Oh how fast the evening passes clearing up the champagne glasses

Continuing my trip up The Guardian's 50 best albums of 2017.

#5 : No Shape - Perfume Genius

On his most sumptuously realised work, Mike Hadreas merely wants to be unbound, to “hover with no shape” – in part, as a consequence of living with Crohn’s disease and the binary that exists around gender. Magnificently, his inventive score and dramatic arrangements more than live up to the challenge, as Hadreas swaps forms, time and again.

This is our third visit with Mr Genius, which seems a surprise until you hear that every visit is on The Guardian's year-end list - my comments so far have been "a less beepy Hot Chip" and "delicate and lush", so I'm expecting to like this.

Hmmm - I'd say this is lush, but it's not particularly delicate and it doesn't really bring Hot Chip to mind either. It feels to have an indie vibe to it, but it's got an almost orchestral feel to it as well - I'd say "hover with no shape" from above isn't a bad description, despite it not really describing anything. What I'm basically saying is it's hard to describe, OK? You get the impression he knew exactly what he want to do and he's put the effort in to do it, so it's impressive - I don't really know whether I liked it or not, but I certainly didn't hate it. I've also got absolutely no idea whether repeated listens would enable me to make up my mind about it. 

Wikipedia tells us this is his fourth album and his first in three years - and that's pretty much it. And critically, it's the usual story of being very well received and appearing on quite a few year end lists - but it also received a Grammy nomination for "Best Engineered Album, Non-classical". But commercially, it didn't quite as well as some of our recent visits, with #40 in Belgium being the best it achieved anywhere - it got to #96 here and #185 in the US. 

discogs.com tells us you can pick up a CD copy for £8, but if you want a signed test pressing then it's gonna cost you - £375! This is an interesting and curious album which defies description (from me, at least) - it's well done and at least worth a listen imho.

#4 : Melodrama - Lorde

If Melodrama looked on paper like the work of an artist who’d had her head turned by success, it turned out to be anything but. The songs on Melodrama that depict the messy entanglements of early 20s life are as incisive, perceptive and shudder-inducingly familiar as the sketches of teenage suburbia on its predecessor.

This is one I previously met in the early days of the Rolling Stone list (over five years ago now!) and I enjoyed it more than I was expecting to - but I've never revisited it, so thought I would again since we're in the top five now.

And yeah, I still enjoyed it - the songs are all put together and performed well, with a decent amount of variety across the album. The songs feel to be delivered in a heartfelt manner, although I can't say the subject matter is overly relevant to me (hard to imagine, huh?) - I can quite imagine Billie Eilish listened to it in her formative years though.

Wikipedia has a massive amount on the album (364 milliPeppers) - it was written to deal with her disillusionment with fame and to help her deal with her first major breakup. She had some major names helping with production including Jack Antonoff and Andrew Wyatt, but she still has a production credit on each track - the girl isn't lacking in self-belief (which is a good thing). As expected, the critics were very keen but this did better than most on decade-end lists, with twelve being listed - and obviously Rolling Stone currently views it as one of the best 500 albums ever (and there aren't all that many albums from this century on that list). Commercially, this did best in English speaking countries - it only got to #5 here, but got to #3 in Ireland and #1 in Australia, Canada, New Zealand (of course) and the US. 

discogs.com tells us you can pick up a CD for £8, but if you want the deluxe 180gm blue double vinyl then it's going to set you back £300 - but if fancy going completely mad you can pick up a signed copy from the US for $1500! This is a very well put together album though and a nice follow up to her debut which kinda blew up (and I wasn't all that impressed with - and I was sure we'd met, but it seems we haven't yet). 

Because we're in the top five (and I've got time for it - just) we've only got two albums in this round and they're pretty decent offerings with both artists putting their creative vision on the line - but Lorde has the more obviously enjoyable offering of the two for me, so she takes the round.

#8-6 - Three impressive albums