The 16th year end Necessary Evil list of the year’s objectively and scientifically proven greatest music is a notable event for a few reasons. Firstly, it will be the first time I’ll be writing a list of year’s best bops and slapsthat played out to a full twelve months of genocide. Like, the whole year. When I wrote last year’s list, it was only to the backdrop of a tiny bit of genocide that covered the last couple of months of the year. And who really pays attention in those winter months? Too busy thinking about Christmas, right? A couple of years back, for example, my housemate Darren engaged in the systematic and targeted slaughter of more than two dozen woman and children in those early December weeks, and I just didn’t notice because I spent the whole time trying to untangle the Christmas lights. Don’t worry, it happens, I get it.
1.(of a process or system) characterized by constant change, activity, or progress
It’s never talked about in 2024, but Oasis were actually a far bigger deal than Nirvana.
In the UK I mean, of course. I am from the UK and writing this in the UK from the perspective of someone who lived in the UK in the 90s. If I were Spanish, I might be writing the praises of the million selling debut album by Laura Pausini, by far the biggest selling record of 1994 in that country. If I were Japanese, I might be talking about how neither Nirvana nor Oasis can hold a candle to Mr. Children (ミスターチルドレン), whose 3.4 million selling ‘Atomic Heart’ album obviously hit that sweet spot between tentacle porn and genocide denial that the country cherishes so much. But, I’m writing in English, so you’d probably just imagine I’d cede to the American version of history, as we are so often wont to do.
When the Politburo unanimously elected Mikhail Gorbachev as the eighth General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1985, the USSR wasn’t in a great place. The cowboy bravado of Ronald Reagan had lead to military spending to ride to 27% of its GDP; production of civilian goods was frozen at 1980 levels; US financing of Mujahideen warlords to overthrow socialist leaders in Democratic Republic of Afghanistan ensured the war in that country was an absolute disaster (and would later be referred to as “The Soviet Union’s Vietnam“); and general faith in the leading party was at a historic low. It was clear that some changes would be needed. And ol’ Mikky G believed he had just the plan.
Firstly, Gorbachev wound down the USSR’s power around the world. He retreated from Afghanistan, likely assuming the $20 billion that the CIA had donated to train and arm the jihad resistance groups was unlikely to ever have any longterm effects. He went all smiles and waves to the hawkiest of hawks (and now 43 year champion of the “Reason For Everything Wrong In the World” award) Ronald “Rawdog” Reagan, making the landmark agreements that they would scale back the arms race with the small concession that America still carry on doing the exact same shit. His “Sinatra Doctrine” threw the USSR’s hands up in regard to the Soviet Union’s satellite states, allowing them to do it their way and conceding power to the nationalists and the fascists. Secondly, there would be the concept of ‘perestroika’ (перестройка/restructuring), which were economic reforms that essentially dismantled the planned economy without any suggested alternative mechanism. It also introduced market factors, being the softlaunch of capitalism and conceding power to the new bourgeois. It also meant McDonalds and future Pizza Hut adverts. Yay.
this is fine
And then there was glasnost (гласность/transparency), the ultimate liberalisation of the Soviet Union. Gorby essentially opened up the USSR’s ‘Marketplace of Ideas’. The previous Marxist perspective on ‘free speech’ was probably best explained in Mao’s ‘Oppose Book Worship’ (反对本本主义): “no investigation, no right to speak”. Not everyone is assumed to know enough to speak on anything. Now, the USSR would work from Western, liberal rules. Anything goes. All bullshit is as valid as the next. And “free speech” meant what “free speech” means to this day: reactionary right wing potato heads using racism and sexism to further their own desires for profit and accumulation.
Listen, boys and girls and others, I’mma keep this relatively brief. I feel like my words are pretty irrelevant here, I’m not sure that it’s easy or even possible to explain the beauty, the power, the genius of one of the greatest albums released during my lifetime. My short lifetime. I am young. I’m basically a baby.
1997 was the best year for music, don’t @ me. There wasn’t even a Manics album that year, so I’ll let that sit in just how powerful a statement that must be coming from me. British music, at least. I was in Britain at the time, you see, and though we were still obviously pathetically in awe of the USA – all the cool kids hated Friends, while every movie at the cinema starred Will Smith or George Clooney or… erm… Robert Carlyle…? – the world wide webification hadn’t yet taken over. What’s big in the US is now just big in the UK, because we’re all hooked up to the same companies’ propaganda machines, but back in ’97 we still kinda did our own stuff. Fucking Full Monty was the biggest movie of 97 (and, for a short time before Titanic, of all time in the UK*), nine of the top 10 selling albums of 1997 were by British acts. Trust me, bro: Jewel? Third Eye Blind? Tim McGraw? Notorious motherfucking B.I.G?? We had no idea who these people were. And you know what? We were happy.
Life has been unfaithful And it all promised so so much I am a relic I am just a petrified cry…
I see liberals I am just a fashion accessory People send postcards And they all hope I’m feeling well I retreat into self-pity, it’s so easy Where they patronise my misery
Remember when I used to do these posts right after I did the albums of the year? So it’d be the Necessary Evil albums of the year, the scientifically proven best album fawned over at length, the stats, and then we’d be officially done for another year?
Boom! You just been Mandela Effected, boyeeee! I actually only think I ever did that schedule once, for Necessary Evil 2019. I’ve always been far more often waaaaaaay late with these statistical breakdowns. What I actually used to do really early is (pfff!) do the stats just before the number one album! I could never (be arsed these days! These days the writing of the list itself is such a huge emotional toil that it takes me a long time to even consider thinking about these fucking albums again. Also, it’s getting harder and harder to think of puns on the word ‘stat’.
But these posts are basically just pictures, so I may as well just freakin’ do it. Let’s glance back at the wonderful year od 2022 when we all collectively thought, as always, “Well at least the next year can’t be as bad as this one…”.
All albums featured on the Necessary Evil best of year countdown
I’ve been doing this dumb blog that nobody reads since my first post on the 1st December 2014 called the latest Pixies album an “especially grievous dirty protest”. 2024’s list was the tenth I’ve written in excruciating detail on the blog. The intelligent thing to do would be to call it a day after that. But then again the really intelligent thing to would have been to never start it in the first place. As a stupid person, I’m definitely conflicted. My (recorded) albums of the year go back to 2007. I’m not wanting to put too fine a point on it, nor am I at all pompous enough to ever overexaggerate my importance, but I think it’s fair to say that I am objectively the paramount and most respected voice on music of the last 15 years. And before that too, I just didn’t have a blog then.
But what about the artists themselves? They sometimes play a part in the psychosexual agitprop magic of this blog. We can obviously consider the artists whose work has appeared most in my year end lists, but that’s obviously going to be the Manics (eleven + one very decent JDB solo record and one dreadful Nick Wire one), Prince (eleven, and eventually all 42 of the fuckers) and Nick Cave (I think around eleven, over a variety of projects). Like, duh much? We can all agree without any argument at all that these are the three most important musical artists of all time. It’s like if someone says their favourite food is “crisps”. Like, of course it’s crisps. Crisps are amazing. Everyone loves crisps. But what does that tell you about them as a person?? No, we need a different gage to work out the real stars of Necessary Evil.
Elle Gilliam has had ‘the feels’ mastered for a long time now. A proven guru of cerebral boo-hoo anthems. She was first mentioned on Necessary Evil when I declared the sublime song Novel by her previous project Helltown as one of the best songs of the first half of 2019 that you might not have heard. Dudes, it’s been more than three and a half years since then, if you still haven’t heard it, then I think you might be past saving, seriously. And the name of that surrounding Helltown album, ‘Picture Perfect Depression’ really describes the music that she absolutely perfected with the project: incisive and often devastating explorations of her own personal demons set to absolutely pristine (initially) acoustic gorgeousness.
Midway through 2022, Elle contacted me personally on twitter.com to inform me that she had retired the Helltown moniker and was now launching a new musical project under the ‘Efficax‘ alias. I made a really funny joke about this when the collection of Efficax singles/demos that I completely made up reached #39 on the best albums of 2022 list. I’m not going to repeat it, you had to be there. Oh, and that album kind of exists now? We’ll get into it. Of course, after I went to try trouble of making that album, she then released her actual debut album, ‘Destroyer‘, in late 2022, because she has no respect for what I do. Don’t worry, I’ve forgiven her now. I’ll never forget what she did to me, but I’ve forgiven her.
Changing musical projects wasn’t the only major adjustment that Elle had gone through recently. No spoilers, but check the pronouns on those Helltown reviews. I was, obviously, desperate to interview her, and said so in my Efficax review (“if you don’t see an interview with Efficax sometime early next year it means she hates me and by extension everyone reading this”). Luckily, Elle is obviously vulnerable to emotional blackmail, so agreed.
Fair warning, this interview goes to places. Remember how Elle is so good at articulating her emotional self through her lyrics and music? Yeah, turns out she’s really good at that in her normal voice as well.
OK, let’s try and put this in some sort of perspective: I have always considered my three favourite artists of all time to be Prince, Manic Street Preachers and Nick Cave. Between all three of them they have all had a combined thirty records make the Necessary Evil end of year list and out of those thirty, two have been namedthe year’s best. If I wanted to throw in some faves – both problematic and less so – from the last 15-20 years I might throw in the names of Janelle Monae, The Hotelier, Kanye West, Let’s Eat Grandma, CHVRCHES or Yeasayer. Twenty three entries between them. One winner. Oh, and Radiohead have never finished first, but
Can we get this meme a medal or something?
Thirteen different artists have won Necessary Evil since it first started in 2007. Maybe fourteen, depending on your take on 2013’s infamous Arctic Monkeys/Hjaltalín controversy. No artist has ever finished first twice. Until now. 070 Shake’s ‘Modus Vivendi’ was the greatest album of 2020, and the 2022 follow-up is unquestionably the greatest album released this year, with its only viable contender being a 1982 masterpiece widely regarded as one of the greatest albums of all time. These are the only two albums she has released.
NE2022 enters into a strange ‘rerelease zone’ for these next three entries. I can’t remember if I did this intentionally. It’s difficult to consider ‘classic’ albums alongside newer material. You need to balance out any nostalgia and the unfair ten year start that some records have had to burrow into your subconscious. Yet you don’t want to go too far the other way, and fail to remember the original spark and energy that was originally locked within a song you’ve heard fifteen thousand fucking times already. You can’t give too much weight to cultural importance… but you certainly can’t just blindly ignore it. It’s an extremely complicated equation that I honestly don’t believe anyone reading this will be intelligent enough to fully grasp. Or, I just realised there were a lot of amazing rereleases this year and didn’t want them all clogging up the top ten, so parked them all just outside. Two releases still escaped and made the top ten. There are five records in the top 15 that weren’t released in 2022. Shut up. Ah do warra want!
Necessary Evil 