19: Hudson Mohawke: Lantern

Dec 9, 2015 ~ Lex Leeson ~ 1 Comment

Ross Birchard is a man of many, many talents, but subtly is absolutely not one of them. Hudson Mohawke’s second album is essentially one exhilarating and impassioned 48 minute scream, it has its hands in the air and a whistle in its mouth, chewing his cheeks so hard that blood drips from its mouth as it swears it can see God in the club lights. Listening to ‘Lantern’ (especially on headphones) shakes your brain so comprehensively, so aggressively hyperactively, that the pure milk of your synapses are churned into the most beautiful cheese, yet always with its arm tight around your shoulder as its sweaty lips kiss your cheek. Even quieter (‘quieter’ being extremely loosely used here) songs like ‘Warriors‘ crescend so spectacularly that you’re taken to heaven, while ‘Portrait of Luci‘ initially tricks you into believing you can have a lie down, before you realise you’ve been sold a massive red herring as you’re soon swerved onto your feet again. Perhaps wary that his Kanye West collaborations may have had people pencil him in as a purely hip-hop artist, here Hudson overcompensates thrillingly by dipping his toe into every other genre of music. I’m sorry to use such a tired and cliched phrase, but this kind of fun can’t be legal.

‘Fun’ Fact: Given his birth date, Ross must have been conceived on May 11^th 1985. The date of the Bradford Fire. There’s some freaky parents.

Mate, mate, mate, mate! I love you man, like, I really fucking love you! Come here and give me a hug! I think ‘Scud Books‘ should keep your current feeling going nicely.

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Important Announcement

Dec 8, 2015 ~ Lex Leeson ~ Leave a comment

OK, we’re actually going to kick it up a gear now. While every album so far has been differing levels of quality, ranging from ‘middling’ to ‘absolutely fucking incredible’ (album number 23 being worse than number 22 but slightly better than the one placed at 24, which in turn is a little better than the one placed at 25, do you see? Do you see? Do you see?) they’ve each had at least one tiny problem. From here on in however each and every album is an absolute classic worth each penny you decide to spunk on its face. Yep, there were nineteen masterpieces released in 2015…

20: Lonelady: Hinterland

Dec 8, 2015 ~ Lex Leeson ~ 3 Comments

Is Julia Ann Campbell’s merely a pastiche of the greatest achievements of her home town of Manchester?All the moves are here: the songs could fit snugly onto the hypothetical third Joy Division album released in 1981, the production mirrors the best of Martin Hannett, the dark shards of post punk mirroring Manchester’s post-industrial fall-out, I’m pretty sure the catalogue number is FAC502. The main difference is that Lonelady is absolutely good enough to be ranked alongside her biggest influences, rather than a talented tribute act enclosed in bondage by her own reverence. Lonelady’s 2^nd album is simply brilliant, a brisk 9 songs and 47 minutes of infectious and angular new wave, there’s certainly tributes being paid here but they never over weigh the sheer quality of the songs. Manchester has been accused (often justifiably) of being a city far too in thrall to its own legacy, but ‘Hinterland’ shows exactly just how amazing it can be if you tune this worship into precisely the correct direction.

‘Fun’ Fact: The title track is one of the best songs to have ever come out of Manchester. Fact.

Sounds a little too objective to be considered a ‘fact’. Since I’m obviously going to go on and love this artist you may as well recommend another song for me: Absolutely no problem, try ‘Flee‘

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21: Ghostpoet: Shedding Skin

Dec 8, 2015 ~ Lex Leeson ~ 1 Comment

As good as Obaro Ejimiwe’s debut album was, his modus operandi of sparse electronica coupled with moody vocals somewhere between rap and spoken word never sounded at all disparate to the dozens of hundreds of millions of British artists who have tried similar tricks since the mid 90s.

What’s that Obaro?

You drank too much last night?

You’re going to do a moody and dark piece about that post-club comedown?

Sure, nobody’s done that before.

Come again Obaro?

Sigh, yes I suppose the big city is a dark and intimidating place sometimes.

Are you sure I can’t get you a bag of crisps or something?

Pretty much the only selling point Ghostpoet had to mark him out was that he wasn’t from Bristol. His second album, however, is a marvellous and largely inspired step into the direction of singularity. While it hardly tears up the book and starts again- it still sounds unmistakably like Obaro’s work- it’s an ambitious step into alt-rock territory that sees Ghostpoet put a band together that gives each of the songs here a weightier kick that was absent on his debut. Upon hearing ‘Shedding Skin’ the influences it brings to mind are no longer Tricky and Massive Attack but TV On the Radio or even Radiohead if Thom Yorke finally gave in to the inevitable and started rapping (which would obviously be the greatest thing ever). It’s astonishing how such moody alt-rock coupled with spoken word generally of the glummest variety can produce music so frequently exhilarating.

‘Fun’ Fact: the brilliant (and titled beyond parody) ‘That Ring Down the Drain Kind of Feeling‘ features Nadine Shah. Nadine hails from Whitburn, also the birth place of both of West Ham’s full backs in the 1923 FA Cup final!

These facts are getting increasingly tenuous: Oh I’m sorry, do you have a problem with this completely free and absolutely insignificant list? Just listen to ‘Be Right Back, Moving House‘ and pretend he’s actually singing ‘I am sitting over here, looking for Beyonce’ like I do.

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22: Hot Chip: Why Make Sense?

Dec 8, 2015 ~ Lex Leeson ~ 1 Comment

Little about Hot Chip makes much sense, they have long seemed too bizarre an anomaly to be easily fit into any scene or genre: you just can’t blast out anthems to the dance kids when you look like you could list off your favourite ‘Magic: The Gathering’ card to be played in any one of the top 50 most common gaming scenarios, while you can never truly be accepted by the hipster nerds when your throwing out tunes as banging as ‘Dark Knight‘ or the absolutely stunning ‘Huarache Lights‘ (that opens here and that the album consequently struggles a little to live up to). ‘Why Make Sense’ is almost a mid-life crisis of an album, asking whether it’s actually still normal to just want to pursue fun while approaching middle age, and whether there’s any point in doing so anyway. As the title implies though there’s really little need to over analyse such basic human desires: we’ve had many examples of music that’s referred to as ‘dance music you can’t dance to’, well ‘Why Make Sense’ is dance music you can dance to but made for people who really shouldn’t, yet do it anyway.

‘Fun’ Fact: Huarache lights are trainers I’m far too old to think are unbelievably cool

I wonder if any of these tracks would work perfectly on Shane Meadows’ ‘This Is England 90’: Funny you should mention that, because ‘Need You Now‘ has the definite and bewitching stench of Shelley’s Laserdome in Stoke-on-Trent sometime at the turn of the decade.

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23: Carly Rae Jepson: E•MO•TION

Dec 8, 2015 ~ Lex Leeson ~ 4 Comments

‘Call Me Maybe‘ was one of those extraordinarily rare things: a pop song that was absolutely ubiquitous and inescapable and yet not universally hated, perhaps because it’s absolute pop perfection. Following that monster hit can be unnerving, but CRJ’s second album is a triumph of capitalist cynicism: more than two hundred songs were eventually whittled down to the 12 here that some boardroom somewhere decided were absolute best to further the ‘Carly Rae Jepson’ brand (collaborations with guaranteed hit makers such as Max Martin and Jack Antonoff were scrapped). And by God it works! Musically there isn’t a wrong step here, with every song being as perfect as the last (with one exception being slightly more perfect). The only problem lies with Carly herself, who is such a vacuum of personality that it’s near disastrous. What is Carly Rae Jepson? There have been absolutely no hints of any sort of personality behind those gorgeous big eyes (and no Carly, telling The Guardian you ‘spent an entire week vaping’ to get your voice ‘gritty’ for one track absolutely doesn’t count). Recently Katy Perry launched her comeback in a leopard print leotard shouting at tigers in the jungle, Rihanna played up her bad-girl image with ‘Bitch Betta Have My Money‘, Miley was dancing with bunnies and spelling ‘twerk’ out in alphabetti spaghetti, while Carly was… er… Carly was telling Tom Hanks that she really liked him. Even Charli XCX opens a song this year with ‘You have an ugly tattoo and fucking cheap perfume’, but you couldn’t imagine CRJ being even that interesting. ‘E•MO•TION’ is an absolutely amazing album, but if it came over the pub speakers I’d struggle to remember who sang it.

‘Fun’ Fact: Carly Rae Jepson is 30 years old, which is totally age-appropriate for me and it wouldn’t be at all weird if we were to get married and have lots of little babies together. If you’re reading this Carly why not lift that restraining order? Can’t we be adults about this?

Great, 12 tracks that aren’t as good as ‘Call Me Maybe‘, why bother? You’re so cynical! Opener ‘Run Away With Me‘ is at least as amazing as that albatross, as perfect a pop song as you’re likely to hear, it opens the album so impressively that most albums would struggle to follow it.

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24: Ibeyi: Ibeyi

Dec 8, 2015Dec 8, 2015 ~ Lex Leeson ~ 2 Comments

Naomi and Lisa-Kaindé Díaz were born in France but grew up with their time spent both in Paris and Cuba due to their father being legendary Cuban percussionist Anga Diaz, who not only won a Grammy for his work with Latin jazz band Ikakere but was part of the Bueno Vista Social Club on that CD everybody bought in 1998 and have never listened to since. He sadly passed away when the girls were just 11 (with their elder sister following 7 years later) but the sisters decided to follow his musical legacy, not only by learning his signature instrument the cajón but also by studying the West African Yaruba culture (where there family descended from until being brought over as slaves in the 1700s) and immersing themselves in Regla de Ocha, the Afro-Cuban religion based on the worship of Orishas. Now, with a backstory as fascinating as that you already love the debut album by the 20 year old twins before you’ve heard a single note don’t you? But even if you set aside the origin story worthy of the Marvel cinematic universe then ‘Ibeyi’ is close to a perfect debut album, in that it touches on as many influences and inspirations as possible in 13 tracks, yet all the while remains doggedly committed to the twins’ unique style so no track ever really sounds like anything other than the band themselves. It’s not until the tenth time you listen to the album that it really strikes you just how sparse these songs are, often just Lisa’s voice over Naomi’s percussion, yet still the albums sounds so conversely FULL. Perhaps that echoes the ideas put across by the album’s lyrics, that of seemingly simple ideas and emotions that are actually far deeper than you may give them credit for. An extraordinary introduction

‘Fun’ Fact: The video for ‘River‘ is one of the most strangely disturbing things you’ll see today

Hmmm, I’m not really a fan of that funny foreign music, are we almost at the Coldplay album? You, sir, are an imbecile, start with ‘Stranger Lover‘ and delve deeper from there.

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25: Sleater-Kinney: No Cities to Love

Dec 7, 2015 ~ Lex Leeson ~ 1 Comment

SK’s much delayed eighth album shows that such periods of absence needn’t lead to such heinous crimes against humanity as last year’s Pixies album. Kinney don’t miss a beat as they breeze through 10 songs and 33 minutes of absolute new wave pop perfection, with hooks you could hang Mussolini on and choruses so big you initially mistake them for Tory benefit cuts. Yep, absolutely noting wrong here, move along…

‘Fun’ Fact: It’s pronounced SLAY-ter Kinney?!?! Oh no! I’ve embarrassed myself in front of so many far cooler people!

That review was barely using a quarter of your arse: ‘No Cities To Love’ is simply an album that achieves what it sets out to do with absolute minimum fuss and so the most appropriate reaction is really nothing more than an enthusiastically raised thumb, imagine something as finely crafted as ‘A New Wave‘ repeated 10 times

26: Shamir: Ratchet

Dec 7, 2015 ~ Lex Leeson ~ 7 Comments

We should all raise our hands and rejoice that artists like Shamir exist, he fits in no obvious hole and listening to his music or watching him perform you at once worry that there is absolutely no crowd that exists for him and also realise with delight that he may be your favourite thing in the world. At the very least he harkens back to the days when your grandparents angrily complained that they couldn’t tell if the performer on Top of the Pops was a boy or a girl, and Shamir delights in playing up to his inherent sexual androgyny (as he considers himself neither male or female he prefers to refer to himself as ‘queer’ rather than gay. I’ve decided it best I don’t refer to him this way) His debut is marvellously constructed pop-dance, as Shamir bounces around like a toddler let loose in the Sunny Delight cupboard, coming across as the Azealia Banks it’d be super fun (rather than terrifying) to hang out with. OK, I’ll admit, of all the albums on this list it’s Shamir’s that I can most envision some people finding extremely annoying, but isn’t such what divisiveness part of what makes pop music so great?

‘Fun’ Fact: Any night out with Azealia Banks would invariably end with you walking home alone with one shoe on.

Sounds a bit exhausting if I’m being honest: That’s always a worry, so the mid-paced ‘Darker‘ is perfectly placed near the album’s end

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27: Everything Everything: Get To Heaven

Dec 7, 2015Dec 7, 2015 ~ Lex Leeson ~ Leave a comment

Have Everything Everything ‘broke through’ with this album? It’s hard to tell. I went to those teens on the corner and asked them but they only scoffed and called me ‘grandfather testicles’ while pointing out that that kids these days unanimously agree that youth culture reached a zenith in 1994 with Shampoo’s ‘Trouble‘ and famous teenage scientists who have their own YouTube channel and everything have instructed all teenagers to give up on pop music as it was now a dead art form akin to needlepoint tributes to the Osmonds. So that was me told…

‘Get…’ has been sold by some reviewers as a monumental step up in quality for the band, but it’s not really massively superior to 2013’s ‘Arc’ (which certainly isn’t a bad thing at all, no siree, nope, not at all), however while that last album was more a hopeless whimper directed at life’s little insurmountable tasks of tedium, ‘Get…’ is a BIG and impassioned cry over the very state of humanity itself, taking stops off to comment on the rise of ISIS and the wet fart of the 2015 General Election. Sure, it’s essentially four middle class white boys complaining about life’s difficulties but at least it’s something, it’s always so refreshing to see the almost critically insular world of indie rock at least take a peer out of the window occasionally. It’s extremely gratifying to hear EE’s sound (a mishmash of countless influences) blossoming into something that now sounds rather unique to the band: you couldn’t really imagine any other indie (if EE even still deserve to be tagged so) band launching their big comeback with a song as angular and esoteric as ‘Distant Past‘.

‘Fun’ Fact: Shampoo used to write the Manic Street Preachers fanzine ‘Big Exit’ and appeared in the video for ‘Little Baby Nothing‘, so they’re alright by me

The main question, and one I ask of all albums, is whether there’s a track that could be played over commercials for upcoming soap operas to lazily demonstrate a character is in some way upset over a past action? Channel 4 used ‘Regret‘ liberally to advertise Hollyoaks over the summer

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