1537 vs. 2022

Welcome ladies and gentlemen of the world to this, the most influential, erudite and groovy awards of the year. Given the choice of scooping top place in a category here, sell-out shows on the moon, knighthoods*, Oscars or having a cool predator named after them, studies show that 98.5% of musical artists would prefer to win a 1537-ini. True story.

I have invited you all to my lair here under the ocean bed in person for the first time in years. Hopefully my ethically sourced Dr Moreau animal hybrid hench folk will be able to cater for all your culinary and other needs. First two bottles are on me, after that you need to purchase at the bar; all major credit cards accepted, proof of ID required, service not included.

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So without further ado, let us plunge on blindly into the awards.

Firstly, the Burke Shelley Memorial Award for the records with the best cover art bought in 2022. The nominees are:

Green Lung Woodland Rites: Wood cut occult pagan genius art; Cosmic Psychos Go The Hack: Three fucking hard Australians standing on a bulldozer, what’s not to love? Green Lung Free The Witch: More wood cut occult pagan genius art, with added (almost) nudity.

The winner is Green Lung, both of ’em. I absolutely love the artwork by Richard Wells, it effortlessly conjures a dark folk horror and I am still spotting new things in it.

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Next up ladies and gentlemen its the big one, the Ronnie Spector Memorial Award for the Top 9 LPs of 2022.

1.  Danger Mouse, Black Thought Cheat Codes

Holy hell folks! This LP is everything I want hip hip to be, everything it is capable of being but almost never is. Wonderful tunes, glancing back to the good old days when tunesmiths dug hard into those crates to find the samples, topped off with some thoughtful, confident and amusing rhymes. There are a football team worth of guests on board, but each and every one adds their own texture to proceedings and never overwhelms it, or makes it feel bitty. 

One listen to ‘No Gold Teeth’, or the incredible ‘Aquamarine’ which features Michael Kiwanuka, is to be transported back to more optimistic times when progressive folks like Digable Planets, Lupe Fiasco, Common and New Kingdom made hip hop feel vital and exciting before $ ruined everything. This is a great LP. 

2.  The Smile A Light For Attracting Attention

Every review of this LP begins by saying this is exactly the Radiohead-ish LP we’ve been waiting for, so I won’t. It is fucking great though, a real blast of vicious guitars, vitality and spite cutting through alongside some swoonsome moodier pieces. Thom Yorke hasn’t sounded this into it for a decade, or so. Everybody sing along to ‘You Will Never Work In Television Again’, ‘he’s a fat fucking mist, young bones spit out, girl’s slitting their wrists’. Good music for taking a Christmas tree down to, this is exactly the Radiohead-ish LP we’ve been waiting for.

3. The Cult Under The Midnight Sun

This was a real surprise, Duffy and Astbury ditch the big modern rock noise they had flogged to death on their last few releases and step back into a more dignified, stately style, last seen circa ’85. There are of course some very silly lyrics hereabouts, that’s a big part of the charm, but the songs and performances are absolutely great, ‘A Cut Inside’, ‘Give Me Mercy’ and ‘Knife Through Butterfly Heart’ are all excellent. In another year this could easily have been my #1.

4. Clutch Sunrise On Slaughter Beach

A far better release than its predecessor, from the opening kickass silliness of ‘Red Alert (Boss Metal Zone)’ on in, Sunrise really does the job for me. They were incredibly good again when I saw them in December and as always they played the bulk of their newie, the heavy spirituality of ‘Nosferatu Madre’ really hit home then and now, as does the title track and ‘Mountain Of Bone’. Goddamnit, I love ’em.

5. Neil Young Citizen Kane Jr. Blues

A brand-new release from only 48 years ago. Young ambled onstage at 2am after a set by Ry Cooder and gave the audience a couple of crowd favourites, a lovely rendition of ‘Greensleeves’ and the bulk of On The Beach, which he’d recorded a month before but wasn’t released yet. The crowd noise and banter make this an atmospheric release but at times Young catches fire like only he can and you can feel the charge in the, fuggy, air.

6. White Hills Revenge Of Heads On Fire

White Hills go back to go forwards. Dave W and Ego salvaged some old recordings from 2007 from a corrupted hard drive and hit us with 6 new tracks and remixed versions of cuts that did make their Heads On Fire album. The results are absolutely jaw-droppingly great in places, especially when Dave steps up to the mountain top and just lets rip. In this context ‘Don’t Be Afraid’ is frighteningly, almost unapproachably epic in scale, I also love the Bladerunner-esque ‘Inoke Tupo’, but my favourite cut here is the creepily atmospheric ‘Is This The Road’. Heavy psych is back!

7. Yard Act Overload

I almost bumped these young Leeds chaps from the list for the temerity to not include their best song (‘Fixer Upper’) on their debut LP. It’s a great taut post-punk indie, sprechgesang, rather funny outing about how shit Britain can be at times. The overall affect is quite uplifting and if you can’t laugh acerbic tears at the anti-Brexit tune ‘Dead Horse’** then you need retuning.

8. Municipal Waste Electrified Brain

An absolute riotous blast from the title track through to ‘Paranormal Janitor’. You know what you’re getting with this crew, punk-infused thrash metal and lyrics that veer between gory and silly, before doing it all again. The Waste just seem to get sharper musically, Dave Witte’s drumming is particularly standout. I like some of the more trad metal moments here like ‘High Speed Steel’, by Jingo they may be evolving!

9. Los Bitchos Let The Festivities Begin

A difficult album to classify, but basically Los Bitchos are an instrumental group from London with roots in Scandinavia, South America, Turkey and Australia and they chuck all their influences into the cauldron for us, sprinkle in some disco psych and surf rock and – voila! Les temps du partay! ‘Las Panteras’ is my favourite.

10. Neil Young & Crazy Horse Toast

A brand-new release from only 20 years ago; spot a theme? Before cutting his Are You Passionate? album with Booker T and the MG’s, Young had recorded them with Crazy Horse, which had been unreleased until now. Toast, bought because it was named after my fave foodstuff and I really love the LP cover, doesn’t get much love but I really like it. The rockers like ‘Standing In The Light Of Love’ are good and rousing and I love the late night feel of the whole thing. Another worthwhile release.

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The Chris Bailey Memorial Award for best older releases bought in 2022 goes to David Crosby If I Could Only Remember My Name, which I’d actively avoided for years because I always thought he was a total knob. He is, the album is excellent; these truths can exist simultaneously.

Honorary mentions go to Melbourne hard arses Cosmic Psychos Go The Hack and David Bowie The Buddha Of Suburbia soundtrack, which was a much cherished present.

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So there you have it all my friends. As always you only have yourselves to blame for everything in my gilded palace of nonsense and sin, if you stopped reading it, I’d stop writing it. Thank you all for that.

2022 has been a weird one, Covid has really slowed down my ability to write, which is very odd given I got it in March last year. It also hasn’t been a bumper year for new music for me, I mean nothing in respect of the quality of the sacred Top 10, but I only bought 17 new albums^ this year which is significantly down on recent years. Thank god for Neil Young seemingly releasing 5 quality albums a year from his archives at the moment.

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But anyway, please stay put and wait for my hench people escort you back to your submarines. On no account attempt to break away from your party and snoop around, it would be detrimental to your longevity. I hope you had a lovely evening and here to play us out are, by popular request, Nelson!

1165 Down (still).

*or damehoods.

**Are you seriously still tryna kid me that our culture will be just fine
When all that’s left is knobheads Morris dancing to sham 69?

^as in released, not rereleased, in 2022. I’m not telling you how many I bought in total!