What a long decade this year has been. I doubt future historians will look back on 2017, the year the sword of Damocles hung over a powder keg of idiocy and racism, with anything remotely approaching affection.
But that's where I come in. Once a week, I pick some music I like. Once a week, I devote some of my time to writing a brief article somewhere between a review and an essay. Once a week, I share it with you. And (I hope) once a week, you find something to enjoy: a ray of sunshine in your day, a smile on your face, or even just an acknowledgement of my frankly inspirational consistency. It's the little joys that keep you going, and two years in I haven't yet missed a week.
It's as much for me as it is for you, dear reader, and I hope my occasional indulgence doesn't deter your future reading.
So here are the ten albums I enjoyed most, and most enjoyed writing about this year. Here's to many more to come.
(Also hey, don't worry too much about the numbering of this list. It isn't definitive. It's not necessarily meant to indicate an absolute stratification of objective quality. More like a general gradient of positive impressions. With that in mind, take a generous pinch of salt and scroll onwards.)
I quite like this album, folks. I like it not as much as those crazy Cuphead funtimes, but the Mylo article contains an impassioned monologue on the general nature of liking things that tipped it over the top. Plus, this article marks the first and (so far) only mention of the mythical bugbear on my blog. Can't say no to huge fuzzy insects with dripping claws and chittering mandibles and an appetite for salmon!
"Mylo Xyloto spurts colour from its every orifice, bigger and brighter than ever before. It is a mid-rainbow snapshot of a band ten years into their career trying something different because they’re bored and they can. [...] Mylo is not as compact as Prospekt’s March, their loveliest little companion EP, nor as charmingly scattershot as the latter’s host album Viva la Vida (or, Death and All His Friends), an opus as magnum as Coldplay is ever likely to make. Mylo is its own satisfying emotional arc; consistent but not stagnant, extroverted but not obnoxiously so, self-contained but never fettered. It strikes a balance between florid and fun."
Click here to read the full article
"Reflektor clocks in at almost an hour and a half, many tracks barrelling well past the six-minute mark. The cover alludes to Eurydice and Orpheus, of Greek mythology, an allusion that continues through a two-part suite that forms the centrepiece of the album’s second disc. The tracklist sprawls from medieval martyrdom to cutting-edge theoretical physics, namechecking both Joan of Arc and supersymmetry. The lyric sheet intercuts copious quantities of untranslated French.
This is an album that does not fuck around."
This monstrous beauty got away from its creators a bit, and so too did this article get away from me. It contains a short surrealist diversion inspired by the Reflektor aesthetic which, like Athena herself, leaped fully-formed and unedited from mind to blog.
(I later happened across Gabriel Samach's Reflektor review for Tiny Mix Tapes which does pretty much what I did but better. Do check out that website. It contains the most pretentious music writing on the entire Internet. It's awful. I love it.)
"A cosmic overflow error has caused the colours of the universe to invert. The exotic irradiated beaches of Reflektor are illumined by a hollow, iridescent moon that shines beneath a frozen grey sea. Great columns of salt thrust high into the empty sky, far too tall, casting unshadows in too many directions. Monochrome figures are posed, stationary on the rippling grey sands. They bask in the black sun."
Link to the full article
What do you like to do for your birthday? Eat yourself into a food coma? Indulge in a shot or nine of your preferred tequila? Curl up with some tea and a book? I like to do all of these things, though not necessarily in that order. One needn't get turnt to appreciate the latest from Chuck Wendig.
That said, if you're tackling David Foster Wallace I would recommend several glugs of absinthe to dull the pain. Two raging headaches for the price of one. Gotta be thrifty.
Can you believe I don't charge for this?
Anyway, for my twenty-second this year, I splashed out some thoughts on my very favourite Victorian cannibalism hairdressing slasher musical.
"Sweeney Todd is Stephen Sondheim’s finest and grimmest work, a misanthropic black comedy that delves deep into the subterranean levels to which the befoxholed will stoop when pushed to their wits’ end. They spin an increasingly mad tangle of mistakes, desperately hoping to avoid the inevitable consequences of their actions. Everyone ends up dead, but even that’s a relief compared to the prospect of living in the world of Sweeney Todd."
So many lessons cannot be taught theoretically in the classroom, but must be learned through practice. The more I write, the more I have found myself jettisoning bad habits on which I used to rely.
(I haven't been keeping track of the time, and though I've improved a great deal since starting this blog I have not yet ascended to Gladwellvana. I'll keep you posted.)
One domain in which I have shown promising progress is the calibration of my superlatives. Not everything has to be excellent or superb or phenomenal: these words do not provide additional clarity, and I use them as a crutch to avoid the difficult task of untangling my thoughts and translating them into a readable format.
This article, penned several lifetimes ago in January, is an extended exercise in hyperbole. Florence Welch is, after all, a superhuman presence, and I felt justified in dropping five-dollar phrases on her, especially in light of the extended comparisons I make to her polar opposite, the worst protagonist in all of literature, Miss Isabella Marie Swan.
With mixed success, I walked the tightrope between communicating clearly and concisely, and spraying meaningless word-vomit all over the inside of your screen.
Please enjoy this important step on my way to refining my craft. I certainly did. Sorry about the chunky mess.
"Florence is, in the Old Testament sense, awesome. She is a force of nature. She bellows and screams and rages against the dying of the light; a hurricane tearing through a distant land of spirits and demons and wind chimes. In a market saturated with whispery indie songsmiths, it is thrilling to come across an artist more at home in some godforsaken thunderstruck cathedral than a dinky little café, and refreshing too, not least from the constant cooling stream of blood trickling from your eardrums. Such trifles barely register to Florence. When she says she "would give all this / and heaven too," one's thoughts turn to celestial bulldozers, evicted cherubim and golden documents signed and initialed in flame. Her ability is beyond question."
A Link Between Worlds
Despite being by far the artsiest album on this list (sorry, Arcade Fire), Dirty Projectors' sixth studio album is warm and inviting and, dare I say, pretty damn goofy.
Where Reflektor dons its dark designer suit, Bitte Orca proudly displays rainbow socks beneath grubby, wide-cuffed overalls. Probably red Converses as well, high-tops, untied. A paintbrush stuck behind the ear. Long, scruffy hair pulled back into a messy bun. Cute overbite. Gluten-intolerant.
There's a first gijinka for everybody.
Plus, the noted tastemakers at Pitchfork awarded it the silver on their best albums of 2009. So there.
"...the music of Dirty Projectors is similarly messy. They fashion riffs and hooks from arpeggio croppings like some slapdash collage, winding threads of melody splashed with vivid impressionistic bursts of backup singing. One may as well sling buckets of colour across a canvas and call it a painting. And yet, as admirers of Jackson Pollock can attest to, from chaos comes great beauty."
Tingle tingle kooloo-limpah
Don't be fooled by the demure black hair and black clothes on black backdrop. This album goes off with a bang and then continues to bang so damn hard for a whopping sixty-four minutes. It's gnarly wall-to-wall bangers on the Paramore Express. Next stop, Bangtown!
"Paramore is bursting with variety, packed to the brim with ideas. Augmenting their muscular classic-rock guitars with stellar, sparkling nerve, they draw upon influences as far-flung as peppy pop-punk and groovy techno: from the occasional judiciously-placed disco fill to the disarming, doe-eyed string section that tenderly rounds out a deceptively simple ballad, Paramore never fails to engage and enthrall."
Fireblight Ganon, Scourge of Divine Beast Vah Rudania
In these next three articles I slip into tour guide mode, a sure sign of music that I really like. My instinct is to let it speak for itself, except you can't hear it in word format, so I take it upon myself to direct your attention to points of interest to explore at your leisure.
I would now like to direct your attention to James Murphy's soft, cuddly gut. This is a man who would demolish a pie. This is a man who would put your beer-chugging to shame. This is a man would give just the most magnificent hugs.
My snugglebuddy Jim is getting on a bit and I'm super into it, artistically and carnally. From his very first single as LCD Soundsystem, he has aired his grievances with "borrowed nostalgia for the unremembered eighties," but not in that annoying finger-wagging, Millennial-bashing, buy-a-house-to-keep-all-your-avocados-in-oh-wait-you-can't-lol-sucked-in way. He was there, you see, and he is feeling kinda weird to see its accoutrements and aesthetics given and borrowed and appropriated and stolen and recycled. The whole LCD discography (wicked boppy dance-punk, extra dry) is soaked in ageing-anxiety juices, and American Dream is the best one yet.
"No one steps in the same river twice, said someone famous probably. It is not the same river, and you are not the same person. There is much to love about the previous LCD canon. Dry wit and drum machines took them far, but never before has their work sounded so cohesive. Like a long thin Tetris piece slotting into an empty space, the simple addition of new clear-eyed context has sparked a connection, a vital connection that snaps the whole thing into sharp, poignant focus."
The imminent arrival of your smiley moon buddy
We're coming down to this year's rub. I laid awake, tossing and turning for hours, pondering long and hard about whom to place on the podium and whom to cast into its cold metallic shadow. I knew the wrong choice would come back to haunt me, like a ghost, or a photo of me from 2009 when I had just begun to experiment with hair gel. (Ironic, given that I'm already having second thoughts about placing Arcade Fire so low on the list, and about not being able to come up with a better accolade for this very good album). It took longer than I care to admit before the solution occurred to me, like it did to that one girl from the taco ad: why not both?
Annie Clarke seems to be in a similar frame of mind.
"The St. Vincent of MASSEDUCTION plunges nosefirst into an impossible tangle of addiction and obsession and intoxication; a Gordonian conflation: sex is drugs, sex is love, and by the transitive property, drugs is love. A spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down. She dances on the edge between the belligerently kitsch and the impeccably stylish, perpetually threatening to careen headlong into the chasm of melodrama and overwrought cliché. Hers is a voice that gasps and sighs and whoops, teetering on the brink of sanity, possessed of razor-sharp half-crazed blood-soaked lucidity. Like Madonna, she is aggressively, iconoclastically sexual. Like Bowie, she is relentlessly, subversively experimental. And like Prince, she will shred her fingers to ribbons for her art.
Annie sings in haphazard spurts and splashes, to arresting effect. Her honeyed tones smear over blindingly bright synthpop gloss like roadkill on a highway. But when mere words cannot express what must be expressed, she brings her fingers to pick and fretboard and erupts in explosive catharsis. Her hands tear out squeals and shrieks and unhinged screams. She makes her instrument sing. And what a song it is."
Hey, listen!
Despite being by far the artsiest album on this list (sorry, Arcade Fire), Dirty Projectors' sixth studio album is warm and inviting and, dare I say, pretty damn goofy.
Where Reflektor dons its dark designer suit, Bitte Orca proudly displays rainbow socks beneath grubby, wide-cuffed overalls. Probably red Converses as well, high-tops, untied. A paintbrush stuck behind the ear. Long, scruffy hair pulled back into a messy bun. Cute overbite. Gluten-intolerant.
There's a first gijinka for everybody.
Plus, the noted tastemakers at Pitchfork awarded it the silver on their best albums of 2009. So there.
"...the music of Dirty Projectors is similarly messy. They fashion riffs and hooks from arpeggio croppings like some slapdash collage, winding threads of melody splashed with vivid impressionistic bursts of backup singing. One may as well sling buckets of colour across a canvas and call it a painting. And yet, as admirers of Jackson Pollock can attest to, from chaos comes great beauty."
Tingle tingle kooloo-limpah
Don't be fooled by the demure black hair and black clothes on black backdrop. This album goes off with a bang and then continues to bang so damn hard for a whopping sixty-four minutes. It's gnarly wall-to-wall bangers on the Paramore Express. Next stop, Bangtown!
"Paramore is bursting with variety, packed to the brim with ideas. Augmenting their muscular classic-rock guitars with stellar, sparkling nerve, they draw upon influences as far-flung as peppy pop-punk and groovy techno: from the occasional judiciously-placed disco fill to the disarming, doe-eyed string section that tenderly rounds out a deceptively simple ballad, Paramore never fails to engage and enthrall."
Fireblight Ganon, Scourge of Divine Beast Vah Rudania
In these next three articles I slip into tour guide mode, a sure sign of music that I really like. My instinct is to let it speak for itself, except you can't hear it in word format, so I take it upon myself to direct your attention to points of interest to explore at your leisure.
I would now like to direct your attention to James Murphy's soft, cuddly gut. This is a man who would demolish a pie. This is a man who would put your beer-chugging to shame. This is a man would give just the most magnificent hugs.
My snugglebuddy Jim is getting on a bit and I'm super into it, artistically and carnally. From his very first single as LCD Soundsystem, he has aired his grievances with "borrowed nostalgia for the unremembered eighties," but not in that annoying finger-wagging, Millennial-bashing, buy-a-house-to-keep-all-your-avocados-in-oh-wait-you-can't-lol-sucked-in way. He was there, you see, and he is feeling kinda weird to see its accoutrements and aesthetics given and borrowed and appropriated and stolen and recycled. The whole LCD discography (wicked boppy dance-punk, extra dry) is soaked in ageing-anxiety juices, and American Dream is the best one yet.
"No one steps in the same river twice, said someone famous probably. It is not the same river, and you are not the same person. There is much to love about the previous LCD canon. Dry wit and drum machines took them far, but never before has their work sounded so cohesive. Like a long thin Tetris piece slotting into an empty space, the simple addition of new clear-eyed context has sparked a connection, a vital connection that snaps the whole thing into sharp, poignant focus."
The imminent arrival of your smiley moon buddy
We're coming down to this year's rub. I laid awake, tossing and turning for hours, pondering long and hard about whom to place on the podium and whom to cast into its cold metallic shadow. I knew the wrong choice would come back to haunt me, like a ghost, or a photo of me from 2009 when I had just begun to experiment with hair gel. (Ironic, given that I'm already having second thoughts about placing Arcade Fire so low on the list, and about not being able to come up with a better accolade for this very good album). It took longer than I care to admit before the solution occurred to me, like it did to that one girl from the taco ad: why not both?
Annie Clarke seems to be in a similar frame of mind.
"The St. Vincent of MASSEDUCTION plunges nosefirst into an impossible tangle of addiction and obsession and intoxication; a Gordonian conflation: sex is drugs, sex is love, and by the transitive property, drugs is love. A spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down. She dances on the edge between the belligerently kitsch and the impeccably stylish, perpetually threatening to careen headlong into the chasm of melodrama and overwrought cliché. Hers is a voice that gasps and sighs and whoops, teetering on the brink of sanity, possessed of razor-sharp half-crazed blood-soaked lucidity. Like Madonna, she is aggressively, iconoclastically sexual. Like Bowie, she is relentlessly, subversively experimental. And like Prince, she will shred her fingers to ribbons for her art.
Annie sings in haphazard spurts and splashes, to arresting effect. Her honeyed tones smear over blindingly bright synthpop gloss like roadkill on a highway. But when mere words cannot express what must be expressed, she brings her fingers to pick and fretboard and erupts in explosive catharsis. Her hands tear out squeals and shrieks and unhinged screams. She makes her instrument sing. And what a song it is."
Hey, listen!
A familiar tune echoing through the doorway of the club as you and your squad pass by, wafting on the thick scent of sweat and deodorant, shining like a beacon through the frigid night air. That heady moment at the karaoke bar when everyone comes together as to sing a raucous rendition of a beloved hit. Lyrics engraved on our hearts. Tunes seared into our souls.
Pop music is shorthand for the human experience; proof that we exist. If we all breathe the same air, and share the same music, no matter how far apart, how different can we be?
Melodrama captured the zeitgeist. Everyone knows it, and everyone loves it: a profoundly honest and deeply weird record wherein a precocious young woman from New Zealand shares the story of her first heartbreak with the emotional lucidity of a Pixar movie.
We want to be Beyoncé. We want to hang out with Ed Sheeran.
We are Lorde.
And Lorde is all of us: neither reified nor sanitised, a snarl of jagged, broken edges pieced back together into something wild and fluorescent.
"...a masterpiece of kintsugi chiaroscuro. Alongside her partner in crime, Jack Antonoff — the same producer who brought his Midas touch to Taylor Swift’s outstanding 1989 — Lorde has conjured up a storm of jagged edges, a bolt of lightning caught and bottled. It flickers and crackles, razor-sharp, threatening to burst loose at any moment. The sombre cloud and the freezing rain are refracted in every corner. There’s nowhere to hide, and Lorde neither wants nor needs to. It’s electrifying."
The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess
Oh look, it's the best movie soundtrack ever made.
"Space.
Stars twinkle.
Three horizons hang in the distance.
A tiny ship darts by, under heavy fire.
A gigantic grey prow thunders into frame.
And it keeps coming, and coming, and coming.
It would be utterly ridiculous, like Sideshow Bob stepping on far too many rakes, were it not for the atmosphere of chilling, deadly seriousness that is somehow also extraordinarily camp.
The underdog and the tyrant are immediately and unmistakeably established. The Tantive IV is small and white, constructed of pleasantly rounded shapes, clearly desperately fleeing, while the Devastator is a single majestic triangle, vast and coldly grey, imposing itself upon our heroes and the screen alike.
Every trick of subconscious bias is promptly checked off. It’s so blindingly obvious that it verges on self-parody moments in. But nobody’s laughing. And that’s thanks to the sterling work of John Williams and the London Symphony Orchestra on the greatest soundtrack in the history of cinema.
It is timeless, and it is perfect.
In form and function, the music of Star Wars is strikingly operatic. Even the simplest and most mundane proceedings — an irksome backseat driver or a simple administrative disagreement — are elevated to high drama by soaring strings and booming brass. In a stroke of theatrical indulgence, Williams makes extensive use of leitmotifs: short, symbolic musical segments that shift and change with their subject. Luke’s theme swells contemplatively as he gazes past the binary sunset, but returns frenzied and panicked during several of his action sequences. The Rebellion fanfare plays softly on subdued woodwinds when the Tantive is captured, shivering with dread, but is reprised boldly on trumpets when the space shoe is on the other space foot during the Battle of Yavin. Mozart would be proud."
The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword
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So there you have it: the top ten albums I wrote about in 2017.
I try to write about a variety of music, and I like to think that there's something for everyone here at the Ramble. If you have an album you'd like to see me write about, or have complaints or compliments about me and/or my work, don't hesitate to shoot those my way.
Much love.
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All album art credited in its respective article