You say the coast is clear but you won't catch me out

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

Well, this is awkward - I listened to #21 which is Paramore's This Is Why and then I searched through my previous posts to see if I'd ever met a Paramore album before.  And yes, I've met one - and you get one guess as to which one it was.  Yup, I listened to this in March of this year because it got to #1 and I'd completely forgotten about it.  Interestingly, the main thought I had the second time I listened to it was that it sounded like Dry Cleaning - and I see I had the same thought on my first listen as well.  I do like the title track though and I've heard it quite a few times through the year.

#20 : Dreamer - Nabihah Iqbal

Like the sunflower of one of Dreamer’s track titles, Iqbal seems to bend towards light – a musician chasing warmth, beauty and transcendence in whatever form she can find it. Her grounding in club culture means that deep house tracks such as Gentle Heart and Sky River properly bump, but this is mostly a dream-pop album, with Durutti Column-ish electric guitar plucking, Cocteau Twins loveliness and, in This World Couldn’t See Us, an unabashed A-ha-meets-New-Order 80s pastiche.

Someone else I'd never heard of but I'm intrigued by The Guardian's description of it.

And I'd say "Cocteau Twins loveliness" is pretty close to where were are here - Angelo Badalementi's Twin Peak's work with Julee Cruise would be another touchpoint for me.  Except for "This World Couldn't See Us", which as The Guardian correctly says is "an unabashed A-ha-meets-New-Order 80s pastiche" - it's quite well done, but I've no real clue why she did it.  Or any of the album really - it's all perfectly pleasant and lovely to have on in the background but I can't see any circumstances where I'd actually listen to it.

Wikipedia doesn't have an entry for the album but her entry tells me she qualified with law degrees from SOAS and Cambridge and was working as a lawyer when she started releasing music and working on the radio as Throwing Shade, but she reverted to her birth name with the release of her first album in '17.  It also tells me that during Covid she had to lockdown in Pakistan because she was visiting her grandparents and her album got stolen, so she started a webseries documenting local plants.  Well, why wouldn't you?

"Customers also listened to" Lucinda Chua, Rahill, Miss Grit and Cloth - I can't lie and say I'm intrigued as what kind of sound Miss Grit makes.  I do like the sounds Nabihah makes but, as I said, I'd never actually seek them out.

#19 : Raven - Kelela

Flanked by a sweat-beaded crack team of underground producers – LSDXOXO, Bambii, Asmara, Florian TM Zeisig and more – Kelela travelled the breadth of club culture from the strobe light in a black-box dancefloor to the pallid sun through the taxi window on the way home. She champions breakbeat, dub techno, dancehall, ambient, R&B and more but never in straightforward genre studies – Let It Go, say, is a deep house track without the drums – and Kelela’s voice, heartfelt yet with a touch of guardedness, says so much in its tone alone.

I've never heard of Kelela and The Guardian suggests it's gonna be dance-ish, but varied - I'm expecting to like at least bits of it.

Yeah, I do - but like Nabibah, this isn't something I'd seek out to listen to.  I'm sure it would be gorgeous if you were sat on a beach in Ibiza as the sun came up, but it really didn't chime on a wet December day in St Albans - it's all well done though (although 62 minutes was possibly overstaying its welcome) and if you like a bit of dance-ish stuff then this could well tick some boxes for you.

Wikipedia tells me this is her second album, coming six years after Take Me Apart, her debut.  The critics were very nice about it, with it making several year-end lists and it was also staggeringly successful commercially, getting to #168 in Belgium.

"Customers also listened to" Caroline Polachek (I liked this album - I wonder if we'll see it?), Yves Tumor, Liv.E and Shygirl - some random bleeps there and no mistake.  I'd have to say Kelela's bleeps didn't sound very random at all - it was all well put together, but I don't really have a use for it.

So three albums I quite enjoyed, provided we conveniently ignore the fact that I completely forgot I'd heard one of them and I have no idea what I'd do with the other two (but I do have to add they both sounded gorgeous over headphones).

#23/22 - Two well done albums
#18/17 - Two ladies doing their thang well