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User
Reviews 54
Approval 79%
Soundoffs 804
Album Ratings 823
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Last Active 12-21-21 11:53 am
Joined 08-22-11
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| | My Ten Favourite Songs of 2024 | | 10 |  | Missy Higgins
The Second Act
'You Should Run'
Mature break-up songs are rare. Partly, one suspects that this is because writers know that audiences do not find grown-up emotional processing as fun as glass-hurling tantrums but it is more probably because they take a lot more character to write. Missy Higgins’ "The Second Act" was that such thing: a dignified song cycle void of finger-pointing that was brave enough to lay bare its creator’s foibles and ongoing difficulties. ‘You Should Run’ is written from the perspective of a single mother of two – it’s Higgins, just so we’re clear – and has the memorable chorus refrain “Loving me will never be easy, babe/These four little hands pull me a million ways” and ends with aching hope as Higgins whispers, “But if easy is not your way/God, I’d love for you to stay.” It is a special song, one that is as much a credit to Higgins’ character as her artistic talent. | | 9 |  | Denzel Curry
King of the Mischievous South Vol. 2
'G'Z UP'
‘G’Z UP’ is a chant of the most testosterone-revving kind. Expanding beyond that is difficult and arguably not necessary. It’s a general looking for a war. You listen to it, you run through a wall. ‘G’Z UP’ was released in July as part of a mixtape called "Kings of the Mischievous South, Vol. 2" – the first volume had dropped 12 years ago before Curry’s debut album "Nostalgic 64" had even entered the world. Bringing it all back home seems like a reassurance that Curry, after stretching his sound deep into jazz and R&B on "Melt My Eyez See Your Future", had not lost his Southern roots. It is not stripped back to the point of primitivism, just to the point that whatever ingredient enters the mix – a damned backing chorale, a scared-out-of-its-wits synth part, a relentless percussion loop and a slowly circling bass line – hits at maximum impact. | | 8 |  | Grace Cummings
Ramona
'A Precious Thing'
With her 2022 sophomore album "Storm Queen", Melbourne-born singer Grace Cummings made an album of tasteful restraint that channelled ye olde English troubadour folk and showcased her magnificent blues-opera war cry of a howl without chancing her arm to sound like she was pushing her ceiling. On "Ramona", she went for broke and dared to make an artistic statement that could be adjudged the best she could achieve. ‘A Precious Thing’ is the most sky-scraping vocal performance on the album, which has stiff competition for such a title. The slowly and dramatically building piano and strings arrangement of producer Jonathan Wilson mirror her lines about the steady rise and fall of time as the narrator reflects on her indifference for how her life is unfolding before her. Grace Cummings is the next big thing for Australia. It is just a matter of time. | | 7 |  | Vampire Weekend
Only God Was Above Us
'Hope'
Vampire Weekend’s fifth album "Only God Was Above Us" begins with a defeatist whisper of “Fuck the world” and ends, quite literally, with ‘Hope’. It is a ragged, eight-minute long vision that, regardless of how much must be endured on the way to rock bottom, the human spirit will outlive all of civilisation's institutions. In singer and multi-instrumentalist Ezra Koenig’s vision of the fall of the Western world, phoenixes die never to return, embassies are abandoned, paintings are burned and statues are drowned but his lyric that burns longest in the memory is “The prophet said we’d disappear/The prophet’s gone but we’re still here.” On an album with no shortage of quirky and smirking indie muzak, Koenig is at his most creative on ‘Hope’. A nursery rhyme piano part runs throughout before he launches an agonised guitar solo that sounds as if it is wrenching the future from the present. | | 6 |  | Primal Scream
Come Ahead
'Settlers Blues'
Scottish dance-rock act Primal Scream delivering deliver the most strident and explicit anti-capitalistic album of 2024 was not expected. Closer ‘Settlers Blues’ is a history lesson on settler colonialism: its weapons, its terrible impact and its justifications from those who conduct it. Verse by verse, Bobby Gillespie trawls through the displacement of Indigenous peoples; the crushing of the Jacobites and the Irish by the British; and the mirage of working class liberation. The ongoing genocide conducted in Palestine by Israel with the support of Western powers was the verse that did not need to be spoken to be understood as the reason for the existence of ‘Settlers Blues’. At nine minutes long, it is a dreary trudge of a song and that is only appropriate: the cycle of man’s inhumanity to man that is at its thematic core is endless to those who have suffered it throughout history. | | 5 |  | Father John Misty
Mahashmashana
'Mahashmashana'
Someone spent a lot of time listening to "All Things Must Pass". The nine-minute title track to Father John Misty’s sixth album is a staggering piece destined to throw its arms around the world as it builds on itself, part by part. Mahashmashana, translating to “Great Cremation Ground” in Hinduism, is a space in which deeper spiritual understanding and liberation are achieved and where the cycles of life and death are transcended. It is also a space open for disciples of all religions – the choice made by a songwriter who grew up an evangelical Christian to deploy a foreign religious concept of unification for a title track and an album opener makes for a clear declaration of intent. If ‘the corpse dance’ sounds a reductive way to summarise the concept of mahashmashana, then the unashamedly humanitarian hopes of the song fix the sights on why the writer brought this holy monster together. | | 4 |  | 3%
Kill the Dead
'Coming Home'
The debut album of Australian First Nations hip-hop supergroup 3% was an inconsistent affair as trio Angus Field, Dallas Woods and Nooky charged "Kill the Dead" on cultural recognition and systemic oppression but did not produce the beats to generate commercial cut-through. The best exception to that rule was ‘Coming Home’, which not only has the most fun beat – a sample of Johnny Little’s ‘Royal Telephone’ with a delightful groove and a beautiful string part – but its statement of man-to-man openness and honesty cuts a tear-jerking distinction to Kill the Dead’s mission of justice and reparation. “Why’s it hard to talk to my brothers? I can’t tell ’em how I feel, I can’t tell ’em how I love ’em,” cries Field desperately, bringing a singularly brave and mature reminder to this album protesting monstrous genocide: we cannot control how the powers-that-be treat us, but we can always love each other. | | 3 |  | The Felice Brothers
Valley of Abandoned Songs
'So Long, John'
Paying homage to those who have come before is at the heart of folk music. This rings true on ‘So Long, John’, the sorrowful ballad from the Felice Brothers’ B-side compilation "Valley of Abandoned Songs". Dedicated to American poet John Ashbery, Ian Felice depicts the loss he felt upon Ashbery’s death in 2017 as he finds himself in a world now void of example and direction. The aching sadness and loneliness capture those moments where we pause and take introspection about who we have become and what is left for us now in the time we have. ‘So Long, John’ might have come from the pen of Joni Mitchell. Or Sandy Denny in the ferocious melancholy that brought her ‘Who Knows Where the Time Goes’. Or the Leonard Cohen of ‘Bird on the Wire’. That’s the beauty of folk music’s adherence to an old sound – at its best, a song is timeless. | | 2 | | Kendrick Lamar
Meet the Grahams
'Meet the Grahams'
In the eight years following his anointment as one of the truly great MCs with To Pimp a Butterfly, Kendrick Lamar did not seem fussed to defend his throne. Only two projects had followed, which is a crucial framing of the context of his 2024 beef with pop star Drake – Lamar came back with venom and muscle that he had not wrought into his art for the best part of a decade. ‘Meet the Grahams’ was the middle and the most bloodthirsty of a trio of body blows beginning with ‘euphoria’ and ending with ‘Not Like Us’. This was an apex predator with the scent in his nostrils, dispensing with zingers and japes for damnation, all fire and brimstone over a hypnotic piano figure. Lamar made recent rap beefs look lightweight. What a way to remind the hip-hop world of his powers. | | 1 |  | The Last Dinner Party
Prelude to Ecstasy
'Nothing Matters'
Dressed in Victorian lace and ballgown gloves as the London-based girls present themselves, The Last Dinner Party did not let style triumph over substance. The highpoint of their awaited debut album "Prelude to Ecstasy" captures the tipping point in a relationship where the ‘just friends’ pretence can no longer be maintained. The control is lost, vulnerability is opened and the trust fall is taken. “I dig my fingers in expecting more than just the skin,” whimpers Abigail Morris under a brittle guitar line before the unforgettably strident and emotionally resonant chorus: “You can hold me/Like he held her/And I will fuck you/Like nothing matters,” runs the call, opening up the interpretation that this passion is little more than both parties engaging in revenge for an affair. It is hard to hear faith in the narrator’s romance but Morris holds the hope of a dreamer waiting for the night to end, whatever the cost. | |
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