That time of year again, when people make lists and display lists. Musical and otherwise.
Someone of my acquaintance announced on social media that
they had winnowed their list down to 118 releases. If this had been in a public
place I would have had to stifle a snort. One hundred and eighteen newly released releases – and that
is your shortlist? (This is someone in my
approximate age range too).
Oh, I can remember making lists of similar size in the late ‘90s and continuing to do so through to the mid-to-late 2000s. I know it's possible to believe sincerely that there are that many likeable and notable releases in a single year. But I also know - through casting my eye back at some of these lists and having to stifle an incredulous snort at my younger self – that these inventories contain quite a number of recordings about which I now remember virtually nothing. I recall also that a fair few were listened to just the once. Now it's true that critics develop a freakish capacity for rapid-response assessment of whether a release is interesting or good. Still, a single listen doesn’t seem enough really, if you're going to put it in a list for public display. There’s a competitive syndrome of ostentatiously liking more - and more varied - things, than the next person; an impulse to seek out things no one else seems to like, or even better, know about. In the 2010s, I tried to reverse these tendencies and cultivate restraint, restricting lists to things that really vividly stood out in the recent memory: records I’d got genuinely stuck on and that seemed (as much as you can predict, which you can't really) to be things that I'd likely be listening to for years to come.
And then suddenly I didn’t need to make an effort – I simply didn’t like that many things in any given year.
Nowadays I rarely review records. Uncoupled from release schedules, I don’t listen with a sense of duty or job-related urgency. But nor is there that FOMO pressure from within: the kind of vocational-existential ravenousness that once drove me on foraging missions. I’ve become more like a regular person who listens to music for pleasure and curiosity. One side effect of that is that I’ve become an increasingly atemporal listener. In 2022, I was as likely to encounter and enjoy a record that came out in 2021 or 2020 as this year. But I was even more likely to hear something for the first time from much further back in time and be blown away by it. Playlists and “your collection” areas in streamers, YouTube, etc provide traces of my year's listening, but they don’t include vinyl and CD, or files already in my computer. So I've had to rely on memory for the following tally. In no particular order of ranking, chronology, genre, or theme... sometimes accompanied by a short thought or impression, often not... here are my favorite listens of 2022 - only a few of which were made or released in 2022.
Pharaoh Sanders, Jewels of Thought
I’d heard records by Sanders before, but I don’t think I’d
ever heard this one – and it hit me as revelation. That warm wide tone.
Knut Wiggen, “Massa”
The entirety of the Electronic Works 1972-75 retrospective – issued a
few years ago – is worth a listen, but this track is particularly wigged out.
Nia Archives
A contemporary artist! But one whose work puts into question the whole idea of "the contemporary". My kid Kieran put me onto this. I'm slightly suspicious of my own enjoyment, given that (like PinkPantheress) this is a young woman making jungle and drum & bass - a genre-era I’ve investments in, you've probably noticed. Beyond my own nostalgia, there’s also a lingering doubt about whether it’s a healthy development for youth today to be makingmusic whose historical heyday was 27 years ago. Even the thing of having her own smoky vocals and songs weaving through it isn’t a totally fresh development (hello Nicolette). But it is absolutely gorgeous stuff – my favorite is probably “Forbidden Feelings” but it’s all very enjoyable. You can hear the whole lot of it here on this YouTube playlist I made or with better sound and in chronological sequence (although she's only been at it for a little over a year as far as I can tell) in my Tidal playlist (I don’t think you need to be a subscriber)
Angel Rada – “Carillon”
My fave Creel Pone of this year was The Early Uraniun Recordings+ and in
particular the 1983 album Upadesa and in particular particular, this track
“Carillon” – a squoinky bubble-bath of electrobliss.
“Saturn Rings Songs” is another lovely squiggle of synth-froth
More about this Cuban pioneer of “Ethnosonic” music here.
It was a bumper Creel year with a huge output, lots of doubles and triples, and I haven't really got to grips with it properly. But there were some great things - have a peruse of the recent releases at the site and play the soundclips, starting with the most recent release CNUCE Computer Music which is really cool. The ANS Electronic Music "box" is also brand new and notable, and eerily timely given Eduard Artemyev's death this week
Dry Cleaning
- Stumpwork
I feel bad for Dry Cleaning as this excellent album has barely figured on the end of year lists – mystifying to me, as it’s clear that they’ve pulled off that tricky trick of keeping everything good about a beloved debut but twisting things and adding things just enough for it not to feel like reiteration. I suppose the sheer shock impact of a new lyrical voice and delivery that you got with New Long Leg was always going to be hard to pull off again. And the musical approach last time – cold, dry, slightly claustrophobic – enhanced that impact. Here, the backing boys really come into their own, exploring lots of other textures and feels, and instead of staying within the debut's postpunk zone they are referencing other historical phases of guitar reinvention / uninvention like lo-fi and bliss-rock. “Anna Calls from the Arctic” is gorgeously ethereal, a whole new mood and flow for Dry Cleaning. The second half of “Conservative Hell” (the escape from hell?) is a glowspace of abstract dream-noise worthy of A**l P**k’s The Doldrums. The dirgescapes of “Liberty Log” and “Icebergs” are wonderfully expansive ways to bring the album to its close, pointing to a third album that I for one am excited to hear.
Surprised that this quavering and glimmering "ballad"doesn’t appear to be widely heralded as some kind of career peak and pinnacle of ecstatic vocal science. I suddenly hear it as a 21st Century inverted answer record to "Roadrunner" - fragile, anxious, out of love with the modern world.
Pause for the Cause: London Rave Adverts 1991-1996, Vol. 1 + Vol. 2
Erroneously reported in at least one place as a compilation compiled by me – in actual fact, Luke Owen, the man behind Death Is Not The End, assembled these glorious collations of pirate radio adverts for raves and club nights. But I did contribute a couple of choice ads. And also donated a liner note, reproduced here
Brothers Johnson, “Strawberry Letter 23”
And so I find myself thrilling to some Lee Ritenour lickmanship
John Barry - The More Things Change (Film, TV & Studio Work 1968-1972)
Bob Stanley, a-sifting
and a-sorting.
Sidney Sager and
the Ambrosian Singers - Children of the Stones
Jonny Trunk, a-digging
and a-exhuming and a-rights-procuring.
Metronomy – “The
Look”
An odd thing about
my favorite records of the year from the mid-2000s onwards is that – as I
become more occupied with books than with regularly reviewing records - quite often I never actually get to write anything substantive about the record that
turns out to be the one I listened to the most and out of which I derived the greatest delight. Black Moth Super Rainbow’s Dandelion Gum, I wrote a tiny review; there was an end-of-year appreciation of The Good, the Bad and the
Queen, also brief . But then Micachu and the Shapes’s Jewellery, Rangers’s
Suburban Tours, Metronomy’s The English Riviera – these are records I’ve
emitted not a public peep about, beyond a few words on the blog and often not
even that. And these are enduring records, returned to many times over the
years. Perhaps that is precisely because I’ve never been obliged to think about
why I like them so much, to tease out how they work or what is unique or new
about them. (With reviewing a record, there is always a danger of using it up –
playing it so much during the review process, extracting images and ideas from
it… in more cases than you’d probably imagine, I’ve literally never played the
album again, after reviewing it).
The non-reviewed record enters a protective enclosure of pure,
unreflective enjoyment. (Well, being wired the way I am, there will inevitably
be the odd thought or trope). Metronomy’s wonderful English Riviera got some
play this year, and “The Look” went into very heavy rotation. I’m not even sure why I like it so much. I
don’t really know what the song is about. “The look”
- is that when ravers’s eyes meet, the look of complicity and shared ooh-gosh bliss? “Just remember how we shook, shook / And all
the things we took, took” does suggest drug
adventures. Or perhaps it's the look of "let's go for it" - let the night ignite. But the rest of the lyric? Don’t know, don’t really care. Whenever we play it, I always notice, as if for the first time, the
drums and how perfect they are – a simple beat, really, but with a great, loose swing,
and the individual parts of the kit are beautifully recorded (Joseph Mount used to
make a sort of drum & bass type music before Metronomy became a band-band,
right? I don't actually know much about the group or have ever felt the urge to find out). The beat dovetails sublimely
with the other elements as they enter – the bobbing 'n' dipping carousel-like
keyboard, the chiming curls of high-toned bass. It all adds up – almost
literally adds up – to this immaculate construction. A career-defining
creation. The lines “And to think they said / We'd never make anything better
than this” must surely ring out strangely for Mount whenever he has to
sing them at some festival or other. Because
they wouldn’t and they haven’t. But how could they? Besides, most bands, most artists, never attain this altitude even once.
The Good, the Bad,
and the Queen - “Three Changes”
Talking of which….
The drums, the drums, the drums.
Huerco S. – “Plonk I”
There’s a pained beauty to the plucked-sounding irregular patterns of “Plonk I”, like a player tentatively grappling with a harp that's been fitted with serrated strings, as somebody said. (Rest of the album is also excellent).
A.C. Marias, “One Of Our Girls Has Gone Missing” (the single and the album)
A real snowblinder of a single, as somebody said. Whole album is lost treasure.
Robert Haigh, Human Remains
Inducing a hyper-ventilating high through saturating the ear with treble frequencies (falsetto, female vocal harmonies, strings, etc), this is a swoony samplescape on a par with The Avalanches's Since I Left You. A celebration of the consoling power of pop's prettiness.
Moon Wiring Club – Medieval Ice Cream
At once dependable and a departure. What you want in one of your favorite artists.
Nick Edwards - Landfill Elektronikz Vol. 1
Santana, Lotus
Really not far from the Miles Davis live albums of this era. Yes, I was surprised too.
Burial, Antidawn
The mark of achieved style for an artist is when you can be parodied – by yourself as much as by others. Rather than formulaic or deja, though, this impacts with feels-like-the-first-time freshness. And it doesn’t hurt that the hurt in this music - Burial's music’s signature mood of orphaned desolation - fits the raw-feeling fragility of life in these times.
Wet Leg – “Oh No,” "Chaise Longue" etc
Perhaps it’s the image, the droll dry vocals, the amusing / annoying lyrics (annoying in the case of “Oh No” – or so I’m told, anyway, by members of the same generation, who know what is cringe and what is not ), perhaps these things get in the way. But I feel that it is rarely remarked how beautiful - as rock music – the best Wet Leg tunes are – a sense of glistening tensile structure that puts me in mind of Buzzcocks’s “stainless steel love songs”, Chairs Missing Wire, even Neu! in moments...
Solange, When I Get Home
Brian Eno, FOREVERANDEVERNOMORE
Doja Cat, "Juicy"
Nilüfer Yanya - "trouble"
Nervous / gorgeous. The whole album is good stuff but this is the pearl.
Ernest Hood, Back to the Woodlands
A lovely extension to the Neighbourhoods sound
Bobby Brown, The Enlightening Beam
Curtis Mayfield, “Pusherman”
Herbie Hancock, “Bubbles”
Mahavishnu Orchestra,
“You Know, You Know”
Weather Report, “Non-Stop Home”, “125th Street
Congress”, “Cucumber Slumber”
Kool and the Gang, “Summer Madness”
Idris Muhammad, “Piece of Mind”
The Crusaders featuring Randy Crawford, “Street Life”
(the above and a heap of that kind of 70s smoov groov collated here)
Al Green, “Love Ritual”
Bill Frisell, In Line
Devo - Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are Devo!
As radical a reinvention / revitalization of rock form as any mounted at that time.
And also the second album’s “Clockout” - mostly for the drum roll.
Wire, Chairs Missing
As radical a reinvention / revitalization of rock form as any mounted at that time.
Also the third album's "The 15th" and "Map Ref 41 Degrees N 93 Degrees W"
Nineties Nuum
This year, like every year, I listened to a huge amount of hardcore, darkcore, jungle, etc and amazingly still managed to hear for the very first time a number of minor delights and the occasional astonishing tune that somehow I'd never come across in the previous 30 years of listening to, collecting, thinking about, and returning to again and again. So much music was made then it is still possible to have discoveries. Even the second-division and third-division specimens are charged with the electricity of the Zeitgeist. Extracting this year's discoveries and rediscoveries from memory is challenging, so habitual and engrained is my listening to this area. Things come and go, get remembered and then forgotten again.
But I did reimmerse deeply with the genius of Gurley and in particular his Rogue Unit remixes, collated here.
I rediscovered Cold Mission's compact, immaculate body of work right at the start of the year - artcore without any rufige removed or smoothed away
That then propelled me into a daft personal project of listening to the entire Reinforced discography (well, up to a certain date). Only some of that first half-90s surgeburst of scenius is gathered here. Not forgetting the often glorious Tom and Jerry stuff - a second front of dancefloor-aimed material opened up by 4 Hero under an alias.
(The second half of the RIVET '90s is partially collated here , and then again as a crowd-sourced highlight reel here, while my struggles with it are explored here).
Out of all the Reinforced-related wonderwork, this tune struck me again most forcefully as a miracle: the 4 Hero remix of Scarface's "Seen A Man Die." It even made me listen finally to the original Scarface tune and its album.
