2018 album of the year, and why I'll never listen to it again
At this time of year I like to write a note - sometimes brief, sometimes not - about the music I've enjoyed the most since January.
Even though I'm writing this in early December I've been thinking about this post for months now. An album came out this year that stood head and shoulders above everything else. I loved it, listened to it a lot, thought a lot of the tracks were timeless. It was an obvious contender for my favourite of the year.
But I can't listen to it now and I doubt I'll ever listen to it again.
Bear with me as I work my way through this.
2018 album of the year: Hookworms - Microshift
Hookworms have been a band that have toyed with greatness but hadn't quite got there.
The debut was enjoyable; too far on the drony side of psych for me but good enough for me to consider it one of my favourites of the year. Their second effort was frankly a little boring. I fully expected the third album to be a slump into mediocrity, maybe with the odd nice track like Radio Tokyo to prop it up.
Bloody hell, did they surprise me.
The press campaign for this album talked about them being cursed, saying that this was an album borne of struggle and things going wrong. What wasn't apparent during those interviews is how those problems informed a set of songs that follow the same structure: every track catalogues a trial, an error, a determination, an improvement. It's an album of overcoming odds and maybe, just maybe, celebrating life. Celebrating when hard work makes an improvement.
It opens on a meditation about a death, with the sombre narrative reflection that the singer still sees the departed everytime they feel down. It moves onto a song where the singer repeats that he's "...facing down, I'm feeling awful. False hope forever", then straight into a song about a son's experience of a father with Alzheimer's.
These songs aren't maudlin. They're honest, they're angry, they're impassioned, and bloody hell they're brilliant. Just like the rest of the songs, really.
Microshift is one of those incredibly rare albums that you want to listen to on a loop and play exclusively for weeks. Every time you think you've got a favourite song, the next track comes on and, wait, wow, that's your favourite. The gnarled fuzziness from previous albums is still there but tempered by really amazing song structures and - gasp! - audible lyrics. It feels scuzzy, and worn, and a little damaged, and yet it's so pure and wonderful. The joy it finds in awful circumstances is truly, truly elating.
But it's now an impossible listen, and that joy rings hollow.
You might know the story already. You might not.
In brief, the most prolific band member has historically championed women's rights online and was particularly vocal on Twitter, often sending out messages saying nothing more than 'believe victims of abuse'. It ran through his lyrics too - Opener is about toxic masculinity and a desire to move beyond that, to be honest and open and to do better for women.
Inevitably, allegations of abuse against him came out this year.
He issued a statement calling the allegations untrue. The rest of the band immediately distanced themselves from him and the band is now effectively over.
It's a struggle to process this. The band have always loudly talked about ethics and how to be more inclusive people. They supported a DIY scene designed to allow otherwise suppressed voices to be heard.
I'm disappointed because it leaves this album now feeling empty. I'm disappointed at MJ's hypocrisy. I'm disappointed because Hookworms were already great and seemed to be getting better.
And I'm furious at how quiet this has all been. If you've not heard this story, you're not alone. Hookworms are on a major label and got write-ups in all the major press, but there has been extremely little comment about what's happened. No-one wants to touch it, and that somehow makes this whole episode even worse. Aside from a meandering thread on DrownedInSound and the odd notice of the band breaking up, there's been nothing. Nothing at all.
Something about this relative silence is awful. On some level, this whole episode is a terrible commentary about the left. Easy to throw stones at things you hate, difficult to do at things you love, and somewhere at the core is some lurking suspicion that the words being said aren't the words being lived by.
Superficially it's possible to say that Microshift is still a good album. But its soul is about courage and fear and finding the right path through difficult circumstances, and those messages now don't ring true. It plays now as some grotesque artifice, either designed to appeal to people who don't hold the same values or, worse, showing how people who display such values don't actually hold them.
It's made me question myself and make me feel like a lesser person. I honestly had a crisis of conscience - I believe the things that MJ used to say, and though I've never been a lefty Twitter cheerleader I can't help but see myself in who he was. Easy to make the jump that maybe I'm like he now is, too.
Urgh.
I loved this album but now I categorically hate it. Because it was so moving and occupied so much of my musical diary this year it'd be wrong to just erase it like so many other list-writing musical naval-gazers have. It is my album of the year, but for precisely all the wrong reasons.