So here we are, at the end of not just another year but another decade. Golly gosh and all that.
As usual, my final blog of the year is a countdown of my favourite albums of the year, from forty all the way down to my favourite.
It's been a strange year for music in some ways, there seems to have been an absolute ton of it for a start. Normally I'm whittling down from a couple hundred of albums but this year has been twice that. I found it quite hard to place most of them after the first ten-fifteen and I'll admit some of them have been placed so the tracklisting scans a little better.
There's also been a lot of comeback albums recorded after a lengthy break released this year. I thought The Wildhearts was a lengthy gap as there are ten years between albums but there's several with even bigger gaps. I think there's four artists where's it's been the best part of three decades since their last!
Several of these albums have some really beautiful artwork that my dinky little images don't fully convey so I recommend having a proper nosey at a decent sized image of them, in particular, Flora Greysteel, Lonely Robot, Gloryhammer, Stonefield and Moron Police have especially nice ones.
I've included a Spotify playlist as well as the download as with previous years. It's about the only blog where every artist will be on there. It's something I'd like to do every time but there ends up being so many omissions that it's just not worth doing.
There's a few noticeable omissions from this list, and I'm not talking big names like Tool, Opeth, Rammstein etc. I liked those albums, I just liked these ones more. There's a couple of albums that I would absolutely have included if not for the following reasons:
Ginger Wildheart - Headzapoppin
The latest solo album from The Wildhearts mainman is apparently brilliant and one of his best. I say apparently as I haven't heard even a single song from it. The album is out digitally but not physically and I think it's on my Christmas list. This would have been right up at the top no doubt.
Janus Stark - Angel In The Flames
Gizz Butt (from The Prodigy)'s band that last released an album in 2000, the brilliant Great Adventure Cigar. They've reformed and have just released this new album. I've bought it but the CD hasn't arrived yet so I've not heard it. I'm sure it's very good.
Toehider - Concerning Lix & Fairs And Other Cooked Stories
This album was only sent to a certain tier of his Patreon supporters and it's not commercially available so I didn't feel it was eligible. On top of that, most of the songs will be on his new album ( currently titled I Like It but that might change) that WILL be commercially available next year. Look for it in my Top Five next December as it's brilliant.
Finally, you may have noticed this is blog number fifty which I'm taking as a huge achievement. I never thought I'd still be going with it and, truth be told, I was planning on packing it in if I got this far, especially when all the algorithms changed and I went from blogs getting over a thousand views to being lucky if I break a hundred.
Still, I'm still enjoying compiling them and some of you still seem to enjoy reading them so I'll carry on for now. I've already got the next three blogs pretty much all planned out so I'll crack on with the next one shortly.
I guess that's everything. Have a great December and I'll see you all in the new year! Oh and if you haven't joined the Facebook page then please do!
Cheers
Luke
x
Download 40-21 HERE
Download 20-1 HERE
Listen to the Spotify playlist HERE
You can find the running order right down at the bottom of the blog so as to avoid spoilers.
