Journal For Plague Lovers - An Underrated Album

Released a decade and a half after the disappearance of Richey Edwards, Journal For Plague Lovers is a compendium of punchy art-punk songs using words he had written before he left his life behind forever. Richey handed a file of songs, sketches, poems and haikus to Nicky Wire a few months before his disappearance. Some of those came out on Everything Must Go, spawning several beloved Manic Street Preachers songs, and in the case of Kevin Carter, one of their biggest singles. Evidently there was much more to come from such a prolific writer, so Journal, in that sense, seemed inevitable. 

The band’s career post-Everything Must Go had been topsy-turvy, style-wise. Their next release, This Is My Truth, Tell Me Yours, was a softened, glacial album, one that spawned some of the band’s biggest hits but was a departure from their previous work. After that came Know Your Enemy, an esoteric stab at covering all the bases of  their output to date - More of a collection of songs than anything else. They changed tack again with Lifeblood, another slow, contemplative collection of songs. After that came Send Away The Tigers, a generally well-received album with a traditional rock sound and a back-to-basics feel. It seemed as if the Manics kept apologising for the last album with each release, and never settled on one style to carry them through the decade.

Journal is an anomaly in this sense, because upon listening to this righteous, effervescent post-punk statement, there’s the feeling that after multiple releases trying to hit the jackpot, the Manics were once again comfortable in their own skin. Many casual listeners will have switched off in the mid-00s and missed this rough diamond in their back catalogue. But I’d implore anyone who gave up on the Manics after their commercial peak to give this album consideration. In my opinion, it’s only bettered by Everything Must Go and The Holy Bible.

After an initial positive critical reception, Journal has been poorly treated by fans and the band alike. Aside from the promotional tour, during which the band played the entire album to excited crowds, Journal has been virtually non-existent in setlists for the past 10 years. For a band famous for their eclecticism and playing random songs during gigs, this is a little strange. Perhaps they intended Journal to be a studio-only effort, which will stand as a monument, rather than a “normal” album to draw a couple of songs from each tour. In any case, going to a Manic Street Preachers show and hearing any song from this album has been a rare pleasure in the last decade.

Richey Edwards, during the Generation Terrorists era - Better days.

Posthumous releases usually raise ire from audiences - Even the most rabid Nirvana fans will agree the asset-stripping and liquidation of all Kurt Cobain’s unused music has been merciless. There’s a balance that should be struck with this sort of thing. Of course it’s worth putting out material after a legendary artist has died, but how much is enough, and how far is too far?

I’d offer Journal as the perfect spot between such unclassifiable points. Aside from the fact that they were sparing with the material, it’s clear that this album was crafted with the respect that only Richey’s three dearest friends could give it. It is because the Manic Street Preachers are so close, that they share so much love for one another and their music, that they are able to pull this off. Journal is their final present to Richey, a farewell tour for his ideas and beliefs.

There are many familiar cues on Journal which pique the 90s Manics receptors in your brain, dog whistles that key you in to the world of the band as they were, in the hot young space of their early years. Journal then, though a 2009 release, is firmly in the aural landscape of the 90s Manics Street Preachers sound. The film snippets before songs, the interview clips in the mid sections, the lo-fi production, the big solos that last eight bars. It’s all familiar. Take the artistic direction, too - An album sleeve from the same artist who provided cover art for The Holy Bible, which caused some controversy on release. The long, obscure song titles, and the niche intellectualism that underpinned all of Richey’s work. The band forgot the last 14 years and made the kind of music we all thought had slowly expired after their peak. The result is a wonderfully listenable slice of artistic triumph. Call it nostalgia if you will, but it contains some of the band’s finest work.

Marlon JD is Richey Edwards 101. It’s about a specific period in Marlon Brando’s life, when he retreated to an island and attempted to live simplistically. Edwards read and watched movies voraciously, and he often obsessed about people he learned about, and how they dealt with life and the pain of existence. For this bloated Hollywood star to want to divest himself of luxury and retreat to obscurity fascinated Richey. The lyrics borrow from a couple of Brando’s films, centring on the humiliation Brando put himself through, and the fact that this young handsome man turned in to what he did, a middle aged slob fulfilling his carnal pleasures with no limits. The guitarwork is fresh, shattering through the air with simple parts that add up to a headrush of noise. James Dean Bradfield’s voice skims over the top, playfully melodic, but with a grinding edge. It’s an instant, urgent Manics track, that begs to be spun repeatedly.

Journal For Plague Lovers recreates the energy of the early Manics years 

One of Richey’s chief songwriting moods on Journal is the anarchic delirium he offers on Peeled Apples, Jackie Collins Existential Question Time and Virginia State Epileptic Colony. At times the lyrics can be impenetrable, but it’s richly rewarding to see the landscapes he painted. The best cut in this vein is Me And Stephen Hawking. Opening with an immortal line “Herman the bull, and Tracy the sheep/Transgenic milk containing human protein”, it’s a high energy riff-rampage that flies out the speakers, but isn’t too intense. What makes these harsher songs shine is the ease in which the band roll back the years and cut away the bullshit. It’s instant vintage Manics. Lines with outdated terminology like ”100,000 watch Giant Haystacks in a Bombay fight” betray the specific part of history these songs came from; it feels like a time capsule of Richey’s final few months.

Richey had been in and out of hospital running up to his disappearance. She Bathed Herself In A Bath Of Bleach is about someone he met during these difficult times. A roaring 4-on-floor banger, this song holds that uneasy marriage between the troubling words and crunchy rock guitar sound that became the Manics’ calling card in the latter years of Richey’s life. The chorus might as well have been ripped from a Holy Bible session, with James spitting out four lines of simple vocals across eight bars of power chords; the closest to a hook this song could yield. Richey-era Manics were always so good at expressing the darker side of mental health with such vitality. She Bathed sits alongside such bleak cuts as 4st 7lb and Roses In The Hospital as prime examples of Richey’s writing about his desperate mental state.

The quieter songs on Journal are what give depth to this album. There are two straight-up acoustic numbers alongside William’s Last Words, the album closer sung by Nicky. The lyrics read like a suicide note, something the band have been keen to play down, but with the final lines being “I'm really tired, I'd love to go to sleep and wake up happy” alongside words about saying goodbye and talking about love for his family, it’s hard to see what else Richey would have been thinking about when writing this song. The strings are understated as they rise towards climax, ending the album with an uncharacteristic level of calmness; a denouement which allows genuine closure. 

Facing Page: Top Left is a starkly beautiful song. Mainly just James and an acoustic guitar, with the addition of a simple harp melody sweeping along in the background, it’s a worthy sequel to Small Black Flowers That Grow In The Sky. Richey often took feelings of hopelessness (Way down, of course I smile) and the relentless consumerism he saw in his daily life (Here is hospitality, skin care tones/Clean fresh and lines, tinted UV protection) to express the despair and self inflicted duplicity of living in the modern world. He could write big emotional acoustic numbers just as well as the angry harder songs he was famous for. This part of his range as a lyricist cannot be downplayed. He really was the full package, and one of the exceptional songwriters of his generation. 

The band in their early peak. Young, angry and very much a four piece!  

It’s easy to talk about Richey Edwards when discussing Journal, but the other three members show a good turn on this album. James Dean Bradfield, though versatile in the other forms the Manics have explored, is right at home with the more classic elements of guitar music he wades through on Journal. His riffwork and soloing is resplendent, hearing him layer melodies as effortlessly as he does is a breath of fresh air after the restraint of previous releases. Sean Moore, the unsung hero of the Manics, has a lot to say on this record as well. His composition and vision brought in the piano mid-sections, the atmospheric outros, the vocal effects, all the extra bits that make the songs last longer than they should. Even Nicky Wire enjoyed himself on this record, writing choruses and the music for key sections in several songs. Nicky made sure his fingerprints were all over Journal, along with his friends. In this way, the rest of the band show their commitment to honouring Richey. This is a group effort.

Something happens when Richey and the rest of the Manics come together in a song, something that’s been missing from their sound since he left. The creative duality he maintained with the music is irreplaceable, and entirely unique. For the first three Manics records, they formed and developed their sound between releases, but it had indelible roots in rock and punk, the DIY aesthetic taking precedence over the polished sound the band would bring to the fore after Richey’s disappearance. His influence on those early years was pivotal. The chemistry between the four young friends made them the irresistible draw they are, but it was all a vessel for Richey’s lyrical poetry.

Great success came in the wake of Richey's disappearance, but they always remembered their musical brother.

This is what appeals so much about Journal. It is a call back to their beginnings, to the brassiness of the 90s that made the band such a force, with Richey Edwards front and centre. He was the pulsing core of the Manic Street Preachers. 14 years after his disappearance, he lived again, channelled through James Dean Bradfield for one last waltz, his old friend doing stern duty to his words. In his absence, Richey Edwards fueled one of the finest records the band has put out. In the end, it was all so easy - The Manics open the book on Richey’s lyrics as if he’d just left the room. 

Of course their career reached unimaginable heights in the years following Richey’s disappearance, and they are more popularly known from Wire-penned classics such as Design For Life, If You Tolerate This, Your Children Will Be Next and Masses Against The Classes. Post-Edwards, the Manics have become an institution, they are quintessential 90s/00s British rock and will always have a place in that era’s pantheon of artists. But Richey Edwards was the essence of the band before all that, and he was the reason they were able to build such a solid base of material and catapult themselves into success. Journal is the Manics’ loving thank you note to Richey. It is an honest tribute to their bandmate, their friend, and their brother. History will remember their bigger releases, but this one is very special indeed.

December 2017 Review

Finally, the year's reviews are done. I am fully 2 months behind where I want to be with these updates, and I'm done with the format now. I'm gonna go into some more  longread-y stuff from this point. Unless one of you fancy paying me to do this. Do.. any of you... fancy paying me... for this? Maybe one day. For now, there's the final 9 albums of the year. As with last December's there's slim pickings - I had to put in a film soundtrack to pad out the numbers. But I am very enamoured with the top 2 records, and I did really enjoy hate-listening to Eminem's latest dirge. Top 40 of 2017 to follow!


The Rest:

Eminem - Revival - C-

Eminem's new album Revival (hasn't he already released like 4 albums with that title?) conveniently illustrates the paradoxical dichotomy at the heart of his huge success. It is a confused mess of superstar guest spots, blunt-force attempts at socio-political commentary and downright ludicrous misogyny. Revival is Eminem's latest attempt to reconcile his Still Don't Give A Fuck bleach-blonde shock-rap persona with his No, Actually I Want To Be Serious Now version of himself he started in the mid-00's. As you may have gathered, it doesn't work.

Eminem would be far more credible and relevant if he picked a side. All the ham-fisted sincerity in songs like Untouchable, Bad Husband and Believe would be at least acceptable if it wasn't on the same album as songs like Framed, Offended and Remind Me, (the latter of which making a complete waste of the clearing fee for extensive sampling of I Love Rock 'n Roll) the lyrical content of which is frankly appalling.

He almost gets it right with progressive song structures. He shows brief flashes of the technical brilliance that made him famous in the 90's. But this is all buried in the quagmire of a terminally disoriented middle-aged stream of consciousness. There is no consistent tone or message, and it's about 20 minutes too long. Hip-hop is in it's third golden age. Records are being released that we will talk of in reverential tones in 20, 30, 40 years time. Boundaries are being broken. Legends are being made. This simply will not do.

G-Eazy - The Beautiful & Damned - C

Gucci Mane - El Gato: The Human Glacier - D

Minors - Atrophy - C


The Best:


01: Glassjaw - Material Control - A

It's tough for heavy bands to keep up the energy of their earlier years as they move in their 30's and 40's. This era of rock band come backs has yielded some mediocre offerings in that regard - You only have to look to At The Drive-In's thoroughly OK album from earlier in the year for an example of this. It's just not that easy to replicate the pure energy of your teens with an extra couple of decades between you and that age, with kids and a mortgage in tow.

With Material Control however, Glassjaw have bridged that gap with some vital, moany American Post-Hardcore. Material Control has all the bite of the best of the 90's output of that scene, with the added bonus of self-reflective hindsight. This is only the band's third album to date from a release history that spans over 20 years. That may be what is driving Glassjaw to such achievements - They still have a ton of energy left from the old days. They have unfinished business.

Material Control is a contained, clever piece of art, with every considered emotive phrase licking at the heels of it's predecessor. The intro suite of New White Extremity, Shira and Citizen suggests a relentless aggressive listen awaits, but as the album unfolds, Glassjaw enable their more experimental side to come out. They balance that out with quieter sections, although they are merely contextual to the soaring choruses in tunes like Golgotha and Closer, which are predictably the highlights, and help Glassjaw keep their stripes with the purists. Material Control is a triumph, and a huge statement for the band's first full length release in 15 years.

02: King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard - Gumboot Soup - A

I made a point of doing these blogs at least a month late because I've always been bothered by major publications lopping off the end of the year and releasing their top albums list in November. After all, what if the greatest album ever recorded gets released on December 31st? King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard put that theory to test by dropping Gumboot Soup on the final day of the year. And it's... Just about worth the wait!

Gumboot Soup is the band's fifth album of 2017. It's been described as a collection of tunes that wouldn't fit on the previous four records, mainly for stylistic reasons. Normally this would set off the one-track 30 minute improv jam cop-out alarm, but King Gizzard are a hugely prolific group of musicians. Their final release of  the year is just as snappy and entertaining as anything else they've given us this year. I'd actually go as far as saying it's the best of the bunch, because even though it's not fully representative of their 2017 output, it's a lot more accessible on the whole. The jazzy meanderings and 9 minute songs take a back seat for this round. It's an easy gate into the overgrown garden.

Intro track Beginner's Luck sticks straight in your head from the first listen, but once you've treated yourself to a few more spins, other pieces come to the fore. Down The Sink, The Great Chain Of Being, and Superposition are all songs that will inspire your creativity and have you reaching for your favourite Zappa records for months. There's far too many great moments on this album to mention, but my top cut is the marvellous psychedelic pop of Barefoot Desert, which positively glows with insight and energy. Gumboot Soup is a brilliant, smart record that is a fantastic sign off to 2017 for King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard.

03: Brockhampton - Saturation III - B

Coming out of nowhere, Brockhampton turned up to the 2017 rap party halfway through but still managed to get as wrecked as everyone else. Released in the space of six months, along with a companion film, the Saturation project spans 2.5 hours. It seems like an ambitious foray for what is the debut full-length offering from the self-proclaimed "internet's first boy band," but the burgeoning collective have appeared to find the whole thing totally natural. Saturation III is 2017's final slice of Brockhampton's easy alternative Hip-hop.

We're used to the drill, now. Saturation III is as tightly-packaged and well-considered as it's sister albums. It's tough to pigenhole so many rappers in one go, but their collective status plant their roots loosely in Odd Future and by extension, Tyler, The Creator's early progressive wordplay. That's just a vessel for their originality, though - In a world of battle-hardened MCs and galactic superstars, Brockhampton sit in their own compartment. Clean enough for mainstream rotation without losing any lyrical edge, accessible enough for casual listeners to dip into without being too sappy, the inclusive vibes of self-worth ripple across the surface gently, spiked with the confidence of a dozen-or-so young dudes who are inching into the spotlight.

Though the form is pleasant enough, you really really have to justify releasing three LPs in half a year. Brockhanpton don't even come close to producing enough quality material to fill out the space, and for that I have to mark it down. Saturation III on it's own is fair enough, but with the others, it's too much. I don't think Brockhampton are arrogantly releasing so much music - They are genuinely prolific. But with a fourth and possibly even a fifth record in the works for  2018, Saturation is an apt descriptor for this band's effect on the music world.

04: Jonny Greenwood - Phantom Thread - B

05: Tom Rogerson & Brian Eno - Finding Shore - B

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

October 2017 Review

Remember October? These are coming through a bit late! Just the nine albums from the latest crop, with a couple of bangers and several also-rans to pore over. I heard possibly the worst album of the yer this time round - Weezer's Pacific Daydream. If there's one thing I cannot stand, it's rock music with no edge at all. It's so sugary it rots your teeth after 5 minutes. It's like Rivers Cuomo is terminally ill and he's decided to just be really nice to everyone for his last 6 months. It's hard to tell if it's a joke or not, to be honest. Anyway, don't listen to it.


The Rest:


Liam Gallagher - As You Were - C

After the demise of Beady Eye, Liam Gallagher's shameless stab at forming Oasis 1.5 in spite of the absence of his brother, (which is like reforming Nirvana without Kurt Cobain) it looked like he was artistically finished, shying from the limelight for a few years in the shadow of Noel's much more successful solo venture. But in summer 2017, Liam came back on to the scene. He had a new band, a new clean attitude and new songs. As You Were was released to a huge commercial reaction, becoming one of the fastest selling albums in British chart history.

This is an unreservedly sincere album, which is probably what has won it so much surprise critical acclaim. Unfortunately though, the quality is lacking. After the initial burst from Wall Of Glass, As You Were drops irretrievably into 2nd gear, and stays there for the rest of the album. Gallagher's voice sounds better than his scratchy late 00's years, but his lyrics are often embarrassingly immature, with hammy references and clumsy imagery. This is very much one of those albums that is only given credence because of the name behind it. As You Were is middle of the road from start to finish.

Kele Okereke - Fatherland - C

ORB - Naturality - C

Weezer - Pacific Daydream - D


The Best:


01: St Vincent - MASSEDUCTION - A

St Vincent is one of those artists that has been unfairly and narrowly categorised. Like people labelling System Of A Down as simply Nu-Metal, and like Blur being cast off as Britpop, St Vincent has been given that dreadful catch-all moniker: "Indie." That's completely unjustified, as across 5 separate albums now, St Vincent has proven herself proficient in countless styles of music. Like pop super-luminaries such as David Bowie, Bjork and Prince before her, St Vincent should be seen as one of the standard bearers for uncategorisable genius. She is a musical polymath, and it's already exciting to think about how album 6 is going to sound. But let's not get ahead of ourselves. MASSEDUCTION is her 5th and best record to date.

MASSEDUCTION is front-loaded, with virtually all the key moments and peaks coming in the first half. My top pick on this album is the title track, an instant classic, modern pop masterpiece. St Vincent claims a wide range of musical influences and Masseduction is a microcosm of  those. In one song we get vocoded textural singing, buzzing synth lines, heavy Grunge guitar, and of course St Vincent's clear-cut melodic singing, which is reminiscent of some of Kate Bush's finer moments. It's a skeleton key for the rest of the album, which is probably why it was chosen as the title track. It's easily one of the best songs of 2017.

The rest is just as good, mind. That's why MASSEDUCTION was at the top of so many end-of-year lists, it never lets up, there's not a bad song or a note out of place on the whole album. There are multiple moods that shape the experience, and St Vincent explores them all thoroughly. The Electro-pop sheen on Sugarboy, the blippy experimentation on Saviour, the exhilarating pop-rock sound of Young Lover, all these songs represent an artist at the absolute peak of her creativity. The lyrical content deals with just about anything you can think of in the human experience; St Vincent herself has said that the album focuses on themes of "Power, sex, drugs, sadness, imperiled relationships and death." - To name but a few. Throw in the more sombre down-to-earth pieces like Happy Birthday, Johnny and you realise this is a very personal record, which makes it all the more vital and listenable. A solid shout for album of the year.

02: King Krule - The OOZ - A

With such a delightfully understated jazzy penchant rolling out tastefully across the musical landscape of the mid-10's, a lot of ground has been covered in the genre in recent times. In times like these, it's hard to stand out from the crowd, but King Krule, an anonymous looking kid from south London, has managed to dig himself a unique trench in amongst the noisy muck of his contemporaries. At 23 years of age, he has already released his third full length record to critical acclaim. The OOZ is a chaotic, dank storm of sounds and textures, and is his best release to date.

King Krule's braying caterwaul is distinctly familiar; he shares a lot of vocal tones with fellow Big Smoke songscaper Jamie T. His music is altogether much darker though, the inky instrumentation adds to the sparse, loosely structured compositions. There's no pleasant electronic blips or sunny hooks to help drag you from the briny depths. You're thrown in at the deep end and invited to find your own way home.

And while that leads to some unforgettably superb moments on The OOZ, that's why this one falls a bit short for me. It's all well and good if you like that sort of thing, but after a while the pained cries of "So lonely!" over scratchy guitar noodlings gets grating, and several songs outstay their welcome. At an hour and 6 minutes, The OOZ is an effort to keep enjoying. If it were 20 minutes shorter it could be the album of the year. It just goes to show, that even with some of the high quality pieces on The OOZ, and with some song writing way beyond King Krule's years, it is possible to have too much of a good thing.

03: Wu-Tang Clan - The Saga Continues - B


Wu-Tang Clan are kinda like the Oasis of rap music - A flurry of  legendary, genre-defining releases in the 90's, followed by increasingly average albums based around the quality of 2 or 3 single-worthy tunes. So while I get that twinge of excitement when my favourite Hip-hop group get back together for another record, I never expect it to be 36 Chambers. With that level of expectation setting in mind, The Saga Continues can be a good listen.

This is a bit of a switch-up for Wu-Tang. With the production handled chiefly by Mathematics, this is the first Wu record that doesn't feature RZA as the head beatsmith. His music is instantly familiar to fans of solo Wu-tang records and fits comfortably around the verses to set the scene. There's no U-God on here (regrettably, as I've always found him an underrated MC) and only one GZA verse, so the project is a little lopsided. Inspectah Deck and Method Man have by far the most enjoyable turns, and do the lion's share of the work. Longtime Clan affiliate Redman is also one of the most prominent rappers on Saga, holding court with the key verse on lead single People Say. This is an oversight, it makes it feel more like one of the unofficial Clan compilations like Wu Block. That's what a lot of the critical advice has been with Saga - Treat it more like a mixtape than a full Wu-Tang Clan album and you'll enjoy it more.

Saga doesn't scale the heights of the first decade of  Clan releases, and I doubt any future Wu-Tang record will ever do so. But it's far better than 2014's atrocious A Better Tomorrow, and apart from a couple of dud tracks (My Only One is exactly the kind of throwaway, weakened R 'n B RZA was ranting about on the intro to the the second side of Wu-Tang Forever - I guess you always end up becoming what you hate) the overall flow of the record is pleasing, and tracks like Lesson Learn'd, If What You Say Is True and Hood Go Bang pump out the stereo with at least a genuine desire to recapture the energy of the earlier Wu-Tang releases. At this stage in the Clan's history, it's the best we can hope for.

04: Ty Dolla $ign - Beach House 3 - B

05: Beck - Colors - B

While he is a celebrated and universally respected artist, with a clutch of huge records to his name, even the most ardent Beck fan would admit that he hasn't done anything truly worthy for some time. With the high water mark of his releases firmly behind him, and as classic albums such as Mellow Gold, Odelay and Sea Change celebrate 10th, 15th and 20th anniversaries, it feels like it's getting harder and harder for him to recapture the golden touch. With Colors, Beck hasn't exactly got back on form, but it is certainly the best thing he's done in a while.

The smart indie pop aesthetic is something Beck has been courting for some time now, and on Colors he plunges deep into the sound that has characterised some of the most commercially successful releases from alternative pop bands like MGMT and Foster The People. For the first time in a while, he's doing what he does best - Snappy, quirky, hook-laden tunes. Beck has eschewed the palate of samples and multi-genre-spanning songs and gone for a consistent sound on Colors, which inevitably exposes the samey songwriting, but doesn't detract from what is an enjoyable listen on the whole. Colors isn't going to change the world, but it's a safe bet from an artist who hasn't knocked it out of the park since the turn of the century.

September 2017 Review

I listened to no less than 14 albums from October, it was one of those months where I read the release list and was all "yep, yep, yep ...yep" and kept on loading my Spotify up with music. As is often the case with these bumper months, there were a few albums I put in The Rest that maybe should have gone in the ranked section - Danny Watts, Death From Above and Four Tet just missed out, and would have been dead certs for the top list on a weaker month. I was toying with a top 7 but... Nah. One to definitely avoid this time round is Prophets Of Rage. It's not like I was expecting anything special, but Rage Against The Machine with the dudes from Public Enemy and Cypress Hill waters down the political message from revolutionary encitement to Rock The Vote. Bring back Zach De La Rocha! 


The Rest:

Tori Amos - Native Invader - B

Death From Above 1979 - Outrage! Is Now - B

Four Tet - New Energy - C

Godspeed You! Black Emperor - Luciferian Towers - B

Mogwai - Every Country's Sun - C

Prophets Of Rage - Prophets Of Rage - C

Danny Watts - Black Boy Meets World - B

Zola Jesus - Okovi - C

The Best:

01: The Horrors - V - A

The Horrors are one of those bands that have been indie darlings for years, but have never quite broke the mainstream. Their last few albums have been critically acclaimed, but they've only troubled the top 40 of the UK singles chart once. It seems that the public at large hasn't quite warmed to the Essex quintet yet. I've never really been that bothered about their sound, but V hit me with some force, and I can't get enough of it.

It's hard to give the genre on this record a name, but it has a pleasing mixture of alternative rock, shoegaze and New-Wave psychedelia that weaves in and out of many different moods and emotions. Mountainous guitar walls tower across the landscape on V, guiding the bigger drops and tying up the loose ends of the calm sections. Enormous shuddering melodies clatter through the speakers, and single notes arc across the sky for miles. Huge tunes like Machine, Press Enter To Exit and World Below uplift the experience to euphoric heights, while low drifting tripped-out pieces like Gathering, Ghost, (which contains an utterly incredible explosion of glittering electronica around the halfway mark) and Weighed Down balance V out to a masterful level.

The boys save the best until last, though. The closing track Something To Remember Me By is an epic 6.40 of soaring vocals, reverb everywhere, and about 4 million guitar channels. The sound is truly monumental, an instant classic that fills out every cavity of your skull with bright, shining optimism. It's the kind of thing you'd expect from the peak of the late 80's post-Punk/Indie wave, but without being a throwback. Lead singer Faris Badwan's voice is beautifully suited to this song, dominating the soundscape for one final push for glory. As the final chords fade out, it doesn't feel like you've been listening for almost an hour. V is a shoe-in for top 20 of 2017.

02: LCD Soundsystem - American Dream - A

Is this a comeback record? In terms of years between albums it would be hard to justify - LCD Soundsystem's previous release was but 7 years ago,  the critically acclaimed This Is Happening. The band's hiatus (according to Wikipedia) lasted merely 3 years, meaning this album took a few years of "active" time to produce. So while it may not be a "long-awaited" comeback, it is still an artistic statement of intent, a signal to the world from James Murphy that he's back on the scene. And what's more, he's back on form, because American Dream is a very good album indeed.

While Blank Screen, the dreary outro track that takes up a fifth of the album's running time is a damp squib, the rest of the record gleans with brilliance, shining with the urbane sophistication that LCD Soundsystem have made their calling card. They are the thinking man's Electronica, a modern, spikier Talking Heads, and with Murphy's spoken-word monologue singing over the top of a lush orchestral vista of instruments, American Dream is another jewel in the already glittering crown of LCD Soundsystem's discography. 

There are many highlights on this record, but far and away the best tune on this is the irrepressible single Tonite, a pulsating fixture in the midst of the album's runtime, with all instruments going balls-to-the-wall for a cacophonous backdrop to Murphy's utterly vital vocal poetry. He is the eye of this particular storm, and his measured observational righteousness is hypnotic. You find yourself lost in the melee of sounds, and just as you think it's getting too much - It's done, and the next song starts. So it goes for the rest of American Dream, an album which will deservedly sit at the higher end of critic's best of lists, and that you will be hearing a lot of at any halfway decent Christmas parties you might find yourself attending this year.

03: Kamasi Washington - Harmony Of Difference - B

04: Masta Killa - Loyalty Is Royalty - B

Wu-Tang solo albums are a more regular occurrence than named storms, and for fans of the 18-legged New York Hip-hop dynasty, they sprinkle over any given year with comfortable islands of sonic familiarity. The quality is sometimes questionable, (Method Man's Meth Lab from 2015 was awful) and most of the releases post-90's have been viewed with a caveat emptor frame of mind. Recently though, the general quality has picked up, and with a new Wu-Tang album on the horizon, Masta Killa has put out his first new record since 2012's Selling My Soul.

Loyalty Is Royalty is an expansive collection of tunes. Masta Killa is known for being one of the least ostentatious of the Clan, and on the whole, his straightforward style is backed with some simple beats. Trouble, Therapy, Noodles Pt. 1 and OGs Told Me, all these songs are straight-up boom-bap ditties, and form the main sound palate of Loyalty Is Royalty. Masta only goes in to full commercial mode on Flex With Me, a latter album track that breaks up the darker pieces with a sweet Rhianna-esque female vocal, which adds a bit of depth. Loyalty Is Royalty is a balanced and varied record, and worth a listen even if you're not a Wu-disciple.

05: Wolf Alice - Visions Of A Life - B

06: Foo Fighters - Concrete And Gold - B

From Dave Grohl's awkward early 20's as drummer for Nirvana, through his rebirth as a neo-Grunge paragon in the wake of Cobain's death, to his current iteration as the Hey Guys Lets All Have A Beer And Groove Out To Some Gnarly Tunes Super Cool Rock Dad, the Foo Fighters have charted the highs and lows of the crown prince of American rock for almost 25 years now. Concrete And Gold is their latest iteration. The album is full of surprise innovations, intro track T-shirt starts the album like a rock opera, and single The Sky Is A Neighbourhood is one of the least single-y songs they've ever put out.

It's the last 4 tunes that really drive home the smorgasbord narrative. The acoustic-driven Happy Ever After, Sunday Rain, a mid-tempo whiskey-n-beer grinder, The Line, with the full-throated optimistic sound they've made their trademark, and finally Concrete And Gold, with it's sludgy, drawn out chords to close. It's entertaining stuff, and makes for one of the most interesting sections of music the band have ever put out.

Being The Biggest Goddamn Rock Band In The World comes with an enormous weight of expectation, and it would be easy for the Foos to play a safe hand every 3 years from now until the end of time, churning out some average rock fodder and getting perfunctory seal claps from the alternative music press. They'd still earn millions a year, they'd still tour the world and they'd still get Best Hard Rock Performance at the Grammy's. So the fact that they are still deigning to experiment in this mid-career era of theirs is a good sign that they still love what they do, and that they care about their fans. This doesn't even touch their 90's material, but that's OK. A thoroughly pleasant album.

August 2017 review

These are getting later and later. I'm gonna retire the format for 2018 - Publishing an August album reviews blog in November is silly, ain't it. Plus I wanna do more longform stuff and rank full discographies and all that. No surprises for the top spot, Ghostpoet's put something incredibleout that could challenge for top 5 of 2017. Don't listen to that XXXTENTACION album, though. That's one weird kid.

The Rest:

Brockhampton - SATURATION II - C

The War On Drugs - A Deeper Understanding - C

XXXTENTACION - 17 - C

Queens Of The Stone Age - Villains - C

Queens Of The Stone Age are certainly a singles band. Snappy, 4-on-floor dalliances such as No One Knows, Little Sister and My God Is The Sun pepper their discography and have heralded album releases with a burst of radio-friendly propaganda, for listeners who don't want to venture too far over the iron curtain and into hard rock territory. That's the crux of their success - They manage to generate tons of mainstream appeal without turning off the leather-jacketed riff fiends that drove their initial rise to prominence. On the first listen, what's so disappointing about Villains is that it contains none of the easy delights we've come to expect - Lead single The Way You Used To Do is frustratingly mediocre and nowhere near their usual standard. On repeated listens however, it's the sheer blandness of the majority of the album that makes this one such a dud. Ball-busting hard rock blasters from their back catalogue like Mexicola, Song For The Dead, Sick Sick Sick, and I Think I Lost My Headache do not compute with the laid back, chilled soft rock disco vibe on Villains.

A stylistic change in the circumstances is to be expected. Queens Of The Stone Age are a different animal from their past releases, Homme being the only constant member since the beginning. Their last release ...Like Clockwork (A magnificent record, and a career peak, by anyone's standards) drew a line in the sand between the old Queens material and a new, fresh perspective. Villains is an attempted continuation of that, and with Mark Ronson on board to produce, this album was always going to be a curve ball. I have a lot of time for that, but the issue I have with Villains is that it strips out the core principles that made Queens such a vital, rewarding group, with nothing but some average lyrical content and aesthetic guitar to replace what they once stood for - Pulsating, hook-laden rock and roll. It's a bit too safe.

There's a couple of cuts on Villains that are worth a look - Domesticated Animals is one, a subtly malevolent song similar to Leg Of Lamb and I'm Designer from previous Queens releases. Songs like this allow Homme to use the full tonal capacity of his voice, giving him a clean backing to float over. The other tune of note on Villains is The Evil Has Landed, a 6 minute rock behemoth, a heavy-duty foot-stomper in the purest sense, with several undulating sections of pleasing, intricate melodies. The final movement has the repeated single power chord motif that has defined their sound since the beginning, and it's just about worth getting through the rest of the album to reach that point. Everything else sounds like a Them Crooked Vultures filler track. This isn't offensively bad like the Arcade Fire record last month, but it is the weakest Queens Of The Stone Age release to date.


The Best:


01: Ghost Poet - Dark Days + Canapes - A

Twice Mercury prize nominee Ghostpoet is back with his 4th album Dark Days + Canapes, an album for big city living in the mid 10's, with all the filth and noise of a subway train creeping out of the station in the darkness. Inky, paranoid compositions filter through the speakers to touch the the deepest recesses of the human psyche, and it all hits home just a little too hard. Ghostpoet's languid takes on futile relationships, loneliness, addictions, and lack of connection with the world and people in it make for difficult, uneasy, but vital listening. This is quite something.

To say this is all dark would be wrong. There's humour, with some light sarcastic utterances scattered around. At times you can hear him smile through the mumble. Somehow, this makes it bleaker. There is mountains of instrumentation throughout the record, but at no point does anything overstep the mark into self-indulgence. Everything has a purpose, and a reason, and there is a tremendous amount of restraint from front to back. Layers of carefully crafted music fill every composition, which is the big metaphor for the whole of Dark Days - Ghostpoet is quietly measured; he is depressed, but ultimately, he is in control. What this creates for each song is a tightly-packed piece, with no beat or note out of place. It's hard to be critical of such an efficient method of expression.

Ghostpoet's style is inextricably linked with the Bristol Trip-hop sound of the 90's, an underrated style that ran parallel to the popular guitar movements of the time. His vocal delivery is similar to Tricky, a legend of that scene, while Woe Is Meee, with it's simple bass funk and tripped-out guitar sounds might as well have been a Portishead track. Dark Days is special because it takes these threads of influence and weaves them into something much bigger, giving Ghostpoet a truly unique spot in the musical landscape. From the anxious rising strings and off-key jazzy piano stabs in Blind As A Bat, through the blackened sound wall that is Many Moods At Midnight and the bleak ballad Trouble + Me, Ghostpoet explores rich, varied veins of quietly neurotic self-reflection. A third Mercury nomination must be a formality for this record.

02: UNKLE - The Road, Part 1 - A

UNKLE's long-awaited new release, The Road: Part 1, 7 years in the making, has come to a deservedly comfortable landing in this list. Their genre-busting debut (and one of this writer's favourite albums of all time) Psyence Fiction is almost 20 years behind us, but UNKLE still have the ability to carve out fresh and varied sounds. The Road is predictably lush, and it's many twists and moods make for a characteristically enriched listening experience.

In a way, UNKLE represent the closest thing we have to Prog-rock in the post-millennial era. They don't have a specific style or form, but it could be broadly defined as electronic music. Along with their dabblings with Hip-hop and Rock, (Prog-rock's equivalent would have been Folk and World music) they create timeless records that strike through multiple genres and eras of popular music. Their song structures are crafted in a progressive sense, but without the long form noodling or extended improv sections, both cornerstones of 70's alternative music. Neo-Prog, perhaps?

In any case, their penchant for guest spots paint them as a connoisseur's Gorillaz, a less hooky version, but certainly comparable, in a musical sense at least. While there are no cartoon avatars, global stadium tours or multi-platinum certifications, UNKLE do exhibit a murky, hallowed presence in music. That they can draw such a polarising list of feature musicians for The Road shows that the group still have a lot of contacts in their little black book. Mark Lanegan, Twiggy Ramirez and Liela Moss are just 3 that appear on this record. And a damn fine record it is, too!

03: King Gizzard And The Lizard Wizard - Sketches Of Brunswick East - A

Sketches Of Brunswick East carries on the extremely prolific nature of King Gizzard And The Lizard Wizard's output, it being their third release this year. (the first one was titled Flying Microtonal Banana, surely the best album title of 2017). With it's multiple leitmotifs and seamless segueing, Sketches plays as one long song; even when you're staring at the track list scanning across Spotify it's virtually impossible to pinpoint breaks between pieces.

The sounds on Sketches are familiar enough for any of you (like me) who follow similar jazz/psychedelic/WTF acts such as Thundercat, Flying Lotus and BADBADNOTGOOD. KGATLW's warped-up vocal takes, down-the-rabbit-hole style flute stylings and low-key bass solos are just about original enough for them to hold their own in the wave of progressive artists that have enjoyed such a successful few years of late.

This is, if nothing else, one of the most fun records you'll hear all year. Though the jazzy melodies can sometimes be challenging to digest, the overall feel is cheery and inclusive. There's a bizarro-world advert break psychedelia that permeates throughout, like the lift music if Captain Beefheart had a mansion. The music glides along steadily, always with the threat that the ride could sharply change direction at any point. It ensures that Sketches keeps producing surprises after several listens. It's mercifully short too, and worth it if you want a vibrant adventure that doesn't take up your entire lunch hour. To say this group have now released 12 full-length projects in 5 years, they are still sounding fresh and lively.

04: Brand New - Science Fiction - B

05: Everything Everything - A Fever Dream - B

Everything Everything's 2015 release Get To Heaven was a superb experimental electronic Rock/pop record, a statement about global politics and their human effect which made my top 5 of that year. When I saw a new album from the Manchester 4-piece on the release list, I got excited. While A Fever Dream doesn't match up to that previous album's lofty standards, it is worth a spin. This is lighter, smoother, less refined. The songs are longer, and the catchy bits are sparingly dotted around. This is an evolution, but still with their signature synth sound, not straying too far from the formula.

The style on this is much more uniform, the boys have opted for laid-back electronic grooves over straight-up pop hooks, and it doesn't work all the time, but when it does, the band show they still have the creativity and verve to carry off their 4th record with as much ease as the rest of their back catalogue. Their musical intelligence is always present, but never garishly so. The lyrical references are subtly educated, and they push the Art-rock aesthetic just far enough without it becoming overbearing. At the core of this album is the warm-hearted sincerity that have got Everything Everything their well-deserved seat at the critic's favourite table.

06: Action Bronson - Blue Chips 7000 - B

July 2017 Review

July wasn't that shining for music. Maybe I chose the wrong stuff to listen to, but in the end I came out with a solitary A rating from 13 albums. I was all pepped up and ready to give the Arcade Fire album a big thumbs up and thee top spot, until I heard it. I heard a few things about how bad it was and I thought "Nah, never! This is the band that gave us Mountains Beyond Mountains for goodness sake!" But yeah, it's really bad. I'm not even gonna try and get tickets for their tour. Everything else was pretty good, though. A couple of solid rap releases, an experimental EP from one of my musical heroes, a tight catchy rock record and an album from a counter-culture legend are the top 5 this month.

The Rest:


Arcade Fire - Everything Now - C-

You know that trope that you see everywhere? Those bank adverts with vanilla poetry trying to be all kitchen sink about the modern world, or when BBC runs an article asking Are Millennials Killing The Glass Blowing Industry? Or when your dull friend from school who you've not seen for a decade posts up a Clickhole article titled A Photographer Removed The Phones From All These Pictures Of People And Like, Wow Man So Deep And Meaningful, Such A Fresh Take? Well, guess what! Arcade Fire have done an album all about that, and it's called Everything Now! They must have been up all night thinking of that title.

The beginning of the album promises so much - A quiet intro building up to an ABBA-inspired piano line that pierces through the darkness atop a pulsing rhythm, which announces Everything Now with the grandness we've come to expect from Arcade Fire's traditionally strong album starts, but unfortunately, the whole thing goes downhill sharply from that point. With Electric Blue, a synth-rock blaster as an exception, Everything Now, on the whole, plays like a Killers cutting room floor studio session. Compare with huge moments from years past like Wake Up, Power Out or Ready To Start and there's no contest. Musically, this is absolutely the worst album Arcade Fire have put out to date.

The lyrics are obtuse and ham-fisted to the point where it feels like a joke. Moments such as Chemistry, an upbeat throwaway song that may or may not be ironic, the 3 minute double track Infinite Content and Infinite_Content, with it's painfully trite "observational" lyrics "Infinite content, infinite content/We're infinitely content" presented over and over as if the meaning behind them is this monumental revelation no-one has thought of before, and We Don't Deserve Love, the last song proper, a dreary indulgence that clocks in at six and a half minutes are amongst the band's lowest ever. To go from Reflektor, the expansive zeitgeist masterpiece of 4 years ago to this is one of the steepest drops in form of any artist I've experienced in some time.

It's just really, really tiring to be bombarded with this kind of bullshit, (which is ironic, considering) and for a standard-bearer of the millennial generation's musical landscape to now participate in this kind of shallow self importance is beyond frustrating, and is little more than an insult to the fans who grew up through their teens on them in the mid-00's, loved them and made them millionaires. Sorry for ranting, everyone. I'n gonna have a few beers and listen to Funeral.

Boris - Dear - B

Foster The People - Sacred Hearts Club - C

HAIM - Something To Tell You - C

Lana Del Ray - Lust For Life - C

Melvins - A Walk With Love and Death - B

Omar Rodriguez-Lopez - Doom Patrol - C


The Best:


01: Tyler, The Creator - Flower Boy - A

Hip-hop's problematic bizarro-altar boy is back. With his own music label, clothing brand, and media streaming channel to run, Tyler could be forgiven if he had taken some time between releases. But barely 2 years on from his whacked-out opus Cherry Bomb, we have the opportunity to embark on another guided tour around Tyler, The Creator's carnival of satanic delights.

Tyler's brand on Flower Boy is heralded by the plucked strings, the radio-jingle female choruses and his own shape-shifting vocal style. He's low-key one of the most creative and original artists on the scene right now. He's not occupying the same stadium-filling, global sensation platform as Kanye, Drake or Kendrick, but his work over the past few years has been just as worthy. Tyler has managed to teeter on the knife edge of commercial viability and critical acclaim for his last 3 releases. Time will tell if he will explode into a Hip-hop supernova or shrink into a cultish backwater, but at least with Flower Boy, he's given himself a little while longer on the cusp.

His evolution as an artist over his full-length catalogue is pleasingly traceable, and the maturation present on Cherry Bomb has extrapolated further; Flower Boy is dreamier, headier, plusher. There are still a few sinkholes of darker material though, pressure drops that pique the ambient melancholia and stretch out the longevity of this project, sly nods to his psychotic past on Goblin. While Cherry Bomb is clearly his finest moment to date, Flower Boy is a vital component of Tyler's creative psyche, and represents the further cooling of his once-livid persona.

02: Nine Inch Nails - Add Violence - B

As the 2nd EP of a promised trio of releases, Add Violence has set Nine Inch Nails on collision course with the end of this year, and the expected denouement of a series that has already yielded some excellent moments. Some fans are speculating a full length record at the end of the greyscale rainbow, pointing to lyrical cues and hints embedded in videos and artwork. We'll have to wait and see on that, but for now Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross are gradually cracking the window to their world and letting the light stream through.

The wide scope of musical styles on this E.P is exciting, and offers an insight into what could end up being the most creatively unfettered era of Nine Inch Nails to date. While the 80's synth driven Less Than stands with Head Like A Hole, Discipline and The Hand That Feeds in the upper realms of the hook-laden singles arena of Reznor's work, Add Violence also contains the longest ever Nine Inch Nails track - The Background World, whose muffled lyrics and gradually decaying outro is sheer pornography for fans of Reznor's envelope-pushing, harsh soundscape material. This Isn't The Place is the best song on the E.P, a slow plodder with little structure and whispered vocals, bearing all the hallmarks of Reznor and Ross's atmospheric soundtrack work post-With Teeth.

It's a huge step for Reznor to have Atticus Ross as an official member of Nine Inch Nails, and it's been drastically understated. This is a project now approaching it's 30th year, and not once before has Reznor officially accepted someone else into the group. Trusted collaborators such as Robin Finck, Charlie Clouser, Alessandro Cortini, Chris Vrenna and Danny Lohner have all worked extensively with Nine Inch Nails and never been an official member. By inducting Ross into this new role, Reznor is making a big statement about how he expects the band to evolve over the next few years. Maybe we'll get a new album, perhaps something different altogether, but in any case, come the end of 2017, the picture will be much clearer about this new release era from the band.

03: Shabazz Palaces - Quazarz vs. The Jealous Machines/Quazarz: Born on a Gangster Star - B

These are technically two separate releases, however as they came out within weeks of one another, I'm counting them as one double album. Shabazz Palaces, the enigmatic duo from Seattle are one of cerebral Hip-hop's uncut diamonds. I'd never heard anything else they've done before this pair of astral-plane surfing albums came around, and I was pleasantly surprised at the scale of this ambitious project. There's not a lot of discernible switch-up in style between these twin releases, however Gangster Star is probably a little more accessible than Jealous Machines.

The group draw lyrical sensibilities from obvious sources like De La Soul and A Tribe Called Quest, whereas the deep, penetrating music verges on Trip-hop at times, with sounds which UNKLE and DJ Shadow fans will find familiar. It's a spacey, perky soundscape that makes this double album a delightfully easy listen. Shine A Light, the lead single, a King-Geedorah-era DOOM inspired instant classic is the best song on either record, and for all the brainy wordplay on these Quazarz releases, it's the sub-3 minute sample-and-strings piece that takes the top spot. That's somehow fitting.

They can sometimes delve a little too much into self-indulgence at times, leaving beats playing too long after the meat of the song has been done with, or adding a 3rd verse where 2 will suffice, and of course a double album from such a little-established act is a big statement to try and pull off, but this is still a great project, and a hidden gem in 2017's glittering rap-spectacular. We are certainly in a golden age of the genre.

04: Broken Social Scene - Hug Of Thunder - B

05: The Fall - New Facts Emerge - B