Welcome, fellow interweb dwellers, to this special bumper version of my end of year list! Not only do we have the customary fishmonger’s dozen (like a baker’s dozen, but the other side of 12) of theatre, but also films AND albums. Let’s go.
THEATRE
Including student shows, things I reviewed and counting acts in double/mixed bill nights as separate pieces, the final count for shows I saw this year comes in at 185. One Hundred and Eighty-Five shows, my dudes.
I am aware that’s somewhat ridiculous. I’m not sure how that happened.
Like other years, I found that some shows stick around whilst others fade away pretty quick, and they’re not always the ones you expect, or even the ones that I’d necessarily say were ‘better’. I’ve tried to put my finger on what it is about the shows that have longer half-lives – there aren’t any consistent common denominators, of course, but this year (in contrast to previous years) I found myself drawn particularly to carefully crafted fictions, to play and improvisation, to humour and cheekiness, and to brilliant performances.
Here’s the other thing – I really love lists. I love making lists. I think it’s sort of ok to indulge in the impulse to categorise and organise, as long as we’re agreed that it’s all subjective in the end anyway. I like doing end of year lists on this blog in particular because they tend to end up looking quite different to most of the ones in the mainstream media. I hope they might shine a little light on some work that flies under the radar and for whatever reason (form, length of run, size of venue) doesn’t get as much love in the December roundups. Advocacy is definitely my favourite part of being a ~critic~.
I’ll add, too, that I saw a lot of work by my friends and peers whose absence from this list feels conspicuous in what’s been a really really great year, so I’d like to put it in writing and sign on the dotted line: the work by Poltergeist Theatre, Anna Himali Howard, YESYESNONO, Josh Coates, Joseph Morgan Schofield, Barrel Organ and Breach that I’ve seen this year has humbled and astonished me.
So look, I’ve decided to go for a ranked list this time. Not because I think you can ever say one piece of art is better than another (obviously, OBVIOUSLY, you can’t), but because I think it’s kind of useful for me in figuring out what I like and why I like it. It maybe helps me start to work out why some stuff sticks. This list is really about how keenly I feel the ghost of a piece of theatre, weeks and months after seeing it.
1. Beginners
Tim Crouch // The Unicorn, London // April
This wasn’t just the best show I saw this year – it was one of the best of my life. Tim Crouch makes theatre at its most theatre-y, always centring the act of imagination and make-believe – so of course it makes sense his most beautiful show to date would be for children. Full of the still-fresh pain of grief, full of the longing ache for the child in all of us who disappears (or at least recedes) as we grow up, full of the simple joy of play and pretend. And Amalia Vitale as Sandy the Dog, delivering the most exquisite and inexplicably moving soliloquy: ‘smell your inside sounds, hear your inside smells’. Maybe the reason I’m a dog person is cos they have a kind of melancholy about them – they may bound for joy and drool and lap, but they all have sad eyes.
2. Mirabel
Chris Goode, dir. Rebecca McCutcheon // Ovalhouse, London // November
Lots of my friends who saw Mirable were uncertain about it, but I fell completely in love with it – instantly (probably specifically at the moment when this song played and Lou Sumray’s animations burst suddenly into life across the gauze), and then more and more deeply as time passed. Look, you’ll probably know I’m a superfan – I reckon Chris Goode’s writing is ten times richer, more complex, more beautiful than most anything else on British stages, and this had all of the lyricism, sentimentality and woundedness of his very best work. Lines like ‘the sky in every direction is the strange phantom colour of uncooked egg white’, or ‘A girl called Prudence on her paper round died. Just bicycled into the unexpected shortcut of her own disappearance’. I mean?? How dare u Chris??? But man, it got under my skin in a serious way, with its thinking about stories, about innocence and its irrevocable annihilation by this wretched, broken world (I’m thinking of it now as a relation twice removed of Beginners’). Most theatre I watch, I think about for an evening and then hang contentedly in the wardrobe of my memory. I feel like I’ll be puzzling out Mirabel for years to come; a flower grafted into forearm.
As an adjacent note, it feels to me at the moment like kindness and care are very important qualities in theatre to a lot of people (cf. this Matt Trueman piece). In many ways I’m totally on board with that, and in other ways I feel a little out of step. Mirabel was interested in cruelty (of the dramaturgical kind, in the way it violently refused to believe in its own very beautiful lie), and I found that not only interesting, but… kind of invigorating. I think Ava puts it really well when she says that while theatre-makers have a responsibility towards their audience, that doesn’t necessarily mean the same thing as a duty of care. Anyway, there’s loads of big, tough thinking in her and Emily’s response, so I’d recommend reading that.
3. Rated X and Moot Moot
Christopher Brett Bailey / Rosana Cade, Ivor McAskill // The Yard, London // January
Every year I get drool all over my laptop from reading The Yard’s NOW Festival line-ups. With Stacey Makishi, Emma Frankland and Rachel Mars all doing new shows this year it was difficult to stop myself from going to London every single week. It was kind of a no-brainer in the end though, I had to go for the CBB/Rosana Cade + Ivor McAskill double bill. Moot Moot was hilarious, repetitive, surreal (the first in a string of pieces I saw this year that embraced an absurdist streak – sign of the times, perhaps). I wrote a bit about Rated X here. But most of all they were both just super enjoyable. It’s frustrating that live art has a reputation of being hard work/impenetrable when my experience of it is that more often than not, it’s pleasurable in a really direct way – ticklish, producing surprise and delight.
Next year’s NOW Festival looks just as great, and I’d especially urge you to catch FK Alexander’s Diana is Dead, Greg Wohead’s Call It a Day, and the new Forced Entertainment (!!).
4. Big trip to Munich
Various // Münchner Kammerspiele // February
GERMAN THEATREEARRGH
I know the mythos around European work is way overblown yada yada yada, but ngl I was absolutely GASSED to actually be going to see some for myself. I got onto a scheme for international students (as in, international to Germany – if you’re a student reading this look out for it and apply!), where you basically get to go to the Munich Kammerspiele and watch eight shows over a weekend. It was really intense, I met loads of great people from around the world, and we danced in the cafeteria. To be honest, I wouldn’t necessarily pick out any individual show as one of the best things I saw this year, but cumulatively they added up to a pretty game-changing experience. It was the acting that really took my by surprise. Alongside international collaboration, one of the central concerns of Matthias Lillienthal’s programming seems (seemed? has he left yet?) to be an investigation of what the actor is/can be as a physical body and/or authorial agent. We saw actors as virtuosic automatons in Das Erbe and reduced to puppeteer-hosts encased in manga-style face-masks in The Virgin Suicides, but also free-range, improvisational performances in Trommeln in der Nacht and Tiefer Schweb. Every single actor in that ensemble blew me away. The highlight of the weekend was when a dude literally threw another dude across the stage straight into a massive flat and knocked it over.
5. UNCONDITIONAL
ThisEgg // Pleasance, Edinburgh // August
Josie Dale-Jones is a fantastic and seemingly unstoppable theatremaker (what kind of person opens TWO new shows simultaneously at the Fringe??). Her shows are really really funny (again, something I wouldn’t have said was necessarily a super important quality to me, until this year), and while I hugely admired ThisEgg’s Edinburgh hit dressed., it was their other Fringe show UNCONDITIONAL that stole my heart with its winding, unpredictable story, its gentle surrealism and Coen Brothers-sized characters, and the way it subverted all my expectations of a mother-and-daughter-make-a-show-together-type-of-show, delivering a small sucker punch to the heart that I didn’t see coming.
6. Trust
Falk Richter, dir. Jude Christian // Gate Theatre, London // March
There was SO much going on in this show. Loads of bits, some of which worked better than others, but it was kind of amazing to see a mainstream producing-house show that felt like some of the weirdest fringiest devised work. The way it treated text as a living, manipulable substance – as music and texture as well as information. The way meaning stacked up and up on top of itself until it couldn’t bear its own weight. The way those monologues blurred past like countryside from a bullet train. The sleepwalky-stasis of the aeroplane and yoga sections. Bethany Wells’ accumulating, meticulously inventoried set doing so much dramaturgical work. I came out dizzy.
7. Three Kingdoms
Simon Stephens, dir. Tom Hughes // East 15, London // March
I met Tom Hughes on the Munich trip and he basically became my new favourite director even before I’d seen any of his work. I loved the way he talked about theatre, his seriousness and conviction about the necessity of play and improvisation, his love of actors and generosity of spirit. And I was right, Three Kingdoms was totally magic. It was inspired by Italian crime caper 70s B-movies and only two of the actors were native English speakers but they were all also improvising in European languages that weren’t their own and there was a stupid dancercising bit and SO much corpsing and a furious monologue written by one of the actors that tackled the play’s gender politics head-on. It was alive, scruffy, trusting and fun. Tom said to me afterwards, ‘I don’t want to make plays, I want to make structures for plays to happen in.’ That’s a philosophy I can get on board with.
8. SESSION
Still House, Steppaz, Empire Sounds // LIFT at Bernie Grant Arts Centre, London // June
I have no hot takes on this one except that it was a bloody lovely evening and those kids can frickin dance. It was just pretty amazing to see really talented young people being really talented + having a great time. It was a balmy summer’s evening, the band slapped, literally EVERYONE was grinning from start to finish. I guess it was pretty much perfect.
9. A Little Death
Vic Llewellyn, dir. Tanuja Amarasuriya and Emma Williams) // Bristol Old Vic // September
I absolutely loved Vic Llewellyn’s last show (with Kid Carpet), The Castle Builder, which was this ramshackle, DIY (literally – there was someone taking apart a chair in the corner) tribute to people who make ridiculous, improbable works of art. It drew on loads of different stories and then kind of simply presented them to the audience. In A Little Death, there was a similar technique of sampling from loads of sources (the myth of an Indian meat monster, the dancing plague of 1518, a science experiment on Youtube with a gorilla on a football pitch), but it weaved them together with a level of dramaturgical sophistication that made my head spin. Taking inspiration from forensic science, it felt a little exploring a crime scene, picking up clues, adding them up to form a constellation that you had to string together. Because of that, it sort of felt like it was about EVERYTHING – it had a breadth of scope that I recognise pretty much only from long, sprawling works like Angels in America, only this did it in 50 minutes. Death and loss, mental health, storytelling, memory, fathers and sons, our ability to comprehend and process horrific things, ageing and the shape of a life – big, fundamental things. But handled with the lightest, cheekiest touch – a gleeful naughtiness (there’s like this 10 minute dick joke setpiece). And layered underneath all that, an autobiographical impetus that you might only be able to glean from the programme note, but which rooted everything in a simple and heartbreakingly direct gesture.
10. Aqui Siempre
Poliana Lima // BE Festival at Birmingham REP // July
This took my breath away. I mean, I’m sure I must have, else I wouldn’t be here writing this, but I don’t remember taking a single gulp of air during the 30 brief minutes I sat watching Aqui Siempre. Featuring four women of varying ages and nationalities, incorporating each person’s autobiographical history and dance background in the subtlest of ways, Poliana Lima’s dance piece felt like an exercise in portraiture. It’s tricky to recall exactly what the choreography consisted of – I remember a repeated motion of falling to one’s knees; wild energy; tight, almost Baroque polyphony synchronising into moments of choric relief. Most importantly, a sense that the dance was made by and for the bodies of the women who danced it – a specificity that meant that their individual identities came to the fore, rather than being concealed by disciplined uniformity. And then a section of stillness, where the oldest member came to the fore, and we were read an email correspondence between her and the choreographer relating her hesitancy about doing this show and returning to dance: too many memories, too much pain stored in the body. It was just beautiful, suggesting deep wells of emotion below what it showed us. Because of the BE Festival format, it was only an extract of the full length piece, and I almost don’t want to see the full thing now for fear it might shatter its own perfect balance.
11. Zero Ultra and WAH
Milktooth Theatre / Sean O’Driscoll // Warwick University // March
Zero Ultra was a student show made by two close friends of mine. A series of short skits, none of which really had much to do with each other – think ketchup smeared on gums, ASMR, chicken drumsticks used as actual drum sticks, an office sitcom but totally wrong, violent clown tantrums and a grown man in an adult nappy doing acrobatics under heavy strobe lighting, and you’re some way to picturing how bonkers Zero Ultra was. I don’t think Ross (Hunter) and Sean (O’Driscoll) would mind at all my saying that it was scrappy as hell and wanted for the hand of a particularly militant dramaturg. But there was a purely gleeful WTFness here that felt very special, and new in a very particular way. I think of this show as meme-theatre, shitposting-theatre – theatre which delights in the juvenile and the gross – theatre of instant gratification and greasy fingers – theatre which speaks Guy Debord and reddit and whose favourite font is comic sans. And I’m counting WAH, a short cabaret piece, in the same exhilarated breath here – Sean makes himself up as Waluigi whilst a Power Point presentation plays with quotes from academic papers giving the Mario universe some critical theory treatment; music from the game overlays back on itself in a nightmarish way and finally Sean sings ‘Don’t You Want Me Baby’ in what Nat accurately described as ‘the manner of a clapped out 70’s pornstar.’ Both these pieces need further lives.
A FEW OTHER SHOWS THAT HAVE REALLY STUCK WITH ME
The Capital by Stan’s Cafe (Birmingham REP)
Workers Party by Ang Kia Yee, Iffah Adawiyah and Louise Marie Lee (Warwick University)
Notes from the Field by Anna Deavere Smith (LIFT at Royal Court, London)
The Midnight Soup by Leo Burtin (Summerhall, Edinburgh)
Now is the Time to Say Nothing by Caroline Williams and Reem Karssli (Arnolfini, Bristol)
Dance Nation by Claire Barron, dir. Bijan Sheibani (Almeida, London)
The Mysteries by Chris Thorpe, dir. Sam Pritchard (Royal Exchange, Manchester)
SPECIAL SHOUT OUTS TO:
> Amalia Vitale in Beginners making me cry with the words ‘bum sniff,’ which really no-one should be allowed to do.
> The gold paint reveal in It’s True, It’s True, It’s True.
> The bit where they sing Creep in Beginners.
> The bit where Adrian the moth says goodbye to Bart in Beginners.
> The monologue in Dance Nation about flying and then forgetting about it.
> Camilla Clarke and Chloe Lamford’s massive icicles and flowers flying in at the end of Beginners.
> I’ll shut up about Beginners now.
> Gerard Bell gliding slowly across the stage on a travellator inThe Capital, looking out into the audience with the weight of the world in his eyes.
> Anna Deavere Smith delivering the sermon in Notes from the Field.
> The aforementioned flat-toppling in Trommeln in der Nacht. Also the bit at the end where stage managers came on with a wood chipper and shredded said flat.
> The bit where they drink reeeeaally slowly from the Coke bottle and then vomit in Susanne Kennedy’s The Virgin Suicides.
> The approximately four minute mark as two brave, brave audience volunteers in P-Project striped naked and simulated sex (‘we’re looking for a good dynamic fuck here, ok guys?’) whilst shouting ‘I LOVE YOU’ repeatedly, all for a shared £500 reward – the awkward laughter in the audience subsided and the atmosphere flipped all of a sudden from über-cringe/disbelief to weird almost-beauty. One for the grandkids.
> The magic trick at the end of The Borrowers where the jammy dodger disappears.
> When ‘Immaterial’ by SOPHIE played during Josh Coates’s short performance Coven at Dice Festival.
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FILMS
I often forget I love films, and then when the end of the year comes round I scurry about trying to cram in all the ones I’d missed. There’s lots I haven’t, and probably won’t, get round to: Suspiria, Mandy, Roma, Madeline’s Madeline, Shoplifters, Peterloo, Loveless, Happy as Lazzaro, Ray & Liz, Burning. I looked up If Beale Street Could Talk and The Favourite and they’re both technically 2019 so that’s fine. Anyway, parameters for this list are 2018 UK releases and things that are technically 2017 releases but that I saw in a cinema in 2018.
1. Leave No Trace
dir. Debra Granik
There was a week this year when I saw three consecutive films, all about life in the wilderness. They came as I was preparing for university finals – i.e. I was unduly stressed, caught up in what I could feel at the time was a particularly narrow field of vision. The relief I felt as I watched these films (the other two are at no. 3 and 4 in this list), feeling the wideness and beauty of the world. The forest in Leave No Trace is the greenest green, vivid from recent rainfall. It’s easy to see why Will and Tom are perfectly content there. It’s not an uncomplicated relationship, though (between father and daughter, or between them and their environment) and this film got me thinking about the ethics at play in the urge to run away from it all, about responsibility, my sense of belonging to cities, the policing and regulation of nature. I remembered that Thoreau lived just half a mile from the main railroad track. I remembered that I was in the middle of trying to make a show about nature, set in a national park in the very same state as this film, from the perspective of someone who doesn’t fully understand how to be in nature.
And then, of course, there was the sheer emotional force of it. Granik is the most compassionate of filmmakers, with a profound sympathy for the marginal and the exiled. The film ends the only way it can end, and I left the cinema in a complete state; shaken and wobbly-lipped, blinking out tears.
2. Phantom Thread
dir. Paul Thomas Anderson
There’s this DVD extra documentary about the making of Magnolia, and in it PTA is like this puppy dog on speed: loose shirts and flailing limbs, swearing accidentally in front of the kids, with all the boyish conviction that he’s making the best film ever, but in an adorable, un-dickish way. Watch interviews with him now, he’s like a completely different person – cardigan, modest greying beard, wise, measured tone. His films trace exactly the same character arc, but here’s the thing: whilst There Will Be Blood, The Master, Inherent Vice were all great films, they were kind of hard work, no? Phantom Thread is possibly his most mature, elegant and controlled film to date, but it’s also glorious FUN. That took me by surprise – the trailer had me bracing myself a claustrophobic psychological drama, and what I got was a romantic comedy. A romantic comedy suffering from a mushroom-induced fever, perhaps, but a romantic comedy all the same. Amazing, too, that there’s no cinematographer credited (it was a collaboration between PTA and the camera team), cos it just LOOKS incredible. Recalling the likes of David Lean and Powell & Pressburger, this is luxury filmmaking – the softest silk and the fattest cream.
3. Western
dir. Valeska Grisebach
A group of German labourers in the Bulgarian countryside, who can’t work because of a delayed delivery. What do they do? Sit around in the sunshine, crack open beers, swim in the lake. One of them ventures into the nearby village – the cowboy in this very loose western. There was a lot of stuff in here about economics in Europe that I wasn’t fully reading, I think, but the thing I remember most about it is this sense of rudderless stasis, of just being in the world with nothing much to do – there is no work, and, one gets the feeling, no law (though there is a moral code). I also remember Meinhard Neumann’s amazing face, careworn and knowing, revealing little, the camera always lingering on it as if waiting to find out a little bit more. I love films which cast non-professional actors, and this one has a truly special performance at its centre.
4. Lean on Pete
dir. Andrew Haigh
I loved Haigh’s last film 45 Years, this very cool, very glassy study of a relationship between two long-married, older people. He brings the same studied camerawork and humanism to Lean On Pete, but on a way huger canvass. The third film in the accidental wilderness trilogy (and the second to feature a horse), this one was all trucks, deserts and diners. Teenager Charley, backed into a corner by awful circumstances, cuts loose and hits the road with only the clothes on his back, and his titular stolen horse. It’s a genuine epic, and it’s pretty brutal. The wilderness brings with it as much beauty as it does hardship, but when he reaches the city, homelessness is suddenly a lot less romantic without those open American vistas. It’s not in any way an unconventional movie, hitting its beats with some degree of predictability, but by the end, I was completely swept up by its huge tide of feeling.
5. Skate Kitchen
dir. Crystal Moselle
Another film with non-professionals, this one just on the edge of the realm of documentary. I tweeted after seeing it that it was like the Instagram grandchild of Wild Style (a film in which artists in the early hip hop scene in ’80s NYC played themselves, within a loose narrative structure – it’s an awesome film), and yeah, that pretty much sums it up. Maybe the reason I’m so attracted to films with non-professionals is that they start to feel more like theatre: there’s a more performative gesture to them. Here, it’s that there’s already a performative element to Skate Kitchen (the group), so it makes sense that in going about making a ‘documentary’ on them, they would perform within a lightly fictionalised narrative form. And the results are just great – sweet, nimble, a perfect soundtrack. Casting Jaden Smith is such a genius move. Anyone who criticises Skate Kitchen for feeling like a fashion ad is missing that that’s entirely the point. It made me think about how social media might have changed how subcultures look and behave in relation to the mainstream.
6. Hereditary
dir. Ari Aster
For ages I thought I didn’t like horror movies, then I watched some, and then I was like, oh, I like horror movies! (How’s that for insightful cultural criticism, huh?) Anyway, Hereditary is one of the scariest I’ve encountered. A clever trick it pulled, seizing on one innocuous motif that becomes synonymous with all of our most primal fears, like some kind of hypnotism – I’m talking about the tongue-click, of course, which I found myself doing absent mindedly in the supermarket afterwards and actually making myself jump. I loved the creepy miniatures, I loved Colin Stetson’s score, I loved Toni Colette, and fuuuuuuuck that ending! The way the movie slides from the heart-stopping jaw-agape out-of-nowhereness of that first act into more conventional occult genre territory, and then straight back out of the stratosphere on a collision course for WTF-land. Loved it.
7. Lady Bird
dir. Greta Gerwig
One of those ‘Greta Gerwig’ t-shirts for me, please. Frances Ha is one of the happy-making movies that I prescribe myself on winter nights and Lady Bird is just as delightful. It’s a lean, mean thoroughbred of a film. Every line is so perfectly written, perfectly placed, perfectly performed. If I had any criticism, it’s that it’s maybe just a little too perfect, allowing little space for lingering, for other thoughts and daydreams to drift into its textures. But the ride, though it comes with a tight seatbelt, is so much fun I’m not about to complain. And the PE teacher subbing in to put on the school play is my new directing role model.
8. Annihilation
dir. Alex Garland
I didn’t love this film. I hyped it up for myself loads and was a bit disappointed – it felt like a great film trapped in the cocoon of an alright film. A bit mediocre of dialogue, a bit clumsy of exposition, not quite to my taste visually (ugh so much lens flare). But I found I just couldn’t stop thinking about it afterwards – I’m really intrigued by the New Weird, and I loved how the film used its sci-fi story to talk about an impulse towards self-destruction (which I gather isn’t so present in the book). It felt like it could really reasonably be read as being about mental health, but in an obscured enough way so as not feel like a blatant metaphor. The last act where Natalie Portman reaches the lighthouse and encounters her alien double notched up the weird to great effect, and the choreography of that sequence was really… disturbing? My friend pointed me to this fantastic essay on mysticism in theology and VanderMeer’s book, which I you might like if you enjoyed the movie.
9. Minding the Gap
dir. Bing Liu
Another skating film! Well, it seems at first like it’s gonna be a skating doc, but it very quickly reveals itself to be something else. Liu uses footage of him and his friends skating as teenagers in Rockford, Illinois, and follows them through the next ten years. Liu and the two boys he focuses on share experiences of domestic violence growing up, and that’s what the film is really about – how trauma is carried, and how it reasserts and perpetuates itself. It captures the intersections between economic deprivation, patriarchy and race with astonishing insight, without ever straying from its intimate focus on the guys. Like the best documentaries, it’s intensely self-aware, and increasingly so as it finds itself going to some ethically knotty places. It’s a remarkable first feature.
10. Spiderman: Into the Spider-verse
dir. Bob Persichetti, Peter Ramsey, Rodney Rothman
Hands down the best superhero movie I’ve ever seen. Fleet of foot where others get bogged down in self-seriousness, with a properly touching family story where others feel detached from life on the ground, and wonderfully meta in all the right places (Co-writer Phil Lord also did 22 Jump Street which maybe explains why I loved it so much). Its climactic showdown goes beyond the explosion-monotony of its peers, with something pretty visually breathtaking/trippy. Yes to offing Peter Parker and yes to a Black and Latino Spiderman. Yes to Spider-Gwen’s costume, yes to Nic Cage, yes to Peter Porker, yes to Brian Tyree Henry. So much yes.
11. You Were Never Really Here
dir. Lynne Ramsay
With this and Steve McQueen’s Widows, I’m so on board with auteurs-doing-genre-thrillers, though admittedly you’d be hard pushed to describe You Were Never Really Here as Ramsay’s mainstream crossover hit. It’s an elusive piece, less interested in plot than what’s going on on Joaquin Phoenix’s sweaty, tortured face. We never quite get the whole story, and we never get a fully fleshed out relationship between him and the girl he’s charged with rescuing. I think I left wondering a little quite what it was getting at, but it also left me with haunting images, an uneasy afterburn.
I also really liked 120 BPM (Robin Kampala), The Square (Ruben Östlund), Widows (Steve McQueen), The Rider (Chloe Zhao) and Last Flag Flying (Richard Linklater) and Sorry To Bother You (Boots Riley).
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ALBUMS
Anyone still reading deserves a big shiny thing. I don’t know how to music crit really, so these are the tl;dr reviews.
1. Double Negative
Low
2018 is fucked, my heart is small and weak. ‘Disarray’ is a very very sad song. BJ Burton’s production makes the album sounds like a ghost coming through the radio. What can art do? What is political form in music? Why don’t I cry to music?
2. Oil of Every Pearl’s Un-Insides
SOPHIE
Nat and I agree that SOPHIE is actually the single coolest person on the planet. ‘Immaterial’ is the year’s no. 1 banger, and I won’t have anyone say otherwise. Grinding metal and acrylic sheen. Self-conscious artifice coexisting with naked emotion.
3. Aviary
Julia Holter
90 mins, big album. Picture like, a huge abandoned palace overgrown with weeds, plants growing out of cracks in the marble, a wolf stalking the corridors. That kind of painterly, romantic, poetic image. Terrible beauty, blissful abandon.
4. Daphne and Celeste Save the World
Daphne and Celeste
Remember ‘Ooh, Stick You’? This ain’t that. Can’t believe this isn’t on any of the big top 10 lists! Daphne and Celeste rise from the ashes of forgotten noughties’ pop and kick ass with Max Tundra produced hyperbubblegummania.
5. Pastoral
Gazelle Twin
Being English is quite bad and scary. This album is full of bad and scary things. Like the doom-laden industrial cousin of Richard Dawson’s Peasant. I want Gazelle Twin’s freaky St. George/court jester costume.
6. Mogic
Hen Ogledd
The Old North meets nanotechnology. I saw them live in earlier this month and they were AMAZING. The shortest song on the album turned into this 10 minute showstopper. What a fantastic band.
7. Age Of
Oneohtrix Point Never
Deliciously complex music that splinters, folds and dives, always in unpredictable movement. Weirdy bendy autotuney Baroquey goodness.
8. Polycrisis.yes!
Jessica Sligter
Scott Walker.vibes! Deep, dark drones and Sligter’s deeper, darker warble. Cold recitations / empty repetitions / soulful crooning. Only just learnt it’s actually about the EU. ‘The Dream Has Died,’ indeed.
9. The Switch
Body/Head
Guitars, guitars, guitars. Feedback. NOISE. No drums. Ticks my boxes. Sound to cleanse your pores with. Wanna read Kim Gordon’s autobiography.
10. The Long Sleep
Jenny Hval
Goooorgeous luscious trancey pop. Bright horns from the clouds, and that super intimate voice. Way happier/more peaceful than you’d expect from Jenny Hval, but just as ear-wormy.
11. I Need To Start a Garden
Haley Henderickx
A world away from generic indie-folk mediocrity. Cordial-clear lyrics, thoughtful and spacious. It has this pristine melancholy about it that’s completely captivating.
And I also liked: Your Queen is a Reptile (Sons of Kemet), Yes I Jan (Bas Jan), Communion (Park Jiha), Dirty Computer (Janelle Monáe), Minus (Daniel Blumberg), Le Kov (Gwenno), Lush (Snail Mail), Konoyo (Tim Hecker), soil (serpentwithfeet), Siblings (Colin Self), K.O. (Miss Red), Ecstatic Arrow (Virginia Wing), I’m All Ears (Let’s Eat Grandma), Veteran (JPEGMAFIA), Safe in the Hands of Love (Yves Tumor), Daqa’iq Tudaiq (Jerusalem in My Heart).
Smaller Temples 