the HOT 100
S t r o n g & l a b e l
6Stewart Smith l icks through this The prohibitive cost of vinyl has led to a renaissance in underground cassette labels and Scotland is full of great ones. GLARC, aka Greater Lanarkshire Research Council, win the award for most original packing, with their felt and ceramic efforts. The music was brilliant too, from Quinie’s stark Celtic folk to Still House Plants’ dreamy and explosive art-pop. Oliver and Laurie Pitt’s Akashic presented the surreal sound art of Vernon & Burns, and a joyous compilation of tracks from Green Door Studio’s youth programme.
year’s movers and shakers among the Scottish cassette, vinyl and digital record houses
9 NIGHT SCHOOL RECORDS
Domestic Exile unleashed the queasy electronics of Sue Zuki, while Winning Sperm Party took a surprise turn into jazz fusion with Banana Oil. At War With False Noise roared back into action with the welcome return of Glasgow’s dark cosmic overlords Vom, while Fuzzkill spooled out garage pop from Catholic Action and Shredd. And if you don’t have a tape player, fear not, for it’s all available digitally via Bandcamp.
At the more commercial end of the underground, Night School enjoyed another great year (see main list), while Optimo initiated its So Low imprint with Happy Meals’ blissed-out Full Ashram Devotional Ceremony. Edinburgh indie stalwarts Song, by Toad brought us the acclaimed debut of singer-songwriter Siobhan Wilson, while crowdfunded Last Night From Glasgow entered its second year with new releases from the Americana- tinged Sister John and ‘minor supergroup’ Radiophonic Tuckshop. Eigg’s Lost Map hosted their Howlin’ Fling festival and released the debut album from Manuela, the off-kilter pop group from Manuela Gernedel and her husband, former Franz Ferdinand guitarist Nick McCarthy. Veteran indie label Chemikal
Underground was the subject of Niall McCann’s documentary Lost in France, while Mogwai’s Rock Action went pop with Sacred Paws’ infectious Strike a Match, a deserving winner of the Scottish Album Of The Year Award.
38 THE LIST 1 Nov 2017–31 Jan 2018
DARK MATERIALS A Glasgow-based label with an international outlook, Michael Kasparis’ Night School continues to impress with great new releases from avant-disco supergroup AMOR, unsettling industrialists The Modern Institute, minimal waver Stacian, pop-auteur Molly Nilsson, and indie songwriter Patience. (SS)
8 RACHEL NEWTON
DOING HER BIT On top of being shortlisted for a SAY Award this year, Rachel Newton was also named Musician of the Year at the BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards. Most recently, the singer and harpist co-founded The BIT Collective, a group which seeks to address gender issues in folk and trad music. (AQ)
7 ARMANDO IANNUCCI STILL IN THE THICK OF IT With real world politics proving far stranger than i ction, satire was in danger of being placed on life- support. Well, we needn’t have worried, as The Death of Stalin is probably the funniest British i lm since In the Loop. (SH)
6 OPTIMO CLUB CLASS JD Twitch and JG Wilkes celebrated Optimo’s 20th birthday in style with a one-day, three-stage festival. As well as featuring a cracking lineup of mostly female DJs and performers, a portion of proi ts were donated to Glasgow’s Coalition for Racial Equality & Rights and to various food banks in the city. (AQ)
5 EWAN MCGREGOR SIBLING RIBALDRY Ewan McGregor started the year strongly, fronting T2: Trainspotting. After a 21-year break, he resurrected loveable ex-junkie Renton in Danny Boyle’s i lm that rel ected the loss of youth and the aging process alongside drugs, crime and violence. Next, McGregor side-stepped into kids i lms, as talking candlestick Lumière, in the live action remake of Disney’s Beauty and the Beast (currently the tenth highest grossing i lm of all time, raking in over $1.2bn worldwide). And then came TV’s Fargo. One of the highlights in McGregor’s career, the third season of this dark and grimy crime thriller featured him starring as two feuding brothers whose lives are torn apart by bitterness, jealousy and murder. (HN)