Best Music 2021

[chveik]

This is fantastic! Like a plunderphonics psychedelic boat ride through a bright and colourful mental breakdown. Reminds me of Eels or Beck at their best but it's so much bigger than that. Such a rich depth of sound, the production is superb and the drab, melancholic sense of humour to it all is really beautiful and honest. Every song sounds like a different type of flower blooming and bursting into tears.

yeah it's by far my favourite album of the year, there are multiple instances where you recognise fleeting influences but at the same it occupies a place of its own. it's the only proper 'lockdown' work of art that has functionned for me.

[sardines]

I should try to edit this with links but still struggle on a phone.
My choices are mainly led by the gaps I find to listen to music while working from home. I notice this leads to less 'noisier'music than when I commute and more immersive stuff.
I'd say Lea Bertucci has been one of my favourite performers both live and on record for several years now.

pauline anna strom - angel tears in sunlight
heimat -zwei
tomaga - intimate immensity
lea bertucci - a visible length of light
ashley paul - ray
richard youngs - cxxi
senyawa – alkisah
tanz mein herz – quattro

[Dirty Boy]

*

[Dirty Boy]

Lingua Ignota- SINNER GET READY
Black Midi- Cavalcade
Deerhoof- Actually, You Can
A Formal Horse- Meat Mallet
Jane Weaver- Flock
Gnod- La Mort Du Sens
Richard Dawson & Circle- Henki
Pom Poko- Cheater
Craig Fortnam- Ark
Arabrot- Norwegian Gothic
Vanishing Twin- Ooki Gekkou
Sucuumb- XXI
Carcass- Torn Arteries
Full Of Hell- Garden of Burning Apparitions
Your Old Droog- Space Bar
The Wildhearts- 21st Century Love Songs

[Johnny Yesno]

Unfortunately, I'm in the 'UNDERWATER BOI is a banger' crowd. It's drenched in this melancholy nostalgia but propelled by a modern punk engine.

Bizarrely, it doesn't appear to have a chorus.

[Poobum]

From Nebenkörper by Vlimmer. Goth synth sums it up.

-io by Circuit des Yeux. Weyes Bloodesque brilliance.

Ex Nihilo by John Roebuck. Scraping strings.

Another Day Another End by Fontaine SMC. Song of the year for me.
 

[Key]

1) Grouper - Shade

2) Jana Rush - Painful Enlightenment

3) Time Binding Ensemble - Nothing New Under The Sun

4) DJ Lostboi - Untitled

5) Jonnine - Blue Hills

[SpiderChrist]

Song of Co-Aklan - Cathal Coughlan
In Observance - Concrete Ships
Vertigo of Flaws - Trees Speak
Conversation Peace - Damu The Fudgemunk
G_d's Pee at State's End! - Godspeed You! Black Emperor
Basic Tools Mixtape - Equiknoxx
Uncle Daddy - Wonk Unit
Black To The Future - Sons of Kemet
Sound Ancestors - Madlib
Promises - Floating Points/Pharoah Sanders

[niat]

https://thearmed.bandcamp.com/album/ultrapop

Doubt you'll need anything else, tbh ;-p

This is correct, but if you do find you need anything else, try Genghis Tron - Dream Weapon:

[Johnny Yesno]

This is correct, but if you do find you need anything else, try Genghis Tron - Dream Weapon:

I bought this album on your recommendation and have been very much enjoying it since. I somehow managed to miss that video, which I like better than the Dream Weapon video.

[jamiefairlie]

Karen Peris - A Song Is Way Above The Lawn

https://youtu.be/T7wuFrN3nWo

Taking a break from The Innocence Mission, Karen produces an album of similar stellar quality.

"Peris' voice is one that captures a very specific mood and tonality – one heavily steeped in wistful, often autumnal-sounding nostalgic melancholy"


Lost Horizons - In Quiet Moments

https://youtu.be/2B6NRpfjKsg

When he was with The Cocteau Twins, Bella Union label owner Simon Raymonde took part in some of the This Mortal Coil albums, effectively a 4AD label roster collaboration. Lost Horizons is same idea with his own label.

This is their second album and this track it features ex-Midlake vocalist Tim Smith, one of my favourite musicians and singers, and a notorious recluse, so this is a treat indeed.

The Catenary Wires - Birling Gap

https://youtu.be/XY85ldWcFXs

The Catenary Wires are Amelia Fletcher and Rob Pursey. They formed in 2014 and their debut mini-album "Red Red Skies"  was released on 1 June 2015. Amelia and Rob are best known for making fuzzy, sixties girl-group inspired indie-pop in their previous bands Talulah Gosh, Heavenly, Marine Research and Tender Trap. This is their third album.

"It's like an English Nancy & Lee singing songs written by a less-cynical Luke Haines.  One song is reminiscent of the doleful but wonderful Broadcast, the next the Mamas & the Pappas. The baroque organ brings to mind Dave Greenfield. The lyrics have echoes of Philip Larkin and Stevie Smith. There are a myriad of influences which blend seamlessly."

Nicholas Lens & Nick Cave - L.I.T.A.N.I.E.S

L.I.T.A.N.I.E.S is a chamber opera by Nicholas Lens set to an English-language libretto by Nick Cave.

https://youtu.be/4acrGU13wq0

"Cave is a complex man of dark humor, wit, and drama, and his own output shows that. But he is also capable of reaching enormous emotional depths. His work is rich with emotion, tenderness, and beauty. His words are haunting and deeply evocative and are sewn into a fine tapestry of Lens' harmonies and melodies."

[The Mollusk]

Listened to the Floating Points/Pharoah Sanders collab yesterday. Gorgeous stuff, delicate and warm and yearning. It uses one little melodic motif as the backbone for its entire duration and utilises that repetition in a similar fashion to "Music for 18 Musicians" (albeit far more restrained and hushed) as an expansive exercise in world building, sounding like music for the calm of all seasons. Sunlight dancing off the ripples of a lake as it laps against the shore, or a snowdrift observed pensively from a high window under a pitch white sky. The gentle orchestral swells and swirling synths in the latter half of the record are well earned without seeming forced or climactic, since it's such a beautifully measured record that it feels cyclical and could effectively exist in a certain space

on a loop



forever...



IF if weren't for the final 3 minutes of the thing, about a minute of silence and then 2 mins of cinematic and jarringly dramatic strings to close it off. I really don't get that artistic direction at all. I wouldn't say it ruins the record but I'm super miffed about it. The tone changes entirely and pulls me right out of the zone. I'm all for bold and jarring swerves in music but really this isn't the time or the place for it. WHY? If anyone has more info or thoughts on this please tell me.

[Kankurette]

My album of the year is incredibly mainstream, apologies. It's No Gods No Masters by Garbage. Destroying Angels is one of the most beautiful things they've ever done.

ETA: I'm enjoying Dry Cleaning more than I thought I would, if only because the singer's got an incredibly deep voice for a woman.

[Greg Torso]

(I wrote a more substantial post but then I got timed-out/kicked-off and had to put another coin in the meter, but the gist of it was:)

Inevitably and depressingly, 2021 was the lowest year in (among other things) engaging with art or music for me, can't even think of a record or CD I bought that was released this year and only one or two digital things. Just a year of demotivation and oppressive stultifying toilet hoovering bollocks.

My one remaining friend that I haven't bored or annoyed off my intellectual property recommended this great album by Beanz Meanz Heinz Tanz Mein Herz, which you can check a long, dreamy chunk of here -

Tanz Mein Herz - Spiegel Haus

I also really liked this one by the Swedish group Monokultur, called Ormens Vag -

https://evernever-records.bandcamp.com/album/ormens-v-g

and the synth duo Reymour put out something I liked too

https://knekelhuis.bandcamp.com/album/leviosa

also enjoyed the aforementioned Pharaoh Sanders/Floating Points record.

Really the two things I listened to most were Xiu Xiu's Twin Peaks covers LP and mainly, I spent a lot of late ones, a lot of 3s and 4s in the mornings, enjoying the lonesome saxophone improvisations of Kaoru Abe, a free jazz musician who died young in the 1970s. Maybe feeling a weird bond due to the tragedy of his early death and his unrecognised potential and just the general sad sounds of the instruments but yeah weirdly when I think back through the fog of the last year, I was lying on the sofa exhausted from being/thinking/feeling nothing and thrilling to the sound of a long dead Japanese kid making his sax bark like a goose for an hour.

[Gradual Decline]

Records of the year round our house:

Carcass - Torn Arteries
Ice War - Sacred Land
Men I Trust - Untourable Album
Armand Hammer & The Alchemist - Haram
Grouper - Shade
Quicksand - Distant Populations
Blank Gloss - Melt
Magdalena Bay ‎– Mercurial World

[sardines]

My one remaining friend that I haven't bored or annoyed off my intellectual property recommended this great album by Beanz Meanz Heinz Tanz Mein Herz, which you can check a long, dreamy chunk of here -

Tanz Mein Herz - Spiegel Haus

You may enjoy the related La Novia release from right at the start of the year

https://la-novia.bandcamp.com/album/le-soleil-ni-m-me-la-lune

[GoblinAhFuckScary]

Swooning over Me Hollywood by Oliver leith

[phantom_power]

He should answer that door

[Key]

Basic Tools Mixtape - Equiknoxx

I thought this was great too. Annoyingly so.
The first 2 albums are classics, then Eternal Children was such a clanger I'd assumed they'd gone off the boil/sold out and so gave it a miss when I saw the tapes on sale. Regret.

[The Mollusk]

Blawan released two absolutely belting EPs - "Soft Waahls" and "Wake Up Right Handed" - and continued to cement himself as one of the leading forces in modern experimental techno. Incredible textures produced with immaculate crisp and crunch, bounding along at brisk pace and most importantly still maintaining a sense of humour despite the abrasive immediacy of his tunes. This music is gnarly but it isn't mean, it's fun. There's no noodly introspective atmospherics, just straight fucking bangers.

I love everything this dude's ever done, from his first Hessle/R&S singles springing out quirky, squelchy beats - already a step ahead of his dubstep contemporaries dipping their toes in the waters of the next wave of dub techno - and across his career he's always carried a distinct sound, front and centre like a weirdly skewed grin spread across the face.

[GoblinAhFuckScary]

He should answer that door

I thought that bit was adorable!

[phantom_power]

I thought that bit was adorable!

I was being flippant. I like it

[Johnny Yesno]

I was being flippant. I like it

I can't listen to it. It sounds like my doorbell and it puts me too much on edge.

[non capisco]

I've been listening to Flock Of Dimes' album 'Head Of Roses' a ton this week.

This one and the title track are the standouts.

Looking forward to working my way through all the recommendations in this thread, if I have any ambitions at all for 2022 it's to listen to more music. I was uncharacteristically unarsed with it all last year for boring prosaic mental health reasons but the old investigative spirit has thankfully come back roaring.

[willbo]

I've tried but I really can't see what all the fuss is about with this album. I've never heard their other stuff but they're a hardcore band right? And this is just a hardcore band making a pop album basically. Super polished production, crisp and watertight, reverb and and phasers out the fuckin wazoo... it's just really insubstantial to my ears. Big anthemic WHOOAAA jams and... that's about it.

There's people chatting about it online like it was handed down from the heavens. Look at this comment:

Makes me think I'm listening to a different album as everyone else.

I listened to the Turnstile album yesterday and again today and like you...I don't get it. It just sounds like the bog standard Kerrang metal/punk I used to listen to in the late 90s, with vapourwave and dreampop parts added in random places.

my fave heavy stuff I discovered this year is Sleigh Bells, it satisfied my desire for heavy stuff that isn't generic rock/metal

[non capisco]

Discovered this weekend that all the singles Big Thief put out in 2021 are excellent. Double album out next month, apparently.

[billyandthecloneasaurus]

Unbelievably good song

[Sebastian Cobb]

Arab Strap - As Days Get Dark
BADBADNOTGOOD - Talk Memory
Erika De Casier - Sensational
Joy Orbison - Still Slipping
Kid Acne - Null and Void
Lady Blackbird - Black Acid Soul
Liminality - Don't Problem
Little Simz - Sometimes I Might be Introvert
Molchat Doma - Monument (released 2020 but physical only came out in 2021)
Nine - Sault
Nubiyan Twist - Freedom Fables
Rico Nasty - Nightmare Vacation (released 2020 but physical only came out in 2021)
Ross From Friends - Tread
STR4TA - Aspects
Shire T - Tomorrow's People
Stigsjo Kryka - Organ Rehersal Tape