Favorite albums, 2019
[1] Girlpool – What Chaos Is Imaginary
Making the matinee is often a question of some importance in my life; hearing it expressed by my favorite band helps me see the quaintness of my cares, the nobility of theirs. To sing that line, with your newest life, as yourself, for a different crowd every night… It’s a rare occasion, and Girlpool can be excused for getting caught up in the thrill. Their urgent, ambitious new album demanded loud, seamless playing, in-the-red vocals, Sturm if not Drang, but the sound at their St. Paul show last April wouldn’t accommodate any of it. No split-second transition from “Minute In Your Mind” to the title track, from booming drums to solitary organ note. No sky-wide smears of guitar, without unwanted feedback. No shout, without some fraction of its joy lost to the murk. Luckily, they have the best produced albums in indie rock, and it’s all still here, albeit understated, miniaturized.
Back to the matinee: Later that month Cleo remembers a startling detail, “how I sold seven doves when I was lying on your back,” while the arrangement suggests Elliott Smith down to the last detail of guitar tone, musical scale, interplay, etc. The exquisiteness of the reproduction could be this album’s primary innovation, its widening of the cosmos, similar to the introduction of a full band on Powerplant. It’s a reminder that a single revelatory artist can offer as large a canvas as the elements of rock music themselves. I’m glad to find Girlpool is still that, for me.
[2] Nilüfer Yanya – Miss Universe
One auspicious night a few years ago, at the M.I.A. afterparty, the evening’s videographer turned the camera on herself, seized the mic and made what would be her first live appearance; now she’s released this perfect debut album. Actually that first part never happened, and the next point in the Elastica-Arular continuum was supposed to arrive in 2015, anyway. But the energy is here, and if you’re tracking Britpop’s afterimage through the decades, Miss Universe is as good a place to look as any: smooth sounds reign, R&B is the dominant grammar, sax is natural (sax is good—sorry). All of this flows from the opening track’s rush of hooks, as potent as “Line Up” or “Pull Up The People.” Like the classics of 1995 and 2005, this is a first album of limitless purpose. Even the interludes are good.
[3] Hama – Houmeissa
I’ve read a few references to the technological obstacles Hama faced in creating this album, which don’t make the results inherently more interesting but do remind me of something I often forget, that electronic music has no more to do with material abundance than any other kind of music. The folk tunes of Houmeissa, however assiduous their reimagining, roll out with ease, shimmering expanses along the autobahn of the mind.
[4] Tink – Voicemails
The year of essential interludes, pt. 2. The voicemails that break up Tink’s hypnotic sound-world are just digital artifacts, on their surface, but in context serve to update pop’s waiting-by-the-telephone script. The central joke goes unstated but can’t be missed: No one really listens to their voicemails, anyway. Attempts to connect only amplify loneliness. So the songs stay lonely, too, as they portray waiting as a powerful act, a time to prepare one’s body, rehearse fantasies. They unfurl in the space between sexuality and interiority; this is one of the best albums to ever live there.
[5] DIIV – Deceiver
The band played life-acknowledging rock. DIIV’s ever-ascending melodic lines are blotted out here, no clarity in the crush of guitars, at least until “Blankenship” arrives as a four-minute greatest hits, part-tuff gnarl part-daydream. The rest is a fuzzed-out warning against narrativizing yrself, with a title that casts Is the Is Are’s conceptual coming to the light as a lie: life just keeps going.
[6] Chai – Punk
In researching this blurb I find that Chai cite Orange Range as an influence, which reminds me that I’m long overdue in adopting my husband’s tastes as my own. I’ve always enjoyed hearing “Иatural Pop” around the house, relay race of feel-good-isms to enliven the morning tea. With a positivity more judiciously applied, Chai have that same kind of casual virtuosity, fully evident by the seventh hook of “I’m Me” if not the first.
[7] Raphael Saadiq – Jimmy Lee
“Sinner’s Prayer” introduces the hardline according to Raphael Saadiq, then unceremoniously cuts to the next track with a burst of static, revealing an album already in a state of fracture, an artist forgoing his big pop moment. The songs still gleam even as they get shorter, more oblique; the primary tension is that of an unrepentant showman inhabiting the voices of the unseen, including his own.
[8] Spellling – Mazy Fly
I’ve heard this music on queasy summer days, on desolate winter nights, on, most memorably, the foggiest morning drive of my life, and it’s brought out the magic in each one. Essentializing an album’s weather and daylight is as silly as letting the cover art dictate the experience. Instead, let the title fly set the scene: Here only briefly, but traversing immeasurable space in the time given. “Under the Sun,” the album’s centerpiece, programs this impermanence into the machine—all slowly waking synths, a drum machine who’s afraid of losing the beat—while the artist remains apart, untouched by mortality’s awkward lurch. Music could use more omniscient narrators right now.
[9] Men I Trust – Oncle Jazz
“You’re listening to Oncle Jazz,” says the announcer, softly, as if easing in to a radio show that promises a sustained mood but nothing so troubling as a song. And the album seems to play that way for a little while, but when “I Hope to Be Around,” “Dorian” and “Pines” arrive one after the other toward the end of its first half, bringing pocket disco and ethereal country and “Head Over Heels” as interpolated by Air (or air), with 13 (!) songs still to come, that mood turns out to be bottomless in inspiration. Like Sault, that other great PR-less, story-less band of 2019, Men I Trust go deep into their craft.
[10] Polo G – Die A Legend
Every young person I know deserves someone even younger saying “I’m so proud of you,” like Leia to Polo G at the beginning of “Through Da Storm.” So I’d just started to hear him as a slightly more famous recipient of that pride, when I looked back at the list of songs recommended to me by my high school freshmen to find him mentioned twice. And that kinda sealed it. I thought about the vulnerability inherent in a recommendation, the mental space it admits to, and wondered what melancholy, secretly sustaining music I would have named at age 14 (Girlpool didn’t exist yet—incredible!) or how I might have dodged the question… Anyway, I’m grateful for an entry point but Die A Legend has more immediate ones: a rapper always right in front of the beat; a procession of somber piano settings made beautiful by human proximity, youth’s quiet storm.
first runner-up: Comet Gain – Fireraisers Forever!
second runner-up: Joan Shelley – Like the River Loves the Sea
+10
Chromatics – Closer to Grey
Foxes in Fiction – Trillium Killer
Hand Habits – Placeholder
James Blake – Assume Form
Loraine James – For You and I
Sasami – Sasami
Sleater-Kinney – The Center Won’t Hold
The Cranberries – In The End
Versus – Ex Voto
Vivian Girls – Memory
…the latter half of which suggests I’m still chasin’ that 90s dream, one shiny disc at a time. But my listening did start to change a bit at the end of 2019, with the acquisition of a $45 device known as the “Cricket Wave.” I still feel weird about this, generally, but being able to stream from Bandcamp and DatPiff while in transit has been an undeniable gift and led to a few inclusions here. This time next year, maybe I’ll have listened so broadly that I’ll even have outgrown the ritual of ranking things (though I doubt it).
