A Handful Of Songs

A quick post on six songs that sparked my interest this year

Being pressed for time this week there unfortunately won’t be the regular newsletter, but I thought I should provide at least something to interest people. So instead, here is a handful of songs from 2022 that I’ve enjoyed and think you should too.

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Tintoretto, It’s For You - Destroyer

Destroyer is Canada’s most important national treasure. Which isn’t a slight on Canada, a country I love deeply and is way more interesting that most people realise, but it is an indication of how compelling he is, even if he is a niche concern.

He released his thirteen album this year, titled Labyrinthitis (which he conceded is a title that sounds like a Tool album), and it continues his move into a more electronic sound (although most of his albums are musically distinct from the previous). But it is his wry lyrics that remain his drawcard. To get a sense of his worldview you can read my essay on his Kaputt album over on my much-neglected, overly-pretentious, music blog, Lunch Hour Pops.

Tintoretto, It’s For You is an incredible song both lyrically and musically, but the clip also provides a good first impression of his generally aura. He has recently found cinematographers who have been able to capture his unique subtle absurdism – see June, from this album, and Foolssong and Cue Synthesiser from his previous album.

Happy New Year - Let’s Eat Grandma

The band’s name is a grammar joke, given that its meaning would change dramatically with the exclusion of the apostrophe. In recent years, the duo have been responsible for some great electro-pop songs - Falling Into Me, being the standout. Happy New Year is another brilliant song, and notably a song about their friendship.

There is something special about bands that are built on a bond that exists outside of their music (see my essay on the Manic Street Preachers’s Everything Must Go album). I don’t have the space to go into my theory about most male musicians (it’s not positive), but bonds like that of Let’s Eat Grandma provide the band more substance, it gives the impression of a shared vision, commitment, genuine motives and sense of living their ideas that other bands lack. Happy New Year encapsulates this, and a beautiful friendship.

World Of Pots and Pans – Horsegirl

Nineties indie rock is back, via three teens who were not alive to live through it the first time. Horsegirl are clearly influenced by Yo La Tengo, Sonic Youth, Dinosaur Jr, with some nods to the shoegaze of My Bloody Valentine and Lush. This sound was a major part of my own youth, and even though nostalgia has become an industry in itself, I don’t think Horsegirl sound this way out of cynicism. They are genuinely attracted to the sound of the era, and, who can blame them? Their debut album – Versions of Modern Performance – and their previous EPs and singles are all fantastic.

Oni (they) - Kate NV

Once you get hooked into the YouTube algorithm, there is a treasure trove of weird, obscure and incredible 80s songs that keep getting thrown at you. In particular, the algorithm works with Japanese music from this era. Kate NV feels like the personification of this algorithm. Her previous album, 2020’s Room For The Moon, was an extraordinary collection bass-led synth-pop that sounded like nothing else from the current era, and more like a continuation of the experimental Japanese music from the 80s (filtered through a Russian native). It is clearly one of the stand out albums of recent years.

Oni (they) is a taste of her new album set to be released early next year, and has her singing in Japanese, rather than her usual Russian or English (or French). Musically it is filled with hyperactive synths that, from other songs previewed from the album like d d don’t, looks like marking it an another completely unique venture.

Tresor - Gwenno

Gwenno has taken it upon herself to resurrect the Cornish language. As one of only around 200-300 fluent speakers of the language, she has made the conscious decision that for Cornish to once again flourish it needs bodies of cultural work to not just attract new speakers, but to give the language a romance and artistic lore that people can incorporate into their lives. You can read more about music and language politics in my essay on the Super Furry Animals’s Mwng album.

Tresor is Gwenno’s second album sung entirely in Cornish (bar one song in Welsh, her other native language), and the album was shortlisted for the Mercury Prize, an annual award for the year’s best music from the United Kingdom.

Unlike her two previous albums (her first being in Welsh), which were heavily influenced by Broadcast’s retro-futurism, Tresor has a less electronic focus, and instead is more ethereal, moving towards a form of pastoral psychedelia.

Rosebud - Manic Street Preachers

This year the Manic Street Preachers re-released their 2001 album, Know Your Enemy, with a completely different format – as a double album with different tracklisting to the original single album. It’s difficult to pinpoint exactly which Manic Street Preachers album is the worst, it really depends on what kind of terrible you’re considering, but Know Your Enemy is a serious contender.

As a coke-album without the coke – where almost every song is a different genre – it seems specifically designed to lose the band as many of the fans they had gained from their previous two highly successful albums. While albums that cut against the grain can be positive and excellent (1994’s The Holy Bible – Britpop’s antithesis – remains the greatest album of all time), Known Your Enemy is just a really bad album. Only the glorious Beach Boys pastiche So Why So Sad is worth anyone’s time (unless, of course, you are into the band as a fascinating cultural phenomenon, and understand their terrible albums are essential to the whole picture of what makes them so interesting).

However, on the re-released version a new song appeared that had inexplicably been left off the original (not even appearing as a B-side). Rosebud creates the similar “euphoric melancholia” that the band had done so well with 1996’s Everything Must Go (and would occasionally recapture since the turn of the century). The song – and the album’s reformatting – may not have saved the reputation of Know Your Enemy, but it was a notable positive addition.