FEATURE:
Outsiders, Inside
PHOTO CREDIT: Unsplash
Great Alternative, Rock and Indie Albums from 2017
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THEY might not accrue the same sort of hype and celebration…
PHOTO CREDIT: Unsplash
as the big names of the mainstream – but that is what makes these artists so good! I have been thinking about the best Indie, Rock and Alternative albums of the year: the sort of record that possesses more depth, intrigue and power than your average chart-bound offering.
Here are twelve records I recommend you add to your collection as soon as possible. They all bristle with energy, fascination and outsider-kick – from some of the best songwriters in music right now…
ALBUM COVERS: Getty Images
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The National - Sleep Well Beast
Release Date: 8th September
Label: 4AD
Critical Snapshot:
“Some will fault the National for not evolving their sound more radically, or speaking more explicitly to the political moment. But Sleep Well Beast is what it is: an emotional battlefield, beautifully drawn, familiar and true. Berninger voices a panicked, depressive insomniac who might be any of us, trying to hold it together while everything falls apart” – Rolling Stone
Stream the album here.
Manchester Orchestra - A Black Mile to the Surface
Release Date: 29th July
Label: Lorna Vista Recordings
Critical Snapshot:
“Manchester Orchestra have always been earnest, though; it’s just that, until now, they’ve been hamstrung by their own impulses. By consciously interrogating everything they do, they’ve created something that doesn’t need a condescending suffix to justify its existence. It’s a new high-water mark for the band, and one well worth the pain to reach” – Drowned in Sound
Stream the album here.
Julien Baker - Turn Out the Lights
Release Date: 27th October
Label: Matador Records
Critical Snapshot:
“…By the end of the album, she’s landed on another cluster of paradoxes: “I’m better off learning how to be/Living with demons I’ve/Mistaken for saints/If you keep it between us/I think they’re the same." The way she sings it, you’d believe she’s telling her secrets to you and you alone, all evidence to the contrary. You’d believe that loving your demons—not banishing them—might just be the secret to that evasive grace” – Pitchfork
Stream the album here.
Fleet Foxes- Crack-Up
Release Date: 16th June
Label: Nonesuch; Warner Bros.
Critical Snapshot:
“Ultimately, Crack-Up is an album about purpose, mutual support and reconciliation, nowhere better expressed than in “Third Of May/Odaigahara”, the complex, nine-minute song quixotically chosen as the first single. The title refers to the Goya painting celebrating resistance to Napoleon; but it’s also, apparently, the birthday of Skyler Skjelset, Pecknold’s bandmate, co-producer and lifelong best friend, separation from whom has clearly triggered the undertow of betrayal and regret coursing beneath the album’s surface. “Aren’t we made to be crowded together, like leaves?” muses Pecknold over miasmic strings, pounding piano and guitar. It’s as if, trapped in the quicksand of fatalism, he’s urgently seeking resolution through the reflection of his life in others: “To be held within one’s self is deathlike, oh I know/But all will be, for mine and me, as we make it”. And as Crack-Up confirms, things often work out so much better when we work with others” – Independent
Stream the album here.
Robert Plant – Carry Fire
Release Date: 13th October
Label: Nonesuch Records Inc.
Critical Snapshot:
“Plucky folk ballad ‘Season’s Song’ stands out as one of the album’s highlights as well as acting as the perfect example of Plant’s intention on merging the traditional folk rock sensibilities with an epic orchestral landscape. This is a familiar trait that flows throughout the album, which acts as a melting pot of abstract ideas thrown together by Plant and his band, from the jangly African guitar lines of title track ‘Carry Fire’ to the more industrial rock and sonic experimentation of ‘Bluebirds Over The Mountain’.
While ‘Carry Fire’ showcases some of Plant’s best and most confessional lyricism, there’s no denying that this is an album that stands out most for its lusciously complex musical structures and influences, allowing for it to purvey an other-worldly quality” - Clash
Stream the album here.
The War on Drugs - A Deeper Understanding
Release Date: 25th August
Label: Atlantic Records
Critical Snapshot:
“…And that lack of articulation, that inability to identify the source of pain and the path to redemption, becomes another of the record’s themes. But all that happens beneath the surface, almost subliminally; it’s the impossible sweep and grandeur of the music that tells the real story, of how a rush of sound can take us somewhere we can’t explain” – Pitchfork
Stream the album here.
Phoebe Bridgers - Stranger in the Alps
Release Date: 14th September
Label: Dead Oceans
Critical Snapshot:
“There’s a ghostly quality from the opening note of Smoke Signals which grabs the attention straight from the start. Like many of Bridgers’ songs, it’s a hushed, contemplative ballad with the singer’s world-weary voice reflecting on the deaths of David Bowie and Lemmy, before namechecking The Smiths song How Soon Is Now. It’s the sort of song that pulls you into an album and demands, in its own very quiet way, that you hear some more” - musicOMH
Stream the album here.
Perfume Genius - No Shape
Release Date: 5th May
Label: Matador Records
Critical Snapshot:
“The “holy shit” factor of Perfume Genius has just shifted locus, then, from Hadreas’s reportage to his art as a whole. On Perfume Genius’s debut, Learning, we had Mr Peterson, a song in which Hadreas’s teacher takes advantage of him and then jumps off a building. Here, we have Hadreas’s desire to transcend his body and self – the no shape of the title – and glorious, inventive, shape-shifting music to match” – The Guardian
Stream the album here.
The Afghan Whigs – In Spades
Release Date: 5th May
Label: Sub Pop
Critical Snapshot:
“It’s worth remarking that, in the years between the Whigs’ breakup and reformation, no one could fill the void they left. Do to the Beast left me doubting that even they could do it anymore, but In Spades is a fitting rebuke to that infidelity. I still hold out hope of hearing McCollum’s guitar on an Afghan Whigs album again, but maybe I’m being overly sentimental. Ultimately, this is the best thing Dulli has put his name to since Blackberry Belle. One look at his discography over the intervening period will confirm just how good that is” – Drowned in Sound
Stream the album here.
The Horrors - V
Release Date: 22nd September
Label: Caroline Distribution
Critical Snapshot:
“V isn’t a huge reinvention, more a subtle reboot, and a move which has worked out perfectly. The Horrors are hardly new to making brilliant albums - they did that with their previous three - but V is better than them all” – The Line of Best Fit
Stream the album here.
Wolf Alice – Visions of a Life
Release Date: 29th September
Label: Dirty Hit
Critical Snapshot:
“Rosewell (Ellie) favors melodies that feel like shouts even when they're whispers. She grapples with a predatory world that steals happiness and loved ones, and creates demands from within and without. Attention wanders during the wizardy fingerpicking of "After the Zero Hour," but production from Beck bassist Justin Meldal-Johnsen ups the focus throughout, even on the seven-minute title track, which slips from Sabbath sludge into surging space rock and back again. This is music that merges raw physical pleasure and dreamscape explorations. The stakes are high, and the payoffs are real” – Rolling Stone
Stream the album here.
Queens of the Stone Age – Villains
Release Date: 25th August
Label: Matador Records
Critical Snapshot:
“Villains, this deep and danceable delight, ends with two searing six minute tracks: the razor-blade blues of the White Stripes-ish The Evil Has Landed, and a sunrise-of-the-ancients pop finalé called Villains Of Circumstance. These are songs that refuse to be crushed, rounding off a disco-rock album determined that the villains won’t win. Bowie’s gone, it says. Trump is here. Move. Now” – Classic Rock
Stream the album here.