Best Music 2024

The Diamond Manifesto: Is this the last list after 60 years of praising the glorious noise (Like a Rolling Stone over Where Did Our Love Go)? For decades my year-end music lists asserted I was measuring some kind of movement in culture, revealing shifting values and beliefs. I confided to mysterious readers (there were few) that the music that mattered to me sounded like a ghost in Time.  I contended that music mapped the peepholes (if not the doors) of perception. 

That assertion was undoubtedly ego-driven and immature (Boomer omphaloskepsis). But I pointed to music in order to explore hopes for revolution of Being, not just prison revolts. I ranked music by the degree it expanded consciousness, resisted the tyrannies of capital and convention, and raised the Freak Flag to mock the oppressions of the Old Regime.  I believed that that was, in part, the whole point of rock and roll.  As though placing Sticky Fingers higher on a list than Bridge Over Troubled Waters would keep track of, and assist to promote, The Revolution in consciousness, if not in the streets.

Over the decades I kept the practice; even knowing that the discernment claimed was really just an update of my psyche (the Me Generation following the Revolt). Lifeworld as art and amusement.  I admitted that no barricade anywhere is stormed by an electric guitar. 

By 2024 the barricades are the screens in front of us, in our hands.  Screens that flatten how we see the world. Screens that addict us to engagement crack.  The history of human knowledge available as a click which results in awareness itself losing history.  What we called history now just forms us as monads of monetized data production.  The more we click, the less we are human.

In such a haze music is clickbait-profit-generation, barely amusement, and never Revolution.  What streams is the soundtrack of submission to the fetid fascism that oppresses and “disrupts.”  After such brokenness we become putrid, cranky and impatient knowing the Big Sleep is near.  Spotify will tell us what to listen to in the meantime because it knows us better than we know ourselves.  The algorithms make us as we sleep.

But now is the season of sleep; the winter wind, if not here, blows on hills near us.  The “ranking” of the music I liked in the past year matters not at all.  The pretense that it does matter, the ritual of deciding what music places where, is my cargo cult of counter-culture.  I suspect this is my last list.  I burn sage. I believe that the Beatitudes should run wild in culture and that the Pristine Presence, co-emergent, non-dualistic, both gnostic and in real flesh, is still accessible.  That Love is all you need.  That Truth is Beauty, and Beauty Truth. So I listen to music, I buy CDs to resist the screens’ complete supremacy. I rank albums like I take communion.  I share it… in winter, in the empty interior where there was once insurgency.  May the wind be always at our backs.

 

1.       Cindy Lee – Diamond Jubilee: How is it possible that something reminds me of the mystical 70s band Popul Vuh (that cherry telecaster’s reverb-pedal plinking) and Patsy Cline (that countrified sentimental echoey yowling for lost love), at the same time. Hard to know what to do with this two-hour exercise in “Nuggets from a decade that never existed” – cross-dressing Canadian garage-rock sounding like Big Star (or even earlier, Box Tops) or Peruvian psychedelic rock of the late 60s or German folk psychedelia or girl groups (early Ronettes) or Stereolab with lo-fi production mixing cheap equipment in bedrooms with grand Phil-Spector-with-an-aneurism missteps.  Perhaps there is a hall of fame where deeply disturbed idiot-savants have digested all your favorite rock hits and made found-object masterpieces that unlock both past and future secrets with cosmic three-chord dance-party hooks. Think Ariel Pink, Benji Hughes, Beck and… at the top of the pyramid Cindy Lee with (her) perfect groovy guitar lines and textures and an endless source of new/old melodies that ready the synapses for space travel and dance parties and fast food and newly old modes of refuge and rock redemption.  Making epic, glorious, throwaway noises in the garages on the plains of Neil Young’s Canada. Nowadays Clancy can’t even sell (her) music. Anarchy with purpose, this is not be available in CD, vinyl, download, or Spotify.  Here’s YouTube for the duration: https://youtu.be/_LJi5na897Y

2.       MJ Lenderman - Manning Fireworks: Starting with cornpone picking from some back porch, moving ominously to thickening clouds of electronic cowgaze thunder, Mr. Lenderman has more range than this Americana Hit Parade music might suggest. I am a sucker for the underwater-wilderness guitar (I am a member of the church of Neil Young and mourn the too-early passing of Jason Molina) – and the instrumentation in general is nutritious and hits the sweet spots: lap steel, fiddle, simple beats. While the Big Guitar brought me in, the quality of the songs/lyrics kept me, with that thin whiny carbuncular voice laying down the hooks and folk-pop wisdom.  Songs more country-slumming than Nashville…and the boho/slacker vibe in the American Alternative Country hitmakers (Big Thief, Waxahachie, Sturgill, Billy Strings) definitely in the DNA. But most of these songs should be huge radio hits… digging deep in the aural networks.  Only there is no radio anymore, and the lyrics and wistful tunes are perfect for a world where so much is lost; melancholy memories of a world of seminaries, barking dogs, flat sodas and summer sunburn.  Now smartwatches tell you you’re all alone.  She’s Leaving You the hit of the year for me.  Put on your clothes boy, she’s leaving you…

3.       The Cure - Songs of a Lost World:  Nothing is forever… except maybe The Cure.  From the opening song (with, typically, the vocal, The Vocal, Smith in all his Frosty Glory, coming in after many minutes of instruments gathering force) it was clear to me this was one of The Cure’s best albums.  Not “oh, best since the 90s”, rather this is among the best Cure ever.  Of course I was always partial to the dark and doomy late Disintegration Cure more than the gothy fizzy hits.  The theme, as in all good Cure, is death and loss and impermanence… and bitter struggle for some kind of peace.  (Smith’s voice embodies these themes more than any human alive, imho, and it defies time here).  But oh what a Magnificent Struggle!  The dense instrumentation, the thick layers of chorus-heavy guitar, flanger-generated noise, cloud cover of synths… how is this music not dated?  How can they be ready for this moment (where a band like REM, should they try to repeat their sound and vision, simply would be laughable, the zeitgeist at the door refusing them entrance).  Peter Gabriel did put out music last year that was quality, important, and right for the times, so such miracles are possible. This year’s Rolling Stones album was monumentally unnecessary.  So it seems to me some rock artists are like classic jazz artists – Ornette Coleman putting out brilliant music in his 80s – and some are not.  For example, Robert Smith lost his brother and wrote about his grief producing perhaps the best Cure song ever for this album, a song that hurts so presently. Indeed in his mid-60s Smith’s focus on the trap of mortality, and how it intensifies everything, is even more stunning and wounding as he ages and faces the beautiful end soon to come.  He’s said he’s got two more albums in him… a trilogy as it were.  Why, indeed, not.

4.       Cassandra Jenkins - My Light, My Destroyer: A slight voice so far up in the mix it could be an ASMR therapy session – but don’t mistake the dry presence, she’s smarter than you and has lived so much she wants to share with you.  Her lyrics are not difficult, but they are poetry.  And real life… confessional poetry.  She just wants you to pay attention.  The instrumentation is healthy American rock and roll (some country lists include her).  But her previous album had stories of swimming off the coast of Norway, which is more attuned to her Brooklyn roots.  Chunky yet jangling guitars sometimes frame her clever broken-hearted chanson – Lucinda Williams lite.  Those are the cuts that need to be played very loudly. Perhaps I am representative of a demographic particularly vulnerable to music that evokes, for me, both Laurie Anderson and late-stage Roxy Music.  Her mom, a high school science teacher, is recorded pointing out the constellations. I thought perhaps mom is dead, but nopes, just an antidote to the modern world which is hard to live in. (Subtle lyrics about Elon Musk consuming our planet home).  How do we live in this vanishing world?  Don’t turn from love (filthy yet true), don’t pretend to be stupid, and don’t give up seeking grace in soothing  yet serious music.  Did you see the comet?  No, but somebody did.

5.       Still House Plants - If I Don’t Make It, I Love You: This London band probably presents the most risky music on the list… although the precise attack of its extremity is with stealth, not scale. Drums, loft-jazz no-wave guitar, and a throaty woman’s alto vocals that sound like Velvet Underground’s Nico with a cold. I suppose a fan of Yoko Ono’s wandering yelps might also be drawn to this.  Or that’s unfair, we should give her more benefit of the doubt.  Sometimes she reminds me of Nina Simone asserting her mental differences with industrial strength melisma. But this isn’t retrospective of some previous decade. This is “new” music by any definition. Asymmetrical warfare filling so much space… artful, dense, intense.  I was going to say it’s not for the feint of heart, but maybe it is exactly the right strength for the journey ahead, even if you’re Moses, not Joshua.

6.       Laura Cannell – The Rituals of Hildegard Reimagined:  The English composer is known as a violinist, but here she plays a collection of recorders, and tunes an ancient harp to those recorders and processes it all through peculiar delay pedals.  Her groundbreaking albums of the last couple decades have presented a love for “early music” while deconstructing it enough to be trendy ambient.  This is certainly that, as she uses the ancient melodies of Hildegard of Bingen to clear all obstructions and get you ready to sit in meditative surrender, whether in cloister or on ketamine.  But this isn’t Catholic or even Western ancient music. It’s from some distant, but peaceful, planet.  Alien ceremonial airs. The sounds overlap and hide from each other and sound like something they are not.  A Japanese Koto in random aleatoric clusters; a droning violin leaking from some alchemist’s lab. Smoke and echoes; shadows and memory. Nones and bones. Vespers and whispers. Compline and completion.  It gets wiser with every listen.  No, I get wiser, it vanishes.

7.       The Smile - Wall of Eyes: (one of two Radiohead, I mean Smile, albums this year, who do they think they are? The Beatles? I am still digesting the second album.)  I have to believe that The Smile project is always a Thom Yorke solo album he’s convinced Greenwood and the others to sign on to. (And probably rescue with Jonny Greenwood’s cinematic soundscapes).  Half of the songs start with the inevitable Yorke wistful reverb crooning over rhythmic acoustic guitars. Territory familiar and unnerving still, after all these years.  He’s a diva, in the disheveled, literary, jeremiad-pandering nature of his perennial graduate student neuroses. Mind you, melancholy alone is not always beautiful.  The demanding rhythms won’t let “beauty” soften you; the book may be a leather-bound classic, but the actual text is Celine or Marx or the Unibomber. Speaking of Do You Want a Revolution, one day I listened closely and decided many of these “songs” could be Beatles outtakes if the Fab Four had been born in 1980, not 1950.  That’s neither praise nor criticism.  That’s both praise and criticism. Yorke and Greenwood: Lennon and McCartney for the constipated and privileged world most their fans live in.  The uncomfortable, well-appointed, savory world. But like all watershed artists, truth is beauty and beauty is truth and The Smile, whatever the cul de sac they may avoid, are Truthful music makers.  “Bending Hectic”, best Radiohead song in years. Welcome to the middle of your life.

8.       Mount Eerie - Night Palace: Phil Elverum returns as Mount Eerie. 26 tracks of foggy romantic reflections about the natural world, impermanence, and being present in the body of this one and precious human life.  He gets away with it.  He moves me, perhaps not just by his poetic lyrics or field-recorded birds, but more by the melodic bass guitar holding the world up. Listen to the grungy Pacific Northwest post-rock guitars.  Then folk picking acoustic.  Then a screech of black metal. Then open mic night at a bookstore. Listen to the sound of the gulls flying on the Puget Sound.  Listen to his own forever grief.  Listen to the product of attention.  Stay at attention, not like a marine, but like a Zen Master.  The world is ample enough to include poetry carried by a down-tuned, lo-fi barely strummed electric guitar.  Everything depends on a red wheelbarrow?  Nah, everything depends on a B minor chord and the sound of the tide coming in and then a deep breath.  This is a love song and a dirge and a rough draft. Warning: plenty of leftist triggers. But the Beatitudes are too woke now anyway.

9.       The Necks - Bleed: They are always called jazz, and the trio’s timbres (drums, bass, piano), even when augmented from acoustic to spacey by sneaky production, is jazz.  Lots of cool bopping at tables in smokey clubs in their native Australia is what they present (while the real listener is likely on some designer drug in a somber-colored bedroom).  But I don’t respond to them like I respond to jazz.  They are meditative in ways that invoke Eno to me, not Alice Coltrane.  They have none of the Africa in them the ways the New Jazz Artists from Britain have.  Stripped down and scoured, their music reminds me that all three of these instruments are percussion and while this spacious record doesn’t make me dance around, it could.

10.  Sturgill Simpson - Passage Du Desir: Still haven’t made up my mind on this mélange of many musical styles I like.  Americana. Folk rock. Rhythm and blue skies. Backbeat bar band. Classic rock.  Singer-songwriter auteur. That drunken redneck sailor wandering through the narrow streets of Paris’s Les Halles. Simpson, country outlaw, doesn’t back off from a sophistication that sinks most of the current Nashville hegemonic polishing. (Though he did need to create a whole new persona. Note to Sturgill, singing this as your truest self, not a slippery alias, is your power).  This theatrical pose is truly Romantic (with a capital R), with serious, trenchant lyrics about adult crises and losses.  The voice, of course, is his secret world-conquering weapon. A voice that tells you his jeans are faded by wear, not calculation. But just when a honky-tonk lap steel guitar, or Allman Bros. riff salting the mix backs up a voice of syncopated generation, there’s a swell of violins or over-produced effects that unplug the appreciation.  This may not be the album of the year, but it tells me that one of these years he’s capable of just that. 

11.  Nala Sinephro - Endlessness:  The African diaspora through Martinique (her parents) to Belgium (her childhood) to the epic coolness of the London New Jazz scenes. She’s the Captain, and her compositions and her pedal harp and piano plan and guide the music, and the aether of her harp lifts everything (Alice Coltrane in its transcendence), but it is the sound some of London’s star jazz players, saxophonists and horns, that give the music the heart and heat needed.  Like I’ve asserted in this and other lists, it’s a curious bloom that’s fed by African roots in London and Paris, while missing New Orleans, New York, Chicago (but maybe not LA, that’s another discussion).  But this is not music building upon an honorific past of American Jazz, it, like American jazz musicians who went to Europe in the 50s, is freed from trad jazz.  I guess some call it ambient jazz, and it certainly is good for hammocks and retreats.  But I’d just call this Spiritual Attainment, like all jazz seeks to be. Or maybe it was just all that X she took in the suburbs of Brussels. 

12.  More Ease – Lacuna and Parlor: Not sure the linguistic intent of “parlor” but this is chamber music ready for civilized reflections in the parlor, perhaps waiting for the herbal tea.  It’s also in that hyrbrid area of “serious new classical” and “ambient modern minimalism” – with guitars that sound like cellos and cellos that sound like trains, and a hammering outside in the neighbor’s garden. More Ease is Mari Maurice Rubio who adds quirky Americana touches and vocoder human singing to these compositions.  Chamber ambience from Tejas, sunny and simple, Phillip Glass in a cowboy hat.  Cellos vs. tumbleweeds: the cellos win, always.

13.  Sarah Davachi - The Head Form’d in the Criers Choir:  I’ve listened to a lot of this composer, who specializes in long-form minimalism. She does well what I am always drawn to: long droning sounds that resonate with other long droning sounds causing incremental sympathetic changes of sound quality and timbre that then drive composition more than pitch and rhythm.  My Holy Grail. So she uses organs, and occasionally strings, and while sound is sometimes treated, it’s not synthesized.  This is perhaps her best offering yet. Only this year did I read that she got a doctorae in musicology from UCLA, and with that I imagine sunny days on SoCal lawns as much as musty churches in the German Black Forest (my previous map for her). Inspired by Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus she says.  Ok, this is a gust in the God, a wind.

14.  Arroj Aftab – Night Reign: Glorious vocals, overdubbed sometimes as though a family of mothers wait at the door – and I say mothers because of the low register, warmth, and grief in her voice.  A hint of gentle sadness is in her phrasing, but I can only guess at what she is passionately, carefully, seriously telling me – her Urdu is a musical scale of its own.  The strings and drums (hands and others) reference the Indian subcontinent. But the 7th chords are jazz and bluesy.  And suddenly there is English and, with alto voice, she suddenly sounds and emotes like an old Joni Mitchell. Nah, an old Billie Eilish.  Under that honeyed voice the music races ahead… ecstatic. I can hear unsheltered Sufi yearning in it as much as Uptown sophistication. Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan just took ketamine, and there are going to be repurcussions.

15.  Richard Thompson - Ship to Shore: 60 years and 20 solo albums later the folk-rock bard plays with as much virtuosity as ever.  That time-to-gargle mellifluous voice is still intense and serious, even when it’s comedic (well he always sounds like a funny heartbreak).  Age has only made it better. Eclectic and as wide as the century he helped define (I mean, Fairport Convention, right?) – sea shanties, country reels, waltzes, Spanish flamenco, lake country folk songs, romantic toe tappers, they all take a bow.  But the rock of folk rock always is present and accounted for. Yes, he’s a brilliant guitarist, but the tone of his guitar and the tone of his voice blend to bless the poor lost sailor, walking unsteadily out on the breakwater, the boat he watched isn’t coming to shore.  Truly, something is floating out to meet the storm. “Romance is overrated” he sings.  Don’t believe it; a farthing for your real thoughts?

16.  Orcas – How to Color a Thousand Mistakes: Brooklyn meets Seattle and Slowdrive is the result.  Benoit Pioulard’s ambient records were familiar to me, but I wasn’t aware he also had a dream-pop/shoegaze band fifteen years ago.  This, apparently, is the welcome reunion of that band. I’d say that the band’s sound hasn’t been updated, in these dreamy, echoey soundscapes (ambient-lite, with a range of fun-late-at-night guitar textures).  Gentle and pretty music (sometimes too pretty, this kind of music and how often I played it should put this in the top ten, but “dream pop” often gives me hives), the vocals, at times too far in front of the chiming guitars, seemed oddly familiar to me. Then it clicked: it sounds like one of my all time fav English bands of the 80s/90s – Prefab Sprout. It’s slight music, but anything that reminds me of what my heart and psyche was like listening to PS’s Jordan is… is… is…

17.  Christopher Owens - I Want to Run Barefoot Through Your Hair: A budding star in the pre-Tech SF City music scene was eventually exposed as an addict destined for an ignoble obscurity – seeing him live at the end of his first star trip repulsed me and I’d be happy to talk smack about his very many faults with smack.  But damn if these barefoot guitar solos don’t seem pulled out of some alt-rock ought’s cave, saved for emergencies just like this.  There is still that cutesy voice (half Andy Gibb and half Warren Zevon) which always mildly annoyed but was inflated by crafty songs and the production of his partner-in-crime JR White in the band Girls. White’s death seemed to me the end of Owens. But here the voice is a smidge more ragged, and the chiming indie-fusion (peaches, twang and underwater) guitars remind you that oblivion knows no decade, no production model, no marketing scheme… all it needs is momentary rescue by rock and roll beauty.  Even just a smidge.  Maybe this is Owen’s tribute to White.  Doesn’t matter.  Nothing matters but the right effect on the right guitar with the right chord change and the right melody to break you and your addictions as your legs tremble relentlessly under the quilt.

18.  Mary Halvorson – Cloudward: so, ok, jazz.  I include so many “jazz” albums on my lists, but so often European jazz, either from the African Diaspora in England or unlimited number of European interpreters.  There is so much other “real jazz” in the US I like, but don’t point to. My weakness in the US is for ambient jazz, psychedelic jazz, world music jazz, hip hop jazz.  So how Halvorson’s straight ahead, arranged, unhinged jazz got to me… is curious.  Ok a white woman from Wesleyan. Maybe that’s how, but I don’t like that answer. But this music, these compositions, often big bands of odd instrumentation, dissonant with concert hall dissonance, not jonesing dissonance… are civilized, evolved, airy, and unexpected.  This is edgy music because the edges appear in surprising spaces and sequences.  The edges don’t cut you, but they could. Cloudy, sure. It may be atmospheric, but it hides lightening strikes.  

19.  Shabaka Hutchings - Perceive Its Beauty, Acknowledge Its Grace:  Speaking of which, perhaps my favorite jazz artist to emerge in this century gives up his Heroic Saxophone to play only flutes going forward because… well we saw him in person this year, and he explained it thoroughly, thoughtfully, and I still don’t understand.  I think there was something about being too “expected” as a sax player, too jazz, too commercial, too… well obviously I don’t know.  His flute playing here, on any number of flutes from Asia, Africa, and Latin America is achingly beautiful.  He is particularly interested in a Roma flute, or a flute from Eastern Europe, that allows him to explore the spaces between notes.  A stunning album, but I will light candles that Shabaka picks the saxophone back up soon.

20.  Khruangbin – A La Sala:  I was an early adopter of this surf/lounge slick elevator-music trio… Houston-international, ambient, reverb, melodic, psychedelic-light almost no vocals… soundtrack for night driving in the desert is the main emotional affect.  Or sitting in that space-lounge in Kubrick’s 2001.  Or in the dentist’s chair waiting for the drill.  Peaceful.  Amusing. Diverting. Inscrutable and as simple and inevitable as toothpaste.  This was my most-listened to record of the year… and its strength is also its weakness and why it’s not #1 on this list.  There is almost nothing there.  Visual of the year: seeing Dead and Co. at the Sphere and hearing this as warm up before the show started: the old hippies bouncing along happily totally oblivious to what they were listening to… or rather, more oblivious than usual.  Good music for oblivion.

21.  Jessica Pratt - Here in the Pitch – When this was released I listened with the misconception that she was “country” (how context too often selects what we hear!)… then months later I listened more closely and heard virtually no country.  Go figure. Light music, 28 minutes, almost an EP, with a little girl voice (so popular in this decade) that isn’t bedroom laptop, but rather Phil Spector reverb cosmic Pop. Sixties lounge pop, Frenchified jazzy simple minor seventh chord Sylvie Vartan… short and piquant melodies and production inspiring more Truffaut images than Instagram likes. Eartha Kitt with tattoos. Billie Eilish singing groovy bossa nova.  Not remotely country.  Would be much higher on the list were it longer.

22.  DIVR – Is This Water:  Granted, all the evidence shows I’ve a weakness for jazz generated outside of the US, residue from the US jazz greats that went to Europe in the 50s and 60s (or so I label this stuff).  Especially trios that are minimalist, odd acoustics, not afraid of trance or drones and matching rhythmic reveries.  Oddly I often hear more Africa in the music from London and Copenhagen than from Chicago (and there is some close-to-gamelan world-music tricks in this album). This Swiss bass-drums-piano trio offers a lot of space in its hard-bop exercises – this music would not exist without Thelonious Monk pounding on a piano, maybe before a soft and silent psychotic break. But I also hear birds both in Zimbabwe and the Finnish forests.

23.  William Doyle – Springs Eternal:  Innocence hasn’t been a quality I’ve looked for in music since…well, ever? But here he is with that pop-art cringey earnest voice clearly singing about climate change and happiness.  Water.  Brit-pop.  Baroque-adjacent English psych-folk sounding perky timeless warnings about our coming destruction.  At first I thought this was like the Kinks, or Thom Yorke if he never found the rest of Radiohead.  But its center does not hold.  Maybe music can’t stay anchored in the tides of our times. But the enervating over-production doesn’t unplug a kind timeless Englishness that isn’t found anymore, let alone in music.  Waterloo springs.

24.  Diiv – Frog in Boiling Water:  Great fuzzy waves of guitar noise falling endlessly, with a simple bass line rumbling under the floor, and silly twee-sugar vocals mixed too high, as the LA band singlehandedly keeps the shoegaze revival going with their fourth album. Atmospheric, pleasing, and possibly forgettable.  One of my best papers in college was identifying a Nevil Shute novel as being so good because it fell so short of greatness.  Hence this band, good not great, good because it eschews greatness.

25.  Robin Guthrie – Atlas:  The Cure and the Cocteau Twins on my 2025 list?  I’d not have had that on my bingo card.  Guthrie “returns” with, mercifully no vocals (the one thing that made me avoid most Cocteau Twins records for, well, ever).  But increasingly I am drawn to guitar-generated ambient post-rock, and this EP is representative of the beautiful ethereal option a well-played and recorded guitar can do.  Calm, almost somber, incomplete and suggestive.  It sounds like Harold Budd, and I forgot that Budd worked with Cocteau Twins 40 years ago. It would place much, much higher on the list, but it is barely 15 min.

26.  Helado Negro – Phasor:  Ecuadorian-American sings like that Agentine-Swedish singer Jose Gonzales.. and many of these songs could be songs by Gonzales’s first band Junip.  I loved Junip’s effortless and mysterious melancholy, and that’s what I love here.  Those latin loping rhythms, good for both sunny days sleeping on the sand and huddling in a mountain cabin.  There is a tricky technological synthesizer thread in all cuts – indeed “Phasor” is some kind of tribute to a groundbreaking synth.  And there is a softly psychedelic flow to the subtle layers of sound.  But 10 of the 12 musicians playing here are percussion.  And that’s the product for me: smart adult danceable exercises, quietly but irresistibly purposeless.

27.  Chuck Johnson - Sun Glories: Albums like this used to dominate my “top tens”… there was a radio show on LA/Pasadena’s KPPC in the 70s that was all “space music” anticipating all of Eno’s ambient masterpieces of the next decade. I think it went on at midnight and I listened religiously. That prepared my insatiable need to “find” new space territory.  The sound of a planet after catastrophes. Maybe even the sound of healing.  I suppose, then, it was soon called New Age. This is a New Age too, I suppose, with its synths and guitars and electro-acoustic ideas layered upon each other, and this guy’s lap steel approximations of Pink Floyd’s Meddle.  Falling into the Machine of False Americas, you’d think I’d have found more of this kind of comfort as a prophylactic against the New Old Dark Age. Perhaps only mirages heal.

28.  Kali Malone - All Life Long: The wife of the guy from Sun O))) (and this is better than any Sun O))) albums ever) moved to Stockholm and found peace.  I guess you can call this an album of deep peace, core peace, serious peace.  Several years ago she recorded two hours of pipe organ drones that remains one of my favorite recordings of all time.  Then she went on to compose and record music for a variety of instruments and ensembles. On this album she returns to her droning organ, and that makes me happy.  Drones that are sacred and mysterious, drones that are rich and reedy, drones that fade and drones that bury. All these cuts were apparently recorded live in concert, and there are some breaks of voices and horns, but it’s all analog and stark and medieval and futuristic.  Elegant music that invokes ceremonies, that tells you to sit down, that refreshes you with The Sacred Drone that will survive all the Mess.

29.  Bill Ryder-Jones - lechyd Da: The Welsh, it’s seemed to me, have always balanced the sentimental and the wild well. With that said, this is a Merseyside Englishman who has absorbed decades of British rock and pop to bring you happy and tender folk rock standards (is Britainiana an equivalent of Americana?), and while the melodies are sentimental the prettified voice definitely has a wild timbre.  For a while I liked this music, but couldn’t reference why… it’s heavily arranged, and not too cheesy in its production, but it’s a kind of produced musical.  Then I pinned it – it sounds like a long lost Spiritualized album, another English band that delivers the narcotized, anthemic, elegant goods.

30.  Mdor Moctu - Funeral for Justice: Several ingredients to recommend this Nigerian (not Tuareg) guitarist.  He’s talented with serious chops, and while you can hear Africa in his sonics, picking, rhythms… he is not a “world music” musician to me, he is rock and roll on his own terms.  Unique, inventive, aggressive, and, not American, so little blues.  But the notes bend in just the right ways and the recording of the guitar is all wires and edges and metal… in every song I get the feeling the guitar is slicing right into me.  Cutting away the waste, getting to the core.  This is completely unironic music building on a history of rock and roll and looking at a future far, from away from the West.

31.  Fabiano do Nacimiento/Sam Gendel – The Room: Tasteful is not always the adjective that best describes music I like, but this is perfect music for headphones on a flight to Brazil, background for a heroic dinner at a Michelin-starred restaurant on the Riviera, or a mildly drugged loft party in Soho.  Only a bosa nova guitar interplaying with an inquisitive American soprano sax. It is a kind of jazz, a kind of South American folk music, a kind of adult response to the insane world in which we find ourselves.  While the guitar is Brazilian, it is often intense and demanding. While the sax is sophisticated and jazzy, sometimes it also sounds like a Peruvian flute rushing inside from the quickly falling rain. A sane umbrella of thoughtful music resisting sadness. It has that secret sauce that always charms me: it could be soundtrack for Jean Moreau walking slowly in a French new wave movie. Ya know?

32.  Eric Chenaux Trio - Delights of My Life: Montreal-born composer, guitarist/bassist,  keyboardist, sound artist, and (who knew?) poet and singer, wanders around in soft-edged improvisational fields that sound like Style Council or Mel Torme or Sade… unraveling.  Drums, organ/piano, and guitar fall apart from each other more than cohere, but oh how beautiful is the sound of their entropy.  One review called this “meandering” and that’s its core.  Gentle and quirky, bent notes and a truly demanding and odd alt-Jazz ready for cinematic picnics on some mediterranean coast with no time left. His voice’s terroir has hints of chocolate, raspberry and Anohni and the Johnsons.

33.  Rafael Toras – Spectral Evolution: I’d listened Toral over the last few decades mostly as a “modern classical” soundtrack composer.  Ambient and electronic.  But apparently he had an even earlier incarnation as a guitar post-rock shoe-gazey musician.  This is his “return” to that tonality.  But I hear spaceships and floating memes in sound-edged noise. I hear the mothership, not the club or the sofa.  Even with its rounded edges, this is not comfort-ambient.  Often it seems like an organ prelude in a church in Alpha Centauri and the service about to begin is foreign, somber, and mysterious.  It’s mysterious in a non-romantic sense – even after having listened to it numerous times you will never predict a phrase of music to come.  It often resolves into major chords (the church), but even those resolutions surprise.  There is a bird on the cover, but this is music from chemical space, not the organic fields of mother earth.  Spectral because of distance, because of resistance to gravity, at least so says the ghost in my machine.

34.  Amen Dunes - Death Jokes: The lyrical intent of these songs is to rebel against the empire, to disrupt the disrupters, to call for an end to the digital dark forces holding us in their chains.  Absolutely aligned to my own haunting by the current zeitgeist, but unfortunately his voice and mannerisms leave the lyrics unintelligible to me (actually not entirely a bad thing).  But the curious minimalist electronics and finger-picking electric guitar, and the metal-screws-in-a-blender percussion are … arresting? Pleasing in an older indie sense.  Music for driving in Area 51 or walking on the streets of Bushwick, both and either.  It’d be higher on the list if it really were British. 

35.  Beth Gibbons - Lives Outgrown:  Kate Bush does Pink Floyd covers (maybe something that Lisa Gerard might have accomplished).  It’s serious and thoughtful music  - a kind of serious cultivated Oxbridge (or perhaps U of Bristol) Englishness that cleanses the post-pop commerce that Britpop left.  The instrumentation is folkish and tasteful (flutes, strings) and the lyrics are adult and somber (as befits the lead singer of Portishead, one of my favorite, somber, bands).  Songs that have been digesting, apparently, for a couple decades.  Given all the elements I should have fallen in love with this more quickly.. but, steady as she goes.  It’s timeless, though that’s not necessarily a great thing about it.

36.  Vampire Weekend - Only God Was Above Us: Effervescent pop glory.  Smart and sensitive lyrics. A sonic bibliography of interesting and contradictory musical influences.  Star quality front man singing. Of an alternative market, an elite but ragged reminder that song-writing is the first art here, even as this music needs commerce like it needs air.  Quick-as-a-fox arrangements.  Maybe too quick?  Yeah, sure reggae and a taste of Africa in the good careers achieved by the frat brothers. But as much as I liked it I found no reason to play it more than a couple times.

37.  Nilüfer Yanya - My Method Actor:  One of my favorite “new to me” artists two years ago with a new, holding pattern record.  No holds barred English rock, albeit infused with the “girl brat” production and club-ready mixes so inevitable (sometimes she sounds like an English Billie Eilish).  But something independent and strong and dangerous about her song writing and the instrumental textures (claves, Jesus and Mary Chain guitars, Ibiza IDM electronics, impatient basements in south London).  There is always just a hint of World Music, beyond not being able to pronounce her first name.  This is modern music, fusion music, make-it-new music that still surprises.  The only reason she isn’t higher for me is that it plants its seeds in what she did in the last record.  Perhaps I expected too much, but that’s her fault.

38.  Melissa Aldana – Echoes of the Inner Prophet: Again, although I listen to Sonny Rolins and Joe Lovano (Aldana’s teachers) I choose here the alterations of non-USA musicians to the jazz idiom.  (Partially BS, she now lives in NYC, not Chile.) Her tone also sometimes references Gato Barbieri, but her band is modern, not merely replicating touchstone masters. Tentative and angular and asymmetric, the arrangements of the band poke around the edges of Aldana’s warm and sexy tenor sax.  I guess her compositions are supposed to be spiritual or cosmic (hence the title of the album), but I hear precious earth and warmth in her every solo.

39.  Hermanos Gutierrez – Sonido Cosmico: Instrumental desert dreams, echoey guitars out on the Southwestern wilderness with Sierra Madre snow covered peaks keeping the “chill” more atmospheric with trees and wind.  It could present itself as Daniel Lanois making a spaghetti western soundtrack.  Two Ecuadorian brothers born and raised in Zurich. Their roots are modern, universal, smart and easy. No vocals to clog the infinite space that the electric guitars weave: a Presence.  Starlight serenades on the Alps too, I guess.  A cosmos of all-cultures, many sources standing their ground and blending with calm skill, skillful means: how they listen and respond to each other’s ideas is a pattern for attention, for improvising peace.

40.  Kamasi Washington - Fearless Movement: The father of Neo-Spiritual Jazz and the Big Canvas scope takes those elements into irresistible driving dance beats with his Alice Coltrane-meets-Big Band brand intact.  It is the relentless movement of his arrangements that alter the consciousness, not words pointing to prayer.  Even with the funk/hip hop notes, the direction is interior, introspective. Though while the prayer in the music may be peace-adjacent (especially the found-object sax solos), the movement is pure cosmic energy, in fractal improvisations.  In these endtimes Washington may as well be the Herbie Hancock of this century – like Hancock, everything he touches opens horizons both familiar and rare.  Make a joyful noise indeed.  What have I to fear when the Lord is with me?

41.  Father John Misty - Mahashmashana: FJM continues to dance on the edge of precious always rescued by his articulate self-denigration.  A master melodist, he croons at the West Coast moon, yet hiding his songwriting roots grown from Laurel Canyon glory days.  Lugubrious and vinegary. A cynic, dark-hearted Bing Crosby for his generation.  Another outing completely overproduced, slipping the vulnerable doom under the studio’s dinner table.  Like Beck, I’m a bit tired of him and his bag of tricks, but his voice is so irresistible and his pilgrimage through the dangers of Self still amuse. 

42.  Pedro the Lion - Santa Cruz: Earlier I pointed out the truth of something being so good because it is not great.  David Bazan may be so good because he is mediocre.  The beautiful artfulness of dull minds and innocent Christ-centered hearts.  The confessional songs make Mark Koselek’s recent masturbatory song cycles sound like French Symbolism, not adolescent diary entries. But as always with this “band”, the guitar strains from some Arizona garage are irresistible and I fall prey to simple-minded tales of my own home town.

43.  Blood Incantation - Absolute Elsewhere: Certainly one of the few pure death/dark/doom/sludge metal bands to appear on one of my charts.  But perhaps this isn’t that… I am not subjected to the bowel-constipated devil growls usually found in these bands, and the structures of the songs are as close to prog rock as they are to pure metal. But it’s the rumbling ambient stormy drones under everything.  I love serious noise.  This is serious noise.

44.  Yasmin Williams - Acadia: Someplace called this “American Primitivism” which seems an interesting angle on pure guitarist landscapes of virtuosity that reminds me of Leo Kottke, John Fahey or Doc Watson.  My own narrow vision left me wanting more soul and blues… because she is black?  But it’s pure folk baroque and roll perhaps obscured a pinch by overproduction.

45.  Kim Gordon - The Collective: I should have this so much higher on the list… all the ingredients of what I would like. Dry Cleaning (whose singer probably thinks she’s Kim Gordon) is one of my favorite bands in recent years. Similarly the almost spoken lyrics are modern, acerbic, sharpened. Some of the instrumentation is industrial strength club-indie.  Again, a place in an equation I should like.  But it’s iconoclasm rubbed me the wrong way.  Clanging too much.  Even its backbeat rhythms seems to slow down, not for focus, just for annoyance.  Annoyance as an artform I guess.

46.  Adrianne Lenker - Bright Future: Big Thief’s leader goes solo again… haphazardly it seems, tossing off melodies and wisdom.  Oh it’s hard-won wisdom, you can always hear the struggle in her country-yelp sinus croon.  She is one of my favorite artists in the last decade, unquestionably.  Why is she so far down with this? See Nilüfer Yanya review – sometimes great artistry sets itself up for sinking in the stars it made us see.

47.  Granddaddy - Blue Wave: I came to this “restart” of a band I liked long ago… from a small town in the CA Central Valley, I’d always heard guitars and dust.  It’s still there, but this was enervating and forgettable, no matter its familiarity.

48.  Rachel Barton Pine - Corelli, Violin Sonatas, Op.5: She’s punk.  She is relentless. It’s pure classical music, but it made me dance, and so it’s here.

49.  Laura Marling - Patterns in Retreat: Joni Mitchell’s old age, had her health been better. This should be exactly what my DNA responds to… but she never completely won me over, and still hasn’t.

50.  Ariel Kalma, Jeremiah Chiu, Maria Sofia Homer – The Closest Thing to Silence: Lovely downtempo ambient jazz.  And of course, it amuses me to put the last music on my last list to be an invitation to silence.

 Best Music of 2023

As Nietzsche said - "without music, life would be a mistake".  This, my annual project (decades of overweening lists) is to honor and select my favorites of the year’s music.  Even in this current darkness one declares the glory of light and I claim here at the end that life was not even remotely a mistake.  This is the music that happened in my cells in 2023.

1.       Atlas – Laurel Halo

Reticent to simply repeat other lists’ #1 (a foundational purpose of these 50 years of lists has been to showcase my terminal uniqueness), Halo’s music delivers deep emotions, intellectual problem solving, and cinematic imagery too beautiful to be denied.  Ever the devotee of drones (incremental stabilities) and minimalist impermanence (press refresh), originally I thought Halo’s schtick was electronic whirrs and humming ambient music.  The kind so useful in Reykjavik and movie scoring.  Then after a few listens I heard the kind of fragments and disintegrating deconstructions I favor.  Then even later I felt the thread of true compositional voicing: many textures, shifting depths, tonal surprises are all carefully, softly, laid out in contrast and in complementarity to each other.  Non-dualistic pop.  This is music to hold up not only the world, but dark energy, dark matter and the promise of infinite galaxies. In the 70s I used to listen to a DJ late at night on public radio, “space music” was the name given to the synthesized sounds that invoked deep space and spinning stars. That sound attack went out of style – too cheesy, too pandering.  But now, after decades of electronic ambient music, Halo presents music to carry us, again, into deep space.  In 2023 it seemed that may be the only place left to live in.

2.       My Back was a Bridge for You to Cross – Anohni and the Johnsons

“It must change” was the song of the year for me… pop, soulful, sad, newsworthy, psychological and transformative.  All with a beat and vibe that sounds like cruising Whittier Blvd in 1971.  In a GTO.  That R&Bish guitar teases you thoroughly in each cut; you will be smitten.  I’d given up long ago on Anthony and the trans-performative falsetto.  I was wrong. The black face on the cover is the DNA of their music and their heartache. Because the voice drips with black and blue truth, desperation, resignation, and struggle.  And the songs and production, clear, uncluttered, confidentyl support the rich complexity of that one-of-kind voice that leaves a shining and sensual sadness.  Slow dance oblivions. Non-binary? The whole human story will simply not fit into any character argument from any side of the breach.  Yes, Anthony/Anohni will be the bridge for anyone willing to go from here to a better future.  Their pain is the price of such perfect movement.  Pain has always been the torch to carry for singers like this (alt-rock, alt-soul Billie Holiday with a creepy fashion sense).  I was moved.  I moved. “You’ll be free”…

3.       Picture of Bunny Rabbit – Arthur Russell

Recovered music from the dead underappreciated gay AIDS victim, classical cellist and East Village loft denizen; made in a NYC that lived in myth and is forever lost in the rents and sustainable coffee beans of Williamsburg, Saudi high-needle condos and trusts of UES… fragments and bittersweet vocals, mumbled and nodding out.  Ambient analog outlines that might be outtake mistakes by Glenn Branca or Sonic Youth.  What’s not to like?  Although recorded over 30 years ago, these just-released fragments from our forgotten history – are sweet, gentle and still completely groundbreaking, decades after Russell’s death.  I am sucker for cellos, especially when droning in analog atmospheric spaces.  His voice seemed so familiar to me, then I read that Norway’s Jose Gonzales (Junip) was a devotee, and, yep, it’s that voice that is irresistible.  Quiet, intense but not selfish, interior but yearning to touch you, to be touched.  Minimalist, stark, and richly emotional.  Resting in peace.

4.       Does Spring Hide Its Joy – Kali Malone

Well, only some warped sense of self-preservation prevents this from being #1.  Three hours of drones.  Not a sequence of different drone pieces, but variations on the same modulated drone composition. So think of the joy (hidden or not): one droning tone with sympathetic frequencies entering and leaving the soundspace (the editing and production is critical and compositional, by the Rick Rubin of ambient electronic music, Stephan Mathieu).  A fan of Malone, only this year did I realize she is the wife of Sunn O)) guitarist Stephen O’Malley (who plays all three hours here, a cellist the only other musician), which makes sense.  Although Sunn O)) seems only to work well at maximum volumes.  Still, like that band’s metal barrage of singular ideas, Malone’s organ playing in her past work seemed to simplify the cosmos.  And the sounds of galaxies spinning into black holes do not make our universe an easy place to exist in.  But joy is in the ear of the beholder - I think one review claimed a romantic melancholy in these hours, and I can hear that.  But I am addicted to finding the One Last Drone that will finally explain everything, and these hours of tectonically shifting tones are sweet and bitter: for me three hours is not enough and it’s best to let it run on repeat: Trio for the End of Time.

5.       Javelin – Sufjan Stevens

He’s surprised some by “coming out” as he limns a song cycle grieving his recently dead husband.  I guess folks weren’t paying attention. I’ve followed him from the upper peninsula through the clowns and cancer of Chicago suburbs to Christian hippie incest in Oregon through cramped electronic Brooklyn apartments and hiking in northern Italy.  Through it all the bittersweet lightness of his voice illuminated the deepest flaws and failures of his one human life, and so all of our lives.  Illuminated with kindness and prayerful petitions for Grace. This is just more of thatness, and the many layers of production may hide that these lyrics are the rawest, most direct, and personal of all.  It is layered with synths, and choirs, and percussion – analog, tribal, and electronic. His arpeggio-tricks of melody are so familiar – I swear every song is just a repeat of what he recorded last year, last decade.  Indeed every song on this seems like it has a single melody.  And probably could pass for Gospel-lite in the praise choir of some grand chapel in Calabasas.  So the mystery is how this breaks the heart so utterly – grief has given him a cold eye and a tissue-thin narrative to hide in.  Like the confessional poets of the 50s and 60s, this may not age well, but for now these elegiac tunes meet the moment, and hold us close in the glory of life ending and love remembered.  Best not to waste time.

6.       This Stupid World - Yo La Tengo

It begins as though continuing a conversation stopped in its midst years ago.  Isn’t that an expected trope describing oldest friends, heartwood companions?  Not many bands can do this, using a musical language that once was innovative, zeitgeist-generated, and is still ghostly on its own timeless terms and textures.  Here they produce new music with that familiar language that sounds disruptive and comforting both, their brand.  Indie strumming, ambient droning, sub-rosa sound insurgencies for the tabula rasa music lover.  Subtle, pretty, no nonsense alternative rock, krautrock, soundtracks, soundscapes, and the ever-generative tension between Georgia’s strictly sweet beats and Ira’s narcissistic and virtuoso flights of fancy.  So, as always, they are bittersweet.  And as focused and coherent and novel as they were forty years ago.  Casual? Yep.  Throwaway? Yep. Uncanny? That’s their middle name… It’s their best work in many years.

7.       Sibyl of the Rhine – Lily Joel Plays the Organ

There is no Lily Joel.  There is, however, Hildegard of Bingen, the medieval mystic who once was famous for being a woman composer who lasted through the centuries, but now is famous for being a great songwriter in any millennium – whose ethereal chants and invocations are best heard echoing through the rafters of Gothic cathedrals. (Do cathedrals have rafters?) So this Belgian musician reimagines H of B not in a cathedral (though it sounds like that’s exactly where this was recorded), but in a psychedelic quiet room in someone’s cerebral cortex, which organ is fluid beyond all thought.  (My cerebral cortex built rafters for exactly this kind of hybrid devotional music).  Ambient, droning, spacious, quiet, intense … ‘O Quam Miribilis’ and  ‘O Virtus Sapientiae’ with really good single-source coffee.  Glorious music that proffers peace running from the cortex, down the vagus nerve, to the subtle body’s heart.  God bless her in both centuries.

8.       Jarak Qaribak – Dudu Tassa & Johnny Greenwood

An astonishing hybrid of artist/music that sounds as pure as it could possibly be – middle eastern “greatest hits” recorded in the manner of Radiohead – and yes I can hear Greenwood, his guitar and his movie-mind being both smart and dramatic – but this is music of the street, the souk, the history of lands taken, families destroyed, and loves won and lost.  Tassa’s voice is irresistible and holds its authenticity in ethnomusicology recorded for western wannabes – like me. On first listen it is one kind of pleasure, but upon repeated listening there is an appreciation both for the variety of songs, but also for how modern sensibilities have ripped some of these songs apart and sound not at all precious, nostalgic and “ethnic”, but rather powerfully contemporary.  Tassa is an ethnic jew singing in Arabic.  Greenwood is an English guitarist playing quartertones.  It's not one marriage, it’s many, many marriages, all made in heaven.

9.       What Will You Grow Now? – Modern Cosmology

I am going to call this the most recent (and one of the better) Stereolab albums.  And why not, it has Laetitia Sadier up front and personal – her unique sophisticated chanson-flavored voice is so recognizable, and her ennui-melisma-flatlines are as modern as climate change.  Her band, the rest of the Cosmology, are very capable bosa nova musicians, and so this is fresh and modern and packed with Brazilian rhythms energizing the rive gauche club workouts.  And the rhythms are irresistible, syncopating the flat-fifth bluesy torchsongs with sambas and wanderlust.  Half the songs make one want to check out the current tickets to Paris more than Rio.  Stereolab always made me want to walk through a Godard movie anyway.  But here the extraordinary tasteful instrumentation makes this not retro, but forward thinking.  Um, actually modern music, right?  And with reduced options to make it sound “new”, Sadier has found one way, for sure. I wonder if this stays a band, or is just an interesting side project for her.  Whatever the case the summer of 2023 will always sound like this in all its futures. C’est la sunny vie, indeed.

10.   The Beggar – Swans

The inevitable “written during COVID lockdown” album is lonelier, more spacious, kinder, and more tentative than most of the Swans’ opus.  It doesn’t require the high-volume racket of cosmic destruction, doesn’t sound like the gates of hell opening, doesn’t even always throw dark armies of electronics at the usual resistant neurotransmitters.  Ringing, droning, throw-away voices, alarms in the distance, and an army of drums on the other side of the sawtooth ridge. Per usual, a lot is going on.  But this sounds less frantic, less cluttered than the last many Swan albums. Words and confessions?  You betcha! Not sure if I’ve the time or hide thick enough to listen carefully.  Michael Gira is not a well man; but he’s working on it and he wants you to know.  The thread of rhythm and the one-chord modal relentless push sometimes invoke Spiritualized.  Is it possible that this is the Swans prettiest album?  Yes, I think it is.  I always heard a kind of medieval intensity in the music (the dark dungeons and demons trope, if not Dead Can Dance), and it’s here too, falling into the Plague and then nothingness.  But its doom really is easy to listen to if not easy-listening now. It’s not at all bleak unless I’m making a mistake. Los Angeles, City of Death is perhaps one of the lovelier songs about my hometown…something about  “…the root of the syphilis fruit..”  While I hope he finds some peace, this, to my ears is nice music to wash dishes by.  Oh wait, I don’t wash dishes anymore.  Ok, this is nice music to make mistakes by.

11.   Everything is Alive – Slowdrive

I am annoyed by much of the breathless, wispy vocals so prevalent in much of the music I like, yet here is the progenitor of wispy: the Original from the days of quiet-is-the-new-loud, slo-core Cowboy Yo La Galaxie Red House Low – and I’d suggest it was that memory they evince more than the ubiquitous shoegaze which in recent years is a marketing descriptor like macha, or CBD, or sustainable, or plant-based…. Worn-out meaning.  So the chiming, airy guitars are a wash of 90s open skies and prettiness more than the thick grungy veld of My Bloody Valentine (e.g. does cowgaze mean anything?) and that oxygen is what they offered 2023.  Pretty, guitar-based, simplicity, without IDM, or noise, or hip hop, or Gen Z humorlessness, or Millenial Hipster residue.. I mean, Gen X never got its moment after Cobain died anyway, so why not a reprise of harrowing Beauty??  They do kind of sound like XX though, the stark, potent, non-derivative version.  Because Slowdrive herein presented is not remotely derivative – they are Moses with the Original Tablets.  I don’t have a clue what any of the lyrics are… they, too, get lost in space.  But the guitars and rhythms and gloomy synths seem very far from worn out.  In fact, they made time New for me this year.  And alive.

12.   I/O – Peter Gabiel

Dated or timeless?  Yes. Some of my favorite artists are so quintessential, and known that I buy, listen, love and don’t include their latest music on these lists (e.g. Neil Young).  Dylan alone has cracked that wall.  But Gabriel’s wise music is as close to my spiritual music DNA as possible and given my Boomer party membership I am proud to put I/O  (I and the Other, one/zero) at #12 (though I’ll be listening to this long after those rated higher).  The sonics are certainly known: the world music beats, the prog rock chords and art rock essence.  And I’ve simple reverential gratitude that he still makes this music (20 years waiting).  Unquestionably it’s a reminder of the explicit spiritual experience of music. So (heh) how is this better than anything he’s done since So? Two points: the lyrics/melodies are not kidding around.  They resonate with a daunting maturity, both chronological and spiritual.  This is not the rock and roll of revolution; this is wisdom, born of long practice. A report from a Teacher who wore his insides out. And, two, the Voice, the quality, timbre, affect and power of a voice unlike any other, unfiltered, timeless.  I am glad I stayed alive long enough to hear his report, here on the threshold of his old age and our next Bardo. He’s ready for The Bridge, as should we all be.  Sidenote: I had the good fortune of listening to this on an absurdly upscale stereo – headphones, no matter their quality, cannot replicate what Gabriel gives us in true space. The production, on a lower level a little baroque or cluttered, heard on a good sound system is like those photos from the new Webb Space Telescope.  Who knew reality was like this?  Gabriel knew, and knows.

13.   Rat Saw God – Wednesday

The avalanche of post-shoegaze shoegaze guitars and primal therapy screaming (very Millennialed) at the beginning bely a very pop-oriented open-faced countrified folk-rock contemplation on life in the suburbs and the coming End. Benadryl overdoses and Sunday school, police raids and naps.  Rock ‘n roll was always, will be always about adolescence and cleaning up messes before the Parents get back. And these indie workouts that resuscitate rock and roll, as opposed to the monetized anger of all the variables of hip-hop that is the real music of the times (that I ignore), are sweetly young and off point.  But still the tradition delivers results – both Linderman’s ponderous power chords, her cheerful playground vocals, and too-clever lyrics.  Cut 7, with its rural speed lab explosions and rusted trucks, is a mirror of Waterloo Sunset.  Ah the bittersweet cancer in the thryoids; waiting for AI and the planet’s demise in a melodic dancehall inherited from the last century.  So many of these kids in these cul-de-sacs of American decline seem to be exvangelicals. Bruised by the Prosperity Gospel of anti-wokeness. Torn jeans, perfect hair, and a pocketful of Narcan.  But it’s a real foot-tapper.  Thanks you Jesus, can I meet you at the sex shop off the highway? Best not to take the wrong drugs.

14.   Afterpoem – Faten Kanaan

Brooklyn = means she is accessible to the au courant non-classical musical ear and worth the effort.  Avant garde = means she is to be listened to for “new edges” not comfort.  Minimalist = means she is comforting no matter what.  Fragmentary = means she gets away with a lot. To me much of her repetitive, incrementally developing music, really is just the offspring of ambient music (Disintegration Loops - the grand progenitor of this music).  But she is a composer in that the looping is often analog, in real time, with wildly different textures.  It is minimalist serious music that is as friendly as apply pie, elegant as designer clothes or drugs.  It is also sneaky – you think you know her tricks but something drops out of the soundcloud with each new listen (once I heard a Souza march minimalist drone, then I realized it was a Neil Diamond melody hidden in the storm clouds).  Yeah, like that.  Good to let play over and over throughout a rainy afternoon.

15.   Villagers - Califone

I remember at one point Wilco covered its Americana in noise and dirt and became America’s best band for a hot Chicago minute.  Califone, another Chicago corn-pone storyteller, cluttered its sound with similar noise for album after album after album.  It never achieved great popularity, so it solipsisticly continued to develop this dirty American throwaway folk rock. It progressed. While Wilco keeps trying to throw a fastball down the middle of the plate, Califone is in the parking lot smoking.  Jazzy, clever, subtractive, relentlessly analog and plinky – he has always been nasal and plaintive, although you were never sure what he was actually saying.  Here, twenty years later, he’s finally learned to clear his throat and sing comprehensible stories.  The ever-delicious folk-trippy instrumentation is still here, but presented in a sunny and warm production.  That distinctive voice, quirky and homely, is mixed up front. And the noise now is the sound of someone dancing, or sitting on the porch in the daytime, not someone hiding. “A Roxy Music cassette on the dashboard dying in the sun…”  His lyrics are brilliant.  Who knew?

16.   End – Explosions in the Sky

But is it? Or is it just a rumination on change, impermanence and letting go? The first album in almost a decade by a band who is both mysteriously ignored and admired as the founder of soundtrack sonics in instrumental post-rock music.  Like Mogwai, the wash of big loud sounds playing hint at an ambient electronic soundtrack experience, but clearly drums, bass, and guitars is the language of the movie they want to play in your head.  Always prettier than the equally loud/soft Mogwai, more transcendent, they continue that soaring guitar picking into our common cosmos if not consciousness, here with perhaps more drums-driven rhythm than before. Simple chords, familiar tricks, and still breathtaking after all these years.  As befits the genre they almost invented, or at least honed, the louder they get, the more peaceful they sound.  The “end” is quite lovely, if very far from quiet. It’s never going to stop.

17.   Echoe Stane – Sarah-Jane Summers

If I say this music plays into the interstices, the intersectionality of composition, I suppose that also is just a way to stop naming something with its proper, new name.  But this Scottish, classically-trained musician-composer plays a variety of violins but here sticks to the Norwegian Hardanger fiddle (reedy and rough, c.f. #33) to layer folk tunes, modernist noise, world-music flavors, artful ambient soundwaves, melancholy melodies on devotional workouts.  It was one of those albums that I let play over and over and I heard new things in it emerge every time.  So often “hybrid” music attract me, I listen for the roots, the categories.  But having given Ms Summers a list of labels, all seductive in any form, this music, the lone fiddle with warm mid-range sonics in a cool room with slight echoes – moves beyond intersection.  I don’t know what this music is, but I know it is real.  The last onramp before the coming cataclysms – walking off with no wheels.  With just a fiddle and a bow.  All pieces were improvised on the spot.  Like breathing. Best to keep breathing.

18.   The Greater Wings – Julie Byrne

Many (most?) of the indie-adjacent bands that seduce me in recent years have women vocalists/songwriters up front (Big Thief, Soccer Mommy, et. al.).  The religion of rock and roll, like the religion of religion, and the religion of the-personal-is-political, is “saved” by the feminist anima.  But I am getting poco andante with the coffee-house ASMR breathy earnest voicings of these non-binary, very fluid-power artists   … and so I hear ersatz Joni Mitchell or replicated Bill Eilish and expunge them from the list.  Byrne, I suppose, is a folk-rock version, but this elegy affected me deeply this year.  Her serious purpose is to name her grief over the death of her best friend/lover. The lyrics and melodies of loss are simpler and less loaded than Sufjan Steven’s dunkel ist das leben work, which places much higher on this list.  The songs linger in languor; give snapshots of profound existential loneliness, perfectly conveyed by a voice singing folk-based melodies, or even redolent of torch singers on open-mic night in a decade that hasn’t happened yet.  But this voice, drenched in ethereal reverb, singing what seems to be the same melody ten times over, isn’t just wispy… there is a texture of something more battered, maybe just a drop of Sandy Deny or Kate Bush.  Life is loss, all is impermanent.  At one point I was sure this was going to be the best album of the year, and then Javelin was released.

19.   Jump on It – Bill Orcutt

An old guy (on the cover of this he looks like a 70 year old homeless hobo, or perhaps a desert monk), he plays his resonant acoustic guitar like old guys (think Bill Frissell, or further back: John Fahey, Leo Kottke) which also means he’s asymmetrical and improvisational and meditative, not looking for glory with his unfathomable chops.  His last album was a long composition for four guitars, and was loud and often dissonant.  This, solo, is gentle and curious, and so dreamy I almost expect Nick Drake to start singing… but his strings and their picking are not completely opiate, even in quiet meditation. Rather they are astringent, cutting softly.  Hearing Chris play more acoustic this year increased my appreciation for these fingerpicked inventions.  Each year there is an album that should win the Miss Congeniality Award… the one I’ll play on repeat and listen in the background for hours and hours.  This is it for this year…

20.   Since Time is Gravity - Natural Information Society

I suspect there are hundreds of “free jazz” artists out there that are better than most of what’s on this list.  My jazz radar is limited.  But the range of what is “jazz” expands… jazz is far from dead; instead it is widely distributed.  This Chicago collective uses African folk instruments, lots of percussion, odd combinations of instruments – a horn and wind section that defies sounding like big band arrangements while playing over harps and harmonium, and on this album the stunning Chicago saxophone of Ari Brown.  Long phrases of urban sax goodness with a driving tribal world music thump underneath (there are two drummers).  The sound is new, fresh, and deeply familiar.

21.   Amatssou – Tinariwen

Those wild and crazy desert insurgents return with an album of rebel rock ‘n roll that sounds richer and more mysterious than ever.  I had listened to it a couple times before I read that Daniel Lanois had done “post-production” work on it, and that explained why this profoundly African music sounded more than ever like classic rock, ala New Orleans and roots-revival ambient music.  It does seem you can listen into this for the basics that were shipped to the US on the middle passage and through blood and sacrifice became the blues.  For, while it’s “world music” and as danceable than anything on this list, there is a darkening sadness to it.  I can’t understand the lyrics, of course, but as the boys sing in unison, it sounds like they are sharing stories of loss.  Whatever the truth of my imposing my old white ideas on their music, the guitar picking and call and responses scour my cultural condescension.  It’s the real deal ready for Marseilles, Mali, or my sofa. 

22.   Travel – The Necks

One of those bands, all instrumental, “jazz” in most keyword searches, that begs the question when they put out a new album, “well, the last three albums were pretty much the same idea, do I need another one?” Yes, yes I do.  The trio, often analog with a vengeance (drums, bass, piano/keyboards), are able to stretch your attention span out to new territories, variations, incrementally developed compositions, excursions – sleepy, inchoate, transcendental.  Yes, 20 minutes is just a start.  This is armchair music as Satie and Eno might say, but it’s not just something to doom-scroll by.  I stimulates something deep in the vagus nerve.  I think because it’s not one mind composing, rather it really is three musicians listening to each other and improvising. That’s what they claim and I feel it – every “practice” session they just start improvising something, and play until they stop. And, recorded, it is in our hands.    Looping over and over, (in rock is that a jam band?) this very, very long single album with single pieces which circle endlessly doesn’t tire.  It sounds new every time played.  As I was writing this I heard in one track a kind of trip through a desert on another continent – maybe the Outback, maybe the Kalahari, maybe Mars.  And then it connected, Oh yeah, travel, duh.  This takes you on trip, far off to foreign lands, they don’t know where they are going, and such is their miracle.

23.   False Lankum – Lankum

I listened to this more times than most on the list, and I am still not sure what this music is.  I also assumed this would be a “top ten” choice for me.  But it’s mercury (if not the Mercury Prize), I can’t fix where it should fit in my ears.  It’s Irish folk rock, of course, but building on a folk music that is not fiddles and dances in pubs with a pint.  Its folk music is droning, mysterious, dark and illusive.  A hut in a remote forest not a stage in a big city.  It’s smoking herbs, eating mushrooms, not swallowing Guiness.  And so its sound is herbal, vegetative, earthy… not air.  In part it’s the production, which behind and through the usual guitar, pipes, concertina, whistles, bodhrán, and organ, it’s got alien arrival noises and industrial dirt woven in each cut. Progressive Irish folk rock from a time that hasn’t arrived yet.

24.   Continuing – Tyshawn Sorey Trio

Sorey, a PhD and Macarthur Fellow, has produced a lot of music in a lot of modes (opera, dance, big band) but here he scales back to go deep and long.  A trad trio (bass, drums, piano) where his drums really do claim the space and lead the way, as they take on some jazz classic standards.  I suppose some would say they deconstruct the jazz standards – and they do pull apart and problematize the chord progressions and the melodies sometimes to a place where they are unrecognizable.  But was deep jazz ever not this way?  And the finished product is coherent, serious, composed music.  There is so much jazz produced each year, and I find things by accident mostly.  Music this spacious and questioning tells me I should be more respectful, and spend more time with the singular American art form.

25.   Borderland Melodies – Jurg Frey

There’s minimalist, and then there’s minimalist.  Some of these cuts sound exactly like one or two musicians of a classical orchestra have come out early and are slowly warming up, tuning up.  Not that they are listening to each other – these compositions (almost all have violin, cello, clarinet, and percussion) sometimes seem like machines left running in separate rooms – accidentally creating harmonies and counterpoints and then vanishing into thin air.  It’s a glorious absence of too many ideas and sounds.  One critic called Frey’s music “like a Mahler adagio suspended in zero gravity…”  I love Mahler.  I loved these long drawn out bowings and soft hooting.  Music that is barely there.. a scent left in a room after someone walks through.

26.   A Leisurely Swim to Everlasting Life – Ki Ono

A lot of beautiful things come out of Korea these days, but to expand a useless ethnomusicologist self-pleasuring observation: beauty out of Japan is cut and firm, no waste; beauty out of Korea has raveling and blurs.  This ambient, wide-spaced, “pretty” and pretty smart music is at its best when is doesn’t wrap ideas up too tightly, and when some musical phrases ravel when you expect them to loop.  The music uses incremental micro-changes to propel it, which is to say it seems like one phrase over and over for the length of the album. Sometimes things this pretty distract from its cleverness: i.e. it seems oriented to the future not the past.  And what sounds nostalgic is also an invitation to lose preconceptions. So to expose such conceptualizing habit and mind-rot stereotyping, Ki Ono isn’t from Seoul. He’s really some guy named Chuck who grew up in Los Angeles.  Go figure.  So what was conceptual and habitual is really asking the mind to be fluid.  And then to swim.

27.   The Cosmic Garden - Takashi Kokubo and Andrea Espurti

This is music that is barely there, assertive in its emptiness. A ritual of the quiet-is-the-new-loud creed.  The Japanese ambient composer claims to have discovered sonics that actually heal the body, from sounds found in the “natural” environment.  (It sounds like spaceships docking in space to me).  He teams up with Espurti, an Italian jazz trombonist, fat and city-sounds over the electronic dark vacuum…. So through much of this I feel like I am in the early 80s watching an Alan Rudolph film with LA nightscapes and jazzy foreboding. That’s an acquired taste.  A little goes a long way.  And the whole point is, I think, how little is needed to change everything. In the end, this “futuristic” music sound comfortably old-fashioned.

28.   (I’m just) Chillin’on Fire – Carlos Niño & Friends

The collaborator-in-chief of a west coast world music collective delivers his annual jazz-ambient-new age soundscape… this is two CDs long (yes my kinesthetically-hungry hands still hold CDs, admire the colors, and curse that my age means I can’t read the too-fine print on them, but use “CD” as a metric of length). With participants as skilled and versatile as Kamasi Washington and Andre 2000, the sheer length and varieties of this probably keeps it lower on the list than it should be.  So many textures and hybrid intersections of all the genres I love, but perhaps too many too quickly shifting; it feels absent of a central theme - is it brilliant or is it music to skate in circles by? Background shopping music in Whole Foods? Tribal kalimbas and flutes and jungle drums also make this sound like a soundtrack for an ayahuasca journey – and the glitchy little hip hop nuances help the mechanical elves jump around like a long-lost Robert Crumb animated cartoon, but chiller (get it?).  Jazz is no longer one thing, not even this many-faceted one thing. Maybe this is not even jazz, just pretending it is in order to name something yet undiscovered in you.  Maybe I should stop thinking all this free flow jazz isn’t as good as Pharoah Sanders.

29.   Long Drove – Simon Scott

The drummer from Slowdrive (who’d a thunk the drummer from Slowdrive would appear twice on my 2023 list) is also an electronic musician and sound-artist.  I suppose there might be some irony that an album by a drummer would have absolutely no drums, and very few “beats”, unless the fluctuations of the earth and sky are counted as beats.  In the fens of East Anglia Scott captured environmental sounds, mixed them up in his skull, and made droning electronic ambient music to carry them.  The sound is certainly minimal, but it is also flavored by that field-recording presence that real analog sound captured in the outdoors always provides.  I listen to so many ambient drone artists and I always enjoy drinking water from new sources.  He claims that the compositions record and report climate changes; I can’t hear what that’s about.  I can hear a world with lengthening space… the distance between the electronic and natural is further than Scott have meant, or maybe it was exactly his attempt to capture… the fens.

30.   Les Égarés - Sissoko/Segal/Parisien/Peirani

I’ve been interested in recent decades seeing Jazz, an African-sourced American art form , re-encounter Africanism in the post-colonial spaces and studios of European capitals.. London and Paris specifically, but also Berlin, Rome, Oslo, Warsaw etc.  Great hybrid textures, melodies, harmonics, and forms.  This quartet of French saxophone, Malian kora, cello and accordion is certainly that hybridized confection, but it is surprising in its own ways.  The different disparate threads don’t mitigate their essences in order to be something new and different in combination, but rather perform their “sounds and atmospheres” complimenting, not changing each other.  A Wayne Shorter solo, and classical chamber music piece, an African folk dance, and a Romany busker on the streets of Budapest thread together, at the same time, keeping their unique timbre and effects.  Sometimes it’s confusing, but it’s always beautiful.  I suppose this kind of bounce-back cultural mélange can best be grown in Paris, and so in that sense this is good, mid-21^st century Parisian music. Is it jazz?  Sure, why not.  But it is new, relentlessly surprising, and seduces with every twist and turn.

31.   Cartwheel – Hotline TNT

The neo-shoegaze barrage of Big Sound carrying Deep Emotions continues successfully.  This is a one-man band – although, unlike a lot of modern niche sound, it seems grown in a garage, not on a laptop.  There are threads of Wall of Sound, grunge, Brit-pop, and Americana stretched from My Morning Jacket to the Beach Boys.  Sunny or gloomy? Toe tapping or head banging? Thames Valley or Williamsburg? Two chords or three chords?  Glitch rhythms or math rock? The answer always seems to be, yes.  Both/and. The vocals are sea salt on the fresh and crunchy popcorn of the multi-tracked guitars.  And those guitars are the glory, fer shure.  The vocals are just slightly too slight, and keep the album from being rated higher.  Somewhere he was compared to Paul Westerberg; but no, way too much satisfaction and good nature in the voice and lyrics. Fortunately the vocals are buried just enough. Best to turn it up

32.   Garden Party – Rose City Band

In a year of close escapes and world war, many artists were stirring up sound in the detritus of the old schools. Here is the prime example of “Ámericana still works”… although there are elements that don’t quite align with that rootsy nostalgia.  Or rather Wooden Shjips/Moon Duo’s Ripley Johnson’s penchant for psychedelic stretching out and improvisation (it seems like this is no longer his side project, but rather his main stage to perform on) has taken friendly country-rock in a time-traveling trip, or even Trip. 60s trippy pop and 70s Laurel Canyon smoke outs, and 80s North Carolina beaches, which is to say, yeah, Portland. Many of the songs seem to break for improvisation and long soloing – so, yes, psychedelic country-folk with improvised solos: it is Grateful Dead adjacent. But those mismatched elements (an East LA farfisa organ in almost every song) keep it quirky and lo-fi… “porch music” he calls it, and it’s quite pleasant on his porch.  Syncopated, weedy, airy, danceteria (in the grabbing at butterflies mode, not clubbing in Ibiza or hip hop in Houston).  On the porch it appears as though they may be microdosing for a better world.

33.   Glimmer – Nils Okland

Okland’s recordings in recent years of acoustic analog rootsy Norwegian alt-folk rock are some of my favorite records of this century.  Gloriously morose tunes played with “authentic” folk instruments including the vaunted Norwegian Hardanger fiddle.  The ECM universe was made for him and his side band Lumen Drones (which, not surprisingly, is a band of luminescent droning).  Tender and unique, his Norwegian folk music has no-nonsense beauty.  Here, with different musicians (a keyboard, which doesn’t align with the hand-carried wooden/strings gestalt) supporting Okland, his music is starkly beautiful still, but where before real improvisation seemed like the musicians were sitting around a fire, this music is arranged and seems made to be performed on a stage.

34.   Living Circle - Shido Shahabi

The Iranian-Swedish composer prepares her piano with tape loops and screws and joins it with an ensemble of cello, standup bass, covers it all with waves, and waves of synthesized fog.  Like so much of the music I like and buy and play and put on these lists, it’s as much a movie soundtrack as it is an album of ambient music.  It’s quiet and resonant, but suggests secrets and loss.  It’s ready for the recital hall as much as what used to be chill rooms or silver screens.  It’s got a love for rich dissonance, and I can actually hear a Persian melancholy (or Swedish suicide watch) in its trenchant melodies.  That’s the groundwater discharge for these “new classical” soundtracks – the simple, wistful melodies stretched out like a patient etherized on a table.  “Modern classical” is what some writers call this.

35.   Clear and Hazy Moons – Eden Longdale

Modern classical, huh? For many years the appearance of “serious” music on my lists has been haphazard and capricious.  I don’t follow “serious” music in the avid way I follow other genres – jazz, ambient for examples.  I know there is a lot a great jazz that never makes my lists, but I know it.  I am sure there is a lot of great serious music that doesn’t make my lists, but I don’t know it.  This is analog, in person, chamber music, that is piano and strings and wind instruments – that sounds like the turning of spheres or slowly collapsing black holes or fields of background radiation proving the Origin story, dark and slow.  It clunks and drones and pipes up when you expect silence.  This is serious music in every sense, as slow and infinite as the cosmos.  It is relentlessly, seriously, cosmic.

36.   After the Magic - Parannoul

He’s supposed to be “anonymous and undercover”, but he has a name, and the lyrics, all in Korean, are, by definition, unintelligible, not hidden.  It’s another work listed as “shoegaze” in 1) the retro-flavor of the day and the 2) catnip to my own interests and taste.  It surely has a big, weighty sound – wide bands of guitar noise and dream-metal guitars that chime as much as down-tune.  Melodic and catchy songs almost survive the flood of production tricks. It’s retro in many ways – sounds like MGMT covering Gentle Giant songs… with a touch of 80s power ballads sneaking in.  It’s fun, and irresistible, but didn’t hold up to my initial affections.  He’s anonymous… probably should stay so.  A confection, spun sugar, melts in the sun. Lugubrious and baroque both: good at high volume though.

37.   Les Jardins Mystiques, Vol 1 – Miguel Atwood-Ferguson

Most of the Gen Z neo-Jazz (from London to Topanga) is either retro In A Silent Way ethno-spiritual or new agey soundtrack-ready.  This is the latter in the guise of trad jazz (nothing too dissonant, ever). And Atwood-Ferguson is more Gen X than Z.  Soundtracks: I remember movies from the sixties, black and white usually, British new wave or New York indie, where the jazz piece played over a montage of the lead characters gamboling through city streets and parks. Spacious moments in gritty neo-realism.  So let me neo the neo and confirm that most of these sounds, three CDs of snippets and partial ideas, would be perfect for such film montages, pretty young things capering in pretty urban settings.  Many, many instruments (many of which Atwood-Ferguson plays) sometimes deliver Big Band fervor ala Kamasi Washington (who plays on some tracks); the leads are sometimes sax, sometimes piano, and sometimes the rare jazz viola.  Three and half hours (!!) of jazz textures and ideas from the wilds of Los Angeles (much of this is recorded live).  Composed as serious jazz, but with lots of air.  Lite isn’t always light, but is here.  Best to put honey in your tea and be prepared for a long flight of fancy.

38.   Trio Tapestry – Joe Lovano, Marilyn Crispell, Carmen Castaldi

Once upon a time Lovano was an enfant terrible sax player keeping the jazz fires burning. Now he is over 70 and his transformation to the wide-open spaces of ECM and submission to Manfred Eicher is complete.  This trio is minimal and Lovano’s sax playing is airy and spiritual (at times sounding like Paul Winter and his ashram phrasing).  The temperature is on the cool side, and that’s fine by me: I often think when writing these lists how the attachment I have to “rock” and experimental music weakens as my crows’ feet deepen and kidneys fail: if I were a real human of the moment I’d be listening to more hip hop in all its permutations.  And there is so much quality jazz I miss.  But a moment of Lovano’s plaintive sax playing here absolves my dilettantish bourgeois myopia. Familiar sax sexiness, yet full of ideas that don’t sell out for comfort only.

39.   Echolocation - Mendoza Hoff Revels

The permutations of jazz?  Sure, like this. Dissonant and aggressive music: I used to love “jazz fusion”, though now I listen to some of the nuggets from the 70s and they sound bloated and noisy.  This is jazz rock that doesn’t have roots in that kind of music.  But it is a guitar-bass attack that clears out the cobwebs and is far from the other hybrid, incense-jazz, chill jazz I usually find.  Straight up, no chaser.

40.   Boygenius - Boygenius

Oh yes, I love the idea of the backstory (sleazeball Ryan Adams thinks “only boys” can make real music, etc.), and initially I loved the record.  Saw them on screens perform it live and it confirmed they are the real deal.  Love the guitars and songs as songs.  But one day I heard in their melodic harmonies that they sound like Wilson-Phillips.  I can’t unhear it.  So, I don’t choose this to listen to much, but then I never listen to Wilson-Phillips, or Ryan Adams, either.

41.   Workin’ on a World – Iris Dement

So many of the emerging “country/Americana” female vocalists of the last decades can inspire the response, “well, she’s trying to sound like Iris Dement.”  So why not go to the source and get the real deal?? I’ve gotten confused sometimes, because sometimes her voice sounds like, and her respect would seem to date from, the 60s or 70s – and I forget she’s actually not that old.  Here she sings songs well intended (pleas for peace and social justice), but perhaps just a little too slight for her rough, ready, and regal voice.  On this list I’ll place her right next to Sza – two vocal pillars of what a better America could be.

42.   SOS – Sza

Yeah, right, make out music with auto-tune vocals, WTF is this doing on this careful and terminally white list?  The production is subtle, simple, and simply delicious, and I believe every wise phoneme she sings and processes through the auto-tune.  Under that layer of modern sound is her melisma of real heartache and its root desire.  Love hurts.

43.   Valley of Heart’s Delight – Margo Cilker

More womanly wisdom: Sometimes you need something crunchy and salty; not a staple of your diet, but when you want it you want it.  Sometimes you need to immerse in heartwood country music.  Not Nashville pop, not Outlaw, not even California weedy countrified rock, but the real thing, not very available.  Ms Cilker from Eastern Washington delivers – tasty instrumentals, clever lyrics, modern and timely – but that voice (a dash of Emmy Lou, a spoonful of Loretta, and even a whine of Dolly) scratches what itches.  While southern story-telling is its main course, hippie westcoast vibe is the additional sauce.

44.   Y Trois – Acid Arab

I’d place this higher, but I’ve already set forth that I don’t/can’t keep up with hip hop/DJ, to my own impoverishment, so I am hiding it down here.  Here is hip hop/trance of an off-shore but relentlessly potent force.  Algerians on the mean streets of Paris – charming, druggy, extreme, angry.  Muezzin through auto-tune: the new world isn’t as planned.

45.   Stories from a Rock n Roll Heart – Lucinda Williams

One of my favorite singers of all time returns from a stroke and… sounds pretty good for someone coming back from a stroke.  Hip hop has always demonstrated the usefulness of albums/songs having “guests”… but here Williams’s guests really seem to distract, and make this sound like a discount store remnant special.  Stuart Mathis, her superb longtime guitarist, is the best thing about this.  I am glad she is alive and look forward to her next one without Bruce Spingsteen.

46.   Cantor Park - Stefano Pilia & Valerio Tricoli

I used to follow (90s, 00s) “electronic” music, not electonica, with ts glitches and hums and compositional assertions.  Now the streams of music produced electronically have converged, diverged, and ultimately purged.  What’s not electronic music now? Electronica sort of became resurrected and called by the old school EDM, and resurges every year.  Now most IDM feels like a waste of my time, and I’d rather dance to world music than RPM-Eurotrash mollified melodies.  Cantor Park (um, named for a philosopher?) is surely European (Italy and Berlin) and is surely electronic.  But it’s also improvised sessions by a real guitarist and then treated with electronic additions and degradations – and is very interested in blips and drones and pops, coming first from an electric guitar before it passes through synthetic space. 

47.   Healing Rituals - Naïssam Jalal

The Syrian French jazz flautist constantly surprises not just with her playing, but with the arrangements and combinations of instrumentation she’s chosen.  (Jazz cello may be my favorite development of recent years.)  Airy, hybrid, womanly (I’ll stand by that) virtuoso playing.

48.   Seven Psalms – Paul Simon

Having no longer observed the “in the Hall of Fame, and so out of competition for the hallowed List” rules, this has to appear.  A short song-cycle, artsongs really, on death.  “Achingly” is an adjective too sloppily modifying “beautiful”, but here Simon’s ache at the beauty of life is only intensified by its loss. The ache is melodic, affecting, peaceful.

49.   I’ve Seen a Way – Mandy, Indiana

I think I am just starting to ossify and not be capable of hearing true zeitgeist-demanded change (e.g my vaunting here of my not having bandwidth or enough neuroplasticity to keep up with hip hop).  But this album got reviews that interested me, and I clearly hear some kind of new international, relevant, and interesting death knell.  It’s a new kind of music cultivated from familiar (industrial, dark metal, noise, dance) sources.  Apparently it was recorded in caves and sounds to me as though it invites you to spend time there.

50.   Imagine this is a High Dimensional Space of All Possibilities – James Holden

Speaking of EDM, here’s some.  Though I still shy away from anything caused as retro-Disco.  I heard and liked Holden’s  animal spirits of several years ago – live and jazzy. So I listened to this with an open mind. I‘m sure it’s high quality music that is DJ-ready, but I’d rather walk on a mountain in Galicia than get loaded in Ibiza.