VOTE FOR YOUR TOP FIVE ALBUMS!! VOTE FOR YOUR TOP FIVE ALBUMS!!
I’ve often wanted to award points to my 4th and 5th favourites especially on strong months for releases and wasn’t able due to my own rules and they end up as honourable mentions.
Vote for your favourite five 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.
Always a lot of great recommendations from you guys about albums that I’ve missed or overlooked
My choices:
Jenny Lewis - On The Line
Self Esteem - Compliments Please
CHAI - Punk
Nilufer Yanya - Miss Universe
Westkust - Westkust
Jenny Lewis’ album is just lovely. A brilliant follow up to to The Voyager.
I wasn’t expecting Self Esteem to be so good. Brilliant live too. Her track “In Time” is my favourite of the month.
Please forgive any shameless bumps of this thread during the week. I’ll keep this thread open until Sunday 7th April and 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.
That’s it for me for now, I’m hoping to discover more through other people’s lists. This album is great though and a really nice surprise given that I’d never heard of her before. I’m struggling to find the right words to describe it, it covers a lot more ground than it initially seems so any comparison I try to come up with falls way short. I think if you like “Pot Kettle Black” by Wilco but wish it had a very light shoegaze touch, this is worth a shot. Some of the guitar kind of reminds me of a more melodic, sadder, more downbeat, softer Speedy Ortiz too, with a little bit of Hebronix thrown in maybe? And the album closer has shades of “Common Reactor” by Silversun Pickups.
Basically if you like sad, downbeat but not boring, hypnotic, melodic music, give this a shot. It’s gotten decent reviews, but I think it’s one of those that’s going to get looked back on much more fondly as time goes on and as she (hopefully) releases more music.
1/ Solange - When I Get Home
2/ Robert Forster - Inferno
3/ Sasami - Sasami
4/ Lambchop - This (Is What I Wanted to Tell You)
5/ Stephen Malkmus - Groove Denied
Really enjoying Jenny Lewis & Apparat also, both very unlucky to miss out.
I have listened to the Helado Negro album so much this month. It’s absolutely lovely. I think Sufjan plays piano on one of the songs, and that’s not even remotely close to being one of the best things about the album.
Malik Djoudi was a late discovery, after going through The Great Escape line-up and then seeing he was playing in London the next day. One of my favourite gigs of the year and the album works so well together. French singing electro sounds.
The others above are all really good also, but these two are the stand-outs for me.
So much other music this month that I’ve not properly listened to or not sure about yet: Deaf Center, Apparat, Lambchop, Finn Andrews, We Show Up On Radar, Petr Aleksander, These New Puritans.
A fine month of nice surprises- I never expected the American Football album to be that good - it’s a proper AOTY contender - and I’d never heard of Sasami, Helado Negro or Self Esteem before. It’s a strong month when new Lambchop and Robert Forster albums don’t make my top 5.
If I could count the five songs Tierra Whack released separately this month as an album they would definitely be towards the top of this list too.
I’m very pleased with the number of Helado Negro votes so far. and am extremely pleased/surprised of another vote for Malik Djoudi! Am checking out Weval from your list now.
Mary Lattimore & Mac McCaughan: New Rain Duets
Harp meets synth. Might be my favourite ML record to date.
Maja S. K. Ratkje - Sult
Musically reminiscent of early 70s era Nico harmonium (?) with some, I’m going to say elegiac, vocals.
Andrew Bird - My Finest Work Yet.
He whistles, he rides a bike, he’s Dr. Strings. Waiting for the record to arrive though so tbh haven’t actually heard this beyond the preview tracks.
Ela Orleans - Movies for Ears.
Compilation so not strictly new but definitely a nice introduction if you don’t know her stuff. AllMusic calls it lo-fi pop, which seems fair.
Marja Ahti - Vegetal Negatives
Electronic & field noise noodling? Not sure. Not a keeper for me but I enjoyed giving it a couple of listens and will probably give it a couple more.