheric to capture the land. Stylistically it’s not a huge step away from the analogue futurism of her debut, more dreamy futuristic pop that so perfectly captures the sense of special and sacred. Gwenno has created, alongside long-term collaborator and producer Rhys Edwards, an album of supreme psychedelic pop.

High praise, but it’s right up there with Broadcast and a Gainsbourgian line of production. As an album there are plenty of beautifully abstract moments, but the mostly gloriously bizarre is the track Eus Keus? (note, Gwenno’s favourite song) that translates from one of the oldest surviving Cornish phrases: “Is there cheese? Is there or isn’t there? If there’s cheese, bring cheese, and if there isn’t cheese, bring what there is!”.

Stephen Malkmus is our guy. Pavement changed our world, Silver Jews were all about subtlety, and his work with the The Jicks over the last eighteenodd years are doubtless some of the most played records we own (shout to to Ed Thorpe for some rare hook ups). Sparkle Hard is the seventh album he has released with the Jicks and contains some of their finest moments. Older versions of themselves, they sound utterly invigorated, an album brimming with confidence and purpose, with Malkmus’ words flying off his tongue even more seamlessly than usual. It is also some of the most sonically diverse material they have created, sonic palettes extending from Malkmus as a Laurel Canyon troubadour, bits of prog, the odd hum on the vocoder, the occasional orchestral flourish and some pretty cosmic rock with plenty of the hypnotic and jangling interwoven guitar solos that we’re all so accustomed to. Bike Lane is an astonishing song. Malkmus is historically not overly regarded as a political songwriter, but the weight of Freddie Gray’s death (in 2015 from injuries sustained in police custody) is like a punch to the guts as you smirk along to the jaunty, chugging riffs before he proclaims that “his life expectancy was max 25”. It really hits home.

The following wailing riffs and dual shouting vocals at the end of the track are euphoric, a demand for change and accountability, it’s powerful stuff.

Another album highlight follows with the gorgeous Middle America, a breezy and sunny ballad that floats on some of the most Pavement-y licks he has produced in 20 years and disguises a plaintive look at topics like the #MeToo movement… “Men are scum, I won’t deny”. Touching on Black Lives Matter and Facebook also makes Sparkle Hard seem like the most contemporary work he has made in a long while, pinning work to a time is again not something typical across his canon. Although charged and more dynamic than they have perhaps ever sounded, it is wry and devilishly funny (in particular Kim Gordon’s guest vocal late on). 30 years in, this is a real peak in an essential catalogue.

11

10

PARQUETS COURTS

ROLLING BLACKOUTS COASTAL FEVER

Wide Awake!

Hope Downs

Rough Trade / May

Sub Pop / June

Wide Awake! is the fifth studio album from Parquet Courts and they are absolutely on fire. It has the best opening to a record all year, no doubt. Total Football, their ode to Panini stickers and halfand-half scarves, opens with a deliciously New York-sounding guitar tone before changing pace on a beat into deranged Devo-esque mad-eyed post punk. Wide Awake! is just that, a joyous deepdive into all the individual facets that make the band so special - running with them, amplifying them, pushing them to the limit and making them even greater. A lot of the band’s signature to date has been about the performance, they are almost peerless in their ferocity and cohesion, and the albums are documents of what is most impacting the band creatively at the time. For this new LP they have employed the services of Brian Burton (aka Dangermouse) as a sonic ally, someone to do the production heavy lifting and put them back into a position of solely creatives. Wide Awake! as a result is the most richly vibrant album they have made to date and neatly weds influences in punk, funk, outsider art and 60s bubblegum pop. Even at its most thrashing, it’s all such good fun. The band themselves described it as “an attempt to make a punk record you could put on at parties”.

Over the last couple of years they have flexed their creative muscles with solo albums, collaborative releases (Daniele Luppi) and time spent running labels and exhibiting art, but Wide Awake! feels fully woke, fully focused and a band clearly having a lot of fun exploring what they do and what they want to do. Parquet Courts have proved you can be fun, you can be loud, you can be mellow and you can pretty much do what you like so long as you do it with heart, and on Wide Awake! every song is delivered euphorically with hearts firmly on sleeves. If you get put in the position of making a mixtape for New Years Eve, maybe standing behind the decks as DJ, or at least controlling the iPhone at the end of the headphone jack… the title track is 100% guaranteed to see off 2018 with some serious groove and welcome in 2019 with total good vibes. Hell of a band.

You’ll remember we spoke last year about Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever’s marvellous The French Press EP, and Talk Tight EP the year before, so safe to say we were pretty excited for the Melbourne band’s full debut album back in June. The Australian five-piece channel all sorts of guitar jangle in the Antipodean lineage (The Chills, The GoBetweens, The Clean…) but find their own space to interweave words and riffs. The occasional vocal twang is a giveaway, but they have steered well clear of being derivative of their influences, they in fact sound not much like anyone at the moment and that is a very big part of their charm. There is a timeless element to what they are doing, you can well imagine discovering them on a lovingly created cassette mixtape at a car boot sale as much as Pitchfork raving them about them. At the front line of the band are three alternating singer-guitarists - Fran Keaney, Tom Russo and Joe White - filling up the space with overlapping waves of tightly interwound riffs, not mere jangle.

The narratives are suitably impressionistic, and with a wry smirk in the delivery (in particular on the brilliant Cappuccino City), they’re based in the everyday grit but it’s not without some pretty funny lines. Joe Russo (bass) and Marcel Tussie (drums) are due much credit too, it’s the brisk momentum throughout from the propulsive rhythm section that offers the tightly coiled triple guitars opportunity to become so gloriously unsprung. There have been few albums this year that got anywhere near the sense of excited summer night exploration, or open-horizoned road tripping that Rolling Blackouts CF captured on Hope Downs. It’s highly evocative, filled from start to finish with incendiary moments of bitter-sweet pop. Really gratifying stuff.

9 LOW

Double Negative Sub Pop / September

“it sounds nothing like Low and everything like Low… they have made what might be their most relevant album, one that holds a mirror up to the world” - Uncut Duluth trio Low celebrate twenty-five years as a band this year with new LP Double Negative, their twelfth studio album and a totally unexpected and quite revolutionary change of sonic presentation.

They are pioneers of slowcore, meticulous music that is wrapped around the fabled husband-andwife vocals of Alan Sparhawk and Mimi Parker. They have never strayed away from big topics or felt afraid to sing openly with honestly and breathtaking vulnerability, they are a band who create atmospheres. Like with Radiohead’s tense and neurotic Kid A, Bjork’s glacial Homogenic or more recently Bon Iver’s minimalistic 22, A Million (whose producer BJ Burton worked closely with Low on this fine album), Low have shown such an assured artistic courage to sonically reinvent themselves with an album that sounds completely eroded, themselves but markedly different. The band recorded Double Negative over the past two years with producer BJ Burton at Justin Vernon’s April Base studio in Wisconsin, following 2015’s Ones and Sixes album where they first experimented together with drum machines and a more industrial timbre. From the very first moments*, it is an album of hissing static and intense mechanical noises, the texture on this record is as important as the melody. Double Negative is an album of darkness, the instrumentation that you would expect has been entirely replaced. The drums are substituted with splintering booms of static, the bass parts are cavernous waves of noise and even the instantly recognisable voices of Sparhawk and Parker decay and intertwine as digital crunches, like warped cassette tapes that have been left to fry in the sun. These are harsh and violent noises, it is the sound of unravelling.

If there was any doubt about the inspiration or narrative of the album, Sparhawk sings it straight on Dancing and Fire, “It’s not the end, it’s just the end of hope”. Not only are these fucked up times, none of us know the size and scale of what we’re fighting or even who we’re fighting against. You can pin it on a demagogue like Donald Trump, but some of the most bruising questions here aren’t what that asshole has done or said now, they are more about all the people standing by and supporting him, voting for him. Much like we, as proud Europeans, find ourselves left asking, who the fuck are we sharing a country with? A product of these uncertain times, Double Negative is a deeply political album but does not necessarily offer answers, it is more concerned with provoking questions. Double Negative is an album of intensity and deep feeling.

It is fierce and beautiful, as chilling a document of contemporary social collapse as anything produced in music or literature in years. *We’ll be honest, the first time we heard the LP was on a test pressing back in the summer and we turned it up loud, dropped the needle and walked away before the cacophony of hissing ripped the tranquility of the kitchen in half. For any of you who thought you had bust a speaker or shredded a stylus on that first play… we feel you.

Mute.com #MuteFourPointZero

GOLDFRAPP SILVER EYE - DELUXE EDITION

DANIEL BLUMBERG MINUS

Includes ‘Ocean’ feat. Dave Gahan, ‘Anymore’ & ‘Systemagic’ + bonus disc of remixes

Features ‘Minus’ & ’The Bomb’.

“Remarkable… A modern classic” HHHHH THE TIMES

CHRIS CARTER CHEMISTRY LESSONS VOL 1

JOSH T. PEARSON THE STRAIGHT HITS

First solo album in 17 years from Throbbing Gristle founder.

Also available ‘Miscellany’ catalogue box set including unreleased material

3 chords & the truth.

The new long player from JTP Includes ‘Straight At Me’ & ‘ A Love Song (You Set Me Straight)’

CHRIS LIEBING BURN SLOW

LAIBACH THE SOUND OF MUSIC

A minimalist electronic epic.

Features vocal contributions from Gary Numan, Polly Scattergood, Aleen, Cold Cave & Miles Cooper Seaton

Songs that have been sung for a thousand years, like you’ve never heard them before

LIARS TITLES WITH THE WORD FOUNTAIN

BARRY ADAMSON MEMENTO MORI (ANTHOLOGY 1978-2018)

TFCF the sequel. 40 minutes of new music plus original TFCF album.

Also available 1/1 Liars first original soundtrack

A 40th anniversary release charting Barry’s writing & recording career.

Includes Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds + Magazine plus all the solo hits.

A CERTAIN RATIO ACR:SET

THROBBING GRISTLE CATALOGUE

A career spanning compilation.

Includes ‘Shack Up’, ’Do The Du’ and new single ‘Dirty Boy’ feat. Barry Adamson

New vinyl collectors editions 20 Jazz Funk Greats, Second Annual Report, Journey Through A Body, Heathen Earth, Mission Of Dead Souls

ERASURE WORLD BE LIVE

IRMIN SCHMIDT 5 KLAVIERSTÜCKE

A brand new live album. Includes ‘A Little Respect’, ‘Love You To The Sky’, ‘Sometimes’ & many more.

Also available World Beyond & World Be Gone

New album of beautiful piano pieces from the legendary founder of CAN. Following on from the Faber Social published book on Can – All Gates Open

8

KAMASI WASHINGTON Heaven & Earth Young Turks / June

Los Angeles saxophonist and band leader Kamasi Washington returned this year with his second full length LP, Heaven and Earth, a conceptual double album exploring the realities of earth and the idealisation of heaven. A hugely adventurous and vibrant record of cosmic jazz that clocks in at over two and a half hours and successfully weaves together dense and complicated arrangements.

As fine as Washington is as a saxophonist - and that he really is - he is also a skilful arranger, and a huge part of Heaven and Earth’s success is the way he pulls in so many rich textures without muddling the clarity of the messaging. The first half (Earth) in particular is groove-heavy, his relationships and creative partnerships with the Brainfeeder roster showing how much the lines between funk, soul and jazz have been blurred in the last few years. There is a palpable sense of tension across the first two sides, there are sections of frenetic busyness that feels like a buzzing metropolis, bleeping phones and twenty-four hour news.

Heaven (part two or sides three and four) places its emphasis on the celestial, and the sweeping orchestration is pretty transcendental stuff. Setting aside two and a half hours can be a challenge as we all know, but the journey from the urgency of Earth to the dreaminess of Heaven is really special stuff.

You could be forgiven for expecting some moments of freewheeling across the 16 tracks, but another of this wonderful double album’s astounding feats is the utterly distinct feel of each individual track; lavish and grand, dripping in funk, percussive, furious scales, minimal, Latin rhythms and those huge choirs. As arranger it feels like he has pushed and inspired his band The Next Step and the West Coast Get Down (WCGD) collective to meet him and expand his broadest and most ambitious ideas Heaven and Earth is hugely accomplished work, so incredibly creative and searching throughout.

It is an album that feels spiritually important from one of the music world’s very brightest talents.

“A series of near-overwhelming musical epiphanies” - Mojo “This is the rare jazz record that feels equipped to venture outside the genre’s familiar borders and engage with the wider world” - Uncut

7

PAPA M A Broke Moon Rises Drag City / August

“These five songs are quiet, repetitive, intimate and meditative. Sometimes they go somewhere, and sometimes they don’t. Either outcome is fine” - Paste Magazine “None of the pieces seems to reach a destination, and are all the more poignant for that.” - The Wire August’s Record of the Month was the sublimely tranquil A Broke Moon Rises by Papa M, one of the year’s most special headspaces. Following his phoenix-like rise from the ashes in late 2016 (with one of our albums of that year, the cleansing Highway Songs, a messy and explosive album that had everything on it from grunge metal to electronics), Papa M returns on Drag City with “music for four acoustic guitars” as the cover sticker proclaims, oh, and a tiny bit of drums. Papa M, or David Pajo, is a hero in these parts (aside from his solo work, Slint were seminal listening and appearances with and part of Tortoise, Will Oldham’s bands and countless more) and we have been so thrilled to have a new album to obsess over. A Broke Moon Rises doesn’t give much away, the sleeve is a slightly off-kilter photograph of a classical frame with a fairly abstract painting (we believe it is by Pajo and titled Ears and Eyes), in many ways this is the album in a nutshell, you can take what you will from it as its primary focus may well be more based in personal catharsis for its author. It is earnest, it is fairly lo-fi and Pajo wrote, recorded and played everything. There is much fragility and the dexterity - although deliberately far from perfect - is spellbinding, intricate parts interweaving to create

some real magic. Album opener The Upright Path is the darkest in tone, and following track Walt’s has the most hazy stagger to it, both intricate and building pieces with a low tempo and maudlin energy.

A Lighthouse Reverie in the middle of the album is pure joy, transcendental layering of gloriously pretty looping plucks and picks, one part Penguin Cafe Orchestra and one part ever-escalating maths rock.

It also ends with the only audible vocal across the album, an exhale and “fucking hell”... did he miss a string? or bum a note? or did he just feel the same as we did when we first heard it… fucking hell… that was lush. Shimmers is a turn back towards the dark with an arresting and filmic intensity, before the album closes with a reworking of Arvo Pärt’s Spiegel Im Spiegel, a thirteen-minute opus that sounds like the long slow closing of eyes. Magical stuff.

Evocative and engrossing, at times world-weary, at others strangely optimistic, the five pieces together form a timeless collection, wonderfully homespun and elegant in their simplicity, complexity and honesty.

Image: Lance Bangs

6

WHITE DENIM Performance City Slang / August

“White Denim’s most produced album, thickly textured with brass, keyboards and studio atmospheres. Play it loud, though, and you easily imagine the euphoria at the bar after every track” - Mojo “Expertly weighted between great hooks and loose, Southern-styled jams that dare you to shake a leg.” - Uncut “A perfect late-summer soundtrack on a par with their 2009 masterpiece Fits” - Q Magazine “What they now lack in raw, ferocious edginess, they make up for with one glorious driving riff after another on Performance” - The Independent

Performance is the eighth studio album from Austin, Texas’ White Denim, our favourite jazz school rock and rollers. Their output over the last few years (also frontman James Petralli’s solo LP) has enjoyed a confident mellowing of sorts, spending more time focusing on the warmth of their amps and the low hum of the tape machines, which has felt like a very logical growth for the band. So a surprise to us all this summer was the arrival of a new album that is positively wild-eyed. Rock and roll bangers. On this new LP, recorded and self-produced at their new Radio Milk studio in downtown Austin, the band sound totally rejuvenated, certainly like they want to rip through a few cans and rip through a few riffs.

The start of the album in particular is explosive, kicking open the doors and running fast and loose with rhythms at breakneck speed. The musicianship is supreme, they are as adept in a sort of glam-rock strut as they are in prickly jazz mode or duelling guitars over crunching blues. There are plenty of smart changes of pace and unexpected musical moments, but the jacked-up lead guitar is king. They have always been a band whose stylistic origins are hard to place, but for the first time, it is hard to tell perhaps when they originate. If you close your eyes anywhere in this record you can find yourself plumb in the middle of the 1970s – it’s unadulterated in a way that seems to place it in a more ingenuous time.

Performance is masses of fun, a scorching collection of air-punching riffs that prove that White Denim are one of the best around.

5 LUMP Lump

Dead Oceans / June

“Lump is brief, but Marling’s gorgeously uncanny melodies – which, like Lindsay’s synth sounds, have an other-timely quality – are dazzling enough to linger indefinitely” - The Guardian “The sense here is of two artists drawing creative sustenance from new light.” - Q Lump is the debut full-length collaborative album from Laura Marling and Tunng’s Mike Lindsay.

Although both much lauded in the UK folk scene some five/ten years back, they might seem like potentially strange bedfellows, but in unison they have created one of the year’s most evocative and bewitching releases. They met by chance backstage at a Neil Young concert, which led to a whirlwind few days of recording and several months of back and forth emailing. In principle it is a fairly straight forward pitch, each track - in the same key - is built around a resampled flute drone. Layers of woozing analogue organs, Moog flutters, wonky guitars and alternating brooding and sunny soundscapes frame Marling’s vocals. Simple, but the devil is in the detail.

The breeze is meticulously built, there is a density to each track and whether atmospherically uneasy or more evocative of sun-bleached photographs, they are full and quite beautifully layered.

And then to Laura Marling, who sounds simply extraordinary and elevates these beautiful, swooning songs into something all the more special, more substantial. Her vocal range on Lump is stunning, no idle gymnastics, she shifts between a low, laconic drawl through a choral sweetness and in harmony with herself is aetherial. The balance is also key, she knows just when to run through the gears and

when to sit back in the mix, she judges the mood beautifully. There is seemingly no part of her beautiful voice left unexplored. Lyrically it is surreal, a stream of thoughts, jokes and ideas which all add to the hazy dreamlike state. It is a short seven track album - the seventh track is Marling listing the album credits over the top of layers of flutes with a cool robotic detachment - that floats in and drifts away, living long in the memory as an unusual and uncomplicated beauty. It is a beautiful, odd gift of an album.

4

BODEGA Endless Scroll What’s Your Rupture? / July

A blistering album of classic Brooklyn post-punk, Bodega’s Endless Scroll is our favourite debut album of the year, a frantic, tense and svelte collection of songs. The young five-piece are fiercely unified in their actions as a band, a shared creative satire and indignation of the influences of 21st-century living. This forms a lot of the album, a rolling and pretty merciless critique of everything from internet addiction and “gyrating” to overpriced smoothies, delivered with an accomplished balance between serious and silly. One of the albums highlights is Jack In Titanic, catchy and most definitely about how Kate Winslet should have shared a bit of that door. The debut was recorded and produced by Parquet Courts’ Austin Brown, using the same iconic Tascam 388 8-track tape recorded used for his own band’s debut, Light Up Gold, which although quite different, feels like a big spiritual ally to Endless Scroll.

The first half of the record flies past in the blink of an eye with varying speeds of punk, witty lines and vocal drawls from Ben Hozie and Nikki Belfiglio (combining to sound somewhere between either of Parquet Courts’ Brown Brothers, Patti Smith, Tom Verlaine or Karen O). A talk-and-type computer voice announces the breaks between tracks, as bass hooks and pounding drums march through the songs one after another. The second half of the record has more change of pace - for example, late on, Charlie is a gloriously subtle side-step, a poignant short song about a friend who drowned. It’s almost formless, primitive but really highlights the multiplicity of the band’s craft.

There is evidently substance to the style, a glorious union of ramshackle rants and slackerish jams, it’s bursting with intelligence, humour and ideas. “Have I heard the latest single by so-andso?”, such deadpan satire. You just can’t help but feel that they are having a lot of fun. A fantastic debut from a hugely exciting new talent.

“This five-piece nail the absurdity of contemporary life with that surprisingly evergreen formula” - The Observer “Whoever is singing, the beats are choppy and the mood intense.

A revelation.” - Uncut

STICK IN THE WHEEL

ADY SULEIMAN

JEREMY LOOPS

Follow Them True

Memories

Critical As Water

FROM HERE

PEMBA

LOOPS MUSIC

GROUP LISTENING Clarinet & Piano: Selected Works Vol. 1 PRAH RECORDINGS

MORCHEEBA

PROTOJE

HAIKU SALUT

SKULL SNAPS

Blaze Away

A Matter Of Time

There Is No Elsewhere

Skull Snaps

FLY AGARIC

MR BONGO

PRAH RECORDINGS

MR BONGO

Released in 2018 with a little help from www.kartelmusicgroup.com

3

NAP EYES I’m Bad Now Jagjaguwar / March

“The Nova Scotia quartet’s chilled-out, endearing indie rock gets a slightly more cutting edge on on their third album.”

- Pitchfork “They’re a remarkably consistent band, yes, but a remarkably skilled band as well.” - Paste Magazine I’m Bad Now is the third album from Nova Scotia’s Nap Eyes, and it radiates confidence and charm, with lucid and contemplative songs about the modern world. We bleated on about their first two albums via the Paradise of Bachelors label (naturally, we always bleat on about Paradise of Bachelors) and this new LP (released over here on Jagjaguwar) finds the band at their most concise. The four-piece are a really great rock band, capable of skiffling jams, but saving those bubbling moments of gratification for when they are most needed and instead painting rich pastorals at a deliciously leisurely pace. I’m Bad Now is their most assured and accomplished body of work to date, testament to its creators’ ability to mix fluidity, depth and lightness. Nap Eyes push the spiritual influence of the Velvet Underground more than ever before, they exude that same swagger and vocalist Nigel Chapman sounds like a Lou Reed who hails from Canada’s East Coast instead of New York’s East Village. Wonderfully deadpan, there are moments of Jonathan Richman in his delivery too, but the real comparison should be in his abilities as composer of modern day vignettes, insightful and gloriously throwaway at the same time. He is no mere soundalike, the smartness of Nap Eyes’ work and observations of everyday life place him in the same conversation as the artists that he perhaps

aspires to be compared with. Although Chapman’s way with words takes centre stage, there are many heady moments and beautifully delivered gestures, they have managed to retain all the shambolic low fidelity of their earlier albums whilst raising the production values, the tightness of the songs and their delivery. Bonded by a love of classic leftfield rock bands like Big Star and Teenage Fanclub, Nap Eyes reflect traces of them all, but - much like those bands - changes of pace and tone thread through the work, their interests also clearly lie beyond the rock canon.

Songs of nostalgia, easy going jangle, songs of tense builds and songs of smart and carefree riffs all held together with great character and geniality.

The band’s carefree demeanour can trick you into thinking there’s not a lot happening in any given song and that is perhaps their best trick, they are fiercely smart songwriters and they don’t even need to shout to get attention. Absolutely adore this album, a real classic.

2

SONS OF KEMET Your Queen Is A Reptile Impulse! Records / March

Image: Pierrick Guidou

Your Queen Is A Reptile is the Mercury Prizeshortlisted epic third album from Sons of Kemet, titans of the new wave of jazz. The group comprises two percussionists, a tuba player and is led by charismatic bandleader, saxophonist Shabaka Hutchings. It’s their first release since the Brexit vote, and is a charismatic and beautifully intelligent response to conventions of identity and monarchy.

Hutchings offers his own version of a royal family, comprising visionary black women, rightful queens: … Is Ada Eastman - Hutchings’ own greatgrandmother, Barbadian matriarch and source of great inspiration. … Is Mamie Phipps Clark - Social psychologist who researched the detrimental effects of segregation on African American schoolchildren. … Is Harriet Tubman - Hugely brave escaped slave who became a “conductor” on the Underground Railroad, leading slaves to freedom before the Civil War. … Is Anna Julia Cooper - Black Liberation activist and one of the most prominent African-

American scholars in United States history. … Is Angela Davis - Radical African-American educator and activist for civil rights and other social issues. … Is Nanny of the Maroons - Jamaica national hero and 18th-century leader of the guerrilla Jamaican Maroons. … Is Yaa Asantewaa - The Ashanti queen mother who fought against British colonialism in the early 20th century. … Is Albertina Sisulu - One of the prominent anti-apartheid South African leaders, widely referred to as the “Mother of the Nation”. … Is Doreen Lawrence - (Baroness Lawrence of Clarendon OBE) British Jamaican campaigner and the mother of murdered teenager Stephen Lawrence.

The concept is so incredibly valid and important in this climate, celebrating trailblazing women whose achievements, rather than their ancestry, inform their worth. In times where the colour of a passport seemingly makes such a difference, it’s a very graceful commentary on the arbitrariness of inheritance.

Your Queen Is A Reptile is a euphoric album, full of life. There is a carefree approach to genres and styles, they’re used like colours in a rich and vivid abstract painting. In the truest sense of jazz, they are thumbing their nose, challenging rigid traditions and rules, and that bold and explorative energy is thrilling. They are a band in perfect simpatico, the constantly restless Shabaka Hutchings counterpointed by the giant tuba of Theon Cross and the hypnotic doubletime percussion of Tom Skinner and Eddie Hick. Guest appearances from drummers Seb Rochford, Maxwell Hallett and Moses Boyd, saxophonists Pete Wareham and Nubya Garcia and vocalists Josh Idehen (of Benin City) and jungle legend Congo Natty all add perfectly to the waves of intensity and hot and snaking desert tones. If you want to gauge the legitimate excitement and interest that the band have aroused in the jazz world, take note of their impact alone on the Impulse! Record label (home to amongst others, John Coltrane, Ray Charles, Charles Mingus, Quincy Jones and Gil Evans), After a sedentary period, they are fast returning to their former glory in releasing urgent, challenging and powerful new works, not least in Sons of Kemet. It’s a hugely special album, a grand political statement, furiously delivered through all tones of jazz with perfectly executed gestures towards dub, Caribbean soca, Afrobeat and even grime. They are a band in the peak of their powers and this is their most brilliant achievement to date.

“That’s an aspect of being a part of a musical diaspora. Not being from the place that jazz is born from means that I don’t feel any ultimate reverence to it. It’s just about finding ways of reinterpreting how we’re thinking about the music.” - Shabaka Hutchings

“This album’s intricate, pressurised urgency keeps Sons of Kemet at that movement’s head” - The Independent “Saxophonist Shabaka Hutchings uses jazz’s cultural memory as a rich language that informs an entirely new conversation” - Pitchfork “This is jazz that’s best heard at maximum volume.” - The Wire

DIRTY PROJECTORS Lamp Lit Prose Domino Recording Company / July

OUR NO.1 RECORD OF THE YEAR FOR 2018 IS LAMP LIT PROSE , THE EIGHTH STUDIO ALBUM FROM THE RELENTLESSLY IMAGINATIVE DIRTY PROJECTORS.

They are a band we adore. We have previously had 2009’s Bitte Orca and 2012’s Swing Lo Magellan right at the very top of our end of year lists, and last year’s sombre self-titled album was number 19 in the 2017 chart. Flash forward to July this year, and David Longstreth has extended Dirty Projectors out to a full band again for a euphoric and irrepressibly sunny follow-up. Lamp Lit Prose is the very antithesis of the self-titled album that preceded it, that same glistening pop production but it’s an album full of love-drunk hope. The songs are some of the shiniest and airiest Longstreth has written to date, catchy, vibrant and snappy pop songs that never outstay their welcome. The new-look band - Mike Daniel Johnson, Maia Friedman, Felicia Douglass, Kristin Slipp and longtime bass guitarist Nat Baldwin - are joined by an impressive roll call of guest contributors.

Syd’s (The Internet) vocal coolly anchors Right Now, the Haim sisters sound incredible on That’s a Lifestyle with a throwback to the rich harmonies of Bitte Orca, Amber Mark is positively delicious in flashes - one of the album’s finest moments as her commanding purr threatens to steal the show - on I Feel Energy, Empress Of’s appearance on the riffheavy Zombie Conqueror has a brilliantly hypnotic refrain and Robin Pecknold (of Fleet Foxes) and Rostam (formally of Vampire Weekend) gather around for really quite lovely open-heart harmonies on the penultimate You’re the One. Even Björk, a previous collaborator on the amazing Mount Wittenberg Orca mini-album, makes her mark on Lamp Lit Prose; I Feel Energy features the sound of a Japanese cricket she recorded and passed to Longstreth who became fascinated with its rhythmic click. All of the talents

Record Of The Year

- and animals - are beautifully borrowed, but even in their most brilliant moments they never detract from the bigger picture that Longstreth’s arrangements paint. There are some lush moments of brass across the album, euphoric swells and an almost cavalry-like strut. All of the timbres are maximal, it is an album of knotted cleverness and unbridled creative energy.

Whereas last year’s self-titled album was a catharsis and a necessity to release, Lamp Lit Prose feels like a set of songs that have exploded out of Longstreth in a very different way, it feels very much like an album that he wanted to make rather than one he had to. It’s passionate and beguiling, whilst still having the frenetic changes in direction that are so synonymous with Dirty Projectors as each song organically changes. Utterly thrilling throughout - a brilliant writer, a brilliant band and a brilliant album.

“Lamp Lit Prose is another outstanding chapter in what is shaping up to be one of the great 21st-century musical odysseys.” - Uncut “This polar opposite of Dave Longstreth’s previous break-up howl, this album is impossible to resist” - The Guardian “It’s a bold project, this madcap quest for personal and political salvation.

But when Longstreth throws caution to the wind, Lamp Lit Prose is wonderful” - Pitchfork

We can’t tell you about any of the bands we’ve signed yet, but we can confirm that we’ve booked the bogs.

Friday 24th, Saturday 25th and Sunday 26th May. www.seachangefestival.co.uk