2020: Close, But No Cigar

I realise I’m a bit late to be casting a beady eye all the way back to 2020, but given the retro-centric nature of everythingsgonegreen, any blogpost covering work from this century might very well be considered an unexpected bonus. Being timely, current, and relevant has never really been this blog’s thing. If you’re here, you probably already know that.

I’ve already looked at my ten “most played” or favourite new album purchases of 2020 (here), but I also want to share a few thoughts on those that made the “close, but no cigar” list … albums I picked up, enjoyed, but for whatever reason didn’t quite make the final “albums of 2020” list.

I’ll start with a couple of homegrown efforts that could easily have made the cut for that list alongside the four local albums that did. Two albums that sat well beyond the mainstream Kiwi pop saturation point that gave us commercial behemoths like Six60, Benee, and L.A.B. as key local industry flagbearers in 2020. As so often, the best local stuff tended to fly well beneath the radar of fans of the aforementioned. Which is a shame … and probably not really a shame at all.

Darren Watson’s Getting Sober For the End of the World came very close to making the cut, but it just came down to the fact that I drew the line at a strict ten. I completely get why a few of the more learned local scribes were quite happy to label the album as his best ever, and it was yet another top-notch effort from the country’s foremost exponent of the blues and roots music.

Tauranga-Auckland pop-rock outfit The Leers returned in 2020 with an (album-length) EP called The Only Way Out Is In, which was recorded in Los Angeles in late 2019, before being given legs ahead of this year’s summer festival circuit. It revealed a softer, more chart-friendly (and crucially, festival-ready) sound, and I was pretty hooked on it for a few weeks late on in the year.

 Elsewhere, Bob Dylan’s Rough and Rowdy Ways got a lot of love, and the old fella keeps coming up with new ways to remain relevant. I’ve always been a little bit hot and cold on Dylan; I absolutely love a handful of Dylan albums, but given that he’s released dozens upon dozens of albums across a 60-year timeframe, loving a “handful” probably doesn’t equate to fully paid-up fandom. Rough and Rowdy Ways was chock full of Dylan signature moments, but mostly it appealed for the way its seemingly effortless stream-of-consciousness narrative kept finding raw nerves to twist and tweak.

Only slightly younger than Bob, the ever reliable and always relatable Paul Weller came up with yet another top set in the form of On Sunset. Weller is a living legend, there’s no two ways about it, and On Sunset contained little slices of all of the many styles that Weller has thrown at us across the past four decades (and more). Rock, soul, pastoral folk, plus rhythm and blues. A genuine hybrid. Weller shows no sign of slowing down whatsoever.

I’m a big alt-80s nut. That goes without saying. Yet I somehow managed to miss everything that Dutch darkwave/goth merchants Clan of Xymox released during what might be called their peak years. I put that right last year when I picked up a copy of the 2020 album Spider On The Wall, which turned out to be a revelation, and the album got a lot of my ear-time during the year. I’ll have a dig back through the band’s extensive back catalogue to see what else I’ve missed.

Kruder and Dorfmeister’s 1995 was one of my rare CD purchases during the year. Brand new, yet somewhat ancient in that it was a collection of tunes that only ever previously saw the light of day on an (unreleased/pre-release) white label some 25 years ago. Discarded and only recently rediscovered by a duo not exactly renowned for being especially prolific since their mid-to-late 90s heyday. Whilst it doesn’t in any way scale the heights of K&D’s best stuff like Sessions (1998) - not much does, after all - I reckon there’s enough on 1995 to satisfy fans, with snippets of that trademark plush/warm production aesthetic they’ll all be very familiar with. It just seemed so appropriate that I got this one on CD, via mail order.

 When I compiled the blog’s albums of 2019 list, I bemoaned the fact that Angel Olsen’s All Mirrors was a relatively late arrival on my radar and I perhaps hadn’t given it enough attention. Oddly enough, I got that chance in 2020 when a heavily reconfigured version was released under the guise of Whole New Mess. Effectively a stripped-back variation on tracks originally found on All Mirrors, I downloaded a copy of Whole New Mess and it once again sat there in my “must listen to” folder for far too long before I got to it. But I heard enough to know it was exceptional, and I’ll be returning to Olsen again soon. I think.

As ever, Polish dub artist Radikal Guru released his latest album, Beyond The Borders, near the end of the year. He’s got form for this sort of thing - by my reckoning this is the fourth time he’s released stuff right on the cusp of the calendar change. That hasn’t stopped three of those albums featuring on my year-end “best of” lists in the past. Not this time though. I picked up Beyond The Borders far too late to give it sufficient digestion time so it missed the cut. I may (or may not) give it a full review in the coming weeks. I’m a big fan of his stuff and I’ve listened to Beyond The Borders a fair bit already in 2021.

The Heaven and Earth Association album 4849:1 was perhaps the most pleasant surprise of 2020. In a year full of too many unpleasant surprises. I wrote a little bit about it here.

There were only a handful more album purchases, none of them especially memorable, and all reviewed on the blog; Moby’s All Visible Objects, Tame Impala’s The Slow Rush, and Pet Shop Boys’ Hotspot.

But wait … we’re not out of the 2020 woods quite just yet. I’ve got a bunch of compilations and reissues, plus a bumper set of EPs, that I haven’t ticked off yet.