Billie Eilish - "When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?"
(Darkroom / Interscope / Universal, published in March )
And then suddenly there was this girl with the blue hair and the yellow jogging suit, who danced with the video clip for her over-hit "Bad Guy" so insolently as if it no longer had all the cups in the closet: Billie Eilish. And it is exactly this feeling of gradually simmering through, the world in general and one's own psyche in particular that is the focus of "When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go", the undisputed best and most important pop album of 2019.
The teenager who is celebrating his 18th birthday these days has been called a "game changer", a phenomenon that could shape the music industry for years to come. One reason for this is that Eilish wrote and produced her debut together with her older brother Finneas in his bedroom studio. It sounds so original, shy, whispered and intimate, like an inside joke between siblings that can explode all over the house at any time with roaring laughter and anarchic frolicking. Whatever you call this genre explosion, DIY electropop, slackergoth or bedroom core, it confidently distinguishes itself from the performance-oriented and provocative extrovert model Britney, which has dominated girl pop for the past two decades - and sets a new, more modern standard ,
Andreas Borcholt's Top Songs 2019
MIRROR ONLINE
Playlist on Spotify
01 Billie Eilish: Bad Guy
02 Slowthai: Nothing Great About Britain
03 Moodymann: I'll Provide
04 CamelPhat feat. Jake Bugg: Be Someone
05 Stormzy: Crown
06 Dave: Black
07 Raphael Saadiq: This World Is Drunk
08 Shawn Mendes & Camila Cabello: Señorita
09 As long as: Binz
10 Kate Tempest: Hold Your Own
11 FKA twigs: cellophane
12 Lafawndah: Daddy
13 Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds: Waiting For You
14 Jessica Pratt: As The World Turns
15 Aldous Harding: The Barrel
16 Haim: Summer Girl
17 Rosalia feat. J Balvin: Con Altura
18 Sampa The Great: Final Form
19 Weyes Blood: Andromeda
20 Leonard Cohen: Happens To The Heart
Eilish's enlightened sarcasm no longer has anything to do with princesses and prom queen raves. "I'm not your baby, if you think I'm pretty" is her rejection of every paternalistic capture and cuteness attribution in "You Should See Me In A Crown". It is almost as stunning and disarming as her now legendary Millennials exclamation in the interview: "Mom, did I ever buy a CD?" Punk lives, her name is Billie.
Read our portrait of Billie Eilish published in March here.
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WHEN WE ALL FALL ASLEEP, WHERE DO WE GO?
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Slowthai - "Nothing Great About Britain"
(Universal, released in May)
Speaking of punk: how much of his attitude Tyron Kaymone Frampton alias Slowthai owes to the Sleaford Mods can be heard in the furiously bad-tempered postpunk-rap fusion of his track "Doorman". It's not just about access to British society in the 21st century on his debut album, which like no other ventured the chaos and hangover mood after endless Brexit debates in the House of Commons. At the Mercury Prize in September, the 24-year-old from Northampton provoked by triumphantly holding Prime Minister Johnson Johnson's cropped head up, grinning diabolically. "Fuck you, Boris, fuck everything," he called to the shocked industry audience. Big fun.
This also applies to the pieces of his album raped in the rhetorically rapid Eminem style. An example of this is the title track, which creates a gloomy panorama of the Albion Kingdom - full of brutal cops, angry EDL Nazis and hopeless young people like Frampton who are trying to find their salvation in drugs and alcohol. And the British upper class? Counts money, maintains elitist privileges, dreams of the Empire and drinks tea: "Sip a cup of tea while we're spittin '/ There's nothing great about Britain". The Anarcho-Arthur of British rap.
Read our original review here.
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Nothing Great About Britain
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The Joy - "What Happened"
(Buback sound carrier, released in March)
"I don't know what happened either / And I'm watching it," Stella Sommer sang cheerfully in the opening title track of her fourth album. Since 2012 we too have been watching how this project, which was founded in Hamburg, developed into ever greater eminence. What's happened? Nothing less than the artistic self-empowerment of the musician Sommer, who let almost all the band members go and who wrote and played everything together with producer Moses Schneider. The last sound cobwebs from guitar fuzz and honeycomb walls gave way to a captivating clarity and sometimes euphoric self-assurance on this album.
Listened to on the radio
On Wednesdays at 11 p.m. there is a wiretap mixtape on Hamburg's web radio ByteFM with many songs from the records discussed and highlights from Andreas Borcholte's personal playlist.
The brittleness and depression that Sommer repeatedly addresses in her texts embraces her here as a given and draws a new, completely captivating strength from it: "The word for it is lonely", she rejoices in "The word": "Come on me, I'm on the very edge ". In fact, the Pathos des Ennuis performed with Knefscher Laconie polarized (still) too much for the pop mainstream - and even the first concerts with the not yet recorded live band lacked the magic of this eminent album. But if Stella Sommer takes on her solitary role as currently leading songwriter of German indie pop on stage, a lot will still happen. It's not for nothing that we give 10 out of 10 points for the only time this year.
Read our original review here.
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Cheerfulness
What's happened
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So long - "When I Get Home"
(Columbia / Sony, released in April)
A colleague rightly remarked recently that there was not a single song from "When I Get Home" that could be removed from the album, for example for integration into a playlist. And it's true: there are no single monuments like "Don't Touch My Hair" or "Cranes In The Sky", as found on Solange's groundbreaking debut "A Seat At The Table". Instead, the artistically more intellectual sister of superstar Beyoncé Knowles created a consequent expansion of her range of sounds and effects. As a framework, quasi analogous to Beyoncé's "Lemonade", a homecoming trip to her hometown Houston, it is again about African-American legacy , this time not so much as the "black experience", but intimate, idiosyncratically playful and personal.
It is the story of a liberation that Solange tells here, largely detached from song structures, genre and commercial constraints. Elements from hip-hop, R&B, fusion, afro-futuristic and spiritual jazz play around sweet and melancholic memory vignettes in the loosest form, in which factual memory and backward transfiguration merge into an irritatingly fragmented storytelling. The suggestive flow and the casual elegance of this album are only revealed if you listen to them completely. Soul music as an ultra-modern work of art.
Read our original review here.
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So long
When I Get Home [Explicit]
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Weyes Blood - "Titanic Rising"
(SubPop / Cargo, released in April)
The British pop critic Kitty Empire found a fitting characterization for Natalie Mering in spring: with her long, straight hair, her musical all-round talent and her feeling for radio-compatible melodies that melt in the ear, she looked like a forgotten Haim sister. Like the pop trio, Mehring lives in LA and feeds this special, sun-stimulated West Coast feeling into their music - but with a dark, apocalyptic twist.
"Titanic Rising", Mehring's fourth and best album as Weyes Blood, envelops the morbid mood of the beginning climate change era in opulent, simmering and sentimental 1970s sounds. In doing so, she takes up the legacy of Carole King and Karen Carpenter, adapted to the spirit of the times. In keeping with the nostalgic-cinematic over-theme of her album ("Titanic Rising", "Movies"), you can let yourself fall into this richly shimmering and flickering music like in a plush beanbag. But we shouldn't make it too easy for us, as evidenced not only by recurring musical slants such as the electronically eerie synth intro from "Andromeda", but also by Mehring's gentle admonitions: "You're gonna be just fine / But, babe / A lot's gonna change in your lifetime ". Here's what it looks like.
Read our original review here.
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Titanic Rising
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What, only five !? Not at all: Part 2 of the Interception Annual Edition follows on Thursday.
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