Fuck 2020: A Transcendental New Year s Eve Celebration brooklynvegan.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from brooklynvegan.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Like locked-down people the world over, I took up a few new hobbies in 2020: amateur epidemiology, amateur immunology, amateur statistical analysis and amateur pandemic-response planning. These are brain-melting pastimes for brain-melting times – if I’ve relied on music for one thing this year, it’s been to drown out my rational mind for a moment. Luckily, this track – a sparkling, saccharine love song adorned with glinting synths, airhorn blasts and a belching bass line – has the power to override almost all conscious thought. Between the in-joke lyrics (Harle wrote the original for his girlfriend; AG Cook named this remix after Harle’s cat) and anonymous chipmunk vocals, Aquarius is not a song that encourages deep meditation, or even basic analysis. Instead, it is mindlessly euphoric, irresistibly groovy and utterly un-serious. I can’t think of anything further removed from analysing local Covid hospital admission data.
Last modified on Wed 30 Dec 2020 05.32 EST
“A balm to your soul” – so went the Observer review of Julianna Barwick’s album this July, which was inspired by the musician’s move from New York City to the wellbeing mecca of Los Angeles. Her one-woman choir of celestial vocals is as calming as the bit at the end of a yoga class where you get to shut your eyes and lie under a blanket, and the album, along with its title Healing Is a Miracle, had extra resonance in 2020. Music is so often a communal experience, but with those possibilities snatched away this year, many of us have looked to sounds like this to soothe us where human connection couldn’t. Another reviewer agreed, writing that Barwick’s new music was “a salve for the collective wound”.
Sleaford Mods – Spare Ribs
The title of Sleaford Mods’ sixth album is apparently an oblique reference to the fatalities in the first wave of coronavirus: “Human lives are always expendable to the elites,” in the words of vocalist Jason Williamson, “we’re in a constant state of being spare ribs.” The presence of a track called Shortcummings suggest events of the last 12 months figure heavily, although lead single Mork n Mindy offered a grim look back at 80s childhood. Released on 15 January
Bicep – Isles
Belfast duo Bicep’s eponymous 2017 debut was an impressively eclectic gem that shifted them away from their deep house roots into breakbeats, electro and drum’n’bass: in scope and ambition, it recalled the blockbusting dance albums of the 90s by Orbital or Leftfield. And Saku, one of three singles already taken from its follow-up, was one of 2020’s low-key delights: a dreamy collaboration with singer-songwriter Clara La San that stirred influences from ID