Let’s Go Eat the Factory… First off the GBV conveyor belt

2012 Top 100 LPs #88-85: Four Tet, Guided By Voices, Doug Tielli, Mordecai Smyth

Published on December 4th, 2012 | Jonny Abrams

Yes, it’s…Rocksucker’s Top 100 Albums of 2012!

Rocksucker has listened to a lot of albums this year, so just for fun we decided to slog back through them and confer varying degrees of merit on them based on our own spurious criteria, so as to count you from 100 right down to number 1. By dint of mathematics (specifically 4 x 25), top spot shall be revealed on Christmas day. Now, let’s get crackling, and then cracking…

88. Doug Tielli – Swan Sky Sea Squirrel

A bewitching sonic mix of pastel colours, drenched in the gentle, psychedelic mania that comes of a solitariness in thrall to the elements, unmarked by time or era. Magical in a rockpool sort of way, y’dig?

Click here to read Rocksucker’s full review of Swan Sky Sea Squirrel

Click here to read Rocksucker’s interview with Doug Tielli

87. Mordecai Smyth – Sticky Tape & Rust

It’s easy to cast Smyth as a man out of time – late-’60s Kinks, playful-mode Beatles, Syd Barrett, Kevin Ayers, Sell Out-era Who etc. – but you can throw a spot of Madness, Misty’s Big Adventure and Stuart Murdoch into the reference points and appreciate that there will always be a place for pop songs this well-crafted and affably eccentric. “Almost Murder Ballad”, “Sinister Cyclist”, “Don’t Cross Colin”; you’ve got to love a song that can make you grin by its title alone, then plant a gleaming melody in your head.

Click here to read Rocksucker’s full review of Sticky Tape & Rust

Click here to read Rocksucker’s interview with Mordecai Smyth

86. Four Tet – Pink

A subtle, crinkly dance floor record from yer man Kieran Hebden, who continues to create architecturally designed music with such a groovy, nocturnal strut about it that it’s easy to overlook how much careful love and attention must go into making it. One of the year’s best electronic LPs, as is by now to be expected.

85. Guided By Voices – Let’s Go Eat the Factory

Bob Pollard and the rest of the band’s “classic era” line-up were hard-pressed to recapture the magic of mid-’90s albums Bee Thousand and Alien Lanes, but there are enough rough gems scattered across this and follow-up Class Clown Spots a UFO to have made their studio return an entirely worthwhile venture. We are yet to hear their third LP of 2012 The Bears for Lunch (not on iTunes or Spotify yet for us Brits, it seems), while there is yet another penned in for 2013, titled English Little League. Oh, and this year has also taken in two solo Pollard records. You think that other band you thought were hard-working work hard? Yeah, well…you get the picture.

With the highest density of good ‘uns that Rocksucker has actually heard, Let’s Go Eat the Factory is our entrant from the GBV camp. Furthermore, “How I Met My Mother” might just be the song title of the year. And how gosh darn jolly is “Doughnut for a Snowman”? Answer: this jolly…

Click here to read Rocksucker’s full review of Let’s Go Eat the Factory

Watch this space for a continuation of the countdown of Rocksucker’s Top 100 Albums of 2012! Bloody do it!

Artists: doug tielli, four tet, guided by voices, mordecai smyth

About the Author

Jonny Abrams Editor of Rocksucker and the website's founder, Jonny is passionate about the music he listens to, both good and bad, as well as interviewing his favourite musicians.