Despite all the lessons imparted to us over the last few decades
by the many tendrils and sects of critical theory, particularly in its archer
fits of inquiry, urging us to resist grand mythmaking statements and
narratives, there remains a certain irresistible human compulsion to try to
impose meaning on our situations, whether they be triumphs or travails, and one
of those unifying, if false, frameworks can sometimes be deployed in the form
of either an imaginary periodization (I venture timidly to suggest at this point
that 2019 is not in fact that end of the decade if one accepts that the first
year was numbered 1 and not zero, so all of those end-of-decade lists we’ve
been reading would appear to be null and void – just saying), and/or a
soundtrack that might accompany such a temporal demarcation. These twinned
delusions often team up in the form of a year-end music list, such as this one,
but they also usually tend or at least try to make a certain sense of the
period for which they have provided the soundscape.
However, our current moment steadfastly refuses such containment,
partly because music is itself fracturing, partly reverting to older forms,
partly forging new and unrecognizable paths and sub-genres, and partly because
the world is lurching and spasming toward unimaginable but very real
infernalities. The world appears to be burning, politically, spiritually, and
quite literally, and while music can often be a great salve and consolation in
trying times, it also feels entirely inadequate to provide comfort or
explanation in the face of what one might call the catastrophic sublime we are
now experiencing, our new hell on earth. I know I’ve said this before by way of
introducing these little sojourns into the musical year that was, but it does
not feel melodramatic or hyperbolic to say that, at the present moment,
everything is terrible.
So, our master narrative, if there is one, appears to be
solidifying into something dystopian and entropic, and music may not be enough
to save us or even to console us. Furthermore, it may not be possible to cohere
our listening experience into a wholly interwoven set of aural textures that
add up to a soundtrack that can either bring us joy or make sense of our
chaotic and apocalyptic moment. We are forced to draw on whatever we can find
in our rattle bag, fragments shored against our ruins, modernism as a refuge
from postmodernism, realism as a refuge from modernism, larger genres as
retreats from micro-genres, grand flourishes as reaction formations either to
progressive or conservative forces, depending on our local perspectives.
All of this is to say that nothing currently makes any sense. It
is also to say that there is an infinite amount of information, of which music
is a part, assailing us, and assimilating that information is practically
impossible. This is why we make narratives, by selectively editing the
infinite, as a way to convince ourselves that something at least makes a little
bit of sense. We take the raw materials of the information sublime and convert
them into our own curation of its constituent parts. That’s what these lists
are partly about, and now more than ever the list seems virtually impossible in
both conception and execution. Why do you think this preamble has been so
discursively evasive? Because I don’t know how to make sense of anything
anymore, so all I can talk about is that fact.
It’s also become harder and harder to separate the wheat from the
chaff in musical terms. I cannot remember a year when I heard so much music and
couldn’t figure out how much of it was actually any good, or more to the point
if I actually liked it. But it seems that there might be two kinds of music
that got my attention this year. The first served mostly just to describe the
conditions we are currently enduring, while the second served as a refuge from
them. If there was a musical third way it might have consisted in the kind of
music that did a little of both.
The last ingredient of this bitches brew is the fact that I have been writing about music in a more formal way this year, in the form of album reviews for Popmatters, which has been a great pleasure but also an obligation whose weight I did not anticipate. It has also somewhat compromised my ability to enjoy music with all the freedom I used to enjoy. It feels like there might be more at stake than just carefree and adventurous exploration, and while it focuses the mind quite well, it also makes the listening experience feel more like work than I might like it to.
And, another strange thing happened, my public writing was conducted on the basis of a very deliberate decision to eliminate the first person entirely, which was at first challenging but eventually quite liberating. To take myself out of the proceedings opened up a new syntax and made, I hope, the reader experience more unmediated, forging a more direct connection between them (assuming that they existed at all) and the music itself. I tried to get out of the way.
This essay, on the other hand, has always been shot through with my opinions, obviously, and for better or worse, and we return to that voice here, once again for better or worse. So here are some albums I liked. I’ll link to reviews of those I enjoyed, and just list the rest about which I have not very much to say. With apologies for the lengthy and half-baked preamble, here we go.
* * * * * * * * * * *
The albums that particularly spoke to me this year contained both
wisdom and humanity in equal measure. There are years when I gravitate toward
the abstract or the plastic, but this was mostly not one of those years, with a
few notable exceptions. In 2019 my soul seem to be craving something organic,
some lessons that might enable me to chart a way forward while learning from
mistakes and missteps of the past, aware of mortality but ready to inch away
from grief toward more life in the midst of so much loss and disappointment. What
follows here is not necessarily an ordered list, although they are more or less in the order in which I adored them.
Fontaines
D.C. – Dogrel
I didn’t write about this album in any formal and public way and I
have mixed feelings about that, because part of me wanted to trumpet its
virtues far and wide, while another part of me wanted to keep it to myself like
a secret. I also came to it a little late, seeing the name Fontaines D.C. here,
there and everywhere but never registering that it was something I should
investigate. But when I finally did press play my doors were summarily blown
off. This is the punk album we have been awaiting for a very long time. The
reference points are easy to identify to the extent that it feels almost lazy
to do so (The Fall, The Pogues and Cloud Nothings among others) but Fontaines
D.C. are nobody’s karaoke act. They are one of those rare bands that emerges
fully formed, utterly confident, accomplished and full of a potential that is
already absolutely kinetic energy in action. Album opener “Big” is typically
brash and insouciant, announcing the band’s grand ambition in one minute and 46
seconds of bravado that is immediately fully earned. This is not a rehearsal
for greatness. It is greatness in prodigal form. And it’s not as if that opener
is a false dawn, because the album maintains and exceeds its giddy
self-announcement throughout the rest of what follows. If I had any hair left,
it would have been blown back and scorched by this album. And yet, for all the
blistering swagger that has garnered so much attention, there are moments of
exquisite poignancy here too, notably in the tender entreaty of “Roy’s Tune,”
whose “Hey love, hey love, are you hanging on?” is almost a check-in with the
listener in the midst of the hurricane laughter of the album that surrounds
this song. Grian Chatten’s lyrics, even at this early stage, are a marvel of
virtuosic concision, literary referentiality (T.S. Eliot is in there, and Joyce
surely underpins so much of this text), fronting up, and majestic irritation.
And to think that there are reports of a second album already having been
recorded in L.A., and that it involves a significant change of direction, with
nods to the Beach Boys – that little zig zag is an aftershock while we are
still recovering from the seismic impact of this devastating introduction to a
band that I hope will be live and dangerous for a very long time. This album is
a miracle.
Addendum: at the risk of being condescending and tokenistic, there
appears to be a mini-renaissance of good-to-great Irish punk bands right now,
including Girl Band, whose album The Talkies was a breath of fresh air similar
to Dogrel, and The Murder Capital, whose debut album When I Have Fears is a
fierce attack on the sense, if it lacks some of the versatility of Fontaines
D.C.
Sharon Van Etten – Remind Me Tomorrow
I have already written about this album (see the link below), but it needs just a little addendum as we come to the end of the year. Some albums lose their lustre (luster if you’re an American person) upon relistening after some time away, but Sharon Van Etten’s Remind Me Tomorrow, released in January, has only improved with age. At the first time of listening it felt like a stunning and intense revelation, a story of emerging from difficulty bruised, damaged, defiant and intact. But after eleven months the depth and intensity of the listening experience has only increased and matured. The layers of this album, musical, lyrical and emotional, are remarkable. If it didn’t already feel that way, listening to it now feels like some kind of spiritual archaeology, sometimes using heavy machinery to excavate something buried deep under the surface, sometimes delicately scratching and digging away at delicate bone sites so as not to destroy valuable evidence. It would be easy to say that the album’s centerpieces are, well, all of it, but it’s hard not to single out the opener, “I Told You Everything,” “Comeback Kid,” “Seventeen,” “You Shadow”(what are those sounds that sound like industrial saws underneath the vocal and how did she get that artillery drum sound? – what an utterly stunning song this is) and “Hands” (so yeah, basically all of it). Sharon Van Etten has been on a triumphant trajectory from the very beginning of her career, but there was always a concern that it was a trajectory permanently burdened by sadness. This album reassures us that there are actual victories to be won. The anger here is righteous. The overcoming is palpable. And the adrenaline is contagious. This is a magnificent achievement, even in the context of her other already magnificent achievements.
Bill Callahan – Shepherd in a Sheepskin Vest
Bill Callahan chooses his words carefully, so writing about him
can be a little daunting. It took me ten minutes to write that last sentence.
Callahan himself took a little while to come back to making music after the
twinned wonders of Dream River and its dub companion Have Fun With God from
2013 and 2014 respectively. Those albums hinted at the possibilities of joy and
freedom, love less equivocal than that he had previously described. The lyrics
to Small Plane, for example, are a miracle of simple pleasures against
impossible odds, and that germ seems to have grown into the abundant harvest of
Callahan’s miraculous new album, which finds him exploring the deep vein of
songwriting possibility inherent in domestic contentment, marriage and
fatherhood. This is the opposite of a midlife crisis, or perhaps its
counterpart, the midlife epiphany. There is a gentle warmth here, humor,
self-awareness, reflection, tenderness, still somewhat cloaked in Callahan’s
angular lyricism which is both gnostic and gnomic together. “The Ballad of the
Hulk” is a perfect example of the new playful Bill Callahan, whose lyrical
progression is dizzying in its switching of registers, contexts and references.
We find him “looking back at the old ways” which are “groundwork footwork,”
just as he very quickly promises that we will soon “be moving along out of this
vein.” The confidence Callahan has accumulated over so many years of honing his
songwriting craft allows him precisely this kind of performative
self-awareness, so that he can tell us a story while tell us what he’s doing
and lead us to a life lesson without us noticing (“A master of Reiki/Waved his
hand over me/And said I ate too much steak/And hold on too long to ancient
aches/And both are so hard/On my heart/Oh, I try to be a good person/I wonder
if it’s annoying/Or worth pursuing/And pursuing/And pursuing/Down highways/At
the risk of the road.” So often we find ourselves in these mystical corners and
backwaters, crossroads, Zen moments, moments of enlightenment, moments of
challenge where the task is handed off to us to carry forward as Callahan moves
on to the next lyrical rebus puzzle. It’s a marvelous achievement, perhaps the
pinnacle of his career, although that is a rather grandiose statement to make
when one considers his body of work. But the moments of breathtaking beauty
here are almost too numerous to count, including “Morning Is My Godmother,”
“747,” “Watch Me Get Married,” and “What Comes After Certainty” and so many
others. These texts feel almost biblical, gorgeous apocrypha, de-stigmatized
folk music, sonorously intoned, perfectly paced. Bill Callahan is, as a wise
person once said, a poet who happens to sing. Read this little lyrical miracle
and think about it for the rest of your life: “True love is not magic. It’s
certainty. And what comes after certainty?”
Loraine James’ For You and I came out
in September but I only became aware of it toward the end of the year. This
happens fairly often – that an album I didn’t know about until late in the year
suddenly leaps into the list and ends up being one my favorites. For You and I
is a remarkable work in so many ways. First of all, it sounds tremendous, full
of all manner of beats and pulses and washes and hiccups that mimic both anxiety
and restless curiosity at once, along with passages of great beauty and calm. In
this dynamic there is a contrapuntal vacillation between the itching and
scratching of grime and the cooing of domestic contentment as shelter from the
storm. In this fairly regular return to a home base of comfort and reassurance,
the album manages to oscillate between uncertainty and constancy in a way that
mimics our outside and inside lives as we venture out every day into a
hellscape of personal and political assholery, immediately longing for return
to the safe space of our lairs with loved ones and blankets. And yet the entire
album feels like it could also be taking place in a warehouse club setting
where we have no idea whether it is night or day, in the ultimate escape from
every hellscape, which is one of the raisons d’etre of the club scene anyway.
In these ways, For You and I achieves so much at once, a mixtape for our angst
and weltschmerz. If I had to give this album some kind of shorthand
description, I would call it “applied grime.”
Burial – Tunes 2011 – 2019
Even though it’s a retrospective compilation
of singles and EPs, it’s important to recognize the impeccable quality, consistency
and innovation of William Bevan, the artist who is Burial. Without Burial the
electronic landscape would be unrecognizable. Because of Burial, the music
landscape far beyond the electronic landscape is unrecognizable. For example,
the Loraine James album lionized above may well not exist, and it certainly
wouldn’t exist in its current form. Bevan is a pioneer, and to hear these small
batch releases all together on a continuum is something of a revelation, even
though they were all already revelatory upon their stand-alone releases. If I
could give someone the gift of Burial’s entire oeuvre and watch their mind melt
as the enormity of the music dawned on them, I could die knowing that my
mission on earth was fulfilled. This is the kind of music that ketamine used to
make other music feel like. This music doesn’t need any substances to enhance
or reveal its layers and meanings. This music is its own intoxicant.
Big Thief
– U.F.O.F
I wrote about this at some length for PM, so I won’t rehearse that
here. Suffice it to say that Adrienne Lenker ascended to the pantheon this
year, as if Big Thief’s first two albums weren’t an obvious enough hint of that
eventuality (I resisted their charms for a while, as is my wont – I am now
fully converted and contrite). See below for a very short apology regarding
their second album of 2019, Two Hands, to which I most certainly did not pay
enough attention. I also want to say that I resent the comment in the subsequent
PM review of Two Hands that dismissed U.F.O.F. as “forgettable.” That statement
is an outrageous calumny from which I would like to distance myself in the
strongest possible terms.
Robert
Forster – Inferno
Robert Forster has achieved legendary master craftsman status at
this point in his long and glittering (if not necessarily lucrative) career,
perfectly fusing his influences, the precision craft of Guy Clark, the abstract
expressionism of Townes Van Zandt, and the do-it-yourself rock and roll bohemia
of the Velvet Underground. His work in the Go-Betweens will one day receive the
general recognition it deserves, albeit that their light remains hidden under a
bushel of this life. No band has meant as much to me during my lifetime, and
while the respective solo careers of Forster and his Go-Betweens co-conspirator
Grant McLennan (may he rest in peace) have been patchy, the trilogy of albums
that Forster has produced since McLennan’s death has been its own minor marvel.
Emerging from the grief of Grant’s passing in the damaged and reflective form
of The Evangelist in 2008, evolving into the modestly titled but audaciously
executed Songs to Play in 2016, and arriving now at Inferno, with its easy
assimilation of archness and elegy, ballad and scorcher, this is Forster at the
top of his late career game. It’s also interesting that this trilogy in some
way mirrors the reformed (if not fully whole) Go-Betweens trilogy that was
delivered to us between 2000 and 2005 in the shape of The Friends of Rachel
Worth, Bright Yellow Bright Orange, and Oceans Apart, the last of which
included some of the band’s strongest songs, combining the churning rock and
roll engine of “Here Comes a City” with the gorgeous “Finding You.” Forster has
taken up this late-era Go-Betweens mantle with aplomb, sometimes
ventriloquizing McLennan, but never losing his own mischievous songwriting style.
He has become an expert in efficiency, both lyrically and musically, and the
arrangements are often quite exquisite (“Life Has Turned a Page”), all while he
is still not afraid to rock all the way out (the title track is a delightful
VU-inflected sizzle). And as always, he is relentlessly erudite and charming.
The opening track sets a W.B. Yeats poem to music in a way that works
perfectly, managing to respect the original lyric while providing a musical
setting that feels entirely natural. It’s as if he’s offering an equivalence
between Yeats’ lyric and his own poetic lyricism, because you really can’t see
daylight between them. And in typically arch Forster style, the title, “Crazy
Jane on the Day of Judgement,” also forces us to wonder if he isn’t also making
a sly Dylan reference. This is what he does, and he’s still going strong. We
need songwriters like this, and we need Inferno to make the other inferno more
bearable.
The continuing proliferation of astounding
music of Antipodean origin is a source of great and abiding joy. I first became
aware of Youth Group with their 2005 album Skeleton Jar and then promptly lost
track of them after their 2007 album Casino Twilight Dogs. It turns out that this
wasn’t actually my fault, because they appear to have been dormant since 2008,
so it’s really nice to have them back with this album of perfectly constructed
guitar pop songs, some of which make indirect or sometimes very direct
reference to their antecedents, notable “Oh James,” which feels like a very clear
homage to the Go-Betweens’ “Clouds,” although that comparison could just be born
of my own need to make such connections and foist Go-Betweens references onto
everyone I meet. But you don’t need a lot of context to enjoy this album. These
songs are wonderfully clean, succinct and concise, each note a pure stream of
clean cool water flowing over ancient rock. This is why I got in to the music
listening business over 40 years ago and its enormously gratifying that the torch
is being carried forward, especially since the tragic and untimely passing of
fellow Australian Zac Denton (from The Ocean Party) in the latter part of 2018
means that we might not have any more of their beautiful music to enjoy.
Martin Frawley – Undone at 31
I’m just putting this here in order to
juxtapose it with the Youth Group album above. Former Twerp (Range Anxiety) makes
excellent solo album.
It’s tempting just to cut and paste
every lyric from what turned out to be David Berman’s envoi, because they say
more than I ever could. In hindsight it seems obvious that this was a farewell
message but it also seems facile to offer such a glib summary of what is at
once a brutally desperate suite of songs and a bracing embrace of what Berman
calls “the void.” The loss of great artists, artists that have changed our
lives and our worldviews, has been all too common and frequent in recent years
(Bowie, Prince, Leonard Cohen, and Scott Hutchison to name just a few that have
wounded me deeply and personally), and Berman’s death hit particularly hard for
reasons that are partly easy to explain and partly for reasons that are more
elusive. Sometimes the passing of an artist makes it difficult to listen to
them. That was true for me with the losses of Frightened Rabbit’s Scott
Hutchison and also with Elliott Smith (I still haven’t been able to listen to
him since he died), but somehow David Berman’s last recorded testament retains
an insouciant vitality in the face of an avalanche of shit, and listening to it
now tends to enliven rather than depress. This is partly because of the jaunty
melodies and musical arrangements behind the distinctly jaded lyrics, but also
because those same lyrics contain such mordant wit to go with Berman’s
ingeniously banal rhyming tendencies. There is also a callback, deliberate or
inadvertent, to the somewhat similarly dark lyricism and sweet (if atonal)
musical sensibility of the dearly departed Gram Parsons, and while their voices
are not at all similar, the experience of listening to Purple Mountains does
remind one somewhat of Grievous Angel and all its grim foreshadowings. Anyway,
I won’t post all the lyrics from the album, but here are the words from the
first song, “That’s Just the Way That I Feel.” Trust me, it doesn’t sound as
depressing as these lyrics look in stark black and white. To the contrary, there
is something redemptive and affirming about Berman’s honesty and his sardonic
descriptions of what are clearly dire straits. We should all be so elegantly
and charmingly humbled by the void, and all of our worst ideas should know how
to swim so fluently in the oceans of gin so deftly navigated by Berman. It
seems unlikely that he is resting in peace, but his final missives at least
cleared out the sinuses of his soul so that he could go out with a somewhat clearer
head. These are messages we need to hear and take on board so that we can live
with less regret, more bravery, and just as much irony as we can muster in
these almost unbearable circumstances. Take it away, Dave, you beautiful soul:
Well, I don't like talkin' to myself
But someone's gotta say it, hell
I mean, things have not been going well
This time I think I finally fucked myself
You see, the life I live is sickening
I spent a decade playing chicken with oblivion
Day to day, I'm neck and neck with giving in
I'm the same old wreck I've always been
But someone's gotta say it, hell
I mean, things have not been going well
This time I think I finally fucked myself
You see, the life I live is sickening
I spent a decade playing chicken with oblivion
Day to day, I'm neck and neck with giving in
I'm the same old wreck I've always been
And when I see her in the park
It barely merits a remark
How we stand the standard distance
Distant strangers stand apart
It barely merits a remark
How we stand the standard distance
Distant strangers stand apart
Course I've been humbled by the void
Much of my faith has been destroyed
I've been forced to watch my foes enjoy
Ceaseless feasts of schadenfreude
And as the pace of life keeps quickening
Beneath the bitching and the bickering
When I try to drown my thoughts in gin
I find my worst ideas know how to swim
Much of my faith has been destroyed
I've been forced to watch my foes enjoy
Ceaseless feasts of schadenfreude
And as the pace of life keeps quickening
Beneath the bitching and the bickering
When I try to drown my thoughts in gin
I find my worst ideas know how to swim
Well, a setback can be a setup
For a comeback if you don't let up
But this kind of hurtin' won't heal
And the end of all wanting
Is all I've been wanting
And that's just the way that I feel
For a comeback if you don't let up
But this kind of hurtin' won't heal
And the end of all wanting
Is all I've been wanting
And that's just the way that I feel
I met failure in Australia
I fell ill in Illinois
I nearly lost my genitalia
To an anthill in Des Moines
I was so far gone in Fargo
South Dakota got annoyed
That's the shit I'm talkin' 'bout
When I talk to you about
Ceaseless feasts of schadenfreude
I fell ill in Illinois
I nearly lost my genitalia
To an anthill in Des Moines
I was so far gone in Fargo
South Dakota got annoyed
That's the shit I'm talkin' 'bout
When I talk to you about
Ceaseless feasts of schadenfreude
And a setback can be a setup
For a comeback if you don't let up
But this kind of hurtin' won't heal
And the end of all wanting
Is all I've been wanting
The end of all wanting
Is all I've been wanting
The end of all wanting
Is all I've been wanting
And that's just the way that I feel
For a comeback if you don't let up
But this kind of hurtin' won't heal
And the end of all wanting
Is all I've been wanting
The end of all wanting
Is all I've been wanting
The end of all wanting
Is all I've been wanting
And that's just the way that I feel
Sleaford
Mods – Eton Alive
Reviewing this album took a lot out of
me, because I had no idea how to get inside the coded and walled off world and
lexicon of Jason Williamson and the alienating beats and backing tracks of
Andrew Fearn. I had been aware of Sleaford Mods for a while but hadn’t yet
fully engaged with them until Eton Alive. To be clear, they’re not an easy
listen, but they’re worth the effort. Much like Mark E. Smith, Williamson
offers his barbs very directly in the sense that they’re spat right at you, but
you may not fully grasp the nature of the insults he is spitting, even while
you probably get the gist. This is some quite brilliant and virtuosic lyrical
prestidigitation that captures the Zeitgeist at a time when everyone is angry
and nothing makes any sense. What is odd is that after a while you find
yourself intuitively understanding the argot until it has been fully integrated
into your own mental DNA. This is something akin to what happened to me when I
got high before watching Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon and then convinced
myself halfway through the film that I no longer needed the subtitles because I
was now fluent, by osmosis, in Mandarin. It’s probably not like that at all,
but I’m doing my best to convey the experience of listening to a band that
makes all the sense in the world while also managing to remain almost entirely
inscrutable.
Hand
Habits – placeholder
Nothing to add
to the review I wrote in March. This is a formidable work and Meg Duffy is already
an important artist after only two solo albums, and that doesn’t even take into
account her sterling work as guitarist in Kevin Morby’s band. We are clearly not
worthy.
Vanishing
Twin – The Age of Immunology
Comparisons
can often be lazy and just as often misleading or inept. So to invoke Stereolab
and Broadcast when speaking of Vanishing Twin might be a fool’s errand, but it
is also hard to resist. However, Vanishing Twin are absolutely ploughing their
own furrow, and traveling the spaceways very much in their own way and on their
own terms. If they use Kosmiche Musik and its offshoots as their own launchpad
then so be it. What is more, they also incorporate jazz chords and time
signatures in ways that their Krautrock predecessors did not. Definitely a band
to keep an eye on.
Cate
Le Bon – Reward
I have nothing else to say beyond my
earlier review of the album except this, which only occurred to me after the
review had been written, submitted and published. It was staring me in the face
the whole time, but the fact that much of this album was recorded in the Lake
District should have been a clue about the commentary Le Bon might well have
been making about some version of Romanticism and the brave and isolated Romantic
heroine, forging artistic paths, integrating nature and the imagination in new
word and sound scapes. I can’t believe I missed that connection the first time
around, but in hindsight there are certainly elements of the lyrical ballads
and Caspar David Friedrich here, albeit recast in Le Bon’s inimitable
surrealist framework, not to mention the more colloquial (but no less surreal)
lower case romanticism of Julian Cope and the Teardrop Explodes version of
“Reward” that overflowed with insane romantic energy, enthusiasm and
discombobulation. Those are my extra thoughts upon further reflection. Another
album that did not pale upon revisiting. Another impressive body of work in the
making.
Deerhunter – Why Hasn’t Everything
Already Disappeared
I’m putting this album here because it
was produced by Cate Le Bon, so it makes sense to consider her album and this
one together. It’s best, though, if we draw a discreet veil over Myths 004, the
EP that she made with Bradford Cox, because I have to confess that I found it
all but unlistenable. I am always happy
and excited to hear a new Deerhunter album because they are never less than
interesting and exploratory, pursuing musical avenues of inquiry that many
bands in their same lane don’t have the imagination or the bravery to go down.
Having said that this album feels like perhaps the least interesting of their
recorded output, which is surprising given that Cate Le Bon was at the helm for
its production. I mean, it’s perfectly pleasant and I enjoyed it, but pleasant
and enjoyable are not quite what we’ve come to expect from Bradford Cox. You
will no doubt point out the contradiction in my argument here, wherein Myths
004 is too difficult to listen to while this album is too “easy,” and I
certainly take that on board, so perhaps I should adjust my own expectations of
what Deerhunter have become. Perhaps Bradford Cox is actually turning Deerhunter
into more of a straight up pop rock outfit (with a lingering 1960 psychedelic component
for additional flavor), in which case this album is kind of brilliant because he
manages to set his weird lyrical scenarios to quite pretty chamber pop arrangements,
all of which makes perfect sense given the presence and influence of Cate Le
Bon. I guess I just miss the old, really weird Deerhunter (and I have to admit
that a song like “Détournement is a perfect example of that, buried at the heart
of what is mostly otherwise a stealth pop album), although I also have a
feeling that over time I could grow to love this newer version of them. This
might be one of those albums that I should spend more time with in 2020 in
order to integrate it more fully into my own canon. Perhaps strangely, my
favorite track on WHEAD is the instrumental “Greenpoint Gothic,” which has echoes
of Eno and Gary Numan (see also the almost instrumental “Tarnung,” which evokes
Low-era Bowie). It’s a beautiful interlude that makes me wonder what a
Deerhunter or Atlas Sound instrumental album might sound like. Anyway, I suppose
the conclusion here is that I am still feeling provisional about this album and
am remaining open to embracing it more fully in the coming months.
Olden
Yolk – Living Theatre
A superb baroque
weird chamber pop album, which would sit very comfortably next to the
Deerhunter album and by extension the Cate Le Bon and Aldous Harding albums.
The
National – I Am Easy To Find
I wrote about this album at length for PopMatters and I won’t add
very much at all to that here, suffice to say that while this was an impressive
achievement it also felt at the same time somewhat entropic, as if it might
perhaps be a punctuation or the beginning of a withdrawal, and I have to say
that I would probably be ok with that, as much as The National have meant to me
for a very long time. There is a brilliant album in here that got a little bit
lost in the thickets of what turned out to be just a very good album. We got a
little distracted by the democratizing project that de-emphasized Matt Berninger’s
role in favor of foregrounding a series of female voices, which was both
admirable and arresting, all while it covered up the legginess of the album as
a whole. I’m still not, for example, a fan of longtime live favorite “Rylan,”
among others. Having said that, “Oblivions” is an epochal song and it will
always already be on any National playlist I make from now on. For that alone I
am eternally grateful.
Girlpool – What Chaos Is Imaginary
I have to
confess that I had not been paying attention to Girlpool until the release of
this impressive album, so it looks like I have some catching up to do because
this is already their third full-length release. If you are looking for hook to
hang things on, there are strong echoes of the trademark Deerhunter sound here
along with occasional echoes of the ghost of Elliott Smith, none of which is by
any means a bad thing, but make no mistake this is not at all a derivative
album. The contrapuntal vocals of the two singers Avery Tucker and Harmony
Tividad are very effective and this album seems to represent the band in full
bloom, full of textures both smooth and fuzzy, musical and vocal drones and
melodies, and more riffs and hooks than you can shake a stick at, all delivered
with discretion and understatement, alternately pretty and gritty. An example
of what indie pop-rock should sound like if one were being at all prescriptive
about it, which of course we aren’t, perish the thought.
Local
Natives – Violet Street
After what felt to me like the
colossal misstep of 2016’s Sunlit Youth, Local Natives’ attempt to go for the
brass ring of commercial success after the niche and massively promising
attractions of 2010’s Gorilla Manor and 2012’s Hummingbird, the band seem to
have found their way back to the rich seam of melody they mined so well on
their first two albums. They always seemed to me like a far less irritating
version of Grizzly Bear in that, while they probably still iron their jeans,
they at least know how to let their hair down and accept pop music as their
personal savior. But while there was no shame in embracing melody and popular
sensibilities, Sunlit Youth seemed quite clearly to be trying entirely too
hard. Violet Street is a welcome and glorious course correction, as the hook of
“When Am I Gonna Lose You” seems to be previewed in the opening two tracks
before exploding into full bloom on the song itself. There is really too much
70s Laurel Canyon pastiche going on right now for my liking, and Local Natives
never lose themselves entirely in that gulch, but they are certainly aware of
it as a point of reference and they are able to pluck sumptuous melodies out of
the air just when we thought there were none left to be discovered. This album
is a joyous delight. Let yourself go and let it in.
I have to confess an unnatural weakness
for M.C. Taylor’s songwriting, and seeing Hiss Golden Messenger live in 2019 as
they toured this new album only reinforced my crush on his entire body of work.
Taylor is basically a seasoned and experienced human being and that is what informs
his creative output. There is a warmth and an empathy in these songs that we
badly need in this cultural moment and they have me in their clutches for the
foreseeable future. HGM’s entire body of
work is worth exploring and Terms of Surrender is a logical and typical
outgrowth of what preceded it. These are emotionally intelligent songs about
the difficult of living with integrity and the vital importance of continuing
to try to do so. The musicianship is impeccable, the balance of mellow and more
raucous material equally so, and the overall feeling the album evokes is deeply
satisfying. “Bright Direction,” “My Wing,” the title track are particularly
affecting but the whole album hangs together wonderfully well. If you’re
looking to explore Hiss Golden Messenger’s back catalog you could do worse than
to start with the incredibly good value that can be found in the box set
reissue of the band’s early albums, Devotion: Songs About Rivers & Spirits
& Children, with excellent and extraordinarily thorough liner notes from
Amanda Petrusich. Beyond that, Heart Like a Levee and Hallelujah Anyhow are
also excellent, but there are no bad albums by this band.
Modern Nature – How to Live (plus Nature
EP)
This album flew
under a lot of people’s radar and that’s really a shame because it’s quite a
gem. I was disappointed when Ultimate Painting went their separate ways, so it
was a very nice surprise when Jack Cooper launched this new enterprise with
BEAK>’s Will Young. Together they make a bucolic and organic music that
builds very gradually and intelligently to some small crescendos, evolving from
tasteful chamber music with strings into an irresistible pulse and drone as the
album progresses. In some respects this recalls the gently relentless work of
Andrew Kenny in both American Analog Set and Wooden Birds. The EP Nature that
preceded the album dovetails perfectly with it and is really required listening
for the full Modern Nature experience.
The Japanese House – Good At Falling
This might be an album so niche that I
am the only person who will fly a flag for it, but I adored Good At Falling.
The Japanese House is basically Amber Bain, just as Hand Habits is really just
Meg Duffy, although the similarities end there. Good At Falling is a delicious
layering of vocals and electronic instrumentation that adds up to some very sophisticated
pop music indeed. It’s a deceptive sound, because it leans slightly toward what
we used to call AOR, but it contains musical and lyrical barbs that keep you on
your toes (viz. “We don’t fuck anymore” from “We Talk All The Time”). The
entire album is beautifully paced and sequenced such that you can take any
track and enjoy it on its own merits at the same time that the whole experience
is sewn together quite seamlessly. The radio has become a bewildering wasteland
of awful new country and people yelling at each other about politics and sports,
but I would like to think that in a world where I was the program director of
an old-fashioned FM station, many show formats would have playlists that revolved
around music sounding like some version of this. In my vision of a reclaimed
radio format, this music would be the gateway drug to draw people into its
logical and more avant-garde extensions such as Cate Le Bon (above) and Aldous
Harding (below). You would like my radio station. I know you would.
Aldous Harding – Designer
There is a lazy consensus (although perhaps it’s an imaginary one originating
in my own head) that Aldous Harding is just “odd,” but we need oddballs more
than ever in a moment when conformity is becoming ever more compulsory. The
songs on Designer are quirky marvels, recalling the elusive and brilliant Mary
Margaret O’Hara. This album is also an object lesson in giving songs time to
breathe and grow on you. We seem to have become reactionary to the point of dismissing
music that doesn’t immediately grab us with its hooks, but iin my experience
the more immediate the listening experience the less likely the music is to
endure, and these songs creep into your consciousness in a way that they
ultimately become knitted into your DNA without you noticing. I would also
argue that these songs are perhaps a little bit less willfully weird than
people might have you believe, even if they are somewhat, well, angular and
indirect. For all the strange twists and turns that the songs take, Harding
will drop in some Leonard Cohen acoustic guitar chords and some lilting honky-tonk
piano riffs as playful and seductive gestures toward accessibility. It’s really
quite a brilliant contrapuntal strategy, almost catlike in its vacillation between
refusing and demanding our attention and affection by turns. If you know
anything of Harding’s work, or of this album, it may well be the remarkable video
for the equally remarkable “The Barrel,” which is a gloriously surreal
adventure that should please those of both pop and avant-garde sensibilities
alike, with the melody tracing a beautiful and delicate arc, while the lyrics are quite fully
out there, as you will see from this brief excerpt:
I feel your love
I feel time is up
When I was a child, I never knew enough
What that do to me?
The wave of love is a transient hunt
Water's the shell and we are the nut
But I saw a hand arch out of the barrel
Look at all the peaches
How do you celebrate?
Can't appear inside of nowhere
How do you celebrate?
Can't appear inside of nowhere
It's already dead
I know you have the dove
I'm not getting wet
Looks like a date is set
Show the ferret to the egg
I'm not gettin' led along
I know you have the dove
I'm not getting wet
Looks like a date is set
Show the ferret to the egg
I'm not gettin' led along
I rushed in to hold down your page
And now I sleep 'side words you do not read with me
I hear a song from inside the maze, the very one you made
You shook at the ivory mantle
As a poet, I knew to be gentle
When you have a child, so begins the braiding
And in that braid you stay
And now I sleep 'side words you do not read with me
I hear a song from inside the maze, the very one you made
You shook at the ivory mantle
As a poet, I knew to be gentle
When you have a child, so begins the braiding
And in that braid you stay
In both of these regards – musical accessibility and lyrical
obscurity – as well as the avant-folk vocal style, Harding recalls the twinned
wonders of Cate Le Bon (see above). But while Harding’s voice is of a somewhat ethereal
register for the most part, which might take a little getting used to (although
she seems able to adapt a gorgeous and startling baritone on “Zoo Eyes,” for
example), if you have already allowed Cate Le Bon into your hearts, then you should
consider making room for Aldous Harding alongside her.
Angel
Olsen – All Mirrors
Angel Olsen is compiling an impressive
body of work. I am immodest enough to remember setting off the Angel Olsen
siren back in 2014 when she released her first spectacular album Burn Your Fire
For No Witness. I am therefore very happy to have been proven completely
correct in my prediction, although I certainly did not expect the artistic arc
that followed that album to MY WOMAN to Phases to the dramatic flourish of All Mirrors.
By all accounts there is a stripped down acoustic version of this album, which
I cannot wait to hear (there was some thought given to releasing them at the
same time, but I understand that the simpler version will be forthcoming at
some point), but this almost orchestral suite of songs is almost operatic in
its scope and intensity, while it also deftly integrates some rock tropes as is
very successfully evident on songs like “Too Easy” and “Spring,” where strings
give way to searing and powerful guitar swells. This is what fully realized
albums used to feel like and am delighted at this return to what feels almost
like a rather quaint notion, the integrated and fully realized work of art.
This is the album that tends to broaden your emotional spectrum and enlarge
your heart in the best way.
Weyes
Blood – Titanic Rising
This album is not dissimilar in some
ways from Angel Olsen’s All Mirrors, both in its instrumentation and its ambition,
and it was very high on a lot of year-end lists, but for me it felt somewhat
overcooked and less convincing than its counterpart. I liked it, and I may well
revisit it and recant this feint praise but in the meantime, it remains in the
pile of albums that underwhelmed me and left me feeling kind of hollowed out.
There were a lot of those this year.
Big Thief – Two Hands
I have to confess to not having given Big Thief’s second album of 2019
nearly the attention it deserves after the intensity of U.F.O.F. (see above) clean
wore me out, so I may have to spend the early part of 2020 digging into this
and getting caught up, but the standout track “Not” is a clear indication that
there is a lot to explore here. Adrienne Lenker is clearly a major (and increasingly
prolific) talent and the growing confidence evident in the band’s work as it
evolves is matched also by the integration of reflective folk and more fuzzy
rock sounds. Big Thief might well be on the way to scaling the same heights as
The National have achieved, wherein they set their own agenda and establish
their own genre, irrespective of any pre-existing industry standards or
expectations.
Shura – forevher
forevher is just a great pop dance
album with exactly the right balance of energies. It recalls in some ways the similar
delicate balance achieved by Perfume Genius (from whom a new album feels overdue,
by the way), although with much more of an eye on the dancefloor. I’m always
wary of making facile and reductive comparisons (although that doesn’t seem to
stop me, apparently), but I hear some of the strains of the goddess Robyn in these
songs. This is an album that feels somehow very close to my heart, embodying as
it does so many elements of my formative sensibilities, dance music, an indie/independent
spirit, a hopeless romanticism and a seductive call to get lost, utterly lost,
in rhythm, melody and an abiding love of
being in love, just as I was taught to
do by Chic, Everything But The Girl and Orange Juice, among others, in my long
ago youth. This is also one of those fantastically versatile albums that works
in multiple settings, equally enjoyable in a social or a solitary setting, soirée
or Sennheiser.
Octo Octa – Resonant Body
The Octa Octa album seems to dovetail
nicely with the Shura album, so I’ve put it here. There is both a more four on the
floor dance imperative at work here, at the same time that Maya
Bouldry-Morrison, the prodigious talent behind Octa Octa, is also dedicated to
exploring some of the more challenging parts of the electronic music spectrum
in a way that recalls the more accessible side of Arca (whatever happened to
Arca, by the way?). Put this on a playlist with Shura and Robyn and you’ll have
yourself a fantastic evening.
Bruce Springsteen – Western Stars
I have to be honest, I didn’t think
Bruce had this in him. Western Stars really bowled me over in almost every way.
And I’ll be honest again when I say that I kind of didn’t want to like it. I resisted
listening to it, and when I did finally listen to it I resisted admitting that
it was even any good, let alone completely wonderful. This is the way to age
gracefully, no reverse ageing CGI required, just a glorious tribute to Jimmy
Webb and Glen Campbell, while also making a roundabout connection to his
earlier solo album Nebraska, as if this were the lush other side of the coin to
his earlier album about less affluent and slightly less western lights. They
seem to dovetail quite perfectly together in a way that The Ghost of Tom Joad never
quite did for me. That’s not to say that the album is pristine and faultless.
There are times when it tends somewhat toward the saccharine, and “Sleepy Joe’s
Café” though is really quite lame and not a little reminiscent of Dire Straits around
the twinned nadirs of “Walk of Life” and “Twisting by the Pool.” Nevertheless,
the album more than redeems itself with songs like “The Wayfarer” and “Sundown,”
“Hello Sunshine” and the album’s title track, all of which demonstrate beyond any
doubt that a true rock star can age gracefully and graciously, and does not
have to turn him or herself into a grotesque cartoon version of their younger selves.
Van Morrison – Three Chords and the Truth
I’ve enjoyed Van Morrison’s multi-album suite of covers and
standards over the last few years, where he revisits his roots and mines the
deep vein of heritage music that influenced so much of his classic original
material. But for all that, it’s really refreshing to get an album of Morrison originals
after quite a long time away and it’s even more exciting to realize that his
songwriting remains as strong as his voice after all these years. This album
really feels like it’s on a continuum with Morrison’s much overlooked purple
patch from the 1980s, and it might be interesting to go back to those earlier
works and test the theory. He seems to have shed some of his more mystical and
gnostic pronouncements in favor of a somewhat direct lyrical approach, but the
feel of the songs seems of a piece with many of those wonderful moments. An
easy example for simple comparison would be the compatibility of “March Winds in
February” with Beautiful Vision’s “Cleaning Windows.” There are some genuinely
lovely and affecting songs here and there is a very pleasing spectrum from the lilting
and reflective ballad of a song like “In Search of Grace,” to the R&B swing
of “Nobody in Charge,” and the Animals-like blues Jeremiad of “You Don’t Understand.”
The duet with Bill Medley from the Righteous Brothers, “Fame Will Eat the Soul,”
is an interesting battle of curmudgeonly growlers that just about works, but it
doesn’t work anywhere near as well as the imaginary duet between Van and Bob Seger
on “We’ve Got Tonight” that my friend Richard and I dreamed up earlier this
year. That would be pure magic, unlike the turgid and frankly quite execrable Astral
Weeks: A Secret History of 1968, by Ryan H. Walsh, which I also read in 2019. Please
don’t be misled. There are only about 20 pages that directly address the
recording of the album. The rest of the book is all about some lame cult that
was operating in Boston in 1968. Three Chords and the Truth is genuinely, and
most importantly, a lot of fun, which we don’t often say about Van Morrison
anymore. Anyway, welcome back, 1980s Van. I’ve missed you.
Leonard Cohen – Thanks for the Dance
A perfect coda to a perfect career, a message from beyond the
grave, an addendum to his last living statement, You Want It Darker from 2016,
which was released fewer than three weeks before his death. Cohen’s son Adam
put this together based on snippets of vocals left over from the You Want It
Darker sessions and finished the songs in a way that formed a short but sublime
posthumous statement. These songs are koans from the afterlife, even more haunting
than their predecessors on YWID.
John Coltrane – Blue World
I’m embarrassed to say that I didn’t pay nearly enough attention
to jazz in 2019 (to be honest, a lot of things went by the board, and jazz was only
one of the casualties of my crisis), and so I have only a couple of jazz-related
entries to offer this time around, one of which is this deceptively wonderful archival
release from John Coltrane. Originally created and recorded in 1964 for the
soundtrack to the French-Canadian film Le chat dans le sac.” The tapes
from this recording disappeared into Quebec and were then embargoed due to a
dispute between the National Film Board of Canada and Impulse!, Coltrane’s
label. Thankfully the dispute was resolved and we are lucky to hear this batch
of songs, almost all of which are alternative versions of familiar Coltrane
standards. But the clarity of tone and the discipline of performance are
pleasing. The two versions of “Naima” here are refreshing and might be some of
my favorite takes of the song. Along with last year’s Both Directions at Once:
The Lost Album, we have been very fortunate to get our hands on some Coltrane treasure
in recent times and it’s a reminder, if we needed one, of what a touchstone he
remains. I’m sad to say that I cannot endorse the lost Miles Davis album, Rubberband,
that was also released in 2019. It feels, sadly, all too much like a patchwork
with vocals and other rather ropy tracks and effects added in to convince us
that this was always a coherent project, instead of which it sounds like a dated
and chopped up mess. This points up the fine line that music curators walk when
they embark on reissue and archival release projects. Coltrane’s guardians have
done an impeccable job, while Miles has, I am sorry to say, done him a great disservice.
Floating Points – Crush
Just as I didn’t spend as much time
with jazz as I would have like this year, I also more or less neglected
electronic music, with a couple of exceptions. I haven’t given Crush as much
time as I should have, but I can already tell you that it’s a worthy successor
to Sam Shepherd’s 2015 masterpiece Elaenia. With Crush he veers away from the
abstract jazz of its predecessor in what is occasionally a more dancey
direction, while never losing his sense of abstraction or his dedication to
meditative musical texts that sometimes come to the edge of spiritual
expression. In this respect, Shepherd is on a similar path to Four Tet’s Kieran
Hebden, easily pivoting from contemplative and abstract electronic music to some
version of the dancefloor banger. This album more or less originated from
Shepherd’s stint opening for the xx in 2017, in the sense that he made a lot of
what he described in an interview with Pitchfork as “some of the most obtuse
music […] I’ve ever heard.” He went on to say that he “ended up making this
whole album using the live setup at the core of it.” This is a really interesting
way to make music, particularly music of this kind, and it is surprisingly
effective. I love the organic connection between music created for a live environment
that is subsequently captured in the more static form of a studio recording. It’s
almost like some kind of version of the Romantic trope of “emotion recollected
in tranquility,” and loathe as I am to give Wordsworth even a scintilla of
credit, that seems to be what Shepherd has accomplished here, and to great
effect.
The Comet Is Coming – Trust in the Lifeforce of the Deep Mystery
The Comet is Coming belong to that new wave of British music that
is jazz but not jazz, disregarding genre lines and mashing up all kinds of styles
and sounds in a bracing hybrid. As is to be expected with such pioneering
efforts, it doesn’t always work, and it isn’t always necessarily accessible,
but when the mood strikes it can be inspiring and provocative, as is the case
here for the most part. TITLOTDM often dwells in the lower registers with some
squeaky stuff bubbling along on the top line, which recalls a mutant version of
Mingus somehow and sometimes. The listener is occasionally compelled to observe
that this music can be more impressive than it is enjoyable, but there is something
else about it that rewards patience and repeated listening, particularly if you
cue up some Mingus before and some Oneohtrix Point Never or Fennesz afterward as
part of an integrated listening continuum that seeks to trace a line through
the last 60 years of some version of the avant-garde. So good luck with that.
Sarathy Korwar – More Arriving
Emerson once said, “If I know your sect I anticipate your
argument.” With those words ringing in my ears as I listened to this album I
realized that I had no idea how to talk about Sarathy Korwar’s More Arriving, except
to say that it seems quite brilliant to me. I have no sense of its context, its
genre or its provenance, so I am leaning heavily on the review from The Quietus,
which described the album as “a remarkable meeting of jazz, hip-hop, Indian
classical music and radical politics.” I am continuing to study that very
helpful review as I continue to explore the many wonders of More Arriving. I
cannot say more except to encourage you to explore it yourself and be as bewildered
and delighted as I have been by it.
Monomotion – Fujisan EP
In order to get the most out of Fujisan’s delightful 2019 EP, it’s important that you listen to it in the context of its two predecessors, Behind The Moon (2015) and Leaving (2017). This trilogy is really quite enchanting and I recommend it wholeheartedly.
Fennesz – Agora
Weval – The Weight
Nivhek – After its own death/Walking in a spiral towards the house
Laurel Halo – DJ Kicks
Sturgill Simpson – Sound and Fury
The general reaction to the latest
Sturgill Simpson album was, briefly put, what the fuck is this, which has
mostly been the reaction to all of his
albums going back to Metamodern Sounds in Country Music in 2014 and, to a
lesser extent, A Sailor’s Guide to Earth in 2016. This should not cause any
consternation in the listenership residing outside of Nashville, though, because
the freakout seems largely to be based on a refusal by the country music industry
to countenance even the slightest suggestion that envelopes are being pushed or
boundaries explored. But Simpson tests even his own iconoclasm with Sound and
Fury, which begins in chaos and continues from that unsettling baseline into
the land where no fucks at all are given. This is the musical equivalent of Mad
Max: Fury Road, as the opener “Ronin” will surely confirm. There is an
organized but righteous rage here that converts into an exhilarating listening
experience. This is the kind of album for which the word “rollicking” was invented.
I encourage you to give this album a chance and allow your mind to be blown,
and I look forward to the rock opera that should rightfully result from this
bonkers album. Alternatively, go back to Metamodern Sounds in Country Music and
have your mind blown just a little bit less as a rehearsal for what comes later.
Tiny Ruins – Olympic Girls
A few words about Holly Fullbrook’s
Tiny Ruins project, if only because her work seems to be so generally neglected
and it deserves better. Olympic Girls feels rather sparser than her previous work,
although even that was never exactly flush with baroque instrumentation. I
loved 2014’s Brightly Painted One and then Fullbrook and Tiny Ruins seemed to disappear,
at least from my radar. This new album is what the critical lexicon tends to
call plaintive, but do not mistake that for weakness. There is a solid spine
here as the music waves and sways like a delicate but robust tree in a strong
wind, bending but not breaking. The arboreal motif seems apposite beyond the throwaway
comparison, as these songs reach like tendrils toward the light under a canopy
of forest dark, spreading roots beneath the surface, and sprouting and
bifurcating toward the sky above it, blooming and withering by turns. This is a
beautiful album, a shelter from the storm.
Jay Som – Anak Ko (Vagabon)
Either Jay Som matured or I did, but I
liked this album so much more than Melinda Duerte’s previous Jay Some album,
2017’s Everybody Works, to the extent that I actively loved it, having rather
actively not cared for Everybody Works. On Anak Ko (the Tagalog phrase for “my
child,” in case you’re curious), Duerte enlists the help of members of Vagabon
and Chastity Belt, among others, and the result is a pleasantly affecting collection
of almost classic and archetypal indie pop-rock that broods and sparkles very
nicely. This makes me want to revisit Everybody Works and prepare yet another
apology.
A.A. Bondy – Enderness
Jane Weaver – Loops in the Secret Society
Fruit Bats – Gold Past Life
Mark
Mulcahy – The Gus
Moodymann – Sinner
O’Flynn – Aletheia
Clairo – Immunity
Resavoir – S/T
The Specials – Encore
Twilight Sad – IT WON/T BE LIKE THIS ALL THE TIME
Chastity Belt – S/T
Black Marble – Bigger Than Life
Angelo De Augustine – Tomb
Stella Donnelly – Beware of the Dogs
Sacred Paws – Run Around the Sun
Mega Bog – Dolphine
Marvin Gaye – You’re The Man
VA – Tiny Changes (Frightened Rabbit tribute/cover album of Midnight Organ Fight)
Moon Duo – Stars Are the Light
Possible Humans – Everybody Split
Blood Orange – Angel’s Pulse
Clairo – Immunity
Resavoir – S/T
The Specials – Encore
Twilight Sad – IT WON/T BE LIKE THIS ALL THE TIME
Chastity Belt – S/T
Black Marble – Bigger Than Life
Angelo De Augustine – Tomb
Stella Donnelly – Beware of the Dogs
Sacred Paws – Run Around the Sun
Mega Bog – Dolphine
Marvin Gaye – You’re The Man
VA – Tiny Changes (Frightened Rabbit tribute/cover album of Midnight Organ Fight)
Moon Duo – Stars Are the Light
Possible Humans – Everybody Split
Blood Orange – Angel’s Pulse
Albums I Didn’t Get or Get With:
Nick Cave - Ghosteen
Lana Del Rey - Norman Fucking Rockwell
Lana Del Rey - Norman Fucking Rockwell
