20. Majical Cloudz – Are You Alone? (2015)
Oscillating analog synth loops from Matthew Otto provide the live-wire ground for Devon Welsh’s one-of-a-kind vocals, at once formidable and inviting as he sings about the shifting fabric of relationships between lovers, between friends, and within ourselves. Power dynamics are excruciatingly and often jarringly real, but on Are You Alone? Majical Cloudz eschew shock and awe for push and pull, something more gradual and compelling. Car crashes, breakups, loneliness and the searing pain of separation and the self-doubt that can ensue, childhood traumas – wrapped in Devon’s arms, nothing ever feels wrong.
19. Run the Jewels – Run the Jewels 2 (2014)
Bombastic with a brilliant core, barking loud but scarcely masking their jugular bite, grungy and brawny but sinuous and smart behind the full-frontal assault, on Run the Jewels 2 the hypostatic union of Killer Mike and El-P achieved the nigh impossible: they bettered Run the Jewels, their awesome debut.
18. Danny Brown – Atrocity Exhibition (2016)
Culturedarm said: ‘On Atrocity Exhibition the most distinctive and offbeat voice in rap doubles down – and hard – on feelings of loneliness and paranoia, trapped in a cycle of wanton sex and addiction to cocaine. Featuring credits from Petite Noir, Kendrick Lamar, Ab-Soul, Earl Sweatshirt, and Kelela add brief moments of levity, buoyancy and braggadocio of a type not provided by the production, which is helmed by Paul White, incorporates Evian Christ, Black Milk, and The Alchemist, and abounds instead in jagged punk, loping ghettotech, and menacing shards of noise.
Brown often sounds like a buzzsaw, frenzied and up on his feet atop a hot floor, but he can switch in a second to something deeper and more combative. Sometimes, spitting even the darkest of rhymes with a lilting precision, he could even pass for the robotised future of meditation or self-help. Atrocity Exhibition more than dabbles in nihilism and yet – as he makes plain on ‘Lost’, with the line ‘Lost in the sauce but a nigga still dipping’, or on album closer ‘Hell for It’ – Danny Brown is writhing ferociously against the void.’
17. Julia Holter – Aviary (2018)
Culturedarm said: ‘Amid glittering and straining strings, crashing rolls of percussion, plucked bass and buzzing brass, a cacophony of sound, on ‘Turn the Light On’, the opening song from Aviary, Julia Holter is stranded again: beaming brightly from the lighthouse, transfixed by memory, enveloped in a love which may be more imagined than real. ‘In a high, vast, and empty distance’, Holter’s love light is a searing, ululating, reverberating supernova of the stars she would have her suitor eat. ‘Turn the Light On’ sets the tone for Aviary, an expandable enclosure with the lure of nature which for all its grandiosity and intimacy finds Holter at her most isolated. Its meditations are full of wariness as well as wonder, and its swirling rhapsodies speak of alarm, for even a love call is a call of alarm when it rises and falls suddenly and is keenly felt.
At eighty-nine minutes, the length of a double album, Aviary might seem daunting, but its songs seem to gallop by even when they unfold with a stately march. Pop hooks and full-frontal auditory assaults subsist alongside elegant baroques, still characterised by the hocketing technique where a single melody bounces between two instruments or voices compete and cohere in rapid call-and-response. Each track is full of interest, and joyous in the ways that they play with sound despite the sometimes remote and lovelorn themes. These days people feel easily oppressed by the attention implied by duration, or by acquaintance to cultural forms outside their usual milieus. In this sense the fact that Aviary draws its title from a line from an Etel Adnan short story, ‘I found myself in an aviary full of shrieking birds’, already serves as a barrier to entry: at best it’s something else to add to the reading list. But references no matter how erudite they might seem have always served as portals rather than hurdles on Julia Holter’s records, and likewise on Aviary. It takes no effort whatsoever to immerse yourself in this.
On ‘Chaitius’, whose soaring choral vocals mimic birdsong before progressing into something approaching new age, medieval strings and naif-like phonetics give way to synthetics and a spoken-word passage delivered in the manner of a self-help manual, with lyrics drawn from the Old Occitan troubadour poet Bernart de Ventadorn. ‘Voce Simul’ continues in the same vein, its automaton utterances over cool and sombre jazz eventually becoming tribalistic. Bagpipes sound like foghorns on ‘Everyday Is an Emergency’, before ominous keys and lyrics which once again function like sound poems figure the dim and circling pseudo-continuous. Some of these songs have long gestations, and ‘Another Dream’ with its jagged synths, spaciousness, and refrain ‘In the sweet melody I can see your face’, harks back to Holter’s earlier works Tragedy and Ekstasis.
‘I Shall Love 2’ is a piece of blistering, beautifully distilled pop, with propulsive percussion and vocal trills reminiscent of 60s girl groups, a Dantean interlude in the lines ‘Why do you squander? / Why do you hoard?’, and whooping and hollering as the song reaches its impassioned climax. ‘Underneath the Moon’ offers a slight change of pace with its ramshackle drumming, ‘Colligere’ is an ornate evocation of memory, as it slips its bonds or disintegrates, and ‘In Gardens’ Muteness’ is an aching, almost tearfully sad song about separation and incommunicability. ‘I Would Rather See’ is based on a fragment of Sappho’s poetry as translated by Anne Carson:
‘I would rather see her lovely step / and the motion of light on her face / than chariots of Lydians or ranks / of footsoldiers in arms’
fitting for an artist so concerned with faces in turn or in silhouette, seen only in the brisk blurred moment.
‘Les Jeux to You’ draws its inspiration from medieval memory games, slinkingly exquisite, its abundance of simple present forms forging an impression of intent which becomes wilfulness, swirling and heady. Quivering strings provide the panorama on ‘Words I Heard’, a sweeping song set in war time, present, ancient, or mythic. Droning bagpipes and strings, chomping bass and constant shakers sustain ‘I Shall Love 1’, a reprise figured as the first part, muttering, pleading, coupling, and dependent. And on the muted ceremonial close to Aviary, ‘Why Sad Song’ – based on a phonetic transcription of ‘Kyema Mimin’ by the Nepalese Buddhist nun Ani Choying Drolma and the jazz guitarist Steve Tibbetts – Holter inhabits a pensive mournfulness before shimmering out on the cymbal. Aviary is lush and exploratory, its sounds exulting in small triumphs, its moods and states lingering.’
16. SZA – Ctrl (2017)
Culturedarm said: ‘Bleeding at the borders of conventional and alternative R&B, with a sonic palette that incorporates elements of soul, jazz, trap, trip hop, disco, chillwave, indie and more, over laid-back guitars and languid, squelching, sometimes tropical beats, on Ctrl SZA takes centre stage. There is a huskiness to her voice which both claims and portends intimacy, which can alternate seamlessly with a snapping conversational high pitch; and yet at moments, usually unexpected, the husk opens and the construct gives as a sudden turn, a repetition, packed syllables or a particularly poetic line spur a vocal soar, ripe and vulnerable, as on album opener and standout track ‘Supermodel’, upon the realisation her adulterous ex was only ever a ‘temporary lover’, or amid the ascending synths of ‘Garden’ when she sings ‘I need your support’. Some of the percussion sounds ramshackle, half-formed, almost a warm-up, buttressing loosely and serving to highlight SZA’s voice, helping towards the album’s twin airs of casualness and immediacy. Sometimes the beat lags behind SZA, sometimes she lags behind the beat.
‘Prom’ juxtaposes the promise of the future, readily imagined and always almost tangible, with the gropings and limitations of sloppy romance and self-conscious youth. ‘The Weekend’ feels like the album’s emotional centre, even as SZA’s voice sounds flat, frayed, tired out. When the Azzaro pour Homme fragrance first came out in the late 70s, it advertised itself with the tagline ‘For men who love women who love men’; here on a perfumed and subtly intoxicating song about having to share, SZA inverts the formula, explaining ‘My man is my man, is your man, heard it’s her man too’, although she thinks she’s got things covered for the weekend, just about. Encapsulating the rest of Ctrl, the song is about asserting agency even where the options are imperfect and self-esteem far from its peak. On ‘Broken Clocks’ SZA struggles to free herself from a loop, as the daily grind and hard-won independence still teeter in the face of stale but comforting romance.
Ctrl itself is imperfect: Kendrick Lamar provides an awkward, energy-sapping verse on ‘Doves in the Wind’, and the second half of the record sags just a little before Isaiah Rashad swoops in on ‘Pretty Little Birds’ and ’20 Something’ provides an elegiac and forlorn guitar-strummed close, still tinged with a little perseverance and hope. But the atmosphere manages to cohere throughout, and it’s insatiable and encompassing, SZA both despondent and engaged, cozy and affectionate and aloof. It’s a bold statement about emotional fragility, late-night and swooning, anxious and frustrated, but patiently and determinedly and artistically wrought.’
15. How to Dress Well – Love Remains (2010)
Quietly, nervously, almost furtively, Love Remains set the tone for so much of the off-kilter and experimental music of the decade, hollowing out the once-familiar sounds of 80s and 90s R&B. Comparisons stretch from the cerebral electro-soul of James Blake, to the more bric-à-brac and outré approach of Oneohtrix Point Never, to early efforts from The Weeknd and Frank Ocean, to the dank cavernous Prince and Donna Summer covers on Mhysa’s fantasii. There are precursors too in the shapes of The Disintegration Loops by William Basinski and The Blue Notebooks by Max Richter, which quarried and hoarded and punctuated respectively old records and Franz Kafka notebooks. Yet however far such experiments stretch, what set Love Remains apart – as it helped birth the contentious genre of alternative, bedroom, or PBR&B – was its thick atmospherics, its tangible, pervasive, acute sense of pain and grief.
How To Dress Well’s debut album smothers a beautiful falsetto and slick R&B melodies underneath layers of thick reverb and disquieting percussion. Opening with a line by Julianne Moore from the Todd Haynes film Safe, its first five tracks sound like keening turned towards popular song. Tom Krell laments in turn strained relationships, a body and mind broken down, and the past irrevocable and lingering. ‘Suicide Dream 2’, the longest track on the album and one of its standouts, attains a stately sort of anguish, in the middle songs the tempo picks up and gets lost in dance, and after the exuberant release of ‘Decisions’, ‘Suicide Dream 1’ finds constancy in the coda. This is an intensely personal and deeply spiritual record, which dwells close to the ground and still ascends as crooked smoke.
14. Joanna Newsom – Divers (2015)
Culturedarm said: ‘While the referential bravura of ‘Sapokanikan’ shaped many interpretations of the album – allusions and quotations from the Lenape to John Purroy Mitchel, from Percy Bysshe Shelley to Vincent van Gogh, coming together in a tender waltz that relays the foundations of New York City even as we walk – the broader concerns of Divers are universal, meditations on time and space and the nature of art. They cohere here into an act of defiance in the face of onrushing death. Joanna Newsom’s most singular and circular cycle of songs is at once harrowing and packed with lush instrumentation, featuring her trusty harp and piano alongside trombones, violins, double bass, clarinet, and celesta, the Mellotron, Wurlitzer, and clavichord, Ryan Francesconi’s bouzouki and baglama, and Judith Linsenberg’s recorder. Divers is a panorama of highways and hillocks, of things jumbled and unclaimed and restored, a cosmopolitan vision, drunk in and then quietly stripped bare.’
13. Kendrick Lamar – good kid, m.A.A.d city (2012)
Perhaps the greatest and most evocative instance of narrative rap came in the form of Kendrick Lamar’s sophomore album, a close coming-of-age depiction of how an introspective, unusually eloquent, agitated and sometimes angry kid from Compton outhung the crowd to become the compromised king of contemporary hip hop. Compromised because there is real sadness in this: its flashbacks are not without fondness, and they show something of the boastful big dreaming of youth, but it’s a tragic tale of petty crime, gang violence, drug addiction, dubious relationships, and family and friends dying young, Kendrick dealing steadily with the trauma rather than conquering at every turn.
Kendrick’s methodical delivery and the abundant detail of his lyrics – which relay conversations alongside his own fluctuating thoughts, and meticulously draw Compton locales and teenage haunts – make the person initially a little hard to discern. His voice is nasal and shifts across an unusually high pitch. Yet on repeated listens what come through most of all are the strengths and nuances of his character. ‘Swimming Pools (Drank)’, ‘Poetic Justice’, and ‘Bitch, Don’t Kill My Vibe’ received the play time, but the twin title pieces ‘good kid’ and ‘m.A.A.d city’ are crucial for rounding out the story, as is ‘Sherane a.k.a Master Splinter’s Daughter’, whose spectral voices do so much towards setting the tone.
12. Robyn – Body Talk (2010)
Intuited at the time but only appreciated on reflection, because back then we were rapt with glitter balls and neon lights, there is the wealth and glory of the popular song, with its youthful ardour and tales of heartache and longing – and then there is Robyn and Body Talk. On and away from the dancefloor she stands alone. A compilation of three mini-albums bearing the same name released across 2010, Body Talk is a record of pristine singles speaking across and echoing within one another. Its numerous highs – ‘Dancing on My Own’, ‘Call Your Girlfriend’, ‘Hang with Me’, ‘Love Kills’ – portray not the full bloom of love, but relationships either tentative or disintegrating. Robyn’s romantic hold is therefore never firm, but her voice is both plaintive and commanding, as she endures tribulation and heartbreak without denying or fracturing her exquisite sense of self. The depth and wit of her voice is allied to jagged, swirling electropop, producing a potent and enlivening, eminently danceable, shimmering pop masterpiece.
11. Chance the Rapper – Acid Rap (2013)
Chance’s metaphors extended and his spiritual side became more overt, but musically and lyrically it’s hard to beat the ebullience of Acid Rap. Chance – just turned twenty upon the release of the mixtape – sticks within a fairly close and familiar set of thematic concerns, drug use, gun violence, his musical influences, his time at school. But the density and the detail of his wordplay, the narrative weight so lightly borne by each of these songs, their brash humour and the irrepressibility of his vocals, together make Acid Rap uniquely intimate, an insight into the life of a precocious young rapper just as he reaches out into the world.
Nobody managed to make the conflux between public and personal so seamless or so relatable as Chance, switching from the casually observant but emotionally scarred ‘Paranoia’, with its Chicago summertime murder sprees, police brutality, and psychic fear, straight into a fond lament for his childhood and a wish for the ‘Cocoa Butter Kisses’ of his mom. Nobody else could conjure such funny and empathetic double entendres as ‘Her pussy like me, her heart like ‘Fuck it” from ‘Lost’, a frisson of real sadness amid the neediness and the mundane. On Acid Rap, Chance held up a bunch of collaborators and featuring artists, from Nate Fox, Vic Mensa, and Noname to Childish Gambino, Action Bronson, and Ab-Soul. The album is full of personal touches, like Chance’s audible incredulity as Ab-Soul desires to eat out the potty, or the phone call from his father which kicks off the outro ‘Everything’s Good’. The production bubbles and flourishes. In this company, you can’t help but have fun.
10. Jolie Holland – Wine Dark Sea (2014)
Culturedarm said: ‘After the tightly drawn compositions of 2011’s Pint of Blood, Wine Dark Sea finds Jolie Holland no less composed, but its pieces rumble, scuzzy and searing, in wave upon wave with her voice cohering at the centre. Songs shift seamlessly between the genres of blues, jazz, folk, and soul. There’s thick feedback played through multiple guitars; reverberating piano; cello which lifts a couple of songs at their most apposite moments, notably in concert with Holland’s violin as it steps and strides forth on ‘First Sign of Spring’; burly bass; and percussion which swells in time, all coming together to forge richly atmospheric, slowly forming, modulating, moving shapes of noise, the bobbing of cork and broad vessels on the sonar.
Holland sounds like she’s having fun, wrapping her voice around words, but more she sounds supremely confident, which is a confidence hard won by an artist performing at the peak of her powers. Nobody else could deliver a song like ‘I Thought It Was the Moon’, reminiscent of ‘Catalpa Waltz’ from her debut, as Jolie patiently navigates the words as she navigates a space, at once carefully recalled and celestially suggestive. She is generous too: just as her interpretation of Townes Van Zandt’s ‘Rex’s Blues’ marked the culmination of Pint of Blood, so here the take on Joe Tex’s ‘The Love You Save’ proves one of Wine Dark Sea‘s centrepieces. Clarinet comes to the fore on ‘All My Love’, a distorted R&B number; echoing, clip-clopping percussion underlies ‘Out on the Wine Dark Sea’; and if the album has any single highlight, it comes on ‘Saint Dymphna’, a summoning of the saint, as Jolie holds and delivers, ‘What do you mean by that? / Do you mean to break my heart? / Do you mean to break my heart in two?’.’
9. Björk – Utopia (2017)
Culturedarm said: ‘Teeming with life, human, animal, and man-made, organic and wind-up, with birdsong eliding the boundaries between many of the tracks, on Utopia Björk willingly and self-consciously gives herself up to an enveloping paradise. Intended as an about-turn from the ‘hell’ of Vulnicura with its austere and astringent uncoiling of heartbreak, it features all of the hallmarks of Björk’s idiosyncratic percussive production, its volcanic eruptions and spurts, sputtering beats, and gushing electronics, here in especially lush surrounds. Yet the proximity to Vulnicura and her continuing relationship with Arca – who arrived at a later stage of the previous project but here worked as Björk’s closest collaborator throughout – still affords some of the same spatial qualities, punctuated deliveries and swirling, throbbing builds.
Sonically ‘Batabid’, a ‘Pagan Poetry’ B-side, and ‘Ambergris March’, from the Drawing Restraint 9 soundtrack, have been cited as touchstones, and the overall ambiance does feel closest to this period, perhaps Medúlla most of all from Björk’s full-lengths. That album eschewed strings for beats and breathy vocals with throaty or choral accompaniments, and while strings do feature on Utopia, they’re in a supportive rather than a structural role, with the focus given over to woodwind sounds and instruments, most of all the flute. At the time of Medúlla‘s release Björk described it as a political album, its ‘human spiritualism’ offering a counter to the fervid patriotism which she experienced especially in the United States following the 9/11 attacks. There’s something of that too in Utopia, at once a retreat and an act of forthright defiance.
After the eye-rubbing, arm stretching, wide awakenings of ‘Arisen My Senses’ and ‘Blissing Me’ – songs which recall and reaffirm intimacy through the possibility of intimacy – ‘The Gate’ unfurls more patiently, its barriers pushed steadily ajar allowing beads of affection to pulse through. ‘Body Memory’, a centrepiece and the album’s longest track, amid squelching percussion and choral backing figures a reunion with nature, which for Björk is always biological and molecular, breathing in familiar air and tramping with the same bend of arch underfoot. ‘Features Creatures’ is about creature comforts, the most fundamental of which is the cherished form of the one we love. And there’s a nice segue, led by flutes, between ‘Body Memory’, ‘Features Creatures’, and the more club-oriented ‘Courtship’, an ebullient take on forestalled and one-time intercourse.
‘Losss’, laid on thick with beats by Rabit and Arca, subtly yet tangibly shifts the pace. A turbulent track, it offers not a lament but an act of recognition, based on the realisation that we must fight to redefine ourselves in the face of lost love. The sibilance of the extra ‘s’ in the song’s title here conjures not nature but the spluttering of machinery, firing and clanking and hammering in an effort to rebuild. For its sound palette, its candour and vehemence, ‘Losss’ and the following track ‘Sue Me’ approach Homogenic-era ‘Pluto’; with limpid lucidity ‘Tabula Rasa’ elaborates on a theme, Björk striving for a ‘Clean plate: Not repeating the fuck-ups of the fathers’. The closing tracks of Utopia are similarly optimistic and egalitarian and watery in the best sense. ‘Paradisia’ is a sunny instrumental which brings birdsong and flute to the fore, ‘Saint’ a personification of music with overlapping, undulating vocals which pays tribute to music’s indiscriminatory healing powers, and ‘Future Forever’ – a spare closer interpolating ‘All Is Full of Love’ – requests ‘Imagine a future and be in it’, a message of hope amid twinkling and glistening, diving and surfacing synths.
Utopia features some of Björk’s most involved, coiling and charming lyrics, for instance on ‘Blissing Me’, which opens ‘All of my mouth was kissing him / Now into the air I am missing him’ and later ‘The interior of these melodies / Is perhaps where we are meant to be / Our physical union a fantasy / I just fell in love with a song’. It’s an album that encompasses, that bends and gives, and that grows with every listener and every listen.’
8. Fiona Apple – The Idler Wheel Is Wiser Than the Driver of the Screw and Whipping Chords Will Serve You More Than Ropes Will Ever Do (2012)
Eschewing lush orchestration for kitchenware percussion and a looser sort of jazz, The Idler Wheel… is Fiona Apple at her most spare and searingly passionate. You know, then, that you’re in for a treat, even if the raw power of this record means it’s not always an easy listen. It coheres in its run-along piano and the crackling intensity of her voice, finding alleyways and rivulets in field recordings and the most mottled shuffles and drums: Apple and the instrumentalist Charley Drayton are listed in the album credits as playing, alongside keys, guitars, harp, marimba, bouzouki, and kora, ‘thighs’ and ‘truck stomper’. Apple’s torrents of poetry are self-conscious and scathingly funny, whether she’s renouncing the hot piss that comes from the mouth of her entitled ex, or playing the coquette and appealing for some rare shared time with folded fans and playact UFC rookie.
7. Joanna Newsom – Have One on Me (2010)
After the elaborate orchestral arrangements of Ys, for Have One on Me Joanna Newsom packed up her pretty dresses and high-heeled shoes and hit the open road, freewheeling and full of camaraderie, but as with so many road trips of this type she carried plenty of baggage with her, and look at the sights she saw along the way! In fact Have One on Me was rooted in the touring schedule for Ys, which saw Newsom accompanied by her five-piece band, rearranging those complex songs for live performance alongside the composer and multi-instrumentalist Ryan Francesconi. With Newsom behind the piano as well as her trusty harp, Francesconi providing additional arrangements while playing the kaval, the soprano recorder, and all manner of stringed instruments, and band member Neal Morgan arranging the percussion, the result on Have One on Me is a sprawling record over two hours and three discs, looser and livelier than her previous work but no less labyrinthine.
It’s an album of bucolic, Edenic clearings and dusty wide vistas, home comforts which begin to spindle and chafe, long highways which soon carry their own slick momentum, old flint stools, worn plush chairs, lavish thrones that just won’t sit. Whereas Ys seemed to capture mythologies in the first act of their telling, Have One on Me lies farther downstream, a few links in the chain from the great oral tradition, as Newsom reworks and in the process revitalises fairy tales and epics from as far afield as the Mekong in Southeast Asia, over and across Europe, to the Roanoke and Native America and the semblance of early settlement, to California and the here and now of home.
Songs like the title piece and ‘Good Intentions Paving Company’ stretch out, driving and building to quickening climaxes, playing happily alongside the redolent parables ‘On a Good Day’ and ”81′. ‘Baby Birch’, which subjugates the world of nursery rhyme, culminates in violent discord as Newsom depicts life’s losses and closed doors. And what happens at the end of ‘Go Long’, a thorough reworking of the Bluebeard folktale, a divine act of creation somehow strangely mechanistic, the sprouting of something monstrous and liberating and bejewelled?
6. Oneohtrix Point Never – R Plus Seven (2013)
Daniel Lopatin’s Warp Records debut took its impetus from constrained modes of aesthetic production and the narrowing confines of modern life, framing a view of America in wide perspective. The title of the record indicates Lopatin’s interest in Oulipo, a school of writing founded by Raymond Queneau and whose practitioners have included Italo Calvino and Georges Perec, which seeks creativity through the imposition of constraints and adherence to identifiable patterns. One such constraint, referred to as N+7, involves replacing each noun in a text with the noun seven places after it in a dictionary.
Lopatin followed Oulipo’s strictures on R Plus Seven to spread disfigured vocals throughout the record. Chopped choirs chatter and chant disparately or in unison, accompanied by synthesized brass and sax, new-age harmonies, and sounds drawn from nature, which break through to provide moments of respite. There is a sheen to these pieces which beyond the riggings of vaporwave, might recall Fennesz or Opiate’s Objects for an Ideal Home, but Lopatin eschews warmth for fracture and his movements are in constant flux. There is a concerned throb and hum at the centre of tracks, and after the muzzled celebration of ‘Americans’, the tension grows. ‘Wait’, the most clearly enunciated word on the record, comes on ‘Problem Areas’, and the tension reaches a laden and hectic climax on ‘Still Life’, before ‘Chrome Country’ unburdens in a choir of children.
5. Grouper – Ruins (2014)
Culturedarm said: ‘Barring the final track ‘Made of Air’ – which was recorded in 2004, and rumbles to life before submerging itself as a coda to the album – the set of songs which comprise Ruins were recorded on a portable 4-track during a residency in Portugal in 2011. Liz Harris has depicted a several-mile hike to the beach, undertaken daily during her stay in Aljezur, and has described the resulting songs as ‘A nod to that daily walk. Failed structures. Living in the remains of love’. Frogs whir, on the margins of the remote tribal beat of the opening track ‘Made of Metal’, and again in the midst of ‘Lighthouse’, with its gently looping piano. Thunder and rainfall surge and then peter out on ‘Holding’. Harris’ voice, tender and plaintive, occasionally pulls away from the keys, straining and marvelling in the separation as on ‘Call Across Rooms’, before reconciling and merging wordlessly with the music.’
4. Frank Ocean – Blonde (2016)
Culturedarm said: ‘Even amid the hype and buzz around Boys Don’t Cry and potential due dates, in the heat of the summer with a boombox and workbenches, with orchestral grumblings and short industrial spurts, Frank Ocean turned the anticipation over his second studio album into something more resembling a slow burn. Blonde is emotionally dense and musically complex and not always riveting, but that’s part of the point: as he sings on ‘White Ferrari’, one of the tracks of the year, ‘Basic takes its toll on me ‘ventually yes’, which is to say that the pressures of life – especially one lived openly – and romances unrequited or forestalled can make expression a struggle and each hour more wearying, but our bodies still pump elegantly and our thoughts can remain lucid and free to roam.
The beats take a backseat on Blonde but bubble up to give life its momentum, as Ocean ruminates and allows his mind to wander against languid guitars and brooding synth sounds offset by the chirping and tweeting of birds. There’s a hazy atmosphere, a lushness to the music especially on the pivotal ‘Nights’, and the crackle of tape recordings which bring us handily back down to earth. Ocean lingers on the threshold of love and reminisces on drug use and his youth, but never gets caught in the mire, casually yet concertedly conciliating and harmonising with the here and now. Blonde is a deep dive yet fresh as the morning.’
3. Grimes – Visions (2012)
From the glitch and kick which opens ‘Infinite ♡ Without Fulfillment’, Visions still sounds like the shock of the new, a startup brand and an artistic statement in the name of Claire Boucher’s cybernetic spiritualism. But as snapping elastic and wispy and ethereal vocals fall in layers over propulsive loops, is she the wave or the vessel?
On Visions Grimes emerged from the murky woods, the dark soundscapes of Geidi Primes and Halfaxa by turns impish and devilish, through voile curtains into a violet clearing. Still hazy and sheer, some of her genre influences – covering everything from dream pop to electronic dance music, K-pop, emo, experimental ambient music, and nu metal – became more discernible. But the construct she leaves in her wake is like nothing else, dreamy but wiry and essential.
Grimes has often been discussed within the framework of the postinternet: a product of the internet’s profusion of materials, its endless repetition and recontextualisation of images, its viral videos, its fractured texts and snatches of song, its closed social aspect. One of the characteristics of the internet’s materiality is that it seems to speed up time, and on Visions Grimes sits at the controls of time, mostly with her finger on the fast-forward button. Yet for an album jam-packed with so many musical ideas and which abounds and rebounds with so much energy and replenished confidence, Visions still feels spacious and tranquil.
Percussion squelches and skitters and refuses to quit, and synths swallow and dive, or circle and soar, spiralling like single-use twisters. After the shattering multiplicity of ‘Infinite ♡ Without Fulfillment’, ‘Genesis’ and ‘Symphonia IX (My Wait Is U)’ sound monastic and holy, bookends to a dance-oriented middle. ‘Oblivion’, one of the songs of the decade, still cutting to the quick, cuts imperceptibly through the murk as Grimes sets her sights on her tormentor. It’s a song about sexual abuse, a valiant attempt to shake loose and turn the tables even while the fear and dread remain palpable. ‘Be a Body (侘寂)’ and ‘Nightmusic’ generously repurpose synth-fuelled bubblegum pop, and ‘Skin’ unfolds in tender intimacy. Vigorously feminist, thrillingly modern, Visions is a wary embrace of life even as the neck hairs stand to attention.
2. Julia Holter – Have You in My Wilderness (2015)
Culturedarm said: ‘A collection of songs without the conceptual underpinnings of her earlier works, on Have You in My Wilderness Julia Holter shifts between salty coastal and sultry urban settings, offering listeners a restless embrace. The palette is effortlessly varied, by turns jazzy, country, and baroque, and keys, strings, synths, and vocals swoop and swirl in often startling juxtapositions, but the record is still characterised by a graceful restraint: these are songs that lilt and teeter on the edge of love, balancing finely between the rush of freedom and the rapturous stay of romance. Have You in My Wilderness finds Holter at her most endearing and approachable, but there’s still plenty of daring here, enough to stumble or strip your breath.’
1. Kanye West – Yeezus (2013)
Yeezus was Kanye West at his most scabrous and experimental yet pointed and compact. It lurches menacingly from the explicit politics of ‘Black Skinhead’ and ‘New Slaves’ to ‘Blood on the Leaves’, which pilfers the paradigmatic protest song, a bristling and graphic denunciation of lynching, a distillation of blues, soul, and jazz, placing it instead on a plinth of egocentric consumption and heedless romance. In the process Kanye lives in the blistering present, scribbling over histories we might otherwise be doomed to forget. And amid the juxtapositions of high and low, realities and aspirations, values and morals set against the seething human spirit, there’s plenty of humour here too, whether it’s his exhilarating verse on ‘Hold My Liquor’ with its stream of setups and punchlines, or album-closer ‘Bound 2’ which melds willful obnoxiousness with exuberance and grace.
This is where Kanye really perfected – by boldness and exaggeration – his collage-montage technique, doing for early twenty-first century music what the modernists did for twentieth century literature, repurposing a diversity of texts in a way that goes beyond sampling, not only colouring but reconstituting the mood and the flow and the meaning of his songs. The yield is one of stunning resonances and real emotional depth. Yeezus features glowing contributions from Chief Keef, Justin Vernon, Frank Ocean, and Charlie Wilson, and incorporates samples stretching from the Hungarian psychedelic rock band Omega to the Jamaican dancehall of Beenie Man to the all-American rockabilly of Brenda Lee. With Kanye West beauty is omnipresent, and never delivered through gritted teeth, but this still feels brilliantly uncompromising and explosively lean. It’s the album that best captures this fragmented decade.
