The Hits of 2012

It’s late – very late, I know – but I’ve finally managed to come up with a list of my favourite albums of 2012. In 2012, I consciously set out to delve a little more deeply into things that were new to me than I have in recent years, to, you know, try out some things I’d only casually engaged with before.

So, without further ado, I give you Daniel’s 10 + 1 of 2012:

1. Hildur Guðnadóttir - Leyfðu Ljósinu

According to Guðnadóttir's website: “To be faithful to time and space - elements vital to the movement of sound - this album was recorded entirely live, with no post-tampering of the recording’s own sense of occasion.” 

This album is a religious experience. Looped, dreamy, disembodied voice floats in slow surges. Cello washes over and under and through the voice. It pulses and breathes and stretches and twines around the voice and twines around itself and expands. This is epiphanic. It is searching and yearning. Haunting and, when the cello takes over in the last third, an amorphous storm. Listen on headphones, loud, in the dark, eyes closed; let it wash over you and under you and through you. Breathe it.

2. Neneh Cherry & The Thing – The Cherry Thing

It’s brash and big and exciting and free and full of twisting asides and ripostes. Cherry’s voice is a perfect companion to Gustafsson’s sax (I just read Gustafsson’s Wikipedia bio and whoever wrote that up added “he is known for his tonal belligerence and intensity when improvising”. Tonal belligerence; I like that. And it’s bang-on). Both Cherry and Gustafsson shred. They engage in such a rough, sexy dance, to which the rhythm section provides the perfect dancehall. Flaten (bass) and Nilssen-Love (drums) are tight; they share a mind, I think. They construct a perfect foundation for the manic dervishes swirling over top of them. They are indomitable. Cherry fits in with The Thing as though she’s always been a part of the group. She fits in effortlessly – a sign of her incredible talent and instinct. Everyone is performing at what sounds to me like the top of their games; they brought it hard.

Favourite tune: “Dirt” (yeah, a cover of The Stooges)

3. Liars – WIXIW

They’ve moved higher, they’ve become ethereal; they breathe more rarefied air than the rest of us. It’s intense music, unsettling, full of sounds that sound almost like something, but that can’t quite be pinpointed. Things hide just under the surface, whisper into your ear from just behind you. It’s an intricately layered album, full of dense synth and distant soundbits; Andrew’s vocals are mostly otherworldly, weary-sounding; resigned: a voiced shrug and sigh.

Favourite tune: “WIXIW”

 

4. Death Grips – No Love Deep Web

Dirty, raw, harsh, noisy, abrasive. It’s also incredibly spacious and open sounding (but also, somehow, very close and almost claustrophobic in its production); minimal and sparse, direct. Burnett’s yells are, when things really get going, throat-tearing. Hill’s drumming (on an electro-kit, using mostly the 808 kit, apparently) is pretty incredible; always a solid foundation under Burnett’s yells. Synth lines are thick and heavy, lots of abrasive textures, but also with some catchy hooks buried in there. It’s a really well-crafted album; teetering on the edge of unhinged chaos, but always reining themselves in, keeping things taut, right at the snapping point. It makes for tense listening.

It was difficult to pick just one of Death Grips’ two releases of this year for the list (especially since “Hacker” is on the other one [The Money Store]), but I think this album is a more cohesive whole; things flow better. The atmosphere is more intense; proceedings are more engaging.

Favourite tune:  “Come up and get me”

 

5. Wadge – Total Volcano Exploding

Take parts of grind (the speed, the intensity, the drums) and powerviolence (the vocals, the riffing), sprinkle generously with surf guitar and copious amounts of fun and awesome and you’ll get an idea of what Wadge is like. Total Volcano Exploding is quite a lot better than last year’s still wonderful Grindcore Lu’au – clearer; more direct; more focussed, stronger ideas. Pull on your board shorts, grab a drink in a coconut (add the little drink umbrella, of course!) and throw yourself a party.

Favourite tune: “Randall’s Reef”

 

6. Billy Woods – History Will Absolve Me

There are some great textures on this album; a great canvass for Woods to paint his words across. Huge, heavy beats. Intelligent, impassioned, angry spitting. It’s a heavy album, full of powerful images and layered, lush, thick songwriting. The songs that work best for me are the ones with more abrasive bits, that push against the industrial wall.

Favourite tune: “Crocodile Tears”

7. Wadada Leo Smith – Ten Freedom Summers

This album is exquisite. It is deeply and intensely moving. Smith’s compositions are so full and rich and so full of life. The interplay between the contemporary classical and free jazz movements is brilliant; they push and pull against each other, they crash into each other, dance together, grow into sweeping flourishes and charged soundscapes.

Abstracted, difficult progressions weave throughout the pieces, but are anchored by the incredible talent of the players; when Smith jumps in, it’s like everyone else holds their breath and waits, listens. He takes centre stage; he fills centre stage. His tone, his phrasing, his voice are masterful.

Favourite tune: “Buzzsaw: The Myth of a Free Press”

Listen here!

 

8. Robocop/Detroit – Dead Language, Foreign Bodies

Robocop sounds huge on this release; everything sounds so massive; the production is spacious and gives everything room to breathe and seethe and stalk around. Songs are wickedly raging bursts; scathing and acidic. It’s clever and inventive grind, with some great hardcore shouting mixed with more powerviolence-like yells.

Detroit’s side is rawer and looser, less controlled; it feels like it could tear itself apart, especially when they pick up the pace and everything is all frenzied and going everywhere and watch out for flying limbs. I think I can hear the sweat and spit.

Favourite tune: Robocop – “Word Virus”; Detroit – “Pusher”

You can check that out here.

9. Swans – The Seer

Expansive and expressive; bombastic and ritualistic; focussed and pummelling. The Seer is huge, unnerving, discomfiting. It is sneeringly epic; it’s whatever the fuck it wants to be. It’s an immersive experience: you can drop right in and float along, carried on its surging and ebbing. It heaves and breathes and is.

Favourite tune: “The Seer”

 

10. Árstíðir Lífsins – Vápna lækjar eldr

The black metal/folk metal hybrid is a tricky thing to get right; it requires a certain balance, a certain gravitas, a love and understanding of Bathory (without too much treading on Quorthon’s [mighty!] toes). This band steps up; there’s a dignity to proceedings here. The songs are epic in scope, honed, whittled, all extraneous pieces stripped away.

The acoustic instrumental sections are well-blended into the straight-ahead metal structures, providing stark contrast to and beautiful respite from the more scathing passages, but it never becomes formulaic or stale.

It’s the sort of Norse metal that causes stirrings within me: to ride a horse across Icelandic fields, fording rivers and loping down hills again; to run through snow-laden, silent woods again.

Favourite tune: “Blóð-Þorsteinn eystri”

X. Thee Walkin’ Jacks – Drop Dead

Caveat: I’m a biased listener; my good friend Josh is half the band (this may not be the correct fraction).

Grungy – not as in “performed within the grunge idiom”, but, like grimy, dirty; rock ‘n’ roll in its whiskey-swillin’, raucous, loose, fuck it, it’s time for a good time way (but with a melancholic misting on some of the tunes; that fine twinge of nostalgia, like dust settling over everything).

Guitars are jangly or fuzzed-out as required, with exactly the right amount of reverb-soaking; there’s a wink-and-a-nod knowingness to the vocals, a bit muffled and hazy. Most of the songs follow a pretty straight-ahead stomp that you can do some serious drinking to and maybe have yourself a bit of a party; don’t be scared to get a bit sloppy; slur your words a bit and just rock ‘n’ roll.

Favourite tune: “I Can’t Remember”

Listen here!

And, for all your partying needs: