All my silence resonates

Continuing my trip up The Guardian's Best Albums of 2020 list...

#34 : Alfredo - Freddie Gibbs And The Alchemist

With two classic albums alongside Madlib, Gibbs continues his other dream producer partnership with the Alchemist (a veteran whose credits include Kendrick Lamar, Eminem, Nas and tens of others) following 2018’s Fetti. As with Madlib, Gibbs pairs well with crackly soul samples, giving him the lofty statesmanlike air he needs when regarding everyone with such alpha-male hauteur, but he never sounds old. His tales of drugs and women are delivered in a hungry flow that is deceptively brilliant: conversational even when at a high technical difficulty.

OK - I'd never heard of Freddie, but the description of "tales of drugs and women" had me sighing.  And, tbh there were plenty of times when I was listening to it that the sighing continued.  However, there were glimmers of hope that Freddie does have a life beyond the drugs and the women and the overall presentation is impressive with a high level of skill involved in getting so many words out so quickly - and some of the background sounds are nice to!  I'm not sure I agree with the description of the delivery as "hungry" - I got more of a "world weary" feel to it, but maybe I'm just personally more world weary than I am hungry!

Reading up on tinternet, there's a lot of love out there for this album so due to my general levels of ignorance around the genre, I'm going to go with the flow and accept people's word for it that there's enough here to distinguish it from the crowd.  I didn't hate it, but there's also no danger of me listening to it again.  I like the album cover though - I feel it's saying something deep, but have no idea what!

#33 : how i'm feeling now - Charli XCX

The title of Charli XCX’s lockdown album might be read as business as usual: she is, after all, our most hyper-present and reactive pop star, one obsessed with stimulation. Frustrated by its absence this year, the self-professed workaholic made an album of sugary obliteration that signalled her fierce hunger for the highs: “I’m so BORED,” she spat on Anthems, a bratty shriek to scare off disassociation. But keeping still forced Charli to actually sit with her feelings – a much harder job than simply acting on them – and her fourth album contains moments of dawning horror at what that stillness revealed. How I’m Feeling Now was awash with static interference, a familiar sound to anyone who’s battled through video calling in 2020 – but it also mirrored an interior conflict between signal and noise, distraction and fulfilment.

Uh-oh - another lower case album title!  

Whilst she's not exactly in my wheelhouse, I must confess to generally liking the stuff Charli produces - it's generally of a high quality and features some interesting collaborations.  So I had high hopes for this.  And whilst I liked it, I didn't like it as much as I liked her previous stuff (I don't feel it's a patch on Charli, her previous album) so was left feeling slightly disappointed/underwhelmed.  

I spent some time considering whether this is Charli's fault, the pandemic's fault or my fault until I decided it is what it is - although I'm happy to take some of the blame because I often find after an artist's 3rd or 4th album (this is her 4th) I know and like what I feel is a sufficient amount of material such that any new stuff has to fight hard to make its mark on me.  So it either has to be obviously "better" (and yes, I realise this is totally subjective) or sufficiently different for me to pay attention (and obviously, if it's totally different there's a strong chance of me going "Ewwww - no").  Elbow are my prime examples of this - there are some cracking tracks on their later albums, but I just can't be bothered listening to them (which makes me wonder - are we going to see any Elbow on the Rolling Stone list?)

Anyway, back to Charli - "customers also listened to" Georgia and Sky Ferreira - neither of whom I've listened to, but I'm tempted now.  I'd also say that, although I've been a bit down on this album here, it's way better than a lot of the other stuff on the list so far so maybe I just need to chill out a bit and say "Thanks Charli!".  I do feel she could have tried a bit harder on the album cover though.

#36/35 - Two albums not as good as they think they are

#32/31 - Two hard to describe albums