Deluxe Issue Nineteen

TOP 100Â

Records of the Year The finest of 2019

TOP 100

Records of the Year The finest of 2019

Welcome to issue 19 of Deluxe. This edition flips the usual parameters as we’re focusing on the content of the shops rather than the bricks, mortar and shelves that confine them. We’ve produced a list of 100 albums - compiled by the staff at Drift Records, our own shop - that have turned our ears and heads throughout 2019.

As we’re based at Drift for this edition, we’ll also talk about their Sea Change Festival - that runs annually on the last May bank holiday weekend - and also the Dinked Collective of independent shops, a motley crew that includes Drift as one of its founders. These days, record shops play an ever bigger part of the creative community. We’re proud to have a home and we’re proud to be needed.

Issue Guest Editors The

www.deluxenewspaper.com Written and compiled by The Drift Record Shop Designed by jenny@atworkportfolio.co.uk Cover illustration by Jordan Amy Lee Sub edited by Lu Overy Printed by Newspaper Club Distributed by Forte Music Distribution © 2019 Deluxe Newspaper Whilst every care has been taken in the preparation of this newspaper, the publishers cannot be held responsible for the accuracy of information or any consequence arising from it.

Record Shop.

WARP ’89—INFINITY 2019 30 YEARS OF WARP RECORDS

Danny Brown

Bibio Ribbons

uknowhatimsayin¿

Stereolab Reissues

Stereolab Reissues

Battles Juice B Crypts

WXAXRXP Sessions

Flying Lotus Flamagra

Plaid Polymer

!!!

Wallop

Daniel Lopatin Uncut Gems OST

Kelly Moran Origin EP GAIKA HEATERS 4 THE 2 SEATERS James McVinnie All Night Chroma TNGHT II

TOP 100Â

Records of the Year The finest of 2019

Top 100...

Picked, voted, ranked and counting down from 100, here are the records soundtracking 2019 that we have most enjoyed.

100.

Tycho

99.

Wovoka Gentle

98.

Damien Jurado

Weather

Start Clanging Cymbals

In The Shape Of A Storm

Ninja Tune / 12 July

Nude Records / 7 June

Loose Music / 12 April

Scott Hansen returned this year as Tycho with his fifth LP Weather, a first in a new partnership with Ninja Tune. The tones here are lush, he really does make such dreamy synth noises, evocative and subtly filmic ambient soundscapes.

The clearest difference in his creative progression is the multicollaboration with Saint Sinner, who sings on five of the eight album tracks. It’s quite a big step into unfamiliar territory, but it pays off in a big way. Out of his comfort zone and taking the Tycho sound somewhere else.

The debut LP from London experimental three-piece Wovoka Gentle. William J Stokes and twins Imogen and Ellie Mason are making genuinely psychedelic music, with soundscapes and tones that sound equally rooted in the 1960s and somewhere in the not too distant future. Definitely loads to check out for fans of Animal Collective or Super Organism, they have the same sort of wooze, and a beautifully coherent way of adding everything into a sonic muddle (samples, synths, instruments) and arriving on the other side with audacious and quite grand collages. All held in place beautifully by the vocals and harmonies which are pretty delicious.

In The Shape Of A Storm was recorded over the course of just two hours one Californian afternoon, an album of beautifully sparse songs. The thundering drums and maximal psychedelic arrangements that formed his trio of preceding concept albums created with longtime collaborator and close friend Richard Swift make way for humble guitar and vocals, with only the occasional celestial accompaniment from Josh Gordon. The limited arrangement is a beautiful framing for these contemplative thoughts, some of the sweetest songs Jurado has ever recorded. Quietly captivating, his fourteenth album is a masterclass in simplicity and song.

Top 100.

Records of the Year 2019.

97.

96.

95.

Flamingods

Qasim Naqvi

Julia Kent

Moshi Moshi / 3 May

Erased Tapes / 3 May

The Leaf Label / 25 January

A positive technicolour explosion of psych, disco, funk and soul from hot and hypnotic corners of the globe. We’ve always had a lot of love for Flamingods, but Levitation very much feels like the band fully in focus, an album that gives the substance to their pretty immaculate style. It’s an aural patchwork of tones and influences that honestly goes off to its own place, and considering there is so much going on, it does awfully well to remain so fantastically coherent.

Above all else, it’s really good fun and impossible not to bob about to.

Teenages is one of this year’s most fascinating 40 minutes, an expansive headspace of miniature synth compositions from PakistaniAmerican artist Qasim Naqvi. He is perhaps better known for the progressive and hypnotic drums he provides in the Brooklyn-based jazz-electronic trio Dawn Of Midi, but Teenages is more in line with his composition work, directing synth-teeming soundscapes that bubble and pop with miniature and quite spooky sounding glitches.

The attention to detail in the sonic textures and contrasting synth bleeps is enthralling, precise yet weirdly homespun. Naqvi has approached the synthesiser like no one else this year, the incalculable buzzes of voltage are strangely spiritual.

Temporal is the elegantly restrained new album by Canadian cellist/ composer Julia Kent and follows the dissonance and tension of her previous Asperities album. It is a meditation on the transitory and fragile nature of existence and is full of really overwhelming moments, long drones that provide some amazing headspace and meticulously unwind or build out of quite primal simplicity. It’s a beautifully dreamy companion of an album - if you really give it your time, you can dial in and marvel at the sheer complexity of it all. Very special stuff.

Levitation

Teenages

Records of the Year 2019.

Temporal

Top 100.

94.

Unloved

93.

sir Was

92.

Clark

Heartbreak

Holding On To A Dream

Kiri Variations

Heavenly Recordings / 1 February

Memphis Industries / 20 September

Throttle Records / 26 July

Unloved is the transatlantic trio of vocalist Jade Vincent, composer Keefus Ciancia and Belfast producer David Holmes. If you watched any of the most excellent Killing Eve TV show they’ll already be known to you, as all the most exciting and alluring scenes were soundtracked by the trio’s ultra stylistic take on 1960s girl group melodrama. In lesser hands the prominence of the styling could have felt a little too throwaway, but here the smoky delivery is honest and heartfelt, and the Serge Gainsbourg/Jean-Claude Vannier production cues are just too much fun not to fall head over heels over. Ultra cool, a perfect trip.

Gothenburg producer Joel Wästberg - a.k.a. sir Was - pulls together all sorts of funk, soul and pop styles in a very hand-made feeling sort of electronica. Holding On To A Dream is way more polished than his debut - whilst still retaining the charming bumps and warps - and is centred around his vocal, often quite effectladen and full of natural soul. Yukimi Nagano from Little Dragon pops up with guest vocals on Deployed, a lush change of pace. Densely crafted with a really nice pace throughout - charming yet highly polished.

Released via his own label Throttle Records, with Kiri Variations Clark has musically metamorphosed into something fresh and new. The album elaborates on music he composed for the British TV series Kiri, moving between acoustic reimaginations and some quite abrasive textures.

There is plenty of brilliantly British weirdness about it, with pastoral keys and kitsch analogue tones sounding modern and highlighting just how progressive a producer Chris Clark is. For all the weirdness, some of the more straightforward moments are just killer, with strings and piano lines against the scattering beats. Quietly brilliant this one.

88.

87.

86.

FEWS Into Red

PIAS / 1 March

Nivhek

After its own death / Walking in a spiral towards the house

Marika Hackman Any Human Friend

AMF Records / 9 August

W.25th / 12 July

Into Red is the second studio LP from FEWS. We first became aware of these guys via their Speedy Wunderground single (good moment to flag up how consistently amazing that imprint is) - and they have grown ever more swaggering, in particular on this LP of driving post-punk. Without ever repeating themselves, the songs lock into a groove and build and build, with waves of intensity and plenty of well-balanced space.

Motorik beats and muscular riffs keep it primal. Co-produced by Joakim Lindberg of Hater, FEWS really are coming into their own, and this is an excellent set of songs.

Top 100.

Nivhek is the new project from Grouper’s Liz Harris, and this first release contains some of her most enchanting work to date. Recorded between residencies in the Azores (Portugal), Murmansk (Russia) and her native Oregon, the locations cast influence on the piece without making the album feel disjointed or necessarily about transience.

A beguiling blurring of mellotrons, guitars, warping tapes, antiquated pedals and Harris’s unmistakable whisper. There are sections of fragile beauty, and some quite overwhelming sections of sadness too, in a brilliant addition to the collection of one of the most unique artists recording today.

Records of the Year 2019.

Focused on desire, Any Human Friend is the razor sharp return from rock provocateur Marika Hackman.

Brilliantly human, it’s a starkly open record, very direct and full of sexuality. She more often than not purrs a disaffected growl over the top of glimmering pop bangers, some quite maudlin, some explosive in their hooks, and all drenched in a dark energy that really grabs you.

Produced with high wizard David Wrench, the album has a tautness both tantalising and addictive.

She is completely in control.

91.

90.

Bodega

Black Peaches

What’s Your Rupture? / 11 October

Hanging Moon Records / 17 May

Shiny New Model

Fire In The Hole

89.

Matthew Shaw Among The Never Setting Stars

Blackest Rainbow / 25 January

Shiny New Model is an eight track mini-LP from Brooklyn’s Bodega, and picks up where their brilliant debut LP Endless Scroll left off - literally, the last track here is a reworking of the excellent Truth Is Not a Punishment that closed out the debut. It retains all that heart and pounding energy - although clearly political, it is more than anything else overwhelmingly fun. The young band still sounds inescapably New York-ish, but whereas last time out was snarling post-punk, they are more influenced here by ESG and Talking Heads, with neurotic and frenetic dance shapes. Hugely exciting band, and they are getting better and better.

Fire In the Hole is the long-awaited follow-up to Black Peaches’ critically acclaimed 2016 debut Get Down You Dirty Rascals, and it’s a real melting pot of a record.

Funk, country and tropical vibes are all skilfully picked and used as new colours in the Black Peaches painting. The biggest victory is taking all the influences and crafting something that sounds their own, the swagger here is both genuine and warranted. It really takes a deft touch to move from gnarly Southern rock riffs to Latin percussion and Harry Nilsson-esque balladry, let alone all in one song!

Debut LP from Dorset-based artist Matthew Shaw. The album is rooted in the tradition of field recordings and borrowed sounds, creating sonic palettes that can be reused as abstract, long-form drones.

Motifs build and fade away across the six tracks, futuristic-sounding ancient tones. Warmly minimal, it’s exciting to come to this record with no preconceptions about themes or narratives, as the beautifully abstract sonics are hugely evocative. We’ve found some brilliant headspace here on more than a few occasions this year. Whether imagined landscapes or hazy reinterpretations, we’ve loved going back to listen.

Some of this year’s finest calm.

85.

84.

83.

Deerhunter

Why hasn’t Everything Already Disappeared?

The Cinematic Orchestra To Believe

4AD / 18 January

Ninja Tune / 15 March

As thrilling and unpredictable as anything in Deerhunter’s near 15 year career, Why Hasn’t Everything Already Disappeared? was recorded in several strategic geographic points across North America, and produced by the band with Cate Le Bon, Ben H. Allen III, and Ben Etter. Surprisingly provoking, it manages to cover so much and with such grace. An album of at-once futuristic and strangely nostalgic sounds, it’s big and possibly the poppiest they have ever been, full of rich analogue tones and the touch of human hands. Brilliantly written pop songs from a band who really sound unlike anyone else and totally like themselves.

After twelve years away, it was always going to be a huge return for The Cinematic Orchestra, and To Believe manages perfectly the weight of those expectations, delivering an album of subtle and expansive music. The guest appearances from Moses Sumney, Roots Manuva, Tawiah, Heidi Vogel and Grey Reverend are beautifully balanced and add to the overall vibe without distracting. The mixing is the greatest achievement, testament to its makers - Jason Swinscoe and Dominic Smith - faith in the slow builds and orchestral flourishes. They are absolute masters of layering the tones.

Records of the Year 2019.

Richard Norris

Abstractions Vol. 1 & 2 Group Mind Records 21st February / 21st June

The first two sets in a beautiful new ambient music series called Abstractions from Richard Norris (Beyond The Wizards Sleeve / The Grid) on the Group Mind Records label. They are truly transcendental suites for deep listening, warm and reflective pieces that slowly evolve. The second in the series features the track In A Heartbeat, a collaboration with artist Marcus Lyall and the soundtrack to his audio-visual installation of the same name. The subtlety of the drones throughout both volumes is utterly captivating, genuinely meditative music that is an empowering and immersive listen… more than a little of the spiritual about this.

Top 100.

82.

Moon Duo

81.

80.

Stars Are The Light

Sleater-Kinney

The Center Won’t Hold

Fontaines D.C.

Sacred Bones / 27 September

Mom + Pop / 16 August

Partisan Records / 12 April

Mixed by Sonic Boom, Stars Are The Light is the seventh full-length studio release for the Portlandbased psychedelic rock duo of Ripley Johnson and Sanae Yamada. There are still layers of tightly wound introspection, but whereas the band started with burnt-out psych jams only a step away from Wooden Shjips, Moon Duo have moved on. This new LP is a joyous treat, a bouncy sort of bubbling dream-pop album with the grooving gestures of funk and disco beats. Really uplifting, it’s dreamlike and full of sweet charm.

With The Center Won’t Hold, their ninth studio album, Sleater-Kinney remain one of the most important bands around. The album marks a period of change, firstly with drummer Janet Weiss’s decision to leave the band, and perhaps even more so with the addition of Annie Clark (St Vincent) on production duties, whose influence is impossible not to be heard as a fourth member. The production is full of icy pop stylistics, as polished and radio-friendly as they have ever sounded, but still dripping in a dark, seductive energy. With signature flurries of frenetic chords and vocal yelps, it’s very much Sleater-Kinney - they’re just twentyfive years in and ever evolving.

The further this country drifts into social disharmony and political disaster, the more the new wave of post-punks sound straight up punk, and the more they sound absolutely essential. Dubliners Fontaines D.C. have captured absolutely everything about the bitter helplessness, the deeply laid frustrations and the snarling response in their debut album, a brilliantly necessary album for where we are. “Is it too real for yaaaaa?” rants Grian Chatten, his native Dublin inflection ringing through vocals that are unaffected and utterly striking, channelling all the eerie energy of Ian Curtis or Mark E. Smith. Rousing, sad, euphoric and very smart, a hugely accomplished debut.

79.

78.

77.

Dogrel

Maps

Drugdealer Raw Honey

Forever Turned Around

Mute Records / 10 May

Mexican Summer / 19 April

Secretly Canadian / 30 August

Colours. Reflect. Time. Loss.?

The fourth studio album from L.A. based auteur Michael Collins the Mercury-nominated composer and producer James Chapman, recorded in part with the classical ensemble The Echo Collective. It’s an album of such sonic decadence, perhaps the prettiest album of the year with overwhelming and immersive atmospherics. It is perfectly created with huge ethereal swells and the most deft little touches working in perfect harmony.

Absolutely no wasted gestures, from the minute bleeps harking back to his bedroom recording origins, through to the maximal dynamics of The Echo Collective. Full of emotions, it is meticulously created with a beautiful flowing charm.

delivers his second LP under the Drugdealer nom de plume. Soaked in the heady fumes of 1970s AM radio, Raw Honey is a collection of hazy pop songs with plenty of sweet melancholia. Although immaculately delivered with rich analogue vibes that genuinely sound like they were recorded some fifty years ago, there is plenty of substance under the thick layers of styling, with themes of self-discovery popping through a few times. Above all else, Collins sure can write a pop song, and this excellent LP is full of hooks and rich mellow vibes.

Records of the Year 2019.

Whitney

Arriving just as the summer nights started to turn to a more autumnal shade, Whitney’s Forever Turned Around felt like a subtly more introspective elder brother to the band’s excellent summery debut LP. Taking cues from 1960s guitar pop-rock, the duo (both formerly of Smith Westerns) give their songs a beautifully modern light, avoiding any simple aping.

The freewheeling jangle of their debut remains and there are some pretty perfect pop nuggets across the album’s ten tracks.

Slow-burning songs that all feel heartfelt, there is a simple honesty here that’s too special to fake.

Top 100.

18

01

12

04

Partisan Records Tender Fear of Falling Asleep

26

2 18

06

19

09

11

07

Fela Kuti & Roy Ayres Music of Many Colours

05

20

10

09

25

10

Cigarettes After Sex Cry

12

IDLES A Beautiful Thing: IDLES Live at le Bataclan

9

05

Pottery No. 1

0

Molly Sarlé Karaoke Angel

1 06

03

Body Type EP 2

Goon Heaven is Humming

Emel Mathlouthi Everywhere We Looked Was Burning

29

04

Craig Finn I Need a New War

Spike Fuck The Smackwave EP

27

Fontaines D.C. Dogrel

22

Ultraísta Ultraísta

11

76.

75.

74.

(Sandy) Alex G

Fat White Family

Portico Quartet

Domino / 13 September

Domino / 19 April

Gondwana Records / 4 October

Ninth studio LP from the prolific Philadelphia singer-songwriter Alex Giannascoli, now under the slightly tweaked moniker of (Sandy) Alex G. It’s often hard for “bedroom” artists to fully transfer to the broader conscious without either sounding entirely different or losing their charm. Alex G has simply kept making music throughout his ascent and has gradually become more refined, more honed and more maximal in his delivery.

Although sounding more controlled or overtly produced than before, House of Sugar is gloriously hazy in content - mesmerising little fragments that come in and out of focus. Mysterious songs that are weird and wonderful. Addictive stuff indeed.

The Fat White Family have always had huge potential, and it has been thrilling to see them refocus their collective efforts and deliver a third LP that brings all their charms and talents into sharp focus. What a raucous return it is.

There is all the filth and snarl that always made them so compelling, only now delivered in a densely wound sonic amalgamation of their collective influences. Some quite glitchy electro-clash tones, some moments that sound positively yacht-rock, and their hallmark glam rock stompers all combine to great effect. Fun, dirty and plenty to pick up on across repeat plays

Memory Streams is the triumphant return of the Mercury-nominated Portico Quartet. Above all else, the ease with which the four-piece play and collaborate is thrilling, often quite simple beats growing ever more frenetic with warped synth pulses and Jack Wylie’s saxophone flowing effortlessly in between it all. The album uses the timbres and palettes they have made their own, and drives them ever more progressively into minimalism, ambient and electronic music.

Pretty sure they could have rested on their laurels and delivered something perfectly impressive, but seeing them challenge themselves to go ever more warped is exciting - this hazy, futuristic and really evocative LP is the just desserts.

73.

72.

71.

House of Sugar

Serfs Up!

Memory Streams

Metronomy

SASAMI

You Tell Me

Because Music / 13 September

Domino / 8 March

Memphis Industries / 11 January

Metronomy Forever… too right! The seventeen-track double album has absolutely everything in one place that makes the band such an idiosyncratic and influential outfit. There are plenty of utter pop bangers (Salted Caramel Ice Cream is far too cheeky for words) that positively drip in crystalline pop production, and they are all the more glimmering against the introspective ambience and woozy soundscapes that complete the trip.

And that’s what it is: a trip through an imagined space and time with one of the finest producers around.

Another immaculate addition to the Metronomy canon and a very strong shout for some of Joseph Mount’s finest moments.

The self-titled debut LP from SASAMI (Sasami Ashworth) is a strange joy, one on the surface that is too maudlin to spend many repeats with, but also one that like all great shoegaze - creates utterly special and euphoric moments that find the pocket between happy and sad. The LP was predominately written over the previous year (whilst on tour playing keys and guitar with Cherry Glazerr) and has an intimate and direct approach. It’s melodic whilst prickly enough to remain super captivating, as the distorted guitar pop reverbs and decays even as you listen to it. A beautiful whisper that’ll stay with you.

Our first Record of the Week for 2019, and one we’ve played consistently throughout the year. You Tell Me is the debut collaborative work from Field Music’s Peter Brewis and Admiral Fallow’s Sarah Hayes. Knowing the principal creators it’s hardly a surprise, but the delivery here is just masterful, perfectly written songs from a multitude of genres that sit so beautifully together.

Some elements are familiar, others surprising and deliberately playing against expectations of how the song might unfold. It’s all so brilliantly connected, thoughtful ballads with some tight little pop bangers in there for good measure.

Metronomy Forever?

SASAMI

Records of the Year 2019.

You Tell Me

Top 100.

70.

69.

68.

Steve Gunn

Julia Jacklin

William Tyler

Matador / 18 January

Transgressive Records / 22 February

Merge / 25 January

Throughout the last decade, Steve Gunn has been one of American music’s most pivotal figures, conjuring immersive and psychedelic sonic landscapes. He has a deft touch as a collaborator, playing in Kurt Vile’s band, collaborating with Hiss Golden Messenger and more recently producing Micheal Chapman. The Unseen In Between is however all about framing him centrally as narrator, and it’s a bit of an understated masterpiece. His quietly confident delivery is poignant and masterfully balanced. Although famed as a fingerpicker, he coherently walks between cosmic, contemporary and quite traditional playing with solid grooves. A real breakthrough from one of the best singer-songwriters around.

Crushing is the second fulllength album from Australian singer-songwriter Julia Jacklin.

It’s relatively stripped back compared to her debut (and last year’s excellent Phantastic Ferniture collab), but her writing is sharp, and the songs don’t need crunching pedal stomps as they all carry themselves so eloquently.

It’s a brutally honest album of selfdiscovery and analysis, addressing both sides of arguments, and that’s brave stuff. Her ability to articulate some big concepts and themes into pop-sensitive little couplets is damn near masterful. A beautiful voice that is as expressive in sombre mode as it is in the euphoric choruses.

William Tyler is doubtless one of the most skilled solo guitar players around, and his greatest trick is remembering to not make a point of it. The former Lambchop man released his fourth solo LP this year, and it’s another collection of immaculately graceful fingerpicked songs that paint epic landscapes with tiny details without ever feeling fussy. His style often leaves you full of hope, even if the content is clearly covering a strained America, ravaged by division and self-destruction. Goes West breezes along beautifully, spiritual music that could be a document from any one of the USA’s few hundred years.

67.

66.

65.

The Unseen In Between

Jessica Pratt

Crushing

Ezra Collective

Goes West

Here Lies Man

Quiet Signs

You Can’t Steal My Joy

No Ground To Walk Upon

City Slang / 8 February

Enter The Jungle / 26 April

Riding Easy / 16 August

The vast majority of Quiet Signs, San Franciscan singer-songwriter Jessica Pratt’s excellent third album, feels like the moments between waking and sleeping, whispered songs that echo through space and time. The arrangements are pretty simple, predominantly Jessica on her own, focusing on the nuances of the songs and her beautiful voice. Captured for the first time in a “proper studio”, she sings like a siren with just the odd gesture of keys and woodwind.

Quiet songs beautifully delivered, it’s really captivating stuff, with incredible restraint and subtlety and some utterly stunning moments presented through her blurry lens.

The debut album from London five-piece Ezra Collective, one of the leading lights in the new wave of UK jazz. You Can’t Steal My Joy is euphoric, a celebration of the patchwork of jazz influences that inspire them and give them fuel.

It’s a hypnotic fusion of styles, big, cool and full of drive with afrobeat, hip-hop and soul improvisations also playing a big part in the Ezra Collective sound. Guest appearances from Jorja Smith and Loyle Carner are both really exciting additions, and even those two huge voices struggle to keep attention alongside Ezra as coconspirators, further highlighting what excellent ringleaders they are.

Always arriving with the obligatory rhetorical question, what if Black Sabbath played Afrobeat? the L.A. based band (comprising Antibalas members) sure can hold a sunscorched riff or two. This new LP continues the ongoing concept of Here Lies Man playing the soundtrack to an imaginary movie, with each song being a scene.

It’s got such a great groove to it, they lock you in and take you on a trip. Gnarly and fuzz-laden riffs, but that’s not to suggest it lacks focus - it really is such a great ride that never stops to idle.

Top 100.

Records of the Year 2019.

64.

63.

62.

Blanck Mass

Flying Lotus Flamagra

Until The Tide Creeps In

Sacred Bones / 16 August

Warp / 24 May

Bella Union / 12 July

Benjamin John Power returns for the fourth time as Blanck Mass, channelling the horrors of the surveillance state and the creeping dread of everyday life into the most aggressive music of his career. It. Is. Brutal. Described as a “delirious soundtrack to the apocalypse”, the album drips in venom, frustration and anger incarnate. Layers and layers of intricate beats and textures collide in waves of crunching distortion and gnarl.

There is quite some euphoria about it, so long as you can channel it as an ally. Impressive and a bit terrifying, it’s fully primal music and no one else gets close to him.

The sixth studio album by American record producer, Brainfeeder main-head and all round vibe polymath Flying Lotus. A fascinating combination of incredibly precise and deeply free flowing, it’s a real wonder of technical dexterity with an almost sketchbook-like approach.

Blurred shades of funk, jazz and rap with a world of guest appearances from Anderson Paak, George Clinton, Denzel Curry, Little Dragon, David Lynch, Shabazz Palaces, Solange, Thundercat, Tierra Whack, and Toro y Moi. Steven Ellison (for he is Fly-Lo) is the grand-nephew of Alice Coltrane, it’s a thrill to see him move ever more from his origins in murky LA beatmaking to a transcendental and cosmic jazz figure. There is no one out there getting anywhere close to this.

One of the year’s most interesting debuts this one. There are lots of influences at play, certainly lots of sonic gestures, but the best trick here is that all the ideas are their own. A really genuine reimagining.

We’re very fond indeed of this lot, having had them join us at Sea Change last year and also playing in the shop as part of Michael Clark’s band. They are quite exceptional musicians, and the central siblings Jack and Lily Wolter have a beautiful musical connectivity.

Dreamy layers part and reform around some quite mathsy rhythms.

Can’t wait to see what they do next.

58.

57.

56.

Animated Violence Mild

Penelope Isles

Leafcutter John

Jesca Hoop

Tim Hecker

Border Community / 19 April

Memphis Industries / 5 July

Kranky / 17 May

We always go mad for Border Community, but they teamed up with Leafcutter John (member of Polar Bear and a guest musician on a quite stunning role call of projects) to release his new LP Yes! Come Parade With Us - and it is one of this year’s most euphoric headspaces. It’s a modular synth record with a bounty of field recordings from the Norfolk coast path, such joyous music with each track carefully unwrapping from tightly wound motifs and beats (including drummers Tom Skinner of Sons of Kemet and Polar Bear bandmate Seb Rochford). These seven bright-eyed folk anthems sing with positivity and a lovely sense of place, suitably handmade but quite magnificent in their scope.

Working with producer John Parish, Jesca Hoop has streamlined her sound on her fifth solo album STONECHILD - an often stark and contemplative piece. Quite stripped back, the subtle electronic production tugs at the edges of her fingerpicked folk. It’s a spooky set of songs about hopefulness and dissolution. She still sings beautifully (in an accent these days that is hard to place between her native California and home of Manchester) and the ethereal sounds are often quite chilling in their stillness and fragility. They have captured some real magic here, full of natural and unnatural noises, darkness and thoughtful contemplations.

Canadian experimental musician and composer Tim Hecker is always essential listening. His work blurs the lines between computers, machines and organic recordings, a sort of surreal audio architecture.

Anoyo, the follow-up to last year’s Konoyo, was also recorded with a Japanese gagaku ensemble. It’s a solemn album, suitably sparse and focused on sections of silence and minute contrasts. Anoyo is so timeless, the electronic timbres are both frenetic and droning, the natural tones of wood and string are ancient, but together it could have been recorded anywhere and in anytime. Special and genuinely overwhelming music, highly affecting stuff.

Yes! Come Parade With Us

Top 100.

STONECHILD

Records of the Year 2019.

Anoyo

61.

Stephen Malkmus

60.

59.

Groove Denied

Bibio

Ribbons

Sharon Van Etten

Domino / 15 March

Warp / 12 April

Jagjaguwar / 18 January

We wondered back in March, could this possibly be the most Drift-friendly album that has ever happened? The secret electronic album ( ) by Stephen Malkmus ( ) of Pavement ( ) finally seeing the light of day ( ). Right from the first listen it was evident that this was an artist using a different set of tools and approaching the project with a genuine sense of exploration.

There are times where the beats and pulses bleep and phase slightly out of synch with one another, galloping ahead, caught up in the excitement of the deliciously analogue tones. It moves from a Daphne Oram meets Human League sort of space through to DIY bedroom pop. As Malkmus explained, it’s fun to mess with things that you’re not supposed to.

An album of supreme, bucolic beauty. As Bibio, Stephen Wilkinson is a writer of such pretty songs. His previous LP Phantom Brickworks was full of stunning ambience, the moments and air that have always been present in his music brought to the fore. This year’s Ribbons recalls those lush tones and uses them as a gloriously woozy bed for Wilkinson as a really quite straightup songwriter. Whispered vocals with anything from fingerpicked six-strings, hissing cassette tapes, a mellotron and spangling low tempo synth-funk as company. As a textural producer he is really peerless.

What a way to start the year this was: January’s Record of the Month, the emotionally jacked-up return of Sharon Van Etten. Her first LP in four years, and although that instantly recognisable voice is right at the forefront, it all offers up a new part of her as a person, and the honesty is pretty special. The contrast between the quiet gothic atmospherics and the huge emotions is piercing, a set of confessionals from an artist in highly experimental mode and powered with utter conviction. A brilliant set of songs with all the right delivery, we’ve played this all year long.

55.

54.

53.

Keel Her

Sarathy Korwar

O Genesis / 7 June

The Leaf Label / 26 July

With Kindness

More Arriving

Remind Me Tomorrow

Carwyn Ellis & Rio 18 JOIA!

Banana & Louie / 28 June

Some 20-odd albums into her career at 25 years of age (she sings about being just 23 in one of the album’s early stand out moments), Rose Keeler Schaefler is quite the prolific talent. Recorded over the last couple of years with friends and conspirators, With Kindness is a collage of ideas and genres, painting a vivid picture of its idiosyncratic creator. 17 short pop nuggets with whirling organs, the odd clattering guitar lick, skiffling drums and a wry and dark lyrical sense of humour running throughout. Full of gloriously lo-fi pop moments from a unique and exciting voice.

Recorded over two and a half years in India and the UK, More Arriving draws influence from the emerging rap scenes in Mumbai and New Delhi. Sarathy Korwar (the USborn, Indian-raised, London-based drummer, percussionist, composer and bandleader) has created a rich tapestry of beats and rhythms that is easiest to place in the jazz world, but the collision of timbres - which is thrilling - makes this one of the year’s most accessible experimental albums. There is little time spent trying to fuse it, it’s all about the striking collisions in instruments, words and cultures. Our July Record of the Month, an inspiring album full of light and energy.

Records of the Year 2019.

The magnificent Carwyn Ellis (of Bendith, Edwyn Collins, Colorama) is always full of surprises, and this years JOIA! has been a constant source of sun. A prolific crate digger, Carwyn was touring South America as part of the Pretenders touring band and regularly stuffing a bag full of choice cuts shop to shop. Chrissie Hynde suggested he record an album of music inspired by the records he was buying, and he bloody did, travelling to Rio de Janeiro to record with two distinguished crazy local artists, Domenico Lancellotti and Kassin. It is a sunny, melodic, catchy and brilliantly outthere record of sunshine and JOY!

Top 100.

Recordings

STEALING SHEEP BIG WOWS

PIP BLOM BOAT

CHAI PUNK

NIGHT BEATS MYTH OF A MAN

NIGHT BEATS BOOM

MATTIEL STATIS FACTORY

UNLOVED HEARTBREAK

UNLOVED HEARTBREAK INSTRUMENTALS

HATCHIE KEEPSAKE

MARK LANEGAN BAND SOMEBODY’S KNOCKING

KILLING EVE SOUNDTRACK SEASON 1

KILLING EVE SOUNDTRACK SEASON 2

HEAVENLYRECORDINGS.COM

52.

51.

50.

Daniel O’Sullivan

Snapped Ankles

Pottery

O Genesis / 5 April

The Leaf Label / 1 March

Partisan Records / 12 July

Folly is the second album from Daniel O’Sullivan (one half of the most excellent Grumbling Fur) under his own name. His delivery is exquisite, ranging from a low baritone whisper to an emotionally strained and yearning flutter. It covers arguably the two biggest themes we have birth (his son) and death (his close friend) - and his ability to pair those two together is pretty amazing. The delivery on both is contemplative and wistful, it’s part of the same cycle after all. The production comes from Welsh experimental musician Thighpaulsandra, and the dense layers of instrumentation are effortlessly composed and a graceful companion to O’Sullivan’s voice throughout.

At last year’s Sea Change, Snapped Ankles brought their quite incredible live experience to Totnes, and utterly destroyed the room. Seeing them live adds further evidence that they are as much a visual treat as an auditory one. For the first time on the utterly thrilling Stunning Luxury, they have got close to capturing that magic on record, with kinetic post-punk, funk-charged bass and all sorts of gnarly noises and oscillations. Politically charged with plenty of darkness, they really are some of the rare few who can blend high-concept with high-octane on an album of massive beats and hooks. Life-affirming stuff.

The first release from Montreal’s Pottery, a tightly wound seventracker full of thrilling riffs and changes of pace. Rooted in a jangling post-punk somewhere between Devo and Orange Juice, the band introduce plenty of pop shapes, and there are sections that are really going to turn some dancing heads. The part-yelped and part-spoken vocals match the frenetic changes of pace with a wide-eyed hypnotic harmony, and the intertwined guitar riffs have that same mercurial energy as the break-out Parquet Courts records. Can’t rave about these guys enough, absolutely the band we want to hear most of in 2020.

49.

48.

47.

Folly

Stunning Luxury

No. 1

Laurence Pike

Richard Dawson

White Denim

The Leaf Label / 17 May

Weird World / 11 October

City Slang / 29 March

The second solo LP from Australian drummer and electronic musician Laurence Pike, one third member of both PVT and Szun Waves.

Broadly, it all moves beautifully between its two modes. There are spatial sections of ambience and thoughtful flourishes, there are hypnotic beats that ebb and flow in primal rhythms. That juxtaposition and coexistence of the minimal and the driven creates a really remarkable space, taking its cues from traditional minimalism, electronica and spiritual jazz with great charm. The repetitive phrases keep you locked in and the sumptuous sonics are a sea to float in.

Richard Dawson - the blackhumoured bard of Newcastle - returned late this year with his sixth solo album, his first since the critically-acclaimed Peasant. Not in recent memory has an artist been able to balance such razor sharp wit (it’s genuinely laugh-out-loud funny) with the sort of empathy that makes a truly great songwriter. All this on not only the same album or track, but even within lines of a song. It was only when watching the video to Jogging - with its set of subtitles - did we realise quite what an extraordinary linguist he is, tricky and complicated word-play wrapped around the song’s prickly guitar pop. In a tumultuous and bleak time, no one has articulated it quite so eloquently.

Less than a year after their last album, the ever-prolific White Denim returned in March with their eighth (studio) record Side Effects. Having built their own studio, the duo of James Petralli and Steve Terebecki (with a revolving cast of helpers) took stock of all their half-finished tracks and quickly set to work on a fizzing follow-up. For the uninitiated (their albums have featured in our top 100 list on every occasion), the Texan outfit have always had the most deft knack of taking 60s and 70s garage rock shapes and giving them a thoroughly modern spin. Side Effects is full of a crackling energy that is synonymous with their live shows, crunching riffs and deliciously offkilter side steps into soul grooves.

Holy Spring

2020

Records of the Year 2019.

Side Effects

Top 100.

46.

45.

44.

Pom Poko

Sarah Davachi

Tropical Fuck Storm

Bella Union / 22 February

W.25th / 14 June

Joyful Noise Recordings / 23 August

Hold onto something. The debut album from the young Norwegian four-piece Pom Poko is utterly frenetic, utterly explosive and utterly joyous. Reminiscent of Battles, perhaps Deerhoof and with Africanised guitar licks that rattle off at a hundred miles an hour, they are thrilling, and they really don’t sound much like anyone else. Even if you think you have a hold on how a song will conclude, it’ll change right in front of you; nothing is predictable and their messy moments are some of their finest. Hugely audacious especially as a debut - Birthday is an album that has left us tingly, it’s full of tightly wound rhythms and riffs and a wild and swirling bounce.

Pale Bloom finds Sarah Davachi coming full circle. After abandoning the piano studies of her youth for a series of albums utilising everything from pipe and reed organs to analogue synthesizers, the prolific Los Angeles-based composer returns to her first instrument for an album of remarkable calm, delivered in four pieces. Full of transformative energy, the piano-led meditations unfold with augmenting vocals (Perfume II), drones (Perfume III) and some truly baroque tones on the 20 minute album closer (If It Pleased Me To Appear To You Wrapped In This Drapery) that slowly turns darker and more atonal towards its conclusion. Quiet minimalism that’s not always comfortable, really quite overwhelming and some of the year’s most special moments.

Featuring members of the nowdefunct The Drones, Tropical Fuck Storm returned in August with their highly anticipated second album, just 18 months after their critically acclaimed debut LP. Picking up where A Laughing Death in Meatspace left off, Braindrops is a heady mix of gnarled psych rock and venomous, deranged vocal tirades.

It’s easy to stay with the - instantly gratifying - messy and tumultuous delivery, but what they’re doing isn’t actually messy at all; listen hard and everything is in its right place, devilishly smart and delivered meticulously. The name, the lyrics, the riffs, the lurid art, it’s enough to make you break into a sweat.

Equally compelling and dazzling.

43.

42.

41.

Birthday

Gia Margaret

Pale Bloom

Braindrops

There’s Always Glimmer

Kim Gordon

No Home Record

Pozi

Dalliance / 24 May

Matador / 11 October

PRAH Recordings / 5 April

A full release of the Chicago-based A huge return from a total icon. songwriter’s debut LP. Delivered predominantly in the dreamiest of hushed tones, Gia sings lullabylike songs of sadness with such a genuine intimacy, it’s hypnotic stuff. The instrumentation is kept pretty simple, strums and whispers augmented by synths and organs, sounding like fragments of echoing dreams. There is a very natural resonance to it and for all the dreamlike quality (she refers to her own music as “sleep rock”), it’s very much like you’re in the same room and being sung to. Serene, beautifully articulate and never overly-maudlin.

Top 100.

With a career spanning nearly four decades, Kim Gordon is one of the most prolific and visionary artists working today. A co-founder of the legendary Sonic Youth, Gordon has worked constantly and widely since. Her first solo LP is everything you’d want; helmed by her instantly recognisable husk, it’s provocative and spellbinding in equal measures. The songs are perhaps the most pop structured she’s ever made, but the way she weaves noise and texture together as part of it takes it somewhere altogether more mysterious.

The lyrics feel like snippets of a stream of consciousness, it’s quite the privilege to feel like you’re so close to her. Utterly commanding.

Records of the Year 2019.

PZ1

We love it when a band genuinely sound like no one else. Released on the excellent PRAH Recordings, PZ1 is Pozi’s first foray into the world of what might loosely be called rock music, and sees the London threepiece launch their first collection of politically and emotionally charged post-punk. Dropping guitars for violins might seem like a relatively simple move, but dynamically it takes them to such a unique place. Sometimes frantic and angular, sometimes sentimentally swooning, it’s a wonderful timbre.

Always urgent, there is a lush chug that gives loads of space for the vocals and strings to lead the show.

2019 Deerhunter Why Hasn’t Everything Already Disappeared?

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A

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Decent

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Year

40.

39.

Little Simz

Girl Band

Age 101 / 1 March

Rough Trade Records / 27 September

Third album from the prolific North Londoner that earned a much deserved Mercury nomination. As Little Simz, Simbi Ajikawo is a brilliant protagonist, confidence personified (she opens the record explaining “I’m Jay-Z on a bad day, Shakespeare on my worst days”), but one of this impressive album’s major victories is that through the bravado she remains hugely likeable, often showing chinks in the armour and revealing self-doubt. She says she’s good, then proves it without dwelling on posturing or materialism. She raps clearly, technically brilliant with natural enunciation that’s engaging and hypnotising with her fierce bite. Guest appearances from Little Dragon and Michael Kiwanuka all add to proceedings, the album closer in particular being the most vulnerable. All the different voices and styles play brilliantly against Little Simz, as her presence is so strong and recognisable.

The production work - from childhood friend Inflo - is incredibly sensitive too. The album starts with pounding beats and busy sound beds, clicks, pops and all sorts of cartoon sound effects that keep things rolling along at a pace, before dropping to a swing speed with soul and jazz grooves. A formidable talent in full flow.

Released almost four years to the day after their debut, The Talkies marks a huge return from Dublin’s Girl Band. Their second album is absolutely massive.

It starts with a couple of minutes of low drone and panting on Prolix, a sort of balled up anticipation of what’s coming, before launching into the mad-eyed stagger of lead single Going Norway. It was only when we’d listened to the album a few times through did we find out that it’s not staged, but in fact a document of singer Dara Kiely suffering a panic attack in the studio during the recording. For an artist and a band who have been open about mental health issues, it’s contextually a stunning opening, highlighting that the shadows remain. The album is all about feelings, and the way the album production articulates it is thrilling. Sections of quite straight-up noise-rock, but the connecting waves of minimalism and industrial timbres give the whole piece an unsettling and dark energy. Dara Kiely is a captivating central figure, and the band in full unison is quite extraordinary, high sonic experimentalism that conveys very physical feelings to jaw-dropping effect. A genuinely affecting listening experience.

36.

35.

Grey Area

The Talkies

Bruce Springsteen

Floating Points

Columbia / 14 June

Ninja Tune / 18 October

A brilliant review (might have been 1982’s Nebraska) said something along the lines of: you either love Bruce Springsteen, or you don’t get Bruce Springsteen.

We’d always taken that as a sort of glib statement, but perhaps it was more nuanced. Western Stars, The Boss’s 19th studio album, is a very different Springsteen and perhaps as good an entry point for the uninitiated as anything he’s done. It’s an album with a central narrator and of rich character studies, a panoramic vision of Americana and broken men on quests of redemption and renewal. The majority of his albums to date have been about capturing the incredible intensity of his live shows. Western Stars would be a hugely audacious one to tour, as it’s a beautiful combination of some of both his most intimate and most grand moments to date. A good handful of its tracks are stripped back to just voice and guitar, but most are accompanied by huge orchestral moments, swells and undulations of high drama. It plays beautifully against his voice that sounds natural, full of emotion and not afraid to crack. Springsteen in his seventies is as raw and vital as any other version of the Boss.

The first full-length album in four years for Dr Sam Shepherd as Floating Points (in that period he has however curated a Late Night Tales compilation and toured various iterations of his brilliant 2015 debut Elaenia). Crush marks the start of a new creative partnership with the iconic Ninja Tune label, an interesting marker towards some of the album’s locked-in beats and the place that the indie label titans still hold in the electronic music scene. And an excellent beat-maker Shepherd is, moments of deeply tense atmospherics propelled with much drive, a sort of primal side effect that leaves you wondering if you are dancing or being danced? A svelte 44 minutes long, his ability to move from experimental textural music, through big beats (album middle point LesAlpx is a techno menace) and back to ambience is pretty thrilling stuff, and makes for a great journey rather than a cluttered ride. There is just too much to take in on any one listen, which makes repeat trips a joy. Dripping in dark energy, the album is about being crush(ed) into the “helplessness of contemporary inevitabilities: climate change and self-serving politics”, and to convey those themes so articulately is again testament to a hugely skilled creator.

Western Stars

Top 100.

Crush

Records of the Year 2019.

38.

37.

Holly Herndon

Jamila Woods

4AD / 10 May

Jagjaguwar / 10 May

Our May Record of the Month, the third full album from Dr. Holly Herndon. It is a record created in collaboration with her own A.I. baby (co-created with Mat Dryhurst), an entity called “Spawn”. The album finds inspiration in the church choirs of her youth, creating Spawn as a member of her ensemble, a new collaborative member. That’s perhaps the most fascinating part of this, so often A.I. is shrouded in neurosis, anxiety and mistrust, but Proto is very much about the possibilities of working creatively alongside Spawn, the opportunity to see where the new timbre can go in a way that is genuinely responsive. Herndon feels maternal in that way, challenging the fear that machines are taking over. It glistens with electronic flourishes and waves of vocal treatment, but it’s a very organic-feeling album in fact, one of the warmest electronic albums in years.

Occasionally you get those academic gestures in music that are piercingly smart, brilliant but coldly dull. Proto is the antithesis of this, accessible and wildly creative, a record that is exciting, challenging and totally inspiring.

Hugely audacious and impeccably delivered second album from the Chicago soul singer, poet and activist Jamila Woods. Legacy! Legacy! is a loving testimony to black artists, with the echoes of the past and the promise of the future. Each track is focused on a historical figure, examining the lives and cultural importance of historical figures like poet Nikki Giovanni, singer Eartha Kitt, blues legend Muddy Waters, funk rebel Betty Davis, jazz greats Miles Davis and Sun Ra, literary icons James Baldwin, Zora Neale Hurston and Octavia E Butler, poet Sonia Sanchez and iconoclastic painter Jean-Michel Basquiat. There is a brilliantly self-assured confidence to both the content and the delivery, a rich and vivid trip through R&B, jazz and soul. In less capable hands it could have played out like a cold monologue, but here Woods has such a rich authenticity and understanding of each journey that she plays the part of a captivating curator. In the context of modern America, it feels as vital and important as the collective works of its inspirations; some of the repeated mistakes are chilling. Content aside, much kudos to her musical sensibilities, as you can almost get lost in simply how good this album sounds.

34.

33.

Proto

LEGACY! LEGACY!

Lee “Scratch” Perry

Weyes Blood

On-U Sound / 31 May

Sub Pop / 5 April

With an iconic back catalogue and the sort of eccentricity that has few equals across any art form, Lee “Scratch” Perry could well just enjoy his retirement years, perhaps investing in a fire safety officer for his studio spaces. But at 83, he clearly still has a lot to say and Rainford (his birth name) is as immediate and engaged as the Upsetter has sounded in a yonk.

One of the big narratives here is the friendship and sonic stewardship of longtime collaborator Adrian Sherwood at the controls. The On-U main head has done an impeccable job of reining Perry in and setting him loose, offering the perfect space for the hypnotic and psychedelic stream of consciousness to flow without losing focus. The album closer Autobiography Of The Upsetter is as poignant a moment as you’ll hear all year, a sentimental, warm and quite emotional amble through the life and family of Rainford. It feels beautifully natural, like a free-flowing anecdote where little bubbling memories ripple on the surface.

Even for an artist with Lee “Scratch” Perry’s legacy, it’s not a wild claim at all that this could be one of the finest and most focused albums he’s ever made.

One of the records we have sold the most of direct from playing on the stereo this year, through the seasons we’re talking about some pretty big vibes here. Weyes Blood (a.k.a. Natalie Mering) returned with Titanic Rising and it is so emotionally immense, recalling the ardour of Linda Perhacs or Judee Sill. Co-produced

by Foxygen’s Jonathan Rado, there was never any doubt that it would sound impeccable, but the biggest victory is for all of its sonic styling, it’s actually produced very sensitively to wash around Mering’s songs and her quite beautiful voice. Based equally in pop music and a sort of new-age experimental ambience, it’s an evocative and deeply vivid album of weird tones, gloriously indecipherable instruments and warbling tape loops. If you spent any sort of time in the 1980s there is a lot to feel sentimental about, but the brightness of the songs successfully avoids any cheap imitation. While bits sound old, Titanic Rising feels new throughout, and Mering proves herself consistently to be a writer and singer of great imagination. It’s ambitious in scope - the artwork itself is stunning and otherworldly - a grand pop opus and her finest hour yet.

Rainford

Titanic Rising

Records of the Year 2019.

Top 100.

FMD

*

Forte Music Distribution OH SEES ‘Face Stabber’

NILS FRAHM ‘All Encores’

Castle Face 2LP/CD

SHANA CLEVELAND ‘Night of the Worm Moon’

Erased Tapes CD / 3x 12”

KANDODO 3 ‘k3’

SHARDS ‘Find Sound’

Rooster 2LP/CD

Erased Tapes LP/CD

PATIENCE ‘Dizzy Spells’

Hardly Art LP/CD

BLACKWATER HOLYLIGHT ‘Veils of Winter’ Riding Easy LP/CD

HEADLAND ‘What Rough Beast ’

Night School LP/CD

NOLAN POTTER’S NIGHTMARE BAND ‘Nightmare Forever’ Castle Face LP/CD

Agitated Records LP/CD

BIG STICK ‘ LP’

CFM ‘Soundtrack To An Empty Room’

SARAH DAVACHI ‘Pale Bloom’

Drag Racing Underground LP/2CD

In The Red LP/CD

2019’s music you can’t refuse

W25th LP/CD

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32.

31.

Alexander Tucker

Theon Cross

Thrill Jockey / 23 August

Gearbox Records / 15 February

Arriving one day less than a year from his previous outing, The Guild Of The Asbestos Weaver is the gorgeous eighth full-length solo studio release from Alexander Tucker, maverick pop genius and the other 50% of the most excellent Grumbling Fur. Five songs full of glimmering pop styling, all mask a much more mysterious and radically psychedelic underbelly. It all grows out of hypnotic drones across a multitude of instruments, influences in both traditional music and science fiction. Some of the bowed strings (most prevalent on Montag) have the kind of warm and bucolic terror that feels in someway linked with the sort of undefinable Britishness of The Wicker Man. Primal and quite chilling. There is a lot of folk to this album; lyrically it is one to be carefully deciphered, with words and lines that resonate like fragments of dreams. For all of the weird strings and thuds, there is also a deliciously antiquated tech element to the album.

Closing track Cryonic scampers to life and the interplay between electronic pulses and twanging guttural strings is quietly euphoric. Mysterious and illusory in style and substance, it’s one to really get lost in.

If you ever wanted a record version of onomatopoeia, then here it is - Theon Cross’s exhilarating debut LP Fyah.

It is honestly flaming throughout, from the rippling and roaring first beats of Activate to the smouldering detours through free jazz, dub, hip-hop, soca and other sounds from the Afro-Caribbean diaspora. Cross will be known to you as the tuba man in the award-winning Sons Of Kemet, and Fyah is his opportunity to lead the line with his own distinct voice in London’s golden jazz generation scene.

He’s joined often by Nubya Garcia and Moses Boyd, with Wayne Francis of the famed Steam Down improv nights also part of the guest roll call, alongside Artie Zaitz on electric guitar and Cross’s brother Nathaniel on trombone. The tuba is such a revelation here, a low rumble throughout that gives Fyah such a rich sonic balance and accentuates the connection between the players.

Whether in low-slung grooves or Carnival-flavoured pumpers, the band flow as one and their technicality is a marvel. As with Kemet, the content and inspiration is rich and diverse (including Candace of Meroe, an ancient queen of the Ethiopian/Sudanese region), an album of super-confident free thought and vivid imagery.

28.

27.

The Guild Of The Asbestos Weaver

Fyah

Aldous Harding

Rozi Plain

4AD / 26 April

Memphis Industries / 5 April

Part way through the video for The Barrel, the excellent lead single and very welcome return from Aldous Harding, she smiles wryly at the camera. Whether a simple gesture or a misunderstood look, it felt like the austere sheen of 2017’s immaculate Party album had perhaps been cracked. It would be easy to misunderstand much of this delicious third album, no matter how hard you look (especially with lines like “I’m not gettin’ wet. Looks like a date is set. Show the ferret to the egg”) but the take away from this formidable set of songs is that Aldous Harding is giving more of herself. It eludes easy classification, she is a fine singer and a gifted songwriter, but the gestures are so microscopic it’s one you have to enjoy from afar or you can get turned inside-out by the subtleties and surrealism. The title track, for example, starts and ends with the saddest and most genuinely affecting little finger-picked motif, whereas the rest of its four minutes is a sort of bossa nova sunshine pop. Beautifully warm, the production is an absolute revelation with swooping mellotrons, synths, strings and brass making a heartbreaking marriage to one of the finest voices currently recording. An absolutely bewitching album.

As a Sea Change 2019 performer and releasing this fine album as a Dinked Exclusive, we were always going to have a great deal of interest in Rozi Plain this year, and her excellent fourth studio album What a Boost has been a regular companion. It was self-produced with the help of a long list of musical friends - including Kate Stables, Jamie Whitby Coles, Neil Smith (all of This is the Kit), Chris Cohen, Joel Wästberg ( a.k.a. sir Was) and Sam Amidon - at the Total Refreshment Centre, a cherished space of the London jazz scene.

The vibes that ran rich through that building clearly had an impact on Plain, and there are more than a few occasions where her intricate, folk-inflected songs have a conspicuous jazz presence. Not too dissimilar, in fact, to the timbres that progressively flowed into the late Talk Talk albums. The only everpresent element is Plain’s vocal, smooth and calming, with the tiniest buzz of distortion as the vocals overlap one another. Plain’s trust in her co-conspirators is evident and although there are some really quite experimental sections, it all sits together beautifully at a languorous pace, with its own mood and hazy charm.

Designer

Top 100.

What a Boost

Records of the Year 2019.

30.

29.

Shannon Lay

Mega Bog

Sub Pop / 23 August

Paradise of Bachelors / 28 June

Knowing that Shannon Lay is part of garage-punk band Feels and a touring player in Ty Segall’s Freedom Band, you could be forgiven for expecting something with a little throttle on her Sub Pop album debut. August, however, is plaintively simple and structured almost entirely around Lay’s finger picked nylon strings and voice that rarely raises much beyond a hushed whisper. Released in August, the album of the same name commemorates the two year anniversary of leaving a job and putting all her faith into her work, totally nerve wracking, anxiety driving, and entirely vindicated, as she’s not stopped since and this beautiful record is a wonderful milestone and testament to that faith. Recorded at Ty Segall’s home studio, it starts with perhaps the album’s fullest moments in Death Up Close - with a spooky haze broken only by Mikal Cronin’s fluttering saxophone lines - and Nowhere - with woozing organs and multiple vocals purring back and forward.

Otherwise, Lay’s vocal is placed front and centre, often accompanied only by her own guitar, a beautiful simplicity that draws you in and leaves you hanging on every word. Beautifully unassuming, an immaculate collection of short, sunny but heart-heavy folk songs.

Erin Elizabeth Birgy released her fifth album under the guise of the intriguingly ambiguous moniker Mega Bog, and it has some of our favourite 2019 trips. Her idiosyncratic delivery is the height of frivolity, clearly the conductor and auteur here, but full of a carefree breeze that makes this utterly unique album an off-kilter joy. It positively bubbles throughout, with sections of sci-fi pop and homespun psychedelia playing against tropicalia and a sort of Lynchian lounge-jazz. In lesser hands it could have been gimmicky, or worse, flat out annoying, but Birgy is just the most captivating muse, and flirts with styles and timbres with remarkably confident experimentalism. It features guest contributions from Meg Duffy (aka Hand Habits) and Big Thief’s James Krivchenia, who also recorded and mixed the album.

Inspired by the myth that when humans evolved from sea creatures some remained behind to live dolphinlike below the sea, Dolphine acts as an imagined name for this hybrid civilisation. Whether this is metaphor or not it is hard to tell, but not one part of this album feels throwaway or superfluous. Deliciously peculiar, Mega Bog has crafted a beautifully weird and intricate web.

26.

25.

August

Dolphine

Sunn O)))

Pip Blom

Southern Lord / 26 April / 25th October

Heavenly Recordings / 31 May

Sunn O))) - formed around the duo of Greg Anderson and Stephen O’Malley - returned after a four year absence with two new studio albums, recorded back to back with Steve Albini, a man whose ability to make very loud records is fabled. He captures the pair here with perfect detail, two albums that clock in at just under two hours with some of the heaviest drones committed to record. The process in which they did so is actually pretty fascinating. The vinyl is produced as a “AAA” album, recorded and mixed on tape via a completely analogue production, from the input of the band’s amplifiers and the air coming off the speakers in front of the microphones to the needle touching the pressed vinyl on your turntable. The method is important, but both albums are dense and compelling listens irrespective of this, quite life-affirming experiences. Life Metal acts as the darker of the two, focusing on the spaces between notes with rays of decay and feedback. Pyroclasts, while still intense, has breaks in the riffs which offer up little beams of light like sun cracking through curtains. Icelandic composer Hildur Guðnadóttir is a marvellous addition on a journey through so many emotions and the shades connecting them.

Boat is the glimmering full debut from Dutch quartet Pip Blom. They are all in their early 20s and exude the sort of brisk carefree confidence that can only come from a band so young and inspired. But that is not to say they are naïve; there is a brilliant selfassurance to the songs, and the sonic styling cues are just impeccable, with a jangle to the guitars and just the right amount of bite in the fuzz. Boat is a joyous reimagining of 90s indie guitar rock with big riffs and huge choruses, it has enough about it to be familiar whilst offering up some great little swerves. They are inescapably melodic throughout, and all the biggest moments are so authentic that you can imagine them beaming with pleasure as they recorded them. Pip is very much the central figure and she writes in a disarmingly direct fashion, autobiographical, candid, and with self-aware empathy. There is no posturing, they are full of exuberance, and they have recorded a brilliantly catchy set of songs whilst also capturing that energy that makes them such a special band live.

Life Metal / Pyroclasts

Boat

Records of the Year 2019.

Top 100.

24.

23.

Jenny Hval

Daniel Thorne

Sacred Bones / 13 September

Erased Tapes / 15 March

Eight tracks of gorgeous, meditative electronic music with washes of arpeggiated synths and gently lifting beats. Between moments of new age minimalism and a glittering pop take on mid-90s trance, Jenny Hval is an enthralling centre point. There has always been an unworldly element to Hval’s music - neither etherial nor alien, just running on a different parallel - but on The Practice of Love she sounds the most immediate and, well, human that she ever has. Her vocal presence runs throughout like a half-awake narrator, it’s very much like you’re conversing with someone’s inner consciousness. Hval’s delivery is a mixture of semispoken vocals with fragile folk-pop layers, and whereas on some of her more recent albums it has carried a dark and foreboding weight, here it is full of hazy smoothness and her presence is hallucinatory and at times almost subliminal. The combinations of guest vocals from Vivian Wang, Laura Jean Englert and Félicia Atkinson all add different narrative timbres, especially when layered to discombobulating effect.

An album of such grace and intellectual weight, and above all, a stellar electro-pop album with production that gives you something new on every listen.

The debut solo album from Australian-born, Liverpoolbased composer and saxophonist Daniel Thorne.

Powerful and totally cosmic music, it explores the utter magnitude of natural events from great scale, like the fast flowing river reduced to just a line from a birds-eye view or ultimately how the birth or death of a planet might sound. Some sections are warm and full of euphoric grandeur, whereas other parts have a dystopian cinematic quality; it’s a testament to the multitude of ways that the saxophone has been used sonically here. The album opener - From Inside, Looking Out - is as impressive a start to any album this year, with its fast, dense layering of noises playing like Philip Glass at his most frenetic. The real mastery on this stunning album though is Thorne’s deep feeling for restraint and knowing when to hold back.

His technical ability allows him to play with incredible dexterity and to explosive effect throughout, but his arrangements - indebted in no small part to his work as leader of the remarkable Immix Ensemble - give space and time for his long wistful notes and other timbres.

It is full of other-worldly beauty, and every gesture feels both deeply considered and gloriously organic.

22.

21.

The Practice of Love

Lines of Sight

Thom Yorke

Nérija

XL Recordings / 19 July

Domino / 2 August

ANIMA is the gloriously ambitious return of Thom Yorke following last year’s Suspiria soundtrack. ANIMA is again a soundtrack, but in this album form it is the accompanying music for the “one-reeler” short film that Yorke made in partnership with filmmaker Paul Thomas Anderson for Netflix. The abstract and dialogueless short is visually stunning, examining dystopian metaphors and isolation. Musically this message is loud and clear, tense songs weighed down heavily by neurosis and anxiety. The production - with longtime collaborator Nigel Godrich - is truly masterful. It takes the songs’ electronic origins and expands them with some beautiful ambience and sonic cues that link to the film, with digital chirps and swells of voices and reverbs. The writing is marvellous too: Dawn Chorus, right in the middle of the album, might be one of the most captivating songs he has ever written - either solo or as part of the Radiohead day job - a five minute drone with minimal synth lines acting as a bed for his hushed delivery, rarely stumbling past a spoken word. Tense and often maudlin, it’s not always an easy listen, but the shadow it casts is deeply alluring and stays with you long after the music stops.

A wide-reaching debut LP from Nérija - the septet of Nubya Garcia (tenor saxophone), Sheila Maurice-Grey (trumpet), Cassie Kinoshi (alto saxophone), Rosie Turton (trombone), Shirley Tetteh (guitar), Lizy Exell (drums) and Rio Kai (bass). A band with the firmest foundations and musical understanding, the collective have known each other since they were teens, attending the free weekend jazz workshop Tomorrow’s Warriors. All the performances were recorded live (impeccably so by producer Kwes) with little in the way of overdubs or post-production, it feels vital and it feels like you are part of one continuous session. There is no fighting for the spotlight, the album is so spacious you can hear everyone at all times, and the subtle moving around to highlight specific timbres and solos is again credit to the telepathic understanding between the players. This is a broad and swaggering presentation of modern jazz that touches on influences from soul, Nigerian afrobeat, Ghanaian high-life and even grungy post-rock without ever sounding too directly like any one thing. London-based, the lineage feels less world-wandering and more soaked in the capital city’s long-lived and ever fluid jazz scene. Gloriously paced, it’s experimental, searching and brimming over with energy.

ANIMA

Blume

THE GLOAMING THE GLOAMING 3 Real World

STEVE EARLE & THE DUKES GUY New West

MIKE PATTON & JEAN-CLAUDE VANNIER CORPSE FLOWER Ipecac

KYLE DIXON & MICHAEL STEIN STRANGER THINGS 3 Invada

SUDAN ARCHIVES ATHENA Stones Throw

BONOBO FABRIC PRESENTS BONOBO Fabric

THOMAS WILLIAM HILL GRAINS OF SPACE Village Green

EMPTYSET BLOSSOMS Thrill Jockey

THE DIVINE COMEDY OFFICE POLITICS Divine Comedy

SPECIAL REQUEST OFF WORLD Houndstooth

THE BRAND NEW HEAVIES TBNH Acid Jazz

RACONTEURS HELP US STRANGER Third Man

www.pias.com/uk

20.

Gruff Rhys Pang!

Rough Trade Records / 13 September

Our September Record of the Month was the sixth solo LP from Gruff Rhys, catching up fast with his Super Furry Animals discography. Pang! developed unexpectedly over 18 months, a solo album in name only, with a global collective of musicians (including Welsh-American ex-Flaming Lip Kliph Scurlock on drums), all under the stewardship of South African electronic artist Muzi. The producer’s effect on the album is massive. The pair met while taking part in the most recent instalment of Damon Albarn’s Africa Express project. Muzi remixed Gruff’s first iteration of Bae Bae Bae, and he was so pleased with the result, that they agreed to work together on his latest set of ideas. Pang! is an album so totally full of life, a tropicalia-tinged set of pop songs entirely sung in

his native Welsh (save a couple of verses of Zulu).

Whereas his preceding Babelsberg album had been recorded as stripped-down tracks then lavishly layered with classical orchestration, the songs that form Pang! developed into a rich collage of grand electronic pop timbres, synths and beats, and some of Rhys’s most summery vibes. His unmistakable mumbling vocal ties everything together, charmingly unassuming, and even though in a language that most of us don’t understand, it is both wistful and rousing, optimistic and nostalgic. To express himself so eloquently in that way is totally unique. Plenty of warm pastoral psychedelia with a fresh step in the shimmering and inventive production; the kind of curious frequencies that will captivate anyone.

18.

Modern Nature How To Live

Bella Union / 23 August

Naming yourself after filmmaker Derek Jarman’s diaries is a pretty succinct way to articulate the sort of bucolic charms that surround this fine debut LP like an autumn mist. Modern Nature is a new project from Jack Cooper - formerly of Ultimate Painting and Mazes - and Will Young of BEAK>, with drumming from Aaron Neveu of Woods and the psychedelic saxophone of Sunwatchers’ Jeff Tobias. How To Live feels like various stages of sleep, with motifs repeating themselves like half-conscious thoughts and Cooper’s beautifully whispery vocals holding together all the changes of pace and tone. Recorded onto tape, it has a rich and unmistakable analogue wooze; the clicking drums are hypnotic when in full flight and play such a

Top 100.

grooving counterweight to the looping guitar jangles and organ drones. In motorik flow they have managed to capture the sort of restless spirit that made Neu! and Can so special, a feat that many have tried to achieve and few have come close to. How To Live is subtly experimental in that way, the tones and delivery often so pretty that it’s easy to miss how weirdly it’s all put together. There are field recordings and other tiny gestures throughout, the album ending on an ever-drifting organ loop and warmly hissing tape. The end is in fact the only part of the record that has a sense of finality to it, with each track feeling more like an evolving version of its processor than something wholly new. A beautiful and totally individual vibe.

Records of the Year 2019.

19.

Trash Kit Horizon

Upset The Rhythm / 5 July

Full of hot and hazy sounding riffs, if we kept track of such things, we wouldn’t mind betting that Horizon would be our most played album this year. Trash Kit are Rachel Aggs (guitar, vocals), Rachel Horwood (drums, vocals) and Gill Partington (bass). All three play in a multitude of other excellent bands, including Bas Jan, Sacred Paws, Shopping and Bamboo; but this is no day-job-side-project. Whereas the first two Trash Kit albums were full of explosive energy and killer hooks, this, their third, is fully realised as a grand statement from a band with a decade of creative symbiosis and musicality. The influences brought together here are gloriously ambitious, and the urgency and honesty of the melting pot makes for quite the heady vibe - post-punk with choral arrangements, piano, saxophone, harp, viola and

cello, pushing themselves further and beyond. Aggs’ guitar playing was informed by her love of guitar music from Zimbabwe and cyclical motifs billow with lean Mbira rhythms. Horwood has similarly approached her drumkit with an untamable freedom, allowing it to breathe as a vivid lead instrument; the interplay with the riffs is hypnotic. The pounding bass of Partington acts as the centre point, driving the songs forward with a primal beat. They have found such an arresting dynamic, exhilarating and rapturous, and although closely linked, not one song sounds the same. Dan Leavers (of Mercury nominees The Comet Is Coming) pops up on the saxophone, forceful but never over-present, giving a sun-baked haze to proceedings. Eleven tracks of sheer exuberance and confidence. A thrilling record.

17.

Cate Le Bon Reward

Mexican Summer / 24 May

For her fifth album, Welsh musician Cate Le Bon took the bold step of leaving the warm sunlight of Los Angeles to set up in isolation in remote Cumbria.

An album of bubbling art-pop was in fact low on the list of her priorities altogether; instead she embarked on a period of solitude, living alone and taking a course in carving wooden furniture. Reward is a work of some catharsis, the product of an artist turning up the interior volume and challenging herself with a blank canvas. Don’t think that this is one of those earthy “off in a wood cabin all stripped back” affairs though, this is as sonically rich as anything she has ever produced. Although she has always had the deft knack for idiosyncratic pop moments,

each song on Reward feels brilliantly structured, and it is unrelenting in its experimentalism, its hooks and its utterly addictive eccentricity. From a place of isolation she has taken decades of the most alternative sounds and reworked them into a totally modern kind of glam pop. She whispers and purrs in layers, the saxophones honk, the guitars whirl with pretty and confusing riffs, and not one moment is wasted. Each track has such a distinct feel, and combined it’s a hugely evocative album, like a long-lost Now Music compilation of the best outsider pop… “now that’s what I call a banging set of songs No.1”. This should have won the Mercury Prize, it’s totally brilliant throughout.

Records of the Year 2019.

Top 100.

16.

Oh Sees

Face Stabber Castle Face / 16 August

A double album that pulls in the widest sonic palette of influences yet from John Dwyer’s long-running psych-rock institution. The subtleties of all that they bring together is quite the marvel, especially as it all becomes so inescapably “oh sees-ish” when you pan back out. There is a post-Can-pre-Kraftwerk Germanic experimentalism, the organs scream like Suicide playing Hammer horror; there are disco beats, sleazy funked-out sections, gnarly no-wave… and the riffs across the record are best pinned to anyone from Television to T. Rex to Thin Lizzy. The middle point, Scutum & Scorpius, is a fifteen-minute prog jam that makes the most overly-stuffy genre in music history sound roaring fun, and the album closer, Henchlock, clocking in at twenty-one minutes, is nothing short

Top 100.

of a jazz odyssey. Even with all of the musical cues worn with pride like patches on a denim jacket, they avoid cliches and never settle into anyone else’s shadow; John Dwyer and his co-conspirators are totally unbounded, with limitless imagination. There is a lurking menace to the music again, and that fury drives the album along through what, in anyone else’s hands, could have felt like a good side of vinyl too long. One of the finest live bands we’ve ever seen, perhaps the quest and marker for success on any Oh Sees record will always be whether they have recorded a faithful version of the incredible spontaneity, musicianship and energy that they have live. One of their most nuanced sets of songs yet, we await whatever 2020 brings with huge excitement.

Records of the Year 2019.

APPARAT LP5

YANN TIERSEN Portrait

SWANS leaving meaning.

“A masterclass in electronic music” 8/10 The Line Of Best Fit

A collection of new analogue recreations of songs from throughout Yann Tiersen’s career

“Deep orchestration, post-rock echoes and techno-informed pop” Under The Radar

Guests include John Grant, Stephen O’Malley, Gruff Rhys and Blonde Redhead

New LP from Michael Gira’s SWANS Guests: The Necks, Baby Dee, Anna and Maria von Hausswolff, Ben Frost, and more...

MAPS Colours. Reflect.

Time. Loss.

ALESSANDRO CORTINI Volume Massimo

KÁRYYN The Quanta Series

“Epic… an instrumental masterpiece” 9/10 Exclaim!

“An essential album” Electronic Sound

“Gorgeous” NNNNN Buzz

“A masterclass in songwriting and performance” Treblezine

THE POP GROUP Y - THE DEFINITIVE EDITION

CABARET VOLTAIRE Chance Vs Causality

The essential & classic album Remastered at Abbey Road with half speed mastering

“Engrossing experimentation and genuinely haunting music” The Wire

“To call ‘Colours. Reflect. Time.

Loss.’ an epic album would be stating the obvious” Clash Magazine

Finely wrought, expansive soulscapes, forever forming, forever dissolving.

underworld drift series 1

metronomy metronomy forever

mac demarco here comes the cowboy

bear’s den so that you might hear me

iggy pop free

lucy rose no words left

sleater-kinney the centre won’t hold

clairo immunity

local natives violet street

best of 2019

The Amazons Future Dust

Kate Tempest The Book Of Traps And Lessons

Palace Life After

Self Esteem Compliments Please

Mini Mansions Guy Walks Into A Bar‌

Pumarosa Devastation

Best of 2019

Warp / 18 October

The joyous and explosive return of Battles with the tightly wound Juice B Crypts. A duo these days, they welcome some amazing collaborators onboard this time, including tUnE-yArDs and space hip-hoppers Shabazz Palaces, who change the flavours throughout.

Battles are one of the very few artists out there who can take a huge set of influences, inspirations and voices into the mixer and deliver something that really is more than a sum of its parts.

Gnarly, chopped-up and thrilling.

Heavenly Recordings / 18 October

Recorded over just 11 days in Los Angeles, Somebody’s Knocking is an album that brings Lanegan’s dependable authenticity to savvy electro pop with a swagger and a weighty gothic delivery. Such an addictive set of songs, they stay with you long after the album has finished. His desolate croon turns everything black, but richly dark, funny and with some of his most joyous moments in a strange way.

An exciting melding of crunching guitars and Depeche Mode-esque synth pop, it feels both current and weirdly out of its own time.

Juice B Crypts

Battles

Somebody’s Knocking

Mark Lanegan Band

- Clash Music

“ It would be hard to find an album to compete with theirs in regards of modernism or creativeness.”

Like the circular record or the compact disc, the year keeps on spinning round and round, so we have to draw the line somewhere.

Here are a dozen or so albums released “too late” for consideration in the top 100, but are very much part of our year.

Late in the day

Michael Kiwanuka returns with the (sort of) self-titled KIWANUKA. My word, it’s the best album he’s made by a mile and we really liked the other ones. His vocal is incredible, sensitive and vulnerable but so big, so proud and so smooth. Really looking forward to playing this a lot more, got a feeling he’s made a bit of an instant classic here that could well place him right up there with some of the icons that have inspired him.

Polydor Records / 25 October

KIWANUKA

Michael Kiwanuka

Sub Pop / 1 November

The triumphant re-emergence of Atlanta three-piece Omni with Networker, their first album in partnership with Sub Pop. Full of warm, angular riffs, it’s choppy post-punk that is less frenetic than their previous Multi-task LP, but equally searching. It’s underpinned by a metronomic beat throughout, which gives so much opportunity for wandering riffs, along with some pretty wild dips and turns. Channels all sorts of CBGB alumni without getting too close to anything specific; it’s more about the vibe.

We really, really like this band.

Bonnie “Prince” Billy always keeps busy - recently covering his own songs alongside those of Susanna Wallumrod, the Mekons and Merle Haggard, also collaborating to dreamy effect with Bitchin Bajas - but I Have Made a Place is his first set of original BPB songs since Wolfroy Goes To Town back in 2011. Guest appearances from Nathan Salsburg, Joan Shelley and drummer Mike Hyman make for a deliciously full sound, but this album is all about Will Oldham’s voice, which is just spectacular.

- Pitchfork

The finest of 2019

Records of the Year

“Will Oldham’s first collection of new songs as Bonnie “Prince” Billy in several years focuses on simple pleasures and persistence.”

TOP 100

Networker

Domino / 15 November

I Have Made a Place

Omni

Bonnie “Prince” Billy The Berlin-based cellist and composer Anne Müller - a regular collaborator with Nils Frahm and Agnes Obel, amongst many others - releases her long-awaited debut solo album Heliopause. A highly personal work, it was recorded, arranged and produced entirely

by Müller. It’s named after the point at the edge of our solar system where solar wind from our own system is in balance with the interstellar wind from outside it.

Exquisitely other-worldly whilst still sounding earthly and humanly crafted, a really beautiful set.

Erased Tapes / 22 November

Heliopause

Anne Müller

Danny Brown is one of our most favourite voices in the hip-hop landscape, full of manic exuberance that creates an adrenaline-fuelled bop of squawks and yowls. His fifth studio LP is an absolute stunner, executively produced by iconic rapper and producer Q-Tip - of A Tribe Called Quest - it’s the culmination of a decade’s work that has brought huge plaudits in both the underground and mainstream. It transcends genres and further elaborates the Detroit rapper’s ability to evolve whilst referencing the past and sounding totally like himself. The best rap record this year by a country mile.

Ahead Of Our Time / 22 November

Uknowhatimsayin¿

Danny Brown

Up On High is the seventh studio LP from Vetiver, a reflective and shimmering album of laid-back growers. Written in an immediate, stripped-down way and slowly added to, they have kept it all pretty simple and it’s really lush for it, jangling guitars that recall R.E.M or Feelies and a calm but committed vocal throughout. Whether it was written on one, or intended for one, Up On High joins a slim area of shelf space that can tonic that Sunday morning hangover with truly revitalising effect.

Loose Music / 1 November

Up On High

Vetiver

- The Observer

“Brown’s storytelling is as witty as ever, with pungent bars that pop like pimples, spattering tracks with quotable filth. His best work by a distance.”

- Mojo

“His most complete artistic statement to date.”

William Doyle (previously Mercurynominated as the most amazing East India Youth) releases his first album in four years with Your Wilderness Revisited, his first work under his own name. Featuring guest appearances from Brian Eno, Jonathan Meades and Laura Misch, it is markedly different, bare sounds of honesty. Whereas EIY felt tightly wound, this new work is expansive and free-flowing; Doyle is a rare and captivating central point. Plenty of melancholy in these smart and brilliantly weird pop songs.

William Doyle / 1 November

Your Wilderness Revisited

William Doyle

Swans / (C) Jennifer Gira.

Written and produced by Michael Gira, the album features contributions from recent and former Swans, members of Angels of Light, as well as Anna and Maria von Hausswolff, Ben Frost, The Necks, Baby Dee and Jennifer Gira.

Stripped back, naked, audacious and a pretty heartbreaking impression of modern America with a delectably unhurried structure and beautiful builds… as ever, Swans still get absolutely monolithic in size. On limited plays, this already feels like a pretty special album.

Mute / 25 October

leaving meaning.

Swans

One of the most extraordinary voices in contemporary music returns with his new outfit The Voltage for the euphoric and highly addictive Bad Wiring. His delivery remains rabid, essays crammed into verses, covering an ever more poignant range of topics and observations with an encyclopaedic set of pop and alt culture references. Dogs Of My Neighborhood - speaking as someone who questions dogs in general - is an absolute peach of a track, and album centrepoint LPs could be his finest moment yet.

Immediate, charming and perhaps the best delivery to date from one of the very most singular voices.

Moshi Moshi / 15 November

Bad Wiring

Jeffrey Lewis & The Voltage Matador / 25 October

A huge return with the 11th and 12th instalments of the longrunning Desert Sessions under the direction of Josh Homme (Queens of the Stone Age). This double edition features collaborations from Billy Gibbons (ZZ Top), Les Claypool (Primus), Stella Mozgawa (Warpaint), Jake Shears (Scissor Sisters), Mike Kerr (Royal Blood), Matt Sweeney (Chavez), Matt Berry and more. Highly charismatic, and successfully keeps the air of rambunctious reverie, whilst actually pushing quite disparate artists to really deliver on new work.

The Livelong Day is the third fulllength release from the Irish folk quartet Lankum, and it’s a bloody riot. It approaches folk like no other record in ages, with long drones and some unbelievably dark colours.

Whereas other bands have held the folk “rules” with a stuffy reverence, Lankum seem determined to use them merely as a starting point.

They have the reputation of being one of the most unique and talkedabout groups to emerge from Ireland in decades, and this quite brilliant LP is testament to that.

The finest of 2019

Records of the Year

TOP 100

Vols. 11 & 12

Rough Trade Records / 25 October

Desert Sessions

The Livelong Day

Lankum

The self-titled debut LP from Melbourne’s U-Bahn, an album of bonkers synth-wave that affirms them as one of the most buzzy new bands around. A vivid collage of glam-pop and new wave, they chop up the energy of the B-52s, Dead Kennedys and most directly Devo, whilst sounding arrestingly new and really exciting. A wild stage show live, they’ve captured that snarly energy on record, and it’s rare these days you can delight in a new band so genuinely original.

Melodic / 13 December

U - Bahn

U - Bahn

Athena, Sudan Archives.

Athena is the striking debut album from violinist, singer, songwriter and producer Sudan Archives.

The ever-present violin - inspired

by North-east African fiddling and West African rhythms - makes for a fascinating timbre as part of the anthemic R&B stylings, a brilliantly weird counterweight to the digital pops and clicks. Her vocals, like a confident slow purr, are not too dissimilar from Solange or FKA Twigs - she’s a really arresting central character. Highly recommended.

Stones Throw / 1 November

Athena

Sudan Archives

- The Observer

“Ultimately, all are visions, alternately haunted and comforting. Subtle evolutions in mood and instrumentation come to peaks that are made all the more stunning by their scarcity.”

35 years into his career, Nick Cave releases his 17th album, Ghosteen, a double album meditating on life, tribulations and ultimately survival… it’s complex stuff. It continues the sonic departure from the band’s former more fierce and brittle sound, that started with 2016’s Skeleton Tree. Ghosteen is ethereal; Cave is vocally rich, truly at ease with delivering melodies that are as straightforward and sweet as anything they have ever recorded. He leads this fine album with his voice; that directness is often overwhelming.

Ghosteen Ltd / 8 November

Ghosteen

Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds

After a period of extreme emotional and physical recovery, MAGDALENE marks the return of FKA twigs, one of the most complex and avant garde artists working in the mainstream.

She described the creative process as putting everything into the mix, onto the wall, and slowly chipping away at it like the great sculptures. To that end, it’s an album sculpted from chamber pop, glimmering RnB, opera and grinding, mechanical production.

It is the work of an artist knowing that every single microscopic aspect is part of the greater composition. Quite remarkable vision, and utterly dazzling.

Young Turks / 8th November

MAGDALENE

FKA twigs

M A G D A L E N E , FKA twigs.

The finest of 2019

Records of the Year

TOP 100

- The Independent

“The follow-up to 2014’s LP1 is the sound of a woman teetering on the brink of collapse, gathering herself, and then erupting into a kind of defiance.”

WORKING MEN’S CLUB

SQUID

VANISHING TWIN

FIELD MUSIC

SHIRLEY COLLINS

TIM BURGESS

Sea Change Festival

Let Us Face the Future

Sea Change returns for its fifth edition, a full weekend on the idyllic Dartington Hall Estate. Always intimate, always different, always special, always rare. ‘Let Us Face the Future’ as we invite more of the finest thinkers, speakers and players to the countryside.

www.seachangefestival.co.uk

PLUS MORE ARTIST ANNOUNCEMENTS IN JANUARY...

RICHARD NORRIS (DJ)

AWESOME TAPES FROM AFRICA (DJ)

KEEL HER

PORRIDGE RADIO

KATY J PEARSON

DRY CLEANING

Utterly essential compilation celebrating the fourth year of output from London’s Speedy Wunderground studio/label. Eight tracks, each more essential than the last, featuring 2019 breakouts Black Country, New Road and Black Midi, the thrilling Tiña, Treeboy & Arc, Scottibrains, and both Sinead O’Brien and Squid who might well end up being two of the biggest things around in 2020. They truly have their fingers on all the best pulses, and their fourth has been another ground-breaking set.

Speedy Wunderground / 6 December

Various Artists

Speedy Wunderground: Year 4

Compiled by Mikey Young (of punk band Total Control) and Keith Abrahamsson (founder of the Anthology label), Sad About the Times is an alluring set of little-known tracks from the 70s, North American jams with plenty of West Coast jangle. It’s curated to weigh heavy with the shadows of 60s psychedelic flashbacks; high-flying idealism had run its course and singer songwriters were ascendant. Folk and psych rock cuts that are radio-friendly gold but somehow missed their window, long-lost gems reframed. to have had him come and play it here for us, he made that church sound quite extraordinary.

Anthology Recordings / 17 May

Various Artists

Sad About the Times

Curated by DEEP LEARNING (Richard Pike of PVT), the Salmon Universe label is one to watch.

This first compilation is a beautiful statement of intent through a 14 artist odyssey, including exploratory ambient electronica from the UK, Japan, Australia, and Canada.

Presenting an eclectic mix of artists, including: India Jordan, Luke Abbott, Haji K. (aka Nico Niquo), Crosspolar, Percival Pembroke and Kenji Kihara, there is a really lush flow to this, carefully curated common threads.

Salmon Universe / 31 May

Various Artists

Salmon Universe Vol. 1

We love a good curated listen, and this year’s set of compilations has given us some fascinating paths to follow in dub, jazz, gospel, minimalism and the sweaty South London confines of Speedy Wunderground.

Compilations

Another excellent year from Soul Jazz Records, with deftly compiled releases covering funk, soul, reggae and early electronic. In January they released Studio One Black Man’s Pride 3, the third instalment of the series covering Rastafarian music at Studio One, with cuts from The Gladiators, Horace Andy, Freddie McGregor, Sugar Minott and the Wailing Souls. April was a jump across our way with the first expose of the Fashion Records label, one of the most important and iconic independent reggae labels to come out of the UK (Style and Fashion). In June they focused on Brazil USA 70, the recordings of Brazilian artists like Airto Moreira, Flora Purim & Sergio Mendes working in the USA for the first time after the South American boom.

Also in June, the label looked at the iconic artist Keith Haring and his cultural impact (The World of

Soul Jazz Records / 2019

Various Artists

Soul Jazz Presents…

The second edition of Luaka Bop’s World Spirituality Classics series (following the stunning The Ecstatic Music of Alice Coltrane Turiyasangitananda album, our 2017 compilation of the year). Compiled by gospel guru Greg Belson, the tracks are a subset of 1970s-era gospel, soulful, passionate, and urgent songs from obscure 45s, lovingly rescued from attics and sheds across the American south.

Without the context of the liner notes, it doesn’t necessarily feel like a set of “gospel rarities”; each track is focused on how we live with ourselves and each other, but bringing in references from funk, soul and even proto-disco. An arresting set, full of euphoria.

Luaka Bop / 13 September

The finest of 2019

Records of the Year

TOP 100

Keith Haring), via the musical work of Haring’s close friends including Jean-Michel Basquiat, Yoko Ono, Larry Levan, John Sex and George Condo (The Girls), as well as healthy doses of rare disco, early electro and New York punk/dance tracks. September was a dive into the Studio One vaults for the DJ Party collection, covering seminal Jamaican artists like Prince Jazzbo, Michigan and Smiley, Dillinger, Dennis Alcapone and Lone Ranger.

October’s Congo Revolution focuses on the explosion of music that came out of the Congo in the years leading up to independence in 1960 - Congolese rumba, a wild combination of African, Jazz and Latin influences. Each release is compiled with a passionate authority, Soul Jazz always dig deep.

Various Artists

The Time for Peace Is Now

- Pitchfork

“Luaka Bop’s collection of ’70s rhythmic gospel rarities doesn’t feel like gospel in the traditional sense.

These working musicians were deeply entwined with the funky, soulful sounds of their time.”

A compilation in varying sizes (first appearing in 2002 as The Bootleg Series Vol. 5) to accompany Martin Scorsese’s new documentary that captures the 1975 tour in all its ragged glory. Bob Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue flouted the touring conventions of the time by featuring an eclectic cast of characters and playing small and unusual venues with little advance notice. The shows would often stretch to more than four hours long, generating some of the artist’s most dramatic and dynamic on-stage performances ever. Some extraordinary performances of some of his most iconic work.

The documentary is excellent too, especially for the scene where Joni Mitchell plays Coyote live at Gordon Lightfoot’s house, thrilling.

Columbia / 7 June

Bob Dylan

Rolling Thunder Revue: The 1975 Live Recordings

- The Guardian

“This is an immersive experience, like being plunged back into the 70s. There is passion there.

No matter how chaotic or bleary things get, no one is in any doubt that the music counts.”

- Pitchfork

“This compilation of extra smooth, funky, and sometimes very odd songs from the hey dey of Japan’s technological boom is a broad yet nuanced introduction to the genre of city pop.”

Pacific Breeze.

Tony Higgins and Mike Peden once again pick choice sections from their own record collections as BBE take another deep dive into the Japanese jazz scene and 25 years of musical progression and invention.

An intoxicating and beguiling range of styles: from cinematic roaring big-band (Little G by Nobuo Hara) and sparse minimal acoustic funk (Teru-Teru Bozo by Teru Sakamoto), to deep spiritual modal epics (Dragon Dance by Makoto Terashita and Harold Land) and funk fusion (Mother of the Future

by Electro Keyboard Orchestra).

One of two releases this year from Light in the Attic as part of the ongoing Japan Archival Series, picking up from 2017’s essential Even a Tree Can Shed Tears.

Pacific Breeze is an expertly compiled collection of choice cuts that range from silky smooth grooves to innovative techno pop bangers, and everything in between - the soundtrack to a country experiencing fast growth and a period of affluence. Longrevered by crate diggers and adventurous music heads, much of this music has never previously been released outside Japan.

The finest of 2019

Records of the Year

TOP 100

BBE / 6th September

Various Artists

Light In The Attic / 3 May

Various Artists

J Jazz Volume 2: Deep Modern Jazz From Japan 1969 – 1983

Pacific Breeze: Japanese City Pop, AOR & Boogie 1976-1986 As they move towards their 40th anniversary, On-U Sound bring back the seminal Pay It All Back series that first debuted in 1984. Volume seven is an 18-track showcase of new Adrian Sherwood productions featuring previews of several forthcoming releases, unique mixes, deep cuts, and unreleased tracks from Roots Manuva, Lee “Scratch” Perry, Coldcut, Gary Lucas (Captain Beefheart’s Magic Band), Mark Stewart, Horace Andy and more.

Stitched together with a number of special pirate radio style segueways, it plays like a unique journey through the modern world of On-U Sound.

On-U Sound / 29 March

Various Artists

Pay It All Back Volume 7

Strut continues its essential compilation series of Indian Ocean sounds with Alefa Madagascar, first ever compilation documenting the heyday of Malagasy music during the 1970s and 1980s.

Collecting little known dance and folk music from the island during this period, its 18 tracks travel from the Madagascan dance genre of salegy and soul to folk and political rallying cries. A record full of hot euphoria, it Includes sleeve notes by legendary producer Charles Maurin Poty and writer Banning Eyre.

Strut / 6 September

Various Artists

Alefa Madagascar Salegy, Soukous & Soul 1974 - 1984

Soundtrack to the collaborative film between Mexican Summer and the New York-based surf and outdoor brand Pilgrim Surf and Supply. The album follows Allah Las, Connan Mockasin, Andrew VanWyngarden (MGMT) and Peaking Lights across Mexico, Iceland and the Maldives with professional surfers, whilst Dungen and Jefre Cantu-Ledesma provide additional original material for the journey. As the opening credits state, the surfing was done in real time… the music was created in response, and they have created a really coherent mood set, with a sense of movement and loads of transient vibes.

Mexican Summer / 14 June

Various Artists

Self Discovery For Social Survival

’

“All Encores demands to be heard in its entirety; this is no companion piece, but a thoughtful progression all its own.” - Loud and Quiet

Collecting all three of Nils Frahm’s limited Encores EPs together, three distinct works that complement last year’s groundbreaking All Melody album. Encores 1 focuses on an acoustic palette of sounds, with solo piano and harmonium at the core. Encores 2 explores more ambient landscapes, and Encores 3 sees Nils expand on the percussive and electronic elements in his work. All three modes show a different side to his composition and production skills; thrilling to see which aspects he follows and incorporates in his next work.

Erased Tapes / 18 October

All Encores

Nils Frahm

Our compilation of the year for 2019 is Kankyo Ongaku: Japanese Ambient, Environmental & New Age Music 1980-1990, one of this or any year’s most beautiful headspaces. Under Light in the Attic’s Japan Archival Series banner, Kankyo Ongaku is an unprecedented overview of the country’s vital minimal, ambient, avant-garde, and New Age music, the literal translation being “environmental music”. Curated by Spencer Doran of the band Visible Cloaks, the collection looks at the stream of Japanese music born out of a growing interest in new computer and synthesiser technology. It’s noted that it was in part conceived as a reaction to a craze for the piano music of Erik Satie, following a series of concerts that took place in 1975.

Equally inspired by John Cage and later Brian Eno, Kankyo Ongaku shares that same serenity of the figures that inspired it. Whereas

Light in the Attic / 15 February

Various Artists

Kankyō Ongaku: Japanese Ambient, Environmental & New Age Music 1980-1990

The finest of 2019

Records of the Year

TOP 100

early ambient music had been very much about analogue factors and with soft blurred edges, on Kankyo Ongaku the sounds are meticulously designed, with crisp, clean edges. It’s an interesting parallel to the rise of prominence of the compact disc in Japan and the desire for supreme high fidelity. Whatever format and in whatever environment you make time to listen to these beautiful songs, they remain as quietly profound and mysterious as when they were created.

The finest of 2019

Compilation of the Year

“An appealingly cohesive compilation of Japanese ambient music that, while decades old, feels uncannily suited to contemporary listening habits.” - Pitchfork

More expanded reissues from the formidable Stereolab archives this year, with reappraised editions of 1993’s Transient Random-Noise Bursts with Announcements, 1994’s Mars Audiac Quintet, 2001’s SoundDust and 2004’s Margerine Eclipse.

Each album has been remastered from the original 1/2” tapes and includes alternate takes, 4-track demos and unreleased mixes.

Across their entire catalogue (these four albums included), Stereolab always wore their influences on their sleeves - the chug and motorik drive of Neu! and Can, the buzzing drones of Suicide and Bauhaus, the light and dark shades of The Velvet Underground, the bleeps and

A 40th anniversary edition of The Pop Group’s seminal, Dennis Bovellproduced debut album, Y. Indicated as one of (#35) Pitchfork’s most important albums of the 1970s, and one of Wire Magazine’s 100 Most Important Records Ever Made, Y is totally radical and totally avantgarde, a meeting of funk, dub and free jazz. It sounds like it could all fall to pieces at any moment, but the propulsive energy keeps it moving ever forward. Quite chilling but utterly captivating, this anniversary edition has been remastered from the original tapes and cut half speed at Abbey Road.

It sounds like you’re in the room with them, terrifying and vital.

Y (Remastered) The Pop Group.

Warp / Duophonic UHF Disks

Mute / 1 November

x 4 Albums

Stereolab

Y [Remastered]

The Pop Group

crunches of the BBC Radiophonic workshop and Lætitia Sadier’s vocals drenched in 60s bubblegum pop and French yé-yé - and whilst barely ever altering their formula, they always sounded inventive, fresh and unmistakably like Stereolab. One of our most favourite bands celebrated in fine fettle, excited to think of what 2020 might have in store.

It’s a purple patch for reissues, each week we’re seeing seminal records re-pressed and back on wax. We’ve picked out a set of releases that really stopped us in our tracks and made us feel something, not always for the first time.

Reissues

The cult album you should be playing to your plants. In the accompanying booklet to this 1976 experimental Moog LP, it was claimed that its intended audience wasn’t human, Mother Earth’s Plantasia was actually created for its “warm Earth music” to be played to plants “to aid in their growing”. We have no idea why, but it wasn’t widely released, only sold instead at the Mother Earth Plant Boutique in Los Angeles and, more bizarrely, with the purchase of a Simmons mattress from Sears. Garson is an equally fascinating figure, co-writing Ruby and the Romantics’s Our Day Will Come (later covered by James Brown and Amy Winehouse amongst others), arranging for artists like Glen Campbell, and film and TV composition to include soundtracking the US broadcast of the Apollo 11… A pretty big gig! A beautifully weird record of botanical experimentalism from a man who should have a much bigger credit in the history of Moog music. Very lush indeed.

Sacred Bones / 21 June

Mother Earth’s Plantasia

Mort Garson

Mort Garson.

The finest of 2019

Records of the Year

TOP 100

- Caleb Braaten, founder of Sacred Bones

“There’s something about it that is immediately nostalgic.

It takes you to this warm place in the past. It’s tickling those same senses as something from your childhood. I think people who didn’t even grow up with that stuff also feel that same warm sensation of… I don’t know.

It’s very interesting.”

Akiko Yano’s landmark debut album from 1976. Recorded with no less than Little Feat as the backing band on one side and the cream of Japanese musicians on the other (including Haruomi Hosono and Tatsuo Hayashi), Yano was just 21 years old, and the record made her an overnight sensation. Released for the first time outside Japan - and about time, as it’s undoubtedly one of the most important Japanese albums of the 70s and one we’ve had a lot of fun spending time with this year. Led by her her inimitable voice, it’s positively bubbling with off-kilter pop bangers.

Wewantsounds / 29 March

Japanese Girl

Akiko Yano

Thousand Knives Of, Ryuichi Sakamoto.

Sakamoto’s debut solo album, this was originally released in 1978 on the sought-after Better Days label, and has often been out of print since. Although a member of the famed Yellow Magic Orchestra, Thousand Knives Of predates the YMO debut and was Sakamoto’s first appearance on record, himself playing a wide range of synthesisers and keyboards programmed by Hideki Matsutake. Much like Akiko Yano, save for a small-scale release in 1982, this is the first time the album has been released on vinyl outside of Japan. Very much the blueprint for the YMO sound, it has been remastered from the original tapes and sounds absolutely fantastic.

Three years on from Prince’s untimely death, a set of carefully curated projects to release work from his famed Paisley Park vaults are slowly seeing the light of day.

He’ll always be remembered as the chart-topping icon and genrebreaking revolutionary, yet for all the time he spent in the spotlight over his four decade-long career, he worked equally tirelessly behind the scenes to write songs for the rising artists he respected. Originals is a set of highly polished demo songs that he gave to other performers, the earliest iterations of some utterly huge pop songs. Nimbly shifting between up-tempo songs and ballads, seems dumb to even say it, but he was a hell of a songwriter.

Japanese Girl, Akiko Yano.

Wewantsounds / 8 November

Warner / 21 June

Thousand Knives Of

Ryuichi Sakamoto

Originals

Prince Back in June, Rhino released a limited edition 40th anniversary version of Unknown Pleasures almost 40 years to the day after its original release on the iconic Factory Records label. You could be pretty cynical and point out that the record has largely been available throughout the last four decades on any and all formats this anniversary one boasting an anniversary inverted colour artwork and red 180g vinyl pressing, admittedly - but it was a poignant couple of days hearing it played in full on daytime radio and pumping loudly in record shops, its austere bleakness sounding so relevant in this year’s muddiest political climate. Sleeve colour aside, it remains the blackest of all magic.

Rhino / 14 June

Unknown Pleasures (40th Anniversary Edition)

Joy Division

The long awaited and hugely overdue re-press of James Holden’s incredible 2006 debut LP, The Idiots are Winning. It’s a master class in delightfully wonky and restlessly glitchy minimal techno, that has influenced many and seldom been equalled as a work of brilliantly human sounding electronic music.

Often regarded for his production skills, this is a testament to his ability to absolutely destroy the club scene too, with music for body and mind. A lush-looking splattered vinyl edition that we have been playing loud and often… It is after all a rallying cry, as the idiots are still winning.

In 1964, the National Film Board of Canada asked John Coltrane to record the soundtrack for a French-language film titled Le chat dans le sac (“The Cat in the Bag”).

Amazingly, no announcement was made that the iconic Coltrane was adding new performances to this film.

Coltrane’s ‘Classic Quartet’ - McCoy Tyner, Jimmy Garrison and Elvin Jones - entered Rudy Van Gelder’s studio and captured five previously recorded Coltrane originals. For many years, viewers of the film - those who recognised the music - naturally thought they were listening to the originals instead of the specially rerecorded set. Blue World presents these newly discovered recordings for the first time, Coltrane and band at their most cohesive.

50th Anniversary pressing of Abbey Road with a new stereo mix by Giles Martin, plus two discs of alternate takes and extras that get deep into the creative process of the band, who would have seemed to have not only been in cohesive and harmonious form, but also working hard to achieve what they could hear in their heads. The remixed album has loads of tiny new gestures for those who know it well, and the restorative work is really excellent the album sounds just as fresh as it did on the day it was recorded.

Apple / 27 September

Abbey Road: 50th Anniversary Edition

Beatles

The finest of 2019

Records of the Year

TOP 100

Border Community / 11 October

Impulse! / 27 September

The Idiots are Winning

James Holden

Blue World

John Coltrane

- Rolling Stone

“In these 23 outtakes and demos, you hear a band in the zone, knowing exactly what they want to do, working hard to finesse the details, even the ones only they’ll notice.”

Edition, Beatles.

Abbey Road: 50th Anniversary

seamless blend of American music with the richest tapestry of timbres and, most importantly, a brilliant set of songs. The guitars jangle and strut, the rhythm section are as adept with pastoral country as they are funk and soul, the backing singers swell and float around Clark - who sounds vocally effervescent - and track for track, it has the sort of indescribable vibe that makes a classic album glow. A damn shame that it took 45 years for everyone to come around, but the good ones always remain the good ones, and revisiting this one reaffirms Clark’s belief. A beautiful edition full of notes, photographs and musical addendums that highlight just what an incredible record it is, certainly one that should never have been forgotten for so long.

- New York Times

“Hindsight has burnished No Other, as it has redeemed other albums that went on to be reconstructed as rock repertory, like Big Star’s Third/Sister Lovers and Lou Reed’s Berlin”

Our 2019 reissue of the year is the long overdue appraisal of Gene Clark’s 1974 masterpiece No Other.

Released on the eve of what would have been American singersongwriter and Byrds founding member Gene Clark’s 75th birthday, this version has been remastered from the original tapes, and the results are spectacular. Originally released on Asylum Records - a year after the Byrds’ short-lived reunion - Clark put his everything into actualising the grandeur he could hear, an album of psychedelic rock, folk, country and soul. It famously cost a small fortune to make and although warmly received by critics, it flopped and was soon deleted, a failure that Clark never came to terms with. He rightly considered it his masterwork, a

4AD / 8 November

No Other

Gene Clark

Gene Clark 1974, (c) John Dietrich.

The finest of 2019

Reissue of the Year

The finest of 2019

Records of the Year

TOP 100Â

Gene Clark (c) John Dietrich, From The Collection of Whin Oppice.

Dinked. Independent but stronger together.

A collective of like-minded shops working in collaboration to bring you bespoke, unique and collectable new editions.

In 2019, we are delighted to have released exclusive editions from: You Tell Me, TOY, Homeshake, Snapped Ankles, Rozi Plain, Flamingods, W. H. Lung, Kevin Morby, Sebadoh, Black Mountain, Black Peaches, Cate Le Bon, Jesca Hoop, BABii, Tycho, B Boys, Blanck Mass, Kindness, Here Lies Man, Tropical Fuck Storm, Moon Duo, Comet Gain, Allah Las, Warmduscher, Portico Quartet, Mikal Cronin, Fenella, Dry Cleaning and Jeffrey Lewis & The Voltage. We’ve also announced our first Archive Edition with The Low Anthem’s Oh My God, Charlie Darwin and the first 2020 releases scheduled from Smoke Fairies, Squirrel Flower and Algiers.

www.dinkededition.co.uk

2019 RELEASES

JULIA JACKLIN CRUSHING

KOKOKO! FONGOLA

FOALS EVERYTHING NOT SAVED WILL BE LOST PART 1

TWO DOOR CINEMA CLUB FALSE ALARM

SONGHOY BLUES MEET ME IN THE CITY

FOALS EVERYTHING NOT SAVED WILL BE LOST PART 2

JULIEN CHANG JULES

MARIKA HACKMAN ANY HUMAN FRIEND

JOHNNY FLYYN BEEN LISTENING REISSUEE

BLAENAVON EVERYTHING THAT MAKES YOU HAPPY

FLUME HI THIS IS FLUME MIXTAPEE

JOHNNY FLYNN A LARUM REISSUEE

RECORDS, PUBLISHING & MANAGEMENT

TOP 100

Records of the Year The finest of 2019

Top 15

The numbers go down, the word count goes up.

The last fifteen albums on our 2019 top 100 list.

The most played and the most raved about.

15.

School of Language 45

Memphis Industries / 26 July

The Brewis brothers of Field Music are national treasures. Whilst on a brief hiatus from the day job, David Brewis took a busman’s holiday and created his third LP under the School of Language moniker with the poignant and slick 45, a concept album about the dubious rise in politics, the capricious behaviour while in office and the motley cast of co-conspirators of Donald Trump, the forty-fifth president of the USA. It’s so brutally funny, “Nobody’s bigger or better at the military, Nobody’s done so much for equality”, being just a couple of the things that 45 knows better than anyone else, on one of the album’s early highlights, Nobody Knows. So long as you can ignore the terrifying underbelly that these are all things said by this preposterous man, listing them all is in itself ludicrous to the point of hysteria, but Brewis’ use of enunciation for a high-funk punchline is pretty incredible. Protest music so often becomes preachy, dogmatic and just, well, boring, but on this shimmering album Brewis has used a new set of tools to craft something highly charged with stylistic influences from James Brown and Sly and the Family Stone.

He lets the satire do the talking rather than barking directives. Musically it bristles with energy, rich and warm while full of short, sharp staccato struts. It takes the Midas touch to pull off something that on paper sounds like a bad idea incarnate, but he’s done it here with flair and charm.

Top 100.

Records of the Year 2019.

14.

Cool Maritime Sharing Waves

Leaving Records / 15 February

Sharing Waves is the second release from LA-based producer and multi-instrumentalist Sean Hellfritsch under the moniker Cool Maritime.

Although the album was technically first released as a micro-pressing in June 2018, it received its full release back this year on Leaving Records, and we just can’t not tell you about it. Sharing Waves has a central theme of the duality between the electronic and the natural - this beautiful album was recorded in remote outdoor locations on his “lunchbox” studio (a synthesiser in a suitcase). The songs were composed in the wild with a scientific mode of recording the panoramic landscapes, notations charting his observations and processing them into looping electronic imitations as part of the suites. It’s all layered into a cacophony, and the tracks slowly emerge from the observational impressions. The twinkling pulses and long, steady rolling swells sound beautifully organic and pristine; glassy droplets of sound patter in entirely natural sounding patterns. Sharing Waves’ journey through seven distinct soundscapes is a beautiful headspace, a reflective and peaceful time away from the hectic outside world. The expansive environments and fully-realized worlds are there to be explored and get lost in, a gently discombobulating experience of entirely electronic compositions that sound so living and so green. This is subtle music, so go meet it halfway. Shed some baggage and let the waves flow around you and over you and genuinely take you somewhere.

Records of the Year 2019.

Top 100.

13.

Ibibio Sound Machine Doko Mien

Merge / 22 March

The third LP from the London based afro-funk futurists, led by the inimitable Eno Williams. Doko Mien largely sticks to the same sonic explosion of funk and retro electro-pop as the 2014 self-titled debut and 2017’s Uyai, but it is the “electro” aspect that has gradually settled lower in the mix. Toned down are the hyperactive laser beams that previously shot through the traditional and percussive rhythms. Doko Mien is a fuller album; there is less of a fight through the cacophony, and the electronic flashes add more of a soft phasing wash to the background. Although ISM has always been very much about London-born, Nigerian-bred vocalist Eno Williams at the forefront, this new album is the band at their most focused and most balanced; she is the central point, gliding between glittering power diva, sultry R&B singer and when required, feral banshee.

Throughout, she is a natural and glorious ring-leader. Stylistically the band still draws heavily on New York new wave and disco with Ghanaian highlife and Nigerian folk culture, but the eight-piece outfit really has locked in their own trademark sound with a unique groove that takes them from electro-punk, African polyrhythms and shimmering R&B, to the lowtempo soul where Williams purrs to great effect. Hugely impressive that her voice cuts through the dense instrumentation; that said, the band throws everything into the mix, and creates euphoria without clutter.

Top 15.

Records of the Year 2019.

12.

Will Burns and Hannah Peel Chalk Hill Blue

Rivertones / 22 March

Hannah Peel, the musician and composer, and Will Burns, the Faber New Poet, join forces for an exploration into the electronic landscapes and natural timbres of England. One of our finest synth standard-bearers, Peel’s analogue soundscapes move from a quiet burr to an intense and rousing drive that recalls the sonic exploration of Delia Derbyshire or Daphne Oram. The subtlety of her soundscapes is utterly captivating and gives a distinct and quiet spiritual identity of its own to the third part of this record, the abstract landscape. Aside from the rich and antiquated beats - at times quietly hypnotic, at times foreboding - the instrumentation is beautifully measured, with long soft piano keys or strings, and incredible emotional weight. Burns’s poetry is deeply personal, a stream of consciousness and memory that is quietly intense and beautifully open. The frailties of human and nature, the mundane, decay and - we think - above all else, love. A few frenzied moments aside - the album’s centre point, Change, for example, carries perhaps the record’s most intense moments of introspection - it is an album of minute shifts and incredible moving atmospheres. Deftly fused by producer Erland Cooper, Chalk Hill Blue (the name of an iridescent blue-grey butterfly which lives on chalk heaths) is a truly majestic piece, a collaboration where two artists bring entirely different elements to the fore and create something that is wholly new and totally special. A sonic coalescence that provides some of this year’s most genuinely moving moments.

Records of the Year 2019.

Top 15.

11.

Kevin Morby Oh My God

Dead Oceans / 26 April

Oh My God is a slow-building masterpiece, a double concept album on modern day spirituality and religion that really gets right to the core of you, well, it got to the core of us anyway. For his fifth solo LP, Kevin Morby has created a contemporary gospel, songs full of searching that use some of the traditional - with repeated phrases and delivery in call and response but remain light throughout; an air of tired early-morning optimism is always present. The instrumentation is for the best part fairly primitive, but dynamic shifts from contemplative ballads to heavenly rousers with soaring choirs are empowering, feeling really loose and all hung on Morby’s addictively laconic drawl. He has such a distinctive voice, and even the pacing of the delivery feels entirely Morby-ish, whilst he channels the same sort of immutable energy as Bob Dylan’s gospel phase or New Skin for the Old Ceremony era Leonard Cohen. “It’s not a born-again thing,” he explains in the liner notes, “it’s more that ‘Oh My God’ is such a profound statement we all use multiple times a day and means so many different things. It’s not about an actual God but a perceived one.” Those repeated phrases are fascinating, it gives the album a sort of loop where themes keep bubbling up to the surface. A spiritual album, the sort of record that you know you’re going to start all over again before it’s even reached its conclusion.

Top 15.

Records of the Year 2019.

10.

The Comet Is Coming

Trust In The Lifeforce Of The Deep Mystery Impulse! Records / 15 March

The Comet Is Coming, and the many projects and artists that are part of their collective reach, are in no small part responsible for the remarkable resurgence of interest in jazz. Their 2016 debut Channel the Spirits received a Mercury-nomination, and the subsequent years have seen the three players - reeds man “King Shabaka” Hutchings, synth player Dan “Danalogue” Leavers and drummer Max “Betamax” Hallett - bring wild live creativity and production energy to artists like Sons Of Kemet, Flamingods, Snapped Ankles, Melt Yourself Down, Ibibio Sound Machine and Rozi Plain. Trust In The Lifeforce Of The Deep Mystery is an absolute odyssey of an album, nine tracks that incorporate gestures and timbres from almost any jazz styling, also bringing in punk-rock, drones, electronic pulses, funk and grime with such authority. Leavers and Hallett provide a remarkable rhythm section, their creative partnership offers a telepathic understanding of not only what they’re doing, but where they’re going.

They create ever-morphing textures and beats that drive the album on through the sections of ambience, and especially when the band kicks into exhilarating

Top 15.

hyperdrive and delivers some of the year’s most enthralling bangers at breakneck speed. The dynamic offers space and time for Hutchings to take centre stage and deliver tones on the sax - and briefly bass clarinet - that are truly lyrical and utterly inspiring. The smoky Ethiopian-styled grooves that bookend the album are as poignant as some of the full-lunged screams in the middle that sound like nothing short of the arrival of the apocalypse. Aside from the sax, the only other voice is the guest appearance of Kate Tempest on Blood of the Past, a hugely successful partnership that further articulates the album’s core message, excoriating how society is not only tearing the world apart, but ripping itself in two. They share some understood colours of jazz here, but there is no homage, this is a remarkable album of thrilling creativity, forward-looking in its unity.

“…pulsating electronic music that draws from the spontaneity and invention of free jazz” - Uncut

Records of the Year 2019.

9.

Ty Segall First Taste

Drag City / 2 August

“First Taste is a record exploding with ideas and interesting twists.”

- Q Magazine One of the early reviews pinned First Taste as our garage king Ty’s 12th “solo studio album”, which seems like a preposterous thing to even try and count to be honest, especially as during the process of compiling this magazine he announced and released a four LP box set of demos and outtakes. Side projects, collaborations and demos aside, there will always be more. The multi-instrumentalist and singer-songwriter delivers First Taste with a fascinating self-imposed ban on the guitars, quite radical to say the least when he is synonymous with the thrashing Californian garage scene. That’s not to say that without knowing this and on first listen you’d necessarily notice, a Japanese koto or a Greek bouzouki can still make one hell of a din if you beat the shit out of them like the tried and trusted Les Paul or Jaguar. The change of instrumentation has really brought some fascinating

production to the forefront, the keys play a big part in delivering all sorts of tones, and the double-tracked drums from Segall and frequent collaborator Charles Moothart sound absolutely huge and totally primal. He also finds genuinely exciting alternative resonances to keep the weird levels pumping - the chorus of manic and discordant schoolyard recorders that brings Whatever to a gloriously unruly close is one of the album’s many peculiar joys. Production wise, First Taste is doubtless one of his most inventive sets of songs to dates, richly psychedelic and totally unafraid to experiment into some brilliantly weird corners.

Some of the big vocal moments - especially Ice Plant and When I Met My Parents Pt. 3 - have more than a little bad-trip Beatles about their layers, rich choruses of voices that are deliciously spooky. Lone Cowboys is a glorious end track. A sort of lo-fi Stairway to Heaven start that gets ever more frenzied across its perfect four and a half minutes. The prolific garage rocker proves again that he is a mercurial and highly inventive producer able to channel his indulgences into a focused and hugely enjoyable album.

Records of the Year 2019.

Top 15.

8.

black midi Schlagenheim

Rough Trade Records / 21 June

“Schlagenheim is the first act of a band that teeters on brilliance - a restless, nerve-wracking high wire act that could easily fall off at any moment”. - Pitchfork One of this year’s most exciting musical directions is that a young London four-piece making profoundly difficult and genuinely unclassifiable music were picked up, Mercury nominated and listened to far and wide. The year’s most talked-about debut confirmed pretty much only one thing, that black midi are making music like no other band in the world. As much as it is a frenetic amalgamation of ideas and influences, Schlagenheim is testament to the precocious and fearless youthful exuberance of its creators. It chops and changes throughout, and although they had all eyes on them, they seemingly carried on much as they do on stage; it’s as if the audience is a byproduct of the frenetic energy that exists between them. The band’s feet are most rooted in a deranged

take on noise rock, a jacked-up mode of the sort of sonic experimentalism that emanated from West Germany in the late 60s. There are elements of free jazz in there too, anarchic sections that break down the pace, further accentuating the flow of the rest of the album where the ideas really click into place.

Some of the tracks have a disarmingly catchy melody under the clunks and squealing guitars. The frenzied guitars and the wide-eyed stare of Geordie Greep’s vocals are truly powerful because they are locked in place by Morgan Simpson’s quite extraordinary drumming. A human metronome, he allows everything else sonic to oscillate wildly as he pounds, thumps and skitters at the very centre of everything they do. The other factor on record is the utterly perfect pairing with producer Dan Carey, a set of hands and ears seemingly connected to everything important and vital around. Although what they are doing is extreme, each sound is beautifully captured, and that clarity makes for a kaleidoscope rather than a cacophony.

A fiercely unique record that is in fitting lineage to The Pop Group’s seminal Y debut, 40 years later and equally disruptive. A legitimate one of a kind album.

One Little Indian Records

Test Dept Disturbance

SHHE SHHE

Henrik Lindstrand Nattresan

AVA Waves

Gabríel Ólafs Absent Minded

Tusks Avalanche

Bad Breeding Exiled

Manu Delago Circadian

Crass Penis Envy

7.

Wand

Laughing Matter Drag City / 19 April

The L.A. based Wand return with their fifth LP - the fifth in five years - a 15-song double album that takes them ever further away from the crackling psych-rock suburbs to become one of America’s most expansive and underrated bands. Since forming in 2013, Wand have gone through an explosive metamorphosis as orbiting members of the garage scene (playing as part of both Ty Segall and Mikal Cronin’s bands, even releasing on Segall’s GOD? label), developing into a five piece and offering more air and space in their compositions, whilst more drastically shifting the onus of the song-writing from Cory Hanson to more of a sonic democracy. The gestures they started to make on 2017’s excellent Plum are fully realised here, they have stripped everything back, the warping fuzz and distortion are no longer at the forefront, but rather as tones to add layers of texture and sound. The interplay between the keys and guitars is really evocative stuff, strikingly pretty music and songs given as much time as is necessary to unwrap. The biggest impact in turning down the gnarl is the emphasis it has placed on Hanson’s vocals, full of a vulnerable melancholy

Top 15.

reminiscent of a young Thom Yorke. Across the hour plus of Laughing Matter‘s running time, there are sections that are exercises in rewarded patience; the late album appearance of Airplane has the sort of slow growing builds that only Yo La Tengo have previously made so captivating. Airplane is also fascinating because Sofia Arreguin takes lead vocals, an entirely different voice but totally in keeping with the rest of the album. An incredibly thoughtful record from a band who might not even be through the metamorphosis they started, and in that way Laughing Matter is a weird sonical sibling of Talk Talk’s seminal Laughing Stock. It has the same quality of creating a hugely emotional character that is the sum of its whole rather than just its parts.

“As they pare away at their sound, Wand move further away from psychrock and closer to true psychedelia.”

- Pitchfork

Records of the Year 2019.

6.

Angel Olsen All Mirrors

Jagjaguwar / 4 October

With Angel Olsen’s album All Mirrors, lightning has struck for the fourth time, another totally different and totally consuming record from one of the most captivating and progressive artists around. Her 2012 debut Half Way Home was lo-fi and immediate, and 2014’s Burn Your Fire for No Witness further developed her voice and ability to deliver emotional intensity.

2016’s My Woman was sheer big time, a swaggering pop record with more charm than bravado, and a skill to wrap the emotional potency in radio-friendly nuggets.

The fourth full-length studio release from the North Carolina-based singer-songwriter is nothing short of revelatory. Some of the biggest emotions committed to record in this year, or any year to date. Initially working almost alone in remote Anacortes, Washington, she focused on the simplest possible delivery to give space and time to the weight of what and why she was articulating. Working with frequent collaborator Ben Babbitt and virtuoso composer Jherek Bischoff, the songs on All Mirrors blossomed into 11 utterly

breathtaking pieces, with an augmenting 12-piece string section and producer John Congleton’s seismic sonic gestures. The orchestrations on All Mirrors are phenomenal, reaching the same drunk lofty heights as Phil Spector (the boom to the drum is particularly reminiscent) and the intense discordance of Scott Walker’s compositions. The instrumentation brings out a different facet of each song: on the album’s opener Lark she sounds utterly majestic, on Tonight she’s hardly able to get the words out under the strain as the rich strings carry her forward, breathy whispers that slowly drown into high drama, it’s utterly heartbreaking.

The other sonic space is a sort of analogue-synthdrenched-retro-futuristic sound - the album’s formidable title track has more than a little of the Gary Numan about it. The two contrasting styles work in beautiful balance, it’s a searing album and her finest yet. The grandest gestures with heartfelt sentiments, everything here is intense and totally overwhelming.

These timeless songs really stay with you.

Records of the Year 2019.

Top 15.

5.

Vanishing Twin

The Age of Immunology Fire Records / 7 June

Vanishing Twin are a fascinating line-up. Led by the elegantly stoic vocals of Brussels-bred, London-based musician Cathy Lucas, she has assembled a widereaching unit to include Japanese bassist Susumu Mukai (aka electro-funk producer Zongamin), Italian drummer Valentina Magaletti (whose credits include Bat for Lashes and Gruff Rhys’s Neon Neon project), former Broadcast sound manipulator Phil M.F.U. (a.k.a. Man From Uranus), and Parisian avant-garde filmmaker Elliott Arndt on flute and percussion. In these frighteningly inward-looking times, it’s thrilling to find that these sonic experimentalists are as widespread in their geography… albeit all based in London, but you get what we mean. They have taken psychedelic traditions from around the globe and created a swirling masterpiece that also incorporates tropicalía and kosmische rock to highly evocative effect. In a year where Stereolab reformed to play live and reissued more of their seminal work, it’s a fascinating symmetry that a band has arrived very much flying their flag for this new audience, channeling the same otherworldly energy and peculiar charm. Not sure that we’ve ever comfortably compared a band to Stereolab before, but Vanishing Twin are more than worthy of that high

“Magician’s Success and the Can-does-The-Normal bleep of Backstroke could be missing soundtracks to some experimental Cold War animation.”

- Q Magazine praise. Effortlessly stylish throughout, there are slower paced sections, but not one moment where richly layered sounds aren’t utterly captivating. Magician’s Success has the sort of bubbling production that would sit beautifully in the middle of a Jean-Claude Vannier record, a beautiful breeze and a swooning slice of melancholic pop. Although indebted to decades of recorded music, with analogue bleeps and tape whirls, there is no sentimentalism or nostalgia here, the group’s unique alchemy gives the record a distinct character all its own. An absolute masterclass in ingenuity and fertile ideas, trying to decode what timbres are making up the rich sonic panorama is time in vain, as they all fade into a gorgeous haze. Eerie and instantly charming, it’s one of this year’s finest moods.

RUPERT’S BARE ESSENTIALS #2

DRIFT ALBUM OF THE YEAR

W. H. LUNG

TRASH KIT

‘INCIDENTAL MUSIC’ 2LP/CD (Melodic Records)

‘HORIZON’ LP/CD (Upset The Rhythm)

“Modern maximalist psychedelia at its best” 4/5 THE GUARDIAN

‘’The clean, glittery melodies of South African pop inform this post-punk trio’s expansive third” UNCUT ALBUM OF THE MONTH

SUNN O)))

SNAPPED ANKLES

‘LIFE METAL’ 2LP/CD (Southern Lord)

‘STUNNING LUXURY’ LP/CD (The Leaf Label)

‘’More mellifluous than menacing despite its formidable display of power’’ 9/10 UNCUT

“A danceable, destabilised stew of The Pop Group, Kraftwerk, Can and Liars” UNCUT “Sounds like Mark E Smith fronting a band of malfunctioning dial-up modems” LONG LIVE VINYL

GIA MARGARET

SARATHY KORWAR

‘THERE’S ALWAYS GLIMMER’ LP/CD (Dalliance)

‘MORE ARRIVING’ LP/CD (The Leaf Label)

‘’On the Mazzy Star / Sharon VE continuum, here’s another great place to linger’’ 4/5 MOJO

“Absolutely of the moment: a psychedelic, electronic, jazzy odyssey that deals with issues of racial identity. It’s fabulous” 4/5 THE GUARDIAN “Rare talent” 5/5 MOJO

VARIOUS ARTISTS

‘KANKYO ONGAKU: JAPANESE AMBIENT, ENVIRONMENTAL & NEW AGE MUSIC 1980-1990’ 3LP/2CD (Light In The Attic) “An utterly confounding yet lushly immersive listening experience” 9/10 LEAD REVIEW UNCUT

LAURENCE PIKE

WARMDUSCHER

‘TAINTED LUNCH’ LP/CD (The Leaf Label) “Exhilarating and irreverent” 9/10 UNCUT “Best band on the planet” MARC RILEY

VARIOUS ARTISTS

‘HOLY SPRING’ LP/CD (The Leaf Label) “A sumptuous, sonic world rich with spiritual under-tones” 4/5 MOJO “Celestial minimalism” 8/10 UNCUT

TIM HECKER

‘PACIFIC BREEZE: JAPANESE CITY POP, AOR & BOOGIE 1976-1986‘ 2LP/CD (Light In The Attic) ‘’A broad yet nuanced introduction to the genre of city pop” 8.0 PITCHFORK

JULIA KENT

‘ANOYO’ LP/CD (Kranky)

‘TEMPORAL’ LP/CD (The Leaf Label)

“One of today’s continued and top creators of elysian odysseys” 8.5 THE LINE OF BEST FIT

4/5 Contemporary Album of the Month THE GUARDIAN “This is music on a truly human scale, in terms of its inspiration, delivery and undeniable emotional punch” 4/5 MOJO

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4.

Big Thief

U.F.O.F. / Two Hands 4AD / 3 May / 11 October

The New York-based Big Thief returned this year in a new partnership with 4AD, releasing two quite unbelievable albums, celestial twins that display the full extent and vision of the band’s artistic grandeur. The first part, U.F.O.F., was recorded in rural western Washington at Bear Creek Studios with engineer Dom Monks, and producer Andrew Sarlo, who was also behind their previous albums. Epic landscapes cast their shadow on the album, full of rain drops on windows as Adrianne Lenker forces her way out of a strained whisper. There is a hypnotic intensity, pretty guitar loops that change emphasis entirely with the subtlest gesture. There is rarely a moment on U.F.O.F. that all four members aren’t playing, finding space for minor movements that in unison are beautifully balanced and articulate. Only a few days after completing the record they took to the sun beaten El Paso desert to tape the companion Two Hands album. The same band, the same tones, but a more earthy flipside to the mysterious and spooky U.F.O.F.; this time it feels very much like you are in the room with them. Two Hands has a different kind of intensity, less long-held introspection, it’s more outspoken with moments of the carefree in Forgotten Eyes and the epic thrashing payoff in Not that has

“Two Hands is Big Thief’s best to date, and undoubtedly one of the best of the year.”

- The Independent “A true masterpiece of folk music from a band working together at the highest level.” - Pitchfork taken an album and a half to finally erupt, voices breaking, drums falling over, distortion swelling like a black hole. It is astonishing. Listening to the albums back-to-back was the first time that we realised that we’re approaching the end of the decade, traditionally opportunity to take stock. These are tempestuous times and these two records might be the perfect one two to play out the decade, to chart where we are now and where we might be headed. Not one moment on these brilliant records is wasted, two different and perfect documents of a band in full creative flight.

3.

Bill Callahan

Shepherd in a Sheepskin Vest Drag City / 14 June

Bill Callahan is such a regularly played entity in these parts that a six year absence of new material hadn’t been as conspicuous as with other artists, in many ways he’s never been away. That said, the release of his 17th album as Bill Callahan or Smog - a 20 track double album no less - was a hugely welcome surprise.

Shepherd in a Sheepskin Vest is an album of pastoral domesticity, it’s a bit like expecting the odd letter from a friend to keep in touch, only to receive the manuscript for a novel, an expansive summary of the last six years and how your friend and our protagonist has changed. In short, we now find Bill happily married (and responsible for us looking up the definition of the word uxorious) and also father to a son. These big life moments informed the shape of the album, it is somewhere beyond the headspace of Apocalypse or Dream River, and a returning theme is to act more as an observer than trying to necessarily decode the themes and conflicts. On his impeccable three proceeding albums there were more resolutions song to song; here there are fewer questions asked (other than the biggest and most unanswerable), centring more on reflections of contentment. The tracks on Sheepskin Vest are often quite short, little vignettes that beam with a simple

“Its hour run time notwithstanding, few albums are this expansive. The acoustic arrangements and brushed drums expand its sense of the infinite, and Callahan disarms with humour and subtly shattering insight.”

- The Guardian prettiness. But it’s not all in soft focus with sunshine pouring through windows, he still has an inimitable turn of phrase that can take a pensive turn, that and devilishly funny in his low-key observations (“Like hotel curtains, we never really met”). The arrangements are beautifully simple, with some of his most countryinspired hues to date (including a cover of the Carter Family’s Lonesome Valley, sung in a duet with his wife Hanly as one of the closing highlights). His rich baritone throughout conveys the intricacy of each song, every moment sounds delicious. Callahan truly has no equal as a storyteller, from the seemingly inconsequential to the very inexplicable, a perfect album.

No. 2 W. H. Lung

Incidental Music Melodic / 5 April

Our April Record of the Month was the incandescent debut album from Manchester’s W. H. Lung. It was a release we’d been waiting for with bated ears since welcoming the band to Devon as part of the second Sea Change Festival back in 2017.

The cataclysmic vigour they brought to our ballroom that night has only grown in the time since, not bigger, but more intense, more controlled, and with their first full release it is perfectly formed. What a gloriously contradictory title it is too, there is not one moment incidental about this album, it is full of considered and carefully orchestrated rises for a journey of euphoric highs. As debuts go, this one is hugely assured. There are cues to Manchester’s musical lineage (from New Order to The Stone Roses), but they’ve avoided paying homage to those cherished catalogues and gone about delivering eight insistent songs with motorik beats, marching synthesisers and some very smart writing.

There are some shared tones which do contribute to the instant sense of familiarity with W. H. Lung: the stark air around the basslines and drum beats - on Inspiration! and Nothing Is - feel spiritually indebted to Martin Hannett, and the huge album opener Simpatico People has the sort of grandeur to the guitars that is more in line with The Cult’s She Sells

No.2

“Rarely has a band justified the attention put upon them so beautifully.” - Q Magazine Sanctuary than anything currently about. Another element placing them directly in the modern age is a fierce lyrical relevance to these songs, they feel politically charged without spelling out the clear views of their creators. “We got qualms with the rich, qualms with the ill, qualms with the poor”… it says a great deal about the political landscape right now, the brooding energy fanning the flames. Without ever appearing formulaic, the band have worked hard to develop their core dynamic strength, they understand fully the need to build and release tension. They control the pace perfectly, not one element overstays its welcome, always playing a clear part on driving the songs propulsively ever forward.

A formidable debut record of modern maximalism.

Record of the Year 2019.

“On this debut album they already sound fully formed, despite only having come together in 2016.”

- Uncut “Incidental Music is like a rollercoaster ride you want to get straight back on and do all over again.” - The Guardian W.H Lung at Seachange Festival 2019, (c) Aubrey Simpson.

Record of the Year 2019.

No.2

NEW ALBUM—OUT NOW

Record of the Year The finest of 2019

No. 1

Purple Mountains Purple Mountains Drag City / 12 July

Our 2019 Record of the Year is the phoenix-like return of David Berman with the absolutely incredible self-titled Purple Mountains, his perfect, final gift.

In May, a full decade after the Silver Jews auteur announced his retirement from music, Drag City mailed a set of 12”s in a box to us with All My Happiness is Gone, the reintroduction of David Berman, now as Purple Mountains. A rose by any other name would smell as sweet, heartbreakingly so, he was unmistakable in both his drawling delivery and his peculiar turn of phrase, overcomplicated and devilishly funny. The album followed in early July, and as we remarked at the time, “We’re pretty sure this is a very special album indeed.” It was, it is. Warmly supported

by Jeremy Earl, Jarvis Taveniere and Aaron Neveu of Woods, singer Anna St. Louis, Kyle Forester of Crystal Stills, John Andrews of Quilt and Silver Jews collaborator Chris Stroffolino, Purple Mountains sounds fantastic, gracious warm country-tinged ballads with pedal steel and weary harmonica, sentimental pop with phasing organs and raucous bar-room stomp-alongs. But that is just the delivery, and that is the mastery of Berman, as Purple Mountains is thematically unrelentingly sad and bleak. Although it all plays beautifully and his winking delivery is great fun, he is unflinching about loss of love and loss of family.

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In early August, less than a month after Purple Mountains debuted and just days before their first tour, David Berman died. The singer Jeffrey Lewis had become friends with Berman - even producing an absolutely incredible piece of art, depicting visual interpretations of Berman’s lifelong works and it was his eulogy that hit us hardest. “I told him that I think his album (Purple Mountains) is great, but that is like reading someone’s suicide note and telling them it has nice grammar”. It’s all there, and after losing Berman, each listen is harder and harder. “The dead know what they’re doing when they leave this world behind”. The first, last and only Purple Mountains album is perfect, ten brilliantly written songs full of a sweet surface sadness, a deliciously wry delivery, and so much heartbreak in the shadows that it took a remarkably brave and skilled person to write them. It is a masterpiece and perhaps the most fitting epitaph for David Berman.

“Sardonic Americana with the lyrics of the year” - The Guardian

Record of the Year 2019.

“A marvellous collection of heartbreak, grief, and bitterness. His careful writing has never sounded so exacting or direct.� - Pitchfork

No.1

Image: David Berman

Call me from Albemarle...

Posted August 12th, 2019 Drag City

You probably already know this, but on Wednesday morning, David Berman took his own life. He’s gone.

We have to keep reminding ourselves that it is real.

Then we’re reminded that is real. Then we wish it wasn’t real. It’s like a trapeze act, and we are the worst acrobats, fumbling these truths from swing to swing. Day after day...

Everybody says these things after a suicide – and this week, we know very specifically why they do.

For instance: five minutes ago, we were in tears. Five minutes before that, hope. Before that, rage. And now, nothing.

We hope that everyone who feels the same way, who has thoughts like the kind that led David to this, please stop what you’re doing and take them very seriously. Talk to someone about them. Stay with us. We count ourselves among those on both the speaking and listening ends of these conversations, and these feelings are not foreign to us. It can be okay. Very likely it WILL be okay. It was okay so many times before.

David Berman But also, in the very likely chance you are reading this on your phone, know that you are very, very likely already in possession of dozens (maybe even hundreds) of suicide prevention hotlines. These are the numbers of your family members, your close friends, and who knows, maybe even casual acquaintances. Whether they are aware of it or not, and whether you are aware of it or not, they are all waiting to hear from you. And possibly to be heard by you. If not, do you really need them in your fucking phone?

We don’t claim to know or understand anyone’s given set of circumstances, at times we don’t understand our own. But in a universal sense we believe that open dialogue may open perspectives and viewpoints and clear a path for emotional change and relief. If there is one thing David taught us, words = hope. And we hang onto his every word, even as he is no longer able to continue the conversation.

So perhaps when you make the call and talk to somebody, for even a few minutes, at the very least there’s a chance the spell will pass. One of the last times we spoke with David, as he was dealing with mundane but harrowing travel logistics, he called in a panic:

(panic) “Car trouble!

Not sure what to do!!!” (gravelly voice) “Did you call a tow truck?”

“Oh my GOD you sound AWFUL! Are you sick?”

“Yes, I have a little flu or something.

Did you call AAA?” (calmer) “Yeah, I called them, they said they’d be here soon.” (laughs) “Jesus, you really sound like shit!”

“So you’re good?”

“Yeah, I’m fine. Get some rest!” (laughs) And he was fine, for quite a while after that. So talk. Or text even! But give yourself the one option that always caused pause and reflection from even a literal genius like David: no-one really knows the outcome of any given situation, so what if it does indeed get better? At the very least, while considering this, the pleasure of the time we have together here may continue on its already too-finite path.

For David however, the struggle is done. His decadeslong fight against what he termed “treatment-

resistant” depression is over. We can tell you with authority, the problem wasn’t drugs -- he had made hard drugs a thing of his past for over a decade.

His problem wasn’t debt -- he knew his new work and tour looked to settle that. It wasn’t family estrangement -- he remained close with his wife, family and friends to the end. He was subject to pervasive, chronic, chemical depression, and fought it daily, as best as he was able.

Now, we miss David incalculably, like a phantom limb we keep willing to help us up. It’s not growing back, we will have to work around this for the rest of our time.

David was a such a brilliant citizen of the world – a contrarian, an anarchist, a cheerleader and a friend.

We delighted in sharing space with him. It was a comfort and a strength having traveled the years with him. He always gave us new ways to think about everything. Almost everything we can think has to do with stuff he said or did. His was a continuous flow of phenomenal ideas, both good and bad - and sometimes his most impossible ideas were the best ones. His moods of giddiness and despair, of loud and quiet. His stubbornness, his ungovernable nature - and then, suddenly, an ability to hear and perceive so deeply and compassionately what a person was communicating and feeling, with an empathy we didn’t even know possible. For all his demons, spending time in his company brought more joy and jokes and laughter than was literally imaginable.

David’s brilliant work, his songs, poems and cartoons, were disguised as entertainments. In fact, wherever those works were transmitted they engendered great responses of joy and comfort and a recognition of seismic empathy beyond words. In the long run this will perhaps be the most important part of what we all agreed so long ago that we were doing together.

It feels like there’s little more to say about David’s place in the world right now that he hasn’t already said himself. Some of his incredible turns of phrase seem to have been written for this awful moment. But know that they weren’t. They were written in lieu of this moment, to replace this moment, showing the world (and himself) that maybe he didn’t truly know what was going to happen next.

It’s some relief to think that his suffering is over. But we can’t help but wish he was still with us. Even though we won’t be hearing any more from him, we know in our bones that we’re gonna spend the rest of our lives thinking about these things anyway. It’s a major loss, we see your pain and share it, and support and grieve with all of you, however you see fit.

Our love, thoughts and prayers are with his wife, family and friends at this time. And with you.

Whatever you’re going through, a Samaritan will face it with you. They’re available 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. Call free on 116 123. You are not alone.