Apart for the first album, there is no order to these, I love them all.
There are a few surprising omissions, in a year that had a new 65daysofstatic and Mogwai album, (spoilers) neither of them show up here.
They’re good albums but a little disappointing to me. Anyway, lets start.
Eths
Ankaa
This is straight up, no question, my album of the year, and I knew it was going to be from about my 3rdlisten.
I really haven’t heard any band that sounds like this. The mix of clean and harsh vocals, alternating between the male and female vocal, the harsh metal of the music, the electronica, to the almost Dead Can Dance world music parts, it’s amazing the way this album shifts between moods and ideas.
It’s just not written like any album I own, there is almost no traditional song structure, no, verse, chorus, verse. The album just slides from one idea to the next, there is no obvious transitions, even between songs. It just flows perfectly, if your attention wonders, there’ll be a smooth change in the song and you’re back into it.
This is an album that demands that you start on the first song and listen all the way through, in fact, the album loses a lot if you just into jump into random tracks.
The best song on the album “Nihil Sine Causa” is a great example of how much Eths mix ideas effortlessly. It has male/female vocals, harsh and clean, metal, an electronic breakdown, Arabic chanting and finishes off sounding like Dead can Dance. All in less than 04.30.
It’s a hell of a thing, and this year? Nothing else comes close to this for me.
Nihil Sine Causa
Esben and the Witch
Older Terrors
This lot have been around a long time and don’t seem to have managed much of a following. On album they’ve always been a bit lacking, but live they were great.
Unfortunately for them they could never capture that magic. That is until, this album, this album comes damn close.
Older Terrors is just 4 songs, which is a pretty crazy thing to do, I’m a big fan of the long song but a 10+ minute song is a big part of an album, if it goes wrong then ¼ of the album is a bust.
Luckily, that’s not a problem here. From the first track “Sylvan” EatW build in a classic post rock way, all building tension and emotive vocal but when it breaks, all I can hear is Patti Smith and I don’t mean that as a criticism.
What you get here are 4 tracks of quality, spooky indie songs and huge crashing, wildly over dramatic post rock crescendos. Its nothing ground breaking, but it sounds amazing.
Sylvan
Minor Victories.
Minor Victories
Everyone writing anything about MV are going to use the words Super group to describe them. Although some scamps will argue the super bit.
Formed with members of Slowdive, Mogwai, Editors and Mycodenameis:Milo, there was no way on god’s earth I wasn’t going to be all over this album the day it came out.
The odd thing about it, unlike most other super groups, is that this is really good.
And while you’d spot Rachael for Slowdive a mile away, MV don’t sound like a mash up of the 4 bands involved. This is just great indie music, the sort of thing I’ve been missing over the last few years. There is a shoe gaze feel to it but there’s no wall of noise lurking on tracks, waiting to frighten the life out of people listening to their headphones too loudly, but that’s no bad thing. The slow build climax of post rock has been done to death it’s nice to have something different.
Breaking My Light
Sophia
As We Make Our Way (Unknown Harbours)
It must be hard living in the shadow of a band you were in before. Robin Sheppard was in The God Machine, a band that was together from 1991 to 1994 but left a huge impression on everyone who listened to them. (Full discloser, the God Machine’s first album is my favourite album of all time).
But the God Machine broke up due to the bass player’s death.
Robin used this new band Sophia to deal with the pain which made for a brutally stark first album (Fixed Water is about as depressing as an album can be) but he started to build a band around him again and amid some amazing albums.
He disappeared for 7 years before making this comeback.
It’s amazing the confidence he shows straight out the gates, Resisting is what Sheppard does best, it’s a huge sounding indie song, locked in by the drumming, wistful, melodic with the almost shoe gaze guitar pinning the track together.
There’s a lot of acoustic led music on this album, but it’s always got enough of a band behind it to keep it interesting, which says a lot for these songs if you know of my hatred of the acoustic guitar.
What makes this album for me though, are the God Machine echoes. “St. Tropez / The Hustle and Resisting” have a bass led groove that TGM were all about, songs that make me smile and wish was I was watching a band that broke up a long time ago, hearing echoes of something I still love through the filter of another band.
But this album ‘s winner is the last song, a song that could only be Sophia, the lyrics cut to the quick, while the music builds beautifully, with the lyrics repeating themselves, spiralling into loneliness and self-doubt all while the music swells.
The gig was amazing and left me in tears (in a good way), it’s a great album, you should check it out.
It’s Easy To Be Lonely
The Great Cold
The Great Cold
There’s isn’t much I can say about this. It’s Blackend, Post Metal.
It’s the first album by a bunch of German teenagers and it just rocks. There is no other word for it. It’s insane that a self-released album on Bandcamp should be this good.
They do a great job of building atmosphere, there is some great subtle work going on here but what’s going to grab you is the towering drums and the huge riffing.
That’s all you should need. Its pay what you want on bandcamp.
*go*
OREAD
Underworld.
Barbara Barbara, We Face A Shining Future
I’m not sure I’ve ever had as bad a reaction to an album that ended up on my end of the year list before. I fucking hated this on the first listen. It just sounded like they’d gone back to Dubnobass and missed the point of everything that was great about that album.
And that was that, I didn’t listen to it again and may have slagged it off a bit.
But it started to get great reviews, I mean, really good reviews. I had a ticket to see them live so I thought; I’d give the album another spin and see what I missed the first time.
I’m very glad I did.
There’s not much of a precedent for 2 guys who first started working together in 1980 to come back after a slump and deliver one of the albums of their career but Underworld sure have done it.
I think it says a lot that they play 5 of these songs on the tour for this album and no one complains.
Nylon Strung has to be the highlight on the album for me. Electronic music used to get shit for being soulless, but of all the dance bands Underworld were the ones who could connect, and this is one of their best. This song just sounds like standing in a field, bathed in sun, surrounded by your mates, dancing. It just sounds so warm, like a hug in song shape; there’s just something about the line “I want to hold you, laughing” that sounds like the most romantic thing in the world.
It’s a hell of a way to end a great album.
Nylon Strung
Spotlights
Tidals
Spotlights are a husband and wife duo that make a great mix of shoe gaze and sludge metal. While it’s never that heavy, it has enough dirty riffage to make most people who like that kind of thing very happy.
What makes this album stand out is the blending of pretty and heavy, the vocal is clean but, there is a remarkable lightness of touch in the song writing, enough that the huge guitar sound never overpowers, it just pulls you in. There’s no real attempt at guitar heroics because this kind of music really doesn’t need it.
I’m finding this hard to sell. It’s really well written shoe gaze/metal that will appeal to people who might not be metal fans, while also appealing to people who love some good old sludge riffing. It’s a hell of an album.
The Grower
Alcest
Kodama
Alcest have been around for a long time but have never made a big impression on me.
They are most known for their mix for black metal and shoe gazing, but to be honest, their first album, which is hailed as a blackgaze classic, has the metal so low down in the mix it makes the whole thing a bit pointless. They then dropped the harsh side of metal and recorded some very pretty, but very dull shoe gaze albums.
On this album they decided to mix the old metal side with the newer, lighter music they’ve been playing.
Make no mistake; this is a really pretty album. Where it needs major cords and uplifting vocals, they use them. The first track, Kodama, is lush, but what sets this album apart is that on 3 of the 6 songs the band devolves into proper black metal, all atonal screaming and blast beat drumming. They didn’t need to do it but it raised the album up, the different styles saving the album from being to saccharin. It’s pretty as it is ferocious, and for me that lifts it above so many other albums this year.
Kodama
Lanterns of the lake
Live With Royal Northern Sinfonia.
LotL released a good album this year called Beings. I was thinking of putting it on this list but to be honest, it’s a good album, not a great album and end of year lists should be great albums.
The band play a very dramatic, piano led indie, with a lot of post rock influence. This live album features a lot of the songs that appeared on Beings, that good, but were missing something, a spark, something to push them into the greatness that they were so close too.
Getting in the Royal Northern Sinfonia to play live with them was the answer. Tracks that simmered now soar, the strings and brass give songs that needed a lift.
The performance is one thing but the post important thing here is the recording of the album. Most live albums are terrible, maybe you’ll listen to them a few times and you’re done. The sound recording on this is amazing. You can hear every part played as it meshes together, the instrumentation isn’t drowned out, nothing overpowers or is left out, the crowd noise is kept out of the songs themselves.
But the real winner is the main vocal, Hazel Wilde’s voice is crystal clear and rings out carrying every last shred of emotion out of these songs.
I mean the lines Hazel sings aren’t earth shaking, but when she sings
Last night I passed out on the kitchen floor
With a drink in my hand
And a song in my heart
And I didn’t want for more.
It’s delivered in a way that sounds romantic, wistful and broken and gives me goose bumps every time I listen to it.
For those missing beautiful indie thrills, I can’t recommend it enough.
The video is a camera phone recording but it is worth watching as the sound is amazingly clear.
Of Dust and Matter (Live)
Cult of Luna and Julie Christmas
Mariner
CoL have been around a long time at this point. They’ve been one of the greatest pioneers of Post Metal but have become a bit stale. They have a great sound but it has been getting a bit samey. After their last album Vertikal, the band seemed to have decided they needed to make a change, mix things up a bit, so they decided to get Julie Christmas in for collaboration.
Now I don’t know much about Ms. Christmas but while other metal bands tend to lean on classically trained vocalists when getting in female singers, Julie is a far more Alt rock vocalist. Yes she can sing sweetly, but she as a lot of anger in her voice and that’s why I imagine CoL asked her in.
Not that CoL were that confidant about the move, the main songwriter was so nervous about realising this, he confessed he was terrified that this was going to be his Lulu.
And no on one wants that.
He need not have worried.
This is a great album. Adding a female singer has added a new dimension to CoL. The song writing has opened up, tracks have more space and feel less monochrome. The usual singer’s bellow is offset perfectly with Julies voice, and not in the usual beauty and the beast way, she’s really screaming on some of these tracks, but fucking hell it works.
The stand out track The Wreck Of S.S. Needle ends with her just repeating the line “put me down so I can see you run” and somehow, she makes it sound like the most threatening thing ever.
Huge riffing, and a lot of passion? What’s not to love?
The Wreck Of S.S. Needle
Wrekmeister Harmonies
Light Falls
Wrekmeister is just one guy who makes some very intense music that runs from drone to metal.
For each album he brings in different collaborators and on this one he worked with the drummer and violinist from Godspeed You! Black Emperor, which has made a big change to the band’s sound. While still pretty intense, it has dropped the metal from his sound and now, strangely, sounds a lot more like GY!BE.
The album splits into 2 sections, the first 3 songs being lighter, more (relatively musically) upbeat but the album darkens considerably as you get through the running time. The songs wax and wane in intensity , when you get to “Where have you been my lovely son?” the album is barely there, constructed from guitar hum, plucked cords, violin and a hushed voice. This however, is just a lead into the best song on the album, “Some were saved, some were drowned”.
For a song that isn’t metal, it’s about the heaviest thing I’ve heard all year, the pounding drums and bass drive the song, but it sounds like loss not fury. There’s a looseness to the music, where it sounds like they’re all playing live in a room, the music being dragged forwards by the broken throated cries of the singer. It’s intense stuff but easily one of my songs of the year.
Some were saved, some were drowned
A Province of Thay
Atonement.
ApoT mix post rock with metal and 90’s Alt Rock, and while this doesn’t sound like the freshest idea they pull it off really well. Despite the fact all the songs are over 8 minutes they still feel like songs, rather than tracks (if that makes any sense to anyone) and the singers best attempts to be a Greg Duli (the Afghan Whigs) help them stand out for the Post rock/metal that I seem to be constantly tripping over.
However, this album is 32 minutes with 4 songs. That’s a lot closer to an ep if you ask me.
Animus
https://aprovinceofthay.bandcamp.com/track/animus
Bwana
Capsule’s Pride
This is an Electronica album made up of samples made from the Akira soundtrack.
At this point you know if you’re in or not.
Unsurprisingly I love it. There are some really great songs on here and while I may bitch that Bwana used the English dub version for the dialogue, I can see why, seeing as he’s Canadian. But it does loose some of the Akira charm.
Thank Christ he didn’t use the dub with Kaneda being played by one of the TMNT!
It’s really cleverly constructed and it’s always great to hear some of the motifs from the original soundtrack, the bamboo percussion and the choir always leave me with a smile when the turn up.
Nightfall in Neo-Toyko.
The ways of exile 