Released December 2013! Read the rules dickhead! Perhaps the fact that Beyoncé’s fifth still sounds as wonderful, ambitious, intoxicating and bewitching now as it did near 12 months ago- perhaps actually a lot more so- is your first hint of just quite what an extraordinary achievement it is. It’s so rare that you see an artist as big as Beyoncé- who could absolutely be argued to be the biggest singer in the World- using the extra space afforded to her by their sheer fame to experiment with and shape their sound, challenging their millions of guaranteed listeners with music from ever so left of field rather than force feeding them dozens of Single Ladies until the fans explode like Mr. Creosote in a messy blob of hip shaking and finger waves. There are no obvious hits on ‘Beyoncé’, yet neither does the record sound like anything but gloriously state of the art pop music, Beyoncé showing that challenging the accepted norms of the genre doesn’t mean you should ever have to resort to anything close to being unlistenable. Even though ‘Beyoncé’ is hardly Slint’s ‘Spiderland’ the fact that someone of her fame is releasing songs as wonderfully obtuse yet still outstandingly beautiful as Haunted (far more experimental and envelope-pushing than anything on the previous Mogwai album) is absolutely something to be celebrated. Beyoncé’s new found embrace of feminism is occasionally a little cack-handed- calling her solo tour ‘Mrs. Carter was a hideous error if you want to fly under the feminist banner, while Jay-Z’s allusion to Ike Turner’s wife-beating in his rap for Drunk in Love is a dumb mistake (merely an ill-thought out lyric rather than any real support for spousal abuse, I actually think the awfulness of the ‘Your bresteses are my breakfastes’ line deserves closer inspection)- yet at least they’re there and the inclusion of the Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s TED talk sample in Flawless adds another layer of anger to an already thrilling song. ‘Beyoncé’ is an equally dark and deeply sexual album and by God it’s absolutely wonderful.

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Brilliant, there’s no fucking about here kids- this is an album by Beyoncé that happens to be called ‘Beyoncé’, you don’t need anything else.

You’ve no idea what a pain in the arse it’s been to put that fucking accent over the ‘e’ every time. Yeah I’m gonna take a star off her for that

4/5

We should all really be thankful for Mogwai, over nearly 20 years they’ve released around 8 albums that merely centralise and more closely define their resolutely uncommercial breed of ultra-arty post-punk instrumentalism, never once even threatening to be huge or make that leap over into the mainstream (though their official t-shirts were once the must have fashion accesory), yet always selling quite enough copies and playing quite enough gigs for it never really being a threat that they might have to consider jacking it all in and getting a proper job. Their success has decent enough in fact for there now not even existing the requirement for Stuart Braithwaite to continue his summer job (a bit of data entry at the construction company his Dad works at, which he did until he was 37). However with every new release each 2/3 years there remained the nagging feeling that the band would never quite better or even truly match the sheer majesty of their 1997 debut ‘Young Team’. Whether ‘Rave Tapes’ is now their greatest release is up for debate, but it’s certainly and by some distance their most wonderful since that epoch-defining debut.

Which epoch?

Sorry…?

Which epoch did it define?

Which e…?

You said it was epoch-defining, which epoch did it define precisely?

The… Well it… Shut up! I’m trying to write here: The name ‘Rave Tapes’ is something of a red herring, this isn’t ‘Mogwai Do David Guetta’, although electronics are often used in areas such as the breakdown of the astonishing Remurdered to devastating effect. Over the album synth stabs are instead used sparingly to instead boost their already confident sound– the isn’t the sound of Mogwai revolutionising, but it may be the sound of them perfecting.

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Ah c’mon, what the fuck is this? Some sub-Emerson Lake and Palmer (not one of the good Palmers) shit?

Ok, if I’m being completely honest the computer just had a shit-fit just now and stopped me doing anything for maybe half an hour, so I’m in a pretty poor mood now: Fuck you Mogwai

1/5

FKA Twigs is one of the best things to happen to British music, or just all music in general, for absolute years. There, I said it. The artist Formally Known As Twigs (do you see what she did there?) is a giant, booming and hopefully deeply shaming laugh in the faces of people who still claim that it’s ‘all about the music’ as Twigs has created a whole universe around herself where the actual songs she might release- while definitely not being the smallest consideration- are merely further cogs in the FKA Twigs persona. Taliah Barnett’s assault on the sense includes a deep devotion to creating her wonderful look, her constantly gorgeous and challenging videos, her use of the stage act as close to individual performance art installations, if you scrape your nail across the speakers as ‘LP1’ (following ‘EP1’ and ‘EP2’- Twigs tends to take a more ‘Ronseal approach’ to naming her releases) plays it actually creates a scratch and sniff effect, and she smells wonderful. Twigs started out as a dancer (and such physical training is obvious every time you see how astonishingly she’s able to perform) in videos for artists such as Jessie J and Kylie Minogue, music she felt didn’t represent her at all and in Video Girl especially she attacks this false pretension (‘Is she the girls from the video?/Stop, stop lying to me… You liar, you liar, you lie ‘) yet it seems that once she’s given full reign to produce her own work instead of stripping it all down as a cack-handed presentation of the ‘real me’ she adds more and more artifice to better demonstrate the vast differentiation between the real person and whatever persona is presented to you as a pop culture artefact. What’s that? Is the music any good?? Oh it’s fucking fantastic, I thought you already knew that.

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Absolutely the year’s best, Twigs shapes and distorts her face to make it at once more cartoonly pretty and also a slightly unsettling dive into the uncanny valley.

The reddened cheeks can’t help but call to mind the Jenny Saville painting of a beaten child that covered the Manics’ ‘Journal for Plague Lovers’. Possibly more from them later…

5/5

Ah shit, if you choose to categorise this as pop/punk you’ll render my previous statement about Against Me’s album being the year’s best by several furlongs rather nonsensical, but come on it’s only a fucking list, stop pretending you give a shit and lighten up a bit. It’s not pop/punk of course, it’s gloriously euphoric and combatively melodic rock music, simply nine collections of mind blowing choruses and hooks so pronounced that they’re each their own civil parish within the Hart district of northern Hampshire (yeah I really peaked far too early with that Dustin Hoffman film reference didn’t I? And that wasn’t that good in the first place). Dalle’s first solo sounds less like the brash punk of The Distillers and more akin to the abrasive and highly melodious rock of her husband’s band Queens of the Stone Age, though you’ll have to go a long way back to find a song Josh Homme’s wrote that’s quite as arresting as Dressed in Dreams or Rat Race (Ok, it was probably last year’s If I Had a Tail, but shut up I’m trying to make a point here). It also turns out writing about your children doesn’t have to be horrendously embarrassing if you use lyrical flushes like Dalle does in Meet the Foetus/Oh the Joy (‘You have sailed through the eye of my needle/A perfect parasite burgeoning Eden/You and I, in DNA, you’ll never get away’) and the appearance of Shirley Manson is always welcome, although I could live without the gurgling baby noises that I Don’t Need Your Love fades off into. Blood in Gutters is absolutely the best song of 2014 to picture yourself shouting at karaoke (Ok, I actually did say that about a different Against Me song didn’t I?)

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I love the typeface, I love the colourisation and I love Brody Dalle’s new haircut.

What more do you want?

Four out of five…

4/5 (see?)

Fucking hell, if I was getting paid per word (rather than not getting paid at all and performing this whole exercise as a ridiculously pointless vanity project) I could probably clock off for the weekend now after writing that title. If the length in some way intimidates you (ooh Matron. You know; ‘length’. Like a penis’s length? You see? Very funny) then perhaps ‘Fuck Off…’ is not the album for you, as it hardly considers brevity a virtue- three of its five tracks break the ten minute mark and the record is not afraid of sounding EPIC. It is an absolute fantastic noise though, frequently and thrillingly dancing with the possibility of becoming unlistenable but instead always remaining absolutely and violently exhilarating. It’s a breathtaking and perhaps radical theory of what a punk rock orchestra would sound like and the music wriggles through your skull and lays eggs in your brain that spawn and mutate for many hours after listening. I accept that perhaps it’s not for everyone, but there exist people who don’t like olives or drinking or oral sex or football- some people, and I can’t stress this enough, are fucking idiots.

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Fucking hell, I mean there’s red-eye and then there’s red-eye and then there’s…

Don’t they have a filter for this kind of thing?

2/5

Spoon have long been the coolest rock band to name-drop as your favourite- go on try it tonight at the office party when you’re talking to that nice-looking person who works in sales, if you say to them that this is your favourite album of the year they’re guaranteed to have sex with you. However conversely if somebody approaches you and tries to convince you that Spoon are their faves be very wary- they just want to have sex with you, they’ve never even heard of them. Go on, what’s your favourite Spoon song? My Girls?? That’s by Animal Collective for God’s sake! Go on, fuck off while this other person tells me how much they love Flying Lotus. Much as the critical soggy biscuit that has long been passed around over Spoon grates and you’d love to pick holes in their music, Spoon’s eighth is simply so fantastic that you can only bow down to its beauty. It kicks off with single of the year contender Rent I Pay and never really lets up- it’s an absolutely perfect encapsulation of how good indie music can be, and the production on it is so wonderfully crisp that it’s being advertised by Gary Lineker. Although to be honest even if it was a stinker the lyrics of Outlier alone (‘And I remember when you walked out of ‘Garden State’/’Cause you had taste, you had taste’) would be enough to secure it a place on this list.

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Yeah there’s not much to that is there?

Yet the visuals are as pristine and as crisp as the records production- no crappy Polaroids here Swift, although I would feel a little better if the album title similarly referred to the band-members’ year of birth so I wouldn’t feel quite so old as Taylor’s made me.

3/5

Hey, I watched some films this year didn’t I? Now’s as good a time as any to list them, as in you’re unlikely to care any less about it than now:

5 Guardians of the Galaxy

Depending on your mood either the film that proved Marvel studios are currently on such a hot streak that they can take any old shit and craft from it a massively entertaining, enjoyable and frequently hilarious popcorn masterpiece, or just proof that Marvel can slap their logo on a 100 minute video of a pigeon corpse slowly decomposing and it’d still gross $900 million

4 The Wolf of Wall Street

Very confusing for some people, as the film never flashed up a subtitle on screen every 30 seconds explaining that Jordan Belfort’s actions are actually pretty objectionable- how on Earth are we supposed to make these judgements otherwise?

3 Inside Llewen Davis

Movies are about musicians either fall into two camps- the frustrating travails of the outstandingly talented yet tragically unappreciated or the humorous pratfalls of the hilariously terrible. ‘Inside Llewen Davis’ is the Coen’s brilliant snapshot of how life is as a musician who is simply ‘Ok’.

2 Calvary

The difficulties and faced by the unlikelihood of being a generally decent priest. Brendan Gleeson is fast becoming the go-to actor when it comes to choosing reliably decent films to see. He’s in Smurfs 2?? Right, that’s next on my list to watch…

1 Under the Skin

Stunning, disturbing, sexy, scary, beautiful, smart, daring, funny and generally wonderful. Yes, very much like myself.

Ok, sorry about that, back to normal business now:

Aaaaaaaaaaah yes. Yes, yes, yes. Yes. Against Me’s sixth is the greatest and most thrilling blast of pop punk this year by an almost embarrassingly large distance (unless there’s actually a better one higher up, I dunno, in that case it’s the second. Or maybe third or fourth, like I say- I don’t know. Probably should have researched that statement before making it). If it is punk of course- the sparkling urgency and bursting chorus can frequently instead call to mind an especially fun and (importantly) less naff update of glam rock. The band have an obvious knack for great choruses, and every song has a hook so pronounced that Dustin Hoff… Hang on, I’ve done that one already haven’t I? Alright: the hooks are so pronounced that they’re… they’re… in a club’s cloakroom. Nah that’s shit isn’t it? Can’t I just do the Dustin Hoffman one again? If you’ve any idea about the band then you can probably guess that the lyrics mainly concern the difficulties and confusion faced by singer Thomas James as she underwent procedures to become Laura Jane, though I worry that the big story behind the record is in danger of overshadowing just what a fine and coherent example of furious, biting and diverse rock music it is. Closer Black Me Out is absolutely the best song of 2014 to picture yourself shouting at karaoke to- ‘Black me out/I wanna piss on the walls of your house/I wanna chop those brass rings/Off your fat fucking fingers/As if you were a king maker’.

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Eugh. This is a difficult one- it’s horrendously ugly but at the same time the whole idea is that it is ugly and difficult to face up to and process, much like Richard Keys

Either 1/5 or 5/5, depending on how you look at it

Before I start talking about this album, I’m actually legally obliged to present a Buzzfeed style list of all the things that weren’t invented the last time Aphex Twin released an album (2001’s ‘Druqs’) so here goes:

• The Microsoft Zune!

• Shampoo!

• Either Shampoo the band or shampoo the product this time, depending on what you first thought when you just read ‘shampoo’ there!

• The concept of reconciliation!

• The Spanish language!

• Forks!

• Future Islands’ performance on Letterman!

• Dirt! And with it of course the perception of cleanliness!

• Can I stop now?

Yes it’s been a hilariously long time between albums (or at least solo disks, Richard D James has continuously released music under countless other guises) and since that last release was a probable career lowlight expectations weren’t sky high for ‘Syro’. It delivers and then some though, perhaps because it’s probably the most oddly traditional album James has ever done- it’s neither showy nor controversial for the sake of it and simply has enough confidence that the sheer quality of the music would shine through on its own terms. And what music- ‘Syro’ simply sounds wonderful, no album this year or even decade better rewards the use of headphones. While you may be initially disappointed that it doesn’t quite break boundaries and wank off conceptions of music in quite the same way you may by now be expecting from an Aphex Twin release- there’s nothing particularly new here- the wonderful arrangements and even fantastic (spit) melody makes the record one of the year’s best. About 12^th best I’d say.

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Nope, nothing much going on here, but do you see the enduring power of a logo kids?

Seriously, that shit’ll pay the bills for years

3/5

Yes, we’ve all seen their wonderful and wonderfully batty David Letterman performance, the stone cold classic pop ‘moment’ that introduced the World to both the showstopping voice and the- shall we say?- ‘eccentric’ performance style of front man Samuel T Herring. In fact, if you didn’t see the name ‘Future Islands’ and immediately burst out the impression that you’ve been working on for the last 9 months then you’re so dismally out of touch that I can only assume it’s a medical condition. Future Islands are easy to mock, but isn’t that a facet of a lot of great pop music? As good as the albums are, I’m willing to best you don’t have an Elbow or Sun Kil Moon ‘bit’ that you break out at parties (you can maybe manage a nice Parklife skit, your Gruff Rhys really needs a Power Rangers helmet to work, while your Ben Frost tribute actually involves you violently gutting half the people in the room and wailing as you smear their blood across your face) whereas Future Islands arrived (a classic four album/six year overnight success) with a style and persona so easy to ape and with their own World you so want to be trapped inside. And the actual music? The music is fabulous, 10 killer choruses, bewitching melodies and brilliant bass lines, not one duff track and some especially heavy highlights.

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Ah jeez guys, I was really on your side there, but this is pretty awful. If you just said you know how to use Photoshop I would have believed you, honest.

1/5