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Top Albums 2022 Part I 50 – 41

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5 0. Vacant Gardens – Under The Bloom / Obscene Re-released in 2022 after flying under my radar in both 2020 and 2021, Vacant Garden’s provided two albums of delightful shoegaze / dream pop. The last time a band sounded this ethereal as the greats such as Cocteau Twins or Slowdive, must have been Asobi Seksu. Vacant Gardens pull together the sweet mixtures of fuzz, gloom, and vocal transcendence. There is rainy melancholy in the guitar hazes, counteracted by flourishes of powerful chords, arpeggios, and gentle strumming, all coming together in the float of Jem Fanvu’s ethereal vocals. Atmospheric density does not need to be inventive as such, it just needs to be well made and full of intricacy. Seldom do albums capture the yearnings of youth I encountered when first making contact with shoegaze. While nowadays most find the best conflation of dream pop and shoegaze in Beach House and their synthetic rhythms and uplifting haze, Vacant Gardens deliver a proof of concept in striking gre
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Top Albums 2022 Part II 40 – 31

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 4 0. Prurient – Creationist (The Ultimate Evil) Creationist is a stark addition to the style of noise compositions Prurient excelled at in 2017’s Rainbow Mirror . The idea of doom electronics as music drenched in noise without sacrificing listenability for alienation nor musicality is something that sets apart Prurient from many other noise artists. Conceptual strength and treating his fans with hand-crafted packages full of ephemera and goodies is what makes these sounds of horror and disgust even more enticing. Somewhere between the connection of the creation myth of the bible and references to the New York serial killer dubbed Son of Sam, the different ephemera, for instance in form of an anti-record, become a form of research into a subject expressed in sound by Fernow. In recent years Fernow has begun to split up his three main projects into more distinct wholes. In the case of Prurient this entails largely eschewing any beats or techno-esque structure for long hisses of noise
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Top Albums 2022 Part III 30 – 21

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30. Kali Malone – Living Torch More than just an addendum to 2019’s The Sacrificial Code , Living Torch sees Kali Malone completely eschew her trademark instrument for bass clarinet, trombone, and a huge array of electroacoustic instruments. The two tracks express a mindset of composition that channels music concrete with a refreshing neoclassical approach, something Kali Malone and her contemporaries of labels such as Ideologic Organ, XKatedral and here Portraits GRM herald throughout their work. Without the organ at the center, much like Malone’s first album, the soundscapes created exist in interrupted timespace. These drawn out and ever-evolving pieces feel decidedly different from what similar artist like Tim Hecker or Ben Frost would achieve. Other than externalities dictating the course and meaning of sound, Malone is a master of a singularly aural perspective, stacking drones and buzzes of synths for the sheer experience of the body in sound. Having had the opportunity to se
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Top Albums 2022 Part IV 20 – 11

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20. Pusha T – It's Almost Dry We might never again receive this kind of production masterpiece. With Kanye West moving further and further away from the charity of his peers with his comments and odd behaviours and his peers failing to help him in any meaningful way, another meeting of Pharrell Williams, West and Pusha T is unlikely. As Williams did at the start of Pusha T’s commercial success with Clipse, West enhanced and reinvigorated Pusha’s career with his production. The rapper never lacked in lyrical prowess, colorfully painting his gangster saga full of cocaine dealing and material excess, but without the production chops of both Williams and West, his best verses would have never hit the same. Splitting the production duties in half and producing “Rock N Roll” together, West and Williams elevate every boast, every grim detail and yearning of Pusha. Running with the motif of painting and chemical processing of cocaine, a great painting starts with the background, priming
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