Neil Kulkarni's Blog

New Mexico is a weird place. On the few occassions Ive been in Alburquerque its like being on another planet - the sky and earth deep red, the horizon an endless arc, the only break in the vista the sporadic flashes of military hardware in the sky, the trails of white plume. It feels mysterious, secretive, timeless, barely inhabited by humans, mainly inhabited by a silence and space occassionally ruptured by tiny suggestions of human presence. This utterly stunning debut from New Mexico duo...

So, they’ve bought up kindness now. I suspected there was a strand of human relationships as yet immune to asset-stripping and commodification but relax, the marketeers have caught up. ‘Be Kind’ is now a t-shirt slogan, and an oddly revealing one at that. Could imply a general empathy with the world but really implies being nice to who you love (i.e yourself). A shame because kindness is absolutely what matters right now, perhaps even more than politics. First, before anything else,  we...

Alphabetical order cos I loathe marks out of ten/competition. Just one list this year. If you see quote marks it means I'm quoting from a review in DJ Magazine, Wire Magazine or the Metro newspaper. 
Oddly, the very first and the very last albums here were the only two that me and my daughters agreed on this year, the first a fave of my eldest, the last a fave of my youngest.

If I can offer one view of what unifies all of these it's that in tough times for all of us, they have offered an...

"if i am bound for something - honey wont you know that i will always take the shortest fucking road" - Nadia Reid 'Reaching Through'
3 minutes out of Cov is Kenilworth but it might as well be a different world. It's in Warwickshire, which we used to be in but now we've been stuck in with Brum...left;">that"if

Gwenno, creator of my album of the year 2018
Sole criteria here is that it wouldn't fit in the previous 3 lists. However as I've always insisted, pop is a way of listening. Everything here got me almost immediately. So fuck it, I'm calling it my pop list even if you're unlikely to have heard them on pop radio. Anything in quote-marks is from reviews in DJ Magazine or The Wire.
The order is important in as much as it genuinely does reflect how often I've listened. Pop should be addictive an...

K-Trap An A-Z of my year engulfed/immersed in Bass. Yeah, I know, but what else to call it without sounding like fkn 'urban'? What qualifies things here and not elsewhere is that this is mainly undergound electronic music with a focus on the low end. Because of the sheer VARIETY of what that loose remit can contain (and also cos I consequently suspect putting these in any kind of meritocratic order would take me until March) these are simply alphabetically listed by artist-name (I know -...

Far too much good stuff this year for it to just be a top 30, so here's my top 50 singles/EPs/albums in hip hop this year. If there's quote-marks they'll be from reviews I wrote in DJ Magazine or Wire Magazine. Thanks as ever to the bloggers & sites that keep this old knacker vaguely in the loop especially Ginger Slim and Suspect Packages.
BTW - heard a lot from friends this year that they feel totally out of touch with hip hop in 2018 and want to know what's good. Rather th...

Uada, #27 on the list and deffo my favourite metal press-shot of the year
In reverse order of fucking awesomeness. There is still day-to-day movement in 11-30 but the top ten are the top ten for a reason. Another great year in the world of GROOAAAGGGHH. Thanks to the sites and blogs (Angry Metal Guy,  Heavy Blog Is Heavy, Cvlt Nation and The Sludgelord) who are consistently invaluable and have been all year. Bubblers under? Too many to go into but special mention for P...

From Melody Maker, 12th April, 1997. Photos by Pat Pope. Words by Neil Kulkarni 
(Right click images & save/open in new tab to read). 

Fuck me, imagine being a hip hop fan who actually gave a fuck about that new Nas snoozeathon? Please Lord spare us from the 'surprise album', the rush-release, the vines of Kanye nodding his head under a bridge, the way pop-crit so often surrenders to the powers of commerce and PR. Even at this mid-point in the year you can kind of tell that the year in hip hop will be 'summed up' by writers who don't listen as being all about that Gambino track. Why are these people not telling their people...