Without you, the silence is loud

Continuing my trip up The Guardian's 50 best albums of 2024.

#15 : Silence Is Loud - Nia Archives

As the huge resurgent success of Chase and Status this year has shown, British youth will always be receptive to drum’n’bass that you can fire gunfingers and sling Dark Fruits to. So it would have been easy for the young British producer Nia Archives to do an album of straight bangers, like her enduring Brazilian-tinged 2022 hit Baianá. Instead, she created a much more exciting hybrid of vibey junglism and thoughtful, vulnerable singer-songwriting. The high-tempo, high-stimulus breakbeats on tracks such as So Tell Me and Crowded Roomz seem to bear down on Nia as she tries to get perspective on her life. 

I thought I'd listened to this, but didn't remember it - a quick search of the posts tells me I met it all the way back in April (making it the eleventh album I'd heard) and my insightful comment was "quite enjoyable". So I'm looking forward to "quite enjoying" it again for the first time.

Yeah, I did indeed quite enjoy it again. It's all very old school jungly drum'n'bass (I'm not smart enough to know the difference). It uses a load of lyrics and hooks from the old days - most of which I couldn't quite put my finger on, but I was very pleased to recognise Neneh Cherry's "give me a motherfucking break-beat" (it's MAD that that's 36 years old now!). All in all, it's pretty well put together - it's not something I have particular use for at my advanced age, but I'd check her out if she was playing at a festival.

Wikipedia has more than I was expecting on the album (105 milliPeppers) and I was surprised to hear it's her debut album - her first tracks came out in 2020 and her name has popped up a lot over the years. Apparently the album is her attempt to fuse jungle with Britpop (which I completely missed), but that's about it for content of interest. The critics were pretty nice about the album, although quite a few expressed concerns about inconsistency. It got nominated for the Mercury Music Prize and commercially only did anything over here, getting to #16.

"Customers also listened to" Neries, Charlotte Plank, venbee and Hybrid Minds - ah yes, them lot. I didn't mind this at all - it's manages to look both backwards and forwards nicely. 

#14 : If I Don't Make It, I Love U - Still House Plants

“It’s hard to know about anything,” Jessica Hickie-Kallenbach sings on Pant, from the London post-punk trio’s third album, “but feeling is good by me.” And Still House Plants layer feeling like a painter builds up impasto, with thick jabs of dissonant guitar that evoke Bill Orcutt’s splayed angles, discrete pockets of percussion that don’t adhere to traditional rhythmic structure, Hickie-Kallenbach repeating phrases and sounds as if summoning the strength to push at a locked door. This would all be so much avant garde noise if the effect weren’t weirdly emotional, making the familiar strange – the glowering guitar of 3scr3w3 has no attack, and seems to ooze like silt and mud at the bottom of a river – and betraying a profound effort to communicate and break through.

Hmmm - "post-punk" is not a phrase that fills me with hope, I'm afraid.

Oh dear. I actually didn't mind the "dissonant guitar" because you can tell that there's a reasonable amount of skill involved and it's making the sound they want it to make. But whilst the same might be true for Jessica's vocal accompaniments, I really didn't enjoy wincing every time she contributed. Quite why anyone considers this to be #14 in the year-end list is beyond me.

Wikipedia tells me the album exists and the critics loved it - apparently it "eschews conventional song forms". Too bloody right it does, I can assure you. It also, to my astonishment, didn't chart anywhere.

"Customers also listened to" Astrid Sonne, Nourished By Time, Orange Blossoms and Jessica Pratt. We heard from Jessica earlier in the list and I can assure you she sounds absolutely nothing like the godawful noise we've got here.

#13 : Manning Fireworks - MJ Lenderman

The protagonists of Jake Lenderman’s fourth studio album are on their knees, puking in their cereal, turning loneliness into a fetish; so desperate for connection that they’re knocking on glass at the aquarium to get the sharks to pay them some attention. They’re losers, no doubt about it, but the precision of Lenderman’s portraits – “I could really use your two cents, babe / I could really use the change” – speaks to a real kind of affection, as do the crunchy little bar-rock hymns he writes them.

I enjoyed MJs contribution to Waxahatchee's album, so I checked this out briefly and thought it was OK, but not as good as I was hoping. It wasn't enough to count as a full listen though, so let's do that now to see if that verdict stands up to scrutiny. That's really quite some introduction from The Guardian though, isn't it?

Hmmm. I quite like the songs (both lyrically and musically), but I don't like his voice - it's just a little too rough-and-ready for me. If he was a little more tuneful (or, even better, a woman) I'd probably be raving about it, but as it is it feels more like a missed opportunity for me.

For a change, Wikipedia tells me the album exists and the critics loved it (although they managed to make more sense here than they did for Still House Plants). We also have some hot chart action to report - it got to #177 in Belgium!

"Customers also listened to" Waxahatchee, Nilufer Yanya, Wednesday (MJ's band) and Cassandra Jenkins - I surprised myself by having heard of all of them! I really wanted to like this, but I just couldn't bring myself to do so - it's got some decent songs on it though.

Somewhat to my surprise, this round is an easy win for the junglist - well done, Nia.

#18-16 - An interesting mix
#12-10 - Hoorah for the grumpy old men