best of bluth appetit | finished xo

[bluth]

and that's 2017 finally packaged up in a neat little bow! thx for the comments, i'll make sure i'll stick around as much as exams will allow me to comment on everyone else's before i hibernate again. here's to a ****ty year, let's hope it's better for all of us next time <3

 

full alberms list

 

Spoiler

 

1	Lorde	Melodrama
2	St. Vincent	Masseduction
3	Vince Staples	Big Fish Theory
4	SZA	CTRL
5	Kelela	Take Me Apart
6	Kendrick Lamar	DAMN.
7	Slowdive	Slowdive
8	Priests	Nothing Feels Natural
9	Blanck Mass	World Eater
10	Thundercat	Drunk
11	Fever Ray	Plunge
12	Big Thief	Capacity
13	Charlotte Gainsbourg	Rest
14	The Horrors	V
15	The War on Drugs	A Deeper Understanding
16	Run The Jewels	RTJ3
17	Charly Bliss	Guppy
18	Kelly Lee Owens	Kelly Lee Owens
19	Japanese Breakfast	Soft Sounds From Another Planet
20	Charli XCX	Number 1 Angel
21	Pond	The Weather
22	Wednesday Campanella	Superman
23	Rina Samawaya	RINA
24	Tyler, The Creator	Flower Boy
25	Mondo Grosso	Reborn Again and Always…
26	Rose Ellinor Dougal	Stellular
27	Susanne Sundfor	Music For People In Trouble
28	Syd	Fin
29	Nite Jewel	Real High
30	Alvvays	Antisociallites
31	Ibeyi	Ash
32	Spoon	Hot Thoughts
33	Brockhampton	Saturation II
34	Kesha	Rainbow
35	Mac DeMarco	This Old Dog
36	Bjork	Utopia
37	Sampha	Process
38	Real Estate	In Mind
39	Poppy	Poppy.Computer
40	Goldfrapp	Silver Eye
41	Phoenix	Ti Amo
42	Pixx	The Age of Anxiety
43	Little Dragon	Season High
44	Austra	Future Politics
45	Mount Kimbie	Love What Survives
46	Turnover	Good Nature
47	Actress	AZD
48	Wiley	Godfather
49	Jacques Greene	Feel Infinite
50	Goldlink	At What Cost

 

 

[bluth]

3 minutes ago, bluth said:

 

10 - 1

 

10 DRUNK THUNDERCAT

in a time where nuclear annihilation hung like a cartoonish piano on the end of a string above our heads, drunk was a humble, often comical, reminder about life resuming its daily course. thundercat basically made an entire album about the mundanity of everyday life, but the album is animated by his self-deprecating sense of humour, telling a failed date "i'd rather play mortal kombat anyway" on friend zone. not least, the production throughout this album is gorgeous, straddling various tightropes between r&b, funk, jazz and hip hop, feeling consistently warm and lush in its presentation. 

drunk, above all, felt like an album that was free of pretension, one which catalogued the daily routine of its artist, but managing to do so in a way that felt interesting. it appeals to the sonder we experience, unveiling a life that may not necessarily be exciting, but boundlessly entertaining in its whimsy, humour, and presentation.

 

best sings: friend zone, show you the way, them changes

 

 

9 WORLD EATER BLANCK MASS

in amongst widespread politicking over the past few years, blanck mass offered something which felt like a much more visceral version of a wake-up call on blanck mass. i can't think of any other album which really had me, uh, shook the way i felt when i heard this for the first time - the introduction building up ravenously like a pack of dogs raring to rip you apart, me eyeing the album cover nervously as if it were about to leap through the screen and tear my face off, until rhesus negative shatters through the room, dragging you down through this hell-like oblivion.

world eater uses electronic music in a way which feels so amazingly atmospheric and immersive, it's hard to understand that you're only listening to a piece of audio. we often turn to music as a means of escapism into a better reality, but world eater tests a sense of masochism in us by inviting us into a microcosm which feels comparatively hellish, brooding and foreboding. yet, curiously, when we leave this place after an exhilarating fifty minutes, bruised, scratched and torn to shreds, the first thing we want to do is dive back in and experience it all over again.

 

best sings: rhesus negative, the rat

 

 

8 NOTHING FEELS NATURAL PRIESTS

on nothing feels natural, priests captured a sense of sharpness and rage that most people felt going into this year. the sound of female-lead punk alone existing in 2017 felt like a cathartic moment, but nothing feels natural is a clever, compact assassination of a culture wherein, often, nothing feels natural. 

priests achieve this through the dual presentation of our own personal hardships alongside political ones - the endlessly satisfying, scream-along line "I THOUGHT I WAS A COWBOY BECAUSE I... SMOKED REDS" on jj could just as much be a mockery of an ex as it feels like a sharp take-down of the way consumerism and corporate-branding infects our self-image. all the while, nothing feels natural remains fun to listen to - remaining concise and exciting in the small details like the sax on suck. it's a salient reminder that life beyond emptiness exists, and that, after we come to terms with our identity in trying times we can always go back and smoke reds as if we're a cowboy again because, ultimately, everything means jack ****. although nothing feels natural, nothing feels natural.

 

best sings: jj, suck, nothing feels natural

 

 

7 SLOWDIVE SLOWDIVE

There’s a saying that people experience two deaths: your biological death, and the final time someone mentions your name. In the case of the latter, it could be said that it felt like Slowdive had passed on. It had been decades since their last album, with little sign of another. Then, from beyond the proverbial grave, came their self-titled album, a beautiful, posthumous memento – the sound of music from the afterlife.

                Even if this was unintentional, it’s certainly evoked in the grand space in which this album operates, where the songs feel so vast in scale. In eight songs, Slowdive transported us to another plane, within which the songs possessed the expanse of the night sky, where it felt like we could see galaxies being born, breathing, and dying transiently like mayflies in the dusk, captured beautifully on Star Roving.

Slowdive is more than just an arresting piece of shoegaze and a demonstration of a band at the top of the game, but it also represented something much more comforting – emptiness being filled with warmth again to the sounds of a lost, loved one finally returning home.

 

best sings: star roving, sugar for the pill

 

 

6 DAMN. KENDRICK LAMAR

I think it speaks more to Kendrick’s own track record than the quality of DAMN. that he can receive praise for being a little more slapdash than usual. Sure, a lot of things said about DAMN. are true even if they are annoyingly obvious – “The beat switch in DNA!”, “He gave us bops”, and perhaps the most banal of all – “He’s the best rapper around right now!” Maybe that’s just my inner cynic talking after my own friends who I introduced to Swimming Pools called me a Kendrick-hater for saying this clearly wasn’t as good as his last two, but I think we have to admit a painful truth after DAMN. birthed the most iconic, non-existent album of the year (RIP NATION., 14.02.17 – 16.02.17), which was going to be the true, didactic masterpiece – the real album.

                That’s not to say that DAMN. isn’t excellent of its own accord, because there are incredible moments here. Kendrick really sounds on top of his game as a rapper, as ever, he captures something incredibly astute about our culture, and he gave perfectly serviceable music that offered a new side to his discography. That said, DAMN. suffers from inconsistency, a narrative that gets slightly lost in the middle during LOYALTY, PRIDE and GOD, and possibly one of the worst moments of Kendrick’s career in the cheesy, nasally refrain of LOVE’s “I WANNA BE WIH YHOO.”

                Nonetheless, some of the criticism this album receives reinforces the standards to which Kendrick is held. As he said on Section 80., he’s not just the next “socially-conscious rapper”, he’s a human trying to make sense of the world, something which often can’t be captured through elegant, woven narratives. Kendrick is still the storyteller he always has been with this album and, as we hear on the final track, we understand the very contradiction of his life – as noted by the antithetical track names. For Kendrick to be alive, let alone releasing one of the most acclaimed albums of the year, is a miracle and a blessing, and it’s in this moment that DAMN. successfully reasserts who we’re in the presence of at the moment: after all the Kung Fu Kenny leaping and jumping at beat switches and endless quotable lyrics, we’re reminded to sit down again. Be humble.

 

best sings: dna, element, humble, feel, xxx

 

 

5 TAKE ME APART KELELA

Our perception of the world can often be very different to someone else’s. Memories are rarely concrete, our emotions can infect the past like dye unfurling through water. When we come to terms with the fact that our minds are so indescribably individual, we can become very isolated by the thought that the only person who will truly accept our version of the universe is ourselves.

Kelela acknowledges these feelings on Take Me Apart, a quasi-conceptual work of metallic R&B where emotions and memories float and merge like gaseous clouds inside a galaxy, presenting a universe in which Kelela is the architect. Though Take Me Apart may lack the true, killer moments that Rewind and All The Way Down offered, one can’t deny that it’s one of 2017’s most fully-realised, consistent and conceptual albums, where Kelela has managed to craft something which is so perfectly coherent and beautifully articulated within her own vision.

                Though we may be alone with our own thoughts, Take Me Apart’s cold, futurism is underpinned by something more warm and personal in the album’s more tender moments. Synth lines in Jupiter feel both so enveloping and isolating as if we’re floating in space, while Kelela’s paranoia radiates through the acidic, warbling instrumental on Blue Light, fear reverberates alongside the shuddering production on Enough. Though Kelela may be acknowledging something deeply discomforting on Take Me Apart, there’s no doubt she does it in a way that never loses sight of the place from which this universe emerged: a living, breathing human.

 

best sings: lmk, truth or dare, take me apart, enough, blue light

 

 

4 CTRL SZA

Being young and struggling with your identity is not a new concept, however, it may have certainly been magnified by the rise of social media, our lives now plastered onto digital screens like tattoos on flesh. Someone who may understand this as much as anyone is SZA, who had yet to even release her debut album before being witch-hunted with an excavation of her old tweets and a deluge of slut-shaming.

CTRL comes, as the title suggests, a dialogue about control in the age of the computer and, like the Control of the 1980s by the woman to which this title pays homage (another album which so astutely captured social attitudes of the time), SZA manages to capture something so candid, raw, and true about our culture. We live in a post-Drake world, one that’s obsessed with loyalty and unmasking “snakes” like an episode of Scooby-Doo, but our preoccupation with perfection has left us inorganic as people. SZA does something few people do, and she creates narratives which feel so true and refreshing for it, her catalogues of being the other woman on The Weekend, being a homewrecker on Supermodel. These admissions don’t shroud CTRL in a heavy sense of villainy, but rather, they feel cathartic and refreshingly honest in a world which is increasingly filtered.

                CTRL felt like more than album; it was a general conversation about our culture and our constant grappling with control over our digital identities. SZA addresses these ideas masterfully; the album is gentle in its delivery, elegant in its execution, warm in its touch which is unmistakably human. The greatest irony of CTRL is that, if anything, it tells us that having control over our lives may not be possible, but the greatest sense of control we may have is when we finally accept that.

 

best sings: supermodel, the weekend, go gina

 

 

3 BIG FISH THEORY VINCE STAPLES

Though Vince made something of a sizeable splash in 2015, it perhaps didn’t cause the waves that others have done with their debuts (I’ll stop with the water puns now, or not.) I was someone who wasn’t completely taken with Vince, but then Big Fish Theory came along and completely blindsided me. Vince flaunts his creativity here and his willingness to explore new territory, bringing together rap with so many influences from 90s dance to modern PC.

Vince Staples is more than a big fish, Big Fish Theory sees him flirting with new, unexpected ideas in a way which swells and breaks the fish bowl Vince occupies, the shattered glass tinkling and scratching like metallic synths from SOPHIE’s production. To certain crowds, this may not seem as innovative as it is, but irrespective of that it’s damn well fun to listen to, giving us some particular highlights from this year where we actually got to hear Kendrick and SOPHIE on a track together and have it work so well. It doesn’t entirely rely on aesthetics for impressiveness, and Vince is as astute as ever with his takedowns of rap braggadocio and his keen eye for detail.

Vince’s skill as an artist was never in question, but Big Fish Theory allowed him to spread his wings – or fins – in a way which left me feeling more excited for what’s yet to come. Vince may have been occupying a small pond as a big fish previously, but now it feels as though he’s moved into new bigger territory. It doesn’t feel like something that dwarfs him, but it poses the exciting question as to where he’ll go next.

 

best sings: yeah right, bagbak, big fish, love can be, crabs in a bucket

 

 

2 MASSEDUCTION ST. VINCENT

Ever since we are able to understand words, we are told that too much of a good thing can be bad. We learn from a young age that if we eat too many sweets we will rot our teeth, and we fail to understand how something so pleasurable can be destructive. These warnings are a recognition of the fact that we live in a world of excess – the most beautiful people in society are often the most repulsive, our **** stars are sexually dysfunctional, our religious figures are amoral, our law-makers are corrupt. If pop music is the music of excess, then Masseduction’s use of it reflects a world where we embrace excess to the point where it becomes debilitating – creating an album which is Annie’s most upbeat but, poignantly, her saddest.

                The saccharine jingles on Pills and robotic hooks on Masseduction juxtapose the album’s more reflective moments, making for an album which occupies a curious ground between two places – between the high and the comedown, between love and raw lust, between youth and adulthood. It’s something which signifies transition, as Annie navigates being an indie musician on the cusp of being truly mainstream, while coming to terms with the loss of youth on Los Ageless and the loss of relationships on Happy Birthday Johnny. As a listener, we succumb to the sad moments on Masseduction, while turning back around to alleviate our feelings through the dopamine rushes of the likes of Sugarboy, mirroring our own cyclic movements between depression and absurd highs.

                It makes for, in and of itself, a poignant illustration of mass, vapid consumerism – the way Masseduction buoys between addictive highs and deflating lows mirrors the unsustainability of our own excess: whether that be our role in mass-consumerism, or our self-destructive, romantic obsessions. As with any cycle of dependency, we know there must be a moment when it finally breaks. As Annie sings on Smoking Section, “And sometimes I feel like an inland ocean / Too big to be a lake, too small to be an attraction”, Masseduction grapples with the 2017 Annie Clark, too big to be truly indie, too small to be truly mainstream. It hints at a monotony that is soon to break, and we, as an audience, watch helplessly as Annie falls over the side of the building, and, as she begins to float over the taxis below, we feel ourselves moving with her.

 

best sings: los ageless, masseduction, pills, sugarboy, happy birthday johnny

 

 

  Reveal hidden contents

 

1 MELODRAMA LORDE

One of the most romanticised things in the world is youth – a supposed holy grail of first times, new experiences and endearing naivety. Our music industry has thirty-year old songwriters creating songs for twenty-year old singers to sell to teenagers; our high school dramas feature beautiful adults portraying pubescent teens. There is such a towering pressure placed on us to be grateful for our youth, and thus, when we become debilitated by social anxiety, towering debt, and a political system which ignores us, we can sometimes feel as though we’re wasting the most precious thing we own, and that we are ungrateful for feeling so. It’s no surprise that millennials have been written off as the entitled, whiney generation. Our feelings are all just melodrama.

                Lorde is possibly the most authentic voice of the youth the industry has seen for a while. On Melodrama, Lorde didn’t feed us another bastardised and filtered-to-**** portrayal of youth, but rather, she gave us something with the artistic resonance of poetry, a stunning work of unique beauty and haunting realism. Lorde managed to capture so many things about the tangible experiences of being young – the glittering nightlife evoked by Green Light’s dancing piano riffs, the brooding hedonism of Homemade Dynamite, the heart-breaking relatability when Lorde sways alone in her living room, wondering whether she can ever be loved on Liability.

                With Melodrama, Lorde managed to capture something so beautifully real and reassuring about our lives – she found a place where the lights from the dancefloor were erupting geysers, the blurry neon signs of the city bled together to become fluorescent brushstrokes on a canvas and that our bodies could paint the road in shimmering red and chrome if we hit it hard enough. It’s an album which enshrines the melodrama that surrounds our lives, offering a warm touch of solidarity for our imperfect lives. While it doesn’t offer solutions to our problems, Melodrama offers something far more comforting and real – you may not be loved, you may not be stable, you may party too hard and you may be fiscally irresponsible, you may have no direction in life and, at times, you may have no friends, you may have no clue what goes on in the “real world” and you may be wasting your one and only chance at youth, but, in spite of all that, you are never alone.

 

best sings: green light, homemade dynamite, sober, writer in the dark, liability

 

 

for the new page 

[Unoriginal]

Melodrama

MASSEDUCTION

CTRL

TMA

[World Eater]

Girl I missed SO MUCH and I haven't visited this thread since yesterday  But WHEEEWWWWWW you really came THROUGH  Love the entire top 20 (with like 2 or 3 exceptions)  We places some alberms, maybe even some from ours top 10s, at the same places but I'm not gonna spoil tew mutch 

[Wicked]

3, 5, 6, 7 & 10 :clap:

 

The rest, as my fave would say, idk ha.

[bluth]

57 minutes ago, Unoriginal said:

Melodrama

MASSEDUCTION

CTRL

TMA

glad 2 see u like it 

 

56 minutes ago, AlexisNeiers said:

Girl I missed SO MUCH and I haven't visited this thread since yesterday  But WHEEEWWWWWW you really came THROUGH  Love the entire top 20 (with like 2 or 3 exceptions)  We places some alberms, maybe even some from ours top 10s, at the same places but I'm not gonna spoil tew mutch 

ffdfs yeah i wanted to get this out of the way quicK. TASTE tho. excited to see ur stuff!

55 minutes ago, Wicked said:

3, 5, 6, 7 & 10 :clap:

 

The rest, as my fave would say, idk ha.

get into 1, 2, 4, 8 and 9 

[theblackestday]

Masseduction and Melodrama suck sorry

 

But BFT, TMA and DAMN & Slowdive make this a perfect top 10

World Eater and Nothing Feels Natural too

I hate how good you are at writeups

[MP2K]

Spoiler

top 5 sums up 2017

 

[Penk]

5,2, and 1 are my favorites. Love everything you wrote. Excellent work bruth

[Playa Playa]

Your words are amazing! They really captured what I liked about BFT and Melodrama.

 

And even though I'm not a fan of CTRL, I loved what you said about that album. It points out perfectly why SZA is having her moment.

 

Great countdown 

[Lazuli]

This top 10 is SNATCHED  

Thundercat is cute  

Slowdive  Such an amazing album 

DAMN, Take Me Apart and Ctrl all did great this year too  

MESSEDUCTION  Didn't think anyone would dare put this so high tho! 

AND THE #1

You described it so perfectly  It really deserves to be #1  

[TheWayWeWere]

Melodrama wins after all

CTRL and TMA should've been in top 3 tho

AND HOW THE **** YOU WRITE THESE AMAZING REVIEWS WHEW

[Eeveelution]

A top 7.  And I'm def gonna relisten to Priests sometime soon. 

 

Great countdown overall, hope to see you next year.  

[Tom Vercetti]

Ngl I expected Kelela to snatch but a top 5 place is more than acceptable. Overall this was a satisifying countdown with a lot of variety. A couple/few may be in the top 10 for me as well. I hope next year will be better for all of us as well. 

[alexanderao]

Look at you out here finishing on Dec. 23rd!

 

As someone who has always believed Kendrick to be very overrated, I liked DAMN. (especially LUST.)