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