It's okay to just admit that you're jealous of me

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 written up - along with BAICDBASB which is a remixed version of Brat that I briefly checked out, but I feel I need to do a complete track-by-track comparison with original.  Because it's #1, baby!

1. 360

This is some nicely bouncy electronica, with the remix version being not overly different but she’s got some mates (Robyn & Yung Lean) involved

2. Club Classics

This is a nicely beat-heavy, squelchy number, with the remix being similar but somehow different - I get so technical with my descriptions at times.

3. Sympathy Is A Knife

Possibly because of the title, this reminded me of The Knife - the remix has added Ariana but it doesn't make a massive amount of difference.

4. I Might Say Something Stupid

The original is a nice vocoded ballad and at 1:48 it doesn't hang around for long. Whereas the remix is an ambient classical version coming in at 4:08, so it's fair to say it's somewhat different - I'd have guessed Jon Hopkins was involved, but not The 1975.

5. Talk Talk

This is a pretty classic Charli sound and a pretty classy remix - I liked it

6. Von Dutch

And the same applies to this.

7. Everything Is Romantic

This is quite swoony in places - with the remix being very much updated by Caroline Polachek, and hence improved for me.

8. Rewind

Another classic Charli number with a decent remix.

9. So I

This is a slower number, which is clubbed up for the remix.

10. Girl, So Confusing

Another standard Charli sound, twiddled up a bit with Lorde for the remix

11. Apple

Another one where I preferred the remix, which reminded me of MUNA.

12. B2B

This has nice use of repetition, skittered up for the remix.

13. Mean Girls

This is a pretty standard number, until a very cool piano break kicks in. And it's brought to the fore on the remix with a vocal from Julian Casablancas, so that makes things a bit different.

14. I Think About It All The Time

This is an OK track, but I really wasn’t expecting Bon Iver to pop up on the remix with a Peter Cletera style vocal. Interestingly odd.

15. 365

This starts slower but really pumps up the bass nicely, whereas the remix doesn’t even bother starting slower - boom!

16. Hello Goodbye
This is fine, but for some reason doesn't have a remixed version.

17. Guess

This is nicely filthy and it’s fair to say Billie Eilish very much enters into the spirit of things on the remix.

18 Spring breakers

This is fine but not the best way to end things and the same is true for the remix. 

When I initially wrote this up, I said it wasn't bad but not as good as I was hoping - and part of me thinks that's a little harsh, whilst part of me is still kinda of that opinion. It's a fine album - there's been a load of effort gone into it, a reasonable amount of variety (doubly so when you consider the remixes) and a lot of top noises on it. It's just that it's still not as good as I was hoping for - but I'm happy enough for it to take the #1 slot!

I also said first time around that there was more on Wikipedia than I was expecting - in the intervening period this has grown somewhat (to 333 milliPeppers - with another 121 on BAICDBASB). One part that has obviously been updated is the critics year-end chart and it's impressive how many people agreed this was the top album of the year - as well as The Guardian, we have The New York Times, NME and Rolling Stone also giving it top spot. I'm not going to delve too deeply into the entries but I will say I was amused that the album artwork took them five months to design - but there's no denying it did what they wanted it to do!

And with that, another year-end list is done - except for the obligatory write-up!

#2 - Quite the, errr, something