So 2018 has been a hell of a year. I’m not sure I’ve ever experienced 12 months that felt like they lasted so long and that runs the same for music too.
This was my first full year signed up to a streaming service (What, you should never be an early adaptor in technology 😀 ) but it has made an incredible difference to the way I listen to music. The turnaround on albums is so fast. Whereas before with an mp3 player you have all your music in your pocket and control of what’s there, when you have all the worlds music in your pocket and large enough data plan there really is no limit and I’ve found myself swamped for the first time ever.
Now, this is also my fault, there are some real first world problems going on here, I spend a lot of time reading websites and wondering through music forums (remember forums?) so I’m exposed to so much new music it’s crazy. Whereas before I had to work at checking out new sounds, now it’s as a simple copy and paste into Spotify and BOOM, there’s another band vying for my attention.
And I don’t know what it says about me, but it can make me a bit anxious, I’m not giving stuff I love enough time. If it wasn’t for my Last FM account keeping tabs on what I’m listening to, I’d be lost.
As always, there is a jaw dropping amount of new bands and amazing talent out there. I just feel sorry for them trying to be noticed in the noise. The old taste makers are gone and I really don’t know how people keep up without a lot of effort.
I do my bit and to be honest, I feel I’ve been pretty good. I’ve been fighting the urge the just sent people links going “LISTEN TO THIS IT’S AMAZING AND I LOVE AND YOU SHOULD TOO!!!”*
I still think my wife is lucky she met me post my pushy evangelical music phase. 😀
(* Since writing this I broke and did send people and bunch of playlists and tried to get as many people as I could to listen to the Twilight Sad )
So, as I was saying there was, as usual, a metric fuck tonne of amazing music this year.
I have my list of 10, and I’m quite excited that I have a clear number 1 this time but I’m going to start with some of the bands that didn’t make the list.
Mogwai.
Kin
Yup, another year and another ‘Gwai album. I’m been listening to them since 1998 and that’s a long time to still be in love with a band. Kin was their first Hollywood film soundtrack and although the film didn’t seem to do much, the soundtrack was pretty good but nothing amazing as an album.
It had Donuts on it though, which may be the best thing they’ve done in a long time. It’s just a beautiful piece of music and absolutely showcases what they do so well.
Just listen to it as loudly as you can.
Orbital.
Monsters exist
My boys 😀 My gateway to dance music.
They broke up again after the pretty great Wonky album and to be honest, I was done. They had made a great comeback album, played some amazing live shows and then called it a day. That’s a point that maybe you should call it quits, but here they are comeback album 2.
And it’s a mess.
The track Hoo Hoo Ha Ha, will, it’s as shit as that sounds, I don’t know what anyone was thinking putting in one here. There is a good track in there but you’d have to work hard to get it out. On There Will Come A Time, Brian Cox is so smug and pointless that you want to slap him. Most of the singles were lacklustre at best, and the fact that it was bundled with 2 extra discs of tracks kinda points to the fact that they had no idea which direction the CD should go.
But!
There is some great stuff on here. I was away when the album came out so I got to see people’s reaction and that tempered my expectations. I saw people comparing it to Snivilisation and so I went in expecting a low key, dark album. With a little editing of the Hoo Hoo song and the Brian Cox smugfest that’s what you get. It’s a taut, pretty aggressive political album with Orbital raging against the political shit show were living through at the moment and it’s nice to see that side of them again.
The extra CD’s are good enough to have made a perfectly great CD on their own, a much more upbeat dancier one, including a Coxless There Will Come A Time but the best track on the album was on CD 3 and isn’t on any of the streaming platforms.
Holy Fawn
Death Spells
With a bit more time this might have made it onto the top 10 list. I’m not a big shoegaze fan (I love post rock, it’s totally different 😛 ) but is a brilliant album. It switches between indie shoegaze, almost metal which then morphs to something along the lines of Slowdive or the Album Leaf.
It starts with the huge Dark Stone and keeps going till track 5, Seer, where it breaks, and almost becomes a different album. Something more ethereal, it’s quite jarring on the first few listens but once you know it’s coming, it makes the album stand out even more from all the more from the piles of NuGaze out there
It’s an absolute cracker but the blackened vocal on the first few tracks will alienate the more “delicate” listener.
Bongripper
Terminal
You kinda know what you’re going to get here don’t you?
40 minutes of crushing instrumental DOOM over 2 songs (10 songs on Spotify, which makes it a whole lot easier to digest). But! It’s not as impenetrable as their last album. This monster relents, the riffage drops and there are pretty passages, tension ebbs and flows, movements rise and fall.
Then some huge fucking riffs melt your face off.
You were in or you were out at the band name, this is an immense album, you should listen to it.
Against All Logic
(2012 to 2017)
Nicolas Jaar has been releasing music for the clubs under the A.A.L moniker and this is a collection from 2012 to 2017.
To be honest, I like it so much more than his usual stuff. This will get you moving, The opening track “This Old House is I All I Have”, with its overdriven synths and warm Blues vocal sample, will keep your head nodding and put a big smile on your face.
It’s such a breezy, fun album but the high point Cityfade is a thing of pure house music joy.
Throw your hands in the air here.
Svalbard
It’s hard to have hope
If there’s a band that’s needed in the horrible shit show that is modern life it’s probably Svalbard. You see Svalbard are fucking raging. Spitting fire and fury and they want the whole world to know it.
So far, so ordinary, they are a hardcore band after all. No, what makes them different is vocalist Serena Cherry, who is taking what is a mostly male dominated platform and screaming bloody murder about women’s rights. From Revenge Porn, which speaks for itself to Pro-Life? Demanding that women should have control over their bodies.
The best track for me is Feminazi!?! Let me just quote the song.
“Will you liken reactions to your misogyny
With one of the world’s most horrific atrocities?
As soon as you utter that phrase
You associate feminism with something so hated
So undesirable but wrapping our words up in thorns
Will not make them undiscussable.”
This album is crushing, raging and full of the most amazing defiance I’ve heard in years. It’s what we need right now.
Dvne
Asheran
So this is my (other) album of the year.
This is a massive cheat as it came out summer 2017 but I completely missed it and only caught it in the end of year lists. I missed it because people had been talking about it as a Prog Metal album and that had me running the other way. Pr*g, like Fl*k is a four letter word round these parts. I wasn’t interested, didn’t check them out and, well that was stupid of me. (Funny that I almost missed my other album of the year because it was called f*lk)
I just don’t have the words for how great this album is, but I’m sure as hell going to try and tell you.
It’s a Sci-Fi concept album so it’s about as Prog as you can get but not in the ways that normally put me off this kind of thing. There are no pointless noodling passages, no annoying ADD time or tempo changes, instead there is a fantastic energy to the album that grabs you and drags you breathlessly through its hour run time. When there are solos, they fit the song and are not crowbarred in so the guitarist can show off, the Prog side shows in the playing which is the way all music should be written IMHO.
The two obvious comparisons to make here are Neurosis and Tool. The drummer works the toms like Sliver in Blood (that might not make sense to most people but it does to me.) and the bass in heavily indebted to Tool’s Justin Chancellor but it’s never just aping. The two influences are just melded together into a sound which is entirely their own.
Although I have to mention Thirst, which is its own massive, fast paced number, that for no reason that I can make out, morphs into an Iron Maiden gallop.
I mean, it’s amazing but I certainly wasn’t expecting it 😀 .
I’ve actually sent links to the album to friends of mine because I just think they should listen to it. I hectored people in Facebook groups and on music forums to listen to this album.
This album is fucking great and I want to push it at as many people as possible.
I’ll leave you with Scion, my most listened track of the year.
I just can’t describe how fired up this track makes me. The crushing toms and power of the first 4 minutes is face melting but then, they dial the crushing riffs back as the bass takes over the song and drives forward becoming this euphoric powerhouse of a thing. Just click the link and annoy your neighbours because I just don’t have the words I need.
The ways of exile 