Quietus Albums Of The Year 2022 (In Association With Norman Records) | Page 5 of 5 | The Quietus (2024)

Back Home is the sound of a band trying to expand their songwriting beyond the established punk rock austerity, touching on more universal themes such as maintaining relationships under capitalism (‘In My Arms’), breaking out of harmful patterns (the Pixies-indebted ‘Taut’), the housing crisis (the rootsy ‘I Will’) and hurtful interactions (the baroque ‘Your Words’). Throughout the record’s 13 songs, Big Joanie leave no stone unturned, sifting through fresh backdrops in which their ethos resonates. And for the large part, they brandish vision and resourcefulness aplenty in this all-embracing quest. If previous record Sistahs lit a beacon, this latest album draws a roadmap – for both the band themselves and kindred spirits who have also been displaced. Indeed, it’s a thrill to find out how Big Joanie will tread it.

Jasper Willems

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Real Lies’ second album, Lad Ash, is definitely a London record (probably the only one this year to reference Patrick Hamilton’s 20,000 Streets Under The Sky trilogy of the mid-1930s and the controversial Woodberry Down development), with all the euphoria and melancholy that the city brings, the lyrics often speaking of a city where the quest for the party increasingly has to keep a step ahead of rapacious landlords and moaning neighbours. Part of what makes it such a great album is how the the sound of the record might most immediately suggest Burial or The Streets, but the feel of it is closer to Suede’s masterpiece, Dog Man Star. Like that album, Lad Ash is a homage to the “love and poison of London.”

Luke Turner

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If Suede’s last album, The Blue Hour, was the final part of a trilogy where Suede defined ‘Suedeworld’, then this latest record sees them standing firmly in it, facing defiantly outwards. The album has everything you expect from Suede: Brett Anderson’s astonishing voice, those pulsing baselines, the violins, the rangy impossible guitars, and the powerful drums. But it’s also a more mainstream record than they have made in years. Without losing what is wonderfully difficult about their music, they are bringing us what they are best at and offering something for people new to the band. There is less of the lexicon we have come to associate with Anderson’s writing. There is petrol but there are no pylons. The messages in the eleven songs on this record are direct and confronting, almost aggressive.

Amah-Rose Abrams

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Comradely Objects is, in Horse Lords’ telling, a more studio-assembled record than late-2020 predecessor The Common Task, but the result is less ‘digital’ in sound. The one standout moment for anyone invested in tracking their relationship to club music (especially after TCT), comes with the intro to ‘Mess Mend’, where a joyous Korg melody of an early-’90s piano house ilk plays itself out before rapidly mutating into something more bluegrass-adjacent – a guitar, tuned by Owen Gardner to sound remarkably like an electrified banjo and locking into a tense, dense trance as Max Eilbacher folds in acidic electronic hiccups. Horse Lords’ interest in “rural American guitar and banjo styles” (Gardner’s words when I interviewed the band five years ago) is a matter of record, but this deployment of them is a fine new horizon.

Noel Gardner

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Much of Claire Rousay’s practice is about appreciating the small moments in life that can be easy to take for granted – your late-night laughs with friends, your daily walk along the river. Everything Perfect Is Already Here again shines a light on how to begin to be more grateful for those routines, especially on the album’s title track, which broadly explores the topic of love. Here, floating strings, stilted scratches and mumbles unite and disintegrate like the waves of action in everyday life. As mumbles become phrases, certain words pop out more than others, like the phrase “she’s perfect,” creating small snapshots of what it means to love and be loved. In music, Rousay wants to show us how something as powerful as love is simple at its core.

Vanessa Ague

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On INNIT, ​​SCUDFM bring the right kind of catchy punk energy, their urgency jolting us awake from a collective brain fog in a moment of re-engaging in community life with newfound resilience. Most importantly, as a wider initiative, they’re posing the right questions by challenging the cultural impasse with a pointedly iconoclastic attitude, avoiding the easy targets like some far-right boogeyman of the mainstream left and dealing with more nuanced internal problematics instead. It may not be reinventing the wheel in sonic terms, but every track is deeply felt and lived, fresh and fun in spite of life turning consistently sour on you and blessed with a strangely moving narrative voice, unpacking amusem*nt from the darkest corners.

Danijela Bočev

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While companion EP Was It Ever Real? is minimal and deep house-inspired, double album Is It Going To Get Deeper Than This? is organic and expansive. It looks further back to disco, using a huge cast of voices and instruments to help capture more personal reflections of the dance music community and experiences of catharsis. Mark Lightcap’s funky electric guitar holds the groove down on ‘Deeper’, as saxophone, flute and bright string flourishes come in and out of focus. It especially reminds me of ‘Eye On The Wall’ by Perfume Genius – another recent queer exploration of dance music that morphs from slender and spritely to stretched and formless.

Skye Butchard

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Flowers Rot, Bring Me Stones brings to mind the hidden qualities of the pillar stones (or gallauns) that litter Ireland. Though unassuming to the inexperienced eye, they are wreathed in lore, poetry, meaning, and, more literally, might stretch twenty feet below despite being only three feet above ground. Upon first listening to, say, ‘The Sea’ or ‘Bring Me Stones’, it’s tempting to ask – as you might if stumbling upon a gallaun – “is that it?” But listen deeper. The lyric “waiting to be found” on ‘Bog Bodies’ is a perfect descriptor for the way these songs just squat there, lying in pieces like dead wood on a beach, or indeed a cadaver underneath a marsh. You might realise halfway through a song that there’s a backdrop of humming, overtones, or unidentified found sounds. You are drawn further in with each recitation of a vocal refrain. Moods, loops and mantras start to spiral and twist like a barber pole, or that concentric carving featured on the album’s sleeve. It’s all heady, enveloping, brown acid stuff.

Will Ainsley

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To catch a glimpse of the sheer spectrum of Širom’s sound, imagine a set that includes the mizmar, balafon, rebab, guembri, banjos, hurdy-gurdy, tampura brač, lyre and ocarina, among other instruments. The Liquified Throne Of Simplicity, their magnum-opus, is a double release where each song barely fits on one side of vinyl. The group draw inspiration from the raw bass and trance of Natural Information Society, stretching the narrative from meditative and soothing to a growing wall of sound in ‘Grazes, Wrinkles, Drifts Into Sleep’. In turn, ‘Prods The Fire With A Bone, Rolls Over With A Snake’ begins with a repetitive motif on the banjo, complemented by Ana Karanja’s vocals through a stunning crescendo, where violins and choral singing combine into stereophonic polyphony on percussion. This ingenious balancing act is a fantastic counterpoint to the trance landscapes of the Slovenian trio.

Jakub Knera

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The inspiration for Shebang came when Oren Ambarchi first heard guitarist Julia Reidy perform on a twelve-string acoustic guitar in Melbourne. As he listened to her looping, plucked melodies, he began to imagine other parts around it, like a ride cymbal; the two would later meet up and record a clip together that would be forgotten about for a while. On Shebang, her playing appears in shimmers, surrounded by ticking percussion, upbeat piano and a swath of other sounds that Ambarchi spliced together from each collaborator. The album wasn’t made with each person in the same room – instead, each artist recorded something in their own voice and Ambarchi connected the dots. There’s something enticing about the ways the album offers each artist their own space yet still maintains cohesiveness, finding the connections between each line to form a quilt made of each artist’s individuality.

Both Ambarchi’s 2022 albums, Shebang and Ghosted, are marked by careful pace and precision. Musically, both of these albums exemplify the richness of letting one, simple melody branch out, seeing how repetition and layering can subtly, even imperceptibly, alter the trajectory of a phrase. On Shebang, these shifts come through in radiant waves. The feeling of the album is often optimistic – flickering, vibrant hues emanate from the ever-growing patterns that Ambarchi and his collaborators establish together. At times, its exuberance feels like a celebration, but it never gets too loud or boisterous. Instead, Ambarchi draws from the power of potential energy, letting sound build and churn in quietude, never quite rupturing.

Vanessa Ague

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On 6°30’33.372″N 3°22’0.66″E, Emeka Ogboh’s second album, the Nigerian sound artist zooms in on Lagos’ bustling Ojuelegba bus station and its surroundings, having previously focused on the city’s wider soundscape on his also outstanding 2021 debut Beyond The Yellow Haze. Billed as an ode to the bus station and the chaotic transport system that exists around Lagos’ iconic yellow Danfo buses, this latest album is built around field recordings captured by Ogboh a number of years ago at Ojuelegba. Those recordings include words from the conductors and drivers of the buses, reeling off descriptions of bus stops, information about the area’s history, intimate details about their day-to-day lives, and mentions of the nearby red light district of Ayilara, besides lots more, all in Nigerian Pidgin.

As with Beyond The Yellow Haze, Ogboh pairs those recordings – of frenzied traffic jams and personal conversations – with deeply hypnotic rhythms (‘Verbal Drift’, ‘Ayilara’) and chugging techno beats (‘No Counterfeit’) that, vitally, afford his other sounds significant space to breathe. Beautifully capturing the disorder that can come with navigating Lagos’ hectic streets on public transport via fittingly noisy recordings of just that, there’s a paradoxically soothing quality to the way that Ogboh weaves together all of his source material and the dub-indebted percussion that runs through the record.

Christian Eede

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The Ephemeron Loop is the latest project born from the mesmeric inner-world of Vymethoxy Redspiders, better known as Urocerus Gigas from Leeds-based xenofeminist rock duo Guttersnipe. Born in Bangor, North Wales, Redspiders has been based in Leeds since 2013, where she has established herself as an underground powerhouse. Debut release Psychonautic Escapism is a “synaesthetic acid bath that cracks open the doors of perception,” tracing Redspiders’ break through her pre-transition life of black metal into a new life of shoegaze music, psychedelic drugs and raves in the Leeds queer underground scene.

Redspiders’ realities of autism, ADHD and trans identity shapeshift through languid flashes of dream pop ambience, doom and hardgrind. Guitars, drums and vocals interlace, darting between hyper-speed death metal, psychedelic dub and breakcore in this stunning solo release. Psychonautic Escapism, an album full of continual sonic and poetic transformation, took 14 years to make. Redspiders describes The Ephemeron Loop as coming into existence at a crucial juncture in the formation of her identity, including "my becoming as a trans woman, my understanding of neurodivergence, and my experimentation with mind-altering substances."

Mariam Rezaei

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“Done with the black and the white, the wrong and the right,” raps Kendrick Lamar on the stunning opener to his long-awaited fifth album, Mr. Morale & The Big Steppers, ‘United In Grief’. It sums up the record’s philosophy, an embrace of the chaos of the inbetween, the war between ego and vulnerability, human nature as contradictory thoughts and opposing urges; Lamar’s refusal to buy into simplistic binary thinking and to embrace the messy multiplicity of human experience instead. It’s a record that offers no easy conclusions and is all the better for it.

The crown of thorns that he has worn in promotional imagery, the album’s cover, and indeed his generational Glastonbury headline set, might be interpreted as a sign of the megastar messiah complex trope, but as he revealed onstage at Worthy Farm, "I wear this crown as a representation, so you never forget one of the greatest prophets that ever walked this earth. They judge you, they judge Christ." If Mr. Morale does have a message, it’s one that Lamar allows a higher power to provide. As he raps on ‘Worldwide Steppers’, in the time between this album and his last one, DAMN., he had "writer’s block for two years, nothin’ moved me / Asked God to speak through me, that’s what you hear now."

Patrick Clarke

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Everything Was Forever marks Sea Power’s first work with Graham Sutton as producer in over a decade, and it shows. The band are always in fulsome praise of the Bark Psychosis man’s ability to conjure out their best work and, as a listener, it’s clear he has an uncanny knack of trimming the fat that prevented the albums since Do You Like Rock Music?, decent though they were, from reaching their full potential. He and the band have worked wonders on a record shared between fire-cracking anthems and reflective moments, a refining of the established Sea Power palette. Abi Fry, Phil Sumner and drummer Woody lift the record not just through their by now trademark augmentation in brass, viola and sturdy rhythms, but the delicacy with which tracks slip in and out of view.

Though it’s not one of the most obvious songs on the album, ‘Lakeland Echo’ is the key that unlocks it. It starts with just a quiet vocal from Hamilton, seemingly echoing the voices of his late parents: "Turn the tape on / That’s a grand track / That’s a good one." It builds and builds to hover in a beautifully poised moment, emotion that is no less tender for its restraint. The song becomes even more poignant when you watch the video that features footage of the Yan and Hamilton’s late parents intercut with shots of the area the family grew up in. At the end, their old man disappears into the distance over a rise in the road, raising his arms in triumph, as if in celebration of his sons. It’s incredibly touching. To think upon loss, to look to the past, to venerate our forebears, does not have to be nostalgia as the reductive, negative energy that holds so many (by ‘so many’ I mean ‘our nation’) back, but as reflective, emancipatory and, curiously, realistic. "It’s not for everyone," Hamilton sings, perhaps again channelling Ronald’s views on Sea Power’s music. That’s at the crux of things for me – "it’s not for everyone" doesn’t have to be an admission of failure, but a comfort that some precious things are going to be beloved by a devoted few.

Luke Turner

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Decius Vol. I is the album I wish I had to hand back when I was – let’s not sugarcoat this, my mum doesn’t read The Quietus – a tramp. The now long-lost era where I’d put the cheery responsible day-job me aside for a few hours to traipse to a dingy club across town where whoever you were – solicitors, truckers, civil servants, John Lewis members – was democratised by what you were wearing, where the zips were and what you wanted to do in it. Where a hoof of amyl allowed access and excess in pissy cubicles or bent over an oil barrel, and the sort of badly lit backrooms when London was the envy of Berlin with secretive places that are now consigned to history in favour of supermarkets, flats or f*cking climbing centres.

That’s not to say it’s a gay or straight or even just a sex album. That’s just me. Maybe that’s you too. To say that this would sound ideal while taking a fist might make you cough on your sourdough. It also works on a swift commute, putting a kink in your step as you head home from the station. The purpose of art is to reflect something back that you recognise in it, is it not? Well, Decius Vol. I makes me feel like that. That it sounds perfect in dank basem*nts, large inhuman cavernous cathedrals of dance, or some sh*tty £5 headphones proves it works. Vol. I is for both the big rooms and the dark rooms.

Ian Wade

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Richard Dawson allows a world to grow on The Ruby Cord, full of dissimilar things, anachronisms essentially, where robots exist next to pseudo-medieval figures. It’s more than that though. The singular idea of a world itself is in question. The gripping settings of The Ruby Cord could be within an arcane text or a VR sequence or a computer game or a dream. Or a dream within a computer game. All within a ruined future world that feels like the memory of a dark age. Dawson is melodically adventurous – it takes real nerve and faith in the audience to soar into falsetto and dive and turn as he does so – but he is also narratively adventurous, never showy or self-consciously experimental but rather pastoral, albeit a pasture of glitches and meta-realities.

The album is the third part of a trilogy that includes the feudal Peasant and the damning state of the nation address 2022. There’s always been a strain of the apocalyptic in Dawson’s work – ‘Ogre’ from Peasant begins with the feel of Under Milk Wood if it took place during a nuclear winter – and it reaches its apotheosis with The Ruby Cord. Yet this is not really an album about the future. Few works about the future are really. It’s about the present. It’s about the different meanings of the word lost and escape. It’s about survival, binds, exile, kinship, ruin, memory, nature. It’s about looking outward, as well as inward, something that has made all the difference in Dawson’s work, by his admission. Far from exalting being a recluse, it suggests going outside to see what you might find. If it’s about the apocalypse at all, it’s about the futility of fantasising about being among the last people on earth and the freedom it would bring. Why wait that long? The last days are already close. They always have been.

Darran Anderson

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Such is the life-force of caroline’s music that their songs can weave their way into whatever situation they please. It helps, too, that their music is so texturally rich. Much has been made of the way the band’s sound draws on Appalachian folk, Midwestern emo, noise rock and choral singing, but it is important to note that they don’t simply mash those influences together. The chiming guitar on ‘IWR’ might recall an old folk song, and the opening vocal line of ‘Skydiving’ might conjure a church chorister, but the references feel subconscious. caroline primarily write their songs on an improvisational basis, first in sessions with core trio Jasper Llewellyn, Casper Hughes and Mike O’Malley, and then in a developmental period with the full eight-piece band. In such a long and layered process it is inevitable that references might arise. What’s most important is that they are presented as incidental; their songs feel delicately ordered with whatever sounds they find appropriate.

As well as singles ‘Skydiving’, ‘Dark blue’ and ‘Good morning’, the record consists of three more long-form songs. The first is ‘IWR’ (which stands for ‘I Was Right’), the group’s most straightforwardly beautiful song on which a lengthy repeated vocal line, sung as a group, serene flowing violins, and repetitious chiming guitars all lattice together. ‘Engine’, meanwhile, consists of one crescendo after another, the gaps between them shortening as the song progresses until the music is a grand, clattering mess. Closing the album is ‘Natural death’. Its first half is stark, just a fragile vocal and uneasy scratches of violin, and its second sees the band dive into complete abstraction, arrhythmic guitar chords, anchorless vocals and crashing cymbals, clattering against one another all out of time; it’s as if the record’s coming apart at the joints, the constituent parts that the band had suspended in mid-air as a beautiful whole now plummeting down piece by piece.

Patrick Clarke

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I think it’s the essential and sublime humanity that sits within her voice that allows Diamanda Galás to explore subject matter that would be beyond the grasp of most artists, for whom to explore them might appear gauche or in poor taste. In the 1980s, Galás released The Divine Punishment, Saint Of The Pit and You Must Be Certain Of The Devil, the so-called Masque Of The Red Death trilogy of albums that turned the shaming language of Leviticus into a weapon of rage to turn against the judgement of the AIDS crisis which had claimed the life of her own brother. She was also arrested for taking part in ACT-UP protests. Other subjects of her work have been the Armenian genocide, schizophrenia and the poetry of exile. On Broken Gargoyles, Galás vocalises the words of German poet Georg Heym, who in the early 20th century wrote verses about the suffering of soldiers at war. The album’s title is also inspired by the 1914 to 1918 conflict, referencing the photographs Ernst Friedrich took of the faces of soldiers brutalised by shrapnel and bullets.

Broken Gargoyles makes most contemporary black metal, edgelord power electronics or exploring-feminity-through-witchcraft-wailers (there are a lot of Fisher Price Diamandas around at the moment) sound like they’re auditioning for a role in a local production of an Andrew Lloyd Webber musical. In this album, Diamanda Galás has produced not only one of her finest works, but a record that is equal and arguably surpasses other records that have the capacity to swallow you whole and spit you out that have been released in the past decade or so – Sunn O)))’s Monoliths & Dimensions, Scott Walker’s Bish Bosch, for instance. No other new record you’ll hear in 2022 so beautifully explores the limits of what the human voice is able to do, and the stories it is able to give life to while doing so. A masterpiece.

Luke Turner

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The enigmatic quality of Jockstrap’s music doesn’t prevent it from being a suitable soundtrack to life within a particular place. Heterogenous as it is, the architecture of London is often brought to mind. ‘Concrete Over Water’ conjures up the gloomy grace of the Barbican estate. Both the group’s Georgia Ellery and Taylor Skye had studied at Guildhall not long before the track was produced. With the lyrics addressing particular places such as Italy and Spain, there is seemingly one particular and non-existent place, a memory in the head of the lyrical hero. The song starts with calliope-like keyboards and Ellery’s vocals, giving a sort of a recollection of events that might be either pre-pandemic, pre-Brexit or pre-whatever: “I live in the city / The tower’s blue and the sky is black / I feel the night / I sit, it’s on my back / On my back / It makes me cry / This European air, I swear it does.” References to various geographical locations permeate the album. Whether it’s a city (‘Glasgow’) or a single building (‘Lancaster Court’), the record brings up a sense of constant – and restless – motion, familiar to any resident of a metropolis.

Closer ’50/50 (Extended)’ is a grinding dubstep track, as opposed to the emotive overtones on most of the record. That doesn’t diminish Jockstrap’s sincerity but shows the way emotions can be suppressed or transformed through a heavy dancefloor workout. The fact that both members are 24-year-olds partly explains the choice of their artistic names as well as the title of their debut record. As you age, levels of vulnerability gradually stabilise. The themes the group explore are familiar to the majority of those living on this planet and, particularly, in its most populated parts. Anxiety, alienation, longing, tidal waves of desire, pain resulting from acknowledging one’s ignorance and arrogance, etc., etc. After all, I Love You Jennifer B could be a statement on a wall of a residential block, inscribed by a smitten teenager.

Irina Shtreis

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