2022 Music: Songs of the Year 50-21

 For part two of my countdown, I'll offer some cursory commentary on why - the hell - such a song made it into my top 50. I'm writing this preamble before I've written any of the comments and I hope I can get these comments finished before tomorrow so I can post it in time (I've already written up my top 20 and most of my top albums so those are ready to go in their place, it's just this one that's up in the air)

 

50) Kobold im Kopp - Versengold (Pagan Folk)

Versengold are an old favourite of this countdown, making my #53 song of 2019, and they're playing in the same delightful territory here. Whimsical, playful medieval folk rock - in German. What more could you want?

49) Neghoniehto - Digawolf (Canadio Indigenous Folktronica)

Great bit of expansive folk here, done with an electronic production quality that both modernises the Indigenous folk traditions it's playing on while also retaining a raw, rustic quality to it.

48) Salt Coast - Kae Tempest (Spoken Word Folktronica)

Kae Tempest was very much a slow-burn artist for me. We heard them in the very first year of the music project where I didn't quite 'get' their music, mainly because it's not really about the music as much as it's about the poetry. Their poetry is always beautiful and haunting, but in this case the music rises to meet it.

47) Goodbye - LP (Pop)

I loved LP's whole album, and it was fairly hard to separate my favourite tracks from it, as you'll see from the fact that she had two songs in my 100-51 and now coming in at 47 as well. This track is probably her most striking as a power ballad with a slight Italianate flavour.

46) Cleopatra - Nova Twins (Nu Metal)

Nova Twins really surprised me with this Mercury prize-nominated album, mainly because I rejected it earlier in the year and then went back to revisit it and it ended up taking my runner-up album of the week. This song is the clear standout though, I love the attitude of the chorus (the line "I'm a boss bitch, I'm Cleopatra" is one of my favourites of the year) and it's just good hard-hitting fun.

45) Indigo - Dirty Heads (Rap Reggae)

This whole album was a dichotomy of try-hard white-boy rap which was largely terrible, and try-hard white-boy reggae which I tend to enjoy a lot more. This tune has a really nice lilting tune to it and grew on me a lot more in relistening.

44) Awakening - Yungchen Lhamo (Tibetan Folk)

Yungchen Lhamo has a genuinely haunting, otherworldly quality to her voice, and this track is just pure white sparseness to let it stand out on its own. I will say that it's further down than it should be just from the questionable production choice to have a long and disconnected Tibetan chant outro to it, which is fine in the context of the album but it deflates the feeling of the song on its own; it's more likely to have been playing in the top 20 if not for it.

43) Harness the Wind - Calexico (Desert Rock)

Another alumnus of my 100-51 songs of the year (this time from 2018), Calexico play in one of my favourite underutilised genres of Latin-tinged desert rock. This track is a nice little evocative piece of psychedelia with a nice earthy undertone to it.

42) We Let It In - Brian Eno (Ambient Rock)

Brian Eno's whole album FOREVERANDEVERNOMORE this year I think was up there with the best of his career, and this ethereal, meditative track was just a lovely breath of fresh, peaceful air. Strange, but also just a lovely bit of quiet musical exploration.

41) Giving in to the Love - Aurora (Indie Pop)

Aurora tends to have a spot reserved somewhere on my end-of-year lists, although she hasn't recreated her #1 song of the year success of the first year of the music project. This is on the poppier side of her spectrum that goes between atmospheric dreampop and more upbeat stuff, and it's catchy and fun and upbeat.

40) United in Grief - Kendrick Lamar (Hip-Hop)

If you've somehow come across my blog randomly (Hi, my first reader who isn't my mother!), you're probably wondering what the fuck kind of fucking shit-hole random 'best of 2022' list this is without it just being full of Kendrick songs. Well not put in just to please you because frankly you're a bit rude, this is really the one Kendrick song that I've really enjoyed. And I mean, ever. Maybe apart from King Kunta which was before we started the music project. What this song really brings I feel is that it really played with the production in interesting, post-modern ways, and wasn't simply about his lyrical content (although that game is also very strong here).

39) High Like You - The Feeling (Indie Pop)

From something very serious and very avant-garde from Kendrick we now come to this, which I like a little bit more but is in every way just the polar opposite. This is just a nice, feel-good kind of track, breezily put together but with a lot of sonic layers including the synthesised strings and bass.

38) Lafayette - Orville Peck (Queer Country)

I'll have more to say about Orville Peck in upcoming posts, but this was a perfect encapsulation of the feeling I got from his album Bronco this year, which is that this dude can be really quite rousing as an artist. Beyond his magnificent voice, there's just an effortless showiness to his persona that's wonderfully injected into his country aesthetic, and this song is a great example of it.

37) Aaj - Bloodywood (Indian Rap Metal)

Ah, Bloodywood. You will definitely be hearing more about these guys and their unique blend of Punjabi folk, rhythmic rap verses and delightfully hard-hitting metal. You'll even be hearing more just later in this very post. But this track is a great place to start with them: fast-paced, infused with flute and some kind of stringed instrument (possibly the Tumbi?) and punctuated with their in-your-face shouty rap. I love it.

36) Paper Doll - Flower Face (Dreampop)

Definitely slowing it down a bit now for this song. This one really grew on me on a relisten; it's a lot quieter on the surface, but there's a swelling drama in the wings here that ends up making it one of the most haunting bits of dreampop I've heard this year.

35) Stained Glass Love - Telenova (Indie Pop)

Similar kind of mood for this one; the vocals are done in an ethereal kind of space, but the production here is far more present and upbeat. But despite the enjoyable, danceable beat here I find the song just as haunting as the previous just because the chord progressions here are so cleverly unpredictable and due to the particular tone of the synth on it.

34) Superficial Intelligence - MOR (Swedish Avant-Soul)

Wow, this is a really weird song. But I love the effects on it that really make it a soul track to stand up and take notice of. The vocals are strong across this whole album (which I liked, but not enough for it to crack my top 25 which I'll get to in a couple of days), but here they really take a backseat to the otherworldly synth drops and sub-bass that make this such a weird bit of wonderfully industrial music.

33) Song for a Drummer - Team Me (Art Pop)

This one really took me by surprise when I was relistening to finalise this list. Only fourth place in its week (although, spoiler alert, two of the songs that beat it are still to come), I found it originally a bit of interesting but still just nicely put-together pop. But when I relistened it really struck me as perfectly poised, with the call-response vocal style a fascinating way of delivering its slightly off-kilter attitude.

32) Up the Mountain - Regina Spektor (Anti-Folk)

I have liked and admired Regina Spektor since before the music project, although was lukewarm on her 2016 album that we listened to in the project's first year. This year's album though was a much stronger effort, at least in the fact that it contained this song which is a beautifully realised bit of musical drama, led by Spektor's keen vocals and innovative songwriting.

31) Tularosa - Kamara Thomas (Psychedelic Country)

I expected this album (of the same name) to be holding its own against some of the heavy-hitters of the year, but in the event it didn't quite make it, leaving just this track to represent Kamara Thomas in my listicles. Fair though, because this song encapsulates everything that was great about the album: it's epic in scale, psychedelic in tone. It holds a melancholic tone, chronicling the misadventures of a wild west frontiersman facing all the dangers of exploring uncharted territory. This song really could just be the album and I'd be happy.

30) Hold the Girl - Rina Sawayama (Art Pop)

Rina Sawayama has been out and about in my end-of-year lists for a while, just barely cracking my top 100 of 2020 (at #100) and then rising up the ranks last year with her cover of Enter Sandman at #28, this year she makes #30 with the title track of her album (but more to be said about that in a couple of days). This song's really got a bit of everything for everyone in it: it's stirring and beautiful, but it's also got a nice bit of shuffling breakbeat. And of course she delivers everything she does with aplomb.

29) Everybody Get Up - Paddy and the Rats (Hungarian Celtic Punk)

This band was quite the surprise: I wasn't aware that Celtic folk traditions stretched as far as Hungary, but these guys do a very good line in the modern variant thereof. What I liked most about them though was that they bring a kind of Eastern European Eurovision energy to it as well, and this track leans far more into that territory than into the Celtic punk. Therefore I kind of hate that I like this song so much, but there it is.

28) Tissues - YUNGBLUD (Pop Punk)

Another alumnus of my top 100, Yungblud did my #58 song of 2018 with Polygraph Eyes; since then he's released quite a lot of music that I've found middling to disappointing so it was a great delight to see him back with a vengeance with this track. It obviously owes a great debt to late-era Cure in its aesthetic and attitude (Close To Me is sampled for this song), but I think Yungblud is a fine songwriter and artist in his own right and this is him at his earnest best.

27) Harder to Blame - Early James (Contemporary Blues)

Early James really impressed me with his powerful voice, and I think he worked best on his album Strange Time To Be Alive when he was infusing a little bit of country influence, which he certainly is here. This track is gritty, hits all the classic blues notes, and leaves you with a suitable feeling of cathartic bitterness to dwell upon.

26) Abalus | In Time - Dim Gray (Psychedelic Rock)

A great bit of psych/prog rock is always welcome, and this track from Dim Gray really brought both the trippiness required but couples it with an almost arena rock-level build with the dramatic chorus and the way it works its various stages of that drama in. It's quite magnificently done.

25) Dana Dan - Bloodywood (Indian Rap Metal)

This is definitely I feel the most talked-about of Bloodywood's songs from their remarkable debut album, mainly because it revolves around a revenge-fantasy where they violently retaliate against a rapist. Which is certainly problematic, but I think speaks volumes about how I found a strange solace in the righteous anger of these guys - misdirected or not - and how they feel like a kind of force for (chaotic) good in the world.

24) Simple Glyphs - Wild Pink (Dreamfolk)

Oh yes, the makers of my #1 album of last year have a new album out this year and this is broadly speaking the first you've heard about it. This was though my standout song from it, and a perfect example of how their album this year took their subtly beautiful dreamfolk and put more of a rock drive underneath it, rendering it interestingly distinct from their previous two albums (which were my #3 and #1 albums of their respective  years) while retaining their focus on thoughtful downtempo folk.

23) SMOKE AND WATER [the chthonic mother] - Crywolf (Experimental Downtempo)

Crywolf did a lot of interesting, complex compositions on his album exuvium [Oblivion Pt II] and strangely this wasn't my favourite when I first listened to it. But it was definitely the first time I seriously started to pay attention to the album as something more fascinating than I'd been giving it credit for, and on relistening this ended up leapfrogging FAR LIGHT (my erstwhile favourite) which ended up dropping from my top 100 altogether. Its use of tuned percussion to add to its overall spooky aesthetic really made it the catalyst for my overall appreciation of his strange style.

22) Doomscroller - Metric (Progressive Pop)

This one was also destined to be higher in my rankings from my first listen, but ended up dropping down when I came to the pointy-end of my year. It's got a great feeling this song, post-punk in its style but progressive in intent: it goes through a number of different stages to deliver its message of "everything is fucked so you may as well be happy about it" (or something to that effect), and it's thoroughly entertaining from start to finish. Could have been a top twenty song of the year for sure, but I just happened to cool on it at the right (or wrong) time.

21) Wrap Your Arms - ViVii (Dreampop)

This one's a bit of an anomaly really, because ViVii is absolutely Jez's artist now (even though they were my discovery originally I think?). Basically he holds these guys (who made his #1 album of 2019) up as his gold standard for dreampop while I hold Sound of Ceres (makers of my #2 album of 2016) as mine. But I took a far greater liking to this song at the time than he did, and here it is just flirting with my top 20 of the year. It doesn't quite have the otherworldly quality that I admire so much in Sound of Ceres, but it delivers the same expansive quality where it starts quiet and progressively builds as the song goes on. It's still earthly but it reminds me of those beautiful parts of earth and humanity that can take my breath away. 

 

So that's it; I've finished my writeup here in time and I can be ready to post this tomorrow morning (by which I mean, right now, because you're in my future).