My 10 favourite albums of 2017

1. Chad VanGaalen – Light Information (Sub Pop)

The man who produced Women’s eternal Public Strain offers up his own bid for eternity with his best solo album to date, a masterful take on guitar pop that takes a skewed look at 21st-century consciousness and offers a pillow for our wounded souls.

2. Art Feynman – Blasting Off Through the Wicker (Western Vinyl)

The man behind Here We Go Magic goes minimal, goes deep, and lays it all out on four track like a lo-fi road map. Head-noddy, funky and scratches all of my itches at once. A worthy successor to Arthur Russell.

3. Grizzly Bear – Painted Ruins (RCA)

The four Grizzlies have left Brooklyn and scattered themselves across America, and in the process have created their deepest, darkest, most satisfying record to date. Ed Droste’s divorce may have been off limits to interviewers, but the pain of something ending and the hope of something beginning permeates this record like shadows and daylight.

4. Richard Dawson – Peasant (Weird World)

The one-of-a-kind songsmith from Newcastle has crafted an epic record as gnarled and beautiful as a storm-damaged tree. A righteous call for community at a time of individualism, narcissism and violence.

5. Machine Translations – Oh (Spunk)

Greg Walker follows up my favourite album of 2013 with my close-to-favourite album of 2017, the songwriting as excellent as ever, but ricocheting with more pitch-bent guitars.

6. Moses Sumney – Aromanticism (Jagjaguwar)

Like shining an ultraviolet light on the ocean, Sumney shows us how deep human loneliness goes. And it’s deep. Falsetto of the year, too.

7. Rafael Anton Irisarri – The Shameless Years (Umor Rex)

Every year there’s one ambient/drone/noise album that turns me inside-out. This year it was made by the man formerly known as The Sight Below. He sends us ploughing face-first into the earth’s crust, delving down, down, down into gorgeous aching misery, churning onward until you see the light at the end of the tunnel. And it’s blinding.

8. Liars – TFCF (Mute)

Angus Andrews is as beautifully incomprehensible as ever. TFCF keeps me listening because I have no fucking idea what’s going on. Despite this, and probably because of it, I know it’s brilliant.

9. Sontag Shogun – Patterns for Resonant Space (Youngbloods)

A wonderfully minimal, tactile record. Its creation started off with samples, then was decorated with delicate piano, rather than the other way around. Like receiving a massage from insects.

10. Everything Everything – A Fever Dream (Sony)

I don’t normally like epic, danceable rock, but Everything Everything are smart enough to juxtapose their shamelessly anthemic melodies with just enough left-field production wizardry to keep things compelling. A fist-pumper for the apocalypse.

Richard Dawson – Peasant

I don't know where we're going. What does our future hold? I worry about the world my daughter will inherit in the coming decades. During my journey to and from work, I observe my fellow commuters and feel alternately repulsed by them and deeply affectionate towards them. At our core we're all the same, and wherever we're going, we're going together – but our experience of that future will diverge wildly depending on where in society we find ourselves.

These divergent experiences are explored in vivid and moving detail on Richard Dawson's new album, Peasant. Individual tracks tell the story of different characters: 'Soldier', 'Weaver', 'Prostitute', 'Scientist', etc. However, no matter where in society these roles are played out, Dawson gives equal weight to their trials and tribulations. Everyone suffers. Everyone struggles. Everyone has their own cross to bear.

Dawson's wildly expressive voice and guitar playing have been a constant throughout his discography, but on Peasant we also find a massed choir of voices and strings, foot stomping and clapping, a herald of brass dissolving into tragi-comic parps. It's long, it's dark and dirty, and it's the most moving album I've heard in a fair while. 

For such a harrowing journey, Dawson has wisely front-loaded the album with the more accessible songs: the rousing 'Ogre', the sweetly sad 'Soldier', the hurtling 'Weaver'. From then on, although things become more knotty and bleak – especially during the nightmarish 'Scientist' and the climax of finale 'Masseuse' – individual songs have plenty of light and shade, whether it's Dawson's voice reaching delicately into the higher registers, meandering passages of slack-tuned guitar, or thunderous riffing that has more in common with metal than folk. It's a deeply disorientating and immersive journey.

While Peasant depicts plenty of suffering, the overall tone is one of hope and deep empathy. Ultimately, I'm reminded of a line from W.H. Auden's poem 'September 1, 1939': "We must love one another or die." Thank you, Richard, for creating such a raw, evocative and poetic album. Whether it will help us as we cascade towards oblivion is another matter...