Won't you dance with me?

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

#41 : Here In The Pitch - Jessica Pratt

Jessica Pratt makes music as if she’s painting watercolours, the shades of her acoustic songwriting blushing and blooming into one another with no sense of delineation. Her fourth album adds gentle percussion, bossa nova rhythms and synths for the first time, foregrounding a sense of temporal logic in songs that obsess over time – running out of it, dreaming of for ever; gorgeous koans like this, in By Hook Or By Crook: “Some people chip away time / More than they understand, an open hand / I’m waiting for way before first light / And it’s the edge worn clean again.” Pratt’s music is endlessly mysterious, but rather than create distance, her openness to the unknown plays like an invitation to wonder

I'd never heard of her until she popped up in the "customers also listened to" list for Mdou Moctar - whatever this is, I'm pretty certain it won't be like that. From the description above, I'm expecting some slightly fey, weird sounds.

And that's exactly what I've got - with a slightly weird 60s Astrud Gilberto kinda vibe. I can't say I loved it, but it was quite intriguing and a lovely palate cleanser after my previous experience with Knocked Loose - it's more of a quiet background album than one that wants to take centre stage.

Wikipedia tells us it's her fourth album, coming five years after her previous one and it's inspired by the "hippie era of Los Angeles" and "figures emblematic of the dark side of the Californian dream". And that's pretty much it, apart from the fact that the critics loved it with one of them describing her as "music's greatest horologist", which makes absolutely no sense at all. It made a couple of the lesser charts here, but achieved great things in Belgium, getting to #143.

"Customers also listened to" Hovvdy, Mdou Moctar (that's got to be down to this list!), Jane Weaver and The Lemon Twigs - I don't know most of them, but I can assure you're they're not going to be all the same. I didn't mind this but it felt a bit insubstantial to really grab me.

#40 : Alligator Bites Never Heal - Doechii

You can imagine even the most modernity-denying hip-hop codgers getting on board with Doechii’s mixtape, characterised as it is by some of the year’s most technically astounding wordplay – particularly on the positively superhuman track Nissan Altima. But she’s just as good rolling over boom-bap at half the speed, and is funny and self-lacerating with it, as on Denial Is a River’s tour through drug and anger issues. As involving as the current generation of freewheeling young US MCs are – Playboi Carti, Ken Carson, OsamaSon et al – there’s something to be said for rappers who stay as perfectly on top of the beat like Doechii does. 

I've never heard of her - I often don't get along with The Guardian's hip-hop recommendations, but they do seem to do a better job at picking the ladies, so there's always hope!

Yeah, I didn't mind this at all - it kinda bridges the gap between old-school and contemporary quite nicely, with some simple but interesting backing tracks and some words you can hear (except on tracks like "Nissan Altima" where she's absolutely flying - it's impressive). It's not one I'm likely to rush back to, but it's an impressive piece of work.

Wikipedia tells me it's her third mixtape and the title relates to the fact that if you want to survive an alligator attack, you have a better chance if you fight back (which seems reasonably obvious). The critics were very nice about it with it making quite a few end-of-year lists and it even charted in the US (#117). 

"Customers also listened to" Doja Cat, Latto, Ravyn Lanae and Rico Nasty - not a crew I'm aware of, to no-one's surprise. And without this list I'd have remained ignorant of Doechii and, whilst she's not my kind of thing, I was pleased I got to listen to it.

#39 : Challengers OST - Trent Reznor & Atticus Ross

For all the frisson in Challengers, the horniest thing about Luca Guadagnino’s surprisingly chaste tennis movie might be its score. More Berghain than break point, Reznor and Ross ratcheted the tension with adrenaline-spiking techno, the beat thwacking like a tennis ball against a hard court. The Boys Noize mixed version was the one you wanted, the ride intermittently imbued with a guttural, carnal undertow, taunting “yeah yeah yeah”s and a reckless sense of velocity that mirrored the players spinning out of control as they vied for Tashi Duncan’s approval. The song Brutalizer referenced the move where a player smacks the ball directly at their opponent’s body, but in the hands of the man who sang “I want to fuck you like an animal”, its relentless, panel-beater assault suggested quite a different kind of roughing up. 

Trent & Atticus know what they're doing, but you wouldn't catch me listening to a soundtrack album under any other circumstances. I'm expecting it to be well done, but a whole album of it to be too much.

Yeah - I think my major problem is that soundtracks obviously need to include a variety of music for the different scenes in a film, which obviously makes sense when you have accompanying visuals but less so when you're just using your ears. Having said that, most of this sounds surprisingly like the Tomorrow's World theme tune, which wasn't exactly what I was expecting for a film about tennis. It's all well done (and I get to watch the film at some point this year, so I'll see how it works there), but it's not something I need in my life.

Wikipedia has more than you'd expect for an soundtrack, but most of it is just saying that the critics loved it with The Telegraph describing it as "counterintuitively perfect" - what does that even mean? There was no "proper" chart action, but it got to #1 in the soundtrack album chart (which I didn't even know existed) and #6 in the dance album chart. Interestingly, they also put out a remix album (which I can imagine could work quite well), but bizarrely it came out two weeks before the official version.

"Customers also listened to" Nine Inch Nails (who knew, eh?), Ludwig Goransson, Dominic Lewis and How To Destroy Angels (a NIN spin-off). This is obviously a well put-together album with a lot to admire about it (and I'm sure it works well in the film), but it's just not something I need.

It's hard to pick a winner here because they're all so different yet do what they do well - and there's no chance of me revisiting any of them. But I think Doechii's is probably the one that had the greatest difference between expectation and reality, so I'm going to give it to her.

#44-42 - Quite the mix
#38-36 - Two decent albums and one very odd one