SPINAL BAP'S TOP ALBUMS OF 2024

“all you did was expose yourself for the deeply hateful person you truly are which sadly is what music journalism has become these days.” So wrote the live bass player for a creatively washed-up band whose twelfth studio album I reviewed ungenerously earlier this year. It’s a misdiagnosis from where I’m standing. Sitting, rather, with a terrible posture and the exact same expression as the “Trollface” internet meme.

Deeply hateful I may very well be. Especially towards the lacklustre twilight efforts of the reprehensible group in question. The part about music journalism in general, though? It suggests this person spends even less time reading the material they are commenting on than they do playing on tracks by the band of which they are supposed to be a member. Rather, most magazines’ review sections are so crammed with glowing four- and five-star write-ups, they resemble the music industry equivalent of the Argos catalogue. Likewise, the majority of the accumulated professional reviewers’ scores for new albums on the Metacritic website are in the 70-plus category. That’d be a First in university terms. Congratulations! Ivor Novellos for everyone who’s recorded anything!

In his book about a lifetime of watching motion pictures, Todd McEwen writes that “In the end there’ll be nothing left, no movies, nothing electronic, so that descriptions of movies in books is all the saucer men will have access to.” That’s if books even survive but perhaps this applies to the music we describe to the saucer men as well. What happens when the so-called gatekeepers or cultural commentators increasingly sing from the same hymn sheet as the cold numbers? It’ll look like everybody in the whole world loved and lapped up anything that was ever released by Vampire Weekend.

Is that what you want the saucer men to believe?

IS IT?

With that in mind, here are Spinal Bap’s top albums of 2024.

This year’s listicle is dedicated to Neil Kulkarni and Steve Albini.

Charli XCX – Brandt

Who wasn’t ready for 2024’s Brandt Summer? The location? The mansion of an elderly philanthropist. The energy? Genuflecting to the eccentric whims of the wealthy. Luxury but trashy, like hiring a hippie bowler to track down a lost playboy model. All you need is your boss’s rug, an ill-fitting suit and a smile which says, “This isn’t awkward at all”. Brandt summer? Ah hahahahahaha! Wonderful! We’re all, we’re all very fond of it. Very free spirited.

The Last Dinner Farty – Prelude To Ecstasy

The Last Dinner Farty are like Sparks dressed as Marie Antoinette at a masquerade ball hosted by Kate Bush in the house extension she purchased using the profits from her handful of live dates in 2014. Only much worse because that actually sounds quite good. Calm down, everybody! It doesn’t matter whether The Last Dinner Farty are an industry plant, popstar nepo babies, forged by freemasons in a Frankensteinian laboratory, blood relatives of Jools Holland from Later… With Jools Holland, a front for embezzling PPE contracts or something to do with the Charlotte Owen super-injunction. The important thing is they’re absolute pap.

Frank Turner – Underhated

The latest album from England’s worst living songwriter was his “first back home with a global independent label setup” which is media spin for the fact that Polydor couldn’t stand the sight of his irksome beard no more. Plus, his rousing counterfeit Levellers anthems aren’t shifting the units they once did in the age of Ikea horsemeat scandals and Robin Thicke.

As ever, the favourite lyrical subject of this socially minded folk-punk troubadour remains… Frank Turner. He sings to his presumably pre-bearded fifteen-year-old self as well an estranged pen pal of his. He remembers dining in his school’s “cafeteria”. (Putting it that way surely undersells the grandeur of the place.) He describes the psychological impact of the lockdown he immediately, opportunistically and insensitively capitalised on. It was comparable to, he sings, being “punched in the dick for two straight years”. Speak for yourself, Frankie. Those who died can’t. Rub some ointment on your tender manhood and shut up.

When not focusing on himself, this 42-year-old is busy perving over a “girl” who works in a record shop using rhymes most teenage lyricists would cross out of their A5 Pukka Pads. Elsewhere, he looks down his nose at commuters with proper jobs.

The Yungblud for moderately tormented executives who are beginning to grey, Turner makes Doncaster’s richest emo look like the epitome of spotlight-indifferent decorum. ‘Do One’ is about shaking off the (his) haters, so Francis Edward won’t mind Mr Writer complaining that his hooks are needier than Ross Geller on a breadmaking course.

Charli XCX – Brant

Who wasn’t ready for 2024’s Brant Summer? The location? Temperate-zone coasts. The energy? Feeding off eelgrass, seaweed and sea lettuce. Luxury but trashy, like living in a bowl-shaped nest, lined with grass and down, in an elevated location, often near a pond using wet tundra environments for both feeding and breeding. Brant summer? Listed of least concern by the International Union for Conservation of Nature.

MJ Slenderman – Fanning Mireworks

Usually spotted only in blurry photographs, this black-clad and expressionless figure lurks in the shadows of the night, tapping on the windows of the sleepless and haunting the venues of North Carolina. His tentacle-like fingers can extend to intimidate and grab hold of his prey, or else reach one of trickier chords on an acoustic guitar. Proximity to the Slenderman is said to trigger nausea, nosebleeds and even violent insanity, especially if he’s singing that ‘Wristwatch’ single that’s in constant rotation on 6Music. England’s foremost ghost-hunting charlatan, Yvette Fielding, thought she had caught the MJ Slenderman on camera once. Turned out it was just Eef Barzelay from Clem Snide, who was stood in the corner of a cob-webbed basement, doing a wee. 

1000 Eyes – Duality

Who nose how to pick an album of the year? Does 1000 Eyes’ Duality have a sniff at winning? S’not sure it’s number one as it has the odd (t)issue. 1000 Eyes don’t blow it, with their ambient noisetrils, and they clearly have a good scent of humour. Nose. Nose. Schnozz. Nose. NOSE. NOSES. HOOTERS. THERE’S TOO MANY NOSES ON THE COVER. HOW MANY? NOBODY NOSE! HOW DOES THIS BAND SMELL?