FKA Twigs — Magdalene

FKA Twigs’ reputation precedes her. Since her 2014 debut, LP1, Twigs has released the odd morsel (including the stunning EP M3LL155X) to abate her fiercely loyal fans. Despite their quality, these releases have felt ancillary. Stepping-stones to an inevitable sophomore album. That sophomore arrives in Magdalene, a wounded work which both defies and exceeds expectations.

Twigs' M.O. is a clinical, slightly frightening deconstruction of female sexuality and power. A former Beyonce backing dancer, Twigs knows the dichotomous nature of objectification. To be something both desired and disposable. To feel eyes which linger before they pass. Her name refers to the cracking of her joints when dancing — a reminder of the physicality of dance; the strength and power requisite for grace.

Magdalene extends and deepens this deconstruction with compassion and cutting maturity. Twigs’ widely publicised fight with fibroid uterine tumours left her living with ‘a fruit bowl of pain’. A Spike Jonze-shot Apple ad featured a Twigs who, unbeknownst to the public, bore a searing surgical cut which reopened and bled as she danced. Rooted, as you’d expect, in the gospels, Magdalene is a product of great pain and eventual resurrection. It shoots for the irresistible melodrama of the Passion, and somehow holds together through it all.

The second half of this LP is more raw and emotive than anything Twigs has ever recorded. Its measured pace may discourage some long-time fans expecting the voguing Twigs of LP1. And when Twigs does try to capture this energy in the Future-featuring Holy Terrain, the result is a track which feels asynchronous with the album it sits in. It’s still more banger than clanger — but somehow disconnected from its peers.

Crucially, Twigs still dodges definition. Her work is difficult to categorise, straddling more genres than you can count and doing stuff all of its own on top. Whatever Magdalene is, it bodes well for the future. Twigs has been through the wringer, but emerges refreshed and better than ever.

Magdalene is available for purchase and streaming here.

Words by Andrew O’Keefe

Have a Nice Life — Sea of Worry

Have a Nice Life contend with the legacy of their seminal work, Deathconsciousness. This is a trap many young bands with promise become caught in. It's the reason My Bloody Valentine took twenty-two years to follow up Loveless. Taking notes from MBV, Have a Nice Life have here rejigged their signature sound.

Tremolo guitar and falsetto ooh-ing gives Sea of Worry a blackened surf-rock vibe. Production is more squeaky-clean than before. Lyrical candour is as biting as ever, but now more considered; less damaged and frightening. The cumulative effect of these changes is a mixed bag. The album separates itself elegantly from Have a Nice Life's previous work, but at points feels tinny and phoned-in.

Earlier works' cracked rage defers to a resigned softness. Lyrics are still peppered with arcane imagery and refer to Satan and death. But something feels more measured; a depressive old-head who has learned to coexist with their condition.

When this approach works, though, Sea of Worry is a joy. 'Science Beat' is a dreamy piece which lunges into some beautiful harmonies and melodic guitar phrases. It's something like a lost New Order song, damaged and decayed but still reaching towards the sun. A microcosm of this album's successes, the song is a balancing act between hope and dismay.

'Lords of Tresserhorn' majestically resurrects the band's noisy origins. It feels like a self-immolating track. Every snare crash loosens the kit's component parts a little more. Every strike of string frays and splits the steel fibres. 'Destinos' is similarly monstrous, but offers unexpected moments of respite amidst its crushing power. These tracks represent a tendency for Sea of Worry to regress further into the band's old sound as it proceeds.

The general tone is one of quiet, fractured ethereality. The viscera has been mopped up, but the floor is still stained. It's an album which is beautiful, hopeful, and even at times fun. Have a Nice Life still occupy the same troublesome world — but they're having a good day in it.

Sea of Worry is available to purchase and stream here.

Words by Andrew O’Keefe

The Frenzies: The Decade In Music (2010-14)

Before we talk about music, trends, favourites, un-favourites, tragedies and triumphs, there’s one big question we need to ask about the past decade, which no one seems to have an answer for: what the hell are we supposed to call it? Everyone understands what the 90s, the 50s and the 80s are. It helps that they’ve got a catchy name. The 2000s just-about got away with being called ‘The Noughties’, but ‘the 2010s’? I have an idea: the Frenzies.

This decade transitioned from anxious to hysterical — first gradually, then all at once. Meanwhile, our consumption of art became ravenous and lightning-fast. We burned through fads so fast the word ‘era’ was in danger of losing all meaning. The decade’s dominant art-form was the meme — a medium so pervasive they’ll probably be studied at most universities by 2030, and so shallow that nearly every big thing exploded and vanished in under a week.

Meanwhile, the pitfalls of this surface-level engagement with the world manifested in disastrous democratic decisions, slow arduous attempts to undo the damage and a global doubling of antidepressant prescriptions.

If I sound cynical and defeatist, I don’t mean to. As this agonising decade meanders shambollicaly to a close I’m really quite optimistic. The aforementioned rate of mental illness is a canary in the coalmine, and the fierce counter-protests and steady decline of social media are signs that the world is not working and we’re waking up. We, as a species, are more in tune with politics, environmentalism, corruption and injustice than ever before. If people are to engage fervently in making the world better, catastrophic mistakes must be made. The threats have to be real, and if we do things right, The Frenzies will one day be seen as a cautionary tale, rather than the beginning of the end.

Science provides the tools for changing the world, but the motivation, ideas and urgency for doing so come from art. There are people out there who think that movies and music and video games are mindless distractions, and those people are only right to a very limited degree. These things are extremely powerful and they have a responsibility to enhance our engagement with the world.

Actor Tony Curtis once said that watching Cary Grant taught him ‘how to behave with a woman, how to get dressed at night, how to go to a restaurant and order dinner’. The Beatles defined the 60s just as much as the moon landings did. To sum up this preamble, the phrase ‘Enjoy responsibly’ shouldn’t just be limited to alcohol labels. Here is the music that defined the The Frenzies for me, for better, for worse, and for the future. 

2010

Reality Sugar-Pills:

Deerhunter — Halcyon Digest

We couldn’t have predicted the mess that the ensuing decade became. That being said, Deerhunter’s lush basement-rock opus Halcyon Digest was a vital lesson in questioning the past. As pretty as it often is, these cobwebbed songs make trauma and nostalgia sing with the same voice. ‘Do you recall,’ breathes Bradford Cox in the opening lines, ‘waking up on a dirty couch?’ Most of us have done that a lot in our lives. But can you remember how often you were glad to be there? The music itself never quite settles in the realms of joy and pain. While there’s a certain familiarity about their concoction of 70s AM pop, 90s shoegaze and 60s garage, there’s an effortless mystery that breathes out of every note, like dust from loose floorboards.

Try: Fountain Stairs

Prestigious Collages:

The Books — The Way Out

Thanks to an unprecedented access to stock footage, user-submitted videos and general internet lunacy, it’s a golden age for cut-and-paste artists. The Way Out is a shining example of how these materials can be woven into music. That being said, it also sounds as if The Books didn’t care all that much for the internet. The myriad of samples have been scavenged from old audio and video tapes — the kind you see in charity shop bargain bins with sun-bleached covers. Self-help and hypnosis lectures, answerphone messages, smack-talking toddlers, televangelist sermons and Gandhi are all instruments here. The uncredited voices have a tangible grubbiness to them, contrasting with the immaculately strange electo-damaged folk music. It would prove to be their final record, but it remains their most inspiring, poignant and purposeful.

Try: Chain of Missing Links

Power, Pomp and Penis-Pics

Kanye West — Runaway

As annoyed as I am with inevitably mentioning Mr Expensive-Pillows-Are-So-Hard-To-Sleep-On, Kanye West’s My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy really was a game-changer. The greatest thing about it is that it challenged the attention span of big-game pop music, particularly with ‘Runaway’. A nine-minute single (or 5-and-a-half for the radio edit) from one of the biggest pop stars on the planet, and he didn’t fall flat on his face? It’s as good as that achievement demands. A tirade of self-loathing swinging between between funny, uncomfortable and righteous, while Rick James’s disembodied voice shouts like an angry father. My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy without ‘Runaway’ would be like Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band without ‘A Day in the Life’ — it’s a vulnerable fourth-wall break that allows you to understand the dream.

2011

Drop That Drop

Rihanna and Calvin Harris — We Found Love

Maybe the most influential song from the decade’s first half, ‘We Found Love’ became the official blueprint for the lazy faux-eurphoric EDM. That revving synth-drop was so depressingly effective every top-40 producer insisted on using it at any wretched opportunity. That being said, as much as I really loathe this song, its dominance was inevitable. MTV was long-gone, radio was dying fast and Spotify hadn’t quite picked up the slack, so how could new music be promoted to fresh ears? Where else but the club. I hated clubs, and yet, I’m almost nostalgic for ‘We Found Love’, if only because it makes me remember a time when I actually went out. Then again, I didn’t go out all that much, largely because of music like this. 

James Dean Goes to Hell

Dirty Beaches — Badlands

When we talk of escapism, is it the desire to be somewhere else, or to be someone else? To show the world through a stranger’s lens – in all its distortions, fears and curiosities – is the goal of many a film-maker. The fact that Alex Zhang Hungtai’s ‘movies’ don’t have moving images shouldn’t penalise him in this category. In his own words, ‘the sound is the leading man’. The hero of Badlands drives a car in desperate need of an oil change; his nose and throat are clogged with soot, but he can still sing like a battlescarred teen-idol (even when he’s having a breakdown in a roadside dustbin). This is rock n roll as heard by unhinged ears. Romance, lust, malice and anxiety are here, warped but vivid, buried under a veil of monochrome celluloid. What’s more, the narrative is incomplete. Ending just as the danger is at its least tuneful and most potent, our obscure leading man vanishes just 27 minutes after we meet him, and is all the more tantalizing for it.

Try: Lord Knows Best

Salty Fingers Breaking Fresh Bread

King Creosote & Jon Hopkins — Diamond Mine

The guys at my local record store used to sell a copy of Diamond Mine every time they played it. This was such a dependable happenstance that it was their best selling album for two straight years. Music this emotionally heavy is rarely so easy to enjoy. Jon Hopkins’ glacial soundscapes recall a Scottish fishing village so vividly it borders on cinematography. It also makes King Creosote’s songwriting shine all the brighter. The songs ache with ancestral grief, and yet, as he sings, it’s as if the wounds are being drawn out like a splinter. The final result can unobtrusively silence a room within a few minutes, and can keep it silent until the end.

Try: Bubble

History of another Future

The Beach Boys — The SMiLE Sessions

Even though Brian Wilson’s masterpiece was never released, the mere idea of it was influential. Many disciples channeled their dreams of what might have been into records of their own, and bootlegs compiled from scavenged outtakes circulated among fans. SMiLE is, was, and always will be unfinished, but four decades after its scheduled release, The SMiLE Sessions is the closest we’ll ever get. The result is heavenly. Like its closest sibling Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, this record blurs so-called high-brow and low-brow culture into an immaculate collage. In fact, it feels a whole lot stranger than Sgt Pepper. Thanks in no small part to the surreal lyrics of Van Dyke Parks, The SMiLE Sessions is a thoroughly holy matrimony of Walt Whitman, Looney Tunes, and Americana from coast to coast. Even after everyone tried to make their own version, there’s simply nothing like it.

Try: Surf’s Up

2012

This Is Pop

Carly Rae Jepsen — Call Me Maybe

It was November, and I was having the most miserable night out of my life. I’d been dragged to a vast and vile London club stuffed full of snotty nitwits who thought nothing of calling you a cunt without provocation. I had my first ever cigarette that night thinking, ‘well… maybe this will help?’ It didn’t. Towards the end of the night, I sank into a chair, hoping to blend into the background until my friends got bored. It didn’t take me long to realise I was finally hearing that ‘Call Me Maybe’ song that people had been making memes of for the past 2 months — and it was brilliant. Those zing-zing keyboards, her nervous-happy singing, the fact that she was telling someone to ‘call’ her as if it wasn’t the age of Facebook stalking and cry-wanking — dear God, I get it! Despite being downcast and alienated in a crowd of hundreds of people with no escape, that was the moment I stopped writing off mainstream pop on principle. Like all music, most of it is bad, but some of it is ‘Call Me Maybe’.

Black and white neon

Daughn Gibson — All Hell

This is just a tragedy. After his low-profile debut album, electronic-country troubadour Daughn Gibson’s career was systematically dismantled by bad luck and bad decisions. His mediocre sequel flopped like a sack of used lube and was backed by one of the worst videos of all time. The listeners and hype melted away. It’s a shame that this could happen after such a promising debut — but All Hell isn’t ‘a promising debut’. All Hell is an unrecognised classic. A brief, cinematic and seductive record that uses its limited budget to its advantage, like a lo-fi Lynchian dream. Gibson invokes rainwashed monochrome streets, loving parents, disappointing sons, worried daughters, undiagnosed mental disorders, technicolor love affairs, fire, brimstone, sex on steaming car bonnets, and wounded optimism. He touches on his scenes briefly and memorably, leaving the songs to bloom long after they’ve finished. So many years and so many plays after I first found it, it still blooms. You can read about more albums on this list if you like but this is my favourite. Go find it. Or if I ever give you a lift anywhere, I keep spare copies in my car because everyone always wants to know what it is.

Try: Tiffany Lou

Winter In Hell

Swans — The Seer

This decade, only Matthew McConaughey and erectile dysfunction made more impressive comebacks. As underground legends in the 80s and 90s, Swans had influenced scores of bands, from acknowledged greats like Nirvana and Nine Inch Nails to cult heroes like Godspeed and Supersilent. They are, nonetheless, inimitable. After eleven albums of industrial, folk, post-punk psych-rock and tape experiments, Michael Gira and his band turned in ‘the culmination’ of all music he had ever made. Its intensity, ambition, and confrontational lunacy is jaw-dropping. The listener’s patience is tested over and over, pummelling the senses with monotony, before the eventual reward of transcendental out-of-body ecstasy (for some). The Seer is the best kind of ‘experimental’ record — the kind with purpose, and so much to add to the conversation, even if everyone in the room despises it.

Try: Mother of the World

Warm Mist On Wet Grass

Mirrorring — Foreign Body

I might not write much here, simply because looking at the cover is all you need to know. Look at it. It sounds like that. The first and only collaboration between ambient-folk greats Liz Harris (Grouper) and Jesy Fortino (Tiny Vipers), Foreign Body has a geothermal rumble and hiss underneath it. There’s a melancholy here, but even at its saddest, its tones are comforting, soft and deep. At times, the singing sounds like melodic pillow-talk. Elsewhere, they sound like lone forest sirens. As for the music itself, neither person in Mirrorring has made anything quite as enveloping as this.  

Try: Fell Sound

Brain Hiccups and Body Rhythms

Fiona Apple — The Idler Wheel…

In the past 23 years, Fiona Apple has released four albums. This is frustrating, but it’s easy to quiet your impatience when you consider the results. Would you prefer Christmas dinner from the oven or the microwave? The Idler Wheel… ( somehow only the second-longest title in her catalogue) is an intensely rhythmic reinvention of the singer-songwriter album. Apple produced it with drummer Charley Drayton, and the pairing is exceptional. Drayton is a veteran who has worked with everyone from The Rolling Stones to The B-52s, but I’m willing to bet money that he really relished working on this. It’s a best-case-scenario of creative freedom — the kind that could only have happened in secret without a major record label’s knowledge.

The whole album creaks and rumbles like a trebuchet. Melody, rhythm and ambiance tessellate into a singular primal unit. This only further highlights Apple’s songwriting, which is at once more tender and more barbed than it’s ever been. Her tone slithers between defiance and shame, love and anger, while never quite landing on any of the above. Hers is a brain at war with itself and the world. That being said, this is far from a worrying listen. Fiona Apple may detail psychological unrest that most of us will never know, but she has never ever been ready to give up. Her forays into the darkness only widen the aperture of her heart — and, by extension, ours.

Try: Daredevil

A Face Being Eaten By a Jungle

Scott Walker — Bish Bosch

Back in the 60s, Scott Walker of The Walker Brothers was a golden-haired teen idol whose fandom rivalled that of The Beatles. This album samples bowel movements. 45 years is a long time. Bish Bosch is not a joke (although there are funny moments). This is one of the scariest albums ever made — an existential nightmare obsessed with decay, toilet humour, colonialism, fascism, insects, and the nauseating flaws of humanity. It’s a long way from pop, it’s a long way from classical. Instead, the closest art-form this resembles is experimental theatre, cross-bred with poetry and visceral sound design.

And what poetry! He seems thoroughly bored with beauty, and is instead obsessed with mapping the infinite depth of ugliness, in all its absurdity and horror: ‘Shit might pretzel Christ’s intestines’, ‘Like a face being eaten by a jungle’, ‘You’re so boring you can’t even entertain doubt’, ‘Here’s to a lousy life’, ‘Cattle are slaughtered, entrails examined, spread out across the moon’, ‘Nothing clears a room like removing a brain’. Speaking of clearing a room, the music follows suit: machetes are sharpened, detuned dogs bark, steel plates cave inwards and (lest we forget) there’s actual farting. True to its title, this is a Hieronymus Bosch gallery come to life, in all its cerebral and stomach-churning thrills. 

Try: Epizootics!

Part II (2013-14)

Part III (2015-16)

Part IV (2017-19)

Words by Joe Anthony Hill

The Frenzies: The Decade In Music (2013-14)

Joe Hill’s retrospective of the decade continues.

2013

Relaxation of the Arsehole

Robin Thicke — Blurred Lines

This doesn’t sound like a refined artist making his well-earned entrance into the mainstream. This sounds like the bullies winning: that kid at school with a gargantuan trust fund who developed body hair in all the right places and at just the right time so that absolutely no one made fun of him; the kid who never felt uncomfortable in his life, never had any trouble getting into someone’s pants or getting out of trouble; the kid who whacked you in the balls with his left hand and high-fived his shitcake friends with the right, all in one fluid motion. ‘Blurred Lines’ was to Robin Thicke what Brexit was to David Cameron — a colossal crash and burn from a man who had known nothing but charmed success from the moment the doctor finished slapping him on the butt. I hate this song and so should you.

In Excess No More

Lorde — Royals

In 1998, Fiona Apple won an MTV award for ‘Criminal’ and used her time in the spotlight to address the glamorous world she was standing in — the world of opulent parties, what’s cool, what’s lame, who’s hot, who’s not etc. ‘This world is bullshit. Go with yourself.’

At the time she was massacred by the press, who didn’t take kindly to this young upstart spitting on their bread and butter. Fast forward 15 years and Lorde takes that ethos to the top of the charts without a shred of compromise. Lorde is the kind of pop star we need. As much as record companies have tried to recreate her sound and style with embarrassing results, hers is an unmanufactured authenticity and we are so lucky to have her. Here’s to album #3. 

Island Life

The Pictish Trail — Secret Soundz, Vol. 2

After some traumatic life changes, Johnny Lynch relocated to Eigg, an island in the Inner Hebrides with a population of around 90. A great thing about watching an artist progress is being able to watch a person grow. Secret Soundz, Vol. 1 from half a decade prior is the work of a young man. Vol. 2 is someone taking ownership of adulthood, exorcising the past, and fumbling his way into an unknown void.

Death stalks so many of these songs. Small wonder, seeing as his mother had died during the writing process, and it was he who discovered the body. That being said, Lynch has a bloody-minded positivity about him, as if trying to turn nightmares into dreams. By the end, the weight of the world is still heavy, but he’s found a curious peace. The penultimate number ‘I Will Pour It Down’ is one of the greatest and purest love songs of the decade, while the concluding kiss-off ‘Long In The Tooth’ is as full of humour as it is spite and regret. On stage, Lynch is a joker (and a very funny one), but on record, he’s one of our most eloquent interpreters of picturesque melancholy.

Try: Michael Rocket

Not What You Want To Hear

The Knife — Shaking the Habitual

The future is unforgiving, and the solution might be also. Karin and Olof Dreijer’s final album as The Knife is a heady conceptual spiral of strange sounds and formidable philosophies. Believe it or not, the album’s music was written during jam sessions. In this case (and perhaps in no other case) ‘jamming’ consisted of Karin twanging a set of bed-springs while Olof manipulated the sound on a laptop. Amongst those sounds, you also get steel drums, electronic clarinets and god-knows-what else.

The result has a tribal alien-ness, and is split down the middle by a near-formless 20-minute ambient oddity. As for the lyrics, Olof took a gender studies course at university and Karin borrowed his reading list. What we’re left with is a sensual assault — a challenge to the status quo that spits acid at socio-economic injustice while treating love and honesty as urgent matters of life and death. If such a thing can be measured, it stands a good chance of being the most brutally compassionate album ever made.

Try: Raging Lung

Nevada Confidential

Boards of Canada — Tomorrow’s Harvest

Everyone loves a big reveal. Death Grips broke their own contract by illegally uploading No Love Deep Web for free, Radiohead let their fans pay whatever they wanted for In Rainbows, and U2 took a dump in your iTunes without your consent. That being said, there might be no album launch more wondrous than this one. Boards of Canada discreetly released two unique 12-inch records, each containing nothing but a string of six numbers. BBC Radio 1 unexpectedly broadcast another row of six, as did NPR, then Adult Swim. When the sixth and final code was discovered in a Youtube video, a fan entered the full sequence onto the band’s website and Tomorrow’s Harvest appeared.

The very idea that Boards of Canada - one of the most beloved, emotive and fascinating peddlers of electronic music — were up to something at all was cause for intense devotion and speculation among the faithful. It pulled them together to talk about what could possibly be going on. When the album finally arrived, it played like the natural extension to the ciphers and whispers. Simultaneously full of a wordless concern and a zen-like calm, Tomorrow’s Harvest pointed towards an uneasy future. These days it plays like a warning and a balm. It doesn’t try to distract you from the worry — it puts a hand on your shoulder as you walk through it.

Try: Reach For The Dead

Ageless, Anew

Sam Amidon — Bright Sunny South

The concept of ‘the test of time’ has stood the test of time. It’s a worthy trial. Nowhere is this clearer than public domain folk songs - songs whose authors’ names are lost to history, but have been passed down through centuries because they’re just that memorable and evocative, even at their most bare. That being said, you couldn’t exactly accuse Sam Amidon of cheating by using them. It’s very easy to ruin great songs — to say that Cotton-Eyed Joe has been dragged through the mud is like saying that Mike Pence is somewhat un-cuddly. The fact that Amidon has brought these songs so gracefully into the 21st Century is a real feat.

With an acrobatic balance of tradition and innovation, he’s blown the dust from their surface rendering them all the more timeless. As if to prove his capabilities, he also covers a Mariah Carey and a Tim McGraw song, making them sit beside Appalachian ballads with strange ease. Only the line ‘just like the Calgon commercial’ gives the game away, and is worthy of a chuckle. It’s debatable whether Bright Sunny South is Sam Amidon’s best set, but it’s likely to be his most approachable. It’s a spiritual heaviness that goes down easily, and warms you like moonshine.

Try: Bright Sunny South

Cinder Burns On A Plaid Blanket

Julie Byrne — Rooms With Walls and Windows

Maybe there’s too many wispy folk musicians in the world. You can’t blow a kiss down a university dorm room without some schmuck with a guitar writing a song about it. Like punk and ambient, acoustic folk easy to make, but hard to make well. It’s a style that’s often defined by its level of intimacy, and when you listen to Julie Byrne you can almost smell the room she’s sitting in. Recorded on a portable tape machine during her stint as a traveling saleswoman, Rooms With Walls and Windows is a strange title for a set of songs conceived in a caravan. Maybe it’s meant to be ironic. If so, it’s the only speck of irony here.

It’s not just the warm analogue timbre that recalls a bygone era. This sounds like it was beamed from a time when recorded folk music was a recent invention, and when cynicism was both unfashionable and unnecessary. That being said, none of this would matter if the songs weren’t good. And if they weren’t good, why would you still be reading this? The glimpses of life that Byrne allows us are as rich as they are fleeting. Here, memories are like incense, gradually crumbling to dust and leaving a smoky haze in their wake. There’s something very anti-materialistic about it, even though she doesn’t explicitly state such sentiments. So much of its emotion and imagery hinges on timeless touchstones — fields, home cooking, a New Year’s Eve party, the light passing through the crack under a window-blind. It’s a person on her own, exhuming comfort from her past life to make herself feel human again.

Try: Marmalade

2014

Live and Rest

Diane Cluck — Boneset

Some customers at my local record store tried to return this record because it ‘wasn’t long enough’. That’s like suing Rothko for not using enough colours. Boneset says what it needs to say and nothing else. The quality of a record shouldn’t be defined by how long it plays for, but how deep it sinks its anchor. Here, Diane Cluck tilts back and forth between graceful spirituality and macabre sorrow. Her gratitude for life is bolstered, not diminished, by her knowledge that it can’t last. By doing this, she makes lines like ‘It’s so nice to see you’ into vital statements of purpose.

There’s an anatomical intimacy going on, the kind between husbands, wives and morticians alike. It’s as if, with bloodied sensual lines like ‘She pinned my tail down, pulled the wishbone wide’, she’s bridging the definitions of open-hearted and open-chested. To say that we’re just an ungainly collection of molecules forever dying shouldn’t diminish the beauty of our connections. If any record illustrates this, it’s this one.

Try: Maybe a Bird

Sexual Anaesthetics

TV Girl — French Exit

There are few things more satisfying or more frustrating than loving a record no one knows about. On the one hand, you can feel smug about being privy to a well-kept secret. On the other, you’re frustrated that it’s a secret at all. Sure, French Exit was a record with no promotion and an honesty-box pricing scheme, attached to a trend which faded out too soon (‘chillwave’, whatever that is). That being said, this is one of the most rewarding, fun and charismatic records of the decade — the kind that someone always asks about when it’s playing.

Like The Avalanches’ masterpiece 14 years prior, the hooks here are both antique and fresh, sampling old-old-old movies, musicals and pop songs, and weaving them into sardonic tales of love, lust and loneliness. These three things drive the characters of ‘French Exit’ crazy, and singer Brad Petering is their half-impartial narrator. He finds humour and pity in their situations, but he’s a veteran of the same problems. It’s as if you just pulled up a bar-stool next to him in a 1940s movie, retroactively soundtracked by an instrumental hip-hop producer. The empathy trickles out gradually, but it’s not a gloomy record in the least. There’s a spring in its step even when it’s recounting a soldier in the trenches sniffing his girlfriend’s underwear for escapism. It’s party music - for one or for many. 

Try: Birds Don’t Sing

Wearisome Tonight

Ed Sheeran — Thinking Out Loud

My friend worked at a country club for a few years, during which he oversaw literally hundreds of weddings. Apparently the number of couples who chose ‘Thinking Out Loud’ as their first dance was astounding. To be honest, I’m not sure why. My experience of love has been difficult — I’ve had to wrestle with mental health problems, issues with my orientation and identity, and a heap of bad luck. However, all of this has made me appreciate marriage all the more. Finding someone is really hard for a lot of people, and even when they find it, it could be dissolved or destroyed by any number of inconveniences or incompatibilities. It’s a really amazing thing when the right person finds the right person. That being said, there are few songs which illustrate this miracle of human connection more clumsily than Thinking Out Loud. This song is vile.

‘Kiss me under the light of a thousand stars’? ‘Will your mouth still remember the taste of my love’? It’s like if R Kelly ghost-wrote for Michael Bolton, with one exception: it’s safe to bet that R Kelly wouldn’t have written ‘Baby, I’ll be loving you ‘til we’re 70’. Then again, why would anyone have written that? He could have easily put ‘when we’re 70’ instead, but no. Ed Sheeran wants you to know there’s a time limit. As soon as you hit the big seven-zero he’s hitting the road with your daughter’s piano teacher. ‘Grandma? Why does Grandad live with that other lady? And why aren’t we allowed to use their hot-tub?’ All this being said though, Ed saves the most infuriating line for last: ‘We found love right where we are’. Cool story bro. In other words: ‘Gee, that was easy. It’s nice that we didn’t have to work for any of this.’ This song is an insult to love. 

Seriously Silly

Ariel Pink — Pom Pom

With few exceptions, cynicism has no place in pop music. If you communicate to your audience that you’re ‘too good for this shit’, you’ve given them no reason to care. That seemed to be a common criticism of Ariel Pink’s Pom Pom. The Guardian’s Alex Petridis described it as ‘pop music by someone who thinks it’s beneath him’. Honestly, this is a little baffling. There’s no way someone could make a record like this without utter devotion to his craft. Seriousness is a virtue, but it’s perfectly fine to be silly, just as long as you’re serious about it.

There were very few records this decade which were this fun to listen to, to sing along to, or to play to unsuspecting friends trapped in your car. ‘Black Ballerina’ is a strip-club fever dream, ‘Plastic Raincoats in the Pig Parade’ is a coked-up Sesame Street oddity, and ‘Nude Beach A-Go-Go’ turns the 1950s summer movie theme inside out. However, all this larking about aside, Pom Pom even finds room for pathos. ‘Put Your Number In My Phone’ is a despondent look at modern over-the-counter romance disguised as a sparkly pop song, ‘Picture Me Gone’ successfully tugs at the heartstrings in between mentions of iCloud photo backups — hell, by the end, even ‘Sexual Athletics’ manages to be thought-provoking as well as hilarious. If Ariel Pink hates pop music so much, why did he provide clear evidence that he’s built his whole life around it?

Try: Black Ballerina 

Cartoon Psychiatry

Dan Deacon — Glass Riffer

I remember so vividly the moment I first heard Dan Deacon. Pleasantly drunk on gin and tonic on my 19th birthday, after everyone else had left the party, my friend took me upstairs. ‘The new Dan Deacon just leaked - can we listen to it?’ When he hit play on America, I genuinely wondered if it was a prank, or if the file was broken. Surely music was just not supposed to sound like this. That initial bemusement soon turned into total wide-eyed wonder. This was sculpting form from malfunction, like some kind of error collage.

In the case of his follow-up Gliss Riffer, those malfunctions are psychological as well as musical. It’s a deep-dive into his fretful psyche, its cartoon choirs alternating between despairing and motivational. Somehow he makes a line like ‘I try not to worry but I always worry’ strangely buoyant — it rings with the relief of vocalising an internal trauma. His overstimulating soundscapes become a mirror for his wired state of mind. It’s also the most pop he’s ever sounded. For a musician with such a verve for wacky experimentation, it’s a surprisingly good fit for him. With echoes of Carl Stalling’s Looney Tunes soundtracks, The Flaming Lips’ empathetic psychedelia and primary-coloured bubblegum pop, Gliss Riffer is one of the most joyful and beautiful records about anxiety disorders ever laid down.

Try: Feel The Lightning

Part I (2010-12)

Part III (2015-16)

Part IV (2017-19)

Words by Joe Anthony Hill