We’ve all had too much sorrow, now is the time for joy.

Merry Christmas, everyone. I’ve chosen to give up despair. It’s still terrible out there, and it seems to get worse every year. But despair is a total waste of time and energy. Take care of yourself. Be there for the people who need you, and commit to making your own world better. What more could anyone ask of you?

Anyway, this is my annual roundup of my favourite albums of the year. As usual, I’m focusing on the stuff that’s new to me, or that I don’t feel will get featured in many other year-end roundups. And the roundups I’ve seen so far – gracious! Far too many seem resigned to wallow.

I’m raising my glass, though, to offerings from certain perennial favourites: Bat For Lashes, The Cure, Elbow, Mercury Rev, The Smile (twice!), Goat, Kamasi Washington, John Cale, Jon Anderson, David Gilmour and, above absolutely everyone and everything else, Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds. We don’t deserve him.

Also, I suggest you listen to Civil Service. They know what they’re doing.

Ellesmere – Stranger Skies

Kids these days are coming up with countless new sub-sub-genres to describe every possible variety of progressive rock: SlimeProg, FuzzProg, RiverProg, FrogProg, GoblinProg, DarkProg etc. etc. Personally, I really like what I’ve heard so far from the FrostProg scene.

But I digress. When describing Ellesmere, the kids went with LuxuryProg. I see where they’re coming from. There’s a refined, premium feel to things. These songs sparkle like crystals, and soar like majestic flying islands over roiling seas of Cumulus stratiformis.

Druids of the Gue Charette – In The Darkest Hour of the Coldest Night

You know exactly what you’re going to get with an album with such a bleak name by a band that likes to wear dark robes onstage. Growling! Rumbling! Screaming! Sacrifice! Blood! Blood! Blood!

Ah, but like Steve Ross standing in for his dad, they’ve pulled a sneaky one on you. Yes, the tone is moderately murderous and gloriously gothic, and there’s a lot of Sabbath here. But there’s much more of The Cramps, The Mummies, and The Monks. It’s not so much a black mass at midnight as a psychobilly hoedown in a neon-bathed whisky-drenched roadhouse. There’s more of the wavey-gravy than the grave about them!

Ixtahuele – Pathways to Paradise

As you might have guessed, they’re impeccably dressed and they’re pressed to help you feel de-stressed!

I’m sorry. I am. When I listen to this swanky exotica, I tend to get possessed by the spirit of Rockin’ Ricky Rialto. I should have a radio show. I’d be unbearable.

Anyway, hot rhythms, jungle sounds, chirpy island melodies, and nothing but the best possible vibes. You’re only allowed to drink luminous blue cocktails when you listen to Ixtahuele.

Mui Zyu – Nothing or Something to Die For

Narcoleptic pop sighed over muffled synths and tired old drum machines. It’s always 3.00 am somewhere, sir! This sounds like the first glimpse of sunlight after a dark night of doomscrolling. Get some sleep. Get some fresh air. Call your friends; they worry about you.

Scott Hepple and The Sun Band – Lammas

If, like me, you spend a lot of time listening to those five-disc clamshell boxsets with names like SCREAMING INCENSED: VISIONARY UNDERGROUND RITUALS FROM THE WIZARD DIASPORA, then I’m sure you often wonder why they don’t make music like this anymore.

The thing is, they do. Whatever your THIS is, it’s still out there. You just have to look for it. But then, you always did. You’ve always been happiest underground. That’s why you dig music that sounds like it was made by hobbits.

Shadow Show – Fantasy Now!

This drifts between propulsive psych garage that’s made for strobe lights and mirrorballs, and woozy daydreams made for trances and delirium. I like it all.

I really want to see them live. It’s nice to think that I’d dress for the occasion with something in glitter or paisley, but I’d probably just wear jeans and a Halloween t-shirt. Inside, though, I’d feel fabulous.

Michelle Moeller – Late Morning

Hungover Moon mice potter about their flat on a drizzly Tuesday morning. A cat runs across the keys of a piano, and likes the way it sounds. The houseplants dance to rhythms we’ll never hear. The computer perks up after finally getting its coffee. The bead curtains sway in the breeze. Lately the cat’s been getting better and better at the piano. I always forget I bought a windchime. The ghosts are up early today. I can’t really afford a plumber.

Mermaid Chunky – Slif Slaf Slof

Anything can happen in the next 45 and a half minutes. And most things do. Chants, ululations, breathing exercises, and spellbound reports from beyond the veil. School reception recorder recitals set to analogue squelches while someone gets intimate with a drum machine. Pirate rhythms, horse chanting, frog jazz, and living toys acting obscenely at the cowboy disco. Screaming. Above all, it sounds like they’re having the time of their lives. Anything feels possible. It does you good.

Regas-McDonald – Moon Paint For Black Winter

You can look back on any period and tell yourself that you didn’t know how good you had it. Today I’m pining for that period that started around 2007 and ended in, give or take, 2012. It was the time of “experimental pop music”, when you couldn’t move for “skittering rhythms”, garbled samples, and beautiful melodies sung in the weirdest way possible. Animal Collective headlined festivals. They even curated festivals. We didn’t know how good we had it.

Regas-McDonald remember. As far as I can tell, they’re a pair of cousins making these lo-fi middle-aged symphonies to God somewhere in Cleveland. And it seems that almost nobody’s listening. This has to change. We have to go back.

Halo Maude – Celebrate

An enthralling magic show for Francophile fans of Deerhoof and Blonde Redhead, and their families. The sort of melodies that feel like they’ve been with you forever. They’ll haunt you for hours, or even days. We saw her in a room painted from floor to ceiling in soft pink. Fitting, but I’d have preferred some kind of haunted Victorian theatre lit entirely by candles, with a big hole in the roof through which you can see comets.

Jinxtengu – Undead Superfoods

Jinxtengu is Jacob Waldemar Buczynski, the cursed polymath behind Bizarre Wound Games. He makes short psychedelic nightmares that sear the eyes and melt the brain. He spent 10 years working on Undead Superfoods, which he describes as his “genre defining album [that] gives thanks to the unborn Chaos Gods in the best possible way.”

It’s nearly three and a half hours long, and every single one of the 64 tracks is accompanied by a unique image, many of which appeared to be MS Paint creations.

Jinxtengu’s most famous game is Revenge of the Sunfish, which tends to break most people who play it. The setting, rules, and controls change every few seconds, and every individual scene is maddeningly chaotic in itself.

With this in mind, you might expect Undead Superfoods to be a challenging or unnerving listen, particularly when you scan the track titles. (Scuzz Dragon. Phat Scumadelica. Glutter funk. And my favourite, Is Bournemouth Real?) But the whole thing’s surprisingly cohesive. He describes it as Cthulucore, saying it’s a “must listen” if you’re a “deranged demi-God in the making”.

A lot of it sounds to me like the music that might have soundtracked one of those early 90s CGI showcase videos. Some songs sound like the instrumental backing tracks to Residents songs, and others could happily soundtrack gloomy Megadrive sidescrollers.

It’s a universe of sound, full of clanging beats, dark synths, lurid colours, and unspeakable horrors. This is what the internet was made for!

Megzbow and Vinegar Tom – Field Mulch

A semi-improvised live session in which our damp duo transform a collection of field recordings from Pembrokeshire into a cold, wet, muddy mess with the help of some brandy, a cowbell, some “knackered synths” and submerged mics. It squelches and bubbles and gurgles, and depending on your mood, it sounds like either the first stirrings of consciousness deep in the primordial ooze, or the last man’s final exhausted slump into the freezing bog at the end of time. Keep dub soggy.

Mushroom – Messages From the Spliff Bunker

A collection of outtasight jazz-rock jams featuring guitar, bass, flute, sax, an array of electronics, and at least three drum kits. There’s a wonderful warmth, and an inviting in-the-room feel. It’s tight, but there’s space to breathe, and a sense that it could go anywhere at any moment. At times it sounds like Grateful Dead, at times like Soft Machine. At its best, it sounds like both bands noodling together in a blissful transatlantic haze.

Elintseeker – Life Without Dreams

We heard Elintseeker playing in a small shop in Yanaka, Tokyo. It was one of the last days of the trip – my first time in Japan, and the happiest I’ve been in years. “Dreamlike” is the word I keep using to describe it, and the more time that passes, the less real it all seems. Were we really there? Did it all really happen? Was I really so engaged, so energised, so happy, and so alive, for so long?

And at the tail-end of the dream, moments before waking, as it were, we heard this slow and sad music – hazy, sleepy, heartbreaking. Usually the sounds you hear and the things you see in your sleep fritter away soon after you wake. But I can revisit this dream anytime I like.

Psychedelic Source Records – Recorded at the Goatfarm

Psychedelic Source Records is a Hungarian psych label that puts on occasional “aggregator sessions” – opportunities for numerous wizards from the label to create something beautiful together. This was the first time they were able to record such a session.

As the title suggests, it was recorded in an open field on a goat farm near Páty, Budapest. Over the course of the day, and into the night, three drummers, five bassists (one of whom used to groove on Motown), four guitarists, one vocalist, and one zitherist contributed to a number of freewheeling monster jams.

According to one bystander account, it was just a lovely day for everyone. “Sunny, 25C, comfortable breeze,” and with the scent of “cedar-spiced dirt” on the air.

Says The Obelisk: “The music started after a few minutes and the sound filled part of the open air but left room for the breeze through the trees over by where a white van — somebody’s van, with a homemade couch — was parked. Goats on the hill behind, a jam taking a doomier turn then twisting back around to psych with tambourine to add to the movement, sunshine, chlorophyll pumping out green like it was getting paid per pigment, and an easy vibe. Beers casually consumed, funk in the wah. Stuff of life.”

Overall, I prefer Mushroom’s jams from the Spliff Bunker. But this one wins because I love what it represents: A bunch of friends getting together in the country to make the sort of wonderful sounds that could have been made at any point over the past 60 years or so. It’s deeply human, and so unstuck from time and space that it’s worlds apart from whatever international horror is currently troubling you. No matter what happens, I believe that so long as there are still gatherings like this, we’re all going to make it.

Behold My 2024 Playlist:

Some of these cats aren’t on Spotify (Mushroom, Megzbow & Vinegar Tom, Jinxtengu), but that’s OK. I’ve included tracks from my perennial favourites for added joy, along with some offerings from other albums that I dug, but which didn’t quite make my list.