You climb the walls, you're made of string

 

I'm mostly enjoying working my way up the Rolling Stone top 500 list, although I can't deny there have been some albums which have been "somewhat challenging". However, it's definitely not introducing me to any "new new" music - the most recent album so far on the list has been from 2017, with the oldest one hailing from some time in the early Jurassic period (or at least it felt like it).

So, when I saw The Guardian were doing a list of the top 50 albums for the year (here), that seemed like a perfect companion list.  If I can manage two albums a day, then we can all relax and enjoy Christmas Day safe in the knowledge that everyone is aware of my opinions on the "best" albums of 2020 - which I'm not expecting to be a classic year for releases, but let's see, shall we?  Starting with...

50 : Visions Of Bodies Being Burned - clipping.

Rapper Daveed Diggs is best known for playing Jefferson and Lafayette in Hamilton, surveying the violent chaos at the outset of the US – here, he seems to survey the same thing at its end. This is horrorcore hip-hop, but deadly serious rather than cartoonish, an apocalyptic world filled with blood, petrol, drugs and rust where “core snap like yolk, floor crack like joke / More cat eye opens, sky racked like coat”. Producers William Hutson and Jonathan Snipes use “electronic voice phenomenon” ghost recordings, corroded signals and electroshock bursts of bass and noise to keep you constantly choosing fight or flight.

Well, Mr Diggs seemed like a very nice chap having a lot of fun playing Lafayette, but this album feels a very long way away from that.  It's quite an eerie/creepy sound at times (the start in particular is quite simple but arrestingly effective and sounded impressive on my tiny speaker, so I might need to replay later at volume!).  The lyrics however are unrelentingly grim, often delivered with a strangely impassionate vocal delivery and I found them challenging after a couple of tracks - and, by the end, I'd definitely had enough of it.  So much so, that I nearly didn't bother listening to the last track - but I'm super glad I did because otherwise I would have missed this (as described by Wikipedia).

As usual, the album closes with a recording of an avant-garde performance piece, in this case, Yoko Ono’s 1953 "event score" "Secret Piece" which was published in her 1964 book Grapefruit. The piece consists of text instructions for the performer:

Decide on one note that you want to play. 

Play it with the following accompaniment:
The woods from 5 a.m. to 8 a.m. in summer.

Can you even begin to imagine how I'd have felt if I'd missed that?  All in all, I'd say it's an interesting soundscape but I don't feel the need for a whole album's worth.  It's got a cool album cover though!

49 : Have We Met - Destroyer

Soft rock’s poet laureate returned with one of his strongest sets yet, with the coldwave chill that arrived on Ken (2017) now getting right into his bones. His lyrics are surrealism of the kind André Breton originally intended for the movement back in 1924, “an absolute reality, a super-reality”: bizarre imagery that nevertheless feels true to life, and in thrall to it. Humanity, for example, is “a room of pit ponies / Drowning forever in a sea of love”. 

Well, this is a peculiar one and no mistake.  The music is kinda fine - maybe a bit too laid back for my liking, but it would probably work well (for me, at least) with some London Grammar-ish type vocals over it.  But instead we get - well, this.  I get the feeling Dan Bejar is very keen for me to compare him to Bowie, so I'll keep him partially happy by saying he really sounds like someone who wants to be compared to Bowie.  And you may, as The Guardian does, think the lyrics are something André Breton would be happy with or you may, as I do, think they're just a bit odd.  I probably like a bit of quirk more than most, but it can get a bit too much - and this most certainly does for me.  Let's just take the first verse from the first song as an example 

I was like the laziest river
A vulture predisposed to eating off floors
No wait, I take that back
I was more like an ocean
Stuck inside hospital corridors

and it very much continues in that vein.  According to Wikipedia, the album was inspired by 1980s films including White Nights and Pretty in Pink, the minimalism of 1980s hip hop, the soundtracks of Korean horror movies, the five-hour director's cut of Until The End Of The World (no, me neither) and Leonard Cohen's last albums.  And if any of that shines through for you, then you're a more perceptive listener than me.  I wouldn't describe listening to this album as an unpleasant experience - but I wouldn't give it the pleasure of describing it as pleasant either.  Just altogether odd - and it most definitely does not have a cool album cover.

#48/47 - A fine new introduction