scaryblog

     So, having got to the end of The Guardian's Top 50 albums of 2024, how have they done this year?   Except for a few black spots, I think they actually did pretty well - although I'm not convinced there were too many albums this year that are truly great.  I was introduced to 31 new albums (down from 37 last year) with ten having already been written up - I was expecting to have met more because I've been checking out all the new entries for a while, but I was surprised The Guardian were quite so commercial this year. Best 15 I've gone for a top 15 this year - I'd prefer to cut it down to ten, but I thought these were all comfortably better than everything else in the chart and couldn't decide how I would pick some to remove. I'd listened to half of them before with five of the others coming from artists I'd not met before, so that was a very pleasant introduction indeed.  #48 - Los Campesinos! #38 - Empress Of #37 - Jack White #35 - Vampire We...

Completing my trip up The Guardian's  50 best albums of 2024 . #1 : Brat/Brat And It’s Completely Different But Also Still Brat -  Charli XCX Brat came wrapped in a blunt, lowercase rendering of the album’s title against a sickly lime green: intended as a snub to the “misogynistic and boring” assumption that a female artist should automatically appear on her own album cover. It turned out to be a masterstroke of branding far more pervasive than any glossy photo, even influencing the US presidential race. Its sound was brash and aggressive, early 00s London club music – electroclash, acid-y bloghouse, dubstep, maximalist rave synths – shot through a chattering, trebly hyperpop filter; “Club classic but I still pop,” as Von Dutch put it. Oozing self-possession and confidence, Brat seemed to swagger even as Charli confessed to insecurity or inadequacy, a cocktail of emotions that seemed to be at the album’s centre. The nineteenth album I've previously met and the tenth I've wr...

Continuing my trip up The Guardian's  50 best albums of 2024 . #2 : Diamond Jubilee -  Cindy Lee Before you even pressed play, Cindy Lee’s Diamond Jubilee took you back in time. When it was released in March, the only way to hear it (aside from a YouTube video) was to go to a GeoCities website – a relic from the 90s internet, complete with multicoloured Times New Roman lettering – and download the audio files via Mega, the filesharing service beloved of 00s music blogs. The music itself went even further back, and indeed sideways, into a parallel dimension of 20th-century pop: doo-wop, glam, folk-rock, Nuggets-y psych/garage, Velvet Underground-style art-rock, French chanson, classic soul, 60s girl-group pop, synthwave, rockabilly and ambient all feature, emerging through lo-fi production as if corrupted on its journey from this spirit realm The last one on the list I've not heard - or even heard of until I saw it pop up on various year-end lists. I have to admit I"m intri...

Continuing my trip up The Guardian's   top 50 films of 2023 #22 :     Typist Artist Pirate King Carol Morley’s warm and sympathetic film imagines artist Audrey Amiss, whose mental illness curtailed her ambitions, on a tragicomic road trip to exhibit her work. Skipping over The Fabelmans which we've already met on Empire's list, we come to this - which I've never even heard of but I have to admit I'm intrigued by the title. The film is centred around "typist artist pirate king" (as it says in her passport) Audrey Amiss (played by Monica Dolan) who has mental health issues and convinces her carer Sandra (Kelly Macdonald) to take her and a selection of her art (carefully stored in a bunch of plastic bags) to a local gallery which is offering to exhibit amateur artist's work. It's only after they get going from Audrey's London flat that Audrey admits the gallery is in Sunderland ("it's local to me!") but, for various reasons that bec...

Continuing my trip up The Guardian's  50 best albums of 2024 . #4 : Charm -  Clairo Charm dwells in a world of attraction and desire. Giddy songs such as Second Nature, with its heartbeat pulse of piano and Claire Cottrill’s nervous laughter, exist in the magnetic forcefield between two people inexplicably drawn together. But with Clairo’s typical incisiveness, her third – and best by far – album is also about what happens when the spell wears off, and when closeness becomes cloying. Co-produced with soul revivalist and bandleader Leon Michels, Charm’s world is fleshed out by vintage Wurlitzers, flurries of brass and breathy woodwind recorded straight to tape. It’s far from the lo-fi intimacy of her breakthrough work – the kind of intimacy that is forced, rather than given. Four to go - two of which I've not heard and this is one of them. Clairo is a name that pops up from time to time, but I've not heard any of her stuff - if it's " far from the lo-fi intimacy of ...

Starting my trip up Empire's   top 20 TV shows of 2024 #20 :    X-Men '97 With its electrifying synth intro, endlessly quotable catchphrases, and eye-popping Jim Lee-inspired aesthetic, X-Men: The Animated Series was peak ‘90s Saturday morning telly. And yet, thanks to its mature, serialised storytelling approach and complex character work, the show always felt ahead of its time. The arrival of X-Men ‘97 earlier this year saw the times finally catch up with our beloved mutants, and the results were beyond anybody’s wildest dreams. Neither remake nor reboot but rather a direct continuation of the OG show, this revival — bolstered by extended episode runtimes, claw-sharp animation, and ambitious plotlines carrying genuine stakes — transcends its forebear whilst honouring its roots. We may have come for the returning voice cast, the “Bwa-na-na-na naaaa na-na”, and the cereal-snaffling nostalgia, but we stayed for a trailblazing animated show that really spoke to the hot-butt...

Continuing my trip up The Guardian's  50 best albums of 2024 . #6 : My Method Actor -  Nilüfer Yanya The heartbroken protagonist of the British songwriter’s third album is hollow inside, bleeding out; soul awol, amnesia reigning. The beauty lies in how she makes this state of desolation feel as opulent as a ruined palace. The palette is febrile and close, as humid as the tropics or as Sade’s sultriest moments; Yanya’s sidling, furtive guitar suddenly obliterated by pockets of thrashing rage, her usually poised voice betraying every wound inflicted on her. It’s one of the best-arranged albums of the year: judiciously applied strings up the sense of suspicion and devastation, and the tension and transitions trap you right up there with her on the knife’s edge. “I’m hardly here either,” Yanya sang on crushed standout Binding, but the 29-year-old’s utterly unique voice has never had more presence. My sixteenth album I've previously met, but I have to admit I don't overly rememb...

Continuing my trip up The Guardian's  50 best albums of 2024 . #9 : Short N' Sweet - Sabrina Carpenter The first time most adults heard of Sabrina Carpenter was in the fallout from Olivia Rodrigo’s 2021 breakout hit Drivers License, which appeared to cast her fellow Disney star as the other woman. While Carpenter’s 2022 album Emails I Can’t Send toyed with perceptions that she was a “homewrecker … a slut”, her sixth record leaned all the way in, Carpenter adopting a bawdy bombshell persona that revelled in the idea of her as a threat. It was a monstrously successful concept, rebooting the classic blond pop princess with a lacerating tongue and a withering attitude to men straight out of the Lana Del Rey playbook – and most winningly, a savage sense of humour that rightly earned Carpenter comparisons to Dolly Parton. Rodrigo witheringly cast Carpenter as “another actress”, and on Short n’ Sweet, Carpenter convincingly played the role of Nashville warbler, disco revivalist, R...