Editor’s Note: For many years, we at The Feedback Society would publish our year end lists of the best in music and film. The task of best albums of the year always went to my friend Dave Scaddan, a man with impeccable taste and an encyclopedic knowledge of music. In 2023, we decommissioned and mostly ceased publishing on The Feedback Society site, but I still wanted to do these year end lists for Craig Silliphant dot com. (Read the last 10 years of these music lists here and his 2023 list here).
Here is Dave Scaddan’s Top 20 Albums of the Year, as compiled for Craig Silliphant dot com. Take a look — there’s a lot of different genres here so there’s no doubt some great new recommendations that may not fly in your usual orbit.
Thanks Dave! Over to you!
20 Clarence Clarity – Vanishing Act ii – Ultimate Reality
This seems like the perfect spot for this album, which is great, but hard to consume all the way through in one go, at least for me. Clarence Clarity infuses his tremendous pop sense with unabashed overproduction, on the level of a JPEGMAFIA or Cornelius. So the sound is just so busy and overwhelming, even as I’m liking it, I’m feeling a need to get a break from it also. ‘Playing Our Parts’ is a great example of how CC can take a track that is downright classic Timberlake, and then take it to places (using the studio) that NSYNC would’ve never dared to go.
19 Mannequin Pussy – I Got Heaven
This is a young band’s fourth album, and they’re an act I’ve never really been up on before now, but ‘I Got Heaven’ worked its way into my listening habits this year. MIssy Dabice has a lot of Patti Smith’s brash, poetic toughness, and while this band may not be doing too much musically that’s new or exciting, she’s new and exciting.
18 Fake Fruit – Mucho Mistrust
Though they hail from the Bay Area, Fake Fruit give me the same Southern-fried post-punk feel as Arizona’s Meat Puppets, combining a herky-jerky, noisy insistency with some technically acute, fast-paced playing. They’ll throw a squonking sax in amongst all the loud guitars, Hannah D’Amato will shriek off-key a little, but it’s all in service of keeping Fake Fruit’s output off kilter enough to make it their own. This music sounds like it would make for a fun live show.
17 Washed Out – Notes From a Quiet Life
‘Notes From a Quiet Life’ is an example of an artist clinging to a style that works for them even though most everyone else has moved on from it. Ernest Weatherly Greene Jr. is still making the same mellow, synthy ballads that we’ve heard on his last four albums. His isn’t a discography that jumps out with any major high points, but this record is my favorite of his so far. Cut Copy made a few albums like this in years past, as did Neon Indian. OMD have been doing it for their entire forty-something year career. In a time when everyone can just program some synths and drums and sing something over them, there are still a few artists who refine that process down to perfection, without getting carried away with the production tricks at their fingertips. Washed Out achieve this rare feat here with a gently presented set of downplayed lullabies.
16 Glass Beams – Mahal
This band is really hard to describe without sounding off-putting, so I’ll just give it to you straight: Glass Beams are an Australian trio who make their mark playing music that would suit a tabla or sitar but using electric guitars and synths. And oh yeah, they obscure their identities by wearing jeweled metal draperies over their faces. ‘Mahal’ is easily good enough to cut through whatever pretension this band’s image might present, and though they work slowly (this is only their second EP in three years) I will remain attuned to their eastern-influenced jams. As with most things, when there’s a little touch of funk in it, it’s much easier for me to like it, and this definitely includes Indian music, which I often enjoy most when Madlib is sampling it or when someone like Charanjat Singh is playing it with non-traditional instruments. Glass Beams are not a funk group, but they have just enough funk in their blend to keep me coming back, and they feature some really distinct guitar-playing styles.
15 julie – my anti aircraft friend
This record may have flirted with the top ten this year if it weren’t for a vocal-sharing issue I’ll get to in a moment. I remember a time in the 90s after Sonic Youth’s ‘Goo’ came out on Geffen Records and all the young bands were trying to match that distinct sound. The goal was to not sound like sell-outs, but still give the audience something pleasantly energetic and catchy. This was the time when “shoegaze” first became a term, and lots of indie bands were slotting themselves into this groove. julie seem to be familiar with the music that came from that era, though I believe it happened before any of them were born. They hit us with a powerful debut in 2024 that rocks and swirls with a better impersonation of that ‘Goo’ style than I’ve heard since Tristan Psionic. One issue is that like Sonic Youth, they split the vocal duties on ‘my anti-aircraft friend’ between the excellent Alexandria Elizabeth (bass) and the not-so-excellent Keyan Pourzand, who sounds like a lot of the trying-to-sound-unbothered-but-still-earnest young vocalists out there. This being a debut, I think there’s hope that this band will eventually realize that Alexandria is the one with the goods and Pourzand is doing more than enough with his fuzzy, squealy guitar to leave the vocals to others.
14 JPEGMAFIA – I LAY DOWN MY LIFE FOR YOU
A lot of other reviewers have put the “punk” tag on the newest record from this Flatbush producer and emcee. I’m not sure what that tag is supposed to mean, except that maybe it represents a listener’s inability to reconcile these tracks with hip-hop expectations. Really, I hear more of an industrial feel on a lot of these numbers, like the buzzing, pulsing production that backs a track like ‘Don’t Rely On Other Men’. If we were to find that someone like Trent Reznor had had a hand in this effort, it would make sense.
Peggy‘s strengths lie mostly in his gifts as a producer. His ability to elude genre and bombard the listener with some of the assaults you might find on a Fantomas record keeps all of this music right in the forefront of the moment it’s playing in, making it impossible to ignore. Lyrically, I’m not going to tell you he’s doing anything particularly groundbreaking, but there are a few memorable bars here and a lot of cocksure, aggressive attitudes sitting on top of all these booming, distorted, quick-twitch tracks.
13 Parlor Greens – In Green We Dream
So, 2024 saw the (sort of) breakup of The Delvon Lamarr Organ Trio, which is tough to deal with. They’ve left us with three superior studio albums and two stunning live records at the end of their six-year run. Now, there will probably be more DLO3 work, but it won’t feature Jimmy James.
James has teamed with drummer Tim Carman and organist Adam Scone to form this new organ trio who keep channeling that great Booker T and the MGs / Meters sound that never truly gets old. This is an incredibly tight, smooth set of songs that constantly highlight the skills of these three players. Hopefully this split means more organ trio music for the future once the new DLO3 get their lineup back in order.
12 Blood Incantation – Absolute Elsewhere
This album really had a moment in October 2024. Reviewers who would normally never reach much into death metal started talking and writing about it very favorably. For a minute it seemed like Blood Incantation was going to bust through to the mainstream.
As it turns out, that didn’t really happen. But ‘Absolute Elsewhere’ has outlasted the hype and proved to be a very satisfying regular listen. Here, the death metal sound is really only a template for lots of other musical styles to be laid upon. An aggressive, dirty stretch of riffing will melt into a Brian Eno synth program or a David Gilmour Strat sequence, always setting up another assault of dark, heavy pounding. This band may not have punctured the public perception like they perhaps could’ve, but someday soon when another death metal band does so, Blood Incantation will be one of the forces to which they owe their climb.
11 Mdou Moctar – Funeral for Justice
The jamming on this album is so off the chain that it sometimes feels like a racehorse running so fast, it might injure itself from sheer effort. This is great guitar-bass-drums music that sounds nothing like any guitar-bass-drums music you’ve heard before. This guy is a guitar virtuoso from the midst of the Sahara Desert, where there’s really no influence of blues or jazz, but something completely different instead. New rhythms, new tones, but still rock n roll with a Stratocaster.
10 Johnny Blue Skies – Passage Du Desir
Sturgill Simpson is still one of the most reliable singer-songwriters working in country music today – he’s got a bit of a persona change here, but it’s still more of the same great country and bluegrass music that he’s delivered consistently at a high level for a long time. There just aren’t that many country artists these days with lots of clever, insightful things to say, leaving Sturg plenty of open space to work in. I also love the way he can meld the classic with the modern using only a single couplet like, “if you need an early morning matcha, girl I gotcha.”
9 Kendrick Lamar – GNX
How refreshing it was to have a year where almost all of the hip hop hype went to an emcee who actually had the lyrical skills needed to merit the fuss. It was also cool to get a “surprise” album drop that basically had the “peekaboo” effect it intended (probably because everyone was still caught up in the massacre aftermath of the genre’s best ever diss track, which doesn’t even appear on this album). Kendrick had climbed the mountaintop long before ‘GNX’, so this is just his confident shouting from that perch, and he can do it with so many different voices. Sometimes he uses that cartoonish, confused, nasal tone that’s so effective for pointing out something stupid someone has done. Sometimes he comes with that panicked, paranoid voice that surfaces when he writes about something too troubling to fully understand. Sometimes he gets into that sleepy, half-whispered mutter, like he does here on ‘luther’, another great duet with SZA. So much talent in one package. Hell, I might even watch the Superbowl in 2025.
8 Jack White – NoName
As a devoted White Stripes fan, of course I’m going to listen to this with a fan’s eager ear, but objectively, it’s still just so much better and purer than any of the other solo work Jack White has done. I even prefer this to some of my treasured Stripes records. Riffs galore, snarly chip-on-the-shoulder vocals, a tightly played set; this is the Jack White recipe we love, and it was intentionally released with about as little fanfare as possible. It’d be a shame if this one slipped under the wire, especially for the old-time fans.
7 The Raveonettes – Sing
First record in a while from this duo and none of their own music appears here. It’s all covers, and they choose some songs to cover here that are famous for being sung incredibly well, most notably ‘All I Have to do is Dream’ by the Everly Brothers. They get into their versions of The Doors, The Velvet Underground, The Cramps, The Shirelles, The Shangri-las, and all with their signature style attached. Sune Rose Wagner and Sharon Foo take on these nearly impossible vocal challenges and nail them, making dangerous challenges seem like bold, clever choices. Their whispery, reverbed style works really well on some of my favorites here, like ‘Venus in Furs’, ‘Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow’, or ‘The End’. Perhaps the most impressive thing about this covers collection is how well these twelve songs gel together as an album. The setlist of originals might be a pretty odd mix of styles, but these covers are unified by the ‘Just Like Honey’ filter they’ve all been poured through. These songs emerge as a set of soft-edged retro performances with some great vocal parts that still sound impressive six months after first hearing them.
6 The Smile – Wall of Eyes
I have a strange relationship with Radiohead that gives me inverted R.E.M. deja vus. R.E.M. were a group that I loved all the way up to the (for me) aptly named ‘Out Of Time’ where they suddenly became a band I broke up with, though I would still revisit our early days together. When friends would get excited about ‘Automatic for the People’ or ‘New Adventures in Hi-fi’, I’d try not to be a snob about it, but I’d always fall prey to the hipster sentiment that I “preferred their earlier work.” This is the inverse of the experience I have with Radiohead. When people whose taste I respected were all over ‘OK Computer’ and ‘Kid A’, I felt like I must have been missing something. They were obviously a good – even important – band, but I never locked into those records in quite the way their reputations made me feel like I should.
That all changed with ‘King of Limbs’, a record that most Radioheads didn’t love (or saw as a fall-off). That was the record that made me feel, in 2011, like I finally got it. I loved how ambitious and experimental they were becoming with songs that were still technically pop or rock, but felt like they were evolving beyond the song structures and production techniques that most pop/rock bands use. In the early 2010s, I felt like Radiohead had let go of any pressure or expectations of what they should do, and they began using their status to write and record whatever they wanted to, regardless of fan expectation. The Smile sound, to me, like the natural evolution of that freeing approach. I know they’re a different band, but it’s impossible not to compare them, so I am just going to commit the blasphemous breach of putting this in words: I like The Smile more than I like Radiohead.
‘Wall of Eyes’ has the traces of some of Thom Yorke’s solo ventures, but with a penchant for slow-building moodiness that is pure Jonny Greenwood. These rockstars are making music now that sounds like they no longer need to play any kind of rockstar game with their music. They put stuff out whenever they want to, however they want to, and I think it sounds really interesting and engaging. ‘Cutouts’ was another great record they did late this year.
5 The Cure – Songs of a Lost World
My favorite band ever put out a long awaited record and it didn’t disappoint. I still mainly experience relief when listening to this, because it’s actually good, consistent with the band’s legacy, and possibly a fitting end to their recording career. It will take more time for me to sense how good it really is, because I have so much expectation attached to it, but it’s a huge accomplishment at this point to just release a record and have it be something Cure fans can still be proud of. What an incredible legacy this group has.
4 Brittany Howard – What Now
One of the easiest albums to put on this year, because it came out early on and never got tired. Based in soul and rock sensibilities, this record goes all over, venturing into prog, pop, house, gospel, blues, and reaffirms how Brittany Howard is one of the most reliable musical visionaries who can literally do anything with her next move.
3 Camera Obscura – Look to the East, Look to the West
Another band who, like The Cure, put a great record out this year after a long hiatus. ‘Look To The East, Look To The West’ is the first time we’ve heard new music from Camera Obscura since losing Carey Lander to a rare form of bone cancer in 2015. It seems like her memory is all over Tracyanne Campbell’s songwriting. This is a little like hearing Roger Waters bringing out his best by writing songs about Syd Barrett, except that when that happened, Syd was still alive. This is a tender set of songs that’s very true to the sound of the band we know and love, but they’re older, more developed, and are adding a few new wrinkles to their sound. Having brought in fellow Glaswegian Donna Maciocia on vocals and keys, Tracyanne Campbell sounds like it’s taken her a while to find the right way to get these songs out, but that she’s comfortable enough to do it now. At the end of the record’s penultimate song, after a chilling set of mournful pop music, when Campbell actually utters the name, “Carey”, it’s too much for me to take sometimes. Chapman brings over a decade of grief and reflection into her songwriting on these 11 tracks, and you can feel the weight of this band’s absence with this return. Again, like The Cure, they strengthen their legacy by proving their incredible staying power even though (and possibly because) their lineup has been altered by tragedy that can be heard and felt throughout ‘Look to the East, Look to the West.’
2 Nubya Garcia – Odyssey
This is the 2024 record that had the most depth for me as a listener. By assembling an incredible band of jazz musicians, Nubya Garcia uses her tenor sax and her multicultural musical vision to paint a palette of incredibly rich and luxurious music that transcends the notion of jazz without ever truly leaving it behind.
1 Ezra Collective – Dance No One’s Watching
There’s a youth movement afoot in the London jazz scene, and it’s been growing steadily since the mid 2010s. Ezra Collective are one of the main thrusts pushing that scene forward, and listening to their latest album should make it clear why that is the case. Though they sometimes get sorted into categories like hip-hop or jazz, neither of those associations are really accurate. They sometimes have rap verses in their songs, and they play instruments that would be right at home in a jazz quintet, but their music has none of hip-hop’s played out false bravado, and none of the stuffy, exclusive attitudes one might associate with American jazz. What Ezra Collective bring to the table that sets them apart is youth, talent and pep, and this year they made their peppiest, most danceable set of tracks to date.
‘Dance, No One’s Watching’ brings together a dizzying set of styles, weaving through funk, reggae, calypso and soul while keeping at least one foot rooted in jazz styles that are energized, renovated and put to a new pulse that make for a really fun album. Yazmin Lacey, who topped this list last year, guests on ‘God Gave Me Feet For Dancing’, which would be a great track to try on if you aren’t sure about putting on the whole 19-track album at once. If you need a joyful, lively, dynamic record to keep your living space upbeat and energized, this is a flawless choice.
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