Pleased as ever to have contributed blurbs to Pitchfork's annual best albums and best tunes end-of-year
For Albums of 2021, I celebrate Dry Cleaning's New Long Leg - which features high up in the chart but not nearly high enough if you ask me.
For Songs of 2021, I delectate over Oneohtrix Point Never's remix-collab with Elizabeth Fraser, "Tales from the Trash Stratum" which pops up just after the half-way mark.
Incidentally I had a different lyric at the end of the Dry Cleaning blurb- "every day is a dick". However it was pointed out to me that this is not actually the correct lyric. I contend that it should be the lyric (it certainly sounds like "every day is a dick" and I'd wager it's a very common mishearing). It's better and truer than the actual line - more expansive, less specific. I supplied a number of alternate dyspeptic lines from New Long Leg (there's no shortage) and they went with one of the best (although "sick of this shit" might have clinched it as my runner-up). Still, every day is a dick is the one really. Says it all.
A casualty of compression was the single sentence in which I acknowledge the contribution of the band, which is not inconsiderable - what they do is always apt, they are very able. But I suppose ultimately it is the Florence Show.
On which subject I'll have more to say when Blissblog does its annual and - each year ever more compact - run-down of the year's aural delights.
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Meanwhile junior genreologist Kieran Press-Reynolds is doing his own looking-back-at-2021 count-down, drawing on a far larger cache of bliss. He has that young hunger to find the new sound, identify the new formation.
So far K's done
Our listening worlds overlap at just two points (these come later in the countdown - no spoilers). I was surprised, though, about one of the intersections.