I'd run the risk of losing everything

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 her breakthrough work" then that's quite hopeful for me, so here goes.

Yeah, I quite like this - although it feels like it would need multiple listens to really let it get under your skin. I'm not entirely sure how to describe it - it's got a quite a retro feel to it and I was quite reminded of Carole King's stuff with it's lightly jazzy piano feel, even if her voice doesn't sound like Carole's. Does that help? Probably not...

Wikipedia tells me it's her third studio album and the critics liked it, with it earning a Grammy nomination for Best Alternative Music Album. Commercially, it did better than I expected, getting to #13 here, #4 in Australia and #8 in the US. This is such a short write-up that I felt the need to check out her entry - and all that seems to say is that she's spent her entire life making music.

"Customers also listened to" beabadoobee, Faye Webster, Remi Wolf and Cigarettes After Sex - I don't see an obvious link to Clairo from the ones I know there, but what do I know. I quite liked this album - it's not quite immediate enough for it to feel likely I'll seek it out again, but if I did then I suspect my appreciation would grow.

#3 : Hit Me Hard And Soft - Billie Eilish

Culpability in a breakup and – as with the paradox in the album title – the impossibility of identifying the villain in a complex situation are the murky themes of Eilish’s third album: sometimes anguished, sometimes vindictive, always satisfyingly messy and candid. Rather than reflect generational angst (as her debut did) or the hell of teenage fame, Hit Me Hard and Soft is insular and intimate, right down to the fantastically prosaic lyric in Lunch – about her newfound desire to intimately acquaint herself with the fairer sex – where she’s “pullin’ up a chair” and “puttin’ up my hair” as she prepares to get stuck in. Lunch is an apt title: desire nourishes and depletes across these 10 songs, and by ragged epic The Greatest (as raw as any Sharon Van Etten rager), Eilish wails in frustration about “All the times I waited / For you to want me naked”, recriminating herself and her estranged lover from breath to breath

The eighteenth album I've previously met and the ninth I've previously written up - and this was an interesting one. I wasn't overly impressed with it on first listen, but my youngest told me I was totally wrong so I gave it another listen and thought there was a bit more to it - and I've been played bits of it a few more times and, whilst I'm still not convinced by it, it's certainly all well put-together. So let's give it one more proper listen, shall we?

Hmmm - I enjoyed it, but I also understand why I wasn't an immediate convert because it's all quite downbeat. But it's downbeat in a good way - it's all very well put-together. Something that didn't come through on first listen is that it has quite a strong sense of yearning or even obsession - the lyrics are quite tricky to make out, so it's hard to tell exactly what's going on, but I suspect multiple listens on repeat (which I suspect many have given this - it's been in the chart for 32 weeks and hasn't dropped below #16) are rewarding. 

It's hard to pick a winner here - both are quite under-stated offerings put together with a great deal of attention being paid to all the details. Neither of them have got to a point that I obviously love them, but I feel they both deserve further listens which would deliver rewards. Billie's is the slicker offering, but I think that Clairo just about swings it with a bit more variety which still retaining the overall vibe - I think they're both worth checking out if you've not heard them.

#6-5 - Two that don't quite hit the spot
#2 - Quite the, errr, something