Fave Albums of 2021
My favourite (new) albums of 2021…
Cleo Sol - Mother
Put this record on and you have an instantly better day. Probably the album I’ve played most this year - Sol’s voice has an exquisite emotional clarity which communicates optimism, love and uplift when you really need it besides which, she’s just a helluva songwriter. How this album got left off most of mainstream media’s 2021 'Best Of' lists is an absolute mystery to me as it feels to me like a longterm, timeless classic.
Pharaoh Sanders, Floating Points & London Symphony Orchestra - Promises
Not jazz, not ambient, not orchestral but some sublime combination of all plus whatever magic ingredient they had working with them that day to bear them, and you the listener, aloft via updrafts and downdrafts with each movement. It’s achingly beautiful. I've been a fan of Sanders for a long, long time and this collaboration might be a career best.
Bruit - The Machine Is Burning And Now Everyone Knows It Could Happen Again
Sisyphean brilliance and majesty that builds to impossible peaks and then ascends some more just when you think it’s barely clinging to the precipice of sound that it's already built. An aural summation of the current human condition. Sadly not available on any format other than a Bandcamp download.
UPDATE as of January 26, 2022 - this astonishing piece of work is now available on vinyl and CD from Pelagic Records. Various vinyl editions, plus merch. See here (for all). For US orders, here.
Arooj Aftab - Vulture Prince
I actually bought this twice on Bandcamp; once digitally then again on a vinyl pre-order when I realised I had to have a physical copy. Here’s what I wrote on Bandcamp at the time: “Something at the heart of this music is intensely moving - sedimentary blankets of emotion wrapped around an absence, as if it's going into orbit around a memory…” Back then, I didn’t know that Aftab had lost her brother and this album is a kind of meditation on grief that transcends that emotional process and transmutes what remains into this yearning musical artefact.
Lone - Always Inside Your Head
Unclassifiable, other than, y’know, it’s EDM, but with the widest of potential horizons in that you can dance to it or just sit down and listen and be immersed in its vast and intricate soundscapes. Gorgeous.
Chai - Wink
Pure, perfect pop that emanates a gigantic sense of both of fun and purpose, which should be mutually exclusive concepts but somehow exist together here without cancelling each other out.
William Parker - Migration of Silence Into and Out of the Tone World, Vols. 1 - 10
There is no adequate description for this set, other than it is both monumental and paradoxically intimate. It flits between those scales, and broadly speaking is a kind of free jazz, but giving it that label does it a disservice as it just doesn’t portray the successful ambition and explorations of each volume. Each is a collaboration between bassist Parker and a female vocalist, and each is of a very different character and scope. He says the following in the liner notes: “...This box set is dedicated to all people in the world who are searching for freedom - those who want to eliminate hate, racism, sexism, greed and lies in their lifetime.” Those aspirations give you a clue as to the breadth of this canvas. It’s an extraordinary work that I’m still exploring.
Sault - Nine
More sketched-in and jammy than previous albums but as politically charged and on point as always. It’s oppressive, claustrophobic, a musical rumination on how things are. By the time a string section swings in halfway through Bitter Streets there’s a sense of relief, of looking for light piercing the gloom. Overall a harder, harsher, less upbeat listening experience than either of 2020’s double LPs, but I suspect, over time, it’s going to feel like the most visceral of their output from this 2020-21 period.
NB: this album was available for only 99 days so I can’t link to it directly - instead there’s a link to their website. Explore.
Christine Ott - Time To Die
Just… hugely original. It’s either gigantic, orchestrally textured, or minimalist and never less than provocative. I don’t know how to categorise Ott’s music, I just know I love it and it leads me to thoughtscapes and emotions other music doesn’t.
ABBA - Voyage
Have ABBA always been a part of your life (in my case, since 1974 and the Eurovision Song Contest)? If yes, you’ll get this record and approach it on its own terms. If no, and if you profess not to like or understand ABBA, nothing I write here will change that. If you do, you’ve already got your own perceptions of the songs contained herein. Myself, I cannot get over the fact that this thing exists at all when I was so sure it never would. It is, perhaps, a proof of sorts that you should never say never, and nothing is impossible.
Oh, and Don’t Shut Me Down is up there amongst ABBA’s absolute best and should go on the next pressing of ABBA Gold.
Squid - Bright Green Field
I was first attracted to Squid via their Sludge / Broadcaster EP, which contains two terrifically explosive and inventive tracks whose intelligent anarchy heralded this LP. It is, by turns, more ambitious / angrier / more theatrical - spirit of ’77 and all that. I wish I could get to see Squid live because I’m sure they’re incredible (as evidenced by the free Live CD that came with this limited edition). It’s not an easy listen by any means, but the intense, considered, visceral outrage this album communicates against the injustices of the modern world (and particularly the last six years or so) means that it’s the perfect album to play to know that I’m far from alone in feeling that.
Yola - Stand For Myself
Holy skies, what a voice. It soars across the ocean in both directions. You can hear the influences, which are both American and British, from country to disco to folk to soul. Yola infuses them all with her own gigantic, Transatlantic, transhuman spirit and weaves tapestries anew with THAT VOICE.
Just listen to this…
L’Eclair - Confusions
Swiss post-rock, from the top of which you can see forever.
Little Simz - Sometimes I Might Be Introvert
My first reaction when I heard this was “Holy shit.” Before this, Little Simz was great and in a class of her own but this is in another whole sphere. This is an inner life, writ large, projected from the tops of the tower blocks of south London. This is both immense and intimate, a mind at the end of its rope which is the beginning of another whole level of creativity and perception - utterly exhilarating to hear and utterly grounded (and grounding), all at the same time. All there, unfolding and blooming as you listen. I found it following Cleo Sol (at the top of this list) who features on a duet here (Selfish) and maybe this album represents the other side of the many-faceted coin they both inhabit.
The Chills - Scatterbrain
As far as wordsmithery and intricate, finely-crafted tunes go, not many can hold a candle to Martin Phillipps (who is, essentially, the Chills). Perhaps his finest record since Submarine Bells…?
Phantasmagoric, psychedelic, incandescent soul. Nai Palm’s voice is extraordinary. I am so glad I went for the limited edition on glow-in-the-dark vinyl which just perfectly describes this radiant record.
Compilations and Reissues
Barry Gray - Space: 1999 Original Soundtrack, Year 1
This year, Silva Screen issued two vinyl collections of Space: 1999 OSTs, one for Year 1 containing (mostly) music by Barry Gray, one for Year 2 by Derek Wadsworth (both also available as a single collection on CD). Gray was Gerry Anderson’s in-house composer for almost all his TV shows up to and including Year 1 of 1999, and it’s this score that finds him at his most epic and glorious. The music is permeated with a sense of “cosmic sorrow” and sublime grandeur that I’m not sure has ever been approached in another genre TV show, ever. This collection is completely remastered and in some cases, tracks are reordered and combined with stock music so that they more faithfully reproduce the way the score was heard in the episode.
The Fall - Bend Sinister
Sumptuous repackaging of an album about which the word “Sumptuous” was probably never supposed to be used. Mark E Smith, while alive, should’ve been knighted and in any just world, would certainly have been recognised as the working class poet laureate that he was. Too spiky, too critical, too maverick, too uncompromising, too insightful, too incomprehensible, and all at the same time quintessentially British and if you like any of those qualities, it’s all here, and then some.
I went home to London this year for the London Film Festival and one day meeting a friend for lunch in Camden, visited Out On The Floor Records. Jake, proprietor of same, was playing some incredible dub while I browsed. It quickly became very clear that I should not leave the premises without acquiring Vol. 2 of this album that he helped curate and exec-produced. Very, very highly recommended to all lovers of deep, mind-blowing dub. (I also bought Vol. 1 from the previous year.)
Innerground 100 [INN100] - DJ Marky and Friends
Makes me feel all London. As is ever clearer with each passing year, you can take the boy out of London, but you can’t take London out of the boy. Or the attitude and dance moves, come to that.
Yacht Soul - Too Slow to Disco
Picked this up in San Francisco, intrigued by a tracklist that featured a Chaka Kahn cover version of Fleetwood Mac’s Everywhere that I’d never heard. Also here: Aretha Franklin doing The Doobie Brothers’ What A Fool Believes, Billy Paul on Paul McCartney’s Let ‘Em In... need I go on? Every single track on here is an absolute gem, every one an outstanding definition of what a cover version is or should do. Absolutely superb collection.
A sublime set of cover versions selected by Don Letts. One of those collections you can pop on time after time and continue to be delighted by.
I listen to music on every format available and many different platforms, but if you want to see some of what I’m listening to, you can follow me on Bandcamp here. I also tend to talk about vinyl a lot on Instagram and sometimes Twitter.
