Dark Room Art

Holden – The Animal Spirits

What a time to be alive!

Musically speaking. Great swathes of musical history lie just behind our little Black Mirrors (is there a more perfect summation of our relationship with technology than the phrase ‘Black Mirror’?… thanks Charlie Brooker). Previously, styles were pegged to moments, and evolution and revolution, inspiration and reaction took their turns gathering acolytes and detractors. But the Black Mirrors have done for that nice neat musical timeline and brought disparate styles within touching distance and enabled previously unthinkable musical bedfellows to spoon and make the beast with two backs at their leisure. It’s a freedom from purity that makes musical stews like Animal Spirits as inevitable as those monkeys with typewriters eventually turning in some Bard. Fantastical technology, older technology, rudimentary technology and the absence of technology repeatedly collide on this album, synthesisers sound like they’re genuinely trying to imitate the random patter of chimes and bells, graceful chord patterns churn in endless loops and wind instruments and wordless incantations bubble around the mix. An Esoteric Albion Rave Mixtape. With added Krautrock and Free Jazz and Aphex Twin and Prog and what can only be described as an Earthy quality (Earth as in grit and ooomska, Earth as in one of the Four Elements). It’s an amazing thing that manages to sound like everything and nothing at once, but it does beg the question:

What time are we alive?

Genres don’t explode out of nowhere very often any more, haven’t, for almost the last two decades, given their times a distinct flavour (compare and contrast with… oh, all the usuals). Do we live in an age of eternal musical re-hash or in an age of ever more imaginative re-combinations of existing styles? It’s not a major challenge - to be poured over by the Boffins for the sake of humankind’s future - But I’m guessing that the (probably already made) ‘Sounds of The Naughties’ is destined for a full blown identity crisis when it does emerge (if it hasn’t already). On the flip side, the overall quality and quantity of new music hasn’t dropped. And in answer to the question, What time are we alive? I’d argue that we might as well concede that Space/Time doesn’t like a straight line, musical or otherwise, that we need to get to grips with the cyclical nature of Things and that we should probably accept that we’re at the point where All The Music is getting thoroughly blended up as it spirals ever closer to the Event Horizon of a Great Musical Black Hole… Who knows what will spill out on the flip side? Maybe we’ve already ejected and The Animal Spirits is an emergent howl… something with distinct traces of Human, but augmented, magick and operating in ALL the dimensions, not just our earth bound ones. What A Time To Be Alive!

Space Witch - Arcanum

Speaking of Space/Time. Did I ever tell you about the time that Hawkwind found themselves at a loose end in the Midlands with nothing but a stash of Mandrax for company? Thought not. Well, they downed the lot and were about halfway through rehearsing Doremi Fasol Latido (during Lord of Light according to Wykypedia) when two things happened. 1) The Lemmons kicked in and 2) Brian Blessed, with little else to do and generally on the faff, stopped by and, infuriated by Dave Brock’s laconic delivery, decided to give some impromptu elocution lessons. The laws of Space/Time couldn’t handle the at odds ripples set off by a heavily sedated Hawkwind rubbing up against a Brian Blessed enraged by poor enunciation. During the first third of a critically lysergic rendition of Time We Left This World Today, the fabric of Space/Time ripped open like soggy kitchen towel and flung the results ‘forward’ into the future, emerging first in 1980 - where Brian briefly took the form of Prince Vultan in a film adaption of Flash Gordon – before shuddering to halt like an ectoplasm blancmange hitting a wall, in 2017. At this point the whole temporal merry-go-round-the-bend took the name Space Witch and spat out a child called Arcanum.

The Cosmic Dead – Psyche is Dead

Did I ever tell you about the time that a consignment of Monster Magnet’s Tab EP (it’s basically an LP) got washed up in Glasgow and Customs & Excise officers became embroiled in a game of Cat & Mouse with a bunch of local stoners who half inched a few cases, ostensibly because tradition states that Tab must be played as a first dance song at a local wedding? No? well… along with that definitely happening, I should probably point out that, unlike the plot of Whiskey Galore (which this story has up until now utterly coincidentally borne a passing resemblence to) the Customs and Excisists actually did round up all the copies prior to said nuptials. But. As it transpires. Not before a few of the ushers had had a listen through and decided that it wasn’t really a brutal enough listening experience and could do with a few less notes. So they dropped all but two notes and proceeded to played a game of musical chicken, whereby the first person to progress from the first note to the second would be… phhhhhhhh… I don’t know… just called a lightweight or something. Unfortunately the three pieces of music they’d prepared did not go down well at the wedding, even though one of them was actually quite beautiful, in the way that maybe Boards of Canada* are beautiful. The assembled Aquarian Noodling Muso Soup loving guests might have been mortified, but the experience was a proper Road to Domestos moment for The Cosmic Dead. They’d seen the truth behind the Haight Asbury tinted spectacles. They had given the newly betrothed Psyche. And it had Died. Psyche Is Dead was born.

*Boards of Canada might be a bit of a leap, but it’s genuinely the first thing that popped into my head when I last listened to the title track, and I can’t be arsed to try and avoid a tenuous comparison: we live in such a plural musical world now, the musical evolutionary tree is way passed the point that it can be pruned and indexed back into £50 man-style shape and order, let’s face it, who’d want to? Embrace the chaos (See The Animal Spirits).

Oh Sees - Orc

See that Orc on the cover of Orc (below), he’s the guy who made this album. They’re spikey, Orcs, both personality wise and physically, and it comes across in the music. Those boney fingers and sharp but fraying nails wring gnarly, scuffed riffs out of guitars stored in damp and dank. They also have a problem regarding attention span and the only way to keep Orcs on track, as is widely known by those in the know, is to employ two drummers to keep pace and hope that they tangle together like creepers vying for the same patch of sky. You can’t be a creature from the realms of Fantasy Fiction and not adopt some of the trappings of a Prog act, and this particular Orc appears to have decided that the two drummer approach is the most appropriate nod to that ouvre; it makes for some frenetic, seat of the cod piece, extended instrumental work outs, brought (presumably) to a close by some form of sacrifice or the booming exhortation of a wizard in the studio control room. There’s definitely a human aspect to an Orc’s voice, so the melodies are recognisable and at times sit about where you’d expect. However, all that time around fires of unknown origin, with just bare branches, mist and the detritus of deep forest for furnishings, has rendered their voices ragged and ever verging on hysteria – liable to take fright (screech) or fight (bellow) at any moment. Imagine trying to sing a lullaby with all those needling teeth. Never going to happen. Lyrically, Orcs have a tendency towards understated reportage of their everyday lives, “Let's witness the whole occasion, Piles of bodies fill the garden, Smash the hedgerow with their plummet, Stop with panic, ugly banquet. Floating in the vile moat yeah, Crack their skulls upon the cobbles, Ringing home their lemming's message, Fill the streets with awful messes.”. They don’t really do braggadocio or anything as flowery as metaphor either, and sometimes just sing to-do lists “Old is warrior drink the poison, I am warrior crush your head in”. They do love smashing heads in and this album makes an excellent accompaniment to said act.

Jarvis Cocker and Chilly Gonzales - Room 29

For this song cycle about the Chateau Marmont Hotel, Hollywood, Jarvis Cocker splits the difference between the kitchen sink magician fronting Pulp and his role as narrator of the nocturnally themed Radio 4 show Wireless Nights. An embarrassment of lyrical riches leap out as he pillow talks the exploits and tumults of famous patrons, ruminates on the way Hollywood is buoyed along by our suspension of disbelief and spills beans that can only sprout from time alone in a hotel room (if you want to read that as a euphemism, then it wouldn’t hurt). He’s part raconteur, part sage, part documentarian delivering filthy one liners the other side of a comma from heartbreaking observations. All the above is underscored by Chilly Gonzales’ minimal piano, occasional strings and the odd sound effect. It’s a perfect musical accompaniment that puts you right there, in the hotel, wandering the lobby, corridors and in and out of the rooms, drinking in the atmosphere and faded glamour, surrounded by ghosts, gossip and fading echoes of the Hollywood dream.

Here Lies Man – s/t

I’m pretty sure that it was Face-of-90s-Golf, Nick Faldo, who first uttered the immortal line ‘It don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing’ (He really had a face for Golf-in-the-90s… God himself must’ve been imagining him prowling the Fairways like a 9 Iron toting lion, when he crafted that face out of his own ManFatTM) and the debut album by Here Lies Man is a strong candidate for the defence of that little aphorism. In this case, the swing is brought by African Clave beats trampling all over some Sabbath style riffage. This kind of explicit fusion can sometimes sound very cut n paste, sometimes at the expense of the magic of the original sources as they’re bent out of shape and squeezed into a mould they were never meant to fit into. HLM avoid that pitfall by allowing the Afrobeats to reign. Structurally, there’s very little by way of verse-chorus arrangement here. Instead the rhythms push the songs between percussive breaks and tone heavy, syncopated, Low Fi riffs with the vocals largely chanted, repeated phrases (honestly, if you read the tracklisting then you’ve got about 80% of the lyrics; “letting go of the human race, sailing to, into outer space” is the closest they get to Leonard Cohen). As a result, the 8 tracks all have a thematic unity but one that offers enough room for variation to keep the album from descending out of the groove and into a furrow.  It’s the use of keys and electronics that bring out beads of sweat though. They’re the last thing you notice, often washes of synth, tingling harmonic flourishes and bubbling organ stabs, but they glue the tracks together and provide borderline subliminal hooks and moments of revelation on repeated listens.

British Sea Power - Let The Dancers Inherit The Party

I couldn’t begin to claim to have listened to even a remotely measurable proportion of the music released over the last twelve months, so this is most likely bollocks, but concision did seem to be a recurring theme of many of the new releases I got round to listening to last year (The relative brevity of Endless Boogie’s Vibe Killer almost resulted in the band changing their name to School-Run Boogie, Kamasi Washington went from 2015’s triple album The Epic to half hour mini album Truth, Destroyer released an album simply titled Ken wherein 7 of 12 tracks came in at under 4 minutes… I could go on, but am a man of my time and my brutally diminished attention span won’t stand for it). I’m going to venture that perhaps a collective, subconscious realisation dawned in 2017 that we really don’t have time to fuck about with exploratory musings via the medium of theremin solos. Attention to detail, actually listening (let alone repeated listening) have not been hallmarks of this age. Maybe some actual tunes needed banging out, just to be sure that a flicker of humanity pulsed its way out into the universe, before one of the myriad nutters we’ve given distracted, denial ridden bunk ups to, finally locates the big red button that his staff have been desperately trying to distract him from. BSP certainly gave a lot of bang for buck on Let The Dancers Inherit The Party. Hooks were veritably ladeled in, exploratory urges were reigned in and yet none of the idiosyncratic and eccentric ticks and whistles that make BSP so special got lost. See Keep on Trying (Sechs Freunde), which, apart from opening with the fantastic couplet “If you must act like a beast of the field, oh what does it yield?”, has Yan Wilkinson yelping the ‘Sechs Freunde!!’ part of the title in a manner worthy of double exclamation marks and moist with euphemistic glee (he basically makes Sechs sound like sex… cad). See also International Space Station; a paeon to the titular escapee from our there-but-for-a-hair-trigger planet. Also. Fans of classic British Understatement… Tired of saying “This. Is. Typical” through gritted teeth? Try Saint Jerome’s opening gambit ‘Oh it’s strange the way that things work out, running out of matches and the fire keeps going out’, it’s wordier, but provides up to 64% of disappointing scenarios with a soupcon of tragic poetry/poetic tragedy. Delicious.

White Hills – Stop Mute Defeat

Another band positively not fucking about these days are White Hills. The ecstatic guitar pyrotechnics and eye on the horizon kosmiche workouts of the past may have been largely purged for the time being, and yet, in spirit, the album from their back catalogue that this most reminds me of is the one where they gave fullest vent to the afore mentioned inner/outer space explorations; their Dystopian Sci Fi epic H-p1. Thematically, H-p1 confronted greed and our societal dissonance, on Stop Mute Defeat Ego Sensation and Dave W sound a call to arms for those left standing as we reach what must surely (hopefully?!) be a nadir. Musically it comes over like H-p1 triple distilled and reduced down to base elements. That album was a largely instrumental workout. In 2017, a skeletal, industrial vibe pervades and although the tracks are shorter and punchier the vocals to music ratio probably isn’t that different, infrequent vocals punctuate the tracks like slogans racing across LED billboards. If H-p1 was their Abstract Expressionist masterpiece then Stop Mute Defeat is the Brutalist monument. Sounds depressing? Not really, the title track is something of a techno banger.

Pontiak - Dialectic of Ignorance

If you’ve ever found yourself thinking ‘I want to listen to something that sounds monomaniacally baked’, then Pontiak’s latest is probably the go to. You could be thinking ‘baked’ as in the bifter soused sense of the word or baked as in dry, it doesn’t matter, it covers both those bases… offering up tunes akin to visions brought on by a combination of dehydration and lens flare at sunset after a day chasing heat haze with your head in an oven and only Mary Berry for company. The sounds and performances are chitin hard, like a particularly determined scarab marching against the sun, through the sand, while listening to Pink Floyd’s ‘Welcome to the Machine’ on repeat. Returning to the baked metaphor, it’s certainly not an overcooked album, there’s space everywhere and I doff my cap to this sense of restraint, the drums often consist of little more than the simplest patterns over which guitar, bass and synth lines take turns at wringing the life out of subtly unpredictable riffs.

Electric Wizard - Wizard Bloody Wizard

Of all the Lovecraft-ian feats that Electric Wizard have managed to pull off over the course of their long and subtly varied existence, perhaps the most satisfying, for me, has been their ability to sound like an inhuman approximation of Doom; The band themselves (Eldritch/Antipodean) imposters masquerading as humans in the vein of characters from The Shadow Over Innsmouth or The Strange Case of Charles Dexter Ward (if you want to go lower brow, imagine the Alien Cockroach in Men In Black who crams himself into the skin of that farmer, fronting a band). It’s an impression I get most strongly when listening to ‘Black Masses’ and ‘Let Us Prey’, but it could be applied to much of their output; their mixes in particular don’t conform to doom metal’s bludgeoning but crisp, stentorian but actually kind of conservative standards. The Wizeeeeerd consistently left instruments unsettlingly out of focus, FX broiling in a mire of fug so dense that your brain and outstretched devil horn salute gave up trying to settle into a comfortable 1-2 and just submitted to the Cosmic Horror.  With Wizard Bloody Wizard though, they’ve stripped away the elemental hideousness that have up till now left them unseeable, like the Horror bestriding Dunwich, left mics and amps together unchaperoned to let nature take its course and gone to town with the bass runs and some bouncing, rolling tempos… and it suits them… really suits them. They sound energised and souped up. At times (Necromania) they come across like Uncle Acid’s actual Uncle - he’s thicker set, looks at you with sunken, you weren’t there man eyes and definitely ran with a Bike gang who may or may not have (definitely did) perform satanic rites – and the results are actually (whisper it) catchy. But then I’ve thought that there was a great pop writer lurking in Jus Osborn ever since I spent more months than I care to remember humming Vinum Sabbathi to the point of Randolph Carter like distraction. Overall, this is the most human that E Wiz have ever sounded – there’s overt blues underpinning See You In Hell, a veritable romp in the form of the Witchfinder-General-covering-Hendrix’s-Manic-Depression stylings of When The Siren’s Scream and there’s an actual laugh at the end of The Reaper. Admittedly, the track’s called The Reaper and it’s a laugh that’s more Christopher Lee than Jimmy Carr, but it’s definitely a bona fide Human laugh.

Uncle Acid and The Deadbeats – Vol. 1

First things first. This album is more or less proto everything. It’s the borderline unreleased debut by a proto Uncle Acid and the Deadbeats, actually dating from 2010 but only officially released in 2017. Secondly, It’s a proto-metal feast, a mud wrestling Blue Oyster Cult before the Pearlman got put before Swine, Masters of Reality style chuggers morphing into King of The Rumbling Spires rumpuses, a whiff of the Kinks at their speaker slashing-est, Crazy Horse getting stuck in a toy box with Alice Cooper, eyeing each other suspiciously but deciding to make a go of it for the sake of John’s Children. Thirdly, it sounds like a prototype of an audio recording to be honest, I wouldn’t be surprised if it turned out that the drums were recorded using a pencil mike plugged straight into a cassette recorder. However, you couldn’t expect/wouldn’t really want it any other way. Uncle Acid is founded on tape worn thin and the impossibly red blood of no budget Amicus productions. Perhaps the moment that best sums up Uncle Acid’s determination to prevent considerations of taste, decency or proficient sound engineering from pissing on the bonfire of escapism is the fact that during Witches Garden they use a gong (3:24 in the link to be precise). A fucking GONG. The instrument drummers plump for when success has become inversely proportional to self awareness, usually around the same time they start thinking that going swimming with a limo is a reasonable way to fill days off. This album first emerged as a run of 30 CD-Rs. And they/he put a gong on it. And the gong sounds like it was recorded about 4 miles away. But it’s a fucking GONG. Inspired.

These aren’t in any particular order. I have, and continue to, love them all. If I’d have listened to the Mammoth Weed Wizard Bastard album more often I reckon that would’ve got in too. Unfortunately I do a lot of listening to music in the car, and I’m perpetually late for work, and it’s impossible to drive at anything approaching the speed limit when you’re listening to an album by a band called Mammoth Weed Wizard Bastard.

Underworld - Barbara, Barbara We Face A Shining Future

Oh Underworld you've soundtracked many significant moments in my life from the 90s onwards, and as we both get older you keep reminding me that youth and fire in the belly aren't the only ingredients necessary for making vital music. Underworld have blown me away again with an album which finds them at their most intimate yet transcendent. To my mind that's the perfect balance to pitch on an album that takes its name from some of a husband's final words to his wife.

The lyrics to Low Burn ('Time, The first time, Blush, Be bold, Be beautiful, Free, Totally, Unlimited') could, in the wrong hands, all too easily find their way onto a platitudinous meme but they sound vital in the context of the tune, a cresting wave of synths, strings, bass throb and eventually Hounds of Love toms. The perspective shifts on the penultimate line to include, "Panic, craving, nothing... Time, the first time..." and it transforms the vocal from a call for the Living to one that seems to encompass life and death's full cycle. Played back to back with Nylon Strung, whose refrain 'I want to hold you, laughing' assumes a mantra like quality, the two tracks feel like a compellingly heartfelt plea to embrace utterly the short moments we have.

David Bowie - Blackstar

We will never see his like again. To some extent that’s probably true, but that’s because Rock n roll is now nearing the point of anachronism; it's passing is inevitable but not something to mourn. We can't be forever young and full of piss and vinegar and I think if you're determined to be 18 till you die you've set your sights pretty low. I actually hope that the future of expressive culture lies not solely in the hands of men and women on raised stages preaching to the masses but in increasingly indivisible hands and minds brought together and operating in the spaces where the real and virtual world blur. I hope it's a place where individuals come second to the product of expression. In short, I hope there isn't another David Bowie. I love the guy (as much as it's possible to love someone you've never met), but I hope that before too long we no longer require these figureheads to align ourselves with or against. I want his work to survive and be celebrated but I hope that the culture he sprung from baffles my descendants, because there's something rotten about our obsession with the shock of the new that is the third quarter of the 20th Century.

Jez: Look, Mark, I'm a musician, in case you've forgotten. I answer to a higher law, the law of "If it feels good, do it."

Mark: Oh, that's a great law, isn't it? What's that, Gaddafi's law?

Jez: It's the musician's law. Colonel Gaddafi could not lay down a bass hook, Mark. That should be clear even to you. - Peep Show (series 3 ep 5)

It was the shock of the new, not a Solomonesque cultural cache. And now the world is moving on. Not diminishing in talent over time as we speed further away from the grand ejaculation of the Big Rock n Roll Bang. Music hasn’t descended into an over reliance on auto tune, or computers. There isn’t a dearth of ‘real’ musicians learning ‘real’ instruments, learning their song ‘craft’… ‘organically’. The world is moving on. But still we get to listen to the fucking bullshit put about by old people convinced that the brief period when you’re most emotionally engaged in the cultural stimuli around you happens to be the apex of civilisation; and you should never underestimate a Baby Boomer’s ability to slip a pair of rose tinted blinkers over your eyes when you’re moving into the crawl space they’ve rented out to you from their burgeoning property portfolios (Hippies and Yuppies – only really distinguishable by the proportion of their income spent on joss sticks).

But back to Bowie. Guilty of none of the above. His capacity for re-invention and forward thinking doesn’t need re-iterating, the back catalogue up to and including Blackstar speaks for itself. This has turned into a rant but, sod it, I'm not in the mood for not ranting.

Here's to Mr Bowie, perhaps the ultimate rebuttal to those who cite ‘honesty’ or ‘realness’ or ‘rocknroooooll’ as fundamental to making ‘organic’, ‘real’ music and writing ‘proper’ songs. Who used artifice, and sounds regardless of source, was fearless and transcended rock n roll and took it higher than it deserves, subverted and utterly disregarded hoary, chin stroking… fuck it… boring… notions of what a song/album/concert could/should be.

And he left us with Blackstar. All of the above.

The Comet is Coming - Channel The Spirits

It's quite hard to believe that this is the sound of just sax, synths and drums (or ‘skins’, if I'm trying to be vaguely alliterative) recorded (to tape no less) in a three day burst of creativity. The sound, all pervading atmosphere and ethos at large here is worthy of the entire Arkestra, amped up and channelled through Funkadelic via Leftfield at their most furious. If they've heard Channel The Spirits, then I imagine that the house band at the Restaurant At The End Of The Universe are probably worried about losing their residency. Sub point: Slam Dunk In A Blackhole (which wouldn't sound out of place on either Blackstar or Kendrick Lamar's To Pimp A Butterfly) is my song title of the year.

Savages - Adore Life

Opening with the three chord grind of The Answer, Adore Life positively pulses and howls (the guitars sound feral) before dissolving into more cerebral territory for the title track. Jehnny Beth's lyrics run the gamut of love, turning the subject inside out fearlessly, never breaking eye contact. It's an intense, beautifully paced piece of work, packaged in monochrome but red blooded through and through.

David Holmes – Late Night Tales

I was introduced to Mr Holmes via one of those late 90s Chillout compilations. The culprit, 'Rodney Yates' is a journey borne on floating ride cymbal and strings a la Lalo Schriffin, which led me to its mother album 'Let's Get Killed'. Over the subsequent years, I've lapped up pretty much everything he's done, be it soundtracks (Out of Sight springs to mind), Psychedelic Funk mix albums (Come Get it I Got It), freaky Hip Hop (The Free Association) and this year, Late Night Tales and Unloved (more of the latter in a bit).

If there's a unifying thread to Mr Holmes' work, to these ears, it's the sense that he's a man outside of time. His work is peppered with samples and ideas from pretty much every decade since it became possible to capture and replicate sound. But this is not the back catalogue of a retro mongering throwback, it's a body of work that speaks of a genuine love of sound and an overarching desire to share it. I have no idea how much of his own music is created from samples and how much is original composition... the lines are utterly blurred and it makes for compelling listening.

In these interconnected times, the Internet, behaving like it's second syllable, drags the endless bounty of musical creativity onwards with ever decreasing regard for chronology and Holmes has a rare talent for sifting through the haul for treasures. If you're on the search for new artists then Mr Holmes beats Spotify or any app you could imagine hands down. He's arguably never been better than on Late Night Tales. It's a beautiful, torchlit collection made all the more striking by the fact that it's largely beatless and full of acoustic and vocal performances thematically linked to questions of love and loss. A truly mesmerising experience.

Church of The Cosmic Skull – Is Satan Real?

I've spent the last few years resolutely trying to engage with modern sounds after years in a proto metal, Sabbath indebted cul de sac (not a bad place to be admittedly, but it's good to shake things up every so often). This year however, I've found myself slipping back into my comfort zone, maybe as a way of escaping the hideousness of 2016, maybe because albums like Is Satan Real? are so fucking tasty. It combines the vocal, harmonic... There's no other way of saying this... pomp of Queen, hooks and almost jazzy flourishes that The Zombies would've actually stayed split up over and a deliciously sparse smattering of Sabbathian crunch. The fact that they only properly let rip on the closing 'Evil In Your Eye' is a masterstroke that has had me reaching for the repeat button, repeatedly.

Metronomy - Summer '08

Joe Mount is not cool, he’s no rock star and he doesn’t swagger, but the music he makes does, albeit in a slightly jerky, twitchy St Vitus on espresso way. When I was small I used to make myself spaceships out of bits of furniture, and go on adventures of the imagination… Listening to Metronomy has always felt a little like being invited into someone else's world of 'let's pretend'. One where the lightsabers are still visibly made from mismatched lego bricks and the Darth Vader helmet is quite obviously a plastic policeman's helmet with a flap of cardboard inexpertly sellotaped around the back. They aren’t smooth. They're not making music for parties in and around Jacuzzis and JD shaped swimming pools, but 40 minutes in the company of this collection of off kilter electro funk, break and disco beats and aching slow jams might allow you to pretend that you are. And, once again, the artifice is far more stimulating and appealing than reality.

Opeth - Sorceress

Opeth. Opeth. Opeth. I just bloody love them. That's a shit review, but it's basically how I feel. I guess that how you feel about Opeth depends on your views on progressive music. If you think it's wanky and unnecessary then you'd be forgiven for avoiding Opeth but I'd argue that you're mistaken, because there are very few elements included in an Opeth number that could be considered unnecessarily wanky. Dramatic shifts in tempo and volume and time signature abound on this, as all, their albums. The key to their success though, is that they're artfully and meticulously placed with an almost architectural eye for detail that seems set on firing the imagination, rather than bludgeoning the listener with its own cleverness. In the truest sense of the word Sorceress is a wonderful addition to an enviable back catalogue.

Hedvig Mollestad Trio – Black Stabat Mater

 I don't really know much about these ladies. I'm not sure whether to describe it as Jazzy proto metal or proto metallic jazz... maybe the latter. But it is fierce. Really fierce. The five tracks slowly descend from a (relatively) straight forward opening freak out on a jazzy, turning bluesy groove, to nightmarish feedback and clatter that could be mistaken for King Crimson being dissolved in a rusted cauldron of battery acid stirred by Trolls. Also: One of my favourite album covers in a long time.

Paul Simon - Stranger To Stranger

Received wisdom has it that 74 year olds should just rest on the canon, firing blanks, cashing in on the willingness of Mojo readers to part with their coin for ever more padded out and barrel scraping reissues. Paul Simon seems to think that the best way to get through one's three score and tens is to build an album from the beats up and then bring in a designer and player of micro tonal instruments to add layer upon layer of otherwordly sound. I like Paul Simon. A lot.

Unloved - Guilty of Love

A collaboration between Jade Vincent, Keefus Ciancia and David Holmes (him again). As with Late Night Tales, Unloved is a creature of the night, but this time with teeth, paraffin eyes and a taste for smoke in the back of the throat. Guitars twang, drums can be heard reverberating up blackened alleyways and the astonishing voice of Jade Vincent entices, admonishes, damns and defies. When A Woman is Around should be considered a classic, 'Truth is seldom found (by a man) when a woman is around... Lose that Cheshire grin, take it like a man, keep what's yours, leave me mine.' Although there's a dark 60s vibe at work here, it's beautifully realised, with the faultless songwriting, performance and production giving it an elusive timelessness.

Nissenenmondai - N/A

This album is a perfect example of singular and fearless exploration.

They're a power trio, but that's where the similarities to that particular trope end.

They veer closest to making minimalist Techno, but with guitar, bass and drums.

They sound like they're being beamed in from the future, and not necessarily a good one.

Some of the album is hard to listen to and imagine it having been created by humans.

That's why I love it.

Below, in no order, are 10 albums that over the last 12 months have provided me with solace, joy and a reason to blither at someone, at some point, about something which they’re probably not interested in.

UFOmammut - Ecate Or Mammoth UFO, which fairly aptly sums up their sound, if the sound of a mammoth UFO is that of cosmic horror made BASS grinding very slowly through your organs like a hand drill powered by the screams of the damned.

Pond -Man it feels like space again Pond make that modern, everything-and-the-kitchen-sink-until-it-sounds-psychedelic racket that manages to sound both cheap and sumptuous simultaneously. On Holding Out For You they lift the chords from November Rain. What’s that guitar computer game? ‘Pretend Guitar Twat’… it sounds like November Rain done on Pretend Guitar Twat, if it used the sound card from a Sega Megadrive. The result is actually rather affecting and, like the afore mentioned Guns N Roses song, fucking hilarious. And therein lies the joy of Pond, they won’t change the world, but they make a great soundtrack to its absurdity.

Marilyn Manson - The Pale Emperor A primal, unhinged scream, the sort that can only come from someone in love with music again, made me buy this album. Said howl comes towards the end of Deep Six, a stomper amidst an album that oozes swampy, blues inflected back payments on a deal with the devil. It’s not without humour either ‘You wanna know what Zeus said to Narcissus? “You better watch yourself”.’ I might tan a little easily to be considered seriously a goth, but I bloody loved Marilyn Manson from Antichrist Superstar through to Holywood and have badly wanted to like an album by this man for so long. I honestly think this is the best thing he’s done since Mechanical Animals, which makes me scream, joyful, primal and unhingedly.

Föllakzoid - iii It has four songs on it and probably four riffs. If you don’t like repetition, then don’t bother with this. If you find that repetitive music slowly unravels your perception of time and allows you to escape the reality of dull commutes, then snap this up and immerse yourself in an alternate universe where South American Stoner guitar vibes are filed under a genre called Evil House Music.

Noel Gallagher – Chasing Yesterday I didn’t want to like this album, Britpop nostalgia has done for my goat, got it all dressed up in a parka and lolloping around bellowing ‘ya-ariiiight, Liam, Jaaaaarvis, fooking… Bleeer, ‘ave it’. Like a twat, to whom the last 20 years haven’t happened. But I was intrigued enough by The Right Stuff to buy this album, then subsequently get a taste for it and not listen to anything else for about a month. It’s just so damn listenable, full of ear worm lyrics and melodies and instrumental flourishes where he pushes that sound just far enough to freshen it up. As punishment for owning and enjoying an album so uncool I have been self-flagellating nightly, using a rolled up copy of Amorphous Androgynous’ Alice In Ultraland with shards of vinyl sellotaped to it.

Destroyer – Poison Season Most of the time I haven’t the faintest idea what Dan Bejar is singing about, but his lyrics never fail to garner a reaction, whether it be laughter or weeping. Musically, Poison Season is devastatingly lush, lavish and warm, reminiscent (to these ears) of George Harrison in the Phil Spector years, with a sprinkling of the bits of Elton John that no one in their right mind could deny are great. It’s like spending an evening in a posh hotel bar, playing poker with a notorious raconteur; you’re not sure how it will end and there’s a chance you’ll come away richer, but at the very least you’ll have some excellent stories to tell.

White Hills – Walks for Motorists Space Rock? Dirty word, if you think that Space Rock is made by floaty, tokey, hippies. Not so dirty once you accept that arguably its prime exponents, Hawkwind, out punked all the punks, all the while making far more violent, interesting music. White Hills have followed a similarly uncompromising trajectory through both outer and inner space, sucking in the influences and spitting them out, re-formed and warped as required. This time round they sound relatively tightly coiled, focussed more on the grooves than the freak outs. The results are a gnarly, electro spattered set, punctuated by corrosive guitar outbursts. Space is the place.

Mbongwana Star – From Kinshasa Take 7 Congolese musicians, add a French DJ, and get something that sounds simultaneously earthly and utterly unworldly. It’s heavy on the percussion, but there’s not really much point trying to delineate between the various elements at play here. The intertwining of melody and rhythm into a febrile, propulsive, heady stew is where the magic lies on this album and magic is best left undeciphered.

Nina Kraviz - DJ Kicks I love a mix album, 1) because it’s a gateway to new artists, 2) because an unbroken hour or so of music is a great way to immerse yourself without interruption by pesky between track silences and choruses that pop up every 30 seconds to remind you to honk out a few single syllable words, like some kind of needy children’s party entertainer. This is a distinctly nocturnal mix, creeping out of the speakers, all hushed voices and between sleep and wake beats. What I especially like about it is that it doesn’t rush between peaks and troughs, just coaxes you away from the shore on an ever receding tide.

Brian Ellis Group – Escondido Sessions Fusion is another dirty word. So much wanking for so little enjoyment. But when it’s done right… The four tracks on this album all have a relentless forward motion, it’s a masterclass in ensemble playing and locked-in grooves, some of which wouldn’t be out of place on a Ninja Tunes compilation. Over this, keyboards, saxophone and guitar dance like agitated jazz bastard night time insects.

'Wind Farmer'