Ban Ban Ton Ton is looking back on the musical year. Since Japanese superstition holds 7 as her luckiest number, we’re gonna try to keep each selection tight to this total, in the hope that our conjuring of 7 X 7 X 7 X … will collectively manifest some magic for 2025. You may witness some attempts to creatively bend the rules, blur / invent genres and rinse formats, in order to squeeze in as many great releases as possible…

The “ever erudite” Adam Turner has already given us A Lucky 7 tunes from 2024, as part of the team from The Flightpath Estate. However, since Adam is a regular contributor to Ban Ban Ton Ton I also asked him to step into the spotlight for a further “alternative” selection… 

Super selections and wonderful words by Adam Turner. 

Much of the music covered on Ban Ban Ton Ton, including the music I review here from time to time, is of the electronic variety; ambient, Balearic, house, acid house, electro, techno… the full dance music spectrum. But it’s only part of the story, so as well as my electronic / dance music Lucky 7 as part of The Flightpath Estate, Rob asked me if I also wanted to do a non-electronic / non-dance music pick. I always hesitate to use the word ‘rock’. It seems so archaic and outdated, so for the purposes of this list, the music here consists of songs largely written on and played using the holy rock ‘n’ roll trinity of guitar, bass and drums.

Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds / Frogs

Nick Cave’s music has been ever present this year and the first single, Wild God, could easily have been my choice here – an instant Cave classic with that heart stopping moment where there’s a pause and then the gospel choir come in singing ‘bring your spirit down!’ and Nick comes back in, the spirit clearly moving everyone.However, that was followed by Frogs, one of the best songs he’s ever written, a superb depiction of Nick and his wife walking home in the rain on a Sunday morning, the story of Cain and Abel rattling round Nick’s brain, and him suddenly becoming aware of the sheer aliveness of everything, of the natural world, of the frogs jumping in the gutter. It’s utterly joyful, a four minute ride, with the Bad Seeds unleashed again as a band. ‘It’s Sunday morning and I’m walking you home again’, Nick sings, as if it’s the only thing that matters after all the horror of recent years. Light and shade. Grief and joy. Kris Kristofferson walks past kicking a can, in a shirt he hasn’t washed for years. Majestic stuff.

Amyl and The Sniffers / Big Dreams

Probably the first time these Aussie pub punks have appeared on Ban Ban Ton Ton. There’s whole a lot of snarling, hilarious, provocative high energy punk rock on their latest album, Cartoon Darkness, and among all those pulverising riffs there’s a ballad. A song that from the opening circling guitar notes onwards is cut from different cloth. Amy sings of people trapped in dead end jobs, in towns they want to leave, struggling with the rising cost of basics, and of being another year older. The video has motorbikes and desert and, yep, it’s rock music but Amy singing ‘You’re a lit one / Always been a big star / Never been a dull one’, is a truth in any style of music.

Bill Ryder-Jones / Nothing To Be Done 

Lechyd Da came out in January, Bill’s fourth solo album, filled with strings, acoustic guitars, a Birkenhead children’s choir, a Gal Costa sample and Mick Head reading from Ulysses. And there is Bill, sounding broken and defeated and running out of road. In the end, he chooses life and love. ‘I just don’t see myself getting past this one’ he gasps on Nothing To Be Done but the kids choir and swelling strings suggest otherwise. ‘One day you’ll find your way back to me.’

The Cure / Alone

When they returned with Alone in the autumn, I don’t think that many people were aware that what they really needed was a new song from The Cure – and yet it turns out that a seven minute song by The Cure was exactly what we wanted. Three minutes of majestic, funereal build up, an exquisite gloom, and then Robert Smith appears singing ‘this is the end of every song we sing’, and suddenly everything’s all right with the world. Well, it isn’t, but The Cure’s final throw of the dice, a meditation on love and loss, grief and mortality, make it sound like it’s the only place we need to be.

(I have to thank Adam for getting me to listen to Songs Of A Lost World. The space I inhabit is so isolated that I didn’t even realise The Cure had a new album out. I grew up, and have grown old, with the band, and on the opening closing epics I can feel the pain that Smith is in. When the change keeps coming, and you, tired, exhausted, just can’t keep up – Rob)

Fontaines D.C. / Favourite

Fontaines D.C. entered the big time with their album Romance and have some very big gigs lined up next year. In the summer they released a single, Favourite – radio friendly indie-rock with breezy, rapidly strummed acoustic guitars chiming like Johnny Marr in 1986, the song rushing by in a torrent.

Hinds & Grian Chatten / Stranger 

Fontaines singer Grian Chatten turned up on the single, Stranger, by Spanish indie band Hinds. Three minutes twenty-seven seconds of lilting, slightly ramshackle but gorgeous, 80s sounding indie pop.

Ride / Last Frontier

Ride returned with a third re-union album Interplay, a comeback that actually works in terms of gigs and making new music. Andy Bell’s been busy with GLOK and Timothy Clerkin – not to mention his cover of Sabres Of Paradise’s Smokebelch on Sounds From The Flightpath Estate Volume 1 – and on Last Frontier, the second single ahead of the album, he channels early 90s New Order into some sleek and soaring cosmic indie for 2024.

You can find more proper, on point, prose from Adam Turner over at his own brilliant blog, The Bagging Area. Adam is also part of the admin team at the mighty Flightpath Estate.