November 2017 Review

Remember November? When Keith Chegwin was still alive, and we didn't know who the winner of the 2017 edition of The Apprentice was yet. It's like it was a different era! November's traditionally the last proper month of releases in music, after that everyone's wrapping up their tours and going on their jollies. November 2017 was no different, as it saw some final pushes for the top of end-of-year lists, some wonderful, some brilliant, and some not so good. This month's top 2 in particular are very good, and the 3rd place album ain't so bad either if you fancy a surprise release from an established artist.


The Rest:

Baths - Romaplasm - C

Hello Skinny - Watermelon Sun - C

MED - The Turn Up - C

Talib Kweli - Radio Silence - C

Yung Lean - Stranger - C


The Best:

01: Charlotte Gainsbourg - Rest - A

It's another female songwriter in the top spot this month. Charlotte Gainsbourg's much-anticipated Rest, her first album in 6 years, is a triumph of breathy atmospherics that bristles front to back with the kind of vitality usually displayed by artists in their formative years. Rest has a pulsating urgency that never lets up. Minor key piano sections form the lion's share of the musical soundscape and make each song flow effortlessly into the next. With occasional orchestral stabs and simple electronic beats thrown into the fire, Rest is a ruthlessly engaging album, one which demands your attention but doesn't punish you with harsh sounds. Everything is smooth and measured. It is a logical, evenly-spaced album, with plenty of hooks.

The start of Rest is virtually apocalyptic; the first song Ring-A-Ring O' Roses is like the opening credits of a film, the synth-harpsichord melody that forms the back bone of the song driving right through to Lying With You, an emotional keys-led piece, both with Gainsbourg's carefully produced vocal laid delicately over the top. Gainsbourg lives in London but she has roots from across the English Channel, and sings half the album in French. This (to a boorish Englishman who can't speak a word of French) creates an exotic, faraway feel to the record, and on huge beat-driven songs like Deadly Valentine, Songbird In A Cage, and the utterly wonderful Sylvia Says, Gainsbourg's mastery of her voice across two entirely separate languages gifts Rest a vibrant, ultra-saturated sound palate.

Rest combines electronic pop with post-punk and goth styles. It's bouncy, happy and clever, but it's also melancholic. The music is virtually all synthetic, but presented with so much honesty and pathos that it's one of the warmest listens you'll have all year. Rest's final track is Les Oxalis, ending the album with characteristic epic choruses, rich synth lines and the driving bass sound that keeps the whole thing bumping like a carnival right to the end. Gainsbourg enjoys a breakdown section at the finish, then resists the urge to drop into a 3rd chorus, instead choosing to turn a vocal sample from a young child (presumably Gainsbourg's daughter) into a big finish, aptly closing a record about the death of her father with the voice of the next generation. Flip it over and play it again, Rest is too good to leave alone!

02: Bjork - Utopia - A

It's tough to write about an artist as lauded and universally acclaimed as Bjork, because really, after years of mind-melting experimentation, everything that's going to be said has been said about her. She covers a vast width of musicality, taking inspiration from countless obscure and mainstream choices and constantly mutates her voice and the instrumentation around it to form music that is challenging, comforting, familiar and unique all at the same time. Utopia is the latest album from this wonderfully idiosyncratic genius.

Bjork attained escape velocity and left the solar system some time in the late 90's, after a wave of huge alt-pop hits left her balanced squarely in the golden spot between mainstream success and critical acceptance. Building on that position with her first 2 records Debut and Post, each of her subsequent albums have gone further and further in pushing the envelope of what can be considered music. Utopia is denser than most of the recent output Bjork has given us; it's altogether more lush than 2015's Vulnicura. This is actually what makes Vulnicura a better album, though. It's much more focused than Utopia; the album's meaning and direction can falter at times. It's easy to get lost in the forest of sounds, and it doesn't wait for you to catch up before hitting you full force with the next section.

This is of course, still a brilliant record. Utopia's pinnacle is Losss, a composition spanning nearly 7 minutes. It starts gently, with Bjork's inimitable voice seeping through stuttering beats, and evolves through newer and newer levels. The music gets more complicated with each passing minute, before the final chaotic section of madness, the gentle plucked strings give way to a full-on electronic-blipped freak out, the malevolent creeping percussion does what it's been threatening to do all song and breaks through the mix, overwhelming the rest and washing over you like an enormous cleansing tsunami. Then just as quickly - The song is over. What do you even call this kind of music? It's beautiful, dangerous, emotional and robotic. It's vibrant and stark. It's Bjork all over. She's been on top form for decades, and there's no sign that she's going to slow up any time soon.

03: Noel Gallagher's High Flying Birds - Who Built The Moon? - B

Noel Gallagher has spent the last few years building himself up from the wake of the breakup of one of the biggest rock bands in history. Since his debut solo release in 2011, he has managed to make a status for himself entirely apart from the lager-fuelled hedonism of Britpop, and the phoning-in of the post-90's Oasis years. His solo work has been pleasantly bereft of the trappings of his previous rock stardom, and has focused around what we knew he could do all along - Writing honest, accessible songwriter's pop-rock. The kids have been sent upstairs to bed, and now the grown-ups are cracking open that hours-chilled bottle of Rosé. Let's have a proper conversation, shall we?

Who Built The Moon? is different to what you'd expect from the 3rd Noel Gallagher solo effort. While it would be remiss to suggest that this album is experimental, (especially compared with Bjork's release from the same month) it is the strongest curveball Gallagher could possibly throw at this point in his career, and for that you have to give him a lot of credit. He could churn out a collection of brusque ballads every 18 months and be done with it, and a lot of his fanbase would probably be very happy about that, so for him to put out such a psychedelically informed record is a big statement. The compositions are brimming with guitar noise, euphoric choruses, and big beats. Gallagher's unmistakable calm voice leads the musical journey, and ties the whole of Moon together, to make a complete listening experience unlike anything else he's ever put out.

There are straightforward tunes like Holy Mountain and Keep On Reaching which maintain the no-nonsense Gallagher brand while simultaneously allowing the more adventurous pieces such as Fort Knox, It's A Beautiful World and Be Careful What You Wish For to shine brilliantly. While his brother plays around in the sandpit with rhyming couplets and 6th form guitar riffs, Noel Gallagher is spreading his wings and exploring new lands. Moon is more compelling than anything Oasis put out in their final decade of existence, and frankly if this is the sort of thing Noel wants to put out under his solo moniker, then that big money-spinning reunion can wait.

04: Converge - The Dusk In Us - B

05: Joji - In Tongues - B

George Miller, questionable Youtube starlet and instigator of the enormous Harlem Shake meme (remember that? 2013 feels like a different world, doesn't it?) also does music, as I discovered a few weeks ago. I'd heard nothing of Joji, his newest endeavour, and mainly picked this E.P from the fact that it was so highly rated on albumoftheyear, which is where I find most of this odd stuff I listen to. In Tongues is a wonderful little E.P, and it's a shame it's not any longer because it feels like the ideas Joji explores on it could very easily be stretched to a full-length effort. It's generally a sombre record; opening track Will He sounds a lot like something that could be on Sampha's early-year highlight Process. It stays the same all the way through In Tongues, and the tripped-out beats, drippy piano chords and floaty falsetto vocals means 16 minutes flies quickly by.

Bitter Fuck is the best song on In Tongues. Joji's style on this song melds elements that bring to mind the styles of Frank Ocean and Beck into a simple mix of instrumentation that ends the E.P on the highest note of all, even though the lyrical content is about loss and despair. It encapsulates the mood Joji wants to explore on In Tongues - Life is shitty, but I'm making the most of it. So even though Joji wanders around morosely throughout this E.P, the overall experience is nourishing and positive. It's a mature project from a young artist who's trying to move to the next level. Someone give this kid a full album deal!

06: King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard - Polygondwanaland - B