1 |
June 1974 |
"Naif" |
single |
Hard to tell whether the piano has a crush on the synthesizer, or the other way around. |
2 |
Therion |
"L'amour est bleu ((heavy version))" |
Les Épaves 5 |
Gothic extremists sounding unexpectedly unbombastic on a short EP of straightforwardly metal spare tracks. |
3 |
Amon Amarth |
"On a Sea of Blood" |
Jomsviking |
Amon Amarthian Amon Amarthists loudly and vikingly Amon Amarthing. |
4 |
Amon Amarth feat. Doro Pesch |
"A Dream That Cannot Be" |
Jomsviking |
Plus one with Doro. |
5 |
Cobalt |
"Ruiner" |
Slow Forever |
Black groove. |
6 |
Dive In |
"Don't Break Yourself Apart" |
single |
Whooshy robot delirium. |
7 |
Caliban |
"Paralyzed" |
Gravity |
German heroic melodic metalcore. |
8 |
Ex-Otago |
"Cinghiali Incazzati" |
single |
Unhurried Italian indietronic post-disco. |
9 |
Silvana Imam |
"10.000" |
Naturkraft |
Surging Swedish soundscape hip hop. |
10 |
The Sun Days |
"OOO" |
Album |
Airy, chiming, Swedish twee. |
11 |
Navet |
"Companions" |
Companions +1 |
Pitch-wheeling through a strangely narrow gap between indietronica and Eurovision. |
12 |
Julie Christmas |
"The Wreck of S.S. Needle" |
single |
Like "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald" with a lot more wreck. |
13 |
Ylvis |
"Language Of Love" |
single |
It's a brilliant gimmick to build a deadpan conventional pop song around a deliberately unmusical chorus anti-hook. |
14 |
Luis Fonsi |
"Esta Noche Es Para Amar" |
single |
Heart-quivering Puerto Rican sentimental arena-pop. |
15 |
Mogwai |
"Bitterness Centrifuge" |
single |
More pop-song-plus-motion-blur than the audacious title led me to hope. |
16 |
Clairity |
"Broken Things" |
single |
Ethereal atmospheric pop in the lineage of Massive Attack's "Teardrop". |
17 |
Grimner |
"Res Er Mina Söner" |
Frost Mot Eld |
Fluty rune-geek folk-metal. |
18 |
BRIDEAR |
"Marginal Lie" |
Baryte |
Female-led Japanese power-metal that manages to be understated by only Japanese standards. |
19 |
Bob Mould |
"Hold On" |
Patch The Sky |
Glimpses of an alternate universe in which Sugar was the Foo Fighters. |
20 |
Dominanz |
"Ruins of Destruction" |
single |
Norwegian industrial-gothic black metal. |
21 |
Sara |
"VDTA" |
SOLUS |
Pensive, patternist synthpop. |
22 |
Miss Montreal |
"One Last Drink" |
single |
Dutch stomp-and-twitter Euro-pop that you could probably transpose trivially into a Gloriana song. |
23 |
The Gospel Youth |
"All She Ever Does" |
single |
Scrape the mildness off an old Gin Blossoms record and it's still perfectly playable. |
24 |
Astrid S |
"Paper Thin" |
single |
Norwegian elf-pop Eurovision crossed, perhaps inevitably, with post-PC Music production glitter. Which seems like a pretty good test of exactly how poptimistic you really are. |
25 |
Weval |
"I Don't Need It" |
single |
Dutch inside-out indie r&b. |
26 |
Jillian Jacqueline |
"Prime" |
Jillian Jacqueline 5 |
What's the minimum amount of twang required for a pop song to qualify as country? |
27 |
HANA |
"White" |
HANA 5 |
Muted, faintly Blue-Nile-esque pulse-pop. |
28 |
Rotten Sound |
"Fear of Shadows" |
Abuse to Suffer (Deluxe) |
Relentless, unselfconscious Finnish grindcore. |
29 |
Simone |
"Ghost" |
single |
Like a grandly wistful indie-synth deconstruction of "Give Your Heart a Break". Eurovision is wherever people believe. |