The Best Of 2022 Part II: The Two Records Of The Year
Part 2: My Twin Record(s) Of The Year & Why
A friend asked me why I don’t do slag-offs on my substack. I pondered that question a while cos it goes deep - into my own motivations but also the state of the art (and the state of its critique). Partly it’s down to how no single album deserves that much negative attention anymore because single records can’t damage a wider culture that way anymore. Audiences can slip between musical worlds with such agility now, consensus is barely there, and certainly not in the depressingly mammoth-blockbuster ways it was in the 90s and even 00s.
Mainly though it’s down to power: whenever I used to slag off a band or album it was always from the innate understanding that THEY had already WON. THEY were signed, THEY were making a living out of making music, THEY had WON. So this poxy little twat taking potshots from his Coventry hovel was always punching up.
That power dynamic has gone now. Sure, I still have NO power. But nor do bands anymore. Even/especially the signed ones. My band bought out a record this year. We’ve been going 20 year-odd, never been signed. We wanted to do it right, and do a double, and have it on vinyl, so we did. And at no point in the entire process did any of us even remotely think we wouldn’t be in debt because of it.
If there’s a choice to be made in making music, it’s really a decision of need and creative pressure rather than a choice about survival. Put simply - it’s impossible to make a living out of making music anymore. I look at so many artists whose work I’ve loved this year and I see them surviving DESPITE being musicians. Unless you’re middle class, rich, nepotistically connected, music simply isn’t for you anymore as a way of making a living and this indoctrination starts young, at school, where the ‘creative’ subjects start getting marked off for the posh kids and the working class kids get pointed towards the factories and the checkouts. By the time music has got to higher or futher education (which sell themselves exclusively on the inherent LIE that music education is a first ‘step into the industry’) it’s an even narrower thing than ever - posh boys and girls who play guitars, post covers, have a support system in place to sustain these gap-years, who will step out of the game if/when/as soon as its penury becomes inavoidable. These are the places that feed an ever-narrowing, ever more bourgouise music scene.
To even be a musician now, the industry sets a heavy price - in a rage that for a while it looked like it wasn’t needed it has returned 99% of its workers to a state of indentured slavery- heaps the young/new artist with a ton of bullshit to do that has nothing to do with making music. Fixing your own image, and disseminating as much fuss as you can about every single thing you do - it’s exhausting, and essentially prohibitive to anyone who has to worry about mouths to feed, even if it’s just their own. Music becomes this joyless process of endlessly accreting disappointment, and being an annoyance about your music to get it heard - disappointment that no one is noticing you, disappointment that the algorithm boosts an increasingly narrow base, disappointment seeing that essentially the beauty you made isn’t being heard, will never be heard, and that you’ll always be seen as a hobbyist. All of this work, all of this beauty . . . into the void. It’s enraging.
You can say it was ever thus. Great artists have always been ignored sure. If we want a music that supports the people making it things can’t simply return to the way they were. But things also can’t stay the way they are right now. What’s going on now is that artists who aren’t getting noticed are being told it’s their fault, that they’ve given it a go but should just knock it off and knuckle down now, that not being heard is a result of making the wrong sounds. Why care about longevity or development when the biz is merely engaged in selling the myth of music, the myth of correct responses in all settings, the exploitation of those fans it supposedly understands, a myth of meritocracy that lures everyone bar the priveliged into being cannon fodder. It’s just this hateful cycle that wears music-makers down. The two albums that absolutely bossed my listening this year were Johanna Warren’s ‘Lessons For Mutants’ and Aoife Nessa Frances’ ‘Protector’. I found them to be masterpieces, addictive, essential records for 2022. Their melodies and feelings suffused my listening this year, I was always coming back to them for sanctuary and solace but also a sense of resistance and raging beauty. Both of them - in the schematics of modern pop - ‘failed’. These two genii are not household names. But the reasons they ‘failed’ are entirely down to the structures of the biz, and the way that biz is now set up only to benefit artists who are ‘like’ those overseers of the industry, a bit posh, alot white, overwhelmingly twee and entirely commercially focussed. It feels like there is no one involved in music - locally or nationally or internationally - who actually likes music, who will stick their neck out to support something that doesn’t guarantee footfall and dwell time and traffic and clicks. Music has purely degenerated into this pot-luck popularity contest wherein your ability to craft ‘luck’, your busy-ness in confecting a ‘buzz’ is all that matters. And so the songs that might sustain you, disappear in a blur of songs that make for good ‘shares’: we are approaching a pop that is ‘charming’ but never life-changing. EVERYTHING gets 3-4 stars out of 5, everything that gets covered is cheerleaded (like most people making anything, critics are scared and compliant and struggling to survive bar a rarefied strata of London mates), and that utter absence of discernment means only those with PR/Biz connections strong enough to exert critical consensus will get through the fuzz and the static. A pop in which those making pop full of possibility and suggestion will have to muddle through, promise themselves they’ll ‘work harder’, take the daily drip-feed of despair. These two albums, more than any others in 2022, reminded me it doesn’t have to be that way but also reminded me that the crafting of a pop vision will always now sit at variance with the way bringing that vision to the world will feel. You can make palaces, kingdoms of song but you better get used to playing the same old bolt-holes, to be hidden, to have to D.I.Y the shit out of being a musician to even feel human at the same time. And you will never ever ever ever be able to survive on it. Especially if you’re a young woman.
Johanna Warren’s ‘Chaotic Good’ was one of 2020’s most startling records, a spellbinding mix of Joni-like jazzy pop and hypnotic folk released just as lockdowns hit and consequently perilously close to being forgotten that year. This years ‘Lessons For Mutants’ was even better, tighter, a half-hour transmission from a genius that welcomed and walked you across Warren’s own existential tightrope in songs that spoke to pain and loss with a wisdom and dissident strength that was hugely rewarding and reassuring.
'I’d Be Orange’ kicks things off with the same kind of heady, 90s punch and hooks that characterised Sasami’s brilliant ‘Squeeze’ this year but it’s Warren’s voice that utterly commands things, a steely, suggestive thing always in control of where a song goes and what it touches, the best ‘ooh-la-la-la’ b-vox you’ve heard since ‘Big Yellow Taxi’. ‘Anyway better not get too existential/ I cannot guarantee that I'll live up to my potential’ sings Warren on the similarly grungey ‘Piscean Lover’ and it nails the spirit of this record - doubt and pain but played with a sureness, a disappearance from the real world that knows it’s not a game that can last. That tension between the real and harsh and the beautiful and imaginative is central to ‘Lessons For Mutants’, that wonderful mix of utterly bewitching music and utterly hard-boiled lyrics, the spiralling dreamy piano of ‘Oaths’ undercut by words like ‘What wicked winds have whipped us into shapes so monstrous and depraved/ And what oaths must we take to be absolved and rendered ready and awake’, words in which you wonder whether Warren is explicitly singing about singing, about trying to sing when the world would rather you were shut up. The album’s first revelatory highlight comes for me in the form of ‘County Fair’, a galdr, a wormhole of a song that steps you through to something both courtly and groundless, ancient and aerial, a song that hangs in your home so evocatively all you can do is wander in it, try and touch it to feel it slip away from any grasp. ‘Tooth For A Tooth’ - just Warren and her piano and a whistle and this song that hurts to hear - is so close to the bone it’s difficult to encounter, every time. Here Warren really seems to be zeroing in on her own pain and loss, and her own stance regarding her deranged decision to make music out of it.
Sometimes I can remember the good times
Sometimes it's easier to forget
So I don't have to miss you too much
Sometimes I can relate to myself
I disassociate more than I'd like to
But what can you do?
Freedom comes at a price
I can tell you from years of taking my own advice
Not many people can handle the truth
But I'd rather be lonely and empowered
Than on a cross or devoured
By those who would take a tooth for a tooth
“:/” is like a little lost Throwing Muses demo and that will more than do me, the title track HAS to be a ‘Planet Caravan’ homage so eerily close is it, flute and warped psyche vocals drawing you into its spell, its conjurations of blood and magic and earth. ‘Hi Res’ - a shuffle that steps between stealth and blissful openness seems almost addressed to the listener (“I realized I don't wanna suffer/I want us both to be free/ I'm sorry for my failure”) before the gorgeous ‘Good Is Gone‘ and ‘Involvus’ leave you wanting way more, but also realising that the past 30 minutes in your life have been perfect, have been more beautiful, have been definitively UNshareable. So special this record, no-one else’s melodies and words have meant more to me in 2022 than Johanna Warren’s.
Only thing that got close was Aoife Nessa Frances’ remarkable ‘Protector’. Frances was lazily pitched as ‘one to watch’ a couple of years ago because her ‘Land Of No Junction’ album from 2020 was a stunning suite of songs, droneish, mesmeric, hugely suggestive and as enfolding a transmission from the other side as Gwenno’s ‘La Kov’ was from the year before. After its release, and in utter defiance of the normal ‘next big thing’ habits getting yourself OUT there) Frances relocated from Dublin to her dad’s home in rural County Clare, and then even further into isolation in a cabin in the village of Annascaul, Kerry, with confederates Brendans Jenkinson and Doherty to craft ‘Protector’.
The results are impossibly even better than her debut. ‘Way To Say Goodbye’ recalls the wonderful Flock Of Dimes, moves with a gentle thrum but hits you hard when the modality shifts, the soundworld a delicious mix of understated elegance and horn-laden colour. Throughout the LP I (mis?)hear Frances’ vocals as double-tracked, central (inspired by ‘Melody Nelson’) and its the feel that you’re not merely witnessing this music but inhabiting it - and being inhabited by it - that makes ‘Protector’ so vice-like in its grip on you. So when she sings on the Broadcast-like ‘This Still Life’ “I took a boat to Mayo/ Swam out off the island/ And waited for the sun to set/ And bathe my answers” you are put precisely in that contemplative place, ‘Reliving this life/Reliving this life/Eyes on this still life”. ‘Emptiness Follows’ sets in motion this wonderful Can-like rotational pattern (very ‘Sing Swan Song’) over which mellotron-woodwind and shards of harp ripple and weft, the repeated hook ‘emptiness follows me’ delivered without ego or self-pity, rather like its an otherwise silent internal dialogue, the woodwinds building until they approach Talk Talk-like levels of wonderment. ‘Only Child’ is seven minutes of utter hypnosis, a Velvets-like simplicity behind which strings, whorls of synth, sax and a whole rustling menagerie of microscopic sound comes together into a blinding blissful wave of white light. ‘Chariot’ is a suggestion about what really matters, about reconnecting with family and friends and being cared for again after two years in the wilderness of wartime, a feeling of dim hope that sweeps the closing suite of wonder - ‘Back To Earth’, the heavenly ‘Soft Lines’ and exquisite Movietone-plays-Bewlay-Bros-like ‘Day Out Of Time’ - deep into the heart.
Both of these records are good enough to make their makers stars, both possibly too good to do anything of the kind. I hope, and kind of know, that both these artists will find ways DESPITE the industry, to keep making their amazing music. But as 2023 begins I think we should consider what kind of music fans we wanna be next year. Please buy music. When someone good plays your town, go see them. If we have returned to an almost pre-industrial state for most musicians - throwing your cap on the ground and hoping for the best - rattle those begging bowls with a bit of shrapnel this year. We can’t hope for revolution, or even any evolution, in the patriarchal dead-end that is the biz so we have to make our own biz, and hope that here and there, the right people are getting involved for the right reasons. The undeserved obscurity these albums lingered within upset me this year, but the sheer ineluctable fact of their beauty offered its own kind of gimlet-eyed hope. An amazing year for music 2022, and I suspect 2023 will be even better. Let’s just try and make it a bit less of a terrible year for musicians and music-makers. Keep punching upwards. See you in 2023.