This is Tunng’s ninth album, their first in five years, and marks their 20th anniversary by consciously going full circle to the gentle sound sculpture and folk melody of their earliest work. It is also thrown into fascinating relief by arriving just as the world is reeling from the loss of David Lynch.
Of the big UK indie bands of the 00s wave, Bloc Party were always the most austerely art-rockish. Where Arctic Monkeys, Klaxons, Franz Ferdinand all to some degree or other had a dose of the vaudevillian and a bit of party “woohoo!”, BP adhered way more to the seriousness, alienation and introspection of their post-punk inspirations.
I don’t really want to talk about this year. Genuinely.
It’s been so horrific on the macro scale with deranged Fascism and the effects of rampant and undeniable climate change looming everywhere you look – and on the personal level I’ve been been bombarded with all the inevitable, arbitrary slings and arrows that life can muster, from multiple bereavements on down – that I’d very much rather just neck a load of tranquilisers and fine wines and resolutely enter my hands-over-ears, “lalalala can’t hear you”, era.
I’ve known for some time that Ariel Sharratt & Matthias Kom’s Never Work is my Album of the Year. This lividly witty, no-filler take-down of workplace servitude arrived on vinyl in May. The creation of two Canadian indie-folkies (from The Burning Hell), it’s my most-played album of 2024, containing my most-played songs, the title track and the poignant, “The Rich Stuff”, the latter a call to revolution themed around The Goonies.
One big problem. I just discovered Never Work came out in 2020. Was it a vinyl reissue? Who knows!
When Vampire Weekend arrived onstage they numbered only three and were bunched together at the front with a large curtain draped behind them, obscuring their backdrop. By the time this marathon set ended two and a half hours later, they’d more than doubled in number and had made full use of their surroundings, a shift which summed up a constantly changing, often contradictory show.
There’s a lot of anger at algorithm-driven music discovery around – a lot of it justified, as the big platforms push the already-big acts and lowest common demoninator slop is aided in rising to the top. But we can’t talk about the topic without also acknowledging that it has provided some surprising opportunities for unorthodox music.
'Tis the season for all manner of bugs, colds and illnesses. One had befallen Katy J Pearson, who struck an apologetic note after the night’s first number to say she had been unwell all day and was going to do her best to get through the gig. That added an unexpected element to proceedings, namely by creating the potential for the whole show to come to a sudden halt at any point.
VINYL OF THE MONTH
Blood Incantation Absolute Elsewhere (Century Media)
The progress of Kim Deal has been one of the great delights of modern music. Much as one wishes Pixies well, they have never been the same without her distinctive voice and presence, whereas her other band The Breeders have only gone from strength to strength – and she has clearly enjoyed the heck out of it, as recently shown on the Live at Big Sur video where the whole band radiate pleasure in playing. Oddly though, although she’s had a spattering of solo singles in the past decade or so, she’s never put her own name to an album until now, aged 63.
Could melancholia be an elixir of creative youth? Or is it that sad people were never really that youthful, so age suits them? Certainly it seems that there was something in the water for so many of the foundational 80s indie bands who dealt in sadness, pain and existential angst that makes longevity suit them: The Jesus & Mary Chain, Dinosaur Jr., Throwing Muses, Ride, Slowdive just for starters have all somehow ambled into the 2020s on the creative form of their lives.