Best Music 2022
Music is good for everything. It is food for the soul. It boosts the immune
system. It replaces damaged synapses. It fills in the missing pieces and tells
you whodunnit. It is a soundtrack for unexpected Caminos and eye operations
which mimic acid dreams. It is not
samsara, it has no chasms to its name, and is sound that honors both silence
and The Silence. Here’s another in a
long series of reviews, ranked because that focuses attention; words to mimic
how a body losing the Tone hears its world.
Music placed in 2022 for now, if not for the long haul. Harry’s Top 40,
the year when The Gaze returns.
1.
Dry Cleaning – Stumpwork - Number one, really? How? I’d have thought her flat affect
narrative/talking over the brilliant alt-jazzy 90s guitars, drums/bass
arrangements wouldn’t hold for another album.
It had seemed pretty gimmicky; that pony had one trick. But the lyrics here actually emerge -
literate and culturally acute– snarky, full of ennui; hip and bittersweet. And her delivery to me resonate with a kind
of 21st century version of British New Wave/Neo Realism (her stories
are in black and white). This band casts
a cold eye on this exact modern toxic life of patrimony and reaction (successful
pop music is like news anyway, right?). Sardonic and danceable. Who can get
away with one romantic sentence about a hazmat suits, emptying bank accounts,
and a feminist “I’m not made to provide blank”
Blank Francis in a stiff undergarment indeed. And underneath her
ineluctable stories and confessions that land like attacks there is that delicious
guitar. Brilliant minor 7th
chords, dissonant, chiming, syncopated riffing – equal part Joy Division, Sonic
Youth and Pavement. Fragmenting life
before your ears even as your foot can’t stop tapping to the beat. Assuming you still have a foot (not a stump).
Good for the cynic who can’t help falling in love.
2.
The Smile – A Light for Attracting Attention
– So, yeah, the Radiohead album you’ve been waiting for. Stripped away just enough to sound new and to
the point. But seriously, this sounds new, I mean new. A couple tracks do
reclaim punk cred (cut 3, you should pogo, really, pogo). But in general this is the “next chapter” of
the boho-radiohead intelligence – the voice painful in its thin delicacy, ready
to be ripped to shreds by clever, current, and wise lyrics. Living and dying
has sharp edges for those paying attention.
The minor chords… and the poly-rhythms with a world-wide spectrum of
production tricks (there are actually horns on several songs that seem
to be only a bass and a piano). But not
to worry, Greenwood’s cinema soundtrack clouds have been stopped at the gate
(not one cut could be called “ambient”): these are songs, are songs you can
sing along to, songs you can dance to. Not
being radiohead released them from trying not to be radiohead. Although you
won’t dance to them, because the world is burning up, and the Palestinians don’t
have a country, and they are also tired of trying to cover up our brokenness. One
day this will end, here’s the evidence, and so may all beings be free from
suffering. Slippery devils. Slippery attention-seeking heart. You play any old
song and we sing. Good for getting up in the middle of the night, drinking cold
Darjeeling tea, looking in the mirror, and happily giving up.
3.
Orem Ambarchi – Shebang - The prolific (57 albums in 20 years) guitarist
is an Iraqi Jew from Australia. Of
course he is. His music is always “world
music” adjacent, with a serious helping of jazz. He’s also a primo percussionist, and this
record is all about the rhythms remembered, interjected, injected, hiding in
plain sight, and relentlessly pushing forward.
Occasionally devolving to barely a snare and bass waiting in the studio,
but always moving forward. The plinky
plink of drum and guitar and keyboard sometimes pretends to be gamelan
ethno-music study. But then there is free
jazz yoga time, stretching the time from metronome to guitar drones. Do I hear
a hint of In a Silent Way? Oh, wait, it’s Weather Report, or that fake
Weather Report Brand X, updated, but still running late at night in the souk to
score. All instrumental, with musicians like Jim O’Rouke and members of the
Australian jazz-fusion band The Necks stepping into improvisational spaces,
while Ambarchi keeps the pace, pushes forward with unyielding rhythm. Some of the “ambient” music that has dominated
my lists over the years has served well as background and also rewarded close
attention. This does that, in a “jazz
like” idiom. Armchair music that can best
heard with the attentive ear. The heart
welcomes the mind. Good for the caffeine
addict who sits Zazen, waiting for the mail; form is emptiness.
4.
Big Thief – Dragon New Warm Mountain I
Believe In You – I have been a huge Big Thief fan. To my ears, pushed to
the corner of old age and eccentricity, they almost single-handedly saved rock
and roll for me. No sub-genre, just rock
as critical life force, an alternative to belief and an antidote to ignorant consumption
and sleep. Sure, countrified, folky,
rootsy – but core-strengthening and plangent guitars, drums, and chord changes
that keep it smart and on task. And in
the revolutionary tradition (what can a poor boy do, but to play for a rock ‘n
roll band?) lyrics that pull apart the culture – and it’s 2022 not 1967, so
patriarchy, gender dysphoria, digital environments, and love in the ruins of
Late Stage Capitalism… all sung in that voice that could be the no-nonsense
daughter of Dolly Parton. That’s all
here; so why isn’t it #1 on my list (given how it is one of the year’s albums
most commonly found in “top five”?) It’s
too much, it’s 20 songs and 80 minutes and 2,374 brilliant ideas. Unlike past
Big Thief, for me, it started good and stayed good. Past Big Thief started good and became as
essential as oxygen after 5 listens. As
brilliant as this all is, it seems like a holding pattern. It’s as if there is
disaster just a step ahead – but this album (with lyrics carefully sung, the
sheet of poetry in front of her breaking voice) looks down, not forward. Good for a jumper on a ledge on the tenth
floor with a crowd below yelling “do it!!”
5.
Nilüfer Yanya – Painless – Easy on the
ears for sure; painlessly surprising innovative rock (a dirty dissonant guitar)
and roll (fun-sized bass guitar in every cut pretends to be trip hop but
in reality is John Entwhistle – these hooky, sing-along popular songs have real
syncopation). In rock ready for new
ears, listening for influences and roots is the standard game my old ears play. Yanya serves up hidden ancestors – behind
London-urbane XX-like sophistication lurks Kate Bush, XTC (they’re always
making plans for Nilüfer), Joy Division, The Go Gos and Turkish folk
dances. But whilst (a word she would
use) this is painless, easy-on-the-ears it’s also hardcore, serious,
disgruntled. The pace is urgent, the
chord changes major to minor, the songs short and to the point, the production
simple, spacious, and jammy. Head
banging for trippers; the precise trance you need in 2022. Good for young EU
backpackers staying up all night then dancing in the sunrise in Ben Nevis,
Patagonia or Cappadocia.
6.
Alabaster DePlume – Gold: Go Forward in the
Courage of Your Love – I’m not completely sure this is music, though its
attraction for me is wholly musical, not a cultural identity bomb. An old jazz classic by Oliver Nelson, Blues
and the Abstract Truth always had a mysterious and foggy sound
palette. Every time this plays I hear On
the Spectrum and the Abstract Truth (apparently there are some “differently
abled” musician in the collective, but that’s not what I mean). This is the alt-jazz, English crackpot
reincarnation of that atmospheric Oliver Nelson work. English jazz by a
musician/poet who didn’t touch a saxophone until his mid-20s. The jazzy
snippets (every cut seems unfinished, preliminary notes for something) are
jazzy enough – a sax’s timbre will not disappoint. But this is
eccentric: folk tunes, ska, art rock, Motown, AfroBeat, ambient distress, kids
at play, coalescing as spacey chamber music. 70 minutes of lovely noise always
just about to come together. Much of it was “played” for the first time when it
was recorded in a quasi-Marxist performance space in south London. But it’s more
than an acquired taste, even with the open mic poetry slam vibe. Good for the perp ready for redemption and completing
community service at the clinic.
7.
Angel Olson – Big Time – Occasionally I like
to sit in the middle of the afternoon eating salty corn chips. Sometimes I just really need a lap steel
guitar, with some clever Nashville Brill Building lyrics that trip you up with
a hard-won heart’s breaking and recovery, and then have it all delivered by a
voice that is harrowed by suffering. A
music with solidity. A music with no
frills. Angel Olson has aged her voice and
built it on a solid foundation (Lucinda Williams, Neko Case), not too vegan,
not too pick-up truck, just sweet and direct Lesbian U-Haul heartbreak. It’s produced with a clever and courteous rootsiness
(with the kind of shameless stripped down production that might have caused me to
be able to listen to Weyes Blood). But her
voice is low enough to fly under that radar, and, well, the lap steel is in
this voice’s DNA (as opposed to Joni Mitchell being painted on Weyes Blood’s
surfaces). Olson could take Mimi Parker’s
place in Low – it’s a voice that really is closer to Duluth, MN than Franklin,
TN. Or cover Cowboy Junkies. Or speak with pristine authenticity in the
fake decades we are living in. Good for
the Gen Xer, lying awake after midnight, thinking of all the loss, and being
grateful for the beauty of loss.
8.
Just Mustard – Heart Under - Heart
undertow of a Great Tide about to crash on what’s left of the world… under the
tow of the doom-like bass.. but wait, is this dream pop, or shoegaze, or… drums
and bass with noise hanging all over the two chords changing back and
forth. But what a glorious noise…
effects and over-driven guitars and the pretty voice fallen off the table there
in the background. This Irish group lets a lot space into the music (think XX’s
minimalist production), but then it opens the Gates of Doom to let the Hounds
of Hell… play with the buttons on the effects panel. War trumpets?
Great extinct woolly mammoths in heat calling to each other? A drunken
grad student from the University of Dublin swaying in the middle of the club,
falling down a K-hole. The horizons
might be clouded, but the center, not holding, falling into itself, is so sweet
(her lyrical voice) with a banging, hypnotic beat. It might be post-shoegaze,
or neo-shoegaze, but it surely is a product of this very moment – don’t let it pass
you by. Good for she who writes then
sends the breakup text that was inevitable.
9.
Svarte Greiner – Devolving Trust - The side project of Erik Skodvin, half of one
of my favorite ambient artists, Deaf Center (from Norway but stuck in
Berlin), this is what they call, I guess Dark Ambient, or what he calls “acoustic
doom.” I only know this because I’ve
studied more this year, I always just thought it was pretty. I thought it was
all just thunder clouds and rain over jagged mountains, the sunlight about to
shine through. Spa music: but I guess the spa is some alternate
universe of metallic/mechanistic whimpering and found sound distortions. But he (oh, those spongy Norwegians) keeps
such space, such panegyrics to the Last Silence, that it still sounds
revelatory. Yes the clips and cries of
movie-soundtrack anxiety might be kitsch or even dated: but, like Deaf Center,
this is the soundtrack of a New Race of sentient beings inviting you to take a
chance at the Top of the World – and I don’t mean contiguous to the Baltic Sea,
I mean the end of History. Quaint, comforting – the purifying dark energy given
to us, unmerited. Good for the advance
Scout tracking the proximity of Nothingness.
10.
Beth Orton – Weather Alive– I remember a book
I had to write an essay on in college, Neville Shute’s Round the Bend –
the topic, if it’s so good why isn’t it great.
The correct answer was it’s so good because it isn’t great. Ms Orton, mostly off the radar for a couple
decades, returns with music that is completely current and innovative and surprising
and absolutely what you might expect from her 90s alt-club music. The background is obscured by her melancholic
quivering voice. That background is
piano-based electro-acoustic jazzy ambient layers which could also be the long-lost
Radiohead of 2019. But then the vibrato-ancient-chanting
vocals are obscured by the too-cool-for-school chill room music. Things are getting cancelled out here. Sometimes playing close attention it sounds astonishingly
eccentric and attractive – Sade on acid.
Other times it just gets absorbed into the easy-listening cochlea cells in
soundtrack-land. Close attention gives
you a contact high of smart lyrics.
Letting it all fall into the background enhances its potency;
contractions. It’s so good precisely
because it isn’t great. Good for the OCD
divorcee making a gratitude list of small victories.
11.
IHVH – The Agnostic – This is much more
reflective of the kind of music that’s dominated my listening in recent years.
(This 2022 list has more “rock” and “song-oriented” albums than usual,
mysterious zeitgeist in the role of The Trickster). Shimmering atmospherics, long and seductive
electronic drones… melding into found sound droning, then electro-acoustic
droning. Muchos drones. Fragments that
get hung up as some kind question for the listener: the framing is Kabbalah,
Vedic, desert-fathers exploration of the nature of The Supreme Energy (IHVH the
non-name of The Name) yet it could also be a soundtrack for some atmospheric BMW
commercial. But hey, who’s to complain
about the creature comfort of a luxury German auto (though this music was
recorded in LA). Old school analog
synths wash away, leaving you at … violins and cellos? One half of the duo is a
violinist, so despite the sound fragments that sound like shoegaze, this is
really “classical” music, not just background ambience. Good for a pilgrim on a meditation retreat in
the Atlas Mountains, where they have high quality snacks.
12.
Rob Burger – Marching with Feathers – Burger
is a hack/Burger is not a hack. Composer
of film soundtracks and commercials and sideman/sound contributor to artists
from Bob Weir to Beth Orton to Lucinda Williams, here he throws a lot of short
compositions against the wall. They all
stick. Unlike many or most ambient
music, this presents radically different ideas from cut to cut. It’s almost like a mixed tape, or artist’s
portfolio showing the breadth and variety of his skills. It moves from solo
minimalist piano ala Satie, Eno circa Another Green World electronica, spa
background music, meditation-ready drones, simple and bittersweet world music acoustic
fragments left incomplete. This variety
is why it’s likely this is the album I played more than any other this year: it
was like a greatest hits of the year’s ambient styles. And letting it play over and over always
seemed to present something fresh, simple, easily digested. All from one
composer who plays all the parts, a hack among hacks. Swiss army knife of comfort. Siobhan has not kept
up with her journal entries, nothing in over a month, this music is good for
her to write through and past the dark night of the soul.
13.
Florist – Florist Wistful analog music dirtied with tape
loop distortions and almost plangent electronic distractions. sometimes
sounding like it could be made/recorded in a back yard. Windy, slo-core,
sandal-gazing. Emily Sprague’s voice is quiet, telling mundane life stories
with perhaps spirit-shattering consequences, or so it seems this is how she wants
us to hear her. Mostly she has that Big Thief trick of seeming to be sharing a
secret to you only, singing next to you on the couch. The folk songs carefully nestle into a
soundscape of tube-amp quiet guitar, also with acoustic open-mic night vibes, electronic
blips, a sax here and there – the clean sounds sliding around on sweet
noise/static; what was next to you on the couch is also outside on the
neighbor’s deck. Or stoop (they’re
Brooklyn, right?) Confessions can have a catchy melody. Smart and simple. Good for waiters-who-are-actors
who know they are getting too old to pretend failure isn’t an option.
14.
Alex G – God Save the Animals – You can’t
overstate the value of a great melody, asserted in arrangements and production
textures that, while highly musical, are not too sweet. A little loose
and unraveling. With a zeitgeist attuned to good coffee, the right pronouns,
and indie cred. I mean that could be Beck, right? Wait, this guy is who Beck should have become,
should still be! Sometimes the right vocal, a piano, and the right drums and
guitars, can sound like a soundtrack for a goofy and sad indie rom-com montage
sequence (and you get to actually tear up) in the dark theater of this
music. In fairness, his voice is less ironic than Beck. Mr Gianscolli from
Philly wants to make songs that touch your heart, not your funny bone. I’d also argue a lot of this music, while
dressed in DYI overalls, has ambitions it discloses slowly, only after multiple
listens. Like all great pop songs, these eventually become comforting friends –
there is craft beaucoup in the garage throwaways. Pavement unafraid of real emotion. Jeff Tweedy if he ever solved the ego
problem. I mean, I think he really does
think animals have the cosmic answer.
Good for the elementary school teacher snuggling on the sofa with the
new puppy… after edibles.
15.
Jana Horn – Optimism – Slight, feathery
folk music from a Texas poet with a full basket of ideas. But while her voice
is fragile and wavering and breaks like a glass heart, there is a strength of
personality in these songs that heralds a kind wisdom that is hard-earned,
hard-boiled, and full of salt\ tears. Sometimes, both voice and craft of
melody/lyrics, it sounds like the better outtakes of a Big Thief project, or
the younger sister of Angel Olsen, just released from rehab and ready to
reenter the world of humans. Listen
carefully, the breath tells as much as the phonemes, as good poetry should. Just enough, she is just enough, she’s just
found that out and wants to tell you.
Good for the single mom waiting for her therapist to get on Zoom.
16.
MJ Lenderman – Boat Songs - Cowgaze?
Countrygaze? I mean wasn’t that
Jason Molina or back further to N. Young and his underwater guitar? Wall of sound, fuzzy Fender reverb cranked up
to 11 and then played slowly, majestically.
Cornporn majestygaze. The thinnest vocals (though more Lowell George than
Young, or even a nasal croak of Paul Westerberg in a pick up truck) keeping the
country rock tradition alive: soap opera stories of drink, drugs, unemployment
and long lost love (if you can find it).
But with an appreciation for all the parts: the fragmentary smart-ass
lyrics, the not-so-hidden vulnerability, the deer-in-the-headlight wit, the
garage-bound production, the fresh-faced worn down innocence (not similar in
many ways, but this tracks back to Gram Parsons – Lenderman is confidently
moving into comic American music, oh, you meant Cosmic? Nevermind (that too)) –
this wants to cohere. Fragments of North
Carolina stoner life wants to be writ whole, on the bigger stage. Good for the Gen X lesbian washing her Subaru,
getting it ready for the next road trip to Big Sky country.
17.
Rosalia – Motomami – Boy, this is
the most difficult album for me to “place” in relationship to other music (which,
as it happens, is the exercise of this whole list I suppose). There are passages that are irresistible, the
most engaging and delightful music of the whole year. And then some passages (with state-of-the-art
trap/hip hop/club production) that sound like a Catalan Justin Bieber. The problem is that sometimes those are the
same passages. I mean Kendrick Lamar isn’t
on this list – because my radar doesn’t really bring in straight-no-chaser hip
hop. I’m old and blanched out by any
measure. But this Flamenco hip hop is just fucking irresistible. So, given the passion in this hybrid celebratory
music that’s timeless and its eccentric production touches, this could easily be
the best album of the year. And given
the vocoder pop clubworld touches that will not fit in my pocket ever, it
should be at the end of the list. So
here it floats, in the middle, though if there’s any music that isn’t in the
middle, it’s this. Good for the farmer
with all the tats in the mountains north of Barcelona, trimming the buds.
18.
Jerome Begin & David Friend – Post
- Begin is a “composer” and
electronic music performer, and while his harmonics and treatments amplify and
reframe Friend’s piano, this is a solo piano album by most measures. How much Friend is improvising and how much
it is composed is curious. Some of the
passages sound almost 12 tone – a serious, classical music back when classical
music was serious. Other passages are
just wild, atonal, dissonant noise – banging on the old ebony and ivory in a
Bang a Can way, can this guy even play?
But it’s that tension between what the piano can traditionally do, and
how much you can extend its sonic range and compositional impact. Like another solo pianist I’ve liked, Hauschka. Treated piano, John Cage, and Keith Jarret
all bundled up. Electronics notwithstanding,
this “ambient” work is both comforting and annoying. It requires attention to keep up with some
fierce keyboard playing. Good for the
grad student cramming for that math exam in trigonometric identities.
19.
Antti Tolvi – Spectral Organ/Feedback Gong - The Finnish artist encloses himself in an
old fourteenth century village church somewhere north of Helsinki. He plays around carefully, slowly, with the
stops of its ancient organ, and the result is a wide spectrum hum with woven
drones: the space opens up with what surely must be (in my aural imagination)
late autumn light through the stained-glass windows. On one level a single idea, on a deeper level
the microadjustments in the organ’s stops waver and bounce virtuous sound to all
corners of the church – it’s a rich banquet of almost one single sound that
changes constantly. It replicates that
sound sculpture in front of me, mobile and peaceful. Good for the hiker on the mountain in winter,
ducking into a skiing shelter for a bit of nap out of the cold air.
20.
Spiritualized – Everything Was Beautiful –
Jason Pierce has been producing the same album for over 30 years. It s a very good album. Witness: apparently
these are mostly outtakes, or started as outtakes, from their 2018 album. I think it’s better than 2018, which rather
than saying “he is in rut” demonstrates the shelf-life of a droning, poppy,
psychedelic, thumping two-chord music.
As always, it’s mixed so the pretty music (the soft tunes) or the
driving drones (the hard tunes) do not cover his vocals, with that
matter-of-fact Brit Pop earnest timbre and vibrato and appeal. He wants
words to matter. Every lyric is decipherable and bears attention: Mr Pierce is
sharing very intimate, hard-won truth.
Which is the odd presence of a real human in a many-layered music with
almost cosmic reach (that’s the psychedelic part). A mélange of melancholy and Kraut-rock truth
telling. May he never stop mining that
perfect drone. Good for the social worker with headphones on the long plane ride
to Auckland.
21.
Binker and Moses - When I first listened to this, it checked all
the boxes. It immediately registered as
“candidate for Music of the Year”, an odd instrumentation (sax and drums duo) and a London pedigree, the African
Diaspora rooted in Coltrane and Sanders developed in the chill comfort of
London clubworld (Shabaka Hutchings, Colin Stetson). And it is that, the sax; sometimes Coleman Hawkins,
sometimes Dexter Gordon, but never sounding anything other than right here
and right now. The drums more
free jazz, more tribal, than Max Roach. The
two instruments listen to each other, but have different roles in the sound;
and there are electronic blips and surges and BPM coding… it’s all exactly music
for now. But over the months it fell
down the list. It asserts a list of
great ideas… feeling improvised and fresh every time… but ultimately it wanted
a Bigger Idea. I think the electronics
took away some air that the Bigger Idea could have used. Good for the millennial
accountant walking down rainy summer streets after midnight in all the various
Sohos.
22.
Midori Takada – Cutting Branches for a
Temporary Shelter - My interest and collection of ambient/minimalist music is
amateur in intent and execution. I randomly find artists and their work on
various websites I “trust”, and then follow them or their associates through
the years. I rarely “dislike” a work found this way. Often, though, I am pointed to a “pioneer” of
genres I was embarrassed to discover I don’t know (just encountered her Through
the Looking Class – 1982 – a couple years ago). Takada is one of great, original innovators
in minimalist, world, ambient sounds; now in her 70s she releases this work,
based on a Zimbabwean folk melody first recorded in the 70s. She is on a marimba that she makes sound like
a thumb piano, and the lovely melody repeats hypnotically in incrementally
changed circles, until it morphs into a drum circle – first African, then
vaguely taiko. The marimba is played
with mallets she’s made herself out of yarn.
That about sums up the quirky comfort available here. Good for the empty-nest hip mother power-walking
with headphones on the San Juan Islands... in the fog.
23.
Caroline – Caroline – I am always curious
about music that is from a “collective” rather than a “band”, I mean that must
mean some kind of politico-cultural statement, right? Implying songs are
written by committee. And this London collective does put out music that seems
often agglomerated, fragments edited together, good ideas left unfinished. Half the songs sound like Low covered by
Fairport Convention. Or Low covering Fairport Convention. The “folk” here is odd, not freakish. And its roots are East Anglia, not Memphis. Indeed
it is almost more “pre-rock” than the “post-rock” it gets classified as. The virtue that keeps it from being precious
is a production that is both stripped down to minimalist ambient music while
having the brightly bowed violins and strumming acoustic guitars that could be
open mic night at a pub in a small college town. Like all good folk music there
is a melancholy running underneath everything.
Space, not soft, is the new loud. Good background music for the young
Danish girl writing that essay for the application to grad school.
24.
Cloakroom – Dissolution Wave – In the
year of Gaze, this band is… folkrockgaze?
Spacegaze? The guitars plunder and bulldoze and move like galaxies
exploding – the light rolling up millions of years after the event. Indeed, if you pay close attention to the
lyrics, the story is some cosmic wave that is dissolving everything resembling
life as we know it – but then, as pretty as the vocals are with their Laurel
Canyon harmonies, they are mixed back in the Cloud of Sound, why listen to the lyrics. The guitars/bass and base/simplifying drums
assert with slow and certain clarity about the beauty possible from destruction. I suppose some of these songs are so “accessible”
as “songs” (back to the 90s) that they might be dream pop, were not the guitars
just so very hard. Minimalist noise –
suggesting peace and destruction have the same blood. Rhythms, like seasons.
Simple as the harvest. Laurel Canyon (you
and your Crazy Horses) hiding in the dark recesses of an Indiana garage. Good for the college-dropout changing the oil.
25.
Maria Moles – For Leolanda – The
Melbourne-based electro-acoustic composer apparently used music and rhythm from
some indigenous tribes in the Philippines as inspiration for these
“roots-seeking”, quietly droning chill room compositions. Occasionally I do hear gamelan-like fugues (must
be an Australian thing), and the polyrhythms certainly drive this music to its
unique corners of the world music traditions.
Oceania – and there are ebbs and flows, tides and waves, this is water
music. But under it all are these clouds of synthesized sounds that keep the
barge afloat. More bliss than trance,
the minimal spaces before and after the drumming (bass drums, tabla-like
surface drums, gongs sinking in the ocean). Good for ethnomusicologists on
mollie.
26.
Kalia Vendever – Regrowth – Certainly the
closest to “classic jazz” on the list – usually I listen and “allow” for jazz
to arrive here through all the subreddits and cross pollinations of jazz in
this century: London, Berlin, and Oslo: (chill, electronica, tribal) cut in line in
front of Chicago, for example. But this is
American jazz standing on the shoulder of giants: although its composed and led
by a young woman trombonist from the hipper enclaves of Brooklyn. And the throaty trombone does sometimes sound
like alt-jazz deviants like Sons of Kemet, but the compositions and the
instrumentation is more Pharoah Sanders than Ibiza. The arrangements are often
soft, cool and, invoke a time past, no longer possible: elegant. The music sets a figure, repeats it,
meditative and urgent. Although fresh
and green, these are heavily composed.
She, her musicians, and the music are all alumni of Julliard. Good for
the young dakini facing the mirror, recognition and breath sweetly fogging the
mirror.
27.
Vieux Farka Toure and Khruangbin – Ali -
Occasionally Mark Speer’s guitar does seem perfectly African, finally finding
its origin and place in the universe after all the years of wandering around in
Khruangbin’s melange of cumbia, ambient cruising, jam-band-adjacent noodling,
and Texas psychedelia. Could be classic
if cooled down Afro-pop circa King Sunny Ade or Toure’s dad. Toure’s voice absolutely anchor’s this world
music in a specific continent, or even more specifically, Mali. But while the
guitar demonstrates its African roots amply complement the vocal calls and
responses, the bass and drum create a trance more likely found in Havana or
Oslo than Lagos. Every now and then you
can almost hear a late 60s hippie blues riff (I could have sworn I heard a
harmonica, but no), or a slow jam cruise down Whittier Blvd. But those are
undercurrents – this raft drifts down the Niger. The sum isn’t more than its parts, but it is
enough. Good for the weary traveler’s
ear buds on the long flight from Houston to the Seychelles.
28.
Laura Cannell – The Antiphony of Trees The UK-based ambient composer (violin,
recorder, electronics) has had a historical tendency to look to British folk or
early music/medieval sources for inspiration.
You can certainly hear that in this work which, with only her recorder
(multi-tracked, but pretty simply recorded without effects). Apparently she went out to the forests of
Norfolk to capture bird calls and then replicates their song here with her
recorder(s). But I hear more massage spa
music than Messiaen – given that the spa might be in an isolated valley in 13th
century Norway. In the end this is quiet and quieting music. Good for both birds and birdwatchers on Zen
retreats.
29.
Grivo – Omit – In all the substrata of super
slow, guitar-based, super heavy music (which I will sometimes gravitate to:
Low, Mogwai, Sunn O))), Earth, Swans) and in all the intersections of noise
rock, electronic/ambient noise, I find some music just calming and pretty. “Doom” is often layered on the descriptions
of a lot of these bands I like, but that term is much too self-cherishing and fancy
for much of it. I do like the great
shards of guitar sound (e.g. Sigur Ros) that sometimes sounds/feels like civilization
crumbling in some great cataclysm. In
this year of a resurgence (in at the least my auditory territory, if not proved
by the data of releases and sales) of “shoegaze” and all its permutations:
doomgaze, blackgaze, cowgaze, zgengaze – Grivo is pretty much down the “middle-gaze”…
indeed they pull out of their pockets the loud/soft of a lot of the original
90s bands, the cloudy vocals, the melodic if tectonic chord changes. Maybe something about the water in Austin
makes some of their hard rock bands so easy listening. Good for baristas fixing that latte just
right.
30.
Shabaka – Afrikan Culture – A musician
who continues to produce volumes of music every year, landing in different
places but sourced always from his cosmic take on the African diaspora. The tale isn’t told, but he may well wind up
one of the watershed musicians of the first half of the 21st
century. He can’t stop, he can’t be
stopped, and his ideas are both ancient, rootsy, and futuristic and political
and reverent and flowering. This year he said good-bye to the thumping Sons of
Kemet, and another incarnation, The Comet is Coming, put out a club-ready, drug-ready,
high energy album of defining Euro-Jazz (and it could/should be on this
list). But here he trades in sax for
flutes, Ibiza clubs for Zen studios in South Africa, Elvin Jones drum kits for
djembes and only expands his reach… into the psyche while not losing the brain
(Afrofuturism) or body (movement). Like
all great jazz, he was always taking the listener (running, trudging, marching,
dancing) to the Spirit. Here, he invites
the listener to sit in that Spirit and breathe for bit. Good for me sitting on the meditation
cushion… anywhere, anywhere at all.
31.
Paul Giger – ars moriendi – The Swiss
violinist has a great ECM CV – with jazz and classical and experimental all
flowing from his strings. Even a klezmer or middle eastern or an India raga
flavor spices up his slow burn fiddling.
This music is about life and (especially) death. The Art of Dying accomplished by living fully
and with wise acceptance that all passes away.
Both his own compositions and then several Bach pieces at the end, are
intended to show the ebb and flow of life… with the ebb being especially
present. Nothing is as present as
nothing; life is only intensified by embracing death. Good for grad students at
Technische Universität München with depressive tendencies.
32.
Lucrecia Dalt - Ay! – She’s accomplished
an interesting mélange: whilst using very traditional, even archaic “latin”
music forms and tropes, she’s pulled it all apart and made it sound rare and
fresh. Yet while it’s electronic and
club ready (albeit back in the chill room at 6:00am, not on the main floor), it
remains intact, organic in its genres… this isn’t noise-artist deconstruction,
it’s calm and rhythmic and smart in ways that hypnotize. This isn’t postmodern, rather it reverts to
“modern” and reclaims bolero-like beauty without a touch of irony. Apparently
there is some thread of story about a future and visits from aliens –
irrelevant to appreciating it and I saw an upper-class tea dance in Buenos
Aires more than a Spielberg vision of Alpha-Centauri. And those cool cookies dancing in that club
might be AI after all, but that reduces none of the elegance. Latin music that
is essential, easy-listening, and challenging, all at once. Good for a best friend waiting outside an
intensive care unit in Medellin.
33.
Horse Girl – Versions of Modern Performance
– Nineteen year girl amps up her game to deliver stadium-ready guitar rock,
with its Indie Credentials fully apparent on its sleeve (black t-shirt) and
sleeve (CD art). What a rich love of raw
guitar! What a reminder that Chicago is a
pretty hip scene. Voice, chords,
instruments, roots, space in the production; all in the right DIY place. Time will tell, but this is a perfectly
surprising debut and its best quality is that is might well fall apart
before the sophomore year, let alone the sophomore album. Sliced off the punkish side of Pavement, and
the vintage amp ruminations of the Pixies.
Both bands who aged out of competition long before she was born. Good
for the young ingenue with head bandages, not head banging.
34.
Black Country, New Road – Ants from Up There
– Ok, I get it, I really do. The progenitors of this music are all my
heroes (Bowie, Nick Cave, Prefab Sprout, Dylan… Thomas, not Zimmerman). And so many critics whose outlooks I share
praise them so highly. But there is some
youthful anxiety in the music (not just in his voice, in the song structures,
instrumentation, varied tonalities) that circles down the drain for me. The yearning of a Generation for better life
(in Berlin or Bath)? The emergence of a
wounded Ego from the shadow of modern life to the bright fields of Rock and
Roll? “Oh love, you’re not alone…” And
kudos to the boy and the band: they’ve earned their Top of the Pops status. But I hear a certain… baroque? overworked?...
quality in this performed self-cherishing.
Too often they sound like Bryan Ferry covering Arcade Fire, or Arcade
Fire covering Ian Hunter. I guess I’m
just too old to wait, to allow the Project to get stuck. Too old to muddle. All I know, and need to
know, is that truth is beauty and equanimity. Good for the unemployed coder leaving the
therapist, walking to his car in the rain, and walking right into that puddle…right
into it.
35.
Arcade Fire – We – This sounded so lovely
and celebratory the first two listenings! Welcome back! Oh holy anthems!! Oh bang the drum not so
slowly!! Then it got put in the glove
compartment, never to be heard again.
Good for detailing your car.
36.
Duster – Together – Original slo-core
progenitor from San Jose resurfaced a while ago and put out their first (hizzy,
garage-recorded, cassette-ready) music in a couple decades. Music this stripped
away doesn’t age much; I suppose there is more clangy grungey fresh doom than
head-banging space rock – but it’s still relentlessly slo and the valium-fueled
vocals season the sludge quite nicely. Sometimes sounding like an outtake from
a Low album, the vocals seem, eh, earnest?
The last song is “Feel No Joy”, but they can’t help from creating a
thick, satisfying layer of noise that, on its own late-in-the-game terms,
sounds pretty joyful-adjacent. Phew, who’d a thunk we’d survive this long? The ever-generative
miracle of the right junk guitar, the right pickups, the right amp, and the right…
what? Oh, sorry, we forget. Ask that other guy. Good for your old cousin waiting
for another blood test at the Kaiser lab with headphones on.
37.
Launder – Happening – Atmospheric:
check. Epic fuzz tones: check. Trance:
check. Melodic: umm… is it supposed to be this melodic? Yes? Ok, check.
Clearly this guy, and his band, was a dedicated student of 90s rock, and
in the shoe-gaze revival should receive just desserts, if not deserts (knowing
he grew up in beachy Orange County does color how I hear this,
unjustifiably). I can hear Mermen and surf
movie soundtrack as much as North Midland head banging. While there is Slowdive
all over this, the vocals and melodies and production also reference NIN, and,
jeez, Goo Goo Dolls. It’s totally unfair
simply to do the “this sounds like that” game with him, but it’s his fault. But
let the glorious rumble continue; may the student always honor his teachers.
Good for your older cousin volunteering to paint your bedroom, and he paints
with the music really loud.
38.
Phoenix – Alpha Zulu – Although there is
a higher percentage of recognizable “rock” music on the list than in many years,
there is virtually nothing that could be characterized as pop music (except maybe
Rosalia): this French rock band makes dance-floor workouts (at home in Ibiza or
Oslo or Bogota or a University of Texas frat) with some really clever lyrics
that’ll match with a melody to imprint victoriously and stay in the higher rent
neighborhoods of your brain all day. I think some of this formula was
“retro-ironic” when they started a couple decades ago (much of the tunes could
be an MTV video, circa 1986). But like those Scandinavian deep-state students
of “rock-pop” who produce replicas that outshine their originals, Mr Mars (a
wicked lyricist for second language English
speaker – “keep the lights on, I’ll flash to the bygones”) and his crew make
music that is irresistible, improving on all the indie-pop they emulate. Good for a dinner party of younger academics
where Jen from the Spanish Dept will be the only one to actually dance.
39.
Alvvays – Blue Rev – A plethora of large
and fuzzy guitars, chiming guitars, this the year of shoegaze revival;
so many pointing to this, high on year end lists as carrying the shoegaze
banner, but like Beach House, this seems more dreamy Big Pop than the grunge-thick-dark
shoegaze of my affections. No question
that the guitars promise to overwhelm in all the desired ways, but I think it’s
her voice. It’s a good voice, emotive,
self-aware, flexible and smart. But it
is dream-like floating on the big train of a band that needs no excuse for its
excesses. This charts very high for many
whose tastes I share, but it sinks into some “pretty” corner for me, gathering
dust. Good for your other older cousin who-drives-up-the-coast
seeking dreams not hikes, ever since the operation.
40.
Mary Halvorson -Belladona – Perhaps one
of the closest to “serious [classical] music” on this list. String quartet
playing things that are 12-tone adjacent, cerebral, Hindemuth-not-Phllip Glass,
i.e. serious compositions… illuminating, provoking, satisfying on their
own terms. But wait, there is an
electric guitar braiding its voice through these chamber pieces. So we get this
odd soundtrack for chamber recital in Prague in 1958 crossed with loft-Jazz
from Greenwich Village in the late 70s, which winds up sounding like Ryuichi
Sakamoto in 2012. Unclassifiable and intellectually, not just satisfying, but
nourishing. Good for your older cousin
editing a film while drinking macha, his mom happy he got a job at last.
And lots of other music that was great and
didn’t make my Top 40 even though I used to review/list 50 or even 100 but now time
has a horizon and I ask to be blessed to remember not to waste this One and Precsious
Life, rare as an Udumbara flower.
