Some Albums I Liked in 2019

It’s been a good enough year for music that the list is 20 albums this time.

20: Wrecked — Zonal
(industrial hip hop, dub)

Zonal marks a new collaboration from Justin Broadrick of Godflesh and Kevin Martin (The Bug). Much like their 90s project Techno Animal, the music is heavy, grimy stuff fusing elements of hip hop, dub, and noise. Wrecked has an odd two-part structure to it, the first six songs being collaborations with Moor Mother (whose own album this year has a similarly apocalyptic feel to it), while the back half is a series of noisier instrumentals. The whole thing is suffused with a strong sense of dread, but at the same time you can’t help nodding along.

Highlights: ‘System Error’; ‘Wrecked’; ‘Debris’; ‘S.O.S.’

19: Anima — Thom Yorke
(electronic, art pop)

Anima, instead of following suit with last year’s score for Suspiria, finds Thom Yorke encased in the same woozy, slightly sterile electronics as his earlier solo work — but it achieves a richer, lusher experience than those albums all the same. The album feels like a soundtrack for anxious night-time city wandering. There’s a slightly alien quality to it, but shot through with spikes of heady emotion. And songs like ‘Impossible Knots’ bring to mind the hybrid organic–electronic approach of In Rainbows — a very welcome nostalgia.

Highlights: ‘Twist’; ‘I Am a Very Rude Person’; ‘Impossible Knots’

18: Punk — Chai
(dance-punk, J-pop)

The music of Chai is absolutely infectious pop, combining J-pop formulas with the grooves and energy of classic new wave and dance-punk groups, along with elements from various electronic genres. The message is one of self-acceptance and love. The performances are absurdly fun and endearing. The attitude is pretty well conveyed by the cover: bright colours, straightforward design, a mood of undisguised joyful enthusiasm. It’s very difficult to listen to this album without a big smile plastered over your face.

Highlights: ‘CHOOSE GO!’; ‘GREAT JOB’; ‘I’m me’; ‘Fashionista’

17: Dogrel — Fontaines D.C.
(post-punk)

Among the bands of the post-punk revival (or is it the post-punk revival revival now?), Fontaines D.C. feel like a very pure exemplar of the genre. Excepting the final track’s ode to classic Irish folk music, there aren’t really any departures — into noise rock, new wave, or whatever else — on Dogrel. Rather, the music feels like a direct evocation of bands like The Fall and Joy Division in all their dimensions, from the morose to the raging. It’s a wonderfully earnest, stripped-down and immediate album, helped along by vocalist Grian Chatten’s lovely Dublin brogue.

Highlights: ‘Too Real’; ‘Television Screens’; ‘Liberty Belle’; ‘Boys in the Better Land’

16: H.A.Q.Q. — Liturgy
(black/post-metal)

After 2015’s bizarre Ark Work, Liturgy’s new album is a return to form and to — well, as close as they ever get to normality. Which is not terribly close. This is decidedly a black metal album, but it’s also peppered with math rock experimentation, with cinematic strings, with vibraphone and glockenspiel. If this sounds potentially unlistenable on paper, trust me, it works incredibly well in practice. H.A.Q.Q. is a strange, intense listen, alternately unsettling and blissful. You can probably ignore the infographic on the cover unless you’re keen to learn about band leader Hunter Hunt-Hendrix’s ‘uniquely marxist and psychoanalytic vision of God’, in which case more power to you.

Highlights: ‘Hajj’; ‘Pasaqalia’; ‘God of Love’

15: New Hell — Greet Death
(shoegaze, emo)

The boys of Greet Death are very sad. They’re excited to let you know how sad they are with their beautiful indie guitars and vocals and occasionally with a big heavy riff. This is prime sadboy material. Band members Logan Gaval and Sam Boyhtari take turns on vocal duties, their voices strongly distinct from each other but both perfectly attuned to the kind of heartfelt performance the band’s rich instrumentals demand. A great album to lie around feeling sorry for yourself to.

Highlights: ‘You’re Gonna Hate What You’ve Done’; ‘Entertainment’; ‘New Hell’

14: After its own death / Walking in a spiral towards the house — Nivhek
(ambient)

The latest release from Liz Harris (who usually releases music under the name Grouper) is a wintry, meditative journey through ethereal vocals, haunting chimes, field recordings, and a couple of fuzzy drone sections. It’s ostensibly two long compositions, but the whole album feels of a piece, the shorter back half reinterpreting sections of the first in muted form. The album conjures a mood of dreamlike stasis throughout, a sense of nocturnal wandering, of quiet solace in desolation.

Highlights: ‘After its own death’

13: The Talkies — Girl Band
(noise rock)

Girl Band’s comeback after several years serves as a reminder that they don’t really sound like anything else out there. The band’s method is still using a classic rock band setup to create music that has increasingly little to do with rock music. Much of what makes up The Talkies more closely resembles dance music than anything else played with guitars. There’s a focus on texture and rhythm over all else. The instrumentation on this album sounds otherworldly, and vocalist Dara Kiely’s are the same manic noise poetry as ever. More even than their debut, this album strains at the limits of what traditional rock instrumentation can do: ‘Aibohphobia’ becomes so blown out and distorted it feels like your speakers are exploding, ‘Akineton’ is a pure noise exercise that sounds something like an alien invasion, ‘Amygdala’ feels like garage rock stripped down to its bare components to the point of parody, and ‘Prefab Castle’ dissolves in the middle into Scott Walker-esque noise collage only to reappear as ecstatic techno.

Highlights: ‘Going Norway’; ‘Shoulderblades’; ‘Aibohphobia’; ‘Prefab Castle’

12: A Gaze Among Them
— Big|Brave
(post-metal)

Big|Brave is a small band capable of producing a disproportionately huge sound. Big riffs, pounding drums, and vocalist Robin Wattie’s uniquely piercing voice combine into a sound that doesn’t really resemble any other band going. There’s a sort of steady, hypnotic quality to the music too, a clarity which transports you to a meditative place and keeps you there, cradled in warmth, until the final beat sounds and the guitars fade into silence.

Highlights: ‘Muted Shifting of Space’; ‘Sibling’

11: Hidden History
of the Human Race
— Blood Incantation
(death/prog metal)

Hidden History of the Human Race sounds exactly like its cover looks: a mad, proggy sci-fi odyssey. It also absolutely shreds. Like last year’s Horrendous album, the music here is drenched in influence from classic bands like Death, but Blood Incantation to let their compositions ricochet off into a far corner of the galaxy. ‘Inner Paths’ is essentially a psychedelic jam session, while the epic closer covers so much ground it feels like death metal’s 2112. Just an incredible amount of fun.

Highlights: ‘Slave Species of the Gods’; ‘Inner Paths (To Outer Space)’

10: Weeping Choir
— Full of Hell
(grindcore, noise)

Full of Hell are relentless both in their musical approach and in their output, putting out collaborative albums galore in addition to their core releases. But they were pretty quiet between 2017 and this year’s Weeping Choir, and it resulted in their most brutal and accomplished album yet. The album is relentless from start to finish, cycling through pummelling riffs without pausing for breath, to the extent that it’s often hard to tell where one track ends and the next begins. Even the dark ambient interlude ‘Rainbow Coil’ doesn’t have a moment of quiet on it. The centrepiece, the magnificent ‘Armory of Obsidian Glass’, is a sludge metal epic featuring haunting backing vocals from Kristin Hayter (Lingua Ignota; more on her below), which just as it seems to be dissolving into the record’s one moment of tranquillity around the five-minute mark, comes surging back into devastating life.

Highlights: ‘Burning Myrrh’; ‘Thundering Hammers’; ‘Armory of Obsidian Glass’; ‘Angels Gather Here’

9: Ghosts — Dead Neanderthals
(jazz, drone)

On Ghosts, the ‘New Wave of Dutch Heavy Jazz’ duo Dead Neanderthals team up with Scott Hedrick of Skeletonwitch for a blast of mind-bending guitar-sax-and-drums insanity. The two long compositions here are repetitive to a fault; they are poised, steady, unstoppable; and when they finally let loose, as for example in the cathartic last five minutes of ‘Death Bell’, the result is absolutely explosive. Music to make you see colours.

Highlights: ‘Death Bell’

8: Love You to Bits — No-Man
(synthpop, progressive pop)

No-Man, Steven Wilson’s art-pop project with Tim Bowness, returned this year after a decade of inactivity with something totally different. Where their albums leading up to the hiatus were characterised by quiet and restraint, bearing a strong influence from latter-day Talk Talk, Love You to Bits is, as the cover unsubtly announces, a big, garish disco-prog epic (or two). In some ways it’s a return to the spirit of No-Man’s early music, but the ambition and polish on display here were not present on those records. Bowness’s vocals are as ludicrously breathy and overwrought as ever; Wilson’s instrumental contributions range through disco, synthpop, electronica and free jazz soloing without restraint. It’s ridiculous, and campy, and somehow brilliant.

Highlights: ‘Love You to Pieces’

7: Sea of Worry
— Have a Nice Life
(shoegaze, post-punk)

Have a Nice Life are back with their first album in five years, and it’s about as gloomy, lo-fi and aggrieved as ever. On songs like ‘Sea of Worry’ and ‘Trespassers W’, take a more aggressive, punk approach than usual, though the production is as murky as ever. Meanwhile ‘Science Beat’ channels the twinkly guitars of 80s new wave (tell me the second half doesn’t sound at least a little bit like ‘Everybody Wants to Rule the World’), while the long closer is more in the vein of the long droning songs they’re best known for. Standout track ‘Dracula Bells’ is an unusually clean, melodic dose of classic post-punk for the first half, then dissolves into a noisy, dissonant Daughters-esque coda which in my book is among the best things the band has ever recorded.

Highlights: ‘Sea of Worry’; ‘Dracula Bells’; ‘Lords of Tresserhorn’

6: Ghosteen
— Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds
(art rock, electronic)

Continuing in the mournful vein of 2016’s Skeleton Tree, Nick Cave’s latest is if anything even more emotionally devastating than that album. Ghosteen deals with grief frankly and vulnerably, in a way that makes it an absolutely overwhelming listening experience. If you’re anything like me, you’re in tears before the end of heartbreaking opener ‘Spinning Song’. The album is full of incredibly lush arrangements replete with strings and synthesizers. Cave’s voice goes falsetto at times in a way it rarely has before. And the two longer songs on the album’s second disc are among the most powerful he’s ever written.

Highlights: ‘Spinning Song’; ‘Bright Horses’; ‘Ghosteen’; ‘Hollywood’

5: 2020 — Richard Dawson
(freak folk, prog rock)

2020, Captain Beefheart comparisons aside, feels to me more like a contemporary version of Genesis’ 1973 album Selling England by the Pound. It’s a sort of state-of-the-nation album, looking at snapshots of people’s lives in Britain today, under the strains of seemingly perpetual Conservative government. The music combines folk and progressive rock with a flair for deceptively catchy melodies. It’s full of pathos and good-hearted humour, but it’s also self-consciously ridiculous; the lyrics are wilfully unpoetic but delivered with unabashed melodrama. ‘I’m not coming in to work today/I’m really ill’, Dawson all but shrieks on the first track. On ‘Jogging’ he sings with heart-wrenching sincerity about the way a supermarket cashier tutting under her breath ‘destroys me for a week’; elsewhere in the same song we see a busker hilariously ‘sneak an ugly word into Wonderwall as I went by’.

Highlights: ‘Civil Servant’; ‘Jogging’; ‘Black Triangle’; ‘Dead Dog in an Alleyway’

4: Sulphur English
— Inter Arma
(sludge/death/post-metal)

Sulphur English is Inter Arma’s ugliest album. The band, known for their blending of various extreme metal styles with Pink Floyd-esque melodic passages and peerless guitar solos, doesn’t really do much of the latter here (except on the inspired ‘Stillness’). Instead, there’s a conscious attempt to create a sustained sense of claustrophobic nastiness here. The crushing death metal stomp of tracks like ‘A Waxen Sea’ and ‘Citadel’, the hideous noise rock of ‘The Howling Lands’, the shifting, psychedelic black metal of ‘The Atavist’s Meridian’: none of it’s exactly pretty. But it turns out the harsh, depressing mood captured here suits Inter Arma just as well as beautiful proggy soundscapes.

Highlights: ‘Citadel’; ‘The Howling Lands’; ‘Stillness’; ‘The Atavist’s Meridian’

3: I’m Losing Myself
— An Isolated Mind
(black/post-metal, drone)

An Isolated Mind is one of these self-released one-man metal projects that often turn out to be the most interesting stuff going on in the genre. I’m Losing Myself takes mental turmoil as its theme, specifically creator Kameron Bogges’ struggles with bipolar disorder. The music is appropriately changeable for the theme. Most songs start with some variety of harsh, dissonant black metal, but they always end up somewhere different: ‘Afraid of Dissonance’ dissolves into a gorgeous denouement complete with clarinet; ‘Turritopsis dohrnii’ transitions from a soaring guitar solo into a series of meditative instrumental passages concluding in a very proggy keyboard-drenched coda; and so on.

The album’s final two tracks are something different and bold: after the manic energy of the first half, the title track is an incredibly low-key instrumental piece which manages to perfectly evoke a slow dissolution of energy and mind. The long droning closer ‘I’ve Lost Myself’ is languid, lifeless, and outstays its welcome rather like a depressive episode.

Highlights: ‘Afraid of Dissonance’; ‘Turritopsis dohrnii’; ‘I’m Losing Myself’

2: Caligula— Lingua Ignota
(noise, neoclassical)

Scott Walker might have died this year, but the spirit of his late avant-garde work lives on in artists like Lingua Ignota. The sonic world of Caligula — described by Hayter as an ‘outsider opera’ — is a heady mix of strings, piano and brass with heavy percussion, guitars and harsh noise electronics. The vocals range from the operatic to the blood-curdling shriek, often mid-sentence. The experience is frankly unsettling, and surprising at every turn. ‘Butcher of the World’ revolves around a sample of Henry Purcell’s ‘Funeral Music for Queen Mary’ with blown-out screeched vocals over top. ‘Day of Tears and Mourning’ unfolds something like a sludge metal cabaret. The vocals on ‘Fragrant Is My Many Flower’d Crown’ and ‘Sorrow! Sorrow! Sorrow!’ are electronically shifted and distorted, ‘Kid A’ style.

The track titles give you an idea of the lyrical content. Caligula occupies a very medieval world of violence, shame, judgement and retribution, but applies all this hellfire to Hayter’s own experiences as a survivor of domestic violence. The lyrics deal in unpleasant depth with issues of abuse, cruelty and suicide, but they also seem frequently to be summoning up a spirit of vengeance to exact retribution for these ills. The line is often blurred between the voice of the abuser and that of the avenger: the atmosphere is one of omnipresent, incomprehensible violence, like a Greek tragedy.

Highlights: ‘Do You Doubt Me Traitor’; ‘Butcher of the World’; ‘If the Poison Won’t Take You My Dogs Will’; ‘Spite Alone Holds Me Aloft’

1: Schlagenheim — Black Midi
(math/noise/prog rock)

Black Midi is the most exciting young band to come around in a long time. They seem to have emerged fully formed, creating music in an odd, intricate blend of experimental rock genres and unleashing it in frenetic live performances which nobody attends without being blown away by the energy and ambition of the band. Schlagenheim captures all this energy and channels it into one of the most unpredictable debuts I’ve ever encountered.

Frontman Geordie Greep’s vocal performances have something of the androgynous theatricality of a David Bowie, a Peter Gabriel, a Tom Verlaine — most memorably on the explosive ‘Ducter’ and the decidedly no-wave ‘bmbmbm’. In fact everything about the album is firm in its rejection of current music trends, its embrace of eccentricity. Elsewhere bassist Cameron Picton and guitarist Matt Kwasniewski-Kelvin contribute their own similarly out-there vocals, Cameron’s alternately deadpan and ferocious vocals adorning ‘Speedway’ and ‘Near DT, MI’, Matt’s wild yells shaping krautrock freakout ‘Years Ago’. The album’s centrepiece ‘Western’ is a memorable odyssey progressing from country-inflected balladry to Yes-channelling prog rock and back again. (The lyrics are as memorably surreal as the music: ‘I dream of a woman with the teeth of a raven and the hands of a porcupine’; ‘a pink caterpillar with six anorexic children’.)

Most of the bands that build up this level of hype in the music world turn out disappointments. The ambition and insanity of Schlagenheim suggests Black Midi will remain interesting for a long time to come.

Highlights: ‘953’; ‘Speedway’; ‘Near DT, MI’; ‘bmbmbm’