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Arbiter of 2023 // 100

This is the sound of the getting lost and found.The morning coffee and the midnight oil.The letting down and the making up.This is the sound of the big night in and quiet night out.The train window dreaming and the turbulence praying.The letting loose and the growing up.This is the sound of the speaker and the receiver.The old dogs and the new tricks.The airwaves and the wax.This is the sound of…

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Arbiter of 2022 // 100

Arbiter of 2022 // 100

Welcome back to Arbiter of Taste, sound advice since 2011.Three-hundred and sixty-five days, in one hundred tracks, from one hundred artists.

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ARBITER OF 2020 // 100

ARBITER OF 2020 // 100

When I was younger my dad gave me some advice. Gesturing first to his ears and then to his mouth, he said: “Two of these; one of this.” By which he didn’t mean, “sit down and shut up” (though I’m sure there were plenty of times I needed to be told that too). But instead, to “listen first and speak second.” To not just wait for my turn to talk, but to truly hear people. Their stories. Their…

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ARBITER OF 2019 // 100

ARBITER OF 2019 // 100

As ice cap melt greases the wheels and As cathedrals burn (flames fanned by open cheque books) and As the Amazon crackles (flames fanned by Big Macs) and As Hong Kong will not be extradited and As Greta the Great sails the rising seas and As a rebellion sprays beetroot from a fire engine and As Chuka changes and changes and changes and As a narwhal tusk takes a stand and A mop is elected and A…

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ARBITER OF 2018 // TOP 100

ARBITER OF 2018 // TOP 100

What a shit-show, eh?

What a deluge of dimwits.

What a torrent of twattery.

What a cavalcade of chaos.

What a circus of charlatanry.

What an armada of arseholes.

What a festoon of fuckwittery.

What a shipwreck of shithousery.

What a year.

But what did it sound like?

https://open.spotify.com/user/thoma/playlist/324ErDQ93zbtykIfLgYGc1?si=6d1BjksUQKC0Zx8OaVs2Zw

(more…)

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ARBITER OF 2017

Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and make a playlist once in a while, you could miss it. (more…)

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ARBITER OF 2016

Watch the dials. First a shudder, just a twitch, but soon a convulsion. And now we’re really falling down the rabbit-hole. Starting to build momentum like a train careering helplessly towards the out-of-service bridge. The dials start to swing wildly from left to right. Pressure building.  Temperature rising. I see condensation on the windows. Sweat? Tears? Blood? I hear glass smashing. We await…

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ARBITER OF 2014 // 0 - 100 Pt. 2

ARBITER OF 2014 // 0 – 100 Pt. 2

 The list continues, accelerating in perceived significance until its final and much-desired conclusion.

  50. Strand of Oaks // Goshen ‘97

Nostalgia drips from every inch of ‘Goshen ’97’. The keys are chiselled from 80s power ballads, the drums and guitars somehow sound like a distillation of every great grunge, pop…

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ARBITER OF 2014 // 0 - 100

ARBITER OF TASTE 0 - 100

A well-worn path of criticism in the twenty-first century has been to decry popular culture as a – at best lazy, at worse non-existent – reflector of the politics of modern life: let’s take economic, race, gender and privacy as a broad four examples. In turn, this is seen to be the symptomatic just deserts of a generation that values displays of conspicuous consumption in the ever-aspirational…

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TRCKRVW // DOJA CAT - SO HIGH (KODAK TO GRAPH REMIX)

NY-based RnB singer Doja Cat’s ‘So High’ is a silky proposition in itself, and Kodak To Graph knows it. That the Florida producer chose to leave Doja’s vocals as the honey trap at the front end of his (the best, I might add) remix of her sleeper hit, saving the lush synths, sprays of tinny percussion and Hemsworth-ian vibes for kicking in closer to the halfway mark, was a stroke of abject genius. The track’s blissful and summery at first, but then Kodak wades in with a sharp, immensely slick trap beat. You get the feeling that if Rustie had spent his childhood in Florida, rather than on a games console in Glasgow, he’d probably sound like this too.

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RVW // MAX COOPER - HUMAN

For years Max Cooper treated producing tracks like research, crafting long, self-exploratory techno songs, and iterating through EPs you could blink and miss. It was an attitude befitting his background as a genetic scientist, even if he still felt like one of the most organic producers around. Human, his debut LP, is the result of that desire to explore becoming a desire to empathise. Liberated from the constraints of club production, Cooper’s patience and attention to detail draw out even more emotive rise and fall from his traditional palette of sounds.

The album begins with ‘Woven Ancestry’, a cleansing dawn chorus with the feel of Krieg und Frieden Apparat, and no hint of a beat. His shift in focus has meant that Cooper is happier to craft songs around ambience and uncertainty now. And there’s an unmistakeably human pang to the way his tracks can suddenly, fickly, morph. Penultimate track ‘Potency’, for example, creeps up on its own muted beginning with a wall of stark white noise and droning feedback.

Lots of Human is scatty and changeable like this. ‘Apparitions’ is Jon Hopkins without the tunnel-vision. ‘Automaton’, sampling BRAIDS’ immense ‘Lammicken’, has the ghost of a floor-filler wrung out and layered underneath Raphaelle Standelle-Preston’s crooning (“I can’t stop it”). It’s a fine balance between music for clubs and music for individuals that he walks all too frequently.

Cooper’s ear for subtle crowd-pleasers finds ample work here too. The propulsive rhythms of ‘Numb’ once it reaches full speed, or the jaunty, relatively soft-edged ‘Supine’ can attest that. Both take different, successful, approaches to wriggling into your mind and feet. It’s also a sign of the man’s affinity for the long format that he can place a descent into heavy-hanging melodrama as all-consuming as ‘Seething’ between them. Changes in trajectory like this usually come with the confidence of album experience, but Cooper gets by on sheer talent.

His closeness to Montreal’s BRAIDS, though, is perhaps the most telling yardstick for Human. The tracks here featuring Kathrin deBoer channel Flourish // Perish at its best - emotive vocal lines amplified by their lush electronic habitat. However, strip away the glitchy, computerised backing - unpick the percussion - and all you have left is a lost girl, singing to herself. Strip away the girl instead, and you have a producer unafraid to make music with its heart firmly on its sleeve. 

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STAFF AOTY13 LIST

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ALBUMS OF THE YEAR // TOP 5

ALBUMS OF THE YEAR // TOP 5

LONG OVERDUE. FOREVER RELEVANT. THE BEST OF 2013.

5 // DANIEL AVERY – DRONE LOGICSincerity fucking sucks. Or, maybe fairer to say is that the kind of sincerity you meet in most contemporary music fucking sucks. There are too many examples of artists who seem to work with the idea that the primacy of their voice and the ‘authentic’/'wholesome’ aesthetic and/or instrumentation that comes alongside…

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RVW // ARTHUR BEATRICE - WORKING OUT

In action - if not necessarily in the heavy thoughts which preoccupy them - Arthur Beatrice seem to realise time is on their side. For a group so evidently capable of making great waves, their ascent has been marked by an intense calm, shorn of the nausea-inducing merry-go-round of hype and instead fuelled by the same kind of self-aware consideration displayed on songs like ‘Fairlawn’ and ‘Carter’. 

In part this is from the luxury of owning their own time, with previous singles and EPs being released solely via their label Open Assembly Recordings and Working Out being recorded and produced by the quartet at their East London studio. It grants them some freedom from the always on/everything now/has it leaked? era, with the consequence that their aesthetic is a kind of cultivated minimalism, formed by decisions that are only made as and when, and by releases that are all the more valuable for their rarity. 

In a more direct sense though, it’s borne from an artistic process summed up by their debut’s title: the tense moment of creativity being given the space and time to steadily unravel, song-writing and interpretation conducted as pass-the-parcel, an egalitarian disentanglement being allowed to run its course. 

Conveniently enough, the band’s video for ‘Grand Union’ provides an accessible visual short-hand for this process, as well as their influences, themes, and preoccupations as a whole. For an afternoon four musicians in their early twenties move into a grand townhouse, dog in tow. The house itself is emblematic of the pre-modernist world and romance they’ve discussed in interviews, all sash windows and wood floors. “We are old for our age” as ‘Fairlawn’ goes. 

Slowly, empty rooms are filled with furniture (some traditional, some re-purposed, some conspicuously modern), the camera following the group in various configurations as they move through the house. Occasionally these scenes are intercut with ones of the four stood around an open notebook, the focus of their huddle the sketched designs of how the rooms will come together. Each is getting on with their own work, moving with their own particular manner, but all informed by this one central mutual blueprint. 

Now the cinematography is made up of shots of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, Egon Schiele prints and a steadily filling book-shelf, with William Boyd’s hoax-biography of Nat Tate notably highlighted. Each choice invitingly gestures towards some significant facet of the band. First, there’s the constant tonal balancing act on the album, a manifestation of Woolf’s’ ‘knife’s blade that separates happiness from melancholy’. The lyrics work in juxtaposition and tension (“safety is the most unsettling” ; “feeling comfortable and suffering”), the minor-key dominates, and yet Arthur Beatrice balance this with their knack for a compelling hook and an expertly employed sneaking groove. These moments where layers of subtle nuance eventually explode into grandeur elevate all the album’s finest tracks, with ‘Midland’ and ‘Ornament and Safeguard’ in particular benefitting. It’s this knack, the band’s able experimentation with and employment of the tools of a pop-framework which ensures they’ll appeal to the full gamut of ears that justly ought to be at their disposal. 

Then there’s the preoccupation with gender, physically, emotionally and intellectually. It’s there in the key dynamic ofArthur Beatrice as a whole, the gorgeous interplay of Orlando Leopard’s phlegmatic, reserved vocals and Ella Girardot’s delicate but lithe vocals, flitting catalytically between subdued and soaring. Lyrically though, this relationship is even more developed and incisive. Beyond simply the song itself suiting a particular vocalist, the choice of vocalist or register of harmony seems all the more pertinent when drawn against the poetic lyricism. A sense of play is created between the pair, a dialogue formed, ranging in subject matter over societal constructs and pressures (“What I do as a woman I do as a man”; “Keep in mind I’m cold and unkind for doing what I feel”) and relationships (“I’ll never roll away the weight of you, seems too much”; “I see the way we coincide and it’s nothing more than chance”). 

Finally there’s an analysis of artistic purpose. The fraternal rhythm-section mount the album cover on the mantelpiece and finally the project is complete. There’s the sparest of moments to see the four at rest, to breathe the room in. Then, like Boyd’s Tate, who supposedly destroyed 99% of his artwork, all is undone: the art taken down, rugs rolled, van loaded and door closed. As a song titled ‘Grand Union’ whose key lyric (“coughing up blood, skin coming off”) is about falling apart comes to its close, in the coming together and coming apart there’s all you need to know. 

In the slow but steady build-up to Working Out’s release, Arthur Beatrice have used their time without waste. Crucially, their ambiguity is no smokescreen for vacuity but a canvas for openness, their patience and careful anonymity deployed to afford themselves the capacity to grow at their own pace. The result is a debut record that’s fully-formed and finely-tuned, a triumph of enigmatic, engaging and exceptional outlier pop for the head and heart.

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AOT // ALBUMS OF THE YEAR 2013 / 20 - 11

20 // KELELA – CUT 4 ME

Debut mixtapes as intriguingly co-signed and exquisitely ambitious as…

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SONGS OF THE YEAR // VAMPIRE WEEKEND – HANNAH HUNT

Often even worse the break-up itself is the realisation of the decline beforehand, of sand slipping through your fingers, moments becoming lost in the rain, memories blowing away in the summer breeze. You look back to when the rot set in and you find it goes back even further than you thought: the weeks become months become years you could have changed. You review incidents that meant nothing at all at the time in a new light, and suddenly find them to be crucial turning points. Whilst the exterior was being kept intact, the inside was steadily eaten away. Then it all caves in.

Ezra Koenig tells a story of road-trips, mistrust, and heart-break that’s carried by a woozy, strange and transportive kind of bliss at the out-set. It’s a trap. Those spare delicate rhythms, atmospheric sound and harmonies drop out all of a sudden and then the dams burst. Drums break through, floods of piano erupt and with them Ezra’s voice breaks, the production making it feel as though he’s singing from somewhere oh so very far away but at the very tippest top of his voice. Then it’s all gone again, fading out as the seeming suddenness is shown to be the final act of inarrestabile decline. Now there’s nothing left at all.

Hannah Hunt might well be the purest, most sophisticated track the band has yet written. They’ve never been more subtle, and yet they’ve never been more purposeful and direct than the emotionally shattering second repeat of the line: “If I can’t trust you then damn it Hannah, there’s no future, there’s no answer.” It still kills me every time eight months later.

http://arbiterof.com/2013/12/23/aotsoty-top-20/

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AOTSOTY // TOP 20

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_MqA0a5iw5k&w=600&h=338]

20 // VOLCANO CHOIR – BYEGONE 

Jux…

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