We’re on our way, slowly but surely, to the end of 2025.
Instead of starting to think about this year’s best LPs,
let’s go back to 2024 and listen to TUTV’s 20 Best Albums
again and look back on what we wrote about each one
of them.
Lias Saoudi (voice/face/wordsmith/poet/writer): ‘Forgiveness Is Yours,’ is about life as eternal
contingency, about no longer suspecting, but knowing that this shit will never get any easier… in fact, it’s about to get a whole lot worse, your body’s going to go into decay and the people you love will slowly start dropping dead around you.
But somehow, you’ve smashed enough of your expectations thus far in life, you’re sort of fine with it… you accept it.The overarching aesthetic themes at work here are torpor and further torpor still.”
TUTV: Without a shadow of a doubt, their most startling and most creative/inventive accomplishment. Sounds like FWF have written/recorded the bone-chilling soundtrack
for an entertaining Doomsday party.
Enigmatic reflections, dark deliberations, distressing vibes, a John Lennon tribute and Saoudi as the foreboding messenger and sinister poet in the middle of it all. It’s the end
of the world, as we know it, and it feels like Fat White Family.
Artist: T BONE BURNETT Who: Legendary American songsmith and lauded producer who worked
with many greats (Elvis Costello, Robert Plant, John Mellencamp and many
more) and scored movie soundtracks all through his long career.
LET THE FLOWERS GROW
The song was originally written by Boy George with its initial message being
“one of
personal acceptance about being gay. As the song developed, it took on a more expansive and universal scope with its lyrics extending beyond sexuality and embracing race, gender, creed and religion.”
Epic.
Boy George – Peter Murphy
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Artist: PETER PERRETT Who: Former frontman of legendary British new
wavers The Only Ones (1976–1982, 2007–2017)
“The song incorporates themes of longing and desperation I felt in my own
life at the time that found a home in anecdotes of the desert and its characters
experiencing these feelings for reasons far removed from my reality.”
Artists: THE GLASS HOURS Who: American songwriters Brad Armstrong and Megan Barbera.
Their music blurs between Sunday afternoon country-folk and
the golden age of the 1970s.
“It’s about that someone you’ll never be with and that you allow to remain
inside you as a perfect unspoiled thing, yet still you measure and hold your
real relationship up against it. It’s a dream, an illusion, an unfair fantasy.
Nothing and therefore able to be perfect.”
“Abject narcissism is our only real code of conduct anymore. Everything is thinly veiled
self-interest. The post-modern post social media condition constitutes a complete death
of outwardness. We are smothered by the infinite present. We have swapped art for the
history of art. The game is up. The party’s over…NO SURRENDER!”
TUTV: First things first. FWF are one of the best bands of the past decade on
record and on stage and spearhead Lias Saoudi is one of the most charismatic frontmen/lyricists/poets around.
Lyrically, Religion For One is a doom and gloom meditation, a pitch-black ballad perfect as dirge at the funeral of the world. Sonically, it sounds like a hidden track on one of Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds‘s latest albums. Just like Cave, Saoudi (now and then), is a goosebumps crooner taking you on his dark side of the mind with a candlelight. Sitting around the Xmas tree with your family will never be the same again.
The accompanying video clip was filmed in Paris, directed by ‘The Dream Machine’s’ Michael William West. It’s described as “a portrait of corrupt ambition, aesthetic incest and the history of abstract expressionism.”
