1537 vs. 2025

So here we are once more, another entry in a diary self-penned.

Thank you for attending these truly prestigious awards and doing your very best to stick to the ‘dress to impress’ dress code. Who knew so many of you would turn up in the timeless backless chaps, bullet belt, bowtie and fez combo? well played one and all, particularly whoever is in that lifesize purple spangled manatee costume.

Well we made it through another run of the sun, congratulations for that people in these troubling times; to think I used to play Fallout 4 for escapist fantasy, rather than as a gritty contemporary life sim.

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First up we have the Brian James Memorial Award for the records with the best cover art bought in 2023. The nominees are:

KiF Still Out. An ambient LP that was so spot-on in its homage to KLF Chill Out that it sparked rumours it was those merry prankster’s themselves; it wasn’t. Plus what’s not to like about a nice picture of a cow standing in a field?

Ennio Morricone The Thing. Which whilst it does not bear a huge comparison to most of the music found in the film, boasts a great tip-on spot-thingy shiny cover, beautiful gatefold and poster*.

Gints Zilbalodis Flow (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack). The soundtrack to my favourite ever Latvian animated film about a cat’s travails in a slightly surreal post-ecopocalypse world. The film is beautiful, touching and funny and the LP is a wonderfully lavish thing with die-cut openings so you can change the titular cat’s expression.

Alice Cooper The Revenge Of Alice Cooper with its great movie poster schtick, is worthy decadent schlock for this blog.

The winner is Gints Zilbalodis Flow (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack). A worthy winner in a tough field, I suspect in 2025 it was just possessing the agency to change anything, even a cat’s expression that swung it.

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Next up we have the David Johansen Memorial Award for the most records bought by the same artist in 2025 goes to Deftones with 4. A band I discovered in June of this year, buying Around The Fur only 28 years after the fact, White Pony, Ohms and this year’s Private Music followed. I think they’re tremendous, really interesting sounding and continually evolving, a gigantic heavily-armoured indie rock experience. Was other good stuff hidden in amongst that nu-metal morass?

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Then we come to the most important part of all this the Jimmy Cliff Memorial Award for the Top 10 LPs of 2025.

1. Lambrini Girls Who Let The Dogs Out.

I have loved this LP for exactly 370 days now. It is an absolute blizzard of in-your-grill righteous punk energy and anger, white-hot, virulent and lethal. It deals with so much gendered unpleasantness, societal ills and pressures, but with enough hooks, swearing and scabrous humour amidst the horrors that listening to it never feels like being lectured. If ‘No Homo’ doesn’t make you beam every bit as much as ‘Company Culture’ makes you rage then you need to restore yourself back to factory settings and start rebuilding your personality.

As a great philosopher once wrote, in these very pages:

Who Let The Dogs Out does a stand-up, stand-down, stand-out, outstanding job for a debut. It really is totally now – angry, messy, hairy, queer, hedonistic and unapologetic.

How could I beat that?

2. Viagra Boys Viagr Aboys.

The Swedish post-punk absurdists serve up a wonderfully fun, groovy dish to ease our fractured world. Some excellent lyrics twinned with great tunes literally conjured an LP for all the 1537 family – I got into Viagra Boys through my son seeing them play in Glasgow and the ‘crouton/futon’ line is oft-quoted hereabouts. I hear new things most times I play Viagr Aboys and given the number of times I have so far, that is no mean thing. As the greatest cultural mind of our generation wrote,

‘if any of that appeals then you are precisely the sort of left-wing, drug secreting, free-thinking weirdo that Viagr Aboys is targeting; you sicko!‘

3. Tortoise Touch.

The post-rockers first LP in 9 years^ is excellent. Touch is a rockier, cheekier treat than you might imagine, opener ‘Vexations’ even has a surfin’ cowboy touch to it before it gets grimy and experimental. Tortoise in 2025 sound brisker, gnarlier and more impatient than they used to; so they should, ’tis the season. Glitches, glockenspiels, grit and g-skeletal beats*^ are very much the order of the day, acoustic instrumentation and synthetic information blend and bleed all over the score to fascinating affect. More to the point Tortoise rock out hard here, on their/in their own terms. Touch is a treat.

4. Warrington-Runcorn New Town Development Plan Public Works And Utilities.

Storming straight in at #1 on the ‘band names I wouldn’t want to get tattooed on my John Thomas’ list, this is an absolutely excellent slice of urban infrastructure based synth soundscape. Trust me. Public Works is the strange cousin of Tron, Jean-Michel Jarre, Vangelis and a particularly spicy council meeting about redeveloping a disused bobbin works. There is depth, grandeur and (in epic LP closer ‘The People Matter’) anger here. This is a brilliant LP and in a weaker year of releases could easily have topped my awards.

5. Pig Pen Mental Madness.

Pig Pen absolutely blow the fucking doors down. Five Canadians, ten venomous songs, one metallic-tinged hardcore sound, Mental Madness absolutely rages. Frontman Matty Matheson is, I now know, a celeb chef but no jobbing dilettante, he is truly excellent at this hardcore lark. The band are equally great in every way you’d want. No cheap jibes here but Pig Pen sound absolutely MASSIVE. Plus ‘Venom Moon Rising’ is a great song title.

6. Alison Goldfrapp Flux.

I bought this LP listlessly out of brand loyalty and memories of my celebrity crush on her^* and came away with an absolute banger. Flux may have been named, inadvertently one assumes, after a variety of ovine dysentery but it struts rather than flows uncontrollably. I love ‘Strange Things Happen’, ‘Find Xanadu’ and ‘Reverberotic’ are just brilliant clever, sexy dance pop tracks and have certainly brightened some rainy mornings for me.

7. The Sorcerers Other Worlds And Habitats.

The Leeds-based combo continue to mutate and drift towards the outer fringes of our cosmos. This is a great, tight band. The sound here harks back to Ethiopian jazz but a newfound emphasis on keys and, my friend Richard’s, vibes playing gives proceedings a more soundtrack-sounding, inner/outer space exploratory feel. The booklet of field notes that accompanies the LP gently wafts us along Hawkwind’s vapour trail, thematically. Tremendous fun.

8. Alice Cooper The Revenge Of …

As soon as Alice crooned ‘I’m so beautiful to look at’ on the opening cut I was hooked. What a wonderful treat as one of my fave bands ever reunite, with a guest appearance from beyond the grave from Glen Buxton to boot. I absolutely loved this LP, it is slinky, funny and very arch indeed. These men are undoubtedly old enough to know better but they don’t let it give them any pause and I’ve been waiting for ‘Kill The Flies’ for most of my ‘adult’ life.

9. Saint Etienne The Night.

Released with only 18 days of 2024 left, I’m letting this one in, just as I have let it into my affections this year. The Night is an intriguingly nocturnal, occasionally world-weary, wise offering of rainy ambience and classy pop moments. Sarah Cracknell’s voice gets richer and more expressive with age^^ and the song ‘Preflyte’ is the most moving song I’ve heard all year. Loss, beauty and wisdom duke it out very sedately in these grooves, I think loss has it by a head.

10. Tunde Adebimpe Thee Black Boltz.

I never quite got TV On The Radio, I tried to but could never quite tune into their channel. So I was surprised when Tunde Adebimpe’s solo debut registered so quickly for me. It’s a wonderfully quixotic and quirky set with a real melodic charge, mostly provided by that brilliantly adaptable voice. The synth charge of ‘Magnetic’ is a rush, as is the Queenly ‘Pinstack’ but the goodbye to his sister ‘ILY’ is simple and pure. There’s a lot I haven’t taken in here yet, but I am working on it; that’s a nice thing to say about an album.

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The Mike Peters Memorial Award for best old shit purchased this year is another closely contended one.

I was captivated by a certain dark Californian (sounding, at least) strain of goth, loving Christian Death Only Theatre Of Hate, 45 Grave Sleep In Safety and The Gun Club Fire Of Love this year.

But the winner is Charles Mingus Tijuana Moods, which I have listened to a zillion times. It is some of Mingus’ most accessible, yet rewarding and atmospheric work and a damn fine LP to read to.

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So in closing there is just time to award you all, gentle readers and award attendees alike, the inaugural Ozzy Osbourne People’s Princess Award to you all for regularly visiting my gilded palace of sin and nonsense. Thank you as always for all your comments and conversations and occasional real world interactions, its nice to know there are good people out there boogieing on in your own realms.

Now please hold still as my hired goons move amongst you to relieve you of your valuables before hurling you naked into the night; it’s traditional.

Word up.

1303 Down (still).

*not quite relevant here but the ‘trapped under ice’, white in blue vinyl is by far the prettiest I bought this year.

^and first really good one in 27 years.

*^which I may just have invented for alliterative purposes.

^*as yet both unrequited and unconsummated at the time of writing.

^^hers, I remain 15 and a half.