48 Wednesday: Yep, Definitely

Dec 16, 2018 ~ Lex Leeson ~ 5 Comments

Off all the artists on this list, North Carolina’s Wednesday is the one I know least about. You guys, I’m not even sure she’s on Twitter! Does she even exist? Her BandCamp page has a paper thin bio that consists wholly of “@wednesday_gurl ♪┏ ( ･o･) ┛♪┗ (･o･ ) ┓♪┏(･o･)┛♪”

“But Alex”, I hear you cry between crunches of the Tangy Cheese Doritos you’re stuffing into your fat ugly face, “@wednesday_gurl? Her bio has her Twitter handle in it! You are so dumb!”. To which I angrily wedgie you by pulling up the underwear you’re somehow still in at 3pm on a Thursday afternoon and scream “There is no @wednesday_gurl handle on Twitter! There’s somebody who calls themselves ~wednesday gurl~ but her actual handle is @Nos_Qween, has six followers, hasn’t Tweeted since 2011*, and it’s very probable that she was a girl who just really liked Wednesdays.”

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61 Sudan Archives: Sink

Dec 13, 2018 ~ Lex Leeson ~ 4 Comments

Why isn’t Sudan Archives a bigger deal? Like, why have you* never heard of her? Why are we all not already sick off her experimental folk/jazz being forced down our throats at every artisan coffee shop and that friend of ours never shutting up about her? Why do I have to be skirting through BandCamp satisfying a peculiar itch to even come across her?

(*Yes, you. Yeah, you know who I’m talking to. You. You there. No! Not you! You’re cool, I’m talking to that numpty next to you. Yeah, you…)

Again, I can’t recommend BandCamp enough…

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69 Noname: Room 25

Dec 6, 2018Dec 6, 2018 ~ Lex Leeson ~ 4 Comments

“My pussy teaching 9th grade English/My pussy wrote a thesis on colonialism/In conversation with a marginal system/In love with Jesus”

When Noname released her second album back in some time in the past (there really is no way of knowing), Amazon offered the opening (and possibly best) track, Self, to listen to as a sample. Early in the song she states “Y’all really thought a bitch couldn’t rap huh?/Maybe this your answer for that, a crack era/The Reagan administration that niggas are still scared of?”, and being the sucker I am for commentaries on the (still) worst US President of the modern era. Soon afterwards, she utters the aforementioned bang up the elephant line that you really should be well aware of by now, and I was sold. I immediately chucked £7.99 at Noname and her scholarly vagina. I later found out that she was also on Bandcamp, so purchased it again in the assumption that she was likely to see a lot more of the money, judging by the amount of cash Amazon siphoned off when I published a couple of books a couple of years ago. For that reason, ‘Room 25’ is the only 2018 album that could be considered so good that I bought it twice.

The thing is though, what does that line actually mean?

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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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15 Rina Sawayama: RINA

Mar 28, 2018 ~ Lex Leeson ~ 3 Comments

Just Preparatory Superstar

(…)

This placing is perhaps a little too high for Ms. Sawayama: her debut EP probably doesn’t actually have the fifteenth greatest collection of songs of 2017. Based on solely the actual musical merits it would still feature highly on Necessary Evil 2017, don’t get me wrong. Though perhaps it’d be awkwardly bumping body parts in the crowded economy section with the likes of Andrew Bird and Ghostpoet, rather than clinking champagne glasses in first class as she spreads her legs and guffaws with Lupe Fiasco over Moses Sumney‘s droll anecdote.

But if you think pop music is 100% about the music then you’re an indefensibly dull person. Great pop music isn’t just about great music: that’s definitely a large part of it, of course, perhaps even as much as 53%, but there are so many other factors involved.

It’s those other factors, those elusive forty seven percenters, that Rina Sawayama knocks comprehensively out of the park

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