Top albums of 2021

Top albums 2021 2020 saw some incredible new music, including Commoners Choir’s Untied Kingdom, an album I find difficult to listen to as it tugs, pulls, batters and soothes at my emotional core. I haven’t found anything to compete so far, but there have been albums which really tap into the modern world.

Bob Vylan’s We Live Here has become the banger of the year for the UK scene, and they were brutally brilliant in York at the Fulford Arms. Though the album’s titular song will always been the most breath-taking song on the album, the other tunes are still like a much-needed vocal heabutt. The rallying against racism is complete with a wider blare against a toxic Britain. Anti-racist music is part of of the DNA of alternative music scenes in the UK, but Bob Vylan’s album doesn’t feel reformist. It’s not a hopeful album, it’s tracks that want to drag the whole fucking thing into the sea.

We Are Lady Parts by Lady Parts is only 11 minutes long, but it represents a fantastic TV show about music, friendship and rebellion. The songs are so well-crafted, they don’t feel manufactured for a sitcom, they feel genuinely like an ace band you’d catch at Manchester Punk Festival. The TV show and EP reminded me of gigs and scenes and communities…something I’ve really missed in 2021.

Fuck These Fuckin Fascists by The Muslims is just non-stop anthems for a post-Trump America. Like Bob Vylan, the titular song is the song I played over and over again, but still the rest of the album feels so painfully urgent. I assume ‘Unity’ is an attack on Democrats who demand conciliation for being in power, when really the problems of racist police and racist borders are still crushing the people. It’s low-fi and full-on punk rock but unlike so many other guitar bands makes me want to get up and move.

Spotify Is Surveillance by Evan Greer is a little bit haunting. Her voice is so fresh and she plays with the ‘lightness’ from her folk sound but with a jagged punk sound. The album is a hopeful one about refusal, about survival, about celebration. But again, this album feels so modern as it looks at algorithms and, like The Muslims, attacks liberals on ‘Emma Goldman Would Have Beat Your Ass’. This was my most-played song of this year, are you surprised? It’s an explosive love letter to the no-compromise of Anarchism through the spirit of Emma Goldman. But there's also the warmth of 'Willing to Wait' and gentleness of 'Back Row' making this a diverse album of loss and hope.

Back to the UK sounds: I came to Sam Fender late in the game after various Facebook groups and articles sang his praises. I think his vocal style reminded me of the ladrock bands of my 00s youth I couldn’t click with. But there’s some real blunt poetry to his lyrics on Seventeen Going Under and he’s not afraid to rail against the Tories and State in his interviews. I think over time, he’s really going to get into my head. This is grey, post-Brexit cynicism, loaded with snarls and shrugs which will hopefully help many bedraggled lads something that articulates their bleakness in Tory Britain.

Albums I’ve also really loved this year:

Open Mouth, Open Heart - Destroy Boys

Reincarnate EP - Witch Fever

Going to Hell - Lande Hekt

Sometimes I Might be Introvert - Lil Simz

Our Hell Is Right Here - Drones

A Northern Coastal Town: Hull In The Blitz - Joe Solo and Rebecca Findlay

Connectivity - Grace Petrie

A Million Things That Never Happened - Billy Bragg

Noise Noise Noise - The Last Gang

At War With The Silverfish - Laura Jane Grace

1집 - Slant

Amigo The Devil - Born Against

Jeff Rosenstock - Ska Dream

Grand Collapse - Empty Plinths

Turnstile - Glow On

Nice One - Catbite

Comfort To Me - Amyl and The Sniffers

Protest Songs 1924-2018 - The Specials

Tory & Coalition Christmas: Festive political songs

Political Christmas songs

Who doesn’t love a decent Christmas banger? From the inevitability of ‘Last Christmas’ and ‘All I Want For Christmas’, to the traditional carols we all sorta kinda know the words to. Sooner or later, punk bands will make a Christmas tune: from the 70s/80s scene you’ve got UK Subs and the Vibrators on Punk Goes Christmas, through to pop-punk from Reel Big Fish, New Found Glory and Man Overboard. In 2012, we got the Dropkick Murphys 'The Season's Upon Us' and in 2017 Vice Squad added to the canon with ‘Christmas Has Been Cancelled’. My favourite Christmas song is 'I Don't Wanna Fight Tonight' by The Ramones, and an honourable mention goes to The Vandal 'Oi! To The World' and the No Doubt cover.

The Flying Pickets were dedicated socialists rooted in the radical, fringe theatre 7:84. They named their a capella group after the Trade Union tactic which had brought down the Conservatives in 1974. In April 1984 they were part of a picket of Drax Power Station and played benefit gigs for the NUM. Their single ‘Only You’ reached Christmas number one…apparently Thatcher was a fan of the tune. Many bands during the 1984-85 miner's strike played Christmas fundrasiers, and using music to raise money is common from Band Aid to LadBaby. But sometimes punk bands will use their platform not only to raise money at this season of giving, but to talk about poverty and politics. To raise money horizontally for political causes, rather than charitable vertical kindness.

This year, Petrol Girls transformed ‘Restless’ into ‘I’ll Give You Motherfuckers Christmas’ to promote a unique Christmas jumper. Sales went towards Unity Centre Glasgow, Calais Food Collective and No Borders Team providing material solidarity to people stuck at the Poland-Belarus border.

I’d like to focus on two political Christmas songs, one by Shirt Boys (a raucous Halifax punk band) and Joe Solo (a Scarborough folk-punk troubadour).

Shirt Boys wrote ‘Coalition Christmas (we’re all in this together)’ in 2010, a song both grungy in sound and imagery, painting a Dickensian Christmas scene in modern Britain. The track opens with a faint jingle to half-heartedly nod to the season, before churning into a rumbling guitar and barking vocals.

You can listen to the song here: https://shirtboys.bandcamp.com/track/coalition-christmas-were-all-in-it-together

The lyrics present various characters like a warped TV Christmas Special. A matchstick girl reoccurs, harking back to Victorian London and invoking poverty with “a cruel cough” and “touch of TB” and conditions that led to the 1888 Matchgirls Strike. The matchgirl’s illness is blamed on “Dave the toff”, leader of a cartoonish band of villains running rampant across the song. George Osborne is “Gideon” who “swings his axe / Santa is taken down.”

While Osborne is the instigator of violence, the Coalition partners are passive and ineffectual. Clegg “Nick has a nice relax / he eats some Christmas pud / all for the greater good” while Vince Cable is “dancing on TV”, a reference to his turn on Strictly Come Dancing. The song haphazardly flips between scathing punk verses and carol-esque intermissions. Grim, filthy and unhealthy, the song’s world is like a gone-wrong Beano comic, and critically this collection of Tories and Liberal Democrats are the villainous mob all in it together, but in it against us.

'Merry Christmas From Hatfield Main' by Joe Solo and The Hatfield Brigade was recorded on location at Central Club in Stainforth on October 30th 2016. Proceeds from the single went to struggling families in the area. This is a fist-to-the-air optimistic song of defiance, but let’s look at Joe’s 2014 song ‘A Tory Christmas.’ Proceeds from the song went towards Joe’s local food bank.

What does an ideal Tory Christmas look like? Laying off the elves and privatising the reindeer. Once again, Dickens’ ‘A Christmas Carol’ is invoked by Joe Solo where the protagonist of the song sings: “sod you Tiny Tim”. Apparently uncle Ebeneezer was right. The character of the song is cartoonishly cruel and greedy, but at his core ultimately individualistic. The poor can have dinner off the food bank shelves. Fuck the rest of you, I’m alright.

The song is rooted in the politics of the early 2010s. Still reeling from the financial crisis of 2008, the Conservatives were riding on four years of ‘tough decisions’ to balance the deficit, claiming Labour had bankrupted the country. And yet organisations like UK Uncut occupied shops to raise awareness of tax-dodging mega-corporations like Vodafone (who had negotiated their tax bill down from £6 billion to £2 billion). In 2012 they held a day of action against Starbucks. So Joe Solo sings “till Hell it freezes over and the banks pay tax / we can all have a Tory Christmas” swiping at both the banking sector, the tax-dodgers and the Tories letting these institutions off the hook.

Both songs are a darkly comic look at a twisted world, but maybe wouldn’t exist today. The stiff-upper-lipness of Cameron and Osborn was forged in Eton and Oxford and the Bullingdon Club. So songs like these unwrap the we-know-best stern mask to reveal the cruel heartlessness beyond. Today, with the Bumbler-in-chief leading a helm of a government tumbling over lies, sleaze, and bodies piling high, it feels all-too-common for them to be painted as incompetant and cartoonish. Gorging on the cheese and wine this Christmas.