Best music of 2020

I don’t know whether lockdown and continuous working from home is the cause of me devouring as much new music as I did, but for whatever reason I have listened to more than I ever have. Circa 200 albums, comprising more than 190 hours and 2,535 tracks (some of these are reissues or live albums). Here’s a link to a Spotify playlist of these, which excludes The Microphones’ Microphones in 2020 and Sumac’s May You be Held, available on bandcamp instead.

https://open.spotify.com/playlist/0NqqIOdZ45eYVlJvprpmNE?si=lXNIrCvjTB2a3V-sv5Lfcw

If Spotify Wrapped is to be believed, some stats (only for the first 11 months of the year, mildly annoyingly) are:

• 454 new artists “discovered” and 1,172 in total.
• My top 2 genres are rock and jazz. (Then electronica, alternative metal, and post-rock. No surprises here).
• My top 5 songs include 3 from Piano Become the Teeth’s 2018 record Wait for Love, 1 from last year’s Cult of Luna album, and Iron Maiden’s Infinite Dreams (from 1988’s Seventh Son of a Seventh Son. For some reason the twin guitar soloing is fun to bath my daughter to).
• My top decade was the 2000s and eDIT’s track Ants within that.
• My top artist was Deftones (within top 0.5% of their listeners apparently), then AFI, Sick of It All, Tiger Army, and Metallica. Deftones had a new record that I listened to umpteen times in a failed attempt to fall in love with it (more on that later), AFI I listen to all the time anyway (more on this another time), Sick of It All had a book out that needed an appropriate soundtrack, Tiger Army and Metallica I think I had back catalogue binges at some points.
• Minutes listened = 104,274 = 1,738 hours = 72.4 days. Spread over 11 months that’s 5.2 hours a day which I actually think sounds too low a figure. My long-suffering wife would certainly suggest it feels more like 24-8 (sleep) = 16 hours a day. In terms of the “new stuff” I made sure I listened to everything at least twice, so that’s 189 x 2 = 378 hours, leaving 1,738 hours – 378 = 1,360 hours for nostalgia, back catalogues, nursery rhymes, Mariah Carey, and Christmas music. Of course, the true figure is hopefully a fair bit more than 378 given several of these new records I will have figuratively spun more than just twice, but still, you get the idea.

Playlists and spreadsheets notwithstanding, it is difficult to hold on to ideas and themes across 200 records, so I’m going to try some subgroupings by “genre” (I will have got some of these horrendously wrong, please forgive me). Some brief comments on certain cuts (generally the best/nearly/disappointing) are buried within those sub-lists that follow below. Let’s see how this goes.

* indicates my favourites within the selections

Collected favourites

Here are my top selections:

1. Fiona Apple – Fetch the Bolt Cutters
2. Taylor Swift – folklore
3. Against All Logic – 2017-2019
4. Mary Lattimore – Silver Ladders
5. Teen Daze – Reality Refresh (EPs 1-4)
6. The Dream Syndicate – The Universe Inside
7. Protomartyr – Ultimate Success Today
8. Caspian – On Circles
9. Ro – Athalase
10. ARTEMIS – ARTEMIS
11. Nubya Garcia – Source
12. END – Splinters from an Ever-Changing Face
13. envy – The Fallen Crimson
14. Napalm Death – Throes of Joy in the Jaws of Defeatism
15. Umbra Vitae – Shadow of Life

A “best of 2020” playlist of songs

https://open.spotify.com/playlist/73eRqBlfhM1jEMM25hvyUK?si=iQSTZbwsSGmF5iqAceuT1w

 Singer-songwriter

1. Alone Zone – Builder’s Ballet
2. Bob Dylan – Rough and Rowdy Ways. Folk will tell you, not without merit, that it’s his best work since 2006’s Modern Times, or even earlier.
3. Corey Taylor (Slipknot) – CMFT. Nothing like Slipknot or Stone Sour, but still kinda fun.
4. Destroyer (you might argue it’s a band, but it’s dominated by leader Dan Bejar) – Have we Met
5. EOB – Earth. Radiohead’s Ed O’Brien.
6. Grimes – Miss Anthropocene
7. Fiona Apple – Fetch the Bolt Cutters*. All I ever knew about her was that if you weren’t her, South Park’s Office Barbrady couldn’t give a rat’s ass. Then I bothered to listen. Clever, striking, and very enjoyable to listen to in spite of often dark subject matter. I’m going to be saying this a lot throughout, not to justify my own taste rather merely to inform, but this features heavily in critics’ year-end best-of lists.
8. Hamilton Leithauser (ex The Walkmen) – The Loves of Your Life. A surprise vinyl present from a friend who is all too aware that any “The” indie rock band or member thereof is not going to come on my radar without a bit of help. Thanks mate.
9. Laura Marling – Song for Our Daughter. Seventh studio album from Brit singer-songwriter Marling. I recall enjoying this more than any album of hers in some time.
10. Lianne La Havas – s/t. Came here via her cover of Radiohead’s Weird Fishes.
11. Keaton Henson – Monument. A return to form after 2019’s slightly odd classical experiment Six Lethargies, IMO.
12. King Buzzo (Melvins)* – Gift of Sacrifice
13. Maria McKee – La Vita Nuova
14. Moses Sumney – Grae. Critically beloved. I previously enjoyed his feature on a Cinematic Orchestra track. A lot of falsetto.
15. Orlando Weeks (ex The Maccabees) – A Quickening
16. Phoebe Bridgers – Punisher* (features frequently in critics’ best-of lists but I haven’t listened enough to be sure myself).
17. Pluralone (Josh Kinghoffer of now ex-RHCP fame) – I Don’t Feel Well
18. Rufus Wainwright – Unfollow the Rules. Previously known to me mostly for his collaboration with Antony & The Johnsons, I am overdue a proper introduction.
19. Sufjan Stevens – The Ascension
20. Taylor Swift - folklore*, evermore. In the past I have deliberately not listened to her music, taken pleasure in Tool keeping her off the number 1 spot for a week, and, largely without justification, considered her the enemy of musical integrity and authenticity. Until now. Perhaps the quintessential lockdown record, folklore blew me away. I love the visual and aural cabin-in-the-woods aesthetic and the collaborations with Bon Iver, The National’s Aaron Dessner, and Jack Antonoff (I wouldn’t normally mention someone like him but given how much I love Lana Del Rey – he co-wrote and produced much of last year’s Norman Fucking Rockwell, I’m beginning to see a pattern).
21. Waxahatchee – Saint Cloud*. Alabaman Katie Crutchfield’s fifth album under this moniker. Features frequently in critics’ year-end best-of lists.

(There were also solo albums from The National’s Matt Berninger and Manic Street Preachers’ James Dean Bradfield but I haven’t managed to check out either. I couldn’t get on with Dua Lipa’s or Lady Gaga’s albums. Not my thing.)

 Electronic / Experimental / Producer

1. Against All Logic – 2017-2019*. The fourth studio album released under this moniker by producer Nicolas Jaar (he also released two albums under his own name this year). I must have come across this via an achingly too-cool-for-school review in something like Pitchfork (which if you haven’t worked it out by now I have a love/hate relationship with). But it has a great depth to it. For me the best music not made directly by humans in real time manages to convey its emotion in other ways, whether that’s through melody, timbre, layering, arrangement, collaboration (poet Lydia Lunch features here), or simple musical choice. And I think Jaar really achieves that here.
2. Agnes Obel – Myopia
3. Arca – KiCk i. I liked 2017’s s/t so much I picked it up on vinyl. This one not so much.
4. Aukai – Game Trails
5. Autechre – SIGN, PLUS (2 albums)
6. Beatrice Dillon – Workaround. Good to see some women in what is a sausage fest of either a scene or my subset of it (see e.g: Gia Margaret, Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith)
7. Bibio – Sleep on the Wing*. ‘Folktronica’ is a fun name for a genre
8. Blanck Mass (Fuck Buttons member) – Calm with Horses (soundtrack)
9. Blaqk Audio (AFI’s Davey Havok and Jade Puget) - Beneath the Black Palms
10. Caribou – Suddenly
11. Gia Margaret – Mia Gargaret
12. Erland Cooper – Hether Blether. Another record, Landform, has been released since but I haven’t listened to it.
13. Faithless – All Blessed. The first album in 10 years, and not at all bad!
14. The Flashbulb – Our Simulacra. Decent but not on the level of 2017’s Piety of Ashes.
15. Four Tet – Sixteen Oceans. Decent but not on the level of 2017’s New Energy. (What was it about 2017!!??). He has also released some new music on Christmas day.
16. Hidden Orchestra – Creaks (soundtrack)
17. Holy Fuck – Deleter
18. Jonsi (Sigur Ros) – Shiver
19. Little Dragon – New Me, Same Us. I got into this band following a feature on DJ Shadow’s 2011 track Scale it Back. I’ve listened to an album or two and even saw them live at Brixton. Underwhelmed.
20. Loscil – Faults, Coasts, Lines. Mostly ambient. Not quite as gorgeous as 2019’s Equivalents, but again that’s probably mostly to do with the element of surprise.
21. John Frusciante (Red Hot Chili Peppers guitarist) – Maya. Named after his cat, who died, I believe (so similar to Tool’s Eon Blue Apocalypse, named after guitarist Adam Jones’ Great Dane dog, in that sense).
22. Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith – The Mosaic of Transformation
23. Machinedrum – A View of U
24. Mary Lattimore – Silver Ladders*. Harp and electronics. Simple but I absolutely love it. Only just discovered it last week.
25. MJ Cole – Presents Madrugada. Mostly known for producing or remixing tracks for such big names as Mariah Carey and Mary J. Blige, this was his first solo album since 2003. Quite a good record to chill out to, I imagine.
26. Moby – All Visible Objects. 17 albums in, and he’s still here. The 18^th came out today (24^th December), in fact.
27. Nils Frahm – Empty. Piano led.
28. Olafur Arnalds – Some Kind of Peace. Features Bonobo on the track Loom
29. The Orb – Abolition of the Royal Familia
30. Pet Shop Boys – Hotspot. I enjoyed this a lot more than I’d’ve expected from a late career artist of any genre. The wedding march sample on Wedding in Berlin is fun the first time you hear it.
31. RJD2 – The Fun Ones
32. The Soft Pink Truth – Shall we go on Sinning so that Grace may Increase? Somewhat leftfield but pretty great.
33. Squarepusher – Be Up a Hello. There was also an EP, Lamental
34. Steve Jordan, Mix Master Mike – Beat Odyssey 2020
35. Teen Daze – Reality Refresh (Eps 1-4)* I don’t know for sure (or at all, really) whether lockdown was the motivator behind these 4 EPs which together make up about 70 minutes of music. But along with Taylor Swift’s albums, I like to think so. The artist has collected them in a single playlist on his Spotify. The nearly 12-minute Meditation, with its major Steve Reich vibes, is a particular highlight.
36. TENGGER – Nomad
37. Trickfinger (John Frusciante) – She Smiles Because She Presses the Button (EP)
38. Yves Tumour – Heaven to a Tortured Mind

 Indie/soft/punk rock

I wouldn’t normally listen to much in this genre, but there are certainly some gems among this lot:

1. AWOLNATION – Angel Miners & the Lightning Riders
2. Creeper – Sex, Death, and the Infinite Void. Despite the AFI love, I just can’t get into this British horror punk band.
3. The Dream Syndicate – The Universe Inside*. My genre classification is more in tune with what this band normally sounds like. But The Universe Inside is a jam. An improvisatory experiment in the studio resulting in cuts like 20-minute opener The Regulator. Reminds me of David Bowie’s Blackstar, Nine Inch Nails’ Bad Witch, and Frances the Mute era The Mars Volta. So you can see why I’d go for it in a big way.
4. The Flaming Lips – American Head. Fans’ favourite for some time. I’m not invested in the band enough to know whether I agree, particularly as I’ve enjoyed the last couple of records too.
5. Fleet Foxes – Shore. Not the sort of thing I’d normally give the time of day to, but it’s not half bad.
6. Fontaines D.C. – A Hero’s Death*. Along with others here, I would describe this is as minimal British punk / rock, which is again something I’d normally pass over without a moment’s thought, but I liked this very much.
7. IDLES – Ultra Mono. Tries to do the same thing as 2018’s Joy as an Act of Resistance. On paper it ticks all the boxes but in reality, it sounds like an unnecessary and unsuccessful parody of themselves. The lightning of simplicity and negating/subverting clichés hasn’t struck twice (or three times, given I have never listened to the first record). Some decent riffage though.
8. Khruangbin – Mordechai. Also responsible for a Late Night Tales compilation this year (given there was one from Hot Chip too, this makes 2020 the first year since 2016 for there to be more than one).
9. The Mountain Goats – Getting Into Knives
10. No Joy – Motherhood. (Also count as Shoegaze, so I might have miscategorised this).
11. Protomartyr – Ultimate Success Today*. I might have considered this too minimalist and the vocals too drone-y, but I’d’ve been dead wrong. There’s a lot more going on in this, the fifth album from the Detroit post-punk fourpiece. There are elements of art and noise rock too, which is probably what does it for me. I think the theme of a lot of my favourites this year are where I’ve been surprised and been very pleased to be so.
12. Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever – Sideways to New Italy*. Second album from Australian indie rock band. Jangly guitars, decent vocals, pounding beats, and well-crafted songs.
13. The Wants – Container
14. Young Knives – Barbarians

 Hip Hop

1. Run the Jewels – RTJ4. I never really got into this duo, but this album features frequently in critics’ year-end best of lists.
2. NAS – King’s Disease
3. Megan Thee Stallion – Good News. Not my cup of tea at all, but that’s just me.
4. Oddisee – Odd Cure. Far too many skits for my liking. Not his best work.
5. Shabazz Palaces – The Don of Diamond Dreams

 Prog rock

1. Caligula’s Horse – Rise Radiant
2. Crippled Black Phoenix – Ellengaest.* Mastermind Justin Greaves and friends + a plethora of vocalists, my favourite being Jonathan Hulten for his mesmerising performance on The Invisible Past.
3. Intronaut – Fluid Existential Inversions
4. Long Distance Calling – How do we Want to Live?
5. The Ocean – Phanerozoic II: Mesozoic | Cenozoic
6. The Pineapple Thief – Versions of the Truth

 Post / instrumental rock / metal

There was a time when I thought 2020 wouldn’t match 2019’s richness in terms of new discoveries and high quality of post-rock, but then it did.

1. An Autumn for Crippled Children – All fell silent, everything went quiet. Not bad but not as grand as the title (which says the same thing twice for some reason) suggests
2. Caspian – On Circles*. Their best album all the way through, possibly ever, and their greatest individual tracks after 2012’s Fire Made Flesh. Wonderful vocals on Nostalgist from Piano Become the Teeth’s Kyle Durfey.
3. Coastlands – Death*
4. Collapse Under the Empire – Everything we will Leave Beyond Us
5. Dragunov – Arkhipov. There’s a picture of a submarine on the over and submarine noises on the album.
6. El Ten Eleven – Tautology. A triple record comprising a whopping 21 tracks.
7. Hope the Flowers – Sonorous Faith, Pt.1
8. hubris. - Metempsychosis*
9. I Hear Sirens – Stella Mori
10. If Anything Happens to the Cat – Kingdom of Roots. Rewards repeated listens.
11. Inventions – Continuous Portrait. A supergroup featuring members of Eluvium and Explosions in the Sky.
12. Mogwai – ZeroZeroZero (soundtrack)
13. Panda Rosa – The Kinspiral. 2.5 hours long but worth checking out over the course of an afternoon
14. pg.lost – Oscillate*
15. Ro – Athalase*. The hardest band name to search for, a band from Spain, and, after Caspian, my most favourite post-rock record of the year.
16. Sens Dep (members of the band Laura) – Lush Desolation
17. sleepmakeswaves – these are not your dreams
18. Spotlights – We are all Atomic*. “Heavy, dreamy, seeping and atmospheric, Spotlights blend shoegaze and doom metal on their new post-nuclear EP.” Yes, that. Thanks bandcamp description.
19. Still Motions - Mirrors*
20. This Will Destroy You – Vespertine
21. Whale Fall – It will Become Itself

 Jazz / Blues

I listened to very little new jazz in 2019. Thankfully 2020 reversed that.

1. Allegra Levy – Lose my Number.* Hardly ground-breaking, but very well done nonetheless.
2. Ambrose Akinmusire – On the Tender Spot of Every Calloused Moment. 2011’s When the Heart Emerges Glistening was a lovely album. Everything since has been borderline unlistenable, including this latest piece of nonsense.
3. ARTEMIS – ARTEMIS*. An all-female group (mostly instrumental but with extraordinary singer Cecile McLorin Salvant popping up here and there), made one of the best jazz records of the year. Together with Allegra Levy, Jyoti, Lakecia Benjamin, Nubya Garcia, and Regina Carter, 2020 has been a fantastic year for women in jazz. Long may that continue.
4. Ben Wendel - High
5. Brad Mehldau – Suite: April 2020. Another obvious product of quarantine.
6. Dinner Party (Robert Glasper, Kamasi Washington, Terrace Martin, 9^th Wonder) – s/t
7. Dinosaur – To the Earth. Led by trumpeter Laura Jurd, whose music I find consistently underwhelming.
8. Gil Scott-Heron, as reimagined by Makaya McCraven – We’re New Again
9. GoGo Penguin – s/t*. Like hip-hop played on a piano
10. Gregory Porter – All Rise
11. Jaga Jazzist – Pyramid
12. Jose James – No Beginning No End 2 (technically a neo-soul rather than jazz effort, if you want to get picky)
13. Joshua Redman – RoundAgain
14. Jyoti (Georgia Anne Muldrow) – Mama, You Can Bet!
15. Kamasi Washington – Becoming (soundtrack)
16. Lakecia Benjamin – Pursuance*. A John and Alice Coltrane tribute album. Could perhaps be shorter and more focused, but otherwise great.
17. Lionel Loueke – HH (as in Herbie Hancock, not neo-nazism)
18. Mammal Hands – Captured Spirits*. Incredibly melodic jazz that I’d gladly listen to on repeat. Lovely line-up and arrangements to rival Portico Quartet.
19. Marius Neset – Tributes
20. Matthew Halsall – Salute to the Sun
21. Micah Thomas – Tide
22. Moses Boyd – Dark Matter*. This young drummer has been around for a while but this is his debut solo album. As discussed with someone on Facebook comments, the British / London jazz scene is pretty amazing at the moment.
23. Norah Jones – Pick Me Up Off the Floor
24. Nubya Garcia – Source*. Her first full length as leader I think, following some excellent singles and EPs and contributions to the Maisha group.
25. Portico Quartet – We Welcome Tomorrow (EP)
26. Regina Carter Freedom Band – Swing States: Harmony in the Battleground
27. SAULT – Untitled (Black Is) and Untitled (Rise) (2 albums). Publicity shy, political, and critically loved. More rhythm and blues than jazz though.
28. Shabaka and the Ancestors – We Are Sent Here by History. This man can, and does, do everything. A free-jazz gig at the Vortex in London, at which he featured, was one of the, if not the, last shows I went to before lockdown. I didn’t previously like …and the Ancestors as much as the Comet is Coming or Sons of Kemet, but with this sophomore cut that’s started to change.
29. Songhoy Blues – Optimisme
30. Thundercat – It is what it is
31. Zara McFarlane – Songs of an Unknown Tongue. Eschews sidemen playing things for her to sing over. Mostly disappointing.

Alternative rock / metal

1. …And You Will Know Us By the Trail of Dead – X: The Godless Void and Other Stories
2. The Acacia Strain – Slow Decay
3. All Them Witches – Nothing As the Ideal
4. August Burns Red – Guardians
5. Biffy Clyro – A Celebration of Endings. Solid as ever. Contains plenty of good tracks.
6. The Black Dahlia Murder – Verminous. After 2017’s Nightbringers introduced me to the band and genre of melodic death metal in general, and was really exciting as a consequence, this kinda pales in comparison.
7. Blackfield (Steven Wilson) – For the Music. Wilson has taken a back seat to Aviv Geffen ever since Blackfield II, mind.
8. Blood from the Soul (including Converge’s Jacob Bannon) – DSM-5. Features Bannon on vocals , and others in the band, but is the brainchild of Napalm Death’s Shane Embury.
9. Code Orange – Underneath. Programming features too heavily, IMO.
10. Dance Gavin Dance – Afterburner
11. Deftones – Ohms. Incredible guitar work, solid drumming and bass playing, and inspired contributions from sampler/keyboardist Frank Delgado, all come together to help make the most consistent Deftones album since 2010’s Diamond Eyes. The vocals are all over the place, incoherently and awkwardly jumping from quiet to loud, sounding a little too low in the mix, and bringing few of the hooks that make songs like Prayers/Triangles, Hearts/Wires and Phantom Thread (I’m picking songs from Gore because unlike seemingly every other fan on the internet, I don’t hate that album, although tbf it has its share of duds) so memorable. Not Chino’s finest hour, then.
12. Elder – Omens
13. Emma Ruth Rundle, Thou – May Our Chambers be Full.* A rather successful collaboration, I’d say.
14. En Minor – (Phil Anselmo ‘acoustic’ project) – When the Cold Truth has Worn its Miserable Welcome Out*. Reads like it could be awful. Isn’t. Does everything Anselmo touches (except white wine) turn to gold? Apparently. 2020 also saw the release of the latest Scour EP and a remixed/remastered deluxe edition of underrated Pantera swansong Reinventing the Steel.
15. END – Splinters from an Ever-Changing Face*. Now this I did like. It’s heavy AF.
16. Enslaved – Utgard
17. envy – The Fallen Crimson*. Extremely accomplished and with impressive variation. Also one of the most beautiful vinyl packages I own.
18. Gone is Gone (supergroup featuring Troy from Mastodon and Troy from QOTSA and Tony from ATDI) – If Everything Happens for a Reason, Then Nothing Really Matters At All. In terms of supergroups featuring Troy from Mastodon who released an album in 2020, I prefer the other one.
19. Good Tiger – Raised in a Doomsday Cult. (Math-rocky!)
20. Greg Puciato (The Dillinger Escape Plan) – Child Soldier: Creator of God
21. Hatebreed – Weight of the False Self. I wasn’t into Hatebreed back in the day. Still aren’t.
22. Hundredth – Somewhere Nowhere
23. Hum – Inlet. A surprise release, the band’s first album in some 22 years.
24. Imperial Triumphant – Alphaville. Fairly original, as these things go.
25. Incubus – Trust Fall Side B (EP)*. I haven’t enjoyed new Incubus this much in a long time.
26. Irist – Order of the Mind. Given I insist on disliking 90% of the vocals of indie bands and about 10% of the vocals of screamy hardcore bands, I open myself up to accusations of lack of discernment. Certainly there are generic growly vocals, but these are certainly not they.
27. Jason Isbell – and the 400 Unit
28. Lamb of God – s/t. There are a couple of interesting things here (particularly the start of opening track Memento Mori, the overall concept of time, and frontman Randy Blythe’s underrated and unexpected intelligence – I read his autobiography this year) but otherwise it’s LoG by numbers and fairly unmemorable. That might be why it’s self-titled, but I doubt it.
29. Liturgy – Origin of the Alimonies
30. Killer Be Killed (supergroup featuring Max Cavalera, Troy Sanders (here he is again), Greg Puciato, and Ben Koller) – Reluctant Hero. I really liked 2014’s s/t debut. This one not so much, but I’m prepared to spin it a few more times.
31. Katatonia – City Burials. A similar story to TBDM. Blown away by the last album which brought me in as a fan; left cold by the new one.
32. Loathe – I Let it in and it Took Everything. Yes you can hear the Deftones influence. Not a bad thing.
33. Marilyn Manson – We are Chaos. He’s gone a bit country. Good for him. No seriously, good for him, still being around after all this time.
34. Misery Signals – Ultraviolet
35. My Morning Jacket – The Waterfall II
36. Napalm Death – Throes of Joy in the Jaws of Defeatism*. Their 16^th studio album and the first I’ve listened to. What happened with Katatonia and TBDM 3-4 years ago has now happened with British Grindcore legends Napalm Death.
37. Nels Cline – Share the Wealth. Could arguably be jazz but since he plays guitar for Wilco I’ve classified him here. A bit long and meandering perhaps, but otherwise right up my street in a manner similar to the Dream Syndicate’s latest.
38. Nine Inch Nails – Ghosts V: Together and VI: Locusts*. A welcome surprise release and worthy companions to Ghosts I-IV. I continue to be impressed at how prolific Trent Reznor (with partner in crime Atticus Ross) is these days.
39. Ohhms – Close
40. Old Man Gloom – Seminars IX: Darkness of Being and VIII: Light of Meaning (yes in that order)
41. Omar Rodriguez-Lopez – The Clouds Hill Tapes I-III. Re-recorded selections from his recent albums. Decent but not really special.
42. Pallbearer – Forgotten Days
43. Palm Reader – Sleepless
44. Pearl Jam – Gigaton. Meh, whatever. This reminds me, I fancy listening to Vitalogy sometime soon.
45. Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs – Viscerals
46. Pure Reason Revolution – Eupnea
47. Puscifer – Existential Reckoning. A real slow-burner this one (unlike the last two). Worth a few listens to expose its riches
48. Sepultura – Quadra. This is the Brazilian metal band’s 15^th studio album, the 9^th without Max (Cavalera), and the 1^st without Max that I have ever listened to. And I really liked it!
49. SLIFT – UMMON.
50. The Smashing Pumpkins – Cyr. Not as bad as the reviews make out, I thought.
51. Sparta – Trust the River. Unlike their parent band, At the Drive-In, and sibling The Mars Volta, I’ve never really shook the feeling that Sparta sounds like kids in a garage recording the first thing they think of. Bah humbug.
52. Svalbard – When I Die, will I get Better? (Probably not, no.)
53. Sylosis – Cycle of Suffering
54. Testament – Titans of Creation. Not quite a Napalm Death situation again, but I do like a couple of songs on this.
55. Touche Amore – Lament. There is something very charming about the fact that at just under 36 minutes, this fifth album from the LA post-hardcore band is their longest. No less good though. Produced by Ross Robinson, no less.
56. Umbra Vitae (Jacob Bannon again) – Shadow of Life.* Unlike Blood from the Soul, I think here Bannon is the most famous member. For a record this brutal, it’s almost a little surprising how infectious and replayable it is!

Best music of 1999

See “Best of 2008” for a general introduction.

If you read my “Best of 2000” entry, you’ll see that as I move backward in time I am starting to run out of a good stock of records from these years that I have memories and opinions and any sort of knowledge or interest in. Now while I have a much larger pool of 1999 releases than I did for 2000, it will only be a couple more years before I run out of experience. I probably have an album that I love from every year after a certain point (it might be fun, for me at least/most, to test this theory) and I could perhaps do top ten jazz albums of the year for some time period like 1955-1965 but we’ll see about those.

A good and knowledgeable friend of mine once suggested in the pub that the late 90s was a bit of a nothing time for music. What with the New York City cool bands like The Strokes and The Yeah Yeah Yeahs and LCD Soundsystem and Interpol (see Lizzy Goodman’s 2017 book “Meet me in the Bathroom” for the lowdown on these) still a year or few away, and Oasis and Blur’s Britpop and mainstream Grunge’s heydays were pretty much over. At the time I eventually came up with Refused’s The Shape of Punk to Come from 1998 as a counterexample, but what he meant was music that captured the public’s imagination / altered the zeitgeist / shifted the paradigm / more than twelve people listened to. While that means little to me, I have often been, rightly but not unashamedly, accused of music snobbery, but as we’re about to see the late 90s was certainly a marvellous time for “alternative” music. 1999 wasn’t at all bad for hip hop either, seeing the release of Mos Def’s Black on Both Sides, Roots Manuva’s debut, a contender for The Roots’ magnum opus, Dr Dre’s 2001, Eminem’s Slim Shady LP and no doubt countless others that I don’t know or haven’t realised about.

It was tough to narrow it down to a top number. Honourable mentions / some records that didn’t make the cut include:

• American Football’s debut LP. If you like post/math-rock and/or the myriad works of the Kinsella brothers (Cap’n Jazz, Joan of Arc, Owls, Owen, etc) then you’d love what turned out to be the first of three self-titled LPs. Just Mike Kinsella rather than Tim as well, but still.
• Blink 182’s Enema of the State. I enjoyed this at the time and there some classics of the genre here, but it’s not something that’s stayed with me ever since. I think I ended up swapping my copy for a Machine Head, The Burning Red CD.
• Speaking of which, 1999 is when Machine Head went nu-metal for the first time! While purists hate TBR, I have a lot of love of it…even the Message in a Bottle cover. Once again it gets Jimmy points because it was my initiation into the band, but there are plenty of tracks on there neither the band nor the fans are ashamed of today.
• Foo Fighter’s third record, There is Nothing Left to Lose, featuring such choice cuts as Breakout and Learn to Fly. I think after this they became patchy and middle-of-the-road. And much like with Red Hot Chili Peppers, while I like them, I resent them a little as bands whose records you can put on in order to please (or at least not alienate) everyone around you.
• Godspeed You! Black Emperor’s masterful Slow Riot for New Zero Kanada, if only it weren’t an EP. It is all of 22 seconds shorter than Reign in Blood.
• Jamiroquai’s Synkronized. Responsible for the singles Canned Heat and Supersonic, and the Godzilla-film-featured Deeper Underground. Many of the non-single tracks aren’t quite up there with the earlier albums, though.
• Limp Bizkit’s Significant Other. Not as childish as Hot Dog and a lot of it has dated more or less OK. I can even still listen to Break Stuff quite happily. Many good illustrations of the band being better than Fred Durst can be found throughout.
• Metallica’s grand orchestral experiment S&M. Worth it for the existence of No Leaf Clover and the arrangement of Outlaw Torn alone.
• Moby’s world-conquering Play. A bit too chilled and subtle for me at the time, but I have since come to recognise it as a classic piece of work.
• The Cinematic Orchestra’s Motion. I can’t include a TCO record every year they release one, so given it’s still a wonderful record but a bit of an early draft of what came later, Jason Swinscoe and Co’s debut can stay out of the top few this time around.
• The Flaming Lips’s The Soft Bulletin. I think this is generally considered their best album, but I confess I don’t know it well enough to opine.
• The Magnetic Fields’ 69 Love Songs (a title that should be taken literally across the album's three CDs). A big deal in some quarters. Including Neil Gaiman’s while he was writing American Gods.
• Chris Cornell’s solo debut record Euphoria Morning, released halfway between the last Soundgarden album until 2012 and Audioslave’s debut, was well received.
• Metalcore innovators Botch’s second and final record, We are the Romans. As great as Botch’s own music was, they are almost as well remembered for the bands its members formed after – Minus the Bear, Russian Circles, These Arms are Snakes, plus some others.
• Sick of It All’s solid Call to Arms. The AC/DC of New York hardcore.
• DJ, tea-lover, and weirdly fish-obsessed Mr Scruff’s eclectic Keep It Unreal.
• Skunk Anansie’s Post Orgasmic Chill. Notable for many things, including a heavier sound and Skin continuing to have one of the most distinct, and, more importantly, also lovely voices in, well, any musical genre.
• Travis’ The Man Who. I couldn’t stand this. I seem to recall the secret track was OK and I didn’t hate a song they did years later. A perfect example of an album I thought maybe the Punks and Metalheads could have united against (remember that people, particularly the English on a platform when the trains are delayed, are united by what they hate and not by what they love), at least until Coldplay’s Parachutes came out the year after, but it was not to be.

Plenty of nuggets there, and now an even better 14 for y’all to wade through my extended thoughts about. You lucky, lucky things.

AFI – Black Sails in the Sunset

I can’t decide whether this or 2000’s The Art of Drowning is my favourite AFI record. While TAoD evokes particular memories of a childhood winter, BSITS is less specific for me. BSITS is perhaps a purer record, with TAoD having a few bumps on the way, but then arguably its goth/horror punk sheen makes it in turn less pure than its predecessors. I think with AFI you either pick the era you like best or go with whatever got you into them in the first place. Same thing, perhaps. Note also that BSITS was the first record with guitarist Jade Puget as a full member.

While I have a lot of affection for the band’s pop-rock era (not least in a sense that AFI doing their pop-rock is better than other pop-rock bands doing pop-rock) it often suffers from a cheesiness that I don’t hear in the earlier stuff when the music and especially the lyrics were less compromised. While the longer tracks are perhaps a little laboured, the album otherwise personifies all the best parts of AFI: beloved opener Strength Through Wounding is a fully realised fist-pumping anthem not just a throwaway intro, God Called In Sick Today is a closing ballad to die for, Baudelaire-quoting secret track Midnight Sun is well worth the wait, Davey Havok’s oblique lyrics are pure poetry (not that you can make them out) and his often cleverly phrased shouty delivery is on point, the backing vocals add so much, the melodies are infectious, the artwork is striking (it was later referenced in the Sing the Sorrow artwork), Havok’s hair/look and tattoos were on their way to iconic (I don’t think he’d finished his Nightmare Before Christmas sleeves at this point),…I could go on and on. And probably will, another time. 1999 is also notable for seeing the release of AFI’s All Hallows EP, as important a bridge between albums as At the Drive-In’s Vaya EP (also released in this year) was between In/Casino/Out and Relationship of Command.

Dream Theater – Metropolis Pt.2: Scenes from a Memory

A concept album where the concept is good and well executed yet the music still comes first. A real DT fan favourite. It features some of the prog-rock/metal band’s best song-writing and most astonishing playing.

Incubus – Make Yourself

An important gateway record for me into alternative music but a fantastic record in its own right, this is probably my (and a lot of people’s) favourite Incubus record. I was due to see it performed in full at the Royal Albert Hall earlier this year but, y’know, lockdown. I like the heaviness, the scratch track, the balladry (Drive!), the singles, the album cuts. And I appreciate the lack of funk, if I’m honest.

Korn – Issues

Unlike the seminal third album Follow the Leader, and to a lesser extent the first two records, the Bakersfield nu-metal quintet’s fourth album has dated extremely well, I’d say. It still has plenty of Korn-staple rage and depressing cathartic lyricism but there is no guest rapping and no ill-advised attempt at humour or nasty sex stuff. There are interludes to make Tool proud, the bagpipes are subtle, the album sequencing is right on the money, it has an “art” ending of 4 minutes of static, and it has this sad-sounding, claustrophobic (I might be overdoing it), production that I always try to call out when I hear it because it suits me down to the ground (see: Roots Manuva albums I like). Falling Away From Me and Make Me Bad are two of the greatest songs they ever released.

Mogwai – Come On Die Young

1997’s Young Team is generally considered the Scottish post-rock chaps’ best work, but I find that record not fully realised and so don’t agree. In any case I think that does a disservice to the rest of Mogwai’s huge body of work and their well-deserved longevity. Now CODY, on the other hand, well that’s a strong contender. Slick and consistent but also chock full of highlights (The Iggy Pop sampling Punk Rock (most spoken word intros or samples I want to skip after the first listen or two – Daft Punk’s Giorgio Moroder, Puscifer’s Simultaneous, every other track on Soweto Kinch albums – but never this nor Godspeed’s) Christmas Steps, May Nothing But Happiness Come Through Your Door), it isn’t bombastic like Young Team but it is more subtle, better produced, and dare I say it…more arty?

Nine Inch Nails – The Fragile

The follow-up to Trent Reznor’s everything-changing The Downward Spiral, this had a lot riding on it. Not least with a 5 year gap while Reznor struggled with addiction and the pressures of fame. Given I started with 2005’s With Teeth and worked backwards, I wonder if The Fragile isn’t my favourite of the classic NIN era. Fans and critics were divided by its length (it’s a double – the discs are “Left” and “Right”) and lack of directness (‘Starfuckers, Inc.’ aside, although that’s ‘buried’ halfway through the 2^nd disc) and classical music influences (recurring themes in general and track ‘La Mer’ in particular), but I wouldn’t have it any other way. The Great Below is for me the superior album-ending (well, disc 1 anyway) ballad compared to Hurt (I also rate ‘Right Where It Belongs’ higher). While there were 5 year gaps between the first 3 albums (1992’s Broken EP, notwithstanding), it would be 6 years until the fourth. After which Reznor’s prolific-ness exploded (we’ve had albums and EPs and soundtracks and side-projects coming out of his ears. It seems sobriety and stability suit him). This is especially interesting for being the other way ‘round to how most bands seem to do it.

Opeth – Still Life

A record I forget to listen to often, unlike everything from Blackwater Park through to Ghost Reveries, but that I always enjoy a lot when I do remember to. Not that lo-fi is anything to sniff at when it comes to Scandi death or black metal, but I gotta say this is the first record where they started to sound really good. Given Opeth’s intricacy and penchant for drawing in from multiple genres, I think a more professional sound suits them.

Rage Against the Machine – The Battle of Los Angeles

Perhaps a little less fresh or shocking than the self-titled debut, but otherwise I find it comparable with that album, in a way that Evil Empire isn’t quite, not just for having grey artwork but for high quality and even consistency. It’s probably worth noting that I initially hated RATM, mostly for the high-pitched rapped vocals, but as with a lot of bands and musical styles I got over myself and came to enjoy those vocals (and the lyrics and politics they espouse) and Tom Morello’s unique guitar sound(s). I have since been lucky enough to see them live twice, and while I understand criticism of their shows sounding just like the record, I’m going to assign that to professionalism and declare them one of the best live bands I’ve ever seen. I tried to learn the bass intro at the start of Calm Like a Bomb, with mixed results. They would often write in their album liner notes that “all sounds made with vocals, guitar, bass, and drums”. I’ll admit I’m not totally sure of the motivations there, other than the fact that Morello makes such weird noises with his guitar people might think they were from something else, but as it is I’ll lump them in with the Melvins as prime examples of how creative you can still be with just the basic instrumentation and no bells and whistles.

Red Hot Chili Peppers – Californication

I am happy to laugh at all the RHCP jokes as much as the next person, but this album is a lot more than a socks-on-cocks party record. Once again I appreciated the lack of funk compared to their sound up to this point (note that that was in retrospect, this being the first RHCP record I’d heard. On my school’s German exchange, in fact); apparently Jamiroquai is a far as I’m willing to go there :s. Anyway, it is perhaps telling that other than beautiful closing ballad Road Trippin’, the 5 singles are all from the first half of the record. After track 7, Easily, and again other than Road Trippin, I only really like This Velvet Glove (but boy do I love that song!). That said, the plodding Porcelain is probably the only track I would actually ditch. Other than that I think we have the perfect mix of quick and upbeat with Anthony Kiedis’ more introspective demon-airing side, and it was a triumphant return for guitarist John Frusciante. While I don’t think Flea deserves all the flack he gets (apparently his parts are quick but not difficult or musically interesting. I’m not sure about that. And he did play bass on The Mars Volta’s Deloused in the Comatorium and it sounded nothing like RHCP. And he can jam. Which is what I guess “proper musicians” do, no?), Anthony probably does, but Frusciante, and drummer Chad Smith, certainly deserve all the praise. Perhaps the pop side of the pop rockiness of this album is why I don’t listen to it much these days, This Velvet Glove aside, but it was another gateway/guitar music initiation for me (on the same trip to Germany I bought Garbage’s s/t and Stereophonics’ Word Gets Around on CD from a shop in Cologne) so it will always be special to me because of that. I quite like the blue/orange reversed sky/swimming pool artwork too.

Roots Manuva – Brand New Second Hand

This might be the last time I say this, but this is the record with this beautiful bleak (claustrophobic!) production which both perfectly suits Rodney Smith’s laid-back mumbly dreamy rapping style and sound and delivery, and appeals to my limited hip-hop sensibilities. A lot of the lyrics are eminently quotable too, in his very British way.

Sigur Ros - Ágætis Byrjun

While I favour ( ) ever so slightly, this is another quintessential album from the Icelandic post-rock second-coming pioneers. Clichéd adjectives that are nevertheless absolutely perfect to describe the sound Sigur Ros make: mercurial, ethereal, other-worldly. Arguably the catchier and more accessible record compared to ( ).

Slipknot – s/t

A teenager-friendly album of its time that I am not going to dismiss retrospectively (like the masked Iowan nonet’s sophomore record, previously derided), here the Slipknot staples that would later grate (cheesy raps, saccharine choruses) do not. I think that could be down to several things. Originality (relatively, compared to themselves at least) perhaps, passion and earnestness definitely, and nu-metal pie-fingerer Ross Robinson’s rawer and slightly underdone production certainly helps. There is a little more filler than there maybe could be, but the Charles Manson-referring intro track is perfect in a way that failed attempts to repeat it on albums 2, 4, and 6 are not, and (sic) is the opening track to end all opening tracks, introducing to the world as it did Slipknot’s trademark multi-percussion attack. Then you have DJ Sid Wilson’s finest moment with the scratchy intro to Eyeless, hit single Wait and Bleed, mediocre but heavily promoted and seemingly beloved band anthem Surfacing, live-show-jumping single Spit It Out, and on we go. Scissors is arguably their best epic track (although I have a lot of love for the track Iowa in this regard) and the bonus tracks were all quite welcome – Eeyore even gets played live, like a proper song!

The Dillinger Escape Plan – Calculating Infinity

I have written that nothing sounds too heavy to me anymore. This brutal mathcore record is perhaps the closest I can still get. While plenty aggressive, sure, there are still plenty of signs of the intelligent and experimental side to the band, not least their signature stop/start jerky tempo changes. Greg Puciato did not vocalise on a TDEP record until 2004’s Miss Machine, so this featured original vocalist Dimitri Minakakis. While Puciato is next level and probably more versatile, I think the band would have done just fine had Minakakis stayed.

The Roots – Things Fall Apart

My favourite The Roots album, I think. I suspect largely because of the tunes Dynamite and You Got Me in particular. While I certainly do like Tariq Trotter and friends' rapping, including the words and the politics, it's the other aspects of the band and their sound that really draws me to them - the hooks, Questlove's direction and super tight-pocket drumming, the beats and production and their involving live/acoustic instrumentation. This record in particular also features a whole roster of hip-hop and R&B royalty - Mos Def, D'Angelo, Common, Erykah Badu and Eve. I also liked the book the album title comes from.

A playlist

https://open.spotify.com/playlist/2d5krj1s80cXIrDKWBoNgi?si=_kDcDnNiQuWszJ5a37CWBA

1. AFI – Narrative of Soul Against Soul
2. AFI – Total Immortal
3. American Football – You Know I Should be Leaving Soon
4. Aphex Twin – Windowlicker
5. At the Drive-In – Rascuache
6. Blink-182 – Adam’s Song
7. Botch – To Our Friends in the Great White North
8. Chris Cornell – Can’t Change Me
9. Dr Dre – Still D.R.E
10. Dream Theater – The Dance of Eternity
11. Eminem – My Fault
12. Foo Fighters – Breakout
13. Godspeed You! Black Emperor – Moya
14. In Flames – Colony
15. Incubus – Pardon Me
16. Jamiroquai – Deeper Underground
17. Korn – Make Me Bad
18. Limp Bizkit feat.Method Man – N 2 Gether Now
19. Machine Head – I Defy
20. Melvins – Toy
21. Metallica – No Leaf Clover
22. Moby – Guitar Flute & String
23. Mogwai – May Nothing but Happiness Come Through Your Door
24. Mos Def – Ms. Fat Booty
25. Mr. Scruff – Fish
26. Muse – Cave
27. Nine Inch Nails – Starfuckers, Inc.
28. Opeth – Face of Melinda
29. Rage Against the Machine – Calm Like a Bomb
30. Red Hot Chili Peppers – This Velvet Glove
31. Roots Manuva – Movements
32. Sick of it All – Let Go
33. Sigur Ros – Svefn-g-englar
34. Skunk Anansie – Cheap Honesty
35. Slipknot – Wait and Bleed
36. Stereophonics – Rise Up and Shine
37. The Cinematic Orchestra – Channel 1 Suite
38. The Dillinger Escape Plan – 43% Burnt
39. The Flaming Lips – Race for the Prize
40. The Magnetic Fields – The Book of Love
41. The Roots – You Got Me
42. Will Haven – If She Could Speak
43. Will Smith – Will 2K 

Best music of 2000

See “Best of 2008” for a general introduction.

I’m not stumped, exactly, for this year, but as it happens I can quite easily keep the list of faves down to a mere ten. My longlist is only 31 records! Now, this is as usual a very personal thing – there are some HUGE albums from this year that weren’t my thing, which I mention in another bulleted list of nuggets here:

• 2000 was the year of…Linkin Park – Hybrid Theory. With thanks yet again to Wikipedia, this record “sold 27 million copies worldwide, making it the best-selling debut album since Guns N' Roses' Appetite for Destruction (1987) and the best-selling rock album of the 21st century. At the 44th Grammy Awards, it won Best Hard Rock Performance for "Crawling".” Wowsers. I was 15 and a raging Korn fan at the time, and so LP was just too smooth and lame and tame for me. Where Jonathan Davis would have a good ol’ swear, Chester Bennington (RIP) would say something like “you tried to take the best of me. Go away”. PG-rated metal

• The opposite of PG-rated, but still about as dangerous as a wet tissue, and also massive, selling c.8 million copies was…of course…Limp Bizkit – Chocolate Starfish and the Hotdog Flavored Water. I did, however, absolutely love the Mission Impossible 2 song Take a Look Around, a silly lyric about little girls filling up the world today aside

• The original version of Lostprophets’ debut, The Fake Sound of Progress, came out in November 2000 (the more famous remaster followed in 2001). Is it an incredibly fun summery record? Is Shinobi vs. Dragon Ninja a pleasingly titled earworm of a tune (that they allegedly wrote in mere minutes)? Do I still enjoy listening to it from time to time? Despite everything that singer Ian Watkins did? Yes

• Where Cave In’s first album was raging metalcore and their third album was melodic indie, the second album, released in this year, was space rock. Not bad, but I don’t love it like the other two (nor the 4th, released in 2005)

• Disturbed – The Sickness. Ooh wah ah ah ah!

• Eminem’s seminal 2nd album, the Marshall Mathers LP!!!

• Marilyn Manson was very much alive and well (he still is, tbf) and being accused of causing school shootings, with the well-received Holy Wood…In the Shadow of Death album

• Bruce Dickinson returned to Iron Maiden after a few years and a couple of albums off. Brave New World was the comeback record and of course it wasn’t bad because Iron Maiden albums never really are

• Rage Against the Machine’s 4th and final release, a covers record called Renegades, came out

• Heirs to Pantera’s groove metal throne Lamb of God released their first album (New American Gospel) under that name (it’s their second release if you count the album recorded under the Burn the Priest moniker)

• The ever prolific Melvins released their third album in a trilogy, the Crybaby. Very long and rather patchy and there’s at least one too many covers on there, but it includes a nearly 15 minute long track featuring the members of Tool

• Pearl Jam’s Binaural is hardly their best album overall, but there are one or two enduring numbers from it

• Thanks to the same friend of mine who got me into Korn, Metallica, heavy music in general, etc, I was big into a band called One Minute Silence around this time. I saw them with him at the Astoria (RIP), where I’m pretty sure I bought a bootleg hooded sweatshirt outside the venue and it only survived a handful of washes. Anyway, while they were ostensibly nu metal and very much of their time, they were actually rather smart, musically varied, and certainly very political (I mean, just read the title of their release from this year: Buy Now…Saved Later).

• Similarly for Pitchshifter, if you remember them (my dad once deliberately but amusingly misheard this as “shit shovellers”). The very early stuff was incredibly industrial (one of the records is even called that) and brutally heavy. They ended up a fairly slick rock band with lots of electronics (they would sometimes stick a track or two of free samples at the end of their albums). Not a little political or above a bit of social commentary either! I think I also saw them at the Astoria, and one of the band members proposed to his girlfriend on stage

• I revisited Raised Fist’s pre-Dedication catalogue as part of these blogs, and 2000’s Ignoring the Guidelines is certainly on a level with that record. There were clearly a good few years when the Swedish punks made impactful music with a bit of danger and edge (not wishing to miss another opportunity to shit on it, 2019's Anthems is the worst but not the only example of them straying into poppy shite territory)

So then, onto ten records from Y2K I like the most. 5 of them are actually some of my favourites ever (the first 4 plus Godspeed) but in some cases the bands did better work another time (AFI and Godspeed and Radiohead maybe, Glassjaw and Pantera definitely). 

A Perfect Circle – Mer De Noms

Not a Tool side project, as it is very much guitar player and songwriter (and previous Tool guitar tech) Billy Howerdel’s band, although singer Maynard James Keenan does play a huge and vital part. They are arguably a super-group in retrospect, but at the time drummer Josh Freese was known chiefly (but not solely) for The Vandals (certainly enough by itself, but he has since played with Nine Inch Nails and lostprophets among a whole host of others), bassist and violinist Paz Lenchantin was just starting out (she has since played in Billy Corgan’s Zwan and is currently in Pixies), and it would be a couple of years before guitarist Troy Van Leeuwen joined Queens of the Stone Age. (2003’s Thirteenth Step featured ex-Marilyn Manson bassist Twiggy Ramirez instead of Lenchantin, a reduced contribution from Van Leeuwen, and touring guitar from Smashing Pumpkins’ James Iha. Talk about the circles some people move in!)

I’m wondering if Sea of Names (English translation) isn’t as timeless or endlessly re-playable as Tool, although it is certainly more straight-forward than what used to be Keenan’s day job. Less so than the average rock band, mind! There are a couple of duds on the tracklist too, but the album earns its place in historical best-of lists purely through the existence of the songs The Hollow, Judith, Orestes, and 3 Libras.

AFI – The Art of Drowning

I honestly don’t know whether I prefer this or 1999’s Black Sails in the Sunset. Where The Art of Drowning earns points for my being my point of entry, it perhaps loses points for the dilution of the goth punk with rock and electronic elements. Looking back, that seems a silly thing to think a disadvantage, especially given BSITS was itself far from pure punk (squint and you’ll hear the influence of the Cure and the Smiths and the album title is taken from an Elvis Costello song, for goodness’ sake). Indeed, the drum-machine featuring the Despair Factor is one of their best ever songs! While Strength Through Wounding (BSITS) and Miseria Cantare – The Beginning (2003’s Sing the Sorrow) are far and away the best intro tracks AFI did (back when their albums all had a similar structure), I think the simple opener Initiation is the most perfect lead-in to The Lost Souls. Speaking of which, this was my, ahem, initiation, into the punk elements of shouted gang vocals and the idea of simple riffs played quickly. And while it didn’t open the doors of punk for me, everything from the artwork to the snowy Christmastime of first listening to it means never a winter will go by without me clearing 48 minutes and 33 seconds from my life to properly give this another spin.

At the Drive In – Relationship of Command

I’m saying this a lot about this period of time, but in terms of alternative music I was mostly just listening to nu-metal and metal. The love of most things post-hardcore and screamy would come a bit later. I do remember friends and acquaintances being in to ATDI at the time, but the tuneless barking thing wasn’t for me. Until second year of university, I think it was. I can’t quite remember how it happened, but ATDI, Soundgarden, Audioslave, and the Mars Volta all came along at once. Around the same time I was binging my X-files DVD boxsets and replaying Perfect Dark on the N64 (managing to complete it on the hard difficulty which I hadn’t first time around) so it must have been another instance of the stars aligning. Well anyway, right from the moment of the shuffling and drum intro to Arcarsenal, I was hooked on everything Omar and Cedric had done and would ever do. The lyrical and musical complexity only enhanced the whole experience. And while the powerful singing on Deloused in the Comatorium was all the more impressive since Cedric did not “sing” for At the Drive-In, it was the lack of bite in the bark on 2017’s Interalia that rendered that record inessential for me. Where Omar and Cedric can be sloppy (rhythmically and tunefully) they make up for it in the sheer energy of the performance. I will even admit that that serves them better in ATDI than The Mars Volta – see their rendition of One-Armed Scissor on Jools Holland, for example: musically horrible in some ways but as a performance it just works. My constant mentions of Omar and Cedric should not detract from the other three members of the band (at the time Jim Ward on guitar, Paul Hinojos on bass, and Tony Hajjar on drums) who not only brought an incredible solidity to the foundation but on several occasions shone out over their more recognisable afro-haired bandmates. The drums are incredible throughout, but even on One-Armed Scissor, an easy choice because it was the “hit” single, the musicality as well as the tightness is loud and clear. And that bassline on Quarantined is one of my favourites ever.

Deftones – White Pony

While this record will always come top in the best-of lists and polls, Deftones’ catalogue is so consistently excellent and often surprising that, outside of self-titled (perhaps, but definitely for me) and Saturday Night Wrist (I really like it but even I wouldn’t put it near the top), ask any given fan and their favourite could be any album. Well anyway, White Pony is certainly the iconic quintessential Deftones record – dreamy and heavy (that constant push and pull between singer Chino Moreno and guitarist Stef Carpenter’s preferences) and experimental, a sublime guest vocal on Passenger from Tool’s Maynard James Keenan, objective recognition via album sales and a grammy win for Elite, rap rock single Back to School to satisfy the label, and their biggest song in Change (in the House of Flies) although, like Nine Inch Nails’ Hurt, I often wonder if they could drop it from their setlists from time to time with no-one being any the wiser.

There was a point when I preferred the heavier attacks of the Around the Fur, but when I was ripping a CD for my friend Matt to try to get him into Deftones (it actually worked, and we must’ve seen them live nearly ten times together) I found myself unable to choose just a couple of songs from White Pony. Back to School isn’t all that representative of the rest of the album, and Pink Maggit is a tad incomprehensible, but there isn’t really any filler on there.

Explosions in the Sky – How Strange, Innocence

The debut album from the Mozarts of post-rock, and yet everything from the musical arrangements to the song titles and artwork style arrived pretty much fully formed. An unfettered tear-jerking joy to listen to.

Glassjaw – Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Silence

I hated this when my friend first played it to me. I thought it was godawful trashy noise. Nothing like the tuneful proper music of, er, Korn… But then somehow the quick-fire (sub 2 minute) track Babe grew on me, then the hardcore screamy approach in general, then Glassjaw’s sophomore album Worship and Tribute, and then finally the rest of EYEWTKAS. It gets a bad rep for its production, but that’s certainly aged better than the rampant misogyny in the lyrics – it is one of the most purely angry records I have ever heard, as Daryl Palumbo rages against his Crohn’s disease and seemingly every woman who’s ever wronged him, but to me the songs and the performances are great enough to try to gloss over the more-than-unfortunate aspects of it. To their credit, the band themselves play very little from it these days, and asked fans not to buy the remastered version, but I think might be for other reasons like their hatred of the Roadrunner Records label. Actually, I just googled it and in a 2017 interview with the Guardian Palumbo said ““It deserves scrutiny. You don’t talk to a woman like that. It took being that angry to write [the debut album’s lyrics], to make it work for my instrument in the band. I was always like ‘Argh, revenge!’ Fall in love easily and then fall into hate easily. I didn’t have to say it that way ... It’s stupid, you don’t speak face-to-face to a woman like that. I was angry. It’s offensive.”

Godspeed You! Black Emperor – Lift Your Skinny Fists like Antennas to Heaven

Four tracks. Each over 20 minutes. Every of second of it epic and thick and dense and glorious and yet not that difficult to listen to and even less so to enjoy. The artwork and Coney Island spoken word sample (“they don’t sleep any more on the beach”) alone have spawned countless internet memes and references. Although the “comeback” albums (at this point there as many, three, released in 2012-2017 as there were from 1997 to 2002) are universally wonderful and lauded as such, LYSFLATH is probably up with F#A#[infinity symbol] as top two material.

Pantera – Reinventing the Steel

Back when I was a teenager and going to gigs in London was daunting, Pantera and Slayer and their fans were scary in a way that Korn and Slipknot weren’t. There is no basis for thinking that and I have never felt unsafe at any gig I’ve ever been to, so this would have been nothing more than fear of the unknown. I was still at school as I started to get into Pantera and Slayer though –I would have been 16 or 17 when I bought Pantera’s Vulgar Display of Power record from a shop in Newcastle (while there on a family holiday). My friend Dan who was the authority on all things proper metal (the aforementioned and Metallica, at least) used to say this record wasn’t as good as the others as the songs weren’t as good quality. Now, RtS certainly isn’t as good as the “great trilogy” (there it is again) of Vulgar, Far Beyond Driven, and The Great Southern Trendkill. It is not a well-crafted album like those, so much as a decent collection of 10 songs. When you are as good as Pantera, though, a decent collection of 10 songs you throw together is still a lot better than average. And, much more controversially, I prefer it to Cowboys from Hell. That record has some greater standout movements but it has a little too much of the glam from Pantera’s early career left in it.

Radiohead – Kid A

Bob “Judas” Dylan goes electric! Radiohead go electronic! A very down-to-earth friend of mine was a big Radiohead fan but he was all about the guitar records. I might have started getting over my “guitar music only!” constraint by then, or I was being contrarian against this friend, but I liked and like Kid A. A lot. It was conceived and recorded as a pair with 2001’s Amnesiac but while they have distinct atmospheres and sounds, Kid A is for me far and away the superior of the two. Everything in its Right Place and How to Disappear Completely are two of the most achingly gorgeous songs they ever released, guitar or no, and Idioteque is a track I will happily dance to in my living room with no one else around (Radiohead’s 2003 song Sit Down, Stand Up is another rare example of that!).

St Germain – Tourist

I was recommended this by a colleague and friend in the Fruit and Veg department at Waitrose, where I worked when I was a student, given that I liked Jamiroquai and The Cinematic Orchestra e.g. acid jazz and nu jazz. Well, certainly if you like those acts and those genres more generally it would go without saying that you’d like St Germain! While “St Germain” is one person, Ludovic Navarre, and the music is more produced and processed than Jason Swinscoe’s TCO, this is not to say it doesn’t have plenty of acoustic instrumental collaborators, features and solos, so I come away from a listen eminently satisfied.

A playlist

https://open.spotify.com/playlist/5oiFWWpnZlnHOb7QeCJcRS?si=I9q2p0bhSGqFTLttmqr6iQ

1. A Perfect Circle – The Hollow
2. AFI – Sacrifice Theory
3. Amen – Refuse Amen
4. At the Drive In – Enfilade
5. Cave In – Big Riff
6. Deftones – Knife Prty
7. Disturbed – Down with the Sickness
8. Eminem – Stan
9. Explosions in the Sky – Remember Me as a Time of Day
10. Glassjaw – Siberian Kiss
11. Godspeed You! Black Emperor – Sleep
12. Immolation – Father, You’re not a Father
13. Iron Maiden – Out of the Silent Planet
14. ISIS – Celestial (the Tower)
15. Lamb of God – Black Label
16. Limp Bizkit – Take a Look Around
17. Linkin Park – Crawling
18. Lostprophets – Shinobi vs. Dragon Ninja
19. Marilyn Manson – The Fight Song
20. Melvins – Divorced
21. One Minute Silence – Roof of the World
22. Pantera – Hellbound
23. Pearl Jam – Insignificance
24. Pitchshifter – Hidden Agenda
25. Placebo – Special K
26. Radiohead – Idioteque
27. Rage Against the Machine – Beautiful World
28. Raised Fist – Running Man
29. Sick of it All – Blown Away
30. Soulfly – Back to the Primitive
31. St Germain – Rose rouge