scaryblog

   So, having got to the end of The Guardian's Top 50 albums of 2023, how have they done this year?   Overall, I think they actually did pretty well - there were a load of decent albums on there and no absolutely dreadful ones.  I was introduced to 37 new albums (down from 41 last year), with nearly all of my previous visits coming through reviewing the weekly charts with only Everything But The Girl (one I sought out) and Lankum (from another year-end list) coming from other sources. Best 11 I've gone for a top 11 this year - I'd listened to three of them before (the top three on my list), with four of the others being from artists I knew about and four being completely new. #45 : Everything Is Alive - Slowdive #40 : Sundown - Eddie Chacon #39 : Laugh Track - The National #30 : The Age Of Pleasure - Janelle Monae #29 : I Inside The Old Year Dying - PJ Harvey #25 : The Greater Wings - Julie Byrne #18 : Madres - Sofia Kourtesis #11 : Raw Saw God - Wedne...

Finishing my trip up The Guardian's   top 50 albums of 2023 #1 : False Lankum - Lankum Lankum’s fourth album is a stunning collection of Irish trad – and a few originals – reimagined over the roar of droning, emotive arrangements and tight vocal harmonies. Broken up into sections by three “fugue” interludes, False Lankum defies genre while yanking classics into the 21st century. In a year of braggadocio rap, highly personal pop and TikTok-fuelled hits, it hacked out its own path: an undeniable work of scale and dynamic builds, with few songs ending sounding as they started. That variety was intentional, and ends up being incredibly effective. As singer Radie Peat put it: “Things work best in contrast because it makes both parts stand out. If something is the same for two hours, your brain stops hearing it.” There’s no chance of that happening here: the staggering beauty of False Lankum stays with you long after its run time concludes One I've somewhat surprisingly heard - it wa...

Continuing my trip down The Guardian's   top 50 albums of 2023 #2 : Heavy Heavy - Young Fathers Heavy Heavy is packed with ideas that probably shouldn’t work in tandem, but somehow do, which pulls you headlong into a world where a distorted, glam stomp-driven excoriation of Brexit and the head-in-the-sand mentality behind it that winds up as an exuberant, irresistible choral singalong – “Brush your teeth! Wash your face! Run away!” – is far from the most improbable thing on offer. Pop hooks meld with warp-speed beats and soulful vocals; warm, euphoric melodies break through production that fizzes and seethes; wild experimentation is crammed into the confines of three-minute songs; industrial noise and scrambled hip-hop samples coexist with piano ballads. All this happens in barely half an hour – in that sense at least, Heavy Heavy is a model of economy; 30 minutes of music marked by the thrilling and increasingly rare sense that you’re in the presence of something that’s unique and...

Continuing my trip down The Guardian's   top 50 albums of 2023 #3 : Desire, I Want To Turn Into You - Caroline Polachek Throughout her fourth solo album, Caroline Polachek is a technically immaculate vocalist, tracing complex melodies as if matching the light-trail of a sparkler wielded by a toddler, but she’s never showing off. The meaning of Desire, I Want to Turn Into You itself is carried in how these vocal lines search high and low, babbling in excited melody, yearning hard to reach top notes, or occasionally speaking in a careful monotone: this is a drama about the all-consuming nature of desire, played out across very topography of Polachek’s perfect voice. This is perhaps Polachek’s lane: being the bard for a generation of digitally savvy, cultural cherry-pickers for whom irony is so dull, even hateful, compared with loving something intensely. I've been aware of Caroline for a few years now and popped in to see her at Glasto this year, but I wasn't aware she releas...

Continuing my trip down The Guardian's   top 50 albums of 2023 #5 is another one we've met before - the snappy album titles continue with Mitski's  The Land Is Inhospitable and So Are We , which was an album I really wanted to like but it just didn't hit the spot for me. #4 : That! Feels Good! - Jessie Ware That! Feels Good! is couched in rapturous hedonism and propelled by breathless ecstasy, Ware inviting you to step into your pleasure. What’s more, she leads by example. “I’m a lover, a freak and a mother / Walking on the line, it’s my human nature / I crave a little danger,” she winks on shimmering satin floorfiller Pearls, before giving you a little push towards the disco ball: “I know you wanna / Go to the moon / But if you don’t go, you’ll never get there.” On Free Yourself, Ware rides bucking pianos, funky bass and Italo disco strings, lassoing together satisfaction and sexual autonomy; Beautiful People, with Ware’s grinning self-aware rapping, cowbells and cajol...

Continuing my trip down The Guardian's   top 50 albums of 2023 #8 is another one we've met before - they're coming thick and fast now, with this previous visit being Blur's  The Ballad Of Darren , which I liked when I met it but I had to revisit my post to remind me of that, because I remembered it being pretty dull.  I should make myself re-listen to it as penance, but I'm not going to. #7 : With A Hammer - Yaeji Across 13 songs, Yaeji moves through a lifetime of hurt, confusion and resentment. Lyrically the songs explode with feeling, but the Korean-American producer’s sound is controlled and often pared back, taking more inspiration from pop structures than her previous EPs – the songs carefully fitted out with synths, woodwind and tidy vocal melodies – and lyrics are sung like mantras. On the title track, she releases the tension that has been accumulating across the album. “There were days I gave up / And put a mask on my face, brain and heart,” she sings in a ...

Continuing my trip across the output of Athens' finest... Collapse Into Now (2011) And here we come to the end of the studio albums - there will undoubtedly be a few more posts on some interesting other bits they've done over the years, but in a lot of ways this can be considered to be The End.  I think I listened to it once and found it to be not all that different from Accelerate, but I could have made that up - the good news is that the sides have gone back to having names Side 1 - "X-Axis" 1.  Discoverer I didn't mind this one - it feels like it could quite easily have been on Green . 2. All The Best This is more Monster -ish - it's fine but I can live without it. 3. Überlin I liked this one - nicely slower with some decent guitarwork on it. 4. Oh My Heart Whereas this harks back to Out Of Time - are we getting a potted history here? 5. It Happened Today Yeah, I didn't mind this one either - there's been a good amount of variety so far. 6. Every D...

Continuing my trip down The Guardian's   top 50 albums of 2023 #11 : Rat Saw God - Wednesday The settings of Wednesday songs tend to be pretty shabby: truck crashes, car park overdoses, accidental firework arson, a “sex shop off the highway with a biblical name”. But songwriter Karly Hartzman practically consecrates the defining locales of her North Carolina youth into sites of religious pilgrimage, honouring this vanishing, violent detritus and the overlooked rural lives of those who witness it. Blurring allegory and anecdote into ripping anthems caught halfway between the disaffection of the 90s Touch and Go catalogue and the Drive-By Truckers’ take on southern rock, Rat Saw God is the year’s best rock album, and a place you’ll want to keep visiting again and again. I've never heard of Wednesday and I've have to say it doesn't seem like the best band name to have in these search engine optimised times - and that was the case even before Netflix got in on the action wi...

Continuing my trip forward in time through the album charts 22/12/23 :  Stick Season - Noah Kahan Well, this week surprises us on a couple of fronts.  Firstly, and probably the least expected, this is possibly the album I've heard most this year - because obviously I'm a massive Noah fan. Well, it might not surprise you to hear it's not me but my delightful daughter - but you might be surprised to hear just how much my youngest absolutely LOVES Noah, particularly given his folkiness.  She's got tickets to see him next year and (excluding festivals) they're the most expensive gig tickets I've ever bought.  But despite having heard the album loads, I've never actually listened to it, so I'm interested to see what I make of it on a one-on-one basis. You know what - the headline is that, having actually listened to it I can report that, at least in places, I liked this way more than I previously did.  I listened to it over headphones for the first time and t...

Continuing my trip down The Guardian's   top 50 albums of 2023 #13 : Something To Give Each Other - Troye Sivan Rush, the deliciously bawdy opening song on Troye Sivan’s third album, is a bit of a feint: after all the body-to-body bumping, the Australian pop star turns wistful, even lovestruck, as he muses on the boys he wants, the boys he can’t have and the boy he lost. He’s twisted up by desire: the robotic vocal processing on lament One of Your Girls embodies how dehumanising it is to want someone so unattainable; Still Got It is an organ dirge that makes crushing into an act of holy devotion; infatuation leaves him lightheaded on In My Room. All the while, he tries to maintain a cosmopolitan cool, his sleek synth-pop slipping from French touch to Spanish guitar to UK garage 2-step. But globetrotting can only get him so far. “I’m just tryna get outside of this body,” he admits on Silly. I have at least heard of Troye and I listened to "Rush" because it was on The Guard...