You got my heartbeat racin' - my body blazin'

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 Guardian's "best tracks of the year" list - I thought it was OK, but nothing to get too excited about.  And I certainly can't claim it's got me excited to listen to the album (although The Guardian claims the rest of the album is nothing like it anyway).

The Guardian is certainly correct - it definitely shifts down a gear after "Rush" opens the album.  The songs are all fine on their own, but as a whole the album does get somewhat tiresome - he's very mope-y on a lot of them.  I can see it has its fans, but I wouldn't count myself amongst them - but I like "Rush" more after listening to the rest of it.

Wikipedia tells me it's his third album and his first in five years - the most amusing fact tells us that album cover was deemed unacceptable in Saudi Arabia.  Does anyone have any ideas why?!?  The critics were really very nice about it - apparently I'm wrong and it's "confessional" and not "mope-y" at all.  It did very well commercially getting to #1 in Australia, #4 here and #20 in the US - our second most commercially successful album on the list so far I think (after boygenius).

"Customers also listened to" Kim Petras, Kylie Minogue, Slayyyter and Chappell Roan - I've never heard of the last two but I can very much imagine what their sound is.  And I feel somewhat disappointed that Troye didn't give me more of that over-the-top exuberance - a bit more variety here really wouldn't have hurt.

#12 : My Back Was A Bridge For You To Cross - Anohni & The Johnsons

Nearly 20 years on from her breakthrough, Anohni’s singular voice still feels like a sun lamp lighting up the grey everyday, and the backings here (co-produced by Amy Winehouse and Duffy collaborator Jimmy Hogarth) allow her to dwell on the warm, soulful end of her remarkably expressive register. But as lovely as the music and vocal delivery is here, the songs grip and sting, confronting as they do the baffling unfairness of grief, guilt at ecological collapse and the cruel violence of transphobia.

Anohni has a lovely voice, but, for me, she's yet to do anything that tops "Hope There's Someone" off "I Am A Bird Now" (which won the Mercury Music Prize back in '05).  My expectations aren't massively high for this, if I'm honest...

And I'm not sure they were even met - as The Guardian says the vocals are lovely but the songs very much do not "grip and sting".  They're just randomly thrown together and Anohni warbles (yes, admittedly beautifully) over some pretty rubbish backing tracks.  The lyrics might be poignant or pointed, but I just didn't bother listening to them - sorry, but this was a big disappointment.  I'm intrigued by the title though - is it a good thing or a bad thing?

Wikipedia tells me this is their fifth album and their first since '13 - we've got a pair of big gaps in this entry, haven't we?  The cover picture is Marsha P. Johnson, who was a gay rights activist who was prominent in the Stonewall riots in '69 - Anohni met Marsha in '92, six days before she was found dead in the Hudson river and was so affected by the whole experience she named the band after her.  I was also impressed by how many people Jimmy Hogarth has worked with - it's a long list with some heavyweight names in there.  The critics loved the album (of course!) - yes, maybe I'm being harsh but I still contend it just feels randomly thrown together to me.  The list of commercial success looks impressively long, until you actually read it and see it didn't properly chart in the UK or the US and the most impressive chart position is #24 in Belgium.

"Customers also listened to" Julie Byrne, PJ Harvey, Grian Chatten and Roisin Murphy - only one of those doesn't make this list and I can imagine Roisin was a bit annoyed about that and, whilst I didn't love her album, I liked it more than this.  I still want to know what Anohni's album title means though - and I've have to say this has been one of the most pronounedly (that's a word, right?!?) challenging posts I've had to compose so far...

Two vaguely disappointing albums here, I'm afraid.

#16/15/14 - Some very interesting sounds
#11/10/9 - Three well put together albums