Twelve months on from a list that doffed its cap to some of indie’s true heavyweights,the rundown for 2014 has a slightly more grubby, DIY feel. It’s home to a couple of notable bows, the odd comeback and a few bands finding their feet and flourishing.
1. Fat White Family - Champagne Holocaust
The best live moment of the year, for me, came at Liverpool’s Sound City most of the way through Auto Neutron, as lead singer Lias Saoudi broke into his lung-splitting scream. What a show, I thought. I wonder whether the album can compare.
Everything about Fat White Family compares. They live above a London pub in Stockwell. They get loaded before shows, they pretty much destroy everything on stage, they call out on Facebook for sofas to stay on in a faraway town. In an industry more manicured and clogged up with posers than ever before, they seem genuinely shambolic, genuinely squalid, to genuinely not give a single fuck. The album sounds like it was recorded live, in a day, and that they blew most of the budget on acid. And it sounds all the better for it. Album of the year from the one band capable of giving guitar music its degradation back.
2. The War on Drugs - Lost In The Dream
Certainly the airplay winner of the year. But Under The Pressure, the opening tune on ‘Lost In The Dream’ is, it’s worth reminding ourselves, just under nine minutes long. It is also generic in so many ways. An easy-listening country guitar tune: intro, verse, bridge, chorus, bridge verse, and so on. But as it languidly unfolds, I challenge anyone not to get completely lost in it, to become caught up in how good, and simple, it momentarily makes life seem.
Ironic, maybe, for the album stems from Adam Granduciel working through relationships and expectations in the face of the group's ever-growing touring demands. This a mesmerising display of soulful guitar ballads that drift, like the title suggests, in and out of psychedelic interludes.
Does anyone wear his DIY corners so easily? Thomas Timothy Vernon-Kell will always be remembered for ‘We Have Sound’, the album he recorded in his early 20s in his dad’s garage. Back in April 2005, it sounded revolutionary. He’d become a fixture, we thought. An album every two years, popstar girlfriend, coke habit and so on. We’ll be sick of him soon.
And then, of course, he disappeared. And didn’t resurface, in any way, until 2011’s ‘Leisure Seizure’. ‘Luck’, its follow-up, was in every way triumphant. Few people of our generation seem capable of understanding, and getting at, what it is to be young and pursuing something in the big city, feeling pressure on all sides. “I wake up thinking I’ve had enough, of lying around all day,” Vek sings on Trying To Do Better. “Not pushing for any one thing, just spinning these little plates.” An acerbic, complex album from a free radical of the industry.
It took Elly Jackson five years to follow up on her self-titled first album, which, for all its sharp lyrics about fear of commitment and sexual slavery, was a melodic wasteland from my perspective. She struggled with writer’s block, vocal issues and split from her songwriting partner Ben Langmaid in the interim, raising suspicions La Roux was a one album firework. But boy, were those five years worth it. For production alone, this deserves to among the best albums of the year.
Everything about ‘Trouble in Paradise’ works; it’s a hit machine of big love songs swathed in textured synths. From first listen onwards, it sounds like the soundtrack to the best movie you’ll never see, or a reawakening of something you haven’t heard since childhood. All that tetchy, nervous intensity of the first album has gone, to be replaced with something confident, seductive and all together brilliant. If the next album shows this much of a progression, then Madonna should look over her shoulder.
Eight years since their DIY beginnings, the band that ironically call themselves 'beach goth’ finally broke through. ‘Chinese Fountain’ is their fourth album, released within a year of the ‘Not. Psych!’ EP. Less tonally dark, and more experimental, than their 2013 effort, but with all the lazy guitars you could possibly wish for, the Californian quintet’s carefree, stoned in the sunshine Garageband pop is a godsend on a cold Blighty morning. The most joyfully sleazy treat of the year.
Two recent performances at Ally Pally were proof that, if rock ’n’ roll is still alive in London, then its future might rest with the boy from Wimbledon - our generation’s Billy Bragg. Jamie Treays arrived on stage and gave every ounce of his attitude, spitting the lyrics and crashing through the chords of the caustic openers to ‘Carry on the Grudge’ before relaxing back into his first two albums.
Treays is another young gunslinger intent on making us forget about him and this was his first album since 2009. His parents suffered from health issues in those intervening years and plenty of doubt and uncertainty, not apparent in the cheeky tunes of his early work, is suddenly very apparent on this great album. “Peter don’t believe in love/Peter doesn’t like this song,” he calls out on Peter, with such confrontational, almost-breaking-down pathos that you wonder, just for a second, whether professional musicianship is a lot more difficult than we might realise. As the album climbs from Love is a Heartbeat Away to, finally, They Told Me It Rained, it's difficult to think of a more tender, personal, and heartbreaking record released this year.
This wasn’t quite ‘Selected Ambient Works’, and didn’t contain anything as memorable as Windowlicker or intense as Come To Daddy. But the very fact that Richard D James is still among us, still capable of creating music as strange and singular as this, should be a cause for celebration. ‘Syro’ is not a re-invention. Indeed, it sounds a little like a trip back in time.
The album almost needs to be sipped, rather than gulped, for its atmospherics can be overwhelming. But ‘Syro’ was almost a reminder that no-one, then and now, is capable of electro music so textured and detailed, so well-arranged, so rhythmically unpredictable, so capable of momentary beauty, so defiantly of its own. Long live the godfather of late Radiohead, Burial and Four Tet, Jon Hopkins and Flying Lotus. And, as a nomination for best tune to walk home to late at night, you’d be hard pushed to find anything better than Minipops 67 [120.2][source field mix].
A controversial choice, maybe, given Rat Boy has not yet released an actual album. But his mixtapes deserve wider notice. The man behind this effortlessly compelling indie triumph is Jordan Cardy, from Chelmsford, Essex. “He was fired from Wetherspoons. He was turned down by McDonald’s. He's never left the UK,” Cardy proclaims on his press release.
But the music lives up the swagger; teenage attitude thrown out like A Tribe Called Quest with estuary slang, witty samples, machine-gun guitar lines, bass and drums connected like telepathy. Another mix will be released before Christmas, with a total of 60 minutes of music thrown out in the time it takes most acts to 'soft-release' a b-side, before a tour and album early next year.
Not, maybe, the edgiest choice for this list. Future Islands brought out Singles back in March, with that extraordinary performance of Seasons (Waiting on You) on the David Letterman show suddenly, strangely and gloriously going viral. The video, in which Samuel T Herring grunts and croons like something between Elvis, early Brando and my dad at a disco, has topped three million views.
At that point, the three-piece from Baltimore, with three albums under their belt, could best be described as having a cult following. But their meeting of synth, bass and guitar creates something urgent and dramatic, a new romantic sound with the feeling of something older, more heartfelt, than most. They were always going to break out at some point, and when they did, it was glorious. Future Islands get a lot of play now, but it would be churlish to ignore them here. An album, and a band, in which to keep the faith.
The latest product from the ever fertile banks of the Mississippi, probably the greatest musical hotbed in the world. With his whisky and cigarettes vocals and his explosive, bullish guitar riffs, the New Orleans-based bluesman breathes the deep musical heritage of his hometown but delivers in the vein of Black Keys and Alabama Shakes and, further back, Fats Domino, Little Richard and Chuck Berry.
But there's something else going on here. Booker grew up on British punk, and the raw intensity of tunes like Violent Shiver and Wicked Waters demonstrate a talent not just intent on looking back, but on being in the moment. This debut can be a little one note, but there's enough to suggest Booker has the energy, and the purpose, to do his forefathers proud.
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