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Fear City and Liars – But It’s Okay in the end
The top tracks of the year are an eclectic mix from seemingly energised artists during their time off stage
THE coronavirus pandemic dictated everything in 2020. Live gigs (remember them) were a no-go, but it allowed bands and artists to take stock and deliver one of the most exciting years for Scottish music that I have seen for this annual “best tracks” list.
This eclectic journey which began with a long list of more than 300 tracks, ended with a top 10 dominated by female artists.
We will avoid using the cliche “girl power” – except we just did.
Here you will find everything from alternative rock, dance, electronica, hip-hop, rap, indie, choral, punk, postgrunge, folk and, well, see for yourself.
The full 100 can be seen online, where there will be a YouTube and Spotify playlist.
20. TAAHLIAH – MIND BODY SOUL
The first black trans DJ and producer to be nominated and win in two categories in the Scottish Alternative Music Awards did so with an unreal, experimental and disorientating dancefloor monster track that shows the new Glasgow-based artist with nothing officially released is an underground creative force to be reckoned with.
19. DYLAN FRASER – I DO THESE THINGS FOR ME
The exciting new Bathgate 18-year-old artist is at his best on this darkly twisting electro-synth epic which comes over like a poppier Nine Inch Nails from his superb debut The Storm EP. He says it’s about the internet and how you see everyone posting about things they are going to do and achieve but nothing really ever happens.
18. STILL HOUSE PLANTS – CRREEAASE
The Glasgow School Of Art-formed trio are very much a law unto themselves and their latest album, Fast Edit, is a continuation of their harmonic but fractious discordant improvisations which in the wrong hands would just sound like an ambiguous mess. This standout track has its roots in an irresistibly mutated groove, and like a funky abstract of Sonic Youth force fed Red Hot Chili Peppers, hangs together very nicely while appearing to fall apart at the seams.
17. LIAM ROBERTSON – COMMON WEAVER
The debut Village of Killin EP from one half of the Perth producer duo Clouds, might from the title signal pastoral folk. Nothing could be further from the truth.
This standout track, is a fascinating experimental, brooding blend of shapeshifting minimalist techno, bubbling bass rhythms, broken tribal beats, stop-start fast-slow dystopia and all underpinned by eerily distorted vocal samples that together sound like the hastily gathered debris of dance music fashioned into a cerebral post-dub.
16. BLUE ROSE CODE FT KARINE POLWART – (I WISH YOU) PEACE IN YOUR HEART
Edinburgh-born songwriter Ross Wilson won’t be heard on Capital. There won’t be plays on Radio 1. With a jazz trumpet, a jazzy inflection and a whole dollop of soul, this emotional, pastoral, contemporary alt-folk anthem provides guaranteed chills.
15. HARSH WINTERS – LIARS
A post-rock vs country influenced track from The Marriage of a Killer and a Bird Song, the debut album from the new project by Edinburgh-based singer-songwriter Luke G Joyce who ended up in the home of country music, Nashville for its launch. “My life has changed so much over the last few years – for better and for worse – and there is a lot of that in this record,” he says.
14. DEATH BED – ICE CREAM
A rabid lo-fi infectious screaming riffola beast made to melt eardrums and make moshpits [should they ever exist again] explode from the Glasgowbased experimental-metallers’ barnstorming debut album No Breeze In Hell. It could be the angry son of Nirvana’s Bleach.
13. THE WILD PLACES – FEAR CITY
With an opening guitar hook that has whispers of the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ Under the Bridge, the Glasgow alt-indie three-piece fashion an altogether more atmospheric mood, with a flicker of desolation, a hint of regret and lost love, a smidgeon of optimism, neat loud-soft-loud dynamics, a soaring, spine-tingling Thom Yorke vocal pay-off halfway through and a drum finale that sounds like shots in the dark. An exquisite standout from a debut album and easily their most inspired moment to date.
12. POPUP – FOLLOW
This Glasgow four-piece indie-art-pop combo gathered 10,000 MySpace fans in a week at a time when that was worth a jot. They released a debut album in 2008 and then nothing... for 12 years. They then deign to release the devil-may-care second Whimpers with its mash of kitchensink Aidan Moffat-style drama and potent guitar jams and this eccentric, messy, fast-slow-fast-faster, thigh slapping cracker of a third track that sounds like it was made up on the spot. Lazy blighters.
11. LEWIS CAPALDI – BEFORE YOU GO (ORCHESTRAL)
A soaring version of the song about suicide by the superstar Scots singer-songwriter, left, which topped the UK Singles chart in January. He says it was “by far the most personal tune” he had ever written and he drew on feelings surrounding his aunt who took her own life when he was younger.
10. AMY DUNCAN – THE WHOLE TOWN
The Hidden World, the seductive seventh album featuring the golden larynx of the innovative Edinburghborn singer-songwriter – a classically trained double bass player – offers this tantalising, sensual and yet still unsettling not-quite-three
minute melodic meditation underpinned by harplike synths from another galaxy that just ends far too soon.
9. LIVMASSIVE & HESSIAN RENEGADE – TARGE
This inspired Glasgowbased experimental collaboration born as a masters degree project, sees the classical/folk vibes of viola player LivMassive aka Rachael Olivia Black, above, team up with the rave-rap duo to create a sweeping R Rated pounding blast from their EP Erocean that sounds like nothing else you have ever heard.
8. LUKI – THE PARTS
The singer, pianist and synth player based in Glasgow says she began her musical career by accident in her late twenties, after making a soundscape for a toilet at a party and realising – quite suddenly – that everything before had been a mistake. This reveals itself in what in different hands could be a standard Tori Amos knock off – but with Lucy Duncan’s beautifully witchy vocals, which sound like their at the edge of an operatic breakdown and an undercurrent of weird sonic noises, you have this barking treasure.
7. GLASVEGAS – KEEP ME SPACE
Seven years after the release of their last album Later… When The TV Turns To Static, the Glasgow’s cult heroes returned with this triumphant taster from their fourth album Godpseed that is a sublime sonic blast of Ramones vs Phil Spector wall of sound vs My Bloody Valentine. With the LP slated for release in April, this track is their finest four-and-a-bit minutes so far.
6. ZOË BESTEL – SHOW WHAT YOU’RE MADE OF
One of the purest “can sing the telephone directory” voices around, the Dumfries and Galloway nu-folk songstress put aside her trademark ukelele and recruited collaborators on this compellingly sparse mid-tempo wonky-synth cover of an obscure song by Glasgow’s Medicine Men. The triumphant tune is the standout track on the Last Night From Glasgow’s The Isolation Sessions album, where artists covered each other’s songs with the proceeds going to venues forced to close due to Covid-19 lockdown laws.
5. CONSCIOUS ROUTE & TRUE NOTE – BROTHERS
A skyscraper slice of space-age electro places the Edinburgh-based emcee’s sharp political posturing on the dancefloor but with an inspired reflective piano-led twist at the end. In the year where Black Lives Matter has come to the fore, this and Lost Routes, the landmark album it comes from, serve to show that really, the world should not have needed to be told that.
4. LIZABETT RUSSO – RELEASE
This intriguing Edinburgh-based Romanian singer-songwriter conjures up a haunting blend of contemporary jazz, avant garde folk and world music, a combination which might be off-putting to some, but on this heavenly fifth track on her recordedduring-lockdown fourth album While I Sit Here and Watch This Tree Volume 1, there is a bewitching aural catharsis that resonates particularly during Covid. When she sings, “I let go, I set myself free”, you can feel a burden lift and can only tip your hat to a world-class artist at work.
3. DJANGO DJANGO – GLOWING IN THE DARK
The Edinburgh-formed avant-surf-pop combo are at their best with this hookfilled acid-inflected breast-banging title track from an eagerly-awaited forthcoming album which is the music equivalent of Pringles – once you pop you can’t stop. Built around a sample from one of Dave Maclean’s spoken word records then plushly upholstered with Moog synths and drum loops, it is one to play again-and-again-and-again.
2. THE BLUE NILE – HERE COME THE BLUEBIRDS
A new Blue Nile song. Surely not. But, yes. While unheralded, this is the best of four unreleased songs for a newly remastered and reconstituted version of their fourth album High by one of the greatest ever bands from Scotland. It has all the intimacy and heartbreaking sophistication of their meisterwerk Hats and while ever so slightly stripped down, it has those trademarks building orchestral synths, and provides all the “hairs-on-the-backof-the-neck-standing-on-end” moments that their best work always manages. And there are “yeah, yeah, yeahs” to boot. If a voice was a Covid vaccine, then Paul Buchanan is the cure.
1. SARYA – I DON’T KNOW WHERE I’M GOING (BUT IT’S OKAY)
This perfectly articulated the feeling of emotional disorientation and heartache that Covid-19 brought, with the power to wash aside the isolation blues with an irresistible cauldron of indie, electronica and folk sounds and the soaring high-pitched vocal melancholy of the Edinburgh-based Taiwanese-American singersongwriter/poet.
It is taken from her glorious third EP which she describes as a “meditation on self-care, a rap to emotional openness, an ode to feeling okay (maybe even great) about you, yourself, and everything.”