This list is not intended as a Best Of 2012, I've not listened to enough music to make any such claim, it's merely a survey of records I've enjoyed. There are many others released this year which are clearly excellent but I've not explored thoroughly enough to write about (Eamonn McGrath's Young Canadians and R.M. Hubbert's Thirteen Lost & Found being examples). Hopefully this list will make you want to explore further.
Sweet Lights –
Sweet Lights
Technically sophisticated but
entirely accessible, dozens of instantly memorable melodies make this
feel like an album you've known your whole life. One of those
'songwriter's songwriters', Shai Halperin makes it all sound so easy, but it
takes a peer and rival to fully appreciate why it's anything but. The
album George Harrison never made.
Land Observations –
Roman Roads IV-XI
This eight-part survey
of ancient highways and byways is composed from the simplest
ingredients; picked harmonics and looped guitar riffs evoke a
sensation of internal travel, it's unusual in being an ambient record
built around propulsive rhythms rather than drones and field
recordings, tracing a map rather than capturing territory. A sonic
gazetteer for the armchair navigator.
Warm Digits – Keep
Warm With The Warm Digits
Rarely is a band so
suited to their name; digital music served with the warmth and depth
of mulled wine, this record is a playful sonic pillow fight.
Neil Halstead -
Palindrome Hunches
Mainstream music
journalism's obsession with 'authenticity' has resulted in a critical
medium reaching a dead-end, a satellite orbiting a dying star,
sending back increasingly absurd reports – the ascetic log cabin
retreat and the 'primitive' recording equipment, the beard and the
buffalo plaid; for many, such ludicrous framing devices seem to
resonate louder than the music. Fortunately not all music writers are
so easily hoodwinked, and not all record labels are so patronising. Neil Halstead has found
a natural home at Nat Cramp's wonderfully understated Sonic Cathedral imprint. 'Palindrome Hunches' is Halstead's darkest solo album so far, but
more importantly it's his most focused, his penchant for whimsy
reined in and his plaintive melodies allowed to suspend in the air
until they dissolve. While the fact remains that many artists write
their strongest work under duress, albums like this don't need a back
story.
Kuedo – Severant
Severant is on first
blush a straightforward arranged marriage of Tangerine Dream
synthtopia and cutting-edge footwork percussion, an album with each
foot planted firmly in a different decade, but the melody lines are
so strong and the sound-scapes so sweeping that the listener will
find themselves asking more of it. What then emerges is a world where
humans are long gone, each hi-hat tick is the footfall of an army of
synthdroids terraforming a newly claimed planet, overseen by an
infinitely wise and benign Philosopher-King supercomputer. Beautiful
and unabashedly escapist, Severant is an intergalactic holiday
brochure for wistful robots.
Burial - Street
Halo EP / Kindred EP
Will Bevan made life
difficult for himself in a way that Portishead did a decade before
him. Creating an aesthetic so instantly influential it left them
without room for manoeuvre, by the time Portishead got round to their
second album, a thousand indie bands had pointlessly bolted a pair of
turntables onto the side of the stage, and with the echoes of Dummy
ringing endlessly in a hall of mirrors, Portishead's sound was no
longer theirs. So they took their time, adapted and moved on. Both
artists stand in a grand tradition of sonic pioneers weaving a noose
to hang themselves with. My Bloody Valentine have yet to rise to
their own challenge, The Stone Roses made a pig's ear of their's, but Bevan continues to hone his occult craft so elegantly that
no-one has come close to cracking the code, and by releasing EPs
instead of albums, he has avoided the issue, forcing people to
appreciate his music outside of the arbitrary strictures of track
counts, running times and size formats.
Emptyset – Medium
Put up microphones in an ancient building, record the sound of nothing, play it back through a P.A. in the same room, record the results. Repeat this process indefinitely. Will you capture the murmurs of ghosts? Definitely.
Happy New Year.
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