Albums of the Year, 2017

Well. I spent so long not quite getting around to posting on my old LJ that the entire site fell to the Russians (no, not in a menstrual sense), and so I migrated its contents here and then never actually posted anything. But 2017 has been a decent enough year for music, if not for much else, so let's get the show back on the road by resurrecting my regular rundown of the Albums of the Year. Usual caveats apply, in that obviously it's wholly subjective, and als it does need to be an album that works as an album. Yes, I realise in the streaming age, that's increasingly kin to compiling a Best Villanelles Of The Year list, but fuck it, these are the lists I compile. And so, without further ado:

20. Sleep Well Beast - The National
After that horrible sparse album which lost everything I love about them, back to being the sound of sinking luxuriously into one's own melancholy bullshit.

19. Rainbow - Kesha
Lately, my love of pop has been sorely tested by a focus-grouped narrowing in on certain sounds and certain themes. Well, turns out the devalued currency of songs about partying and not letting the haters get you down might still have some life in it after all, so long as it's pinned to something a little more substantial than a bullshit Instagram feud or whatever the fuck. Rainbow is a bit long and diffuse, and some of the collaborators don't add much, but fuck it, after everything she can be excused that, and she deserves some appreciation nonetheless.

18. Inter-Domestic - The Melting Ice Caps
Poignant and gentle if you don't listen too closely, but quietly and eloquently furious at Britain's recent decision to do a national Elliott Smith when you do. Spoiler: we'll be returning to the theme of Brexit later.

17. Grow Up - Desperate Journalist
TFW your former flatmates play the bloody Scala and you realise they're kind of a big deal now. Big, lovelorn, goth-tinged indie like I didn't think anyone would be making anymore.

16. Room 29 - Chilly Gonzales & Jarvis Cocker
Two figures who were always faintly ridiculous, their best years now clearly behind them, collaborate on an homage to the most tired-out, coke-fucked cliches of rock culture. Somehow, it's amazing.

15. Shadows and Reflections - Marc Almond
If some tedious rock bloke did an album faithfully covering his tired canon, dropping in two new compositions which effortlessly blend, I'd denounce it as the most ghastly, pointless retromancy. When Almond does something similar with the songs of Bobby Darin, Billy Fury et al, it's gorgeous. What's the difference? Class, darling.

14. I Tell A Fly - Benjamin Clementine
Inevitably it's not quite as strange and new as the first contact of At Least for Now, and nor do the songs seem quite so catchy - and ultimately, wherever I may roam, I'm always on some level faithful to tunes. But bloody Hell, it still feels like an artefact from a better, purer world than ours, where the hurts are deeper and the joys brighter.

13. Juniverbrecher - The Indelicates
Yes, they'd normally be higher, in my list if not the world's. But as they said themselves in the lyric book, they'd been warning Britain about its nasty revanchist tendencies for their whole career, so you could easily have assembled their Brexit album from songs they'd already released. There is a new spine here, true - the notion that British pop culture in its entirety is an incidental side-benefit of paedophiles finding excuses to hang around with the young which didn't involve becoming teachers or priests - but even that was implicit in the odd line as far back as 'We Hate the Kids'. Still, nobody else would get this high with a reprise.

12. Oczy Mlody - The Flaming Lips
I'm not always that into the Flaming Lips, but this sounds like a party in a domed pleasure city on a moon with a really seventies view of the gas giant overhead. And the drugs at that party are some amazing Culture shit which means I end up feeling faintly buzzed even if I'm listening to Oczy Mlody in a slightly too shallow bath on a dreary Tuesday morning.

11. Every Valley - Public Service Broadcasting
The rise and fall of coalmining as an epic for voice and film sample. I wasn't entirely sold on the space album, but this wields the double-edged sword of nostalgia as deftly as their debut, especially on that perfectly ambivalent Tracyanne Campbell line "I believe in progress..."

10. Utopia - Björk
A techno-pastoral song cycle looking forward to the rise of something calmer and saner once capitalism burns itself out. 'Tabula Rasa' in particular is gorgeous, and would probably leave me even more emotionally overwrogught were I a parent. Just a shame that the cover art is utterly hideous.

9. Hippopotamus - Sparks
Like most of their work these past two decades, still two very smart men being extremely silly. Would that we could it all carry it off so well at their age. There's a thought: they're both pretty much the same age as Trump, aren't they? And he has something of the same love of repetition, the qualities of a child...I'd best finish this up, I think there's a thesis on 'Trump as Qliphothic Sparks' needs writing.

8. Masseduction - St Vincent
She was the only gig by a big act I went to this year, and I found the minimal, stripped-down format entirely unengaging, but like a bad film of a book, it couldn't hurt the album. Brittle, human and heartbroken, especially on 'Los Ageless', which is probably my song of the year (yes, I know the consensus seemed to settle on 'Bodak Yellow', but I couldn't get over how unhappy the cheetah looked in the video).

7. Oh, Sealand - Oddfellow's Casino
The last time I encountered eccentric geopolitical anomaly Sealand in a pop song, it was Art Brut's cheery celebration of the ultimate lovers' retreat. Here, it's an uneasy symbol of a newly isolated Britain where the clouds are closing in. A murmuring folk horror build-up of an album, which would probably be higher if it didn't depress me so much.

6. Hopeless Fountain Kingdom - Halsey
Because dreamy SF concept albums about doomed love and determinedly visible bisexuality are very much to be encouraged.

5. American Dream - LCD Soundsystem
For a month or two, this topped the list - but listening again it's very much the album of a particular moment, and parts of it already feel more like a time capsule than something affecting me here and now in itself. Which is surely crazy, but who can keep up with what's crazy anymore? Still far better than coming back after such a short and spurious break has any right to be, and very much the future soundtrack shorthand for films about 2017, assuming of course that there is a future.

4. Fin - Syd
Wooziness seems to be pretty common in R'n'B and hip hop lately, but a lot of it feels more listless than anything else, and leaves me entirely cold, like a stoner explaining why they can't undertake a simple task. This, though, this is the late-night, Julie London sort of woozy I love.

3. The Hero's Journey - The Mystery Fax Machine Orchestra
Martin White's grand folly continues; this time, he and the surprisingly large band he's enlisted on his Quixotic adventures do a song for every stage of Joseph Campbell's monomyth. Given how stripmined that structure's been these past few decades, that might not sound too appealing, but Hollywood has seldom been quite this lateral in the application. It may just be because it was one of the first tracks to be released and so I've known it longest, and the video has ghost versions of several mates, but I'm especially fond of the sex-funk 'Supernatural Aid'.

2. Goths - The Mountain Goats
I was drifting away from the Mountain Goats for a while there, until the wrestling album brought me right back. But for all that wrestling is kin to superhero comics and thus the only sport I could ever hypothetically see myself getting into, it's still not a part of me, not like being a kid from a nowhere town hearing something strange and fascinating in weird bands who wear black. Most of Goths isn't goth in any recognisable sense, and even at my most crimped Gene Loves Jezebel were always a bridge too far (though in the current climate, I can see why they avoided mention of Sex Gang Children). But that place deep inside that's always going to be wowed by mirrored walls and dry ice? This album gets me there.

1. 50 Song Memoir - The Magnetic Fields
Ever since 69 Love Songs, Stephin Merritt has seemed as if he were so scared of being able to live up to it that he wouldn't even try. So he imposed a series of Oulipo-style restrictions on his subsequent work and, with the exception of i, it's generally resulted in frustrating will-this-do? albums where even the few good songs could have been a lot better. Well, turns out he just needed another stupidly maximalist project, like one song for each year of his life. Yes, it wobbles a bit in the nineties, and normally that sort of inconsistency makes me respect an album less qua album. But the rules are different when you operate at this scale (cf: my forgiveness of the clunky bits in Jerusalem, or my readiness to admit yet forgive the fact that my favourite TV show has, across its 54 years, often been fairly terrible). Like 69 Love Songs it's at once monumental and intimate, and so multifaceted that my favourite song changes with every listen. Triple figures next time, Stephin?

And as a bonus, let's have 2016's list, which was too depressing to post at the time, what with mostly being old men meditating on time and death. And no, I've still not heard Beyonce's Lemonade, because fuck premium streaming services and their exclusive wars, and streaming seems really to have done for home taping and all its noughties children:

albums 2016
1. Blackstar - David Bowie
2. Skeleton Tree - Nick Cave
3. You Want It Darker - Leonard Cohen
4. The Last Boy in the Locarno - The Cleaners from Venus
5. Skilled Mechanics - Tricky
6. Take the Slow Train - Philip Jeays
7. The Waiting Room - Tindersticks
8. And All The Ships At Sea - Lightning In A Twilight Hour
9. Pleasure - Medium Wave
10. Coyne Castle - Eugene Coyne