Top 50 Music Picks for
2019 (50th anniversary edition)
Time is playing tricks? There is no particular reason why music
pleased me as much as it did this year. The drones (a search will reveal eleven
instances of “drone” in the following), hybrid serious (and increasingly acoustic)
music, alternative guitar rock, prog jazz, and electronic and ambient compositions
– all the usual genres. Nothing groundbreaking,
but still, music seemed more purposeful, more successful, more beautiful to my
aging ears and brain in 2019. Perhaps the
trick is in the ears not the music. The right trick, I guess, is just enough.
1.
Big Thief – UFOF
At 2:56 into “Contact”, the first cut of
UFOF, a full-throated electric guitar drops loudly into what had been an
earnest if plaintive folk song, reminding the listener that the idiom of this
brilliant band (woman) is rock music. Might
as well be an epiphany. Guitars,
acoustic or electric … these poems are threaded through chords, finger-picking,
and a simple drum’s back beat. Most of
the songs could be picked out in a dorm room, or motel downtown, or the house
at the lake, or a mental hospital’s craft room. Because make no mistake, this
woman, writing from inside the personal stories her body holds on to, writes
poetry. Confessional poetry like Robert Lowell, or (I worry for her) Anne
Sexton. But poetry born of this century,
this decade, this moment – even as it narrates the palimpsest images of her
childhood and subsequent romances, its flowing gender ruminations, and offers a
melancholic placeholder for some future better alignment of the stars. Rock as
a tool of the artist, real rock, not sound engineering, rather analog analyses
of a this not that that is both sobbing yodel that may not make
it through the dark night of our collective soul, yet also a stark assertion of a personhood
strong enough to (might as well) stay alive. A voice that demands
attention, even as it’s the most annoying, broken-hearted warble since after
the goldrush. Permit me voyage, love,
into Adrianne Lenker’s more than capable hands. Because, after all, rock music.
Not dead yet.
2.
Big Thief – Two Hands
Happy pop songs about body dysphoria,
gender performance, loving betrayal and remembered child abuse. I suppose they
could have waited and made a double album. But these songs bring that pinking
shears voice even further forward in sparse arrangements. And, as is her wont,
she sounds (even sometimes double-tracked, with harmony) seriously insistent.
There is something urgent, horribly and desperately urgent that needs to be
shared. Less dense than UFOF, the songs
are hardly light – some of them could be covered and reimagined as arena rock
or a classic power ballad, rather than 2:00am accusations in the kitchen, where
they seem to live in this setting. DNA
as a death sentence and redemption in one fell confession. “Not” is the song of
the year; Dylan could have written this in 1966, if he’d gotten laid less and been
able to recognize the bed that is haunted with a blanket of thirst. “I am
unstable, rock and sing… rock and sing.” Soul clap its hands and sing, and
louder sing.
3.
Kankyō Ongaku: Japanese Ambient,
Environmental & New Age Music 1980–1990
Minimal. Delicate. Detailed. Borrowed
technology. Who better than the
Japanese, right? Two hours of carefully curated samples of many composers. The variety of “new sounds” is its delight –
some like machines humming quietly in the background, some lugubrious
Vangelis-like soundtracks, some raindrops in a (of course) Zen garden, some
like the most meditative Eno – music barely there at all. Many compositions are
architectural. Some are provisional, almost hesitant in their reserve. All are astoundingly beautiful. And if these
composers didn’t directly influence much of the electronic/ambient music I dote
on and drone on about now, they heard then what became what my favorite
musicians hear now.
4.
The Comet is Coming – Trust in the
Lifeforce of the Deep Mystery
Young Brit saxophonist Shabaka Hutchings
continues his monumental exploration of psychedelics, electronics, dub-jazz,
and the cosmic cocktail lounge.
Propulsive (summon the fire, like now, ok?) and brand new, this music
reminds us, quoting both beatnik dreams and Chicago avant-garde blue note
screaming, that Cool is still better than Chill. Sun Ra through the looking
glass. Sun Ra pogoing as a punk. Sun Ra on the Day of Ascension. Sun Ra head
banging in gentrified cities, in council houses, and on a road Trip. “Unity”
almost sounds like John Klemmer quiet-storm 70s jazz, and is the second best
“cut” of the year (c.f. “Not” above). Even
given the epic flag waving of Hutchings’ Trane-like sax, all three pieces are
equally needed. The rhythm section is
not respectful, has no time for reminiscing about the jazz canon. Indeed this
music, both its hot and cold sides, isn’t patient. Music on the edge of time –
a trio of blokes keeping the beat of cosmic relief or total dystopia. Annihilation either way.
5.
Yann Novak – Slowly Dismantling
Well there are drones (deepening into one
place, clearing away distractions, aural stability), and then there are waves of
drones – the forward momentum of similar or congruent sounds (treated, found
and re-shaped) that seem to suggest the ephemeral, the transitory nature of
sound and time, and so being itself. (Think Disintegration Loops) This is much more composed and chosen here
than the work by Basinski, which celebrates the accidental. And Novak, the LA
composer, proposes that this is in fact a tone poem or musical essay on his growing
up queer. I don’t hear that in the largely comforting industrial hums and pitches.
The mothership is always entering the frame – it’s all about a challenged
notion of time, space and perception – and the result is a chronological record
of the undone. Renewed at every listen. Be
still and know that I am… well, I am. Among
the best droning of the decade.
6.
Michael O’Shea
It’s hard to think what he wanted this
music to be. A buskers’ inward gaze really,
messages from an interior world. The
home-made dulcimer drones on while the beats pound the rhythmic point
home. Indian raga, north African melody
lines, and scenes from the Galway coast all at the same time. Tinariwen playing
in a medieval court. Its rescue from obscurity (this music is 30 years old)
only one element of what is essentially Mystery. As much in the religious as musical sense.
7.
(Sandy) Alex G – House of Sugar
There is a tradition in pop/art rock of
eccentrics using musical bromides in odd and arresting ways. English eccentrics (Julian Cope, Robert
Wyatt, Kate Bush) and American eccentrics (Jonathan Richman, Don Van Vliet,
Ariel Pink). Eccentricity deeper than a utilized “quirkiness” (Van Vliet
compared to Zappa). This music occupies
that kind of unsettling origin. Much of the album sounds like a demo session; suggested
ideas more than pop songs. But the electronics are sophisticated noise. High
tech recordings of lo-fi elements (a strummy guitar seemingly with no re-verb),
and a fine fuzz overlaying simple street corner freak-folk ditties. His voice
burying special needs lyrics (What if Ariel Pink tried to be serious?), the
double tracking helping tentative vocal chords more than hold their own. Perhaps it’s telling that the best song on
the album is a “live” track at the end where a sax helps him and his melody,
against all logic, sound like Bruce Springsteen.
8.
Kali Malone – The Sacrificial Code
Some of this careful and calm organ droning
sounds like the quiet and meditative organ prelude before a funeral. Greeting friends
not seen in years, sadly thinking about mutability and the ephemeral nature of
living. But when the “pedal gets stuck”
and there is one tone left, it’s not a mindful meditative stasis; and it’s a
relief when there is finally a next and second tone. And then mercifully the residue of a melody. Minor
key and stripped down to the clear minimum, not disintegration loops, this
sound of things falling away is sharp, not fuzzy. I remain a sucker for the tectonic
plates pace of slowly moving sound designs. Many minimalist electronic droning,
even other acoustically produced albums that are the métier of choice, have a
similar pace, but none have these rough and mellow sonics of an analog pipe organ
(like last year’s cello compositions of Clarice Jensen). Toccata, passacaglia, preludes – this music
inescapably invokes churches and chapels – what produces these sounds uses a familiar
tradition, even if the artifact performed steadily, slowly disrupts. Using the language of history to make
something utterly else.
9.
Thom Yorke – Anima
Finally getting the balance right between
club-ready electronica and the majestic ennui of his first-world-problems
voice. But maybe it’s too late – the very
timbre and intensity of his voice concretizes a zeitgeist just as much as a
Dylan, Johnny Rotten, Cobain, Tupac or Cardi B – but the quality of this mercy
is pretty strained, time’s up gentlemen.
A musical Brexit from Euro-trash. I thought we had a deal. I
really mean it, man.
10.
John Luther Adams – Become Desert
The lines between “serious music”,
commissioned by serious orchestras and awarded Pulitzers, and experimental “popular”
music, has been blurring for years, and now doesn’t exist in this list (there is
another Pulitzer or two on the list). Adams’ won the Pulitzer for the sequel to
this composition, Become Ocean, and this is even more simplifyingly
beautiful. Perhaps its my own affinity
for deserts and spirituality – small sounds magnify into cosmic
proportions. Limited sound pallets first
open the ear. Hermitage, retreat, magnificent hysechia – eventually with a huge
orchestra – Mahler after doing E - with a string section, kettle drums,
woodwinds, brass, chorus… all in a single swirling sound of unerring space and
light.
11.
Purple Mountains – Purple Mountains
Fine, you finally figure out how to bring
an endlessly nourishing indie sound to the middle-aged hipster masses who like
their rock gods to be poets, and then you commit suicide? Well, it’s a perky
suicide note, for sure. Countryfied
choruses with soul-hungry harmonics, rom-com melancholy, riffs and pedal steel,
two-step beats allowing the head to bob in rhythm just so, as you get it all
together just in time for check out. These are songs Leonard Cohen could have
written, if you pulled out the Zen, inserted some Jeff Tweedy, and sprinkled
lightly with a death wish. David, you
coulda been the Warren Zevon of the 20’s. Epitaph rock?
“Songs build little rooms in time
What comes after certainty
And housed within the song’s design
Is the ghost the host has left behind
To greet and sweep the guest inside
Stoke the fire and sing his lines.”
12.
Lumen Drones – Umbra
Those long Norwegian nights bear a
secret. Or so this seems to promise.
Half folk rock with a mournful fiddle stating the melodic premise, half Euro
rock with a constant drone and Tangerine Dream insistent percussion driving the
point home. I guess the marked distance
between the lumen and the shadow is the space to ponder, to rest in. Post-rock
ideas that assemble unexpected conclusions – calm resolutions not meant for the
faint of heart.
13.
Bremer-McCoy – Utopia
Danish piano/bass instrumental duo, analog
and no effects, creating jazzy post-classical ambient soundtrack. A little like
Satie’s gymnopedies , a thoughtful simplicity, future-focused with the Neue Innigkeit sense of creating the new
by reductions, not additions. Chill
enough on the inside. Best heard when left on repeat; the increments and accretions
of solace.
14.
Bon Iver – I.I.
Have you heard the good news? This is
Gospel music at its core. Hipster,
deconstructed, fragmented shards and samples of heavily produced and processed
gospel music. And I guess popular music has always been white guys
appropriating black music; here Vernon sounds like he’s singing with hip hop
Auto-Tune, even when he’s not. The
lyrics themselves are self-satisfied and cryptic, largely around love and
relationship. White, spacious, wintry, and coolly beautiful music, with
effective but creepy hooks. I like you, I like you … but that’s nothing new.
15.
Black Midi – Schlagenheim
Much of “young kids’”music seems to me
chopped up, partial ideas, inchoate, segmental and impatient (Lorde, Billie
Eilish). ADHD of the clicks and downloads; cut and paste software. A language with some future and potential
maturity. Prog-rock is an old man’s field of dreams, just embarked upon by
these British teens. Ephemeral in service to the eternal. That particular
King’s crimson is an adolescent blush of “let’s try this.”
16.
A Winged Victory for the Sullen – The
Undivided Five
Comfort audio food. Analog piano rolling slowly around electronic
fireside chats. Simple melodies fade away before they’re done. Slow core, slow
shell, slow breath, opening spacious music for sitting meditations. Country clapboard
church and Park Slope brownstone two sides to the same lucky coin; a tidal wash
of sound, small on the surface, but bigger than the moon.
17.
Nivhek – Walking In A Spiral Towards the
House/After Its Own Death
Liz Harris/Grouper doesn’t make intentionally
pretty music, although there’s a lot of beauty here, conventional beauty with echoing
choruses and starkly snow-like aural landscapes. She doesn’t make simple music, although there
are moments of repetitive minimalism here.
The voice (her voice) is distinctive as it’s multiple tracking eventually
sounds like a Bulgarian women’s choir, quarter tone harmonics before a “gamelan”
up in the attic shows up and states the main themes. The voices almost rubbed out and the
static-laden gamelan are the primaries sounds in this seriously unique
composition.
18.
Ellen Akro - Chords
Adventures in minimalism! A chord is a
combination of multiple tones, by definition, and here the composer composes by
varying timbre, volume, resonance, tremolo, and buzz of the tones in a single
chord. Until the next chord. There may
be as many as two chords in 60 minutes. The composer references the great base
pedal tones of a huge organ in a cathedral and the dentist’s drill heard though
both air and bone. Indeed, played
loudly, some of this does a nice job of vibrating the sternum. The second half’s vinegary guitar chords,
finally following the organ, turn white noise into sunshine.
19.
Fennesz – Agora
A return to form from the clubs via the
last Trans-Europe Express to Lhasa. I always liked the F at the beginning and
sz at the end; so much of his droney electronics were fizzy, fuzzy. And these are matured and well considered
drones, good to put on repeat and listen to for hours on end. Music of the Public Spheres
20.
Sarah
Davachi – Pale Bloom
Serious, intellectually challenging music
can also break the heart. This does just
that. Just as the ear can develop informed taste for drones and electronics, so
the lay listener can discern the quality and intents of bare minimalist
compositions. This contemplative music
is radically minimal but familiar: acoustic authentic sounds of piano, strings,
organ and voice. A solo piano of a few cool notes is quietly, slowly heightened
with counter-tenor vocals, chanson, art song human voices dropping in
almost as if the radio channel was shifting. The tender grief of a human voice.
The organ and piano then join in modal increments. What would minimalist counter-point sound
like? Viola and violin bifurcate the space between each instrument, causing
oddly pleasing dissonant harmonics, like Tibetan tingshas. The organ at the end
is like Allen Ginsberg’s Hindu hand organ, and the result is indeed a felt need
for prayer, chanting, and ceremony wherein one note, held just long enough, is
a complete invocation of the mortally sacred.
21.
Christian Scott aTunde Adjuah- Ancestral
Recall
In the mélange of influences (afro-cuban,
tribal dub-step, rap, John Hassel-Freddy Hubbard-Miles, Fourth World) the
timbre of his piercing trumpet, muted or not, and shamelessly melodic phrasing,
are the sonic and soaring arcs building bridges. From the cool 50s cocktail lounges to the
industrial 10s concentration camps and a neo-modernist and fragmentary future.
Those bridges are heavily produced, and cross many rivers (more Rio Cauta, and
Niger, than his Mississippi River home).
22.
Hammock – Universalis
Released in December, 2018, but I’m
claiming it for this year. Achingly
beautiful post-rock from Nashville, with pedigree of Winged Victory, Olafur
Arnalds, Johann Johannsson. Explosions in the Sky slowed down to a subconscious,
sub rasa pace and place. Chamber rock in indie-soundtrack mode, with droning
longterm phrases. Plenty of space to ponder the elegant and rooted despondency
growing underfoot, left alive. So high on the list because it was played more
than anything else this year, in my Dharma Bums’ hut, marking time.
23.
Our Lady of the Flowers - Holiday in
Thule
Astonishing sound montages of found sound
and layered electronics produced clean and clear, the distance from the highest
3D treble to the massive undercurrent of bass humming constantly, is a mile
wide. Some electronic music fills space,
some expands it. Deepchord exceeds it –
you’re on the 14th floor, and every minute sound scrap below is heard and is in
perfect dubstep with the larger construction. Heady stuff in the purest deep
electronic house tradition – it does sound a little old school. Wired and wondering.
24.
The National – I Am Easy to Find
For the ennui connoisseurs only. Adult
music, with energy, and tasteful classic rock/Eno production values. Hooks, breaks, crescendos, drum fills, funny
string instruments and the relentlessly depressive irony of his voice. That
voice falling off a baritone cliff, and phrasing like an apologetic message left
on a Williamburg barista’s cell phone. Gen X heartbreak, again. It’s gonna
be totally ok. Yeah, that voice (a little distracted by the duets on this
album) will always make you forgive him, if only until he leaves at 2:00am. Again. I guess he really should be singing in
French. Best since their first, but sometimes I wish they’d scale back the
production, and let the guitar and his voice get to know each other. Although
not high on this list, it’s likely I’ll listen to this more in ten years than
most of the music listed here.
25.
The Delines – The Imperial
Although from Portland’s gluten-free roadhouses,
these songs want to tell stories of the real grit from Americana’s dark and
nourishing/poisoning bars where a drink or two is needed to make it through the
night. Documenting the hard scrabble myths in the lower middle classes without anthropology
or art. “You’re using all your vacation days…” “Arlo’s been a good man to
me, and I take care of his daughter too…”
Hammond organs and quiet horn section critical to keep you on
life-support. Got any quarters for the jukebox?
26.
Ralph Alessi – Imaginary Friends
The requisite ECM-stable and cerebral
cool-bop, falling apart, unravelling from some quiet but desperately beautiful
center. “Stable” in that the wide Mies
Van der Rohe spaces of the minimalist cocktail lounge, predictably,
comfortingly, encourages limits at the compositional fraying edge. Samples,
found sound, errors, and the sweetest horn timbre. Euro-jazz’s reminder that jazz is the past
century’s most serious music.
27.
Neil Young and Crazy Horse – Colorado
There is no way, of course, that this
should be on the list. But the garage is
still Holy, and the young man’s tremolo, having become an old man’s quaver,
still sings the song of the hippie dream, with three crunchy underwater chords
and the truth. Play at full volume.
28.
Ellen Fullman and Okkyung Lee – The Air
Around Here
If you like droning, the trance-like and
meditative qualities of music composed horizontally, not vertically, what
better design than the electronically mushed and augmented analog latitudes of
Fullman’s cello? Both close to the sound of the human voice and of a large oil tanker
slowly grinding on a pier, this experimental music takes its time. The Lee electronic
chirpy appurtenances, I guess, are the seagulls circling, flying to remind, there
is air around here.
29.
Caroline Shaw/Attaca Quartet – Orange
As music morphs and hybridizes, the subsets
of “serious” music and electronic popular music produce unexpected
successes. And not just the orchestral
soundtrack successes of Max Richter or Jóhann Jóhannsson, but chamber music
like Orange. This string quartet always is a trip to places new and familiar at
once. And you can shoe gaze and thoughtfully nurse a single-sourced coffee to pizzicati
and borderline twelve-tone. When you
need an aural cleanse, serious music like this is the ticket.
30.
DIIV – Deceiver
Music that dives deeper than their previous
respectful, druggy shoe gaze. Full body and exposed power chords dropped among
the murky chimes. Heads nodding more to
music than central nervous system
downtime. It suits him.
31.
Moon Duo – Stars Are The Light
The lovely chuga chuga of psychedelic kraut
rock via Marin county, 2019. The underwater guitars of the guy from Wooden
Shjips, thick and expansive. Ecstatic voodoo brewed with single source coffee
beans.
32.
Lankum – The Livelong Day
Beyond the folk-based melodies and sources,
there is something intrinsically Irish about building from a moment emerging
from silence to a heightened ecstatic intensity, even if that ecstasy is
melancholic. These songs build… and
drone from quietness to a desperate jig at the end of time. Acoustic celtic rituals threaded through a
powerful electronic doom and gloom. Espirit d’dirge – the Irish illnesses and
hungers.
33.
Tim Hecker – Anoyo
Tricks with traditional Japanese music and
its instruments continue. Hecker did
this last year, and this repeats the surprising textures and pastiche melody
lines he gets when he records old Japan, electronically alters the sounds and
chops it up in western ways. One of my
favorite ambient composers is in a holding pattern.
34.
Floating Points – Crush
Shepherd’s music has always sounded a
little like “music” drifting through interstellar space, of one intelligent
civilization trying to declare life and find and communicate with another. Although it’s clear that the sending planet
is Club Ibiza. Here he goes pure
electronics, although some interludes sometimes sound more like Wendy Carlos
than Klaus Schulze. Unlike a lot electronic music, the melody itself tells the
story. He should trust this quiet side more.
35.
Joshua Redman and Brooklyn Rider – Sun on
Sand
One of the best hybrids of jazz and
classical, which doesn’t sound either dissonant, or recklessly blue, its
uptempos more qi than urban raucous, and its downtempos more meditative
than opioid. Oddly, the sax seems to harken back to a simpler time, and the
strings rush forward, no prisoners. Sax, bass, string quartet – nothing else
like it this year.
36.
Better Oblivion Center – Better Oblivion
Center
It’s beyond meat simulation and potatoes, rooty
and juicy. Down the middle of the road,
if this road still existed. Craft and
literary competence.
37.
iLe – Almadura
Classy Latin torch singing by a woman whose
firmly personal and confident voice, older than its years, seems burnished by
real and unrelenting life. Hard soul
indeed.
38.
The Caretaker – An Empty Bliss Beyond
This World
A ballroom at the end of time, its dances
captured in a recording that hisses and pops and suggests it’s an archival remnant
from another dimension. Interesting, but
seemed to be only one trick.
39.
Sharon Von Etten – Remind Me Tomorrow
What if Patty Smith had been a Gen Xer?
40.
Pedro the Lion – Phoenix
Still awed by God, just can’t quit Him, these
are memory pieces about the suburbs of the 70s, Partial stories, with Barzan’s
timeless thick and tubey guitar filling the spaces.
41.
Tycho – Weather
One of my favorite post-rock atmosphere
bands added vocals to no particular good purpose.
42.
Angel Olsen – All Mirrors
I get it, I don’t disrespect the
respect. But just too gauzy and
sweet-toothed. 80s wet drums with string
orchestras don’t leave much room for error.
43.
J Balvin and Bad Bunny – The only reason
a “trap” album makes my desiccated white guy list is the luscious summer sounds
of his voice and the ritmos columbianos lurking.
44.
Rocketship – Thanks to You
Totally unironic mining of shavings drawn
to the same musical folk-pop lodestone as Momma’s and Papas/Carpenters, then
filtered through mid-70s Fleetwood Mac anthemic tendencies. Who listens to this brilliant stuff? You
couldn’t make music less attuned to the zeitgeist. Sacramento, eh?
45.
Ride – This Is Not A Safe Space
Underappreciated 90s band return to suggest
that some shoes need no longer be gazed upon.
46.
Sturgill Simpson
Noisier than his brand would suggest.
47.
Tyler, The Creator – IGOR
I like the Latin riddim’ touches, though.
48.
Weyes Blood – Titanic Rising
Worst Well-Reviewed release of the
Year. This Avant pop is stale spitwads cluttering
my synesthetic ears.
49.
Son Volt – Union
Well-meaning political angst in the key of
Americana. And rates ahead of Jeff.
50.
Wilco
Neil Young award for old dad rock
disqualifying from lists like this. Oh,
wait a minute, Neil still makes good music.
