Bearing in mind this is cassette-recorded, a demo collection in all but name, the recent past has produced few more fascinating characters than Beal, a head-turning backstory as nothing compared to music that's sometimes Alan Lomax field recording blues hollerer, sometimes Tom Waits clanking busker from hell, sometimes post-Jandek late night agoraphobic self-critical folkie. A couple of times he's pretty much rapping. Its imperfections are what make it, the lo-fi recording and often playing giving the impression of a layer of cerebrum erased. You can almost certainly assume he'll never replicate it, but as an individualist curio it more than justifies its place.
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24 Fanfarlo - Rooms Filled With Light
Despite the band’s talk of textural and electronic overhauls, their second album is evolution rather than revolution. Featuring far fewer of Reservoir's folkish leanings and with the Arcade Fire dial moved forward to The Suburbs' charging sense of purpose, it's not an immediate hook-laden rush, which turns out to be to its strength. For all the underlying additions of synths and electronics they haven't lost touch with what they do best: a slightness of touch with melody and restraint with production and arrangement, rather than just dumping a load on top of everything. The early charges turn into contemplative internalised musing, sometimes earnest but never apocalyptic.
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Fanfarlo - "Deconstruction" from stereogum on Vimeo.
23 David Byrne & St Vincent - Love This Giant
I don't know what we thought this combination might sound like, but the underscoring by a full funk brass section probably wasn't it. It fits in ways other than just standing aside from their usual discographies, though, Byrne harnessing his art schooled dilettante stream of consciousness through old themes and new observant poetry, while Annie Clark's hesitant outsider anxieties gets taken for a ride, from ice queen to electrified kookstress. The pair inform and engage each other even if they don't duet that often, suggesting a certain passing of the torch between generations of obtusely eclectic songwriters with presicent thoughts and quixotic delivery. it feels like fun.
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22 Animal Collective - Centipede Hz
Having taken a lick of paint off the mainstream with Merriweather Post Pavilion, the returned to four-strong AnCo delved back into the morass of busy sampledelica (including a Johnnie Walker radio jingle) and warping electronics. Nowadays there's a central structure to their freeform investigations - however much sparking and whirring clutter the songs throw out, there's more than likely a vocal melody and a series of ideas that never quite get round to falling over into a massive heap. Freak-folk, weird Americana, odd electronica and purest polyrhythmic spontaneity make for a sensory overload that at core makes a kind of sense, if only to the committed.
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21 Perfume Genius - Put Your Back N 2 It
If Mike Hadreas' first set of uncomfortably close confessionals felt like autobiography, moving slightly on to more emotively driven narratives proved a way of dealing with wider personal issues at one remove, couching scenes set amid heartbreak, family and self-loathing in that cracked, heart on sleeve voice usually within frail minimalism, the piano sounding as bruised as the basic emotion. The production heightens everything around it, knowing when to peel back to pin-drop quiet and when to layer in effects and extra instrumentation. Nothing Hadreas is involved in is ever likely to be easy, casual listening, but maybe nobody has approached difficult subjects with such lyrical openness.
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