King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard - Have A Flying Banana
With seven members, two drummers and a flagrant disregard for patience, King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard released more albums in 2017 than Donald Trump sent spectacularly ill-informed tweets. The first of about 692 LPs was performed entirely on customised hollowed-out fruit and consisted of one 45-minute Australian psych-rock reinterpretation of the classic cockney knees-up ‘Let’s All Go Down The Strand And Have A Banana’.
Morrissey - Low In IQ
On his eleventh solo album, indie rock’s surliest martyr stuck it the to the nefarious forces of the mainstream media by unleashing a much-needed truth bomb on the sedated minds of the sheep-like public. Via his MOR warblings Morrissey informed us that Queen Elizabeth II, Emmanuel Macron, Michelle Obama, Barry Scott from the Cillit Bang adverts, Ant & Dec, Jamie Redknapp and The Weeknd are all sinister illuminati lizard people. You just have to squint your eyes a bit and spend too much time by yourself in an LA mansion. The Mozfather also revealed that our tap water has been laced with fluoride with the express purpose of making the public more susceptible to the art of Banksy who is secretly a double-agent of MI5, that Lena Dunham was an inside job, Ellen Degeneres died in a tragic accident back in the 1990s and was replaced by a doppelganger of Owen Wilson, Hurricane Maria was faked by the BBC news, no one will let you say Christmas anymore, and Israel proudly invented the banoffee pie.
Queens Of The Stone Age - Bellends
Oh come on, he didn’t mean to kick her in the head. He was just trying to help her get a better shot of the underside of his shoe. Anyway, you can’t even boot an innocent female photographer in the head anymore without being hounded by the alt-left forces of oppression. It’s political correctness gone mad! She was probably fat and ugly anyway which is why she’s behind the camera instead of in front of it like lovely Kate Moss. I bet she has no sense of humour and I could easily beat her in an arm-wrestling contest, wrote Giles Coren in his latest column for The Times.
LCD Soundsystmeh - Amehrican Dreameh
In 2011 Jamehs Mehrphy disbanded LCD Soundsystmeh even though the act is essentially just him anyway. This year Jamehs Mehrphy returned with a new LCD Soundsystmeh album. The whole thing was orchestrated to make money and everybody was fine with that, as that is what music is for. Mehking lots and lots of mehny.
King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard - Polywonkyplonkywoowoo
By mid-April, King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard were already on their 116th album of the year. Building on the 115th’s innovative fusion of tinned spaghetti instrumentals and operatic Go Compare vocal work, Polywonkyplonkywoowoo was a concept album in three chapters which narrated the interlocking stories of Zuko: Destroyer Of Planets, Flabby Ian The Moss Monster and a final character based loosely on the classic Sega Master System protagonist Alex Kidd. All this was set to a furious neo-psych post-prog soundtrack complete with complex polyrhythmic freebop cyber beats. So quite similar to Elbow’s Little Fictions, then.
Arcade Fire - Everything Foul
One of the most irritating promotional campaigns in recent times saw Arcade Fire impose a strict dress code at their concerts which dictated that no audience member was allowed to wear a band t-shirt bearing the name of any musical group objectively superior to Arcade Fire. That didn’t exactly narrow it down. The campaign rolled on with Arcade Fire claiming ownership of the millennial pastime of eating Subway sandwiches while watching repeats of The Big Bang Theory on their iPhone in a crowded quiet coach.
Then all of a sudden the whole thing was revealed as an elaborate hoax. Not just their most recent album rollout but also Arcade Fire’s entire career, including even Funeral when they were still good. It had all been one long spoof conceived by Jim Carrey when he believed he was the resurrected spirit of Andy Kaufman with some assistance from that Lee Nelson bloke.
Liam Gallagher- As You Wad
When the ex-Oasis frontman announced the first solo album of his career, few expected to it to consist entirely of songs originally performed by the British reggae outfit Aswad. Despite some critics having expressed discomfort with Gallagher’s brazen appropriation of black culture, most agreed that the material was not as dubious as Gorillaz. Without any doubt, As You Wad proved significantly more successful than the second album by Beady Eye, 2013’s UBE40.
First a footballer, then Guy Ritchie’s go-to movie hard man, and now an award-winning multi-instrumentalist who’s every bit as handy with a slide whistle as he used to be with a sliding tackle, there really is no end to the talent of Vinnie Jones. Many of the songs were said to be inspired by the impressive eyebrows of Eric Cantona, one exception being the opening track ‘Hang On Me’ which was written from the point of view of Gazza’s trouser plums. The record fared better than that terrible X-Men film he once did, even if St Vinnie lacks the effortlessly cool charisma of Lana Del Ray Wilkins.
King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard featuring King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard - Fuzzy Wuzzy Pomegranate Gasblimp Part I
King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard’s 442nd album of the year was their most ambitiously conceptual work to date. Using innovative Holodeck technology and formal advice from The Ghost Of Christmas Yet-To-Come, King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard 2017 were able to collaborate with their future selves in the form of King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard circa 2049. Together the cross-period 14-person supergroup managed to create the busiest psych-rock album since King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard’s 441st album of 2017. No band needs four drummers, mind.
Richard Dawson - Pheasant
Prior to his latest release, everyone had assumed that the alt-folk troubadour was a north-eastern everyman. It turns out that he was a privileged member of the landed gentry all along, as Dawson (real name Richard “Dickie” Davenport-Fiennes IV) revealed in this concept album about the illustrious history of his favourite game bird. Little has been heard of Dawson since his latest gig at Islington Assembly Hall, although sources close to Nicholas Witchell claim to have seen him playing an aggressive round of croquet with Princess Eugenie after a night on the razzle with Ed Sheeran and The Bluntmeister.
