What Luke and I and the rest of the Quietus team have with you, the reader, is a bona fide relationship many of you have been with us for 13 years now. Thinking back on it afterwards, this exchange reminded me of the Quietus itself. Constructive solutions were actually relatively easy to locate (although maybe less so to implement, with neither of us being on the board of directors of Columbia Records). From my Terminator-style drop down menu – which also included "Steve Albini's commendable but way overdue mea culpa" "COVID's exposure of damaging fault lines in DIY communities" "The recent failure of the Spotify cloaking device revealing it to actually be Titan's Eternal-Deviant warlord Thanos" – I selected, "Adele versus independent music."ĭespite us coming at the subject from pretty much opposing corners, after a few minutes of nuanced debate we found that actually we were pretty much in agreement with one another where it counted, unlike, it seems, literally everyone else who discussed it on my Twitter feed. After a pleasant 40 minutes we both said, "We should do this more often!" But I think we're both aware that circumstances are stacked against it happening again for the time being so fraught is the current moment.ĭuring this oasis of a conversation my girlfriend asked me, "What's going on in the world of music?"Īnd boy, what a question it was. I couldn't remember the last time we'd been afforded the luxury of communicating at length without the sole aim being to discuss fears regarding elderly relatives, finances, employment, schooling, health, climate, COVID and so on. I went out for a coffee with my girlfriend this week, simply for the pleasure of sharing a slice of cake and having a chat.
If time is on your side, do spend a few hours listening to entries that are unfamiliar to you – I can guarantee you'll find a batch of records that will turn your head and at least a handful that will permanently penetrate your heart and mind. My PayPal account is already sobbing tremulously at the thought of the number of digital downloads, tapes, CDs and vinyl LPs it's going to have to process because of this bountiful inventory. These are the Quietus albums of the year, as voted for by staff, columnists and regular writers of this site.