2024: Top Ten

For what it's worth, there is no Charli XCX on this list. Read on. 

10. Mick Harvey - Five Ways To Say Goodbye

While nothing can be underrated in the age of Internet, what other word could you use to describe Mick Harvey's solo career? Five Ways To Say Goodbye is Harvey's interpretations of songs by the likes of Ed Kuepper and Dave McComb as well as a few excellent originals. However, you will not be able to tell which is which. He totally reimagines the songs (the word 'cover' is not even applicable here) and makes them his own. One of the most beautiful albums of 2024, a year that was very kind to Nick Cave's associates, both current and former.  

Best song: "Demolition"

9. The Messthetics & James Brandon Lewis - s/t

Whether it is food or music, I find the word 'fusion' absolutely repulsive. And I shudder at the very idea of jazz rock. However, this self-titled album by The Messthetics & James Brandon Lewis is a pure undiluted thrill ride. Adventurous avant-garde jazz plus the rhythm section of Fugazi - what's not to like? Music of incredible intensity and intelligence. Plus, the ferocious jazz punk of "Emergence" is one of the best things ever.

Best song: "Emergence"

8. Beth Gibbons - Lives Outgrown 

While Portishead is a band I admire rather than love, Beth Gibbons's Out Of Season is one of the most cherished vinyl records in my collection. Autumnal, soulful music that becomes essential listening in the month of October. Lives Outgrown is her first album in 22 years, and you can sense how much thought went into creating it. These shapeless folk songs are not particularly immediate but further listens are rewarding. It is all very subtle, but also quite powerful. 

Best song: "Floating On A Moment"

7. The Libertines - All Quiet On The Eastern Esplanade

Oh I know what you are thinking. Who the hell even cares for The Libertines in 2024? Well, oddly, I do. I still believe that Pete Doherty is a great songwriter, and what's more, Carl Barât has written some good songs for a change. Just forget about the contexts and the background bullshit, and you will get a collection of eleven tight, engaging, tastefully ragged songs. They wrap it up beautifully, too, with a wistful tune and a few giggles ("Songs They Never Play On The Radio").

Best song: "I Have A Friend"

6. Max Décharné - Night Darkens The Streets

The Fall. The Go-Betweens. Kate Bush. These are just some of the bands / artists I have called the best ever at various points of my life. There was a time, too, when I said The Flaming Stars were the greatest. It was a sad day when they disbanded, and it was something of a pleasant shock when I found out (by chance - how else?) that Max Décharné has a new album out. Sadly, this is very obscure, but if you do find it (it is not even on Spotify), you will hear stylish, literate music that ranges from stripped down late-night balladry (the vibraphone-based "Doctor Caligari Will See You Now") to toe-tapping rockabilly boogie ("Last Diner On the Last Highway"). Record Collector called it the coolest album of 2024.

Best song: "Doctor Caligari Will See You Now"

5. The Cure - Songs Of A Lost World

So finally it happened. After years of teasing, after long months of false hopes and fake announcements, Robert Smith has finally done it. He has released the new album, and it is The Cure's best in a very long time. Songs Of A Lost World sounds like a warmer, deeper Disintegration, and that is all I ever wanted from them at this point. They won't give me another Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me, but this is a near-masterpiece. Classic build-ups, beautiful tunes, and that boyish, unfading voice that will make you believe in witchcraft.

Best song: "And Nothing is Forever"

4. Blixa Bargeld & Teho Teardo - Christian & Mauro

Blixa Bargeld will never release another album with Nick Cave, and maybe that's a good thing. The last Einstürzende Neubauten album was excellent, and this ongoing collaboration with the Italian composer Teho Teardo is pure bizarre magic. The German restraint and Italian expressionism come together beautifully. Chamber pop has rarely been this eerie, and this strange. The lyrics of "Dear Carlo" have to be heard to be believed.

Best song: "Dear Carlo"

3. Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds - Wild God

After hearing this album live, and after listening to it for a few months now, I do not think I can improve on what I wrote back in August: Wild God is not exactly straightforward but it does not hide under any pretence. It is filled with joyous, expressive sound that swallows everything around. Grand orchestration, powerful piano chords, expansive backing vocals... So much so that there is a sense that the album is simply too big to clock in under 45 minutes. It almost feels like it should have been a double or even a triple album. Instead, Wild God is a concerted, life-affirming explosion of pure joy. 

Best song: "Conversion"

2. Bill Ryder-Jones - Iechyd Da

God it is hard to do this list as any of these top five albums could be my number one this year. For instance, there is no doubt in my mind that with Iechyd Da (Welsh for 'good day'), Bill Ryder-Jones created his masterpiece. These are his most realised melodies, his most accomplished lyrics, his most elaborate arrangements. Iechyd Da is a well-honed, intimate work that moves me to absolute tears. If you have a vinyl record player, buy it on vinyl. If you have a tape recorder, buy it on tape. But get it somehow, it is a special album that an artist only makes once in their lifetime.

Best song: "This Can't Go On"

1. Peter Perrett - The Cleansing 

This, too, is a once in a lifetime masterpiece, and I happen to know that Peter Perrett feels the same way. The Cleansing is a work of great confidence and experience. There is a lot of darkness on the album (the haunting, piano-based "All That Time") but also a lot of light ("Fountain Of You" is one of those love anthems he could always do so effortlessly) and even playfulness ("Secret Taliban Wife" is a perfect pop song with a dark lyrical twist). And it is all infused with Perrett's melodic wit that has never really left him. Twenty songs, each one is amazing. I can't wait to see him in Madrid in a couple of months, obviously.

Best song: "Mixed-Up Confucius"

***

Song of the Year.

There was quite a lot of musical catharsis in 2024 (the ending of "Bleed" by The Necks, the strings break in the chorus of "Dear Carlo", the intensity of The Messthetics' "Emergence"), but I'm going to pick "How It Feels" by Cold Specks. She has gone through quite a lot lately, and this soulful, gospel-tinged comeback single brings me all the way back to that club in Munich where I was high on absinthe and she was doing the masterful Neuroplasticity in its entirety. So great to have her back.

"December Will Be Magic Again"

Incredibly, Kate Bush recorded this Christmas single in 1980. It was bookended by the anti-war "Army Dreamers" and the existential "Sat In Your Lap", and yet here it is, a true wonder of a song that has all that dream-like romanticism, that childish yearning which defines December. Five minutes of pure magic, and the "like the snow" line never fails to sweep me right out of the window and into the Christmas lights. Like... the SNOW. Merry Christmas, Wesołych Świąt, etc.!

Conclave

You know that feeling when someone's hand is rummaging inside your backpack? It does not even matter whether you know whose hand that is. Your enemy's or your best friend's. What matters is this great sense of discomfort that ties a painful knot inside your stomach. You feel powerless, cheated, compromised. 

Which is exactly the sense I got when I watched films like Breaking The Waves or Dogville all those years ago. One way of looking at it would be to say Lars von Trier is a masterful director who can really get into you. I would argue, however, that the sour taste goes way beyond that. Because I do not actually mind the sense of discomfort when it comes to art (after all, there is nothing especially comforting about the image of Leopold Bloom ogling girls on the beach), it is manipulation that I find so jarring.  

Von Trier is not even the worst culprit. The Danish director is hardly idealogical (as he himself would be the first to admit), he is only there to manipulate your senses. Which, let's admit, is hardly a criminal act. To some extent, most art does that in order to exert impact on its readers and viewers. It is just that von Trier mutilates a duck for you to get there. Whether he does that figuratively or physically is an entirely different matter; the problem is that it all results in a certain lack of sincerity that has little to do with great art. Still, it is somehow much, much worse when art goes after your politics. Like Conclave, for example.  

And God do I hate to say that. Because I was really enjoying the meticulously constructed tension right until that unpredictable final act. An act so unpredictable as to be completely and utterly predictable.

The film is based on Robert Harris's 2017 eponymous novel about the death of a Pope and a rather lengthy election of a new one. This could sound impossibly dull, except that the devil is, of course, in the details. Actors like Ralph Fiennes and Stanley Tucci really stick their teeth into the material, and right away you are caught in the little games that everyone seems to be playing here. The sheer amount of plotting and scheming is quite impressive, and it is intriguing to get behind the scenes of a world so famously cloaked from the rest of us. Especially when you add to it the lush cinematography (the scene with umbrellas is immediately iconic), the unsettling music and the silent and mysterious figure of Isabella Rossellini. 

That there is so much dirt and backstabbing in the world of organised religion is hardly surprising. That there are different factions within the Catholic church is equally credible. That the whole thing is teeming with scandal is common knowledge. The film deals with these matters very skilfully (the more I think about that script, the more Machiavellian it gets), and I actually enjoyed those brief yet insistent moments of the outside world encroaching upon the intimate proceedings. However, when the final act finally started, I actually began to whisper to myself, prayer-fashion, begging for them not to go there. But they did, full-on. 

It is not even about my politics, really. Or anyone else's, for that matter. Being an immigrant, I hated the image of that girl on the balcony at the end of Knives Out. And being an atheist, I equally hated the cheap resolution that Conclave finally settles into. Still, I am not going to spoil it for anyone. Because I believe the film is worthy of being seen (worthy of an Oscar for Ralph Fiennes, too) - if only to witness how badly it all falls apart at the end. With what manipulative twist. With what religious abandon.