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Top 25 Records of 2019

There seems to be a thread running through the albums that I’ve gravitated towards this year. One of a sort of wary hopefulness. Things may have been tough, they will inevitably be tough again but there is a sense of perseverance laced throughout. The world may feel like it’s taking two steps forward and one and a half backwards at any given moment but through this we are left with a choice: give in to the mounting gloom or battle to find some light emerging from within it. This isn’t a binary separation of good or evil. It’s a challenging breadth of experience that informs almost every decision that might face us in the coming year. Here are some records that might help steel you for the journey.

One quick note - I’ve opted not to include reissues and compilations in the list this time around. That’s not because there weren’t any worth considering but, essentially, I had to find a way to thin a very competitive pack. It turns out that I have only ended up cheating myself by sticking a reissue in the list anyway… Whatcha gonna do eh?

Anyway, here are a bunch of reissues that could/should/would have made the list at any other time:

Vatican Shadow’s steady flow of early tape releases now pressed onto vinyl.

Kayo Dot’s post-metal classic Choirs of the Eye arriving onto a breathtakingly packaged LP set.

A couple of absolute beauties from Light In The Attic:

Kankyō Ongaku: Japanese Ambient, Environmental & New Age Music 1980-1990

Pacific Breeze: Japanese City Pop, AOR & Boogie 1976 - 1986

Have A Nice Life's brilliant Deathconsciousness 

And finally making Neil Young’s score for Dead Man  available on wax at a price that doesn’t cause eyes to water.

That's enough swingball... Here's the list:

25. Stephen O’Malley & Francois J Bonnet - Cylene 

Editions Mego

Sometimes putting out a solo record, two studio albums from your main creative outlet (in this case, the era-defining Sunn O)))), and appearing on scintillating releases by heavyweights such as Tinariwen & Yann Tiersen just isn’t enough. Sometimes you also need to collaborate with a powerful and renowned creative force in order to conjure up a sonic interpretation of volcanic despair. I think that it’s fair to say that 2019 was a particularly fecund year for the axe-wielding drone dredger.

Full review here: https://www.echoesanddust.com/2019/09/francois-j-bonnet-stephen-omalley-cylene/

24. Lower Slaughter - Some Things Take Work

Box Records

These top-drawer characters returned with a sludge-slinging album jammed to high heaven with gargantuan riffage, cathartic vocals, and architecture-bothering bombardment. It's like having your door kicked down, being pinned to the wall and getting sucker-punched in the feels with infectious hooks and deeply resonating emotional sincerity. You're gonna need this one in your ear holes.

23. These New Puritans - Inside The Rose

Infectious Music

A web of crystalline sounds that showcase TNP’s progress from rambunctious synth-botherers into purveyors of sweeping and grandiose musical vistas. More Scott Walker than The Fall this time around, Jack’s vocals have evolved from an unrepentant bark into something quite magnificent and lustrous. Inside The Rose feels like a smattering of bright star-punched holes in a draped backdrop of dark and weighty velvet.

22. Teeth of the Sea - Wraith

Rocket Recordings

With Wraith, TOTS have consolidated their position as preeminent pedlars of psych-injected electronic scores for hallucinated cinema. Part Morricone-bait, part buzzsaw guitars, and part glitch swagger. Wraith is all smart muscle.

21. Salford Electronics - Deconstruction

Hospital Productions

Technically just an EP (and one of at least 11 different digital releases from the rain-bringers in 2019 alone) but this one successfully locked into the rising agoraphobia inherent to Burial & Quarter Turns… era Raime and then dialled it up into a feverish swelter. The title track (not to mention the Ancient Methods & Vatican Shadow remixes) was a very early contender for track of the year.

20. Sarathy Korwar - More Arriving

The Leaf Label

Speaking of track of the year, when asked by my employer to submit one for their end of year lists, I went straight to the fourth song on this fierce and timely release. ‘Bol’ is a majestic piece that artfully blends Zia Ahmed’s deadpan wit with low end throbs, pounding drums, and Aditya Prakash’s soaring melodies. So much so that when Ahmed forlornly delivers the line “I am so damn lost” the hairs on the back of my neck can't help but pay rigid attention.

19. Justin Hopper & Sharron Kraus with The Belbury PolyChanctonbury Rings

Ghost Box

If you’d told me at the start of the year that I’d hear an album of soothing ambience and spoken word, in which an American writer expatiates about the mystical qualities of a renowned ring of trees atop a hill just north of my hometown… I would probably have looked a little puzzled. Perhaps as puzzled as you might appear now. But, trust me, this one wriggles deep beneath your skin and proves a very worthy companion piece to Hopper’s The Old Weird Albion.

18. Skin Crime - Traveller on the Road

Hospital Productions

Ghostly winds, scuffling and scratching. A sense of looming doom. The thirty minutes that make up Traveller on the Road are rotten and unsettling. And I’m all for it. It’s the same uneasy air that permeates Henry’s wanders through piles of filth and rubble on the way to discover that he is a father in Eraserhead. Delightful stuff.

17. Carla Dal Forno - Look Up Sharp

Kallista Records

I was, quite fortunately, able to write about Carla’s excellent follow up to You Know What It’s Like for my work’s end of year list. so I’ll probably just regurgitate that here:

“From brooding melancholy and disembodied dub to rumbling post-punk and scaly dream pop, Carla conjures something that is both seismic and entrancing. Look Up Sharp takes on board all of the aspects of Dal Forno’s previous releases and then chisels them down into their most lean and dynamic forms. The Melbourne-via-Berlin-and-London artist inspirationally navigates the blights of modern life with an album steeped in the overcast greys of London town. Just give ‘Don’t Follow Me’ a spin and imagine it as a soundtrack for dodging your way through pissy puddles before ambling down into the depths of a tube station that is buckling under the weight of its morning-breathed commuters.”

16. My Disco - Environment

Downwards Records

Another one for those yearning for Blackest Ever Black (RIP) Raime type sounds. This is ghastly noise construction from confrontational Aussie types. It throbs and crashes around like the dismantling of a squat. The duo aren’t afraid to go off and explore sounds in their own good time too, resulting in an even more stark and startling barrage when they return to zero in on your aural annihilation.

15. Moonbeam Terror - Comfort Knife

Hospital Productions

I’m not sure if I’m a bit of an oddity, an outlier, a freak, even, but I genuinely find the harsh pulsing distortion that fills out ‘Cruelty of Care’ quite soothing. It’s like a vicious massage occurring inside my cranium. The rest of Comfort Knife doesn’t disappoint either. It’s a record that will have you checking your speaker cones for tears. Real strong work from one half of Autoerotichrist.

14. Jenny Hval - The Practice of Love

Sacred Bones

Another one that I was allowed to evangelise about for Echoes & Dust. Hval has really upped the ante on The Practice of Love, delightfully fusing her artful experimentation with an undeniable knack for melodic ear-worms. I dug a little deeper here: https://www.echoesanddust.com/2019/09/jenny-hval-the-practice-of-love/

13. Silk Road Assassins - State of Ruin

Planet Mu

An oddly overlooked record that really grabbed me back in last January. It’s resplendent with soaring grime instrumentals that deftly flash from futuristic electronics to the type of melancholic beats that Holy Other was dropping a while back. Honestly, what’s not to adore?

12. Michael O’Shea - Michael O'Shea

Allchival

I definitely owe Boomkat a nod for this one. It probably shouldn’t be included as per the reissues blather above, but it is flipping gorgeous and completely new to these tired old ears. Otherworldly, ethereal, oneiric. It touches upon each of those words but none of them quite cover it. Somehow spacious and full, O’Shea was channelling something mighty magnificent back in 1982. And it’s basically all played on a door.

11. Nivhek - After Its Own Death / Walking in a Spiral Towards the House

W.25TH / Superior Viaduct

Grouper’s Liz Harris delved into a thick haze for this project. Choral arrangements drift along in wonderful serenity before flooring it with hench drones that smother and envelop us, her awestruck listeners. Top stuff and hopefully not the only time that we’ll see her surface under this moniker.

10. E-Saggila - My World My Way

Northern Electronics

Basically a ball of fury that has taken sonic form. Bursts of noise interrupt mangled speech before your teeth are toe punted into sparkling shards by techno thumps played at nose-bleed inducing tempos. And that’s just the first track. From then on we’re neck deep in this Torontonian’s manic and wired world. It’s the musical equivalent of a Safdie Brothers film. All hurtling energy, knee-jerk decisions, brief elation, and seat-of-the-pants survival. Proper.

9. Richard Dawson - 2020

Weird World

Erratic rhythms, wry lyrics, and a sense of unbridled humanity. All of those classic Dicky Dawson characteristics are here and present but they’ve been fine tuned and intertwined with exhilarating electronics likely picked up from his Hen Ogledd dalliances. Dawson’s vision of 2020 is much like 2019. Just even more so. It’s littered with a cast of characters who range from relatable to confounding. But, in each instance, we see a part of ourselves that we can choose to embrace or shy away from. How we choose to react to this may well inform our responses to the challenges brought by the coming year. Also, ‘Jogging’ is yet another contender for that coveted Top Track 2019™ spot.

8. Moor Mother - Analog Fluids of Sonic Black Holes

Don Giovanni Records

Moor Mother ain’t messing. This year saw her in world domination form. The collaboration with Zonal (The Bug & Justin Broadrick) ought to have been enough to blow minds but she took it to another level and delivered this mind-recalibrating album of hurt, sorrow, and rage. They say that when you’re angry about something, it’s not just an emotional response but a guide to something that you wish to change. Well, justifiably, Moor Mother has a list of amendments that she’s got planned and, if this record is anything to go by, she’s not going to finish kicking until it’s done. Third track, ’After Images’, won 2019. End of.

5432… Cos after they’ve come for me, they gonna come for you”

7. Sunn O))) - Life Metal & Pyroclasts

Southern Lord

This is like when you're sat waiting for a bus and then two arrive... but they appear to be sort of connected. As if there's a rope bridge dangling between them. They’re taking a similar route to roughly the same destination but, somehow, each journey is markedly different. The faces seem to be the same yet there’s an uncanny difference. An injection of the eery. Suffice to say, Sunn O))) put out two studio albums recorded during the same sessions that are quite different and yet equally compelling. I couldn’t separate ‘em… So I didn’t. Except that one of them is reviewed here… and the other, here.

6. Clipping - There Existed an Addiction to Blood

Subpop Records

Another record of fierce noise but this time accompanied by big swaggering beats and scathing bars spat out like a foul taste. Clipping found a balance between their electronic cacophony and antagonistic verses on this one. It’s already outlived Splendor & Misery’s disappointing shelf life and with tracks like ‘Nothing Is Safe’, ‘La Mala Ordina’, and ‘Blood of the Fang’ easily rubbing shoulders with ‘Body & Blood’ and ‘Dominoes’ it’s safe to assume that this one’s going to be a regular returnee to the turntable. Oh and the last track is 18 minutes of a piano burning. Yup.

5. Andrew Wasylyk - The Paralian

Athens of the North

One that snuck under my radar when it was released back in February. Thankfully I was given ample opportunity to right that wrong and I’m very glad that I did. This is a wonderful meditative record. It’s like gleaming rays materialising through breaking clouds following a colossal storm. Somehow feeling like a breath of fresh air each time I put it on. Just a brilliantly crafted world that encompasses elements of folk, jazz, ambient, post-rock, and a sense of hardy pastoralism.

4. Kali Malone - The Sacrificial Code

Ideal Recordings

What can I say about Kali Malone’s ineffable The Sacrificial Code that hasn’t already been said? It’s a heart-stopping wonder. That’s about the best that I can muster. Organ drones that summon the pangs of scarred history. Dirges of unfathomable beauty. It’s on par with William Basinski’s iconic treatise on time’s rot. Heavy and yet hopeful. It’s personal but expansive and all encompassing. The theatrical definition of epic: a grandiose experience understood on both a global and individual scale.

3. Mamiffer - The Brilliant Tabernacle

Sige Records

Mamiffer is the husband and wife duo of Aaron Turner (of Isis, no, not that Isis, fame) and Faith Coloccia (who also records under the name Mára and has released another incredible record that I heard just a little too late to include here). On The Brilliant Tabernacle they joined forces to spellbinding effect. With wending piano, surging guitars, sombre strings, swelling drums, and Coloccia’s effervescent vocals they unwind this rich tapestry that imperceptibly shifts, moment by moment, from fragile folk trinkets into a cataclysmic storm befitting Armageddon.

2. Minor Pieces - Heavy Steps of Dreaming

FatCat Records

Another pair crafting heavy and sonorous works with feet straddling folk and noise subsets. If we’ve ever crossed paths, there’s a fair chance that I’ve spent that time evangelising about the music that Ian William Craig makes. And yet I’m very confident in saying this: Minor Pieces might just be his best work yet. Here’s an actual review that I wrote on the subject - https://www.echoesanddust.com/2019/10/minor-pieces-heavy-steps-of-dreaming/


1. Lingua IgnotaCaligula

Profound Lore

There wasn’t really any room for debate on this one. From the moment I heard it, back in June, Caligula was firmly ensconced in the top spot. It’s steeped in catharsis, salvation, revenge, survival, and everything in between. I wrote this about it for the work annual:

Caligula is a fierce call to arms for survivors of sexual and psychological abuse. It's a powerful diatribe that simultaneously wrenches both your gut & your heart. It's about no longer being a victim and it's undoubtedly the most vital recording of music that I've heard all year.”

Pure Grain Audio also allowed me to ramble on about this masterpiece a whole load more here - https://puregrainaudio.com/reviews/lingua-ignota-caligula-album-review