Tuesday, December 31, 2019

The Year in Music - 2019



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

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. 

Youth Group – Australian Halloween

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. 

Purple Mountains – S/T

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
And when I see her in the park
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
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
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
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

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.

Hiss Golden Messenger – Terms of Surrender

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
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 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

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

Albums I Didn’t Get or Get With:

Nick Cave - Ghosteen
Lana Del Rey - Norman Fucking Rockwell