The best from elsewhere

Mothers’ When You Walk A Long Distance You Are Tired is Sam Valentine’s No.1 international album of the year. Photo: supplied.

Well, here it is. Another year has gone by and who can say how much we’ve learned. This week, it’s Suitable Alternative’s international roundup, picking my 26 (a number I arrived at randomly) favourite albums of the year.

It’s a little out of the usual scope of this column, but hopefully it is useful or informative nonetheless. Next week, we’ll turn the focus locally again.

MOTHERS
‘When You Walk A Long Distance You Are Tired’

Every song in Kristine Leschper’s debut as Mothers is an emotional bloodletting. Affecting and emotionally raw throughout, the songs are intimate atmospheric folk indie portraits of the self. Delicate mandolin and taut, unstable and unpredictable math-y guitar underpin Leschper as she faces down bladed lines such as "I don’t like my body/I love your taste" or "You always made it easy/Reminding me not to bloom". Her vulnerability and honesty is striking and her haunted vocals hit you like a punch to the insecurities of your heart. Album closer Hold Your Own Hand is a melodic, guitar-centric empowered, yet weeping, anthem and it never fails to wholly shatter me.

FRANK OCEAN
‘Blonde’

In Blonde, Frank Ocean intimately puts together a supremely chill set of opulently emotive songs: quiet, meditative and perfect for the longing and nostalgia of solo late nights. The songs here aren’t R&B bangers, but tone poems of muted introspection, drawn with a haze of ghostly guitar, cozy warm synths and Ocean’s velvet soul vocals, almost completely sans drums. Ocean’s lyrical pronouncements float by in clipped fragments, singing openly on and looking back on deep heady love, adolescence, identity and sensual eroticism.

CAR SEAT HEADREST
‘Teens of Denial’

Will Toledo’s first album for Matador records and first real studio album brings his wiry, wordy rock to the forefront of the hivemind indie guitar scene. With bedroom pop tenderness and classic rock ambition and grandeur, Toledo’s constructions on Teens often eschew traditional songwriting structure, tracks such as the epic and ambitious The Ballad of the Costa Concordia flowing through a few different sections, building, falling, and finally, soaring. Toledo is ever-present though, with his mumbling and laconic vocal story telling of existential despair and crushing depression in a manner that sounds like a future festival crowd sing-along, like the unrepressed fun of album opener Fill In the Blank.

ANGEL OLSEN
‘My Woman’

With My Woman, American songwriter Angel Olsen scans through 1970s album-oriented country, ’50s rock ’n’ roll jukebox fare, and even shimmering silver-wigged synth-pop, recalibrating past perceptions and expectations.

The nervy 1990s glam of Shut Up Kiss Me is an aggressive micro-anthem, bursting with retro energy that was 2016’s most immediate classic and also the best guitar song released this year.

ANOHNI
‘Hopelessness’

Hopelessness is befittingly a bit of a crushing listen. Over sleek, glossy and positively ecstatic production from Hudson Mohawk and Oneohtrix Point Never, Anohni weaponises these highly dramatic anthems into protest songs of the people, crooning powerfully about the dire macro universal facts of drone warfare, mass surveillance, the impending environmental ecocide crisis and the arrogance of violent toxic masculinity. Drone Bomb Me and 4 Degrees was this year’s most devastating opening one-two punch.