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The Orielles’ fourth LP, Tableau
New album: This fourth, sprawling, ambitious, cinematic, genre-spanning double LP by the Halifax trio of singer/bassist Esmé Hand-Halford and co is an enthralling, constantly morphing mix of psychedelia, prog, jazz, funk, R&B, indie, space pop, electronica, house and disco
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Crack Cloud: Tough Baby
New album: Eclectic, original, energised and experimental, this is an enthralling third post-punk, pop, rock and thunderous concoction release by the Vancouver collective led by drummer and lead vocalist Zach Choy filled with the passionate and oddball
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Jake Blount
New album: After his acclaimed 2020 solo debut Spider Tales, the American bluegrass fiddler, banjo player, Afrofuturist and historian returns with a starkly beautiful, atmospheric album drawing on old spiritual numbers and set in a climate-changed, apocalyptic world
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Jennifer Vanilla’s Castle In The Sky
New album: Wonderfully inventive, eccentric new LP of talky electronica, dance, funk, jazz and pop by gender fluid persona of Becca Kauffman, the performance artist, vocalist, and voice over artist based in New York City
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Black Midi’s Hellfire
New album: With heatwaves and wildfires ablaze globally, there could hardly be a more prescient title or dystopian theme by the London prog-rock-jazz experimentalist, whose third LP is strangely among their most accessible among its lightning riffs and stop-start energy of King Crimson or even Buckethead proportions
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Wu-Lu’s debut album Loggerhead
Debut album: A strikingly alternative and genre-defying release by the south London producer and multi-instrumentalist Miles Romans-Hopcraft with influences and echoes from grunge to grime, trip hop, electronica to jazz, dark 80s Factory Records era, Tricky to DJ Shadow to Slipknot
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Moor Mother’s Jazz Codes
New album: A mesmeric new album that began as poetry book by the American artist Camae Ayewa mixing jazz, blues, soul, hip-hop and spoken word in her own form of Black Quantum Futurism group, her multi-artform fusion of black history ontology
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Seven Psalms by Nick Cave and Warren Ellis
New album: Less an LP of songs, more a 25-minute series of low-key ambient synth pieces by Ellis over which Cave’s spoken word prayers of reflective, intense, meditative poetry on death, sin, guilt, grief and more
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Kae Tempest: The Line Is A Curve
New album: An emotionally candid, tender, vulnerable and quietly declamatory fourth album by the writer-all-rounder, mixing hip-hop and spoken word with electronica and pop, with some nicely chosen guest appearances
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Alabaster DePlume: Gold
New album: The nom de plume of London-based Mancunian jazz artist Angus Fairbairn returns with a mesmeric selection of 19 numbers, his intimate jittery saxophone embellished with a wider range of acoustic sounds, choral backing, and offbeat and inspiringly strange spoken word
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aya’s album - im hole
Album: Quite unlike any other LP of the last 12 months or longer, this highly experimental work by Huddersfield-raised artist is avant-garde electronica splattered with wittily odd disembodied vocals resulting in psychedelic states of poetic “transient psychosis”
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Favourite selection part 2.
Favourite albums of 2021 – Part 2: Welcome the second instalment, following Part 1, which can be found here. A huge number of excellent releases, of which again this is just a selection many of which were written during, and about lockdown, but also saw many outstanding voices emerge as well as innovative sounds developed
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Take your pick. Are your favourites here? Also check out Part 2 coming soon.
Favourite albums of 2021, part 1: Another difficult year for everyone, but from soul and jazz, electro-pop the experimental and avant-garde, an outstanding one for music releases, perhaps in part because out of diversity comes great art. Also feel free to explore Part 2, which is now available to view here.
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I Will Not … Behave Myself
New album: The Wirral’s Louisa Roach and co return after the acclaimed 2018 LP Revolution of Mind with stirring, feisty, rebellious songs that rally against injustice, celebrate society’s outsiders, filled with seething, articulate anger about everything from food banks to the patriarchy
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Public Service Broadcasting’s Berlin album
New album: The historical archive-inspired band’s fourth LP is entirely centred around the city of Berlin, and is a far more impressionist and instrumental than previous, with German language vocals and a nod to Weimar era and David Bowie’s Low album
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New album: With limited availability, an excellent fifth album in two years by the collective headed by producer Inflo (Dean Josiah) centres around growing up in inner city London with a mix of old-school soul and African styles
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Kojaque: Town's Dead
New album: An original, distinctive voice in hip hop in this ear-catching second LP by Kevin Smith from Dublin, filled with dark corners of drugs, gentrification, difficult relationships and city soundscapes, an edgy New Year’s Eve and articulate, heavy accented anger
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Dean Blunt
New album: This follow-up to the 2014 album by the East Londoner frontman of the mischievous alt-pop duo Hype Williams (named after the video director) is a bizarre, offbeat collection of 10 short songs mixing droll, deep-voiced delivery with a range of almost cinematic instrumentation
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Loraine James’s third album, Reflection.
Album review: Restlessly imaginative, with arrhythmic oddness, jittery beats, sounds and disembodied voices, spoken word and trap-hop, this experimental electronica album by the London producer by is an candid expression of the mind in 2020 lockdown
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Greentea Peng’s debut LP Man Made
Album review: The debut album by the south Londoner is has woozy, easy, hazy, lazy summer feel, a mix of languid hip hop, reggae, jazz, and soul with a dash of dub, a dribble of drum’n’bass and even psych with a hippie sprinkle
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