DiS Users' January 2021 Album Of The Month - The Results

VOTE FOR YOUR TOP FIVE ALBUMS!!

This thread is now in it’s 8th year. How thrilling.

Vote for your five favourite albums. Make your selections clear please as it makes tallying up the scores easier. If you list a whole bunch of albums without making your selections clear I’ll take the first five mentioned as 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th and 5th. No joint positions please. Sorry to be a pedant.

Your album of the month will get five points, 2nd placed album four points, 3rd placed album three points, 4th placed album two points and 5th one point. If you name only one album I’ll give that five points. If you name two albums I’ll score them with five and four points etc. You get the message.

My choices:

1. Skyway Man - The World Only Ends When You Die.

2. Teen Creeps - Forever

3. Grandbrothers - All The Unknown

4. Pearl Charles - Magic Mirror

5. Kiwi Jr - Cooler Returns

Skim listened to Skyway Man the first time and dismiss as Beachwood Sparks kind of stuff that didn’t like. Gave it a few repeat listens and loved it. Apparently it’s a folk opera album. Songs are layered and more complex than on first or second listen and there’s something to be gained from each song after each repeated listen. Not sure if anyone has mentioned the album here but it’s worth checking out.

Teen Creeps’ album is just very good indie rock. No bells and whistles but similar in style to Sebadoh and Pavement.

Grandbrothers have a lovely electro (piano) dance album. Makes great listening on commutes and walks in the winter.

A woozy electro pop/easy listening album from Pearl Charles.

I like Kiwi Jr but probably not as much as many others here but enjoyed their album. The Palberta album was good too.

I thought I’d start the ball rolling before tomorrow’s releases. Goat Girl is the big one for me and have fond memories of an afternoon gig of theirs inside a converted industrial unit in Hackney Wick about two years ago. Their debut was great and have high hopes for the new one after watching their slight album playback and chat thing on the internet. My top five will almost likely change with album releases from Arlo Parks and Besnard Lakes too.

Always a lot of great recommendations from you guys about albums that I’ve missed or overlooked.

Please forgive any shameless bumps of this thread during the week. I’ll keep this thread open until Sunday 7th February so you’ll have over a week to listen to tomorrow’s releases before choosing.

Vote now!! (Or later in the week) but make your choices clear please.

4 Likes

Bicep - Isles
A lot of hype but it lived up to it.

Logic1000
Fantastic house/techno goodness

Kessler
This has been making me happy all week. Glitchy dnb breaks, sounds a bit like Burial in places and has fantastic techno bits to stress test your system.

Gatecreeper
Fantastic Death metal, Death/Doom.

4 Likes
  1. Thermohaline - Maelström
    Nautical themed avant-garde black metal, jaw dropping!
  2. Bicep - Isles
    No description necessary I don’t think, just chock full of bangers!
  3. Svrm - Розпад
    Russian atmospheric black metal
  4. Ancient Mastery - Chapter One: Across The Mountains of the Drämmarskol
    Symphonic black metal/dungeon synth
  5. Sun Do Silver - 1
    New album/project from the guy behind Petrels
2 Likes

Shame
Viagra Boys

Shame album is a step on from their debut (which is about half decent, half filler). I’d never listened to Viagra Boys until this month, it’s been a great distraction from this miserable month.

1 Like
  1. Pom Poko - Cheater

  2. Bicep - Isles

  3. Binaural Space - Karel Čapek’s RUR

  4. Black Swan - Repetition Hymns

  5. Palberta - Palberta5000

First two were the big two that I was waiting for and fully expected to like and was not disappointed by one bit. More punky-pop from Pom Poko and more polished danciness from Bicep. Great.

The Binaural Space one is a concept album based on the Karel Čapek play which debuted 100 years ago this week (the play that popularised the term, ‘robot’). The album uses spoken bits from a 1937 radio adaptation of the play mixed in with ambient-y electronica. The Bandcamp page explains it all better than me Karel Čapek's RUR | Binaural Space

Black Swan is 80 minues of gorgeous drone. And Palberta’s off-kilter-punk latest is lots of fun. It got criticised by the Pitchfork reviewer who said “This band weakens a series of good-to-great songs by repeating a single lyric, without any variation whatsoever, for two to three minutes”, which I don’t understand at all because those, for me, are THE BEST BITS and, if anything, should have been longer.

Anyhoo, surprisingly good month, I thought.

1 Like

I haven’t listened to enough albums to make a top 5, but I’m just commenting to say that I checked out the Grandbrothers album based on your description here, and really liked it. Thanks! I’m trying to articulate how to descrive it without resorting to the sort of lame “x meets y” comparisons I used to made a student journalist hack.

The penultimate track reminded me of a Chris De Burgh song and I say that as someone who’s willing to go in to bat for some of Chris De Burgh’s tunes.

2 Likes
  1. Cheekface - Emphatically No
  2. The Besnard Lakes - The Besnard Lakes are the Last of the Great Thunderstorm Warnings
  3. Kiwi Jr - Cooler Returns
  4. Buck Meek - Two Saviors
  5. Hilang Child - Every Mover

Decent month, with Jim Ghedi, Pom Poko and carm bubbling under and more time needed with Goat Girl and Cathedral Bells. And really good EPs from Emma Ruth Rundle/Thou, Club Sinister, White Flowers and Nice Biscuit.

  1. Bicep - Isles
  2. Madlib - Sound Ancestors
  3. Jazmine Sullivan - Heaux Tales
  4. Grandbrothers - All the Unknown
  5. Still Corners - The Last Exit

  1. Kessler - Ambivalent
  2. Badmixday - Goya
  3. Stimulator Jones - La Mano
  4. Yu Su - Yellow River Blue
  5. Fredo - Money Can’t Buy Happiness

Was excited for the Bicep and Madlib/Four Tet records and both hit the spots I wanted them to hit. Can see the criticisms for Bicep re: very polished, not much of a departure from their debut etc but their sugar-rush formula works for me. The Madlib record is amazing, Four Tet has knocked it out of the park. Need some more time with it.

The other 8 records are by artists I’d never heard of (except Fredo) and all have come from these boards so thanks very much collective hivemind! Some really lovely downtempo stuff which would probably be higher if I wasn’t WFH with the TV; affects how many spins the ‘weirder’ stuff gets…

3 Likes
  1. Drunk Tank Pink - Shame
  2. On All Fours - Goat Girl
  3. Isles - Bicep
  4. Pom Poko - Cheater
  5. Kiwi Jr - Cooler Returns

Was it just me or was that a really good January for new music? Shame and Goat Girl (on a fourth listen now and I’m just loving the texture of the music) could be knocking about my album of the year list yet.

3 Likes

1: Yu Su - Yellow River Blue
2: Madlib - Sound Ancestors
3: Emeka Ogboh - Beyond The Yellow Haze
4: Yasmin Williams - Urban Driftwood
5: Jazmine Sullivan - Heaux Tales

Amazing to have five such strong records for January.
Yu Su is amazing - loved an EP of hers from a few years back so checked this out, and it’s just amazingly well executed - dubby, housey ambient in places, but sits as an album really really well and maintains a really strong sense of personality. It’s a phenomenal record.

Obviously Madlib is brilliant, just sounds phenomenal on headphones, and is a credit to all involved (which is high praise when you combine those back catalogues!).

Emeka Ogboh i’ve never heard of before, but is essentially techno interspersed with field recordings from central Lagos. He’s a sound artist by trade I believe - this was taken from an exhibition - but it’s so full of life, and is expertly assembled, it’s so immersive. A real, lovely surprise. Deserves a bigger audience…

Same for Yasmin Williams, normally acoustic Instrumentals aren’t really my thing, but she’s got a real pop sensibility and this is so engrossing. A genuinely brilliant surprise, can’t recommend it highly enough.

And Jazmine Sullivan is as strong as I’d hoped, flows brilliantly, great songwriting, incredible voice and the interludes tie it together really well. Couple of future classics on here - Pick Up Your Feelings, Lost One - no doubt.

Bubbling under - Bicep is really good, but I haven’t connected with it as well as their earlier stuff (still hammering ‘Just’, 5 years on), and Kessler which I picked up on the back of string recommendations here and can’t get enough of, but plumped for others by dint of it being an EP and I had 6 records and 5 slots! Unreal for a January really.

3 Likes
  1. Weezer - OK Human
  2. Luiz Vasquez/The Soft Moon - A Body of Errors
  1. Notwist
  2. Pom Poko
  3. Leafing
  4. Teen Creeps
  5. Cobal Chapel
5 Likes
  1. Madlib - Sound Ancestors
  2. Tom Furse - Ecstatic Meditations
  3. Breeze Brewin - Hindsight
  4. Portrayal of Guilt - We Are Always Alone
  5. Warmth - The Darkest Place
    .
  6. R.A.P. Ferreira - Bob’s Son

Good start to the year :+1:

  1. Goat Girl - On All Fours
  2. Still Corners - The Last Exit
  3. Bicep - Isles
  4. Sleaford Mods - Spare Ribs
  5. Pom Poko - Cheater
2 Likes

Really strong January…

  1. Black Swan - Repetition Hymns (If I hear anything better this year it’s going to be a cracking year)
  2. Madlib - Sound Ancestors
  3. Warmth - The Darkest Place
  4. Bicep - Isles
  5. Martina Bertoni - Music for Empty Flats

Also really enjoying the Notwist album (Angel Bat Dawid! Ben LaMar Gay!), and yet to hear Illuvia - Iridescence of Clouds, which i’ve heard very good things about.

  1. R.A.P. Ferreira - Bob’s Son
  2. Viagra Boys - Welfare Jazz
  3. Bicep - Isles
1 Like
  1. LICE - Wasteland: What Ails Our People Is Clear (Mathy post-punk from Bristol)
  2. Bicep - Isles
  3. Madlib - Sound Ancestors (Instrumental hip-hop)
  4. Still Corners - The Last Exist (Indie/dream pop, I can imagine them playing at the Roadhouse)
  5. Shame - Drunk Tank Pink
1 Like
  1. Viagra Boys - Welfare Jazz
  2. The Dirty Nil - Fuck Art
  1. Black Swan - Repetition Hymns
  2. Besnard Lakes - can’t remember the title
  3. Tom Furse - Ecstatic Meditations
  4. Divide and Dissolve - Gas Lit

Only just listened to the last one but it sounds alright

This was meant to say at the Roadhouse in Twin Peaks

1 Like