2: Unknown Mortal Orchestra: Multi-Love

Do you capitalise the ‘love’ in ‘multi-love’ if the hyphenated word itself is capitalised? Wish I’d paid more attention in English class. Or, you know, all those years I was an English teacher…

This work of absolute genius came out of near nowhere, UMO were a perfectly serviceable indie rock band that occasionally sounded a little too in thrall with their influences and made music that seemed to try its absolute best to sound like it was released in 1977 (I ranked their last album at number 32 in 2013 and remarked it was “unfocused and skittish, and probably the record on this list with music most difficult to claim to be modern”), it seemed that only Pete Postlethwaite was less likely to release a classic album in 2015 than Unknown Mortal Orchestra.

But this?

This?

This is absolutely majestic, indulging more synths and pop production into their sound and creating exactly the sort of genre-hopping bonkers pop music that Prince should be making in 2015- just imagine how perfect all existence would suddenly be if Prince came back with a song as weirdly brilliant as ‘Ur Life One Night‘: they’ve even got the spelling correct! ‘Multi-Love’ is packed with slight and subtle references and gestures that alludes to pretty much every single musical movement of the past 100 years. Despite all of the genre-hopping and breathtaking musical variety ‘Multi-Love’ never once sounds disjointed, the album is always pulled together by amazing pop songs that are always an absolute joy to listen to, mainly because of Ruben Nielson’s absolute mastery of choruses. If you see any other end of year list (though you know I don’t really like you seeing other people) that doesn’t have this album at least in the top 10 you should burn the magazine/website/television you saw it on and send the writer the bill as the list is automatically rendered obsolete.

‘Fun’ Fact: UMO are not in any circumstances to be confused with the United Macedonians Organization

I fancy a sing-along, and also at the same time an underwhelming reveal of where this list’s name came from: Let’s stick ‘Necessary Evil‘ on then

Album Link