Tag: music

#1 Fever Ray: Radical Romantics (Greatest Album of 2023)

~ Lex Leeson ~ 1 Comment

This is for our careers

Putting my kid in high school

Even it Out… sort of

All year I adored the opening lines from ‘Radical Romantics’ fifth track. I loved the angry, vicious attack of the commodified work of an artist. How the work is no longer about inspiration or true artistic integrity, but just a career. Under capitalism it has become just another desperate attempt to ensure safety, housing, food and education for your family. And what does such a system force you to do with your artistic inclinations? Or maybe the social safety nets?? “And then we cut, cut, cut, cut/Cut, cut, cut, cut/Cut, cut, cut, cut/Cut, cut, cut, cut/Cut, cut, cut, cut/Cut, cut, cut, cut/Cut, cut, cut, cut/Cut, cut, cut, cut”. Comrade Karin Dreijer! Give those capitalist pigdogs what they deserve!

There’s no room for you
And we know where you live
One day we might come after you
Taking back what’s ours

Workers of the World unite!!

SUNSET IN THE MAZE (YOU’RE ASKING ME MY SYMPTONS, DOCTOR, I DON’T WANNA FEEL)

2 Blondshell: Blondshell

~ Lex Leeson ~ 5 Comments

Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck a big part of me wanted to put this at #1.

Did I enjoy any other record in 2023 as much as ‘Blondshell’? Probably not. Did I listen to any other album in 2023 more than I did Sabrina Teitelbaum’s debut? I’m guessing ‘no’. Can I sing any other 2023 record back to back like I can this one? Absolutely not. Do I sometimes catch myself wandering around the house and muttering killer lines like “I think my kink is when you tell me that you think I’m pretty” under my breath? You can’t prove that, but yes. Does Teitalbaum simply rock harder than any other rock rocks in 2023? In years? Affirmative. Is it my favourite album of 2023?? Mate, probably…

SO YOU’LL RUN, YEAH, BUT YOU’ll NEVER ESCAPE

3 Prince: Purple Rain (Deluxe)

~ Lex Leeson ~ 3 Comments

In 1984, there was only one man in America more popular than Ronald Reagan. His name was Prince, and he was funky.

Had Prince run for president that year, he would have certainly carried his native Minnesota—the only state Ronnie lost—and he probably would’ve cleaned up most other places. The reason: “Purple Rain,” his groundbreaking, genre-blurring, utterly genius sixth album. It was a massive seller wherever there were radios and people with pulses.

Kenneth Partridge for Billboard

So, this is it. Our annual trawl through Prince’s albums reaches 1984 and His sixth release. His place in eternal pop culture, His position as music’s most influential figure of the past 50 years, His most abiding songs, His eternal iconography and His cultural footprint. They all come from this era. One of the best selling records ever. Prince said that ‘Purple Rain’ is what people shouted at Him in airports rather than His name. For forty years afterwards, if pop culture was going reference Prince, it would be this era, This album.

If you only own one Prince album, it’s this one. It was the first one I bought, as a spotty teen in Glossop Woolworths back in the early to mid nineties. It’s also your favourite Prince album. If you’ve only heard a couple more. It’s the non-Prince fans’ favourite Prince album. It’s massively overrated. It’s massively underrated. It’s impossible to rate at all. It’s just a bigger deal than almost every other record ever released. I was born six months before the album was released. It’s impossible for me to properly assess it because I can’t remember a reality before this record was released. And that isn’t too big a claim: for the last 39 years and six months we have all absolutely been living in a world, a reality where ‘Purple Rain’ exists. Me being expected to critically analyse it is like you asking my opinions on my own liver. I don’t really have an opinion. It’s just there. I can’t offer any opinions on it because I can’t picture life without it.

TOAST UP, SO WHAT? STREET SMALL BUT IT GO BOTH WAYS

4 SZA: SOS

~ Lex Leeson ~ 4 Comments

This ain’t no warning shot, in case all of you hoes forgot, they know we’ve been more than lost. Us punk-asses tried to replace them but the stakes were too high, we weren’t able to live off some SZA mini-me. In December 8th 2022 they dumped this album like a press squeeze, they were horny like “Suck these”, daring like “Touch me”. They just want what’s theirs, after spending more than five years watching countless people try and fail to replicate the magic of their debut album.

And it’s hard to be a SZA mini-me. Their incredible 2017 debut album felt like a true moment in the history of recorded music. It’s one of the handful of 21st century records – as our tastes become more and more individualised and the latest stage of capitalism involves eliminating community and creating more dividing lines along identity – that is near unanimously considered an all-time classic. It spent more than 300 weeks on the Billboard top 200, selling millions of copies. You gotta rip that off, right??

OUT OF REACH, OUT OF TOUCH, TOO NUMB, I DON’T FEEL NO WAY

6 Noname: Sundial

~ Lex Leeson ~ 2 Comments

The child who is not embraced by the village will burn it down to feel its warmth

proverb of unknown origins, likely African

We could scapegoat everything
We could penny-pinch the homie for defendin’ the dream
A simpler thing, by any mean
Niggas will kill they team
Say the gun did it, run with it
White man or frontman, a whole vision

We just see self in his image
Won’t be a self-critic, burn up our whole village
That wasn’t us, that was colonialism
We keep our babies fed, we don’t beat and rape on our women, we good
We is Wakanda, we Queen Rwanda
First black president and he the one who bombed us, yeah

hold me down
AND I’M ALREADY ACTIN’ LIKE A DICK, KNOW WHAT I MEAN?

8 Ethel Cain: Preacher’s Daughter

~ Lex Leeson ~ 2 Comments

Fucking hell, first today I have to write about a black kid born into Jim Crow Alabama (like, literally Jim Crow, not just modern Alabama, which may still be accurately described as ‘Jim Crow Alabama’), now I get to Hayden Anhedönia, raised in one of those creepy Southern Baptist communities (Hayden was literally the preacher/dean’s son, and when their Daddy would visit they’d come along, while Mummy sung in the choir) and was home schooled. Home schooled!! You know that they’re fucked up. Why am I covering all of America’s weird and traumatic – but always buttressed by religious belief – traditions today?? Oh, and before you ask: no, there isn’t a song here as good as Olivia Rodrigo’s ballad of a homeschooled girl, so let’s nip that in the bud straight away.

I talked to this hot guy, swore I was his type
Guess that he was makin’ out with boys, like the whole night

I don’t get religious people. Hayden told their Mum that they liked boys when they were 12 and, yeah, I get how religious people don’t like unrepressed homosexuality (“I was the spawn of Satan to most people. The first person who told me that I wasn’t going to hell when I died was my therapist that my parents forced me to get when I was 16.”). Hayden left the family home aged 18, shaved their head for a while to try and be as masculine as possible (““I’m going to be a boy, and my family is going to love me, and I’m going to make them proud”), but that didn’t last long. On their 20th birthday, they came out as trans. What I don’t get is… Won’t their family accept them back now?? I get how they need to repress homosexuality – that’s kind of their ‘thing’ and it would be culturally insensitive for me to criticise that – but now Hayden is a woman who likes boys! They’ve come back around the other side! They’re straight again! Show me the part in the bible that disproves what I’m saying, you bunch of freaks. Didn’t Jesus come out of that cave three days after being crucified dressed as Trinity from The Matrix while praising the positive effects of their recent top surgery? Dude, look at that gorgeous flowing hair! You’re telling me a cis guy takes that much care over their hair routine?? Also, a carpenter?? So obviously a lesbian.

IF I TAKE A STEP BACK TO SEE THE GLASS HALF FULL

Seth Manchester’s 2023

~ Lex Leeson ~ 4 Comments

Aw man, it has not been easy to keep up with Seth Manchester this year. It’s been more than five years since Seth’s otherworldly production on ‘Goodness‘ convinced me to buy every single album that Mr Manchester produced from that point onward. This has lead to around 15 further entries on this list. And a lot of death metal. Well, it stops here.

Well, kinda stops. I use Discogs to keep up with Seth, and going off that they’ve been involved in a total of forty records in 2023 (!), though that is including some rereleases and a handful of albums I can just find no other information on anywhere else. This is obviously unsustainable, especially when you consider that Manchester works on quite a few records that I do not enjoy listening to at all. But there is also some very interesting stuff that I missed out on this year that might have made the list. were I not wasting money on more instrumental noise rock.

So the Seth Manchester run will continue. I still think they’re the greatest rock producer working and they introduce me to music that I’d overwise have no chance of coming into contact with. Already on NE2023 we’ve seen the Manchester produced Lingua Ignota project, who I only know in the first place because of the Seth ties. Only, in the future I’m going to listen to an album first and then decide if it’s likely to be worth me spending money on and adding it to the Necessary Evil rotation. Yeah, I know, you probably thought I did as much already, right? Nope. I’m a fucking idiot. Anyway, I’m going to run down some of the more notable 2023 Seth credits.

BEEN SOME DARK DAYS LATELY AND I’M FINDING IT CRIPPLING

12 Mogwai: Mogwai Young Team (Remastered)

~ Lex Leeson ~ 3 Comments

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.

I GOT A NEW MAN ON ME, IT’S ABOUT TO GET SWEATY