And now, with 2024 coming to a close, here is my annual list of records of note from the past year:
- Boy With Apple - Attachment (BandCamp), Deary - Aurelia (BandCamp) and Rinse - Starfish (BandCamp)
2024 was the year that shoegazers discovered drum loops and sequencers in a big way, and we have no fewer than three records, from different countries, to show for it:
London shoegazers Deary win the title of the Slowdiveiest band that isn't actually Slowdive with the title track of their EP Aurelia; it sounds as if it was distilled from the concentrated essence of several Slowdive songs (to my ears, Souvlaki Space Station, Melon Yellow and possibly Go Get It, though your impression may differ), albeit with a more “produced”, for want of a better word, sound, sounding not so much like a live song but as its own remix. (Given that the record was mastered by Simon Scott, there doesn't seem to have been any objection to this homage.) The other five tracks continue as the EP started, mixing the traditional shoegaze elements (chiming guitars, Rebecca's crystalline vocals floating over the maelstrom of fuzz) with trip-hoppy beats, washes of synth and uses of the digital studio as an instrument in ways outside the live-rock paradigm.
Rinse is a shoegaze project from Naarm, though this EP is a transpacific affair, bringing in several guest stars from the Los Angeles dreampop scene, namely Australian expat Hatchie (whose track, Kiss Me (Kill Me), sounds as catchy as her own material), someone named Caroline Loveglow (who sings over shuffling beats and walls of shoegaze guitar on Stranger), and Hatchie collaborator Winter. Winter's track, Raindrops, would be, to me, a high point of this already solid record: her vocals float ethereally over chiming melodic accents, subtle washes of synth, MBV-esque guitars and a very groovy bassline, all underscored with an Archie's Roachclip-style drum loop. The guest tracks are sandwiched between two other tracks: Breathe, which sounds reminiscent of 90s Australian shoegazers Swirl and Everything Feels So Different Now, which closes out the record on a high.
The third band doing this sort of sound is Boy With Apple, from Gothenburg; Attachment is their first full-length album, four years after their debut EP. Their music is a sort of shoegazey indiepop with electronics and drum loops, processed guitars and a quintessentially Swedish knack for catchy hooks. It opens with GBG Hills, setting out their hometown flag with a shuffling drum loop, an anthemic guitar figure and some subtle electronics. Other highlights include Lily, which, with its synth arpeggios and catchy chords, has an almost Even As We Speak quality to it; Brighter Than The Sun, a glorious slab of breakbeat-led shoegaze-pop, and Rosemary's Baby, which sounds almost like it may have been written for the other Swedish 'gaze-adjacent band mentioned here in recent years, Spunsugar (and not only because of its horror-film-themed title). (Comparisons to other Swedish bands do come up as well; there's perhaps a hint of Azure Blue in Green Eyes, and while describing their sound as “pastel-hued Makthaverskan” wouldn't be entirely accurate, it wouldn't be completely wrong either.)
The sound of shoegaze-adjacent music in 2024, and its differences from its antecedents in the Thames Valley scene of the early 90s, are at least in part a matter of technology and the culture emerging from it. As digital recording has become cheaper and more commonplace, making a record is no longer a matter of getting everything mixed down in one expensive burst of studio time, but of recording the elements and manipulating them in one's own time, on a consumer-grade laptop. As such, the boundaries have become blurred, indiepop has started to sound more like shoegaze (which no longer requires mastery of an imposing array of pedals), which has started to sound more like electronic music (because you might as well). This is by no means a bad thing.
- the bv's - Taking Pictures Of Taking Pictures (BandCamp)
the bv's, originally from Augsburg, Germany, have made a name straddling the worlds of indiepop and krautrock, playing popfests all over Europe and wearing their love of an arguable golden age of British indie like a button badge on a cardigan. Their new album Taking Pictures Of Taking Pictures follows up their last year's single, Warp, and blends C86/Sarah Records-influenced sounds with a formalistic sense of pattern and repetition as an element. The opening track, Clipping, is in an almost Sea Urchins/Electric Pop Group, with jangly guitars and more melody in the bassline than the somewhat deadpan vocals; it and the second track, I Can't Stand The Rain could easily have come off a UK indie 7" recorded around 1988. The title track starts off like The Field Mice at their most sentimental, before breaking into something faster and more self-referential ⅔ of the way through, and the Field Mice influence continues on Sundays, which, whilst peppering its lyrics with their song titles, sounds perhaps more like The Lucksmiths. There's also a version of their single Warp, but it is very much abbreviated from its standalone release. Elsewhere, the bv's more motorik influences emerge: Kleber starts with a long buildup, echoing My Sad Captains at their most krautrock-influenced; as it builds, quiet vocals come in in the background, and then it ends. Breakdown consists of repeated mantras over metronomic beats and guitars, namechecking places including the Autobahn, the M1 and a train shed (which may be a reference to a particular now-defunct indiepop festival). The album ends in a customary fashion with one of their formalistic tracks, titled "d../" and consisting of repetitive buildups on guitar, a work of Kosmische Musik up there with The Field Mice's Freezing Point.
- The Cure - Songs Of A Lost World
The Cure's first album in over a decade, and the first Cure album I bothered looking at since the turgidly overlong Bloodflowers. It must be said that it's a bit more stylistically varied than that, with some more intricate arrangements (the opening track feints at shoegaze; later, piano figures add depth to the soundscape). I've seen this one compared to their magisterial 1989 opus Disintegration, and some of the arrangements do appear to aim for that, though it feels a bit darker and spikier. To my ears, it sounds closer to Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me (you know, the one you bought for the cute pop song about love and found was mostly full of dark, dense, fuzz-drenched accounts of having a bad time on drugs).
Having said that, this is, like the past few decades' worth of Cure albums, one from the depressive Cure, being occupied mostly with loss and regret and the miseries of the human condition. They did hint at having a few more albums in them sooner rather than later, so maybe the next one will be a manic Cure album, full of bouncy, euphoric pop songs about cats and giddy infatuation.
- Julia Holter - Something In The Room She Moves (BandCamp)
A record of shifting, shimmering subtlety which is hard to adequately describe. Objectively, there is electric piano, synthesiser, processed sounds, and fluid, almost free-jazz song structures with complex harmonies and interweaving melodic lines, with a lightness of touch evoking impressionist painting. Thematically, it feels subjective and introspective, as if Holter is writing about the minute qualia of inner experience, teasing them out into luminous, gossamer-fine dioramas that shift like the qualities of daylight, and grow through repeated listening. There is a sense of natural light, and the passing of time, from the warm dappled sunlight of the opener Sun Girl, with its kalimba, percussion, layers of synths and close-miked, reverbed vocals, through the pulsing busyness of Spinning, with its rhythm of chords and drum machine, its free-flowing verses rising to an imploring chorus, the dusky languor of Evening Mood (which has perhaps a touch of Sadé about it) and the long shadows of Talking To The Whisper (which, if one were to draw a triangle in music space with points at Momus' Closer To You, Janet Jackson's Anytime Anyplace and one of Destroyer's more oblique songs, would appear somewhere close to the centre); to say nothing of Ocean, a 5½-minute synthesiser instrumental that evokes the shifting colours of sunset far from land.
- Los Campesinos! - All Hell (BandCamp)
Cardiff's Los Campesinos! made a big impact in the 00s with their wry, rambunctious indiepop, pivoted towards emo and despondence, and then vanished for a number of years, leaving that space to a number of new bands like ME REX and Campfire Social. Now they're back, with a subtler, more layered sound. The opening track, The Coin-Op Guillotine, sets the scene both musically and thematically, with a touch of shoegaze in its subdued melodic tweemo and a mood of preemptively defeated leftist rage, recounting a waking-dream vision that even the Revolution referred to with half-jocular longing by the millennial precariat will inevitably be predatorily monetised; the tempo kicks up a notch with “Holy Smoke”, which echoes the youthful Campesinos of “You! Me! Dancing!”. The album continues from there, with strong melodies, propulsive grooves and the kinds of wry, self-deprecatingly witty lyrics combining the emotional rawness of emo with British understatement and touches of online discourse, like a more bolshy Aleks and the Ramps, or perhaps if Efrim Menuck was a sardonic Welshman (one could compare “we will feast on the tongues of the last bootlickers” with A Silver Mt. Zion's “let our crowds be fed on tear gas and plate glass, 'cause the people united is a wonderful thing”).
Songs with titles like “To Hell In A Handjob”, “0898 HEARTACHE” and “Adult Acne Stigmata”, take in late-capitalist gallows humour, terminal suburban boredom, geriatric-millennial despair at having aged into one's late-30s with nothing to show for it, and the idea of Revolution as Freddie-the-Lobster wish-fulfilment fantasy; seedlings of hope bursting through the cracked concrete of Starmer-era Broken Brexit Britain like shafts of light gracing the corners of our rooms. Perhaps this will be the protestation of injustice that launches the first Molotov cocktails, though probably not; in any case, it's a good listen.
- Momus - Ballyhoo (BandCamp), Yikes! (BandCamp) and 20 Frisky Whiskies (BandCamp)
2024 has been a bumper year for Momus' music; with three albums, after a fashion. Yikes! is his regular album—the one he releases on an annual cadence—and much like other recent ones, tends towards a sort of highly conceptual mutant music hall. This year, there are comedic numbers on psychology (Codependency), the death of idealism and cooption into a complicit system (Becoming You), a Mark E. Smith pastiche (Sark E. Myth), a cabaret number on the current geopolitical situation (Before The War) and a song about misheard lyrics (Mondegreen), styled along the lines of Blue Monday and/or every Stock/Aitken/Waterman production.
Ballyhoo, which preceded it, is an experiment in using generative AI tools to make backing tracks, and musically sounds like it's collaged out of numerous samples (which, in a sense, it is), with Momus using the tracks as ready-made backings for his lyrics, which cover concepts such as Korea's recent moment of pop-cultural hegemony (the appropriately named Plastic Seoul), an electrofunk number (sort of) tackling the idea of enshittification, and Glassy Menagerie, a personal account of cities he has lived which sounds like an updated Charm Of Innocence. The sound is mostly a smooth, retro-styled electropop, with elements of city pop, jazz fusion and funk/boogie; aesthetically, the closest comparison in Momus' career is the Joemus/Sunbutler collaborations with Joe Germlin. Much as with AI images, it sounds superficially good (considerably crisper and brighter than his own backing tracks), until one recognises it as AI output and sees through the trick: perhaps when the environment fills with songs made with prompt-engineered backings, people will start skipping tracks that sound too AI, in the way that they skip blog posts with AI-looking images?
Finally, 20 Frisky Whiskies is, like his 90s 20 Vodka Jellies album, a compilation of odds and ends, and contains some gems, among them Murder In The Village, which casts cozy English murder mysteries as a metaphor for the Brexit malaise, and The Stars Are Out, which he originally performed as a pre-cover of an unreleased David Bowie song, going only on the title, but which stands on its own quite well.
- Saint Etienne - The Night (BandCamp)
Saint Et have always had a tendency towards the psychogeographical and (whisper it) hauntological: it was there in their early days, when they juxtaposed the condition of being young in 90s London with the vaunted golden age of Young London—the yet-to-be-overexposed Swinging Sixties—marrying stylish mod-pop with italo-house pianos, dubby basslines and funki-dred drum machine programming. This tendency has only increased over the decades; in between his St. Et career, Bob Stanley has built another as a scholar of pop-music esoterica, writing two books delving into the history of pop and curating numerous compilation CDs, each capturing a fragment of a moment, scene or milieu in 80 minutes of deep cuts, with extensive liner notes, and as such, the band has also drifted further from its indie-pop (if not indiepop) origins into the liminal, as its geographic references have from the boundary of the M25.
If an album may be judged by its cover, The Night would be a hauntological artefact. The cover is a photograph of an office still life sometime before the 90s—an old computer terminal on an desk and a hot drink machine labelled in Eurostile, accented in cyan and tan, like a bleak low-budget British take on Wes Andersonian symmetry, promising perhaps some variant on Ghost Box haunto. Musically, it follows its predecessor, the experimental don't-call-it-vaporwave record I Was Trying To Tell You, or perhaps is the Amnesiac to its Kid A, synthesising the outcome of the experiment into the band's usual practice. There is more for Sarah to sing, though it is still not a pop album in the way that, say, Good Humour or Foxbase Alpha are, though something more contemplative: there are no verse-chorus structures, references to the excitement of youth are in reflection over memory, and in lieu of danceable beats and basslines, there are synth swells, ambient drones, sparse minor-key melodies and field recordings of rain. The geography, where mentioned, is far from any Tube station, and by the sound of it, rather pastoral.
There are echoes of what came before. Northern Counties hearkens back to the summers long since passed with its stabs of house piano breaking through field recordings of rain, soon giving way to an elegiac descending chord progression underscored with droning bass; it is followed by an even shorter interlude, Eliar Carr, reprising some of the young Saint Et's pop moments transposed out of the city, with Sarah reading a list of place names that definitely are not on any Tube line, followed by a journal entry describing a pastoral landscape, the buzz of the city replaced by the vastness of landscape and time. This is followed by a songlet titled When You Were Young, with piano, clarinet and electronics, underscoring the passing of time.
Those missing the old, poppy Saint Et aren't left entirely out in the cold, though: the Bandcamp version at least has a bonus track titled Daydream, placed apologetically at the end, acknowledging that its verse/chorus structure and pop lyrics don't fit the main album as such. Perhaps more albums should come with appendices?
- Sega Bodega - Dennis (BandCamp)
The latest from the Irish/Chilean producer, falling in the space of dark, vaguely danceable electronica between PC Music hyperpop, dubstep and the dark electronica of Fuck Buttons/Demdike Stare; expect thumping kicks, squippling 303s, barrages of synth lines like some kind of cyberpunk cityscape, and fragments of vocals, often processed to within an inch of their life, melting through the haze, spontaneously forming vast structures, and yet managing to be at once calm and hectic, the maelstrom subsumed into a grander ebb and flow. Some of the tracks evoke an almost classical grandeur: True, with its processed choral melodies floating over shifting beats, could have been commissioned for a memorial to dead ravers. Meanwhile, Humiliation Doesn't Leave A Mark combines string arrangements with elements of reggaetón and dubstep, and Dirt races forward propelled by chopped-up pads and rapidfire synth lines. The album closes with Coma Salv, a beatless piece of percussive synths and string pads, evoking Angelo Badalamenti's incidental music from Twin Peaks.
- The Softies - The Bed I Made (BandCamp)
The Softies—the duo of Jen Sbragia (also of the All-Girl Summer Fun Band and Rose Melberg (of Go Sailor, Tiger Trap and more bands than there's space to list here)—formed in the early 90s out of an exchange of zines at a gig, and in the eight or so years that they were a band, put out a handful of albums, before going their separate ways in 2000, reuniting only to play the occasional gig. Now, 24 years after their last album, they're back.
The Bed I Made is unmistakeably a Softies album. There are 14 songs, filling barely over half an hour, and covering the usual themes: love, heartbreak, drifting apart, or just the wistful awareness that joys are fleeting, written as if journal entries made into songs. From the first notes of the first song (Go Back In Time), there is no mistaking who this is: the interplay between the two guitars (Rose strumming, Jen picking melodies), the effortlessly harmonising vocals, the mood of wistful longing, it's all there, as it was 24 years ago.
A lot has changed since the 90s, and the world The Bed I Made is released into is not the one of landlines, mixtapes and photocopied zines that The Softies formed in. And while the songs sound like they could plausibly have been from a 1990s Softies record one somehow missed the first time around, the fact that Rose and Jen are adults with decades of life experience behind them shows through in the writing. There is perhaps a more mellow, steady quality (if one still open to emotion and vulnerability) in The Bed I Made. The title track itself speaks of the baggage of a life lived, and the house that life had been lived in (“I cried here, and twice love died here, but everything I need is still inside here”), and the metaphor of a lived-in house for a lived life returns in the closing track, the wistfully hopeful Don't Fall Apart: the house is old and a bit odd, but needs only care, not repair. Meanwhile, Dial Tone, a song about missing people one has lost contact with (“there's no telephone line between your place and mine, I just wanted to tell you that I'm doing fine”), takes on an extra gravitas that it wouldn't through a voice with the temporary immortality of youth.
I had the good fortune to see The Softies play live (at Glas-Goes Pop in July), and they were great; if you get a chance to see them, do it. In any case, this album is a strong return and an essential addition to any Softies record collection.
- Alan Sparhawk - White Roses, My God (BandCamp)
The solo debut for Low's Alan Sparhawk, made after his wife, and the other half of Low, Mimi Parker died of cancer after thirty years together, is a work driven by a desperate grief and the artistic and human yearning for transcendence. While Low were broadly in the post-rock/slowcore milieu, singing and playing instruments together with few recourses to electronics beyond guitar pedals (at least until their last few albums), Parker's passing also took a whole world of intimately shared musical expression with it, so Sparhawk had to find another.
Trap beats snap, 808-ish kicks thump and synthesiser arpeggios saw brutalistically through the air; over this floats his autotuned, pitch-shifted voice, spectral and insectile, a cry of raw emotion becoming something abstract and crystalline, yet no less affecting. In places, guitars make an appearance, but in fragments, looped, chopped and screwed like flotsam. The songs have titles like Feel Something, Black Water and I Made This Beat, documenting his struggle to negotiate with grief. One gets the image of an artist relearning, through sheer determination, an entire new means of expression to replace one amputated by bereavement, which is essentially what happened: according to the record notes, Sparhawk started playing around on his kids' drum machine and synth, and the need to create prevailed. Though there is more to this than just the loss: this is not outsider music, but the work of an artisan forced by circumstance to adapt to new tools. And Sparhawk has adapted skilfully and created a solid piece of what sounds like tough, dysphoric rap-adjacent electronica, albeit from a different angle.
There are many ways something like this could have gone badly, producing something dire or cringeworthy, to which the sympathetic response would be to ignore it. None of those happened. White Roses My God stands on its own as a groundbreaking album, in the way that Radiohead's foray into IDM-esque textures was.
- Rosie Tucker - UTOPIA NOW! (BandCamp)
Wry indie in a K Records vein only way more nerdy, spanning topics such as Internet-of-shit crapgadgets, planned obsolescence as metaphor for late-capitalist burnout, and the terrible techbro pipedreams we are all trapped in, with song titles like Paperclip Maximizer and All My Exes Live In Vortexes. Musically, it sounds almost ironically pre-internet, with distorted alternative-rock guitars, live drums and not a trace of any kind of glitch/hyperpop/vaporwave/chiptune aesthetic. Tucker, a trans woman from LA, sounds like a nerdier, and way more online Mirah, and one expects her to have a presence on BlueSky (though probably not the fediverse; the fact that we have heard of her shows that she has too much clout to be on Mastodon; this is definitely Not Bonkwave).
And some other releases:
A.G. Cook — Britpop (the latest solo album from the PC Music impresario, and another walk through the latent spaces of hyperpop (i.e., what you get when you take the pop out): a collection of jittery, progressive instrumentals building from digital synth sounds and chopped vocals, with a few song demos, sung over guitar and then processed; a mixed bag, but there are some good tracks here) ¶
Emma Anderson — Spiralée: Pearlies Rearranged (tracks from her last year's album, remixed by artists including deary (who take For A Moment in a Weatherallian direction with breakbeats and dubby basslines), MEMORIALS (who give Inter Light a spaced-out post-krautrock feel) and Julia Holter (whose deconstructed take on Taste The Air is as impressionistically beguiling as her own work); the others are excellent too) ¶
Beabadoobee — This is how tomorrow moves (Bea leaves behind not only grunge but, at times, even rock'n'roll and the blues,making forays into ragtime and bossa nova; reminiscent of early Emmy The Great in places) ¶
Belong — Realistic IX (if you loved My Bloody Valentine's Loveless but only wished it was more krautrocky, this record is for you) ¶
Ben Frost — Scope Neglect (the grim Icelandic-Australian soundscape artist is back with another record, this time blending heavy-metal riffs with r/collapse eco-doomerism and some apposite field recordings (rave hoovers reduced to the buzzing of flies on a carcass); for those who found Teeth Of The Sea too frivolous) ¶
Black Aleph — Apsides (metal-tinged guitar-and-cello post-rock somewhat reminiscent of Season) ¶
Blueboy — One and Deux (the surviving members of the legendary Sarah band return to recording with some new material; One is choppy and skronky, whereas Deux leans into their more dreampoppy side; more, please...) ¶
Briana Marela — Teardrop Star (the belated release of an album Marela had been working on before the pandemic and a shift to a more abstract style, this is a tying up of the loose ends of the brand of twee electropop she was doing before, and feels like a more polished version of Call It Love shading into the experimental ambience of her more recent material) ¶
Cehryl — Willow Tree (close-miked bedroom pop from a Hong Kong artist, alternating between confessional folk and lo-fi attempts at glossy FM-radio pop; the final track, Guarantee, is particularly lovely, in an understated way) ¶
Cindy Lee — Diamond Jubilee (gender-ambiguous Lynchian hypnagogia from the timeless expanses of 20th-century popular music; there's a new lady in the radiator) ¶
Cong Josie — Moto Zone (the second album of the former NO ZU frontman's solo post-punk synthpopabilly project brings the Alan Vega influences to the fore) ¶
Anastasia Coope — Darning Woman (hypnotically repetitive music, somewhere between Appalachian folk traditions and the experimental ends of post-punk) ¶
Cowboy Sadness — Selected Jambient Works Vol. 1 (atmospheric soundscapes with guitar pedalboard, electric piano, jazz brush percussion and some subtle electronics, as wide as the sky over the American desert at night, sounding like the soundtrack to a thoughtful, slow-moving videogame; file alongside Slowdive's Pygmalion) ¶
Dummy — Free Energy (the LA band branch out from the unnamed genre that's basically a cluster around Broadcast and Stereolab, bringing in some more sounds from the early 90s, deconstructed into repetitive textural elements; there's some MBV (Soonish, appropriately), Stone Roses/Black Grape-style big-beat psychedelia (Unshaped Road) and some Leaf Library-style pastoral krautrock (Minus World and Nine Clean Nails)) ¶
English Teacher — This Could Be Texas (arty, referential indie rock, somewhere between Dry Cleaning and Black Country New Road) ¶
Father John Misty — Mahashmashana (a juggernaut of lush, maximalist yet wistfully introspective vintage-styled psychedelic pop; highlight: I Guess Time Makes Fools Of Us All, 8½ minutes of philosophical disco groove that comes across like Leonard Cohen on uppers) ¶
Beth Gibbons — Lives Outgrown (haunted, lachrymose sonic landscapes from the anhedonic Portishead chanteuse; no trip-hop beats, but wintry guitars, dissonant strings, and a lifetime of regrets (has anyone ever sung “love changes things” with quite so much world-weary anguish?); highlights include Reaching Out, which builds up like something from the Balkan branch of the Black Lodge, and the closing track, Whispering Love, a lovely piece of haunto wickerfolk replete with birdsong, that wouldn't sound amiss on a Jane Weaver or Death And Vanilla record) ¶
Karl Johann Grobe — lo tu il loro (the Swiss lounge-funk duo's first record in English; what one imagines the music in the Disco Elysium extended universe would sound like) ¶
Kelly Lee Owens — Dreamstate (Owens leaves the sonic cathedral behind for the mainroom and brings a self-consciously retro exercise in dance music, built up of 90s-vintage digital synth pads, drum patterns and Devilfished 303s, with vocals about joy and desire on the dancefloor enveloped in the mix; those of a certain generation may experience flashbacks to sitting on a clapped-out sofa in a student sharehouse listening to Underworld or Robert Miles) ¶
Kite — VII (hard-edged yet anthemic EBM-tinged Swedish synthpop, with stacks of hard synth lines, Blade Runner-esque crescendos, dark echoes of 80s classics and tribal percussion that's equal parts gothic processional and Eurovision pyrotechnics; file alongside Purity Ring and The Knife) ¶
Kosmischer Läufer — Track Club EP (more recently uncovered tracks from the DDR's leading (and only) exponent of krautrock, and another dose of Berlin-school electronics, Harmonia-influenced Kosmische Musik and socialist-brotherhood Ostalgie, or at least a digital facsimile of both) ¶
The KVB — Tremors (a bit more gothic-rock than their last Kraftwerkian foray into high modernism, with chiming guitars and vocals half-shadowed in reverb) ¶
Les Big Byrd — Diamonds, Rhinestones and Hard Rain (metronomic, propulsive psych/krautrock jams from the Stockholm stalwarts, driven by analogue synths, subtle fuzz guitar and copious tape delay; mostly instrumental, except the title track, which veers towards Singapore Sling rockabilly (krautbilly?)) ¶
Liraz — Enerjy (an infectiously groovy blend of mutant disco and Turkish psych rock from an Iranian-Israeli group, with bongos, monosynth solos, funky beats, all in Middle Eastern scales; in a better world, this would be more representative of the region and its vibe) ¶
LOMA — How Will I Live Without A Body (understated songs with reverb-drenched female vocals and subtle instrumental accompaniments, recorded in a coffin workshop in a snowed-in Dorsetshire village; a highlight is Affinity, which sounds not a world away from
There were a few recurring themes this year: shoegaze, as mentioned above, is going from strength to strength. Indiepop is in good health (with the bv's, The Reds, Pinks and Purples and the returning Softies), as are various descendents of krautrock (Memorials, the bv's and Kosmischer Läufer among them) and the ripples of hyperpop keep making an impact. There were some noteworthy rereleases, not least among them the two compilations of demos from Broadcast, reminding us of what we lost (just as bird flu is in the news again, no less). Though the kinds of liminal approach they pioneered remains popular, with everyone from Saint Etienne to Warrington-Runcorn New Town Development Plan to Jessica Pratt and Cindy Lee making music with one kind or another of a dreamlike quality. Speaking of dreams, a new genre named Hit Em had a moment, with not one but two compilations, making 5/4 time a thing again.
In other happy returns, long-lost Naarm bedroom indiepop project The Motifs is (sort of) back; someone has rereleased five more of their tracks, following up 14 they rereleased last year; meanwhile, The Motifs played this year (not when I was in town, unfortunately), and a little bird tells me they're working on new recordings. Also in Naarm, there is apparently a new Mid-State Orange album that's almost complete, which will hopefully see the light of day, and the possibility of new material from Ninetynine. (There wasn't any this year, but there were a couple of remixes of one of Laura's solo tracks; disclaimer: I was involved in the production.) There was also another Cat's Miaow compilation from the early 90s, though not yet any new material since their return to live performance last year; maybe next year?
If I were to name a record of the year, it would be The Softies, or perhaps Julia Holter.