A God-awful Small Affair

  Alright, not going to waste more time apologising for the death of this blog, just going to get straight to the point. I listened to 142 albums and EPs this year apparently, and trawled through every New Music Fridays like an addict in search of a rush, so... if I missed anything, there's not really any excuse. I have a top 50 albums and top 100 songs as always, deluding myself as if I'm Pitchfork or something. Here's a list of everything I listened to but wasn't good enough for the list, apparently, with a score attached* Syd - Broken Hearts Club - 8 Taylor Swift - Midnights - 8 Superorganism - World Wide Pop - 8 Angel Olsen - Big Time - 8 Animal Collective - Time Skiffs - 8 Charli XCX - Crash - 8 Empress Of - Save Me EP - 8 Plains - I Walked With You A Ways - 8 Sabrina Carpenter - Emails I Cannot Send - 7.9 Conan Gray - Superache - 7.9 Aurora - The Gods We Can Touch - 7.9 Mura Masa - Demon Time - 7.9 Yaya Bey - Remember Your North Star - 7.8 Fletcher - Girl of My Dr...

Well that bandwagon disintegrated pretty quick didn't it? In the few weeks between this album's release and me actually listening to it, one could've drawn the impression that Abel Tesfaye had put out a series of Aqua covers. The backlash aimed at his first proper LP - the first after a confusing and, at times, frustrating series of EPs and repackages of EPs named something silly like Trilogy - is almost certainly down to a few hipster whinings about how it (obviously) doesn't quite measure up to House of Balloons . I remember a few similar complaints between Nostalgia.Ultra and Channel Orange; Section.80 and good kid; So Far Gone and Thank Me Later... well, the list goes on. There is a marked stylistic difference here, though. What was in 2011 a very hushed, sensual and subtle Tesfaye is now collaborating with French house giant Kavinsky, and getting remixes from Pharrell. After signing with Republic Records in 2012, he started to drop that whole shy-from-the-pu...

#40 - "Holy Ghost!", Holy Ghost! If you're going to buy just the one synthpop album from 2011 - this is very much one of the frontrunners. Listen to 'Do It Again' now. #39 - "Twist Again", Bodies of Water I still much prefer the band's outings as 'Music Go Music' but if you're a little afraid of ABBA revivalism and fond of folky nostalgia, this won't disappoint. #38 - "House of Balloons", The Weeknd I didn't review this when it came out because it totally escaped me, but having downloaded it a couple of weeks ago I found it surprising, exciting and basically what Bon Iver might have been had they worked more with Kanye West. #37 - "Veliciraptor!", Kasabian It was totally daft but it's nice to see that at least one British mainstay has retained the ability to put out an album of original tunes *glares at Beady Eye* #36 - "Angles", The Strokes I really wanted to place this higher on accounts of its ...