eops Albums of the year 2012

The end of the world show ... part two.

At the turn of the Millennium I mixed a tape for a friend called “The End of the World Show” – you know ... just in case. It wasn’t very good but it got me thinking; if you were going to select tracks for the final mix before the apocalypse what would you really want to hear? Do you really want to drift into the afterlife dooming over a Joy Division riff? It might be more fun to go out punching the air shouting “Lager, Lager, Lager”?

2012 was slated to bring the end of days but as any self respecting Mayan will tell you predicting an apocalypse is a tricky business. The fact is that doomsday will almost certainly arrive when you least expect it to. It’s frankly unlikely you will have had time to prepare your ideal soundtrack to oblivion. I clearly wasn’t ready for the world to end this year but if I had drifted into the afterlife last Friday then this is what I would have been listening to.

10 Brother Sun, Sister Moon: Brother Sun, Sister Moon (Denovali Records) 

Brother Sun, Sister Moon: All you need.

This beautifully packaged gem on Denovali Records is a daydreamers delight. Drenched in sunshine and recorded completely in soft focus by Roof Lights’ Gareth Munday, the album features the breathy vocal talents of Alicia Merz from Birds of Passage. I loved its quirky psychedelia, clever use of field recordings and Drake-like guitar pickings drowning in the reverb alongside some wonderfully subtle breaks. It’s post Trip-hop warmth mixes perfectly with a Slowdive like Indie sound that stares resolutely at its shoes despite the summery feel.

9 Toy – Toy (Heavenly Records) 

Toy: Motoring.

There's a lot of music industry chatter about Toy - so much so it got quite off putting long before I'd heard a note of actual music. Like their fellow haircuts 'The Horrors' they are often reviled for being ‘scenesters’ (whatever that actually means). It’s a shame because that sort of talk really distracts from a well thought out and perfectly executed exercise in Gothic tinged UK Psyche. It took me a while to lean in to their sound but after hunkering down into the glory hole that is ‘Kopter’ I found myself yearning to slip into a pair of drainpipe jeans and poorly buttoned paisley shirt. Luckily for you I resist this urge but I am happy to listen to it whatever anyone says.

8 Mala: Mala in Cuba (Brownswood Recordings) 

Mala: Changuito.

Mala is serious about his music that attracts a certain type of poe-faced critic, I read one review of this LP that bemoaned the fact 'Mala in Cuba' had failed to become ‘coffee table Dubstep’ album for the masses. It went on to complain that the music was sample driven and that Mala should have used longer passages from his Cuban recordings to show off the musicality of the people that played for him. If you will pardon my vernacular: WTF? This for me is exactly why the album is so successful, not a reason to look down on it. Mala remains true to the music he helped create; the samples are clipped and frame the basslines like all the best Dubstep tracks. This gives them a potent urgency that would surely be lost if the project were to become some sort of Buena Vista Social Club museum piece. As the saying goes – you can take the boy out of Croydon, but you cant take Croydon out of the boy, Mala in Cuba is all the better for it. 

7 Tame Impala: Lonerism (Modular Recordings) 

Tame Impala: Elephant.

Tame Impala peddle the sort of tripped out sonics that should be a perfect fit for me but despite enjoying their first effort ‘Innervisions’ I felt it was all a bit too derivative of the Beatles melody wise. Ask Liam and Noel – that shit doesn’t last. However ‘Lonerism’ fully rights that wrong. This is now a mature sound being made by a confident producer. Confident enough to glam it up a bit in places and still drop the tempo earnestly when required. In fact it makes me want to shake my big grey trunk all up in your face.

6 Ty Segall: Twins (Drag City) 

Ty Segall: Would you be my love?

Some of my favourite musicians are absolute perfectionists who painstakingly produce inch perfect pop records over months, years and sometimes decades of self imposed studio isolation. Unfortunately the best way to ruin the intended spirit of any song is to overproduce it and that leaves a thin line between perfecting the magnum opus and obsessively polishing a turd. Ty Segall knows that sometimes its better to thrash something out with feeling then release it warts and all than to deprive the world of a few rough edges for the sake of musical vanity. Twins is an audio bulldozer with a wrecking ball attached, it contains some genuinely melodic moments that can charm the pants off you but it delivers them with the sort of gusto you would expect of a rowdy garage blues man drinking JD straight from the bottle. Play it loud.

5 Death Grips: The Money Store (Epic Records) 

Death Grips: The fever (aye, aye).
Whilst in my everyday life I am a mild mannered company man politely ghosting my way through society I do, on occasion, get an overwhelming urge to set fire to famous buildings and run amok through the streets. This sort of teenage blood lust requires a soundtrack suitably enraged with contempt for the norm. Death Grips are the first band I’ve heard in a long time that genuinely sounded threatening on first listen. Sounding truly shocking is an extremely difficult thing to do in the modern world, but Death Grips storm out of the speakers to desecrate your ears with aplomb. Most importantly whilst some may argue this sound is closer connected to Punk, Juke and Ghetto-Tech than Hip-Hop, this is the first ‘rap’ album that has truly surprised me in years evoking memories of the first time I heard Public Enemy or N.W.A. It's also been a joy to watch 'Epic Records' take the massive risk of signing such a militant artist and then watch helplessly as Death Grips impatiently released their follow up album 'No Love Deep Web' against their wishes on the Internet for free. It's every bit as powerful as 'The Money Store' and features a cover that shows the title written large in marker pen across a band members, 'member' (yes, his penis.) Classy stuff there from MC Ride and company, you go tell the man! If you were a teenager today this shit would definitely annoy and alienate your parents – I can think of no higher praise. 

4 Actress: RIP (Honest Jon’s Records)

Actress: N.E.W.

Detroit, Chicago, Sheffield, London, Berlin … techno reviews often sound like a travelogue of post industrial cities to which the roots of electronica are retraced for reference points but the real truth behind great electronic music is that if done correctly the best techno sounds like it wasn’t even made on this planet. Actress (British producer Darren J. Cunningham) is prime example of some fresh thinking livening up a genre prone to repetition (literally). It’s hard to put your finger on exactly how Actress perform this trick but its clearly more than smoke and mirrors. R.I.P. is a deep, thoughtful album reminiscent of Boards of Canada or Speedy J in their pomp. The lines are clean and controlled; in its quieter moments songs like ‘N.E.W’ draw the listener in like a sonic tractor beam. So let’s not dwell on Earthly locations like London and Detroit – lets just sit back and enjoy the ride.

3 Grizzly Bear: Shields (4AD) 

Grizzly Bear: Gun shy.

Grizzly Bear recently claimed that their audience in Europe was ‘too old and too male’. It’s a fair cop I suppose but think on young cubs, as Tony Soprano would say, “You don’t shit where you eat”.  I can see why HMV's £50 man appreciates this sophisticated music. Its cool but you could slip it on at a dinner party and no one would complain, you could then look pretty hip waxing lyrical about them from the confines of the kitchen. It encourages the old school indie boys to do a bit more paunch gazing but we shouldn't hold that against it. The music on Shields is simply wonderful in places and I love the way it melts through your thoughts at the end of the evening. It's like the last sip of red wine dissolving on the back of your tongue, you want to savour it and hold it in your mouth because you know when it’s gone so is the moment. 

2 Liars: WIXIW (Mute) 

Liars: Brats.

When an indie band announces that their next LP will see them ‘go electronic’ it can be easy to accidentally blind yourself by rolling your eyes too hard. It’s a very difficult transition to make and one that is often severely underestimated by already successful musicians. However when it works it can free a band from the shackles of expectation and see them transcend their genre. Liars, like Radiohead before them have got the transition spot on. Just like ‘Kid A’ this was a squid like attempt at deliberate obfuscation and 'WIXIW' is an inky pool of an album. There is more than a touch of desafinado in this selection. The whole experience is claustrophobic, keyboards detune and the lyrics paint a bleak scene over sparse deliberate rhythms. This isn’t the record your life coach will want to add to the motivational playlist. What life coaches don’t get is that sometimes you want to wallow in the darkness; sometimes you need to make space for yourself to be depressed and deal with stuff before you hop along the yellow brick road. Music can be the best companion in the darkest days. As black as the cover it comes in 'WIXIW' is an ebony gem and even though the melancholy is Dickensian, Liars are not a one note band and they even manage to make time for a bit of 'Bleak House' on the sublime 'Brats'. Play it on your own.

1 Shackleton: Music for the Quiet Hour/The Drawbar Organ EP's (Woe to the septic heart!) 

Shackleton: Music for the quiet hour (Part three).

When you are forever snuffling for truffles in the musical orchard sometimes you need to remind your inner truffle pig exactly what you are looking for. The ideal outcome for me is to find something unexpected and yet familiar, after all, great music is an evolution, with artists standing on the shoulders of giants. That said it has to move things on. It doesn’t have to be fashionable or even successful – it just has to amaze the listener in some way and perhaps capture something of the time. Music is a time based medium and yet its often not judged in the same way a film is. Too often music is seen as something can just be ‘on’ … ‘in the background’ … ‘Heart FM’. In a cinema everyone would sit through something light and easy, lot of people will chance a horror film, some will invest time in a moving documentary and a few will take in an art house movie. What everyone does is sit in the dark with their phones off for two hours essentially concentrating on the film. I always feel its so sad that so few people attempt to do this with music, Gil Scott-Heron agrees. 

Music for the Quiet Hour is not an easy listen. Producer Sam Shackleton deliberately agitates the listener with an armoury of studio tricks. Endlessly rising Shepard Tones ratchet up the tension, the use of stereo is dizzying and the oft' forgotten art of dynamic production provides peaks to every trough. There are points when you feel truly unsettled by the music, but its worth remembering that to really feel the release of music you need to endure the build up – as I said it’s a 'time based medium'. This is a unique piece of work and should be endured and ultimately enjoyed as if it was a dark science fiction screening that demands your attention. You only need do it once – go on, I promise it will be much more rewarding than Avatar. You might love it, you might hate it … but either way you really can’t deny its power and craft.

Compilation of the year:

Jeff Mills – Sequence: A Retrospective of Axis records (Axis)

Techno, techno, techno … but not as you know it, eminently listenable and perfectly judged tunes created by the 'Wizard' – Jeff Mills: Godfather of techno.

Reissue of the year:

My Bloody valentine: Isn’t anything/Loveless/EP’s 1988-1991 (Sony)

Seminal noise pop barely covers it, these are stone cold classics and in many ways the EP’s combine to create a long lost MBV LP for those that missed the vinyl first time round.

Nearly ran’s …

They were lots of great albums this year but I don’t have time to review them all so to save space I shall précis the 'best of the rest' in Haiku form.

Sharon Van Etten: Tramp (Jagjaguar)

Singer Songwriters

Normally Irritating

This one is quite good 

Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti: Mature themes (4AD)

Mercurial guy

Incoherent bontempi

To be expected 

Carter Tutti Void: Tranverse (Mute)

Factory/Gristle

An ’art’ collaboration

Synthesiser porn 

Godspeed you! Black Emperor: 'Allelujah! Don't Bend! Ascend! (Constellation)

Canadian band

Better than Nickleback eh?

SONIC CATHEDRAL! 

Dexys: One day I’m going to soar (BMG)

Twenty-seven years

Rowland talks all over it

It’s rather a shame 

Any other business?

Well ... I like to think I did pretty well with my 3 to watch in 2012 blog.

While Addison Groove’s debut LP didn’t quite hit the spot, labels like Swamp 81, Hemlock and Hessle Audio have hit a rich vein of form producing some of the most interesting dance music around.

Roof Light had a hand in the excellent Brother Sun, Sister Moon LP as I mentioned above but there were also a couple of skittish house tracks and simply beautiful 12" on Styrax under the moniker GhostLight.

But I take all the credit for giving early props to … 

Throwing Snow

Throwing Snow: Perca (Taken from the Clamor EP).

Throwing Snow really began to make a mark this year with a session for Radio1Xtra, remixes galore, critical acclaim and a new label at his disposal. The Clamor and Aspera EP’s were rich and varied 4 trackers that had real finesse to them. Snow Ghosts the much-anticipated collaboration with Augustus Ghost should appear soon and I have feeling 2013 will see Ross Tones and company go from strength to strength.

Thanks for reading – please buy your music if you really like it. I don't want to encourage the use of Spotify but I'm sure you will find most of the artists featured on there if you search.

Also …

I seem to manage about three posts a year on here so I’ll try and up the work-rate somewhat with smaller posts that require little or no forethought.

Meanwhile I’d welcome your recommendations for the doomsday mix-tape, 'Haiku Reviews', comments, shares and RTs.

Here’s to the next thing that makes us go: O_O

@eops