Cowards - here's the sun, so bow your heads
Continuing my trip down The Guardian's top 50 albums of 2022.
#16 : Cool It Down - Yeah Yeah Yeahs
At their historic best, Yeah Yeah Yeahs have made music for cramped spaces: basements they can strain against and blow the roof off. But their fifth album, and first in nine years, is proper big-sky music, full of cavernous, lovingly patient songs made for staring at the stars and pondering your place among them. Karen O is at her most intimate and open-hearted here as she weighs up the balance between futility and optimism, comfort and the wild, in strikingly elemental and intuitive lyricism; meanwhile Nick Zinner, Brian Chase and O’s still-sharp punk teeth gnash at the edges of the magnificent vistas they conjure.
I quite like Yeah Yeah Yeahs when I remember they exist - which isn't really all that often. I have pretty high expectations for this and I really should have listened to it when it came out, but I guess I'm just a terrible person.
Yeah (Yeah Yeah) - I liked this a lot. As The Guardian says, it's a bit calmer and more considered than some of their previous stuff and, for me, it's all the better for it. There's a pleasing amount of variety across the album but it's all well crafted stuff with strong vocals. At times, it's channelling good Blondie - both with the Debbie Harry like vocals (good Debbie Harry, please note) and the basic 80s vibe. And at other times, it really sounds like someone else whose name is JUST evading my addled brain and it's really annoying me. But, all in all, it's very enjoyable.
It got to #10 in the charts, but still only managed the one week - I wonder what was the highest position where that happened in the last year? Wikipedia has more than I was expecting on the album, but all it really says is how it's been nine years since their last one and the critics liked it. It actually did best commercially over here, with it only getting to #45 in the US.
"Customers also listened to" Broken Bells, Metric, Death Cab For Cutie and King Princess - all of whom I've heard of, but that's as far as it goes. I really liked this latest offering from YYYs though - I'm definitely going to try to make an effort to revisit them more often.
#15 : Caprisongs - FKA Twigs
Before this year, it was well established that FKA twigs could do pretty much anything – sing, write, produce, pole dance, sword fight – but until the release of Caprisongs, one question lingered: could she make party records? Caprisongs showed that the answer was an unequivocal, neon-lit yes. Humid, rhythmic and alive, it slips between distended dance tracks ranging from hyperpop to reggae to afrobeats, and serene, moonlit balladry. It feels like a summer night that stretches until dawn, constantly drifting from the party to the street to an overstuffed Uber. After the alien soundscapes of Magdalene, Caprisongs brings twigs down to earth, crying and laughing and dancing like the rest of us.
I like Ms Twigs and thought I'd previously written about her, but it seems not - I'm expecting to like this though.
And yeah, I did - although I wouldn't say I ever get invited to the kind of parties where this sort of music gets played. Whether that's a reflection on me or the music, I'll let you decide (but yeah, you're right - it's me). It's not quite as unique as her previous stuff and kinda tricky to describe, so I probably won't even bother - I was reminded of Mandalay if you're aware of any of their stuff. It was certainly an interesting listen though.
It's also an interesting one charts-wise - it had one week at #42 in the week of release and a week at #91 nine months later. I assume she did something newsworthy for the second "run" but I could probably spend months researching it and still not find the answer. Wikipedia tells me it's not an album, it's a mixtape - I've looked into the difference between these before and I'd have to say I'm no closer to understanding it. This is a 48 minute collection of mostly new songs mostly written by FKA herself (and yes, I do know what FKA stands for, before you accuse me of thinking that's really her name) so it pretty much seems like an album to me. Wikipedia also makes the point that this is viewed as a more mainstream work than her usual stuff, but it also points out that it's a piece of "visceral art pop", which isn't sounding particularly mainstream to me. The critics liked it though and it did pretty well commercially, getting to the dizzy heights of #91 in the US, which seems like a decent effort to me.
"Customers also listened to" Kojey Radical (not sure it's all that like this), Little Simz (yeah, it's more like this), Priya Ragu and Shaybo (neither of whom I've ever heard of). I like FKA Twigs though because she does interesting stuff and this is another interesting album which has some nice sounds on it and quite a bit of strangeness as well.
Two fine albums - this is one of our better selections, certainly.
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