Albums of the year: 2020

Last year, I wrote a blog detailing the albums I’d listened to throughout the year and the importance of developing a relationship between music and events. That we do so much better when we build our own recollections, as opposed to shoehorning the ones Spotify can provide for us. I’m doing it again this year with a slight of obligation: a sense that there wasn’t so much music this year that moved me. The Guardian called it “the lost year”, but I think a better term is “year in stasis”. Friends have told me how they spent the year in general and lockdowns in particular listening back to their summer favourites. Radio presenters have covered their favourite songs in every colour, from Craig Charles’ Funky Forty to Cilian Murphy’s Songs from Under the Stairs. For my own sake, in the unholy combination of a due return home and an undue expanse of free time, I have regressed to the music of my teenage years. Maybe I’m not the only one: being left to your own devices, not knowing how to employ them, and suffering for it. That’s an adolescent disease. And idle hands make the devil’s playlist. Gnawing through Coldplay and The Wombats, I isolate less embarrassing favourites, and tortuously pull them into a lightweight summary of the music I listened to this year, free from the burdens of regression and regret. To celebrate 2020 with the music I pushed myself to listen to, instead of the music I was pulled into listening.

1. World’s Strongest Man by Gaz Coombes

This 2018 release is symptomatic of the slow death of Britpop. It’s something I’ve struggled with recently, personally: coming to terms with the end of one of the genres that I was first fond of. The age of Britpop is unambiguously over. Damon Albarn is forcing funny animations. Noel Gallagher is pretending to novelty. And Gaz Coombes, lead singer of Supergrass, the Britpop band too many people forget, is writing exactly the music you would expect to come from the mouth of a forty-odd Londoner with nothing to lose and confusing taste in hats: I like it, it hurts how much I like it. “I’m the world’s strongest man... don’t leave me by myself”. There’s rock-star post-pretensions mixed up with the melancholy of a lost celebrity. The year after this album came out, Supergrass reunited and released a special edition compilation, playing gigs across Europe. The whole motive of World’s Strongest Man – to give Coombes a context in which he could bow out – went caput. But it’s still a wonderful hauntology of the noughties-age, squeaky guitars and small falsettos applied to describe car-drives in cities that Coombes can no longer recognise. Oh, and there’s Oxygen Mask, decrying the contemporary: “They got driverless cars in Florida, and drones to your door, well it's like science fiction, and it's all right here, place your oxygen mask on”. Sometimes I listen with Coronavirus in mind. Prescient coincidence is my favourite kind.

2. Punisher by Phoebe Bridgers

Fresh off the presses in 2020, this one. Full disclosure: I didn’t like Phoebe Bridgers the first time I listened to her. I thought: this raspy emo gal is just a bit much. But that was 2017 and this is now, and the half-off neon-lit drive you imagine as Bridgers murmurs through your ears is perfect for 2020. It is (more!) melancholic nostalgia incarnate. Us millennials can dream for the past now, we’ve lived long enough. Garden Song: “No, I’m not afraid of hard work, I get everything I want. I have everything. I want it”. This album is the emptiness that follows a consumer cloud, and Phoebe walks through it like a fresh nymph. Kyoto is equally brilliant: how a relationship lulls through distance, dreamt up before the fact but perfectly applicable in a pandemic. Bridgers said the song was actually about her father, and his recovery – so the beauty is in just how many stories it manages to include. Halloween tells us about an ailing relationship, barely saved by the facades of spooky masks (“we can be anything”), facing up to the millennial challenge of becoming something for someone else: “I’ll be whatever you want”. You can choose whichever mask you want, so long as you choose the one that makes other people happy. Chinese Satellite goes the whole hog, appealing to the generation that grew up with E.T. and the millennial malaise in one go: “I want to believe, that if I go outside I'll see a tractor beam, coming to take me to where I'm from, I want to go home”. The loss of belonging. The longing for it. Forgetting collective memories. I love Phoebe Bridgers, not like you love a band, like you love a person. I’ve never met her; I’ve just heard her sing about driving around L.A with the windows down and ultraviolet lights in her eyes.

3. Music Has the Right to Children by Boards of Canada 

I listened to this album – a 1998 vintage – a lot this year, in a lot of different situations. After it arrived in the post, I put it in my hi-fi, lay back on my bed, and let it play out in full. That was 2019, though, so every listen in the current year could only be a revision. But in this genre of Aphex-adjacent ambient, the tracks evolve with every listen. Telephasic Workshop gives mind to a series of stresses, a sense of incoming pressure as the synths seem to push the listener down. The chords resolve only to immediately un-resolve, and there is always one synth following another. There is always another task. Something waiting in the inbox. An ego to be pounded into dust. 

Turquoise Hexagon Sun remains one of my favourites as one of the calmer cuts from the album – even though it exhibits some of the same harsh, progressing drums as Workshop, it phases them in and out to allow moments of honest-to-goodness serenity. In a completely different vein, the vocal on One Very Important Thought reminds viewers that Fair Dealing and intellectual property rights are important. This leads into the final track, Happy Cycling, a rollicking series of rhythms that build over the course of almost 8 minutes into something that, again, is never really resolving. Gentle wailing falls over tom drums until an airy synth and some seagulls arrive to sort things out. Then a bubbly wave embroils it all. It’s like cycling along the Dutch coast with a man you think is called Jaap who knows more about you than he lets on. Hopefully that carries the message: the album is, in large parts, a bit unsettling. But that is what makes it an interesting listen. It takes you places. When I started listening to it, I felt a bit funny, living in a flat with two girls who didn’t follow ambient – but then neither did I, at the time. Now that I do, it chimes with me a lot more. I can explain why I like it. And it’s varied enough to be the perfect introduction to the genre.

4. RE-ANIMATOR by Everything Everything

I’ve already covered this album at length here and this post is already too long. The short version is that, for my sake, it is the ideal encapsulation of a series of political ideas that string together hopelessness, anxiety, ambition and solidarity all in one. Everything Everything have never made overtly political music – all the better for it. It’s underwritten with infinite themes, in a jumble of time signatures and math-rock stings that build up to a beautiful denouement-come-take-down of our timeless age. I think it might be my favourite LP from their discography. “Come on, you only lost your mind…” I did, the first time I heard it.

5. Helplessness Blues by Fleet Foxes

I mentioned earlier that this year featured a lot of retraced steps – schlepping home and re-covering tracks with tired eyes. Fleet Foxes turned that to a joy, this past summer. Songs like The Shrine give body to the sunlight. Bedouin Dress summons a glade. The reverb on the vocals across this album make me imagine that they are engraving the lyrics into a little log cabin just beyond my cone of vision. They are wherever I am; provided I am in nature. The strings are plucked like pine needles, the drums like fence gates, the wind instruments like, well, their namesake. Listening to this album can grant a semblance of adventure to even the slightest country walk: pull The Cascades out of its .mp3 between two hedgerows and they will inspire a journey, for two minutes and four seconds at the very least. And, of course, the title track’s lyrics can be bound to poignancy in a year of pandemic: “I was raised up believing I was somehow unique… and now after some thinking I’d say I’d rather be, a functioning cog in some great machinery, serving something beyond me.”

“But I don’t, no I don’t, know what that will be. I’ll get back to you someday, someday soon, you will see. What’s my name, what’s my station, oh just tell me what I should do…”

I won’t list the lyrics end to end. They were penned by lead Robin Pecknold when he was only a little older than me. Clearly a greater man. Argh! The millennial malaise recurs! It always bloody recurs.

“What good is it to sing helplessness blues? Why should I wait for anyone else?” At the end Pecknold muses about having an orchard – how the ownership would activate him somehow. I think we could all have done with an orchard this year. Especially those of us with little more to our name.

6. Worhead by Little Comets

Little Comets came a cropper on last year’s list for the singles they’d released that year, but in 2020 I found myself going back to their latest full LP: 2017’s Worhead. I never really gave it its dues at the time, but bought it on a whim this year as part of a done deal to secure a band t-shirt. My favourite thing about this album is how it pushes the boat out for the “left behind”: finding signs and symbols in the ideas of, maybe, a lost identity: forgotten traditions, empty homes, cold, pebbled coasts and barely-there causeways. 

The song The Man Who Wrote Thriller tells us – and this is a true fact – that said man lives in Scarborough. That truth gives Little Comets confidence, when someone with such a claim to fame can reside in the Yorkshire Dales. Similarly, Break Bread focuses more or less entirely on the act of breaking bread with family, and all the comfort that affords. And Redeemer details “the holy nest of Jarrow” – where my dad’s family and Little Comets alike grew up. The message here is that when we’re young, everything we do or say is born out of the context of our first home. Arriving to university aged 18, plucked from somewhere else in the country, we’re suddenly far less smart and out of our comfort zone. Our Jarrow is where our sage wisdom sits, where it remains until we’ve had another 18 years somewhere else. The achievement of Worhead is in its ability to forge a loving and a longing for collective memory in a country like England, where so many of us despise our own identity. But it doesn’t retreat into parochialism, ruralism or pastiche. The man who wrote Thriller really, honestly, lives in Scarborough.

7. All of a Sudden I Miss Everyone by Explosions in the Sky

At the beginning of the year, I already knew I liked another band, a band called Khruangbin. I’d seen them live and remarked, individually, on the hair of each of the members: two with long stuff. One with none. Good balance. I'd have said the same about the music: a lilting genre-hop experience of Thai guitar meeting roadside café chill. The best thing to come out of Texas, I’d venture, or have ventured. But then I caught up with Explosions in the Sky, a good few years since I last heard their single So Long So Lonesome – and it provoked incommensurable feels. 

I was sat there, trying desperately to get something done on my second day of the job. The school just beyond my window had just got out for breaktime and the resulting noise saw my ears pushing my brain into remission. I was sick of it. I'd had a rough month and the schoolyard shouts were pushing me beyond. Post-rock, or this album in specifics, turned out to be a timely medicine. The perspective-yielding presence of gently building guitars, layered like an orchestra, melodics prized eternal. The Birth and Death of the Day is a sun rising slowly, punctuated by the moments when it strikes a tree just so and it inspires twice as much for a moment. Welcome, Ghosts leaves the doors open for gentleness. And the aforementioned So Long So Lonesome is melancholic nostalgia staking another wonderful claim. The song reminds me that all things must come to an end. And sometimes they end in a post-rock flavour.

So there you are, my 7 albums from the past year, collected on display. Make your own list, why don't you. Think about why you listened to the music you did. And even if you only listened to something once or twice, think about the times an album, a song, even a line - really touched you. That is where Spotify, or any other streaming service for that matter, will fail, and where only individuals can succeed: in recognising that each listen is different, dependent, and fundamentally distinctive.