20. Liv.e • I Been Livin
19. Yaeji • Never Settling Down
18. The Bats • Red Car
17. Kaash Paige • Mrs. Lonely
16. No Joy • Nothing Will Hurt
15. Tiwa Savage • Dangerous Love
14. Katie Gately • Waltz
13. The Psychedelic Furs • Ash Wednesday
12. Victoria Monét • Touch Me
11. Loraine James feat. Jonnine • Don’t You See It
10. Bob Dylan • I’ve Made Up My Mind To Give Myself To You
9. Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever • She’s There
8. Cleo Sol • Her Light
7. Chloe x Halle • Ungodly Hour
6. KeiyaA • Hvnli / Hvnli (Reprise)
5. Cindy Lee • Heavy Metal
4. Zeroh • Aquamane
3. Perfume Genius • Describe
2. Katie Dey • Dancing
1. Pantayo • Kaingin
82 minutes of streaming, with an unavoidable glitch between the two halves of “Hvnli.” Upon request, the physical edition can append a few of the 40 extra songs listed below (if shipped on cassette) OR omit “Hvnli (Reprise)” and substitute the single edit of “Describe” (if shipped on CD). Or both, I guess.
Not much else to report this year, except to note that continuing to listen through December proved worthwhile in ways it didn’t always used to. In past years I’d hit a limit, and publications’ end of year lists, and my other attempts at gap-filling, couldn’t tell me much that I had a real chance of absorbing. But over the last couple years I’ve relaxed a bit, and a certain message board has continued to help in adjusting those limits. Relatedly (?), voting in this summer’s poll of Janet Jackson songs led to a few weeks’ worth, and one night in particular, of slow, dedicated listening that was honestly as much fun as I can remember ever having, alone with music. I doubt I’ll reach that level of joyful deliberation again, but hopefully something like the thrill of the process persists in this year’s mix and bonus lists.
alright, I’m in the living room with my Janet CDs and a sheet of paper, time to make some choices :)
― geoffreyess, Friday, July 24, 2020 9:02 PM (five months ago)bookmarkflaglink
excellent narrative songs have a way of falling off the mix
Phoebe Bridgers • Kyoto
Kathleen Edwards • Glenfern
Land of Talk • Footnotes
Polo G • I Know
it’s early March and these are still the only new songs you’ve liked this year
The Chicks • Gaslighter
Grimes • Delete Forever
Lady Gaga • Stupid Love
Pearl Jam • Dance of the Clairvoyants
classic rock to me
Blue Öyster Cult • Box In My Head
Cornershop • St. Marie Under Canon
Flower • Lost Horizon
Stephen Malkmus • What Kind of Person
Pet Shop Boys • Wedding in Berlin
The Radio Dept. • You’re Lookin’ At My Guy (Tri-Lites cover)
Yo La Tengo • Roll On Babe (Ronnie Lane cover)
+25
Autechre • Esc Desc
Azana • Your Love
Bbymutha • Holographic
Toni Braxton • Dance
Chai • Keep On Rocking
La Chica • Agua
Default Genders • Am I Gonna Die?
Helena Deland • Truth Nugget
Iris DeMent • How Long
Gum Country • Tennis (I Feel OK)
I Break Horses • I’ll Be the Death of You
Junglepussy • Arugula
Machinedrum & Freddie Gibbs • Kane Train
Mahalia • BRB
K. Michelle • That Game
Mandy Moore • When I Wasn’t Watching
Róisín Murphy • Something More
Lido Pimienta • Eso Que Tu Haces
Poppy • Concrete
Prince Kaybee, Shimza, Black Motion & Ami Faku • Uwrongo
Real Estate • November
Pa Salieu • Betty
Sault • Son Shine
Slum of Legs • Benetint & Malevolence
Jazmine Sullivan • Lost One
All other 2020 faves were those purchased via the Animal Crossing ATM.
A would-be road trip mix that ended up describing more stationary windows, though not entirely: I burned it to two discs just before an outing to North Mississippi Regional Park, on what remains the year's most photographable day (not the farthest from home I made it, but certainly high on the list). Belated 2018/19 faves dominate this mix, though as its catalysts I'd single out a rediscovery of Pre-Millennium Tension (while walking on Nicollet) and a most momentous ever listen to "Lloyd" (couchbound), which I'd assumed I was ten years past.
A (44:03)
1. 박혜진 park hye jin • Call Me
2. Jay Som • Crown
3. Stephanie Mills • You Can’t Run From My Love (12”)
4. Lower Dens • Hand of God
5. Mbongwana Star • Suzanna
6. Leonard Cohen • Closing Time
7. Chaka Khan • Eye to Eye
8. F.O.E • In My Jungle
9. Tess Roby • Ballad 5
B (44:03)
10. Foxes in Fiction • Antibody
11. S.O.S. Band • Even When You Sleep
12. Tricky • Makes Me Wanna Die
13. Pistol Annies • 5 Acres of Turnips
14. Grant McLennan • Haunted House
15. Roberta Flack • Why Don’t You Move In With Me?
16. Silver Jews • Open Field
17. Boyracer • Awkward Silence Is Not A Steady Diet
18. Jane Siberry • The White Tent The Raft
19. Swell Maps • The Helicopter Spies
20. Camera Obscura • Lloyd, I’m Ready to Be Heartbroken
Pump Up “What” Volume Sept. 15, 2020 • stream (78:52)
It's appropriate that I can't remember if this one was prepared ahead of anything particularly special, though I think "Daybreak" bookended a walk in Father Hennepin Bluff Park (a name I just looked up; "that secret garden we stumbled onto, two feet from the city" is just a few more syllables). This mix was supposed to more closely mirror my drives to and from work this summer, when Living Colour felt for a while like the perfect band. Their coolness, an idea I'd long ago absorbed, then dismissed, then forgot, was confirmed (at last!) because I was the only one around who needed convincing. Others followed, but instead of sequencing Hum, L7 or Fishbone, I ended up with, say, the 1-2 big soft punch of "Pines" and "Be That Easy." My mixtaping instincts have changed, I guess.
1. Drugstore • Fader
2. Deniece Williams • Free
3. Janet Jackson • Daybreak
4. Heavenly • And The Birds Aren’t Singing
5. Toy Love • Don’t Ask Me
6. Bo Diddley • Diddling
7. Aretha Franklin • You and Me
8. The Glands • Ruddy’s Waltz
9. Men I Trust • Pines
10. Sade • Be That Easy
11. Fountains of Wayne • Sick Day
12. Gene Clark • The True One
13. Gal Costa • Índia
14. Loraine James feat. Jonnine • Don’t You See It
15. Curve • Left Of Mother
16. Slant 6 • Thirty-Thirty Vision
17. Living Colour • I Want To Know
18. Patrice Rushen • To Each His Own
19. Pantayo • Kaingin
20. Swing Out Sister • Breakout
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).
20. Business of Dreams – “N.R.E.A.M.”
19. Little Simz – “101 FM”
18. Comet Gain – “The Girl With The Melted Mind And Her Fear Of The Open Door”
17. Fantasia – “Believer”
16. Joan Shelley – “Stay All Night”
15. Sudan Archives – “Confessions”
14. Christelle Bofale – “Origami Dreams”
13. Imperial Teen – “Somebody Like Me”
12. Sir Babygirl – “Flirting With Her”
11. Cate Le Bon – “Daylight Matters”
B
10. Deerhunter – “What Happens To People?”
9. Sault – “Threats”
8. Purple Mountains – “Nights That Won’t Happen”
7. Dua Saleh feat. Velvet Negroni – “Survival”
6. Girl Friday – “Decoration/Currency”
5. Hand Habits – “Are You Serious?”
4. Charlotte Adigéry – “Okashi”
3. Aldous Harding – “The Barrel”
2. Mekons – “How Many Stars?”
1. Sasami – “Not The Time”
It’s the Macromix that asks the big questions, answers with a deflecting “no,” and longs for simpler times. But hear no retreat or denial in these tunes, please. Should that longing prove too overpowering, there’s Charlotte Adigéry to curdle it with a marketing pitch: your past, restored, for a mere drop of blood. A tempting offer, but somewhere behind the benign corporate assurance, I think I hear Sheryl Lee back again in Twin Peaks, screaming out all the light in the world.
All we have is now, possibly tomorrow, so what follows that song might be the most brazenly therapeutic finale I’ve ever sequenced. “The Barrel,” and the indescribable energy of its video, settled me many mornings in 2019, and there’s much else here that meets the present with prescient calm. Paradoxically, it was the music that sounded oldest that felt the newest: the way Comet Gain bends the sensibility of a previous century to these untimes seems like it would require superhuman presence of mind.
Bookkeeping: As last year, I decided nothing from my (imminent) top ten albums would appear here, otherwise you’d likely find “In Your Head,” “I’m Me,” “Through Da Storm,” etc., on side B. And a further window into the arbitrary and personal nature of the selection process: Little Simz’ “101 FM” is here but Swervedriver’s “The Lonely Crowd Fades In The Air,” another great single from the first week of December 2018, isn’t, because I convinced myself that it feels vaguely tethered to that time. Underneath the video: “Dedicated to Pete Shelley (17 April 1955 - 6 Dec 2018).” It’s sometimes a relief to let extramusical considerations do the sorting.
“Being inundated with music just means I should be making harder choices,” says David Drake in his end-of-year intro. I relate to that (and feel further inundated by the discoveries of his 2019; Tree released three albums last year?!), but also realize that the constraints of the Macromix need not limit my list of further listening. Here’s 20 more:
Billy Woods & Kenny Segal – “Spongebob”
Charly Bliss – “Camera”
Dawn – “Dreams and Converse”
Girl Ray – “Because”
Hovvdy – “Watergun”
Julia Jacklin – “Head Alone”
Katie Dey – “Stuck”
Kelsey Lu – “I’m Not In Love”
Kim Gordon – “Airbnb”
Living Hour – “Hallboy”
Octo Octa – “Deep Connections”
Our Native Daughters – “Moon Meets The Sun”
Park Hye Jin – “Call Me”
Patty Griffin – “Where I Come From”
Sampa The Great feat. Mwanje Tembo, Theresa Mutale Tembo, Sunburnt Soul Choir – “Mwana”
The Highwomen – “Crowded Table”
The Proper Ornaments – “Song For John Lennon”
Vagabon – “Flood”
Yves Jarvis – “To Say That Is Easy”
Yves Tumor feat. Hirakish, Napolian – “Applaud”
1. Meat Puppets • Whirlpool
2. Scritti Politti • Absolute
3. A.R. Kane • Grace
4. Chanté Moore • Wey U
5. Cocteau Twins • Tishbite
6. The Alan Parsons Project • Time
7. Debarge • Love Me in a Special Way
8. Evelyn “Champagne” King • Teenager
9. Greg Sage • Stay By Me
10. Sam Phillips • Soul Eclipse
11. Nilüfer Yanya • In Your Head
1. Joan Armatrading • Only One
2. Wild Carnation • Wings
3. Martha Wash / Black Box • Everybody Everybody
4. Tanya Donelly • Bum
5. Yoko Ono • Move On Fast
6. René & Angela • I Love You More
7. Josef K • It’s Kinda Funny
8. Luther Vandross • Don’t You Know That?
9. Air • Redhead Girl
10. Meshell Ndegeocello • Bright Shiny Morning
11. Sasami • Not The Time
A long-languishing mixtape, now collecting 18+ months of unreported listening. I had it nearly ready to go for spring, as an 80-minute disc, then realized I’d forgotten Wild Carnation and the whole thing got thrown into chaos. Should I continue wingless, or expand to two discs and include the uncompiled highlights of Older ’17, the leftovers of Crunch I, and the un-macromixed best of 2018 and (as of now) 2019, not to mention other discoveries, rediscoveries, omissions??!? You’ve already seen the answer,* above: scaled back down and split into halves. I burned these on a pair of CD-Rs for a July road trip but they have yet to grace a tape; while you wait for your order, stream here.
Notes:
1. Rob Sheffield calls it “utterly moronic” in his otherwise excellent Meat Puppets overview in the Spin Alternative Record Guide. At least he quotes the lyrics, and ascribes some intention to them. I’d go further and say that if the band’s music is a complete mythological system (it is), then “Whirlpool” is one of the songs that best explains where it came from: a belief, embedded in the notes, that every single thing is animate and soulful.
2. Green is my Timothée.
3. Another year, another newly heard A.R. Kane album to clarify my listening habits.
4. The purpose built next generation interstellar Waiting to Exhale track. (ILXors will know.)
6-7. See you at the roller rink.
8. Evelyn “Bubblegum” King. Sprinklers on a bright green lawn.
1. It took Nilüfer Yanya to help me hear that Joan Armatrading invented Britpop, though this song is not the key illustration of that.
2-3. The two joys.
3. Critical re-crediting.
7. It’s kinda funny that I only ever knew the (differently hypnotic) Confetti version; relative to the re-forgotten Josef K (post mid-00s reissues), that band never existed.
11. The four sounds strings make (distorted, shoegaze-y, strummed, synthesized) pair off in a mini-suite, just before the final chorus, that makes this the new highest-density locus of everything I love.
Other highlights, 2018/19 — Maxwell’s Embrya, Toni Braxton’s s/t, Royal Trux’s Cats and Dogs, For Against 90s reissues; new favorites by old favorites, discovered or repped during ILM polls: Björk (“Triumph of a Heart”), Tori Amos (“Cloud Riders,” “Concertina”), Belle & Sebastian (“The Rollercoaster Ride”), Beck (“Lazy Flies,” “Seventh Heaven”), The Go-Betweens (“Bye Bye Pride,” “Boundary Rider”) and, inevitably (?), Low (“Laser Beam,” “I Remember”); being the last to find out that “Slow Emotion Replay” is the The The song; the last to hear the immensity of “Star Guitar,” while gliding past a Kansas sunset; the last to be disassembled by “Children’s Story” and the art of storytelling; the wholly separate thrill of the ear-worm that ends it; similarly loop-able micro-hooks on Bizarre Ride II The Pharcyde; new plateaus of affection, on encounter #837 (“It’s My Life,” “Love My Way,” “Everybody Wants To Rule The World”); the uncanny BPM of Whitney’s “Love Will Save The Day”; trying to reclaim Love & Rockets, struggling to conjure the “so” in “So Alive,” etc., but conceding the coolness of “No Big Deal” as still a minor deal. To me they’ll remain the band in my friend’s tale of a demonic b-side on a desert drive. The full story, someday.
Future highlights — Stephanie Mills, George Jones, Leonard Cohen’s “Closing Time.”
Julia Holter was already the movies to me, and “feature-length Holter album” seems like an idea I dreamed and still haven’t woken up from. Every song here contains at least a few moments as huge as the ones that previously served as shorthand for the expansiveness of her vision (“Maxim’s I” 0:56, “Boy in the Moon” 4:28). In between there are long stretches of mindfulness, blankness, alarm. Like a lot of music tagged as experimental, it would be fairer to distinguish Aviary from pop’s abstractions by calling it, broadly, representational. Even the album’s most notably dissonant passage, four minutes of tuneless bagpipes in the middle of disc one, is clarified by its (again) Frank O’Hara-channeling title: “Every Day Is An Emergency.” I might normally lean toward a more distancing kind of music, but I love how assuredly Aviary moves between states of experience, from stale gray daylight to sudden, startling occupancy of the senses.
[2] Yves Tumor, Safe in the Hands of Love
Upon closer inspection maybe only “Licking An Orchid” really sounds like A.R. Kane, and maybe it’s fatalistic to imagine Safe inheriting the legacy of 69 and “i”: invisible catalysts for redrawn boundaries of pop music in the next decade. But as “Noid” and its tangle of fears and warnings give way to grieving a few songs later, on “Lifetime,” as “us” dissolves, it’s clear how vulnerable an inside the songs represent, and how much damage the term “outsider art” has done to artists. Anyway, a few windows to music’s center, then and now:
[3] Kacey Musgraves, Golden Hour
An album with an unusually fluid context, even by 2018 standards. Whatever yours may be, look up to find it: Is Golden Hour a beam from the great studio in the sky, like Air’s impossibly good-sounding Talkie Walkie? Is it as heaven-sent as George Michael’s weightless, fully lived “Fastlove”? For me, yes and yes, and that makes the details of Musgraves’ phrasing all the more precipitous. Lonely contentment gives way to “and if my sister lived in town I know that we’d be doing something fun,” and suddenly the distance is untenable and Lucinda’s “Crescent City” appears on the horizon and I’m homesick. The sound that follows is decades of weekends with sisters, in one mmm.
[4] Meshell Ndegeocello, Ventriloquism
Ndegeocello plays the R&B hits of her formative years, ’82-’90 (plus “Waterfalls”), but Ventriloquism avoids many trappings of the covers album (memoir, nostalgia, even the question of interpretation) in favor of a disappearing artist reappearing history. In terms of cultural mourning, the time for these songs is right now, and the elasticity and resonance of the performances suggest a band trying to capture and hold vibrations as they pass, transmuted, through yet another set of objects. In the liner notes Ndegeocello writes about the sanctuary of process, about how playing these songs offers reprieve from the present until it too has become the past. That trick of time works in the opposite direction, too, as Ventriloquism stretches out with a grace that lets the past become the present.
[5] Speedy Ortiz, Twerp Verse
Their best and least immediate album, for the same reason: it bears all the marks of poet-leader Sadie Dupuis sharpening her focus, line editing the music for inefficiencies. Atomize the guitars and you’ll find syllables, morphemes; there’s no room for pillowy language, though the pillowy synths of “You Hate The Title” somewhat cushion the landing. After 33 minutes spent relentlessly untangling a knot, it’s the first chance you’ll have to rest your fingers, catch your breath.
[6] Belly, Dove
After Tanya Donelly’s Swan Song Series triple-set in 2016, I predicted new experiments in sound, not scale, from a reunited Belly. I was wrong, which isn’t to say Dove doesn’t sound terrific, but it’s so comfortable in its predestined ’97 shininess (Lovesongs for Underdogs-bright, with 20% more country) that the band is liberated to more important work: intergenerational empathy, massive choruses. The first three songs pass the 5:20 mark with many, many rounds of the refrain, but consider these no lesser gateways to appreciation than whatever forbidding passages a more difficult album might put in your way. Give in. The last of this trio, “Human Child,” is as generous toward the wind-facing youth of the title as it is toward its probable (older) listener, and was ending Belly’s encores during their recent tour. It held the audience, grateful for a band that changed at its pace, as rapt as “Super-Connected” or “Low Red Moon.”
[7] Jennifer Castle, Angels of Death
Did I imagine a consumer warning on the back cover? “This record is meant to be played quiet.” Hear it as if from another room, another summer. The metronomic austerity of “Crying Shame” sets the pace and for a while I was tempted to call it Plastic Castle Band, but then I started to hear the songs as built up from silence, not stripped down from spiritual exhaustion. There’s a whisper that subsumes Castle’s voice, meaning that there are always two melodies happening simultaneously, the song and its afterimage.
[8] U.S. Girls, In A Poem Unlimited
The most poorly served band at Rock The Garden was also the 2018 band most capable of summoning urgency, so a 30-minute midday set was hardly a wash. “Time” went to battle with time: embrace the material richness of the given moment, then reject its constraints. I went forth into the day’s oppressive heat but many months later still haven’t figured out what this evidently political album is saying. And I love it for that reason, and for the typographical detail that suggests U.S. Girls are simply players in A Poem Unlimited, not agents of it. All that matters is that Emma Goldman would dance to these grooves, right?
[9] Kadhja Bonet, Childqueen
“Procession” is A Seat at the Table’s “Rise” reimagined as Spaghetti Western overture, and what follows is so subtly adventurous, the voice that binds it so hypnotic, that it’s easy to drift through these 37 minutes and scarcely notice their macro view of the 70s, from Hot Buttered Soul to Perfect Angel to The Pleasure Principle.
[10] Jorge Elbrecht, Here Lies
A scattered portfolio of Elbrecht’s production talents slowly reveals itself as a marvel of sequencing, a trip back in time through the first musical decade of the artist’s life, from the synth-pop of arpeggiated hallucinations (“Endless Fire”) to the post-punk of repurposed political imagery (“Guillotine,” and its “downfall!”) to the soft rock of starched-stiff wordplay (“Words Never Fail to Fail”). And then back again or somewhere else entirely, on “Mirror.” Better, Elbrecht employs only whatever studiocraft the songwriting supports, e.g. you don’t record a song as if you’re trying to keep the radio within range of its signal unless you’ve written a verifiable gem.
first runner-up: No Age, Snares Like A Haircut
+10 Black Panther: The Album
cupcakKe, Ephorize
Daphne & Celeste, Daphne & Celeste Save The World
Mary Gauthier, Rifles & Rosary Beads
Kristin Hersh, Possible Dust Clouds
Low, Double Negative
Stephen Malkmus & The Jicks, Sparkle Hard
Miss Information, Sequence
Janelle Monáe, Dirty Computer
Yo La Tengo, There’s A Riot Going On
The year in streaming
“You spent 0 hours with your favorite artist Björk, and the pleasure was all theirs,” according to Spotify. Their template probably doesn’t account for the lapsed user, though I do appreciate the (unintentional?) Medúlla reference. New music in 2018 came almost exclusively from Electric Fetus, the library, promo e-mail lists I’m miraculously still on (thanks, Slumberland! The Spook School’s “Still Alive” and Smokescreens “Someone New” were dueling opening tracks for the ages, and Papercuts’ Parallel Universe Blues lived up to its title, if “parallel universe” means “the dream persisted” and “blues” means “poignant ache”), YouTube and Bandcamp, the latter doing the most work to shake up my listening. Some favorites there I hope to return to: World On Sticks by Sam Phillips, Yes I Jan by Bas Jan, Skulls Example by Dear Nora, Trade Winds by Hello Blue Roses, Salt by Mr. Twin Sister, Quieter by Carla Bozulich, Cloud Corner by Marisa Anderson — also a great live act, opening for the first full-band Circuit Des Yeux show I’ve seen, on a night that looms in my memory as tales and mythic noise. (Yes, I saw Kim Deal in 2018, too.)
20. The Chills – “Deep Belief”
19. Tirzah – “Holding On”
18. Kali Uchis – “Tomorrow”
17. Neneh Cherry – “Kong”
16. Sam Phillips – “Tears in the Ground”
15. Frankie Cosmos – “Caramelize”
14. Let’s Eat Grandma – “Falling Into Me”
13. Toni Braxton – “Long As I Live”
12. Robyn – “Because It’s In The Music”
11. serpentwithfeet – “bless ur heart”
B
10. Stephen Malkmus & The Jicks – “Middle America”
9. Spellling – “Hard To Please”
8. Ariana Grande – “No Tears Left To Cry”
7. Miss Information – “Theme”
6. The Breeders – “All Nerve”
5. Low – “Always Trying To Work It Out”
4. Yo La Tengo – “What Chance Have I Got”
3. Wye Oak – “It Was Not Natural”
2. Mitski – “Why Didn’t You Stop Me?”
1. Janelle Monáe – “Screwed”
75 minutes — 74 with whiplash transitions on the Mixcloud file. And with most of the short songs concentrated in the top half (2:22! 2:11!! 2:08!!!), I’ll have room to append the majority of Whack World to the end of side B. Jk, this one’s shipping exclusively on CD.
The overall mood is less funereal this year, I hope, though it was hard to find an artist who wasn’t singing about some kind of daily collapse. Anecdotally: “Now my friend we’re out of time,” Sam Phillips once sang near the end of an album, and the ensuing silence glowed with the years ahead. Thirty years later that halo has shrunk to nil and she’s out there chasing her waking nightmare with the only words that feel good: “No one will cry for you.” Still, there’s Janelle Monáe’s vow to “fuck it all back down,” or Josiah Wise’s heart chorus, or, most improbably, the enduring warmth of Martin Phillipps (heavenly, molten, etc.) to confirm that the future not only exists, but in some kind of abundance. Personally, I feel like I spent the entire year sweeping up cat litter. I don’t intend to stop.
Some bookkeeping: I’ve managed to avoid any overlap with my albums list for the first time ever, I think, partly because I spent 0% of the year writing about my listening and a last-minute spreading-the-wealth seemed wise. Even so, I’ll spare you the usual litany of other songs I liked this year, with the exception of the last one I had to cut: “Hot for the Mountain” by Natalie Prass. Play it tonight for your new year’s toast.
