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.