Annual Post for 2019 Music

Hello dear readers,

I imagine the best way to build up a loyal readership base is to rarely post on this thing. I don't want to overload people, you know? Well I'm sorry to interrupt my silence with the one reliable post I like to make. The music retrospective!

I wanted to list all my favorite albums of the decade but I didn't have much time for that. I still might make a list but not try to write about them yet again because I just wrote about all the things in those yearly retrospectives as well as An Ear For An Era. So it was revisited just a bit ago. I am trying to finish up my top 100 songs of the decade playlist, because that's a fun way to do things and it's somewhat related to another project I'm working on - a podcast! But that's a different entry.

2019 was a year I was on Spotify. It's a weird world. I still purchased vinyl for most of these, I'll try to do so for at least all the albums I love enough to put on a list like this. But the nice thing about streaming services is that very few of these albums are ones I would have known to check out if it wasn't so easy. Most of them were things I gave a chance on and got hooked onto. My tastes seem to be drifting off in other directions. I'm more interested in something that probably has a name but I will call singer-songwriter-R&B. Like, soul that is more of an individual statement by the artist? I don't know, but I was into a lot of that instead of my usual indie rock. And a renewed interest in punk rock, particularly that fronted by women. I guess I'm starting to get somewhat bored by bearded dudes that look like me.

I was also less into hip hop this year. I liked a few albums but none cracked this list for me. Maybe my brain just couldn't process it enough. Having said that, there are a few hip hop albums I highly recommend in the Honorable Mentions list below.

So here comes the list. There are fourteen. I'm not ranking them this year because I'm back in the "ranking something so subjective seems so silly" mode. There was also no clear #1. If it's on this list, I found it very compelling and found myself going back to it a lot this year. Call it a 14-way tie. It's in more-or-less chronological order.

Sharon van Etten - Remind Me Tomorrow
She took what I loved about some of her songs from previous albums and made a full album of it. Just great get-your-fists-pumping music with lots of passion and empathy. I don't have a lot of words about this but I was very into it.

Le Butcherettes - bi/MENTAL
I just found this band last year when they opened up for Hot Snakes. I was blown away by their performance. This is their first new album since then and it's a quite good payoff. Good chaos rock full of righteous rage. Empowering words, and a musical style that fits somewhere between DC angular hardcore and Detroit jangle rock and hits you in the jugular? Does that make any sense when describing a Mexican punk band?

Adia Victoria - Silences
So badass. Kind of reminds me of listening to Tom Waits, even though it's pretty different. At least vocally. I think she could play Tom Waits songs and Tom Waits could play Adia Victoria songs and I wouldn't bat an eye. There's a knowingness to her vocals and lyrics. Kind of the blues with that Waits style of drunken music that accompanies the vocals but not quite in lockstep. More of a companion that understands you and shares your world view but doesn't need to talk about it all the time.

Kelsey Lu - Blood
Kind of reminds me of why I first got into Jesca Hoop. Very similar vocal delivery. Very haunting. Probably a little more range though. Sometimes she goes off and reminds me of a singing saw. That with the strings that come naturally with her cello background feels like it's swirling around you like a tornado but not, like, damaging anything. You know?

Jamila Woods - Legacy! Legacy!
Maybe my favorite sung album of the year. And the hip hop beats just pull me along. I'm having a hard time describing why I love this album, it just feels so right. It's soul and it's hip hop and I know those genres have spent so much time together, and I don't know why this is unique but it just is. It's like nothing else even if it's like other things. Definitely making sense here.

Otoboke Beaver - Itekoma Hits
This is so fresh to me. The bursts of noise, it reminds me of the punk I was into in the early 2000s. Like Refused. That level of precision to the explosions of noise, but this is a new noise. It has a youth factor about it. It takes me back to high school even though that was half my life ago. Infectious energy with frequent start/stop tempos. I think that basically explains the awesomeness that is Otoboke Beaver.

black midi - Schlagenheim
Mathy. It gets me. From Battles to Deerhoof to The Ex, rhythm section driven chaos is extremely my jam, and we can put black midi on that list. I don't feel like working anything else about this. If you haven't heard of them but like those listed bands you should check them out.

Purple Mountains - Purple Mountains
It reminds me of great 70s singer songwriters of great wit such as Harry Nilsson and Warren Zevon, all of whom are dead. I always meant to check out Silver Jews but they remained on that list of someday. Someday passes at some point. When David Berman passed, I finally checked out his work, starting with this solo effort released very shortly before he took his leave. It's an eerie listen to hear these lighthearted songs of depression because it feels like a suicide note. But it's so catchy and inviting. It makes the whole thing so damn disturbing but irresistible.

Gauche - A People’s History of Gauche
It sounds like Sleater-Kinney at first and then it evolves into sounding like Black Eyes. Very adventurous and wonderful. I mourn the Priests hiatus just a little bit less knowing it could lead to more Gauche. Punky and funky and the right kind of off-putting.

Bleached - Don’t You Think You’ve Had Enough?
I feel like this was very underappreciated. Bleached was always very poppy in their punk, and here they leaned even further into that to a somewhat Blondie-esque sound. I loved it. The whole album is catchy, maybe catchier than most of their older stuff. And when they do decide to rock, such as on “Daydream” and the payoff of “Shitty Ballet” (a song I don’t care for until suddenly I love), it’s that much better.

Sleater-Kinney - The Center Won’t Hold
It might not be the best Sleater-Kinney album of the decade, but there was something very compelling about it that I kept listening to it. And the 1-2-3-4 punch of the last four songs beginning with “Bad Dance” is a real knockout. If that were an EP it would be right up there. It speaks so clearly to the urgency of this moment in history. I just wish it had worked out with Janet Weiss.

Baby Rose - To Myself
Uncanny how much she sounds like Nina Simone but still so modern. Beautiful, sometimes heartbreaking, and always with a haze of “cool” over everything. This would be great in a movie soundtrack to really elevate a scene of intensity

Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds - Ghosteen
It’s just so vulnerable. So moving. A really heavy listen. The last album Skeleton Tree was one of my top albums of the decade and I can’t decide if this one is even better. Every time he sings the title phrase in the song “Waiting for you” I just get chills and have to stop whatever I’m doing. It might hit closer to home now that I’m  a father, and I hate to say that because great art can make you feel things regardless of your personal context. But an already amazing album is deepened by the very heavy weight of its subject matter and knowing what happened to Cave and his family. You have to be ready to listen to this, though there is no preparing for what it contains.

Kim Gordon - No Home Record
I didn’t give myself enough spins on this one, but it was so great when I did. I was always partial to the Kim songs on Sonic Youth albums, and her other projects (like all SY related side projects) were very avant garde. This solo album strikes the same balance the great SY albums have, where it’s plenty weird and interesting but there’s a pop anchor to grab onto. But very different in other ways. More electronic in an industrial sense, without sounding like anything else I’ve really listened to. Maybe brief hints of Nine Inch Nails, but it sounds very new.

Those are the ones. Here are some honorable mentions.

As mentioned above, Malibu Ken, Little Simz, Rapsody, and Danny Brown. Plus People Under The Stairs.

Mike Krol, FEELS, Uranium Club, Petrol Girls, Titus Andronicus, Yeesh, Battles.

Better Oblivion Community Center, Stella Donnelly, Wilco, Angel Olsen.

Nekhane, Helado Negro, Calexico & Iron & Wine, Bill Callahan, Jesca Hoop, Esther Rose.

Mekons, Hot Chip, Pixies, New Pornographers.

Carly Rae Jepsen, Charly Bliss, Kitty Kat Fan Club.

An Ear For An Era: 2016

Remember 2016? Sure you do. It was so recent. Yet so long ago.

A tense time, a sad time, a time with a few breaks from the sad tension...

We did go to Universal Studios and the Simpsons area they have there. That was great. And we went to Germany, which was legendarily great. In January, we took a short vacation to Florida and an even shorter two-night cruise to the Bahamas. It was on that cruise ship when we found out that David Bowie had died.

And that just kind of kicked off the year that would be 2016.

Blackstar by Bowie is about as great a swan song as any artist has delivered. It has the sounds of a restless artist putting everything out there in a final purge of energy. A scream, not a sigh. Jazz and industrial and rock and whatever words you use when you describe Bowie's career in full. It's all there. And yet, there was probably more in there lost to the afterlife. The last song is called "I Can't Give Everything Away." Even so, he gave more than most any artist in our lives. I can't say enough even though I've said nothing. Bowie.

David Bowie "I Can't Give Everything Away"

Iggy Pop recorded an album with Josh Homme called Post Pop Depression. It was great and inventive and I spent much of the year worrying he would join his compatriots in the afterlife. Especially since last time I saw him live (I can't believe I have seen him three times!) he talked a bit about probably not being much longer for this world. But he continues. And Post Pop Depression is an awesome album. But even that album title!

Savages are a kind of direct descendent of Iggy Pop's post punk innovations, and their second album Adore Life is super engaging and makes me want to go to 1979 in Germany or something.

I feel like people didn't freak out enough about Emily's D+Evolution by Esperanza Spalding. I know it got some rave reviews, which was why I decided to give it a shot when it eventually hit the $5 bin. But I just finally listened to it now and wow. This is so much. It's funky, it's post punk, it's so much in addition to the "jazz" label. Not that jazz has limitations. But as much as I heard she was branching out or whatever, I did not expect this. I need to listen to it more times.

Freetown Sound by Blood Orange was another great singular vision of high creativity. Usually something with as many guests as this would feel a bit scattered, but this was a clear statement and so of the times in 2016 (and today, it's only 2 years later after all, things don't change that fast...).

Another respite from the challenges of living in 2016 was Welcome the Worms by Bleached. Pop punk in the true sense of the word is the catchiest music to me. And no song was in my head in 2016 as much as "Wednesday Night Melody."

Bleached "Wednesday Night Melody"

And back to sadness of losing great artists. Do I write about Charles Bradley here? He lived until 2017 which puts him outside the class of 2016, but he put out his final album Changes that year and it was really something. Screaming eagle indeed, his voice was unrivaled in its passion.

Perhaps my favorite album of 2016 (there were two frontrunners and I'm going to go ahead and exercise my right to not pick a #1) was created by someone who is fortunately still around, but an exploration of loss in the wake of an unspeakable tragedy. I'm speaking of Skeleton Tree by Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds. Every song on the album gives me deep feelings of love, loss, dread, and a little bit of hope. It is a masterwork. If Cave were someone besides Nick Cave, it would be a career defining album. But his catalog is so vast and incredible that I can't even attempt to quantify that. But in a year like 2016, this was (potentially tied for) the greatest thing an artist could release.

Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds "Girl in Amber"

Leonard Cohen had already teased the idea of dying when he was promoting You Want It Darker, but it was still a shock when he departed shortly after its release. But he went in the way of Johnny Cash, with a string of late career masterpieces on the way out (only Cohen stuck with original compositions the whole way through). You Want It Darker was everything you want from the master. Funny, reflective, intelligent, and yes, darker.

Hip hop in 2016 was kind of amazing. To briefly shift gears from the people we lost in 2016, there were great hip hop albums by Chance the Rapper, Aesop Rock, and De La Soul. Particularly De La Soul. ...And The Anonymous Nobody was a great comeback/re-introduction/modernization of a classic crew.

And then there was Danny Brown. Atrocity Exhibition is an album that I hesitate to call a hip hop album because to my ears the only thing that makes it hip hop is the rapping. The music itself is a combination of post punk and industrial and electronic and all sorts of influences.

And Run The Jewels, that's always good. RTJ3 came out on Christmas or something like that, so it basically counts as 2016.

But of course the other best album of 2016 was a reunion and a farewell and a wake for a fallen artist. Phife Dawg of A Tribe Called Quest left this world but not before recording We Got It From Here...Thank You 4 Your Service. Furious but hopeful, pushing boundaries in a way that evokes their classic 90s output while still sounding fresh, it's almost like a debut album in how much energy and purpose it has. This is not the album 2016 deserves, but it's the album we need after a year like 2016.

A Tribe Called Quest "We The People"

And I also have to mention...
Prince. Technically no 2016 music so all I can say is thank you for your service.
Sharon Jones. (She had a posthumous 2017 album though, so we'll talk about her next time)

Other Things:

• The Falcon - Gather Up The Chaps. The kind of sort of maturity of the latest Lawrence Arms album kind of sort of reflects onto this album but also not. I like The Falcon.
• Open Mike Eagle - Hella Personal Film Festival. Continuing to evolve and be great.
• ANOHNI sang a lot about drones and death and destruction on Hopelessness. A beautiful and sad album reminding us that Obama was still deeply flawed, which can be a hard thing to fathom now in 2018.
• Midwest Farmer's Daughter by Margo Price is beautiful, yes it is. Artists like this are why I can never write off "modern country music." 
• Kendrick Lamar's untitled throwaways are gold!
• Santigold's album 99 Cents was kind of a stark contrast to the general bummer of 2016 with some positivity and fun. It was good to have a break.
• case/lang/veirs was a great reminder of this Neko Case fan of how great K.D. Lang is.
• Sam Beam and Jesca Hoop put out a collaborative album and I liked it like I like both of them. Great complementary voices!
• Frank Ocean doesn't belong down here but I don't have time to write about Blonde enough. I really need to listen to it a bunch more times anyway.
• Kool Keith had a pretty great comeback in 2016 with Feature Magnetic.
• I quite liked Hypercaffium Spazzinate by The Descendents. 
• Dan P's music is really good for playing for my son.
• Avalanches returned! It was lots of fun! Danny Brown works well for their style.
• Bon Iver went off the deep end (in a great way) with 22, A Million.
• This:

Mac McCaughan "Happy New Year (Prince Can't Die Again)"

Next Time:
2017 shall be the last one of these, it would appear. Not soon enough, as it's near impossible to find time to write this and update playlists with a newborn around. 2017 was the year of...stuff. I think it broke the '7 narrative I've been building in this thing. I think 2016 was better. I still need to work out what the highlights actually were though.