Ok, finally, let’s get this show on the road. Apologies again for the delay in commencing this mammoth countdown, but I’ll try to get all four(!) instalments out of the way by early Feb, if I possibly can.

To begin by stating the bleedin’ obvious though, the ways in which I engage with music have changed considerably during 2020.

To rewind a bit, let's just say that, over the past five years or so, I’ve found my listening splitting itself neatly into two distinct streams. Firstly, there’s more frenetic punk, metal and rock stuff, along with whatever song-based indie stuff still persists in my diet, which I listen to on earphones whilst out and about, travelling to or from work, or traversing the city for one reason or another. And secondly, there’s slower, more relaxing, texture-based, droney or repetitive music, which I listen to at home on the nice speakers.

Needless to say then, the pandemic has had the effect of largely eliminating the life circumstances which allowed me to enjoy the first of those two categories. As a result, whilst I have still discovered and enjoyed plenty of frenetic and/or song-based rock music during 2020, it’s fair to say that I have spent less time listening to it than at any point in my adult life to date, and the stuff which has ended up on my Best Records list reflects this.

Conversely however, nine months of working-from-home have meant that I have been listening to a hell of a lot more music whilst at home, and, significantly, this listening has increasingly been taking place whilst I’ve not necessarily been relaxing and/or exhausted.

Previously I should note, I never listened to music whilst working - partly because I’ve always been operating under threat of interruption from phonecalls or human interaction whilst in the office, and partly because I’ve never wanted to end up associating the music I love with sitting in a strip-light illuminated open plan room, filling in spreadsheets.

Working-from-home though, sitting there with no immediate distractions, turntable right next to me and a ton of crap to plough through…. well of course I’m going to play some records! And, it’s been pretty great to be honest - my ears have been getting a hell of a work-out, if nothing else.

Like it or not though of course, music conducive to working naturally tends to veer in certain directions. Toward tasteful, unobtrusive electronica, stretched out, groove-based stuff of one kind or another, low key, upbeat jazz and funk…. you get the idea. Precisely the kind of stuff, in other words, which my angry, teeth-grinding teenage self would have derided as bland, broadsheet-acceptable background pap. Yet here I am. I’m diggin’ it. ‘Selected Ambient Works’, Soul Jazz comps, Roy Ayers, Tony Allen and the two Four Tet albums I own have been in heavy rotation, as I finally begin to realise that all those refined, head-noddin’, CD-on-in-the-background grown ups I used to look down upon weren’t really malign, self-satisfied cultural homogenisers. They were probably just BUSY.

Anyway, needless to say, this change in circumstances has dove-tailed nicely with my renewed engagement with contemporary jazz, many of proponents of which happen to be based in the UK and able to post records to me without much difficulty. Something about the combo of rhythmic drive, cerebral atmos, varied textures and abstract, instrumental beauty offered by jazz of all stripes allows it to function as a perfect counterpoint to ploughing through a desk job, and this is reflected by its prominence on the multi-part list which follows.

Yes, multi-part list. For, as you will have noted, the blighted year of 2020 has actually proved so astonishingly rich in great new music - at least from my own personal POV - that I will be present the world with a Stereo Sanctity TOP FORTY, for the first time since the misbegotten / hazily recalled ‘glory days’ of 2010/11-ish.

As ever, the placing of items on this list is largely arbitrary. If it’s on here, that means I really liked it, simple as that.

In addition to all the jazz, I think 2020 also ended up being a bit of a banner year for releases within the UK’s psyche/noise rock scene, even as its proponents were perversely prevented from flogging their wares in that music’s natural environment of sweaty, unventilated rooms for the duration. I predict a distinct lull forthcoming in this regard as we hit the inevitable period in which archives have been emptied and bands not yet able to fully reconvene in aforementioned rooms to assemble new material, so - let’s enjoy it while we can, that’s my advice.

This strand is strongly represented on the first instalment of the big list below, beginning with a triple header or precisely this sort of thing. As other commentators have noted, assessing and commenting on some of these records without distant shards of their amp damage ringing in my ears feels strange. But, nonetheless, the racket abides.

Splendidly OTT stuff from this UK psyche-noise super-group led by Luminous Bodies’ Tracy Bellaries. Back in September I ventured to observe:

“With three guitar raging, creeping and blaring through the mix around the central driveshaft of Bellaries’ bass and Cleaver’s drums, together with Ghold’s Alex Wilson going completely off his nut on tonsil-gargling/dying vampire vocals and more effects than you can shake a stick at on everything, it sounds as if all concerned are having a veritable whale of a time here, somehow emerging with a sound both ridiculously excessive and totally solid. The most riotous, undemandingly fun set of UK underground rock gear I’ve heard in an age, this comes hugely recommended.” 

 

Veterans of years-worth of exhilaratingly anarchic (if unconscionably sticky) live performances, up to this point Sly & The Family Drone had yet to really surpass their jokily-named origins when it came to the field of recorded music. Perfect timing then that they’ve ended up finally making the transition to credible recording artistes during a year which saw the very concept of live music effectively annihilated.

Initially based around a core of free-form, pedal-based electronics (with everyone’s mic outputs seemingly filtered through everyone else’s boxes), The Family Drone’s arsenal has expanded over the years to include polyphonous, crashing drums and honking, elephantine brass, and it these elements which tend to predominate on ‘Walk It Dry’. Cutting the band’s oft-exhausting marathon jams down to a series of sub-five minute ‘pieces’ also works extremely well here, allowing for a greater variety of atmospheres and instrumental set ups to get a look-in, whilst keeping listener attention spans ticking over nicely.

As in the group’s live shows, menacing/bowel-quaking Throbbing Gristle-ish industrial shrieks and rumbles find themselves perversely infused with an infectious sense of child-like, saucepan-banging fun, without a trace of grim-dark mopery in sight. Which is great, especially with the reverb-drenched, metal-oid percussion throws in a bakery’s-worth of rolls and a baritone sax or tuba (or something) thundering away Mats Gustafson-style like a wild boar digging for truffles. Splendid stuff, which I can now enjoy it in the comfort of my own home without getting doused in second hand bottled ale or harangued by flabby, naked men - which, personally speaking, I count as a major plus, even after ten months of hermetic isolation. 

 

 

Though the band members themselves would presumably beg to differ, Casual Nun’s existence thus far seems to me to have comprised a series of scorched earth skirmishes between the band’s rockist and experimental tendencies (always a fascinating struggle to witness, cf: ‘80s Sonic Youth). For better or for worse, the former seems to be very much in the ascendant here, with nine tracks squeezed into a lean thirty two minutes, as a ragin’, roided-up noise-rock vibe predominates for the most part, anchored in urban anxiety with repurposed Motorhead riffs and a GBH-worthy punkoid stomp from the rhythm section, leaving only the heavy warp of pedal-grue applied to vocals and guitar alike to really speak to the band’s ostensible psychedelic MO.

Don’t speak too soon though! Midway through, the experimental faction regroup, allowing the record to slide into a central valley of monged out weirdness, with a more reflective, drum machine-trudging’ burned out mope (Pink Celestial Herons), leading into a beatless swathe of blissed out, fuzz-trailing ambience recalling the kind of thing electric guitarists usually come up with when asked to record something ‘desert-y’ (‘Pana, Tejas’), before ‘Rabbits’ brings us a skit-like bit of way out nonsense involving creepy, childlike narration and murky, free-form shards of noise. ‘Heavy Liquid’ (Stooges or Paul Pope inspired?) proves the wildest outlier however, diverging from a reassuringly straight up opening riff and sinking instead into a deconstructed murk of frog-marching, time-keepin’ rhythm and distant, discombobulated vocals hysterics, stretching our patience until the band eventually return to core rock-pleasure-principle biz, momentarily dropping into about twenty seconds of Pigs x7-like stomp at the end - a notion which happily remains central to the remainder of the album. The closing Greek language ‘Φυλαχτό’ proves especially effective in this regard, with a crushing melange of snare-on-every-beat stomp and shrieking, Vest-ish wah-wah combining to pummel those ol’ experimental tendencies into submission just so. 

 

From June: “Heavy duty, oxygen-sucking, cosmic / cloud level Popal Vuh-esque drone-work here from Austria-based American guitarist Eric Arn (Primordial Undermind) and British cellist Jasmine Pender (Rotten Bliss). First cut is perfect for witnessing a pale sun rise across a planetery curve as one falls into the orbit of a frozen, featureless gas giant, or so I should imagine, whilst the second explores more tense, noisy and recognisably instrument-y angles on the same kind of weightless inertia. It’s good, in other words.”

I’ve been meaning to dig into the work of the temptingly named Promoridal Undermind andor Rotten Bliss ever since I wrote that six months ago, but time just hasn’t allowed. For no though, this remains a pretty killer piece of aural stasis. Maybe later this year? 

 

 

Ok, so, first off, please don’t let the cover artwork put you off this one. I mean, yeah… I don’t know what’s going on with it to be perfectly honest, but rest assured, it does not really reflect the agreeably no nonsense cartoon-ish heavy metal found within.

I’m sure there must have been dozens of bands named “Midnight” over the years, so, for the avoidance of confusion, this one is seemingly a one-man metal outfit operating out of Columbus, Ohio.

With the background thus established, I’ll make things easier for you by going a bit “choose your own adventure” with the remainder of this write-up (a suitably METAL reference point, right?), leaving you to pick your preferred pithy summation of Midnight’s MO from the following:

a) Imagine if Venom had valued musicality over theatricality, and had put a bit more effort into tight playing and achieving a cool recorded sound (albeit, one rendered on a four-track in somebody’s basement).

b) Imagine if the progenitors of ‘90s Norwegian black metal, rather than growing up to be a bunch of shady, questionable-belief-system-incubating misanthropes lording it over one of the most preposterously myopic and tedious sub-genres in rock history, had instead been content to go on presenting themselves as easy-going, beer-swilling dudes who dig stupid, fast music and pretend to worship Satan because it’s funny.

c) Midnight is the metal what The Spits are to punk.

Choose your path, adventurer! Whatever happens, you’ll likely get clobbered by a rat-ogre as songs with names like ‘Devil’s Excrement’ or ‘Fucking Speed and Darkness’ blare, but that’s life, right? 

 

 

Also from June: “Seemingly demonstrating that you can take the boys out of the Pond, but can’t dry ‘em off no matter how hard you try, this collaboration between Bardo Pond guitarists the Gibbons Bros and a drummer named Scott Verrastro finds the trio initially tip-toeing around each other with a few minutes of uncertain, questioning abstraction, before they apparently make eye contact, exchange shrugs and lock into exactly the kind of stoned, heavy-weight-on-butterfly-wings grandeur which has helped cement the brothers’ main band’s ‘90s output as such an indelible and insurmountable cornerstone of modern heavy psyche.

Although the sound is necessary somewhat stripped back here, I’ve not heard these guys tap into this particular sweetest of sweet spots for some years now, making their decision to break out the big spoons and just dig in across the majority of this three track release feel like a slo-mo, fungoid sugar rush of purest delight.” 

 

Always nice to hit a bandcamp ‘play’ button and find yourself thinking, “what the holy hell is THIS?”, isn’t it?

Sounding like some long lost cry of confusion dredged up from some dark, primordial burrow adjacent to the furthest outpost of the UK’s ‘70s freak-rock underground, the two songs presented here - apparently the work of one Shane Horgan and collaborators - mix croaking, rather disturbing acid casualty vocals with lumbering, ‘Come As You Are’-style chorus pedal bass lines, looming thunder clouds, Simon House-era Hawkwind synths and a lugubrious, proto-doom rhythmic swing, enhanced by atmospheric, echo-drenched Link Wray power chords and patches of frazzled, weirdly melodic guitar heroics.

For my purposes at least, the results sound utterly out of time, and pretty f-ing epic, in a mad kind of way; troubling psychedelic grue from the dark heart of nowhere. I’d throw out an appeal for more of the same, but actually, wouldn’t I prefer it if this thing just remained an uncouth, one-off mystery lurking deep ‘neath the surface of my iTunes? Probably. 

 

From darkest April: “Pure, third-eye blasting maximalist fields of bliss straight out of the American south, conjured forth via a 12 string acoustic, hammered dulcimer and some (fairly minimal) percussion, with nary an amp nor pedal in sight. Swings open those bead curtains into blinding sunlight just like I like this stuff to. Pretty magnificent. Sitting comfortably alongside such aforementioned-in-the-pages acts as Woven Skull, Sarah Louise, Sally Anne Morgan & Kryssi B., Elkhorn etc, there seems to be a fresh strain of rustic-minded, pure psyche brilliance starting to bubble up from the Trump-bedevilled underground which needs to be acknowledged and celebrated. Children of Pelt rejoice!”

Damn, what was I on. Still sounds nice, anyway. 

 

 

For a white-skinned person who lives in Nottingham to style himself as ‘Dusty Bible’ and begin playing ‘the blues’ without also assuming the mantle of being an unbearable tosser, is quite an achievement. For said person to actually end up making some great, resolutely unpretentious, music is little short of a miracle. As the evidence presented on this dredged-up-from-the-archives live album (the first of two of this year’s list taped at Notts’ estimable J.T. Soar) ably proves however, canonisation should be a shoe-in for this particular old boy.

Ably backed up by a pair of blatantly non-Canadian Canadians (including Grey Hairs guitarist / Notts legend Chris Summerlin on bass), Mr Bible clearly draws heavily from the loose, overdriven punkoid swagger of Hound Dog Taylor & The Houserockers (no coincidence perhaps that it was the blog of the aforementioned Mr Summerlin which first hepped me to those guys way back when). By largely eschewing the slide in favour of more straight up, knotty pickin’ however, and by letting his combo’s obvious background in avant/ post-hardcore type rock creep in around the edges, Dusty & co actually end up hitting on a style which sometimes uncannily recalls that of early ‘70s Mancunian thugs Stackwaddy.

As regular readers / mix CD listeners will be aware, there are few higher recommendations than that from my POV, so, even as DB & The Cs (if you will) proceed to cook up a denser, more tangled power trio-type racket across these cuts than the ‘Waddy ever managed to get on tape, complete with a few touches of Groundhogsy spikery and ZZ Top muscle, those looking to enjoy a more contemporary take on the kind of testosterone-fuelled ur-rock carnage they represented, made by men who (one hopes) have never resorted to threatening Black Sabbath roadies with tyre irons or throwing band members out of moving vans, are nonetheless encouraged to take note.

Also - closes out with the best version of Hooker’s ‘Boom Boom’ ever. Best one in my collection anyway, I’ve checked. And that includes about half a dozen by the man himself, so…

 

 

The ‘Welsh Triangle’ UFO flap of the late 1970s, around which the music on this album is based, is of particular interest to me, as I grew up in the area in which these alleged events took place, just a few years after the fact.

Did you know, I even saw a UFO once, when I was a small child? No kidding. I got out of bed super-early one Saturday morning, ran downstairs to watch the cartoons on TV, and there it was - hovering over the farmers’ fields opposite our house like some kind of steel-plated steampunk balloon type thing. Of course, by the time my parents got up a few hours later, it had gone, and they told me to shut up and stop making a fuss, and that was the end of that. But I know I saw it.

Anyway. Be that as it may, the idea of something so utterly outlandish arising from and/or descending into a landscape which, to me at least, seems so prosaic and familiar, is inherently fascinating to me, whilst the geographically specific track titles (‘Stack Rocks Humanoid Display’, ‘Beneath RAF Brawdy’) and samples from contemporary news reports which Nick Scrivin, aka The Night Monitor, filters through his work here, seem especially eerie.

Would Scrivin’s menacing aural question marks of hermetic analogue synth retromancy play quite so potently for a listener unencumbered by such interests and associations? I’d like to think so. This stuff is pretty good! And, whilst the innovation of tying these hauntology-friendly conjurations to paranormal events which took place in the UK during the 1970s may seem like a staggeringly obvious strategy (The Night Monitor’s other extant album concerns “the 1977 Enfield Poltergeist case”), that doesn’t make it any less aesthetically appealing, from my POV at the very least.

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To be continued…

Labels: best of 2020, Casual Nun, Curanderos, Dusty Bible & The Canadians, Eric Arn & Jasmine Pender, Gerycz / Powers / Rolin, Midnight, Mummise Guns, Sly & The Family Drone, The Night Monitor, Wolfen