hey hey hey everyone, Brerthony Brertano here, BuzzJack's least reliable personal charts nerd, back with another (the first) edition of Brer's Weekly Track Roundup

 

*ahem* hi again Personal Charts forum, sorry I kind of abandoned you again but after completing a round total of 150 traditional weekly top 40s (at least the last 50 or so of which were increasing drifting off schedule to the point where the latest ones were like 4 weeks late oops) taking me from January 2019 to mid November 2021 I decided that format was something that I couldn't really sustain any longer. But fear not for I am back to resume sharing my favourite releases of the week in a slightly different way ~

 

Say goodbye to chart runs, songs appearing for more than a single week and the rigid structure of a 'top 40', this new iteration of my chart threads is just going to be a straight roughly ranked list of however many songs that were released (or otherwise came to my attention) in a given week I thought were good enough to want to come back to. This first thread covers Monday 3rd to Sunday 9th January and as it were it's a little on the short side as the music business hasn't fully woken up yet, so there's only 28 songs this week but I'm sure it won't be long until I have weeks with more than 40 songs.

 

If I can be bothered to I might make a monthly traditional top 40 as well but I'm not committing to that yet, let's see if I can actually sustain this weekly format first :kink:

 

Before getting to the list proper here's a bunch of honorable mentions (the '...meh...' section if you will, if you caught the obvious references to Anthony Fantano's weekly roundup series, I won't bother with a 'worst of the week' section but these are some songs that I thought were pretty good but not quite enough to go on my playlist, or perhaps songs that had some interesting / very good elements but are a little lacking overall though may still be worth checking out if you haven't already and think any of these look interesting):

 

Belters Only - Make Me Feel Good (feat. Jazzy)

Blood Red Shoes - MURDER ME

Burial - Strange Neighbourhood

David Guetta and MORTEN - Permanence

Father John Misty - Funny Girl

Gang Of Youths - in the wake of your leave

Gunna and 21 Savage - thought i was playing

HUGEL, Jude & Frank and Twolate - La Candela Viva

James Morrison - Don't Mess With Love

Jnr Choi - TO THE MOON

LF SYSTEM - Dancing Cliché

Luude - Down Under (feat. Colin Hay)

MARINA - Free Woman

SASAMI - Say It

Son Lux - Plans We Made

The Weeknd - Every Angel Is Terrifying

The Weeknd - I Heard You're Married (feat. Lil Wayne)

The Weeknd - Starry Eyes

WEISS - Ain't Me Without You

Yard Act - Rich

YoungBoy Never Broke Again - Fish Scale

 

And here are this week's Best Songs of the Week:

 

1 The Weeknd - Sacrifice

2 Let's Eat Grandma - Happy New Year

3 The Weeknd - Less Than Zero

4 Bonobo - From You (feat. Joji)

5 Burial - Shadow Paradise

6 The Weeknd - How Do I Make You Love Me?

7 Stromae - L'Enfer

8 The Weeknd - Gasoline

9 Orbital - Are We Here? (30 Something) (Dusky Remix)

10 Lights & Motion - The World I Remember

11 Earl Sweatshirt - Titanic

12 Stephanie Beatriz and Olga Merediz - The Family Madrigal

13 AURORA - A Dangerous Thing

14 Burial - New Love

15 Subjective - Lost (feat. Tom Misch and Frida Touray)

16 Low - I Can Wait

17 Kid Kapichi - New England (feat. Bob Vylan)

18 Foxes - Absolute

19 Andrew Garfield, Joshua Henry, Vanessa Hudgens, Robin De Jesus, Alexandra Shipp and MJ Rodriguez - 30/90

20 AURORA - Everything Matters (feat. Pomme)

21 Hugar - ævi

22 The Weeknd - Don't Break My Heart

23 Halsey - People disappear here

24 King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard - Black Hot Soup (DJ Shadow "My Own Reality" Re-Write)

25 Burial - Antidawn

26 HI-LO and Reinier Zonneveld - String Theory

27 Majestic - Tricky (feat. Autumn Rowe)

28 REZZ - Menace

 

The Weeknd and Burial dominate with 5 and 3 songs respectively from new album 'Dawn FM' and new EP 'Antidawn' (what a coincidence those were released just one day apart with those titles), with The Weeknd taking the week's #1 with the ultra groovy 'Sacrifice' plus 3 further places in the top 10. Burial's top showing is at #5 for 'Shadow Paradise', the 10 minute centrepiece of his ambient soundscape EP, serving the project's most spine-tingling moments. Norwegian mystic songstress AURORA also dropped a pair of new singles to kick off the year and both make it onto the best list, one with some bilingual cred courtesy of French singer Pomme.

 

Blocking The Weeknd from taking the top 2 is Let's Eat Grandma who had my favourite song of 2021 with 'Hall Of Mirrors' and have kicked off the new year with a similarly brilliant melancholy synthpop banger aptly titled 'Happy New Year'. Bonobo should have an album bomb next week but for now he's also in the top 5 with the vibey 'From You' featuring Joji. I'm going to pretend that awful single Stromae came back with last year didn't happen because the follow-up 'L'Enfer' is immeasurably better (the instrumental is actually listenable this time, in fact it's the best part of the song, although I have heard the lyrics on this one are pretty hard-hitting too not that I'd know being a filthy monolingual). The top 10 is rounded out by an update of Orbital's 1994 track 'Are We Here?' in the signature style of remixers Dusky (one of the most consistent names in current electronic music imo), plus 'The World I Remember', a beautiful cinematic instrumental reliably delivered by Lights & Motion who you may know from Chez Wombat song contest entries.

 

This week is a little light on hip-hop but it is represented by 'Titanic', a short but punchy trap banger from Earl Sweatshirt (formerly a fellow member of Odd Future alongside the likes of Tyler, The Creator and Frank Ocean). Film soundtracks are well represented though as the incessant earworm 'The Family Madrigal' from Stephanie Beatriz and Olga Merediz from 'Encanto' makes an appearance as does the dramatic '30/90' from Andrew Garfield et al. which is from some Netflix film I'd never heard of (I just peeped the song out of curiosity because it entered the UK top 100 and was pleasantly surprised, reminds me a bit of... I want to say My Chemical Romance?) Subjective is a new project from drum n bass legend Goldie, admittedly I only checked this one out for the Tom Misch feature but I'll keep an eye out for future releases from this project. There's a bit of LOUDNESS in the middle of the list from noisy indie band Low (the first song that's really grabbed me from them, came out last year but brought to my attention by its music video) and the slowthai-esque punk/rap fusion from Kid Kapichi, followed up by the latest breezy dance-pop bop from Foxes because my music taste is nothing if not all over the place. Also making the cut this week are classical/post-rock act Hugar (of Jadakissnia fame), a belatedly digitally released bonus track from the latest Halsey album, a DJ Shadow remix of what was already probably my favourite song from the latest King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard album, and finally a trio of electronic tracks of various flavours from HI-LO (aka Oliver Heldens) and Reinier Zonneveld (this one dropped in 2021 but I missed it, thanks to Jade for charting it and bringing it to my attention), Majestic with another earworm and REZZ with a song that is a certified REZZ song (if you've heard one before you'll know what I mean but hey it's not a bad formula).

 

I think that was a manageable level of commentary but we'll see how quickly I get lazy with it

Here's a playlist of this week's Best Songs of the Week if you are for whatever reason inclined to check it out.

 

 

I'm also going to keep a growing overall playlist for 2022, adding each week's Best Songs. There will also be some songs I add to this list which aren't on the weekly lists. That may be songs which belatedly grew on me (this week there are a few of those from songs that re-entered the UK top 100 in the first week of the year, namely THE ANXIETY, Arz and Benson Boone), older singles from freshly released albums (a few of those here already too, The Weeknd's 'Take My Breath' of course plus the first couple of singles from the new gupi album which I haven't bothered listening to in full) or songs from the various song contests around the forum.

 

edit: belatedly also added a few more songs which were either new entries on the US Hot 100 or new additions to the Radio 1 playlist at the start of January (Adele, Ari Lennox, Carolina Gaitán - La Gaita et al., Fireboy DML (sans Ed Sheeran although his remix is fine too x) and FKA twigs/The Weeknd).

 

 

Next week's thread - assuming I don't immediately get so lazy that I give up on this format after only one week - should be a bit less wordy now the format is established. x

 

Feel free to comment on anything in this thread if you see anything interesting but I won't promise to reply because I am historically awful at doing so :kink:

Hi there Bre!

Great to see four of the ten songs in the top 10 being songs from The Weeknd!

I also like seeing "L'enfer" and "Absolute".

Great chart!

I'm loving Are We Here? (30 Something) (Dusky Remix) at the moment! Tricky is the epitome of diet bop but I do be bopping :music:

 

Liking this new format! I was wondering where your late charts went and if the Multichart was always 5 weeks behind because of yours lol