THE 75 BESTALBUMS OF 2021
VILLAGERS Fever Dreams (DOMINO)
“As you get older,” Villagers’ Conor O’Brien told MOJO this year, “you realise that music is where you need to go for the joy rather than the dread.” Hence the sixth Villagers long-player, while not quite untouched by sadness, was a woozy world away from the angsty indie-folk of O’Brien’s early records: a chamber-pop fantasia that audaciously – and successfully – stretched out to embrace full-on psychedelic soul. Standout track:
The First Day
NICK CAVE & WARREN ELLIS Carnage (GOLIATH)
With the Bad Seeds scattered to the four winds, Nick Cave called on one, first lieutenant Warren Ellis, for his pandemic exorcism. Percolating electronics and heartbreaking loss were familiar from 2019’s Ghosteen (“I’m travelling appallingly alone on a singular road”), but Carnage also re-introduced an older version of Cave: wrathful Old Testament enforcer, navigating absurd tableaux (some strong Grinderman callbacks) with a taste for gospel choirs and dick jokes. Standout track:
White Elephant
ROBERT PLANT & ALISON KRAUSS Raise The Roof (WARNER MUSIC)
The first Plant & Krauss album serendipitously coincided with Led Zeppelin’s 2007 reunion; its long-awaited sequel arrived in time for the 50th anniversary of Led Zep IV, and was again strong enough to hold its own against revivalism. Brit folk was added to the country and blues mix, T Bone Burnett’s all-star friends provided empathetic backup, and there was even a Zeppish portent to their take on Jimmy Reed’s High And Lonesome. A magical rematch. Standout track:
It Don’t Bother Me
LOW Hey What (SUB POP)
2018’s Double Negative, bathed in distortion and electrostatic, became the most acclaimed album of Low’s career, and Hey What – their 13th, but first solely as a duo of Alan Sparhawk and Mimi Parker – hardly compromised on that radicalism; My Bloody Valentine seemed a key antecedent. Nevertheless, the new songs that emerged out of the noise were more strident and anthemic; hymnals that, heroically, now sounded as resilient as they did awesomely apocalyptic. Standout track: Hey
SONS OF KEMET Black To The Future (IMPULSE!)
Shabaka Hutchings’ role as figurehead of the UK jazz revival was compounded by another fine, fiery album by his flagship project. Kemet’s strength, though, was ultimately collective: from core members like vibrational tuba man Theon Cross and drummer Tom Skinner (also busy in Radiohead spin-off The Smile); and from rappers, poets and instrumentalists drawn into their orbit – Kojey Radical, Angel Bat Dawid and Moor Mother, especially, on this fourth outing.
Hustle
Standout track:
THE CORAL
Dilapidated fairgrounds, Arcade Hallucinations, “the smell of candyfloss on the offshore breeze”; if it sometimes seemed The Coral had spent the best part of 20 years building a psychedelic theme park on the Wirral, their 10th album – a double – tackled the job in earnest. Coral Island was the ambitious, intoxicating statement of a band playing to their strengths: The Coral’s very own Ogdens’ Nut Gone Flake, with James and Ian Skelly’s grandfather in the Stanley Unwin role. Standout track: Faceless Angel
(INTERSCOPE) Coral Island (RUN ON) LANA DEL REY Chemtrails Over The Country Club
For the follow-up to 2019’s career-defining Norman Fucking Rockwell, Lana Del Rey was ever keener to manoeuvre herself into a classical pantheon, namechecking Joan Baez, Stevie Nicks and Joni Mitchell (covering, faithfully, the latter’s For Free). The presumption was justified by another superb set of California morality tales, now with as much sun – country, too – as LA noir. Like a Mazzy Star elevated to superstardom, mystique intact. Standout track: Dance Til We Die
PAUL WELLER Fat Pop (Volume 1) (POLYDOR)
With touring a non-starter, Weller’s immense energies were focused on the studio, bouncing out of one fine album (2020’s On Sunset) straight into another. Fat Pop, as the title implied, was a diverse, punchy collection of what in another time would’ve been 7-inches: Weller at his most direct, whether working in punk or soul idioms, or all points in between. The “Volume 1” parenthesis was less of a wry threat, more a tantalising promise of yet more to come. Standout track: Testify
ST. VINCENT Daddy’s Home (LOMA VISTA)
Joni also got namechecked on Annie Clark’s remarkable sixth album as St. Vincent, alongside Nina Simone, Tori Amos, Candy Darling and a litany of heroes from sepiatinged bohemia. Where 2017’s Masseduction was high-concept contemporary machine pop, Daddy’s Home was warmer, groovier, enriched by references to the Stevie, Sly and ’70s songwriter albums that Clark had enjoyed with her father: the Daddy of the title, released from prison in 2019. Standout track:
…At The Holiday Party