78 Lil Yachty: Nuthin’ 2 Prove

Dec 2, 2018Dec 2, 2018 ~ Lex Leeson ~ 7 Comments

Longtime readers of this blog (hi, Mum!*) will know I have a bit of an obsession with Lil Yachty. I honestly think he’s a fascinating figure who has the sufficient lack of self-awareness and disregard for the supposed former statesman and accepted tropes of his genre that he could potentially create something very special. His sound is obnoxious, flagrantly disrespectful and nonchalantly artless. But then, I’m a depressingly old white idiot: the sound of 2018 should sound borderline offensive to me! Lil Yachty is 21 years old, he’s already released one stone cold classic song (fight me) and a patchy and imperfect debut album that nonetheless showed flashes of the buoyant/obnoxious/genius/overjoyed style that is all his own and that could see him take over the world before too long, to the fabulous irritation of old farts everywhere. Whether you like it or not, this was evolution and it was frickin’ exciting!

(*My Mum has far too much self-respect to read my blog. Only people with a base level of pitiful self-respect would ever waste time reading this shit. Yeah, I’m talking about you. Aunty Cheryl, however, loves it! She is, however, a shameless crack cocaine addict and, if I’m being completely honest, has been dead for 12 years next April)

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79 stef chura: Messes

Dec 2, 2018Dec 2, 2018 ~ Lex Leeson ~ 5 Comments

Four albums in, and two of the artists have debilitating issues with capitalisation (stef shares similar disregard for proper nouns to american poetry club). The only two artists from America, make of that as you will. Is this the Donald Trump effect? In fact, if any human being on Earth loves capital letters, it’s The Trump, so maybe these artist’s refusal to capitalise is a subtle form of process. Fair enough, as you were…

I don’t think I had as much of a personal relationship with any artist on this year’s list as I had with stef chura. Back in early 2018 I was relatively new to Bandcamp, which is one of the Greatest Things Ever that I really don’t have time to talk about here (I’ll save that for an album where I can’t think of what to write about- there’s plenty of those coming up). I was initially overwhelmed by this new tool that was seemingly offering me endless opportunities to hear new music from artists not even yet big enough to have had held discussions over the exact makeup of the band’s logo*, artists so obscure that even if the singer committed suicide it would only make even the local news on a really slow news day, that I didn’t really know where to start. I followed a few people, hoping to get suggestions from their own opinions rather than go through the laborious task of forming my own.

(*Every band should have a logo. Listen, this isn’t a debate, I’m just telling you a fact. If you haven’t yet got one you’re obviously not taking your art seriously enough. I’ll accept that some artists might not have had the time yet, but if you’re on your third album and still logoless then you’re showing offensive disregard for your own brand. Did Steve Jobs die for nothing?**)

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80 american poetry club: we are beautiful even when we are broken

Dec 1, 2018Dec 1, 2018 ~ Lex Leeson ~ 7 Comments

I had honestly planned to write each of these entries off as quickly as possible. The last two entries were a combined total of more than 3000 words, and it’s literally taken up my entire Sunday writing them. I’m afraid american poetry club (what, they have no caps locks in Missouri?? You people disgust me) are going to bear the brunt of my frustration at being unable to sufficiently edit myself, and I’m not going to say much about their delightful little blast of lo-fi emo.

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81 Ital Tek: Bodied

Dec 1, 2018Dec 1, 2018 ~ Lex Leeson ~ 1 Comment

He’s back again! You remember Ital Tek? Of course you do, he’s the sound of Brexit

And, while I’d love to exercise my unparalleled skills of music journalism to dissect and discuss the… baselines… and chord progressions… and things… on Mr.Tek’s recent album, I feel it is only fair to the man that I use this opportunity for the third successive year to discuss the Brexit he is obviously so keen to ally himself with.

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82 Ash Koosha: ‘Return 0’

Dec 1, 2018Dec 1, 2018 ~ Lex Leeson ~ 5 Comments

The human race is kind of resigned to losing all of it’s jobs to robots. In their March 2017 paper, ‘Robots and Jobs: Evidence from the UK Labour Market‘, Acemoglu and Restrepo found that the addition of one more robot per thousand workers reduces the employment to population ratio by about 0.18 – 0.34 percentage points and wages by 0.25 – 0.5 percent.

Of course, I wouldn’t be the widely lauded and routinely celebrated investigative journalist that I am if I didn’t investigate their findings and see if such statistics could be replicated in the UK job market. Unfortunately, Manchester Refugee Support Network only employs 5 people, so in order to get a proper reading on effect on one robot per one thousand employees I had to measure the effect of

one two hundredth of a robot on our work. I think. There’s really no way of knowing exactly what the maths are, but that’s what I did so it has to be correct.

It’s hard to truly say what would represent 0.5% of a robot, but my contacts in the robots industry* tell me that equates to roughly a robot eyeball. With this in mind, I introduced a fully automated eyeball to the office at MRSN. Well, I initially assumed it was a fully automatic robotic eyeball, but later examinations have suggested it may in fact be closer to a chocolate ball wrapped in tinfoil. Again, there really is no way of actually knowing, but talks conducted with my contacts in the scientific research industry* have confirmed that this trivial matter should have had no effects on the findings.

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Necessary Evil 2018

Dec 1, 2018 ~ Lex Leeson ~ Leave a comment

An Unwanted Return That Nobody Really Wants and Everyone is a Bit Embarrassed At

‘Necessary Evil is for better or for worse the imaginative record of man’s sexual will’

-Peter Michelson

‘On Necessary Evil, every platitude leads to an obscurantist pretension and back again’

J Lloyd Samuel

Necessary Evil 2016 was posted in October 2017, Necessary Evil 2017 got a little closer by starting in February 2018 and now- look!- Necessary Evil 2018 actually comes out in two thousand and fricking eighteen!!

Yes, the countdown finally gets back to starting on December 1st in a vain attempt to capture the relevance it once had way back in 2015 (remember my review of Drenge’s ‘Undertow’? Special times, we’ll never have that type of magic again). And- fuck me!- the main consideration this year in to finish the thing before I go to bed early on New Year’s Eve, cryong over the fact I have no friends. So this year’s list won’t have as many 6000 word philosophical ruminations on the human condition as loyal readers of this blog might have come accustomed to. Also, in the name of brevity I have tried my hardest to condense 2018 into the 15 essential records that deserve whatever little attention this blog affords.

At least, that was the idea, and I honestly tried to exclude as many records as I could. As always, though, it turns out that there are just so many records out there! Loads of legitimately brilliant records that I want to shine light on; loads of perhaps less accomplished records by more obscure artists I believe deserve the attention; loads of records that might not be ‘good’ in the scientific sense but, to quote Jonathan Swift, light a spark in my whoopsie; loads of records that might not be ‘good’ in the scientific sense nor ‘good’ in any sense whatsoever but I want to tall about anyway because I love the sound of my own keyboard taps; and of course, as always, there are records that are the sound of Brexit.

I managed to scale it down to 82. Kill me.

It’s been another great year for music, with some NE mainstays delivering their greatest album yet out of nowhere, some old favourites releasing puzzlingly unsatisfactory records, and many artists jumping immediately to My New Favourite Thing status.

I’m still not sure if there were any amazing records released in 2018. All of the best albums of the year have at least one glaring flaw, and despite their being a perhaps record number of Extremely Good albums with four stars spilling out of their anuses, I’m not sure any 2018 album will in the future be regarded as a classic. Because of this, I’ve never struggled so much over which record should be number one, and there’s a very good chance I’ll change my mind about it in the 3’185 days it takes me to write this bastard list. This is also the first list in a long time that I’ve written with no idea what the critical consensus is leaning toward, so I don’t think I’d be exaggerating were I to call Necessary Evil the purest and- dare I say it?- most woke albums of the year list on the internet.

If you’ve read NE before you’ll know what to expect- it’ll start off a bit scrappy and ill-defined, hit its peak around half way through with some legitimately brilliant posts, then descend badly into nonsense as the writer just begs for it to end. We’re gonna have a good time!

Also, because I’m really aiming to wrap this up in appropriate time, I’m afraid I won’t be filling my reviews with dumb, nonsensical wrestling references that literally nobody reading this is going to get.

Only joking, I’m probably going to do more than ever– wait until we get to JPEGMAFIA’s album!! Oh, erm, spoiler, i guess…

OK, so No. 82 is…