10 of the Best for 2020

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10 of the Best for 2020

/ By Andie Jeenius

It’s that time of year, when we all start to look back and take stock of the offerings of 2020. Pandemic and lockdowns dominated but music was the tonic. Having checked in with various sites and bloggers, there is definitely a small group of albums in which at least one, has cropped up in almost everyone’s ‘Best of 2020’ lists. In no particular order, are 10 albums which got many of through lockdown, isolation, Black Lives Matter and political marches, election fatigue, uncertainty, love and loss. It’s an eclectic mix, offering view points from varied angles and experiences, including disagreement, hope and ultimately, acceptance.

Any of these make your list? Let us know your thoughts and favourites in the comments below.

Waxahatchee – Saint Cloud

After ditching her demons, her angst and finding sobriety, Katie Crutchfield moved herself and her partner Kevin Morby back to Kansas City, USA and created a brand new sound which focuses on her newfound optimism whilst reaffirming her roots in Birmingham, Alabama and her years of being on tour around the world. What she serves up on 'Saint Cloud' is a gentle alt. folk catalogue, which many are claiming is her best writing yet.

Fiona Apple - Fetch the Bolt Cutters

Well known for her reclusive tendencies, Fiona Apple had created and recorded ‘Fetch the Bolt Cutters’, her masterpiece lockdown album on her own at her Venice Beach home, before we’d even stock piled our bog roll! However, the tracks cry of liberation rather than confinement and they include a menagerie of ambient sounds, snarls, harmonies and even a dog bark, but still meet the brutality of life, head on. Featuring in many of the top music industry bloggers ‘Best of 2020’ selections, this album must be doing something right?

Run the Jewels – RTJ4

Two years in the making, Run the Jewels album RTJ4 came as a gift and it’s timing was perfect. Offered up for free (as they do with all their albums) two days before it’s official release, it quickly became the Hip-Hop album of the year. 2020 has been a mind-fuck and this album brings all of that to one place, not because or in spite of, the Black Lives Matter movement, but alongside it. Killer Mike and El-P, known for their hardcore, revolutionary lyrics telling you not just how it is, but how it should and will be.

Phoebe Bridgers – Punisher

Following on from the huge success of her first album, this busy gal has pitched it perfectly. Clever lyrics from Phoebe Bridgers, mean her release of ‘Punisher’ offers up tracks which are specific, but have individual and solid stories. This twentysomething offers her peers some solace with her funny, dreamy, sometimes dark take on the world but is relevant and appealing.

Dua Lipa – Future Nostalgia

Taking the influences of previous Pop Goddesses, Madonna and Kylie Minogue, with the production skills of amongst others, Mark Ronson, creating an album which ‘feels like a dance class’ was a certainty with Future Nostalgia. Flavours of disco, funk, new wave and house bring nothing but fun from the past, into the present and onto the future.

Perfume Genius – Set My Heart on Fire Immediately

Mike Hadreas (aka Perfume Genius) has placed ‘Set My Heart on Fire Immediately’ firmly in the alt-pop camp, but blends it with synth-pop, hefty guitar rifts and baroque harpsichord flounces. Hadreas vocal range is fabulous and leaves the listener eager for his next project.

Deftones – Ohms

The Deftones have brought back some hard-rocking guitar and bass riffs on their new album ‘Ohms’. After a 10-year hiatus, this will please the fans of their 2000 album White Pony. Their constant evolving and experimenting brings a revitalised sound to this new album, which will garner them new fans and satisfy their existing devotees.

Thundercat – It Is What It Is

Following on from his successful 2017 album ‘Drunk’, Stephen Bruner’s (aka Thundercat) fourth album brings an impressive cast of collaborators including Childish Gambino, Ty Dolla $ign and Kamasi Washington adding to the fun, jazz fusion vibes but also remembering the loss of his close friend Mac Miller is 2018 in the track ‘Fair Chance’.

The Weeknd – After Hours

Following on from 2016’s ‘Starboy’ and his 2018 EP ‘My Dear Melancholy’, The Weekend’s new album is a tiny swerve in a different direction and not what many people were expecting from the talented Canadian. Offering introspection and an open spirit, you can’t help but be wrapped in the adventure.

Lil Uzi Vert – Eternal Atake

Lil Uzi Vert’s highly anticipated follow up to his 2017 debut album ‘Luv is Rage 2’ is here. ‘Eternal Lake’ offers witty punchlines, cosmic beats, rythyms, melodies and hooks which cleverly stay with you even after the track has finished. Old themes with new ideas, make this album exciting, familiar and a definite classic.

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04
Jun

10 Reasons why the world needs Jeeni

My name is Mel Croucher. I'm a record producer and computer nerd. Over the years I've worked with a whole bunch of superstars like Prince, Frank Zappa and Eminem. In other words, I've been around successful musicians all my working life. A few years back I was hearing from more and more artists how unhappy they were with the big streaming services. So I polled 4,200 of them about their Top-Ten Problems with Spotify, Apple Music, Soundcloud, Deezer, and the rest. The poll result was a shocker, and I asked a bunch of the best brains in the music business to help me create an ethical alternative. It's taken us two years, and we call our alternative JEENI. Here's what the artists we polled told us, and here's our Jeeni solution to their problems. 1 - Money. Artists get paid a pittance. Platforms like YouTube pay $0.00069 per view, so even 10,000 views earns us less than the cost of a pizza per month.Jeeni solution. OK, we get it. You do all the hard work, so you deserve all the rewards. How about a Jeeni deal where you to keep 100% of all music sales, ticketing, and merchandise sold through our platform. 2 - Recognition. We try really hard, but streaming platforms just don't get us more fans or recognition.Jeeni solution. Right. Let's make Jeeni an artist development platform. Our founder invented viral marketing in 1994. Then he achieved the world's first million-user viral campaign. Now he's designed all the tools you need to grow your fanbase and get recognition: all part of the Jeeni service. 3 - Communication. We don't know the identity of who's streaming our stuff, so we can't get in direct contact with anyone who wants to know more about us.Jeeni solution. OK. Here's the deal. With Jeeni you get a built-in fan database to contact everyone who votes for you or likes your work, and you communicate direct with them as often as you like. Safely, legally and all opt-in. 4 - B*llsh*t. The big streaming platforms are full of it. We hate the adverts, we hate the artificial likes, we hate the paid-for recommendations, we hate the hype.Jeeni solution. The answer to this is an ethical alternative. We guarantee Jeeni will stay advert-free. We pledge our charts are the result of democratic votes by real people. And we promise that all Jeeni content comes from genuine unpaid sources. Oh yeah, we'll also pay our taxes in full, because we believe we should make a positive contribution to the society we live in. 5 - Rip Offs. We just can't break through, and even when we think we're making progress as artists we get ripped off.Jeeni solution. Yep. The entertainment business has always been full of shysters. Let's be honest here, the people behind Jeeni have all made it to the top somehow, and between us we've made every mistake in the book. Our mission is to help you achieve success and avoid the rip-offs. That's why our Jeeni Mentors, Ambassadors and Masterclasses have joined forces to do exactly that. 6 - Choice. The big streaming services all offer similar content, dominated by the same big star names.Jeeni solution. Agreed, so let's ignore the content everyone else uses and leave our competitors to fight it out! Jeeni is designed for undiscovered artists to break through, based on talent alone, not ad-spend. 7 - Channels. My work doesn't fit into mainstream channels. For example, what about channels for spoken-word?Jeeni solution. No problem. Jeeni already has dedicated spoken-word channels for poetry, comedy, and voice actors, plus channels for entertainments ranging from dance to videogame soundtracks. And if we don't already have a channel that suits your need ... we'll sit down and create it! 8 - Visibility. People either don't know about our work, or can't find it even if they do.Jeeni solution. We've designed the smartest user interface we can. On Jeeni, you can search by name, type of channel, instrumentation, latest uploads, popularity, even by influences and heroes. But above all, our artists have complete control over publicising their own announcements to their specific Jeeni audience. 9 - Fakes. What's the difference between the Jeeni Awards and the fake results dominated by celebrity voting?Jeeni solution. Simple. Jeeni doesn't have celebrity voting. Our Awards will always be based on one member - one vote. No ifs, no buts. 10 - Live performance. I'd like to stream an event, and charge people to watch it. Can Jeeni do that?Jeeni solution. Um, not yet, but we're working on it! Come on now, we're not perfect, so we need your help. Jeeni has returned to Crowdcube to raise more funds for helping new talent. Jeeni founding director Mel Croucher says, “We’re ahead of our original schedule, but there’s still so much more to do. We need to scale our online platform globally now and build our mass artist showcases. Jeeni raised £100K in 6 days and we’re working hard to get more investors on board. Then we can hit all our targets, and give our new artists the recognition they deserve.” If you want to see our pitch click HERE.

06
Jun

My grandfather was killed by a rubbish truck.

Jeeni has returned to Crowdcube to raise more funds for helping new talent. Jeeni founding director Mel Croucher says, “I admit we’re ahead of our original schedule, but there’s still so much more to do. We need to scale our online platform globally now and build our mass artist showcases. Then we can hit all our targets, and give our new artists the recognition they deserve.” If you want to see our pitch click HERE. Mel has been writing the best-loved column in top-selling tech magazines for over 30 years. Now he’s agreed to share his work with all our members. He’s a video games pioneer and musician, and to to find out more about Mel check out his Wikipedia page. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mel_Croucher. Here’s one of Mel’s latest! One bright Autumn morning, my grandfather was killed by a rubbish truck. He got run over crossing the road on his regular walk to work. He was 84. And I am comforted to know that he loved his work as much as he loved his walk. As for me, I have yet to reach that ripe old age but I am still working most hours, most days. It's not so much that I love my work, more that I don't know what else to do. When I was younger, so much younger than today, I was promised a sci-fi world where all labour would be performed by robots, leaving us humans to enjoy a more meaningful existence. Before my grandfather was born, Karl Marx wrote that in a mechanised society workers would be freed from the monotony of work to “hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, criticise after dinner.” My grandfather certainly never saw such a sci-fi world or Marxist society, and I'm still waiting for it. But the way things are going I may not have to wait much longer for robots to take over the tedium of work. Judging by their behaviour, I suspect that most telemarketers, receptionists, estate agents and bar tenders were replaced by robots ages ago. And for drivers, machine operators and manual workers, it can only be only a matter of time. The first robot aircraft pilot took to the skies then navigated flawlessly and landed safely way back in 1947. Robots have been successfully conducting complex heart surgery since 2004. Artificial intelligence has already reached the cognitive power of a nine year-old human, in which case it is qualified to run for President of the USA in November. But do we really need political leaders to tell us how best to fill our waking hours? If we can develop all these technological wonders then we should be smart enough to work it out for ourselves. Our waking hours are dominated by work, whether we are in work or not. Strikers are depicted as troublemakers. Artists are depicted as idle. The poor are depicted as scroungers. The state cajoles the unemployed, the sick and the disabled to get off their arses and work. We are educated with the goal of work in mind, then having worked all our lives we are grudgingly handed back a mingy pension which we paid for in the first place. The idealised worker works in order to pay the childminder, the Deliveroo driver, the dog walker, the baker, the brewer, the app maker, because the idealised worker has no time left for such things. The idealised worker is too busy working to do any of these things for herself. For huge numbers of us the significance of the old certainties of community, religion, politics, and even family, have all fallen away to be replaced by work. For huge numbers of us work is how we give our lives meaning, while at the same time work has become more precarious, more impersonal, more stressful, and the app-driven gig economy is a perfect example of this. Yet everybody knows that automation is already capable of doing most manual jobs of work, and now artificial intelligence is predicted as achieving the capability of taking over most desk-bound jobs too. Since the pandemic, the entire framework of work is falling apart. But as a species we are not hardwired to work for a living. We never have been. We were lied to by those who said we must work, either to deserve a mythological afterlife, or protect an artificial realm, or for supposed honour, or someone else's glory, or for tokens of currency that can only be spent at the store owned by the company that issues those tokens in the first place. But of course all of those motivations are a con. And an obvious con at that. So here's the thing. Now we have cheap reliable technology, let's get all the robots to do as much of the muscle work as they can, and let's get all the artificial intelligences to do as much of the brain work as they can. Then let's redistribute the remaining working hours evenly to we the people, and in return pay ourselves some of that fabricated stuff called money so we can buy good food and decent shelter. By my reckoning six hours a day, three days a week will do nicely to pick up the slack left by the robots. Work needn't be useless. Work includes child-rearing, caring for the elderly and protecting the vulnerable. It also includes growing food, dreaming up new businesses and fixing the tap. And work includes creating music and dance and poetry and streaming it on Jeeni.com. It is self-evident that all valid work is worth the same valid reward. This is not a Marxist idea, or even a socialist proposal. It's the Tories who bang on about work being such a good thing and everyone pulling their weight, and I completely agree with them. Margaret Thatcher, that champion of work culture, said, “The heresies of one period become the orthodoxies of the next.” Yes indeedy, so bring on the robots and the electronic brains. If work is such a good thing then let everyone have a go for a few hours a week for a universal payment. And don't worry about how the payment is distributed, the accounts have all been reckoned by computers for years. Click HERE to visit or return to jeeni.com

05
Jun

Love everything creative and want to be a blogger or a podcast creator?

Are you a professional music journalist or a music student who wants to expand your arena? Are you a collaborator or curator or a podcast creator who would like us to help you distribute your work globally? For each blog and podcast posted we will donate £10 to you and also promote your blog and podcast to all our members for FREE and encourage anyone that reads your blog or listens to your podcast to donate as well, on average bloggers an pod casters can earn from $800 to $2,000 a month. The Independent Musicians and Performers Community (IMAP) has been set up by the founders of Jeeni. Our Community is for everyone and anyone creative: musicians, voice-artists, performers, poets, singer-songwriters ... the list is endless. We connect, collaborate, share and support each other, while we have some fun and make a real difference. We are a completely independent group and have no interest in political debate in this community. We encourage our members to share their original music and performances. We scan the media every day for what support is available for musicians and performers. We make it our mission to wade through lengthy documents and policies so our members don't have to, and we grab the main highlights and takeaways to make it easy for them to absorb the plethora of information swimming around. The industry is being very responsive and coming up with lots of ideas, like allowing artists to keep earning by adding donate buttons on streaming platforms. Some organisations are making grants available, some are discounting their streaming platforms, whereas others are allowing artists and fans to sign up for free. We expect to see many online services partnering with one another to combine their overall membership offerings, such as Soundcloud and Twitch. And we are very interested to see what the major global companies do and how they respond to these new and unknown market conditions. If you fancy joining Team Jeeni as a blogger, pod caster or a contributor and want to find out more just drop me a line and we can start chatting.

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