Japanese alternative music and culture magazine Ele-king, for whom I'm an occasional contributor, just published their winter issue, featuring their year-end albums roundup. They asked me to contribute a personal top 10, and while my personal favourites and their rankings are always fluid, this list gives a fair sense of the kinds of thing I enjoyed and listened to a lot this year. The magazine only has the list and a short comment though, so just in case anyone wants to read in a bit more depth, here's the same list with short reviews of each album.
1. Bilge Pump - We Love You
Bilge Pump have been grinding away in the Leeds, UK underground scene for most of the past 25 years, one of those bands that everyone plays with on their way through, but which never makes much of an impact beyond their local scene. That deserves to change with the marvellous We Love You. Grinding riffs and unpredictable rhythmics recall the better moments of 1990s post-hardcore, but Bilge Pump build on an experimental rock tradition that goes back much further, taking in the staccato arrangements of Wire, the otherworldly noise-rock of This Heat and the playful, folk-tinted progressive rock of the Canterbury scene.
2. Carter Tutti Void – Triumvirate
Not satisfied with just putting out an excellent solo album at the beginning of the year, Cosey Fanni Tutti also returned to her occasional project with long-time collaborator Chris Carter and Nik Void of Factory Floor. Triumvirate is an insistent, richly and subtly layered record, its beats and sequencer patterns pulsing with pop undertones while guitars and dub effects distort and disorientate and spectral vocals float wordlessly in and out of the mix. Billed as the trio’s final album together, Triumvirate demonstrates how comfortable and confident they are as a creative unit and makes for a powerful and joyful capstone to their career together.
3. Former Airline - Rewritten Memories by the Future
Released as a limited edition cassette in February, Japanese artist Former Airline’s Rewritten Memories by Future is an album born out of a cauldron of 1980s experimental and underground influences but doesn’t remain bound by them. Crash and Learn recalls the claustrophobic rhythms of Liaisons Dangereuses, drawing out and developing the origins of acid house from its chatter of electronic bleeps. Meanwhile, the artist’s love of krautrock and shoegaze – ever present on the album – is expressed most strikingly on the gorgeous closing The Angel Between Two Walls. Through the album, analogue glitches, drones and intrusions of noise act as the cement holding this sonic structure together.
4. Witching Waves – Persistence
London trio Witching Waves’ third album clocks in at only 27 minutes but brims over with ramshackle new wave songs, driven by Emma Wigham’s clattering drums and Mark Jasper’s scuzzy slashes of post-punk guitar, the sound thickened out by Estella Adeyeri from Big Joanie’s bass. There are echoes of bands like the Au Pairs and Delta 5, but Witching Waves have a particular atmosphere of their own that channels a sort of weary desperation into something thrilling and exhuberant.
5. Groundcover. - ██████
Throughout their multiple shifting, contracting and expanding lineups, Groundcover. have been one of Tokyo’s most consistently interesting noise-rock bands, combining roots in hardcore and post-Boredoms junk with a drift into expansive sonic territory. ██████ is the culmination of that evolution, retaining the raw riffs and explosive energy that characterised their hardcore days but wedding it to via the rhythmically tight, increasingly dub-influenced sound system band leader Ataraw Mochizuki has built up around him over the years. The result is an album that builds up immense, triumphant, richly layered walls of sound, deployed with impressive control.
6. Guided By Voices – Zeppelin Over China
The first of the three albums Guided By Voices put out in 2019 (68 songs adding up to about 150 minutes of music), this double-album in a way represents all of the band’s releases this year. Its 32 tracks of garage-infused indie rock sit somewhere between the prog-leaning ’70s rock of October’s Sweating the Plague and the lo-fi micro-songs of April’s Warp and Woof, and the songwriting is deeply steeped in the sort of wide-eyed British invasion anthems twisted through post-punk structural dynamics that vocalist and main songwriter Robert Pollard produces so instinctively.
7. Soloist Anti Pop Totalization - S.A.P.T.
This Tokyo-based artist takes his cues from the sound of early Mute Records artists like Fad Gadget and The Normal with his relentless machine rhythms, dentist drill synth intrusions and squirts of analogue electronic interference. About half the album is made up of experimental instrumental tracks, and where vocals emerge, they do so as a series of distant, lo-fi, Mark E Smith barks and utterances. There are moments too, on songs like Depression (Part 2) and Other, where the music slips into a more accessible and even pop groove, and this helps S.A.P.T. take the listener on a surprisingly diverse journey through its synthetic dystopia.
8. Folk Enough - Lover Ball
This album by Fukuoka-based indie rockers Folk Enough is absolutely horrible to listen to, taking the lo-fi recording aesthetic to the sort of scuzzy extremes it hasn’t seen since Twin Infinitives-era Royal Trux. Swimming around in this sonic murk, however, are moments of fragile beauty that recall Lou Barlow at his most beaten-down, and moments of rock’n’roll swagger that hint at Jon Spencer at his most explosive. Across the whole album lies a sort of confused, alcoholic fug that means you’re never sure whether what you’re listening to is genius or a terrible mistake. Folk Enough’s secret is that it’s both.
9. Sleaford Mods - Eton Alive
Over the past half-decade or so, Sleaford Mods have emerged in the UK as the voice of a country first ravaged by economic austerity and then torn apart by Brexit. Their minimalist combination of Jason Williamson’s wry poetry, which recalls Mark E Smith and John Cooper Clarke, and Andrew Fearn’s sparse, beat-led arrangements is so finely realised that doesn’t have much obvious room to evolve, but they keep edging into new territory with each new release. Eton Alive touches on stripped down post-punk and hip-hop with hints at DAF-esque EBM with lyrics that are angry, absurd, hopeless and defiant.
10. Gotou – Gotou
Hailing from Hokkaido, Gotou did what so many promising Japanese underground bands do and released a marvellous album before immediately going on indefinite hiatus. It’s a shame, because this album really is something special. Drawing from the gloomier end of post-punk and German new wave, the vocals scrape the lower end of the singer’s range in a way that pays clear homage to Malaria! (the band declare this openly in their Twitter profile and even cover Malaria!’s song Your Turn to Run on the album) but while it may not be blessed with an overabundance of originality, this album stands out as something distinctive in the Japanese underground scene.