When did you first hear the word "saccharine"?

Continuing my trip down The Guardian's top 50 albums of 2023

#36 : Gentle Confrontation - Loraine James

With four albums and three EPs following her 2019 breakthrough For You and I, it’s been astonishing how quickly and deeply London producer Loraine James has hollowed out her own particular grotto in music: connected to other underground sounds from electronica to modern composition as well as the deeper corners of R&B, hip-hop and jazz, but decorated with the flotsam of her own life and lit with a wobbling flame. Guest singers such as Eden Samara and George Riley are on hand here for soaring vocals, but James’s own more earthbound, conversational voice remains the most affecting of all, confiding family trauma with a stoic shrug.

Someone else I've never heard of - it sounds like the sort of thing I'd like, but you can never really tell with the bleepy kinda of stuff (often I'm unable to describe why I like the stuff I like - I just know I like it!).

Hmmm - yeah, I do like bits of it but it's either so well put together that it sounds very simplistic or, well, it's just very simplistic.  I know I wouldn't be able to pull it together in a million years, but Loraine has a lot more experience of this sort of thing and I can't help but feel she could chuck this together in five minutes.  Yes, maybe that's harsh (I'm not expecting her to get in touch to let me know - imagine my surprise when she responded on Twitter with "Fair enough") and as I said, I did like bits of it - but at the same time I was a bit disappointed.

Wikipedia tells me this is her fifth album and, apart from the critical reception, that's pretty much it.  The critics, it won't surprise you to hear, are slightly more eloquent than my comments - apparently Loraine "uses chaotic arrangements and glitchy drums to express knotty, difficult-to-name emotions".  I can't believe I didn't think to put it that way!  And there's absolutely no word on commercial reception, which means there was none.

"Customers also listened to" Ritchie, Laurel Halo, Quinquis and Anjimile - I think I might have heard of Laurel before but I wouldn't bet on it.  I wish I'd liked Loraine more than I did though - it just didn't quite click for me and I feel it should have.

#35 : Everyone's Crushed - Water From Your Eyes

As if emptying the contents of an overstimulated head on to a metal workbench, this triumph of art-pop is noisy, disorientating and full of possibility. The Brooklyn duo pick up punk-funk basslines, car-alarm riffs, plucked strings, spoken word, corporate chimes, pure noise and more, and hammer it all together with the haste of someone who needs to get to their next job. The end product is fascinatingly tactile and in the case of the ballad 14, utterly beautiful.

That's four in a row I've never heard of - "art-pop" covers such a wide variety of (often completely random) noises that it's hard to know what to expect or whether I might like it, so I've no option other than to just go for it.

Well, it's not horrible but it is all a bit odd.  I think The Guardian gets it right with "disorientating and full of possibility" - sometimes it works for me (I liked "True Life") but mostly I was just left scratching my head.  I didn't spot any general underlying cohesion which doesn't really make it feel much like an album, but it's not an unpleasant selection of tracks.  High praise indeed, I know!  She certainly has a peculiar style of singing though.

 

Wikipedia has two sentences on the album and four large paragraphs on the critical reception - which feels like the wrong way around to me.  The critics mostly liked it (with a lot of very specific scores such as 8.3/10) and it made a lot of year-end lists.  It appears not to have made the charts anywhere though, but there is a remix album available (Crushed By Everyone) if you feel the need to go there - personally I think all the tracks are so random that I don't quite see the point to remixing them.

"Customers also listened to" feeble little horse, Youth Lagoon, Wednesday and Mandy, Indiana - I certainly preferred this album to Mandy's effort, but that's not really going overboard now, is it?

Both of these feel like wasted potential to me - they're not horrible and quite listenable in places, but I didn't really understand what either of them were trying to achieve.

#38/37 - A contrasting pair of albums
#34/33 - An intriguing pair!