“It still whets the appetite for next year’s promised Krautrock album (if only to see how terrible that could potentially be)”- 2013 Palmers

Ah come on, were you really expecting anything else? Tiger Woods was once asked whether he considered himself to be the greatest golfer of all time and replied that he only wanted to be involved in the conversation, similarly while the Manics’ 12^th (twelfth! I need a lie down…) may not automatically be considered their best work, it at least deserves a seat at the table. In fact 1994’s ‘The Holy Bible’, 1996’s ‘Everything Must Go’ and this form a delightful triptych of the three stages of the Manics. This third stage actually opened up with last year’s underwhelming and rather wet ‘Rewind the Film’ (after stage two had closed off with the equally unremarkable ‘Postcards From a Young Man’) and it seemed like one of the generation’s most essential and exciting bands (in fact, fuck that, this is my list: the generation’s most essential and exciting bands) might be about to sadly drift off into middle-aged irrelevance, perhaps releasing one acoustic meandering every two or three years to the wider public’s collective shrug. ‘Futurology’ was previewed by Nicky Wire as always throwing out brilliant sound bites about how the new album was going to sound like Bowie, Kraftwerk, 80s Simple Minds and of course Krautrock, how it was going to encapsulate the band’s new Euro-influenced sound and was fittingly recorded in Berlin, the kind of brilliant trash-talking we’ve now come to expect to preview every release before we actually hear the record and it only sounds like more Manics. Then lead single Walk Me To the Bridge (which Nicky claims has nothing to do with Richey Edwards and is in fact all about his own uncertainty over the band, which is patently bollocks and surely Wire isn’t arrogant enough to refer to himself with the line ‘Still blinded by your intellect’) arrived and sounded brilliant– a thrilling combination of electro stabs and BIG melodic blasts based around a hook so massive you could hang Mussolini on it (yes! I knew I had one left in me!) and people started whispering about whether the Manics could somehow pull it off. When we first heard the second release- the gloriously bonkers Europa Geht Dirch Mich (German for ‘Europe gives dirt mice’) featuring a wonderful guest vocal by German actor Nina Hoss that sounds like nothing if not Goldfrapp’s Train fed through a meet grinder- the band’s wonderful new direction’s success began to become clear. Talking it had never been a problem but it seemed that they were actually going to walk it on the new album. And so it proved- ‘Futurology’ is a perfect 13 tracks and 48 minutes that manages to take on many new influences and perform new tricks while still sounding like nobody else like the Manics. And despite all these new influences ‘Futurology’ is a very ‘Manics’ album- no other band could happily stick such wonderful silliness as Sex, Power, Love and Money on such an ostensibly ‘serious’ album without batting an eyelid, no other band could sing a chorus of ‘I am the Sturm und Drag/I am the schadenfraude’ as they do here on Misguided Missile, no other band could express such self-awareness as the Manics do in Next Jet to Leave Moscow (‘So you played in Cuba did you like it brother?/I bet you felt proud you silly little fucker/And all the sixties dreamers called us English/Said we started something we couldn’t finish’- as always the best Manic Street Preachers songs are about the Manic Street Preachers). Even with the album sounding quite so ‘Manicsy’ it still fits in an unusually large number of guest appearances that are all uniformly brilliant, from the aforementioned Hoss to Scritti Politti’s Green Gartside turning up on the wonderful Between the Clock and the Bed to the absolutely gorgeous voice of Georgia Ruth on the absolutely gorgeous Divine Youth, it seems the Manics have created whole political party where anybody’s welcome and it all sounds like fantastic fun. When the band started writing the album they couldn’t have foreseen how when it would be released the concept of Europe and people being (un)invited would turn out to be such a hot button subject, yet when it was released ‘Futurology’ suddenly turned out to be the anti-UKIP album, a statement of how wonderful Europe is and how blessed we are to be a part of it, looking- as the title suggests- to a idealised future where more borders are torn down rather than Farage’s constant hankering for a past where more such things existed. In fact this album and the Young Fathers’ debut (plus that child of Sharon van Etten and Kayus Bankole I’m engineering) can both be seen as a wonderful riposte to the current popular ideas of cutting the country off from the outside World (two of Young Fathers’ three members would be deported under UKIP policies. As would Nigel Farage’s children but let’s just ignore that) and instead highlights the possibilities of what beauty could be created if we all pulled as one.

Ah shit, this is rapidly turning into some hippy bullshit, I’m off fox hunting.

The album’s great by the way.

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Shite…

1/5

Where do you start with Young Fathers’ debut? It’s an introduction into a World that’s at least as evocative and thrilling as the Wu-Tang Clan’s ‘Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers)’, even if that debut was quite clearly a hip-hop release and to simply label this album under the same genre can’t help but feel like laziness- it’s kind of hip-hop but at the same time frequently something else entirely, constantly taking turns off I into weirder and weirder places without ever sounding strange. Young Fathers have a marvellous and intense (‘intense’ is apparently the one word that comes to mind when meeting the band) desire and ability to experiment and challenge their sound, while at the same time possessing an innate understanding of how to pull off an absolutely storming chorus and every song here is nailed down to a delicious melody that ensures no cattle’s ever too spooked by the record’s inherent craziness. While the band are based in Edinburgh, and the music at times has a wonderful ‘Edinburgh Tattoo hip-hop’ (Edip Tattop? Eugh that’s horrible, forget I said anything)approach,there are even splashes of digitised bagpipe sounds occasionally sprinkled over the songs, which somehow manages to sound brilliant and in no way as crap as you’d quite justifiably imagine, but ‘Dead’ is a very international sounding album, the results of how brilliant a melting pot of different cultures and styles can be. Of the band’s three members Kayus Bankole spent a lot of his formative years living in his parents’ homeland of Nigeria, while Alloysious Massaquoi (these names are requiring some furious copying and pasting) was born in Liberia and moved to Edinburgh aged 4 (G Hastings, born in Scotland to Scottish parents, much be rather self-conscious about being the ‘boring’ member) and their sound is a wonderful aural example of the kind of majesty possible with immigration, how the introduction of different cultures doesn’t in any way result in the ‘watering down’ of any one way of life, but rather introduces a thrilling third way that is like a wonderful amalgamation of what has gone before it. Right, now I just need to somehow manufacture a baby born to Kayus Bankole and Sharon van Etten (hang on, that’s eugenics isn’t it? Yeah, better scrap that idea). To be honest, I was seriously considering making this number one outright until the record became a gloriously surprising winner of the Mercury Prize (rarely has an album deserved the accolade more) and it all became a bit too obvious (like the winner isn’t obvious already). Like I say though, these top three are pretty much interchangeable, it’s all meaningless, get over it.

The next album wasn’t even nominated for the Mercury Prize! Bloody immigrants, coming over here, stealing our awards…

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Jeff collapses in tears onto Paul’s shoulder.

‘Don’t you see!?’

He cries out through his sobs.

‘They were holding hands ready to embrace death! All of the toys!’

3/5

Wow… Just… Wow…

Sharon Van Etten’s fourth (obviously not self-titled- watch and learn Clark) is an absolutely devastating Sturm und Drag bulldozer of emotion, a sharp piercing blade of hopeless heartache that is as heartbreaking and moving as any movie you’ve seen since ‘Toy Story 3’. What makes ‘Are We There’ (the lack of a question mark in the album title is particularly significant) so especially moving is that it’s not about the big emotional turmoils in life, it’s not about that horrific break-up, not about the time fiancé Jeff shagged your sister, not about people close to you dying, not about that time you both sat down and watched the opening scene of ‘Up’ together (it seems I link large emotional feelings exclusively with Pixar movies. I’m Ok with that). Instead the album’s real power lies in its mortifying presentation of a relationship slowly crawling towards its end, the sad and slow death of a union that was once beautiful now just consists of two people silently hating each other yet staying together because they believe they for some reason should. Van Etten begins track eight by hoping ‘Maybe something will change’ but by the song’s end is clear where the relationship is now heading- ‘Nothing will change/Nothing will change/Nothing will change/Nothing will change’. The album is one 46 minute speculation over whether it’s all really worth it– why allow yourself to feel so close to someone when the massive possibility of it ending in this sort of sluggish despair exists? It’s unlikely this kind of slow surrender has ever been better caught musically, and Van Etten has abandoned the slow Americana that she was previously known for (apart from Taking Chances, the nearest the record has to a dud and a song that really halts the album’s flawless flow somewhat) and instead dressed the songs up in sumptuous music that acts as a much needed counterpoint to the lyrics’ occasional gloom. Thankfully just when you think you’ve been maybe clinically depressed ‘Are We There’ ends with the relatively sunny When the Sun Comes Up smirking slightly at the relationship’s collapse (‘I washed your dishes, but I shitted in your bathroom’) and the album concludes with Sharon giggling as she messes up a recording- maybe everything’s going to be alright. Shit, maybe this should be higher. Look, the top three are pretty much interchangeable to be honest, they’re all joint winners really, Ok?

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Sharon has been stuck behind this tractor now for going on 20 minutes and is in real danger of being late to the Olly Murs gig

‘Oi mate’ she leans out the window ‘Any chance of moving aside, yeah?’

No response

‘Jesus… Anyone fancy a pint?’

3/5

Annie Clark’s fourth (seriously? Self-titled? Get a fucking grip- your debut is allowed to be self-titled, or perhaps your late career attempt to reverse a loss of form and fortune and recapture the days when you were relevant. But fourth?? It shows such a heinous lack of respect for the conventions that I couldn’t let it pass) is the sound of something absolutely marvellous: an artist’s growth into their own sound and style reaching completion and their feet finally filling their shoes perfectly and delightfully comfortably. You could argue whether or not it’s St Vincent’s best record (her third ‘Strange Mercy’ was at least as wonderful, and contained perhaps more moments of that could truly stun you silent with its sheer invention and idiosyncrasy) but it’s definitely Clark at her most delightfully comfortable with her sound. ‘St Vincent’ carries the feeling that it was written and recorded in one take, maybe a lazy Sunday afternoon after Clarke realised the local cinema wasn’t actually showing ‘Transformers: Age of Extinction’ until early evening and she suddenly had a few hours free. St Vincent (the artist, not the record. Do you see how confusing this becomes?) takes her cues from prog rock and jazz, never taking the obvious route to any song’s destination, and yet crafts it all together to create wonderful and wonderfully unlikely pop music- you’d never accuse the gorgeous Prince Johnny of allowing its experimentation to get in the way of it being perfect pop. She’s also an absolutely killer guitarist, yet like the equally talented Prince she rarely if ever pushed the skill to the forefront for cheap fret-wanking, only ever really utilising it when it best services the incredible songs. St Vincent is certainly a major player now. The open mouthed cheek slapping reaction to Birth in Reverse‘s opening lines (‘Oh what an ordinary day/Take out the garbage, masturbate’) when it was first released as a single in December last year shows that in 2014 (well, 2013 technically) there’s still nothing as shocking as a woman admitting to wanking. Unless of course everybody was just shocked that she took out her own rubbish- don’t these people have people for that sort of thing?

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The lights go dark, your eyes flutter, the gun shot pain ebbs away and you wander into the light. The afterlife is governed by as striking a deity as you could ever imagine. Yes! Score!

Sigh… I wish I was dead..

I admit I may have just put St Vincent so high mostly because of precisely how much I love her hair.

4/5

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