The tractor is big, but my heart is large

Yes - it's that's time of year again!

I've done The Guardian's list of the top 50 albums of the year for the last six years and it's always been an interesting combination of hidden gems and absolute horrors, so here we go again on the race to complete this year's list before 2026 comes around.  Last year I'd previously met nineteen of the list and had written up ten of them - I'll be surprised if the numbers are quite as high again this year, but let's see.

#50 : The Passionate Ones - Nourished by Time

Marcus Elliot Brown, AKA one-man project Nourished By Time, has a classic R&B singing voice in the style of Freddie Jackson or Luther Vandross: warm, earnest and with every word enunciated as if to express his keenness of feeling. But his music is quite different: a slippery layer cake of samples, multitudinous keys and lo-fi pop production, with Brown singing of a world where “the ebb and flow isn’t ebbing right”, be it in love or civic life. There is still room for an instant-classic R&B ballad though, in Tossed Away.

The Guardian has a habit of putting albums I've never even heard of at #50 which then turn out to be pretty decent - from the description above, I'm not 100% convinced this is going to be up my street but there's always hope.

The Guardian's description is actually pretty accurate - it's like Luther Vandross thought "people don't really listen to me for my voice, do they?" whilst making an album. Errr, yes Luther - actually, they do. The music's not dreadful, but it doesn't feel like it's playing to his strengths and "Tossed Away" is merely fine, rather than an "instant-classic R&B ballad" - I actually preferred "When The War Is Over".

The album didn't make the main chart but did get to #9 on the UK Hip Hop & R&B album chart. It also has a Wikipedia entry for the album but it's very light on content. The most amusing thing is that the mixing was done by Frank The Carvery - silly names are definitely a theme here because apparently Nourished By Time is also known as Riley With Fire and Mother Marcus (he just finds Marcus Brown a really boring name). And discogs.com has nothing of interest on the album which I suspect is going to be the case for most of them, so I'll only bother reporting anything worth reporting for this list. 

#49 : Through the Wall - Rochelle Jordan

Everything is just so on the British Canadian producer’s sixth album: expensively plush deep house suggesting club lights low, gleaming mirrors, potent looks igniting across the dancefloor. As much as the cold beat and ballroom flow of Ladida or the slapping “body, body, body” incantations of On 2 Something suggest a steadfast commitment to abandon, Jordan maintains impeccable poise and control throughout, whether in diva mode on Words 2 Say, breaking hearts on Bite the Bait, standing up for her needs on Doing It Too (“I’m not too much / You just give too little”) or patiently waiting for a frustrated lover to see the light on Ladida. Commanding, wise and committed to atmospheric excellence, party hosts don’t come better.

Deep house is a weird genre for me because I either really quite like it or I find it utterly, utterly boring - and I'm completely unable to describe what makes the difference. So let's see where this takes us...

Hmmm - it's somewhere in between. I don't mind it (and it is indeed "expensively plush") but a whole album of it was a bit too much. I think part of that is that it's really not suited to a wet December morning - if it was G&T time on the patio in the sunshine then it would be lovely to have on as a background groove.

The internet tells us she's been going for over fifteen years and has released three albums in that time, but none of them have ever charted - it's fair to say there's not a huge amount of information out there about her! But she makes a nice enough sound though - but it's unlikely I'll be revisiting it.

#48 : Once Upon A Time...In Shropshire - Ferskin Jendrix

Jerskin Fendrix’s high-profile scores for the last three Yorgos Lanthimos films can’t really help prime you for the Midlands composer’s eccentrically beautiful second album, which pairs pristine musical theatre with the harebrained prog cabaret of Faith No More and (particularly) the under-sung Morphine. At first, Once Upon a Time … casts the rural bliss of growing up in 00s Shropshire in a golden light, a haven of getting ratted on Baileys and listening to Kanye on a farm, then having a lovely hungover group breakfast in someone’s kitchen. But the unexpected deaths he has experienced in recent years intrude to spoil paradise, eliciting feverish, absurdist expressions of grief – Jerskin Fendrix Freestyle is a bravura wig-out – and fathomless devastation from his camp, craggy voice. It demands a full theatrical production.

What kind of a name is Ferskin Jendrix? Possibly not his real one, I suspect...

Well this is a curious one and no mistake. It's like a musical brain-dump of someone who has done and knows loads - there's just so much going on using different instruments. For some reason John Grant and Bo Burnham sprung to mind (maybe because both show some manic-depressive tendencies) and Nick Cave certainly resonates with the darker moments, but there are a load of musical references in here. But did I like it? Hmmm, I'm really not sure - it's certainly eccentric, but I'm not convinced it's beautiful.

This album didn't chart but his soundtrack to Poor Things got to #23 in the Soundtrack Albums chart - apparently Yorgos Lanthimos got in touch after hearing his debut album (Winterreise in '20) and he even got a cameo in the film! Also, Wikipedia also tells me that Jerskin's real name is Joscelin Dent-Pooley, which I suspect isn't one he thanked his parents for when he attended the local comprehensive (I am, of course, kidding - people with names like that don't go to comprehensive schools).

So - three very different albums, none of which I'd even heard of before and which are not really that easy to compare. So obviously I'm going to go straight in there and declare Nourished By Time as the bronze medal winner of the round, but the other two are harder to split. Rochelle is certainly the more polished artist of the two but there's more to Ferskin's offering - possibly too much, one might suggest. So let's start the year with joint gold medal winners - well done to Rochelle and Ferskin (an unlikely pairing to say the least). However, I do have to say that I think that none of them were what I'd exactly consider to be essential listening - up your game, Guardian!

2024 - Another year over