Best Music 2019

Top 50 Music Picks for 2019 (50^th 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.

Best Music 2018

"Because it is not what you are nor what you have been that God looks at with his merciful eyes, but what you desire to be."

1. Nils Frahm – All Melodysn
2. Park Jiha – Communion
3. Amen Dunes - Freedom
4. Olafur Arnalds – re:member
5. Bruce Brubaker - Codex
6. Jim O’Rourke – Sleep Like It’s Wintersnai
7. Low – Double Negative
8. Michael Pisaro – A Mist is a Collection of Points
9. Car Seat Headrest – Twin Fantasy
10. Yves Tumor – Safe in the Hands of Love
11. Snail Mail - Lush
12. Jakob Ullmann - Muntzers Stern Solo II
13. Ice Age - Beyondless
14. Kamasi Washington – Heaven and Earth
15. Big Red Machine – Big Red Machine
16. Gas – Rausch
17. Makaya McCraven – Universal Beings
18. Nik Bärtsch’s Ronin – Awase
19. Goldmund - Occasus
20. Dedekind Cut - Tahoe
21. The Necks – Body (Northern Spy)
22. Non Standard Institute – 5863
23. Steve Tibbetts – Life Of
24. Nils Økland - Lysning
25. Spiritualized – And Nothing Hurt
26. Eli Keszler - Stadium
27. Jon Hassell – Listening to Pictures
28. Niklas Paschburg – Oceanic
29. Clarise Jensen – From This From That Will Be Filled
30. Steve Hauschildt - Dissolvi
31. Tim Hecker – Konoyo
32. Masayoshi Fujita - Stories
33. Cavern of Anti-Matter – Hormone Lemonade
34. Sons of Kemet – Your Queen is a Reptile
35. Magos Herrera and Brooklyn Rider – Dreamers
36. Yo La Tengo – There’s a Riot Going On
37. US Girls – A Poem Unlimited
38. Let’s Eat Grandma – I’m All Ears
39. Kacey Musgraves – Gold Hour
40. Superchunk – What a Time to Be Alive
41. John Hiatt – The Eclipse Sessions
42. Blood Orange – Negro Swan
43. Father John Misty – God’s Favorite Customer

Best Music 2013

Best Music of 2013

Perhaps the Warrior’s Dilemma is not that there is no war, but rather that there is only war.  For after all (and after part) “He can certainly be loved, but not thought. He can be taken and held by love but not by thought.” 

 

1.       Justin Walter – Lullabies & Nightmares

Tribal and roughed out electronically filtered sounds from analog sources that devolve into ambient bliss and eventually get to the point:  Walter’s yearning and thoughtful trumpet lines amplified and framed by a magical forest of blips, and drones, and squawks.  Centered between cool and minimal Euro jazz and Chicago free form (Anthony Braxton?), this is original music, expanding the limits of what any of its source genres do.  Warmth where there is expected frost; chill where there potential chaos.  Beats that reemerge at precisely the right moment.  Composed music for blurring the lines and finding a New Land.  A compass.

 

2.       Mark Koselek  & Jimmy Lavalle – Perils from the Sea 

Koselek continues to develop his treacly narratives of the mundane details and solipsistic confusion of the sensitive troubadour.  In this next chapter of life in the Bay Area – melancholy and stoned – we hear stories of tools in the garage, lonely concert tours in Scandinavia, boxing on the TV, airplanes, cancer and fatal car accidents ,absent fathers, dogs scratched behind ear,Thanksgiving in Orange County and undocumented immigrants.  As his songs, relentless couplets hitting the ears like waves on a breakwater, dissolve into cut-and-paste from his Outlook calendar, the winsome and raspy baritone begins to wear very thin.  He is more whiner or confessional poet than folk singer by this point (the morbid fixations so inward looking).  He aims for the recognizable commonplace to convey transcendence (the dirge, the minor chord, the shimmering image).    It’s an acquired taste that suckers me in over and over again.  His project may continue to slip into terminal self-service and fern-bar open-mike kindliness.  But here the wheels are greased by the saving graces of Lavalle’s friendly electronics, which emphasize the sweet melodies and keep the confessions not so horribly egocentric.  Lavelle’s contributions are the bell that saves, and helps this to be my favorite of the year.  The last song’s lyrics document the wonder of all life’s perils of our dying-animal selves, recognized from an airplane drifting high above the East Bay floating into SFO, the sunlight on the bay and heart-sickness of feeling too much opening up the first wound.  A mirror.

 

3.       The National –Trouble Will Find Me

God, this is boring music.  Melancholy, trenchant, whining, mature, depressive, insightful, posturing, gloriously boring alt-countryish paeans to the struggle of adult life.  Continued reverb atmospherics (equal Cure and My Morning Jacket’s approximated space).   Lyrics that are overworked to their simplicity, but how many on the list have any memorable lyrics at all?  This has more 80’s beats than their last couple, and so most of these songs wind up being foot-tapping hook-laden fern bar micro-brew soundtracks.  But somebody’s gotta do this music.  Ain’t there one damn song that can make me break down cry?  Apparently not, but here in their waiting room of mid-life, it’s nice to have the comfort of at least the footnotes of heartbreak.  A chilly bottle of Blind Tiger Ale and a restraining order.

 

4.       Charles Lloyd and Jason Moran -  Hagar’s Song

His timbre still fresh and warm 50 years later, this is the real deal.  Showing that “the tradition” is best known when played by “the tradition.”  And it’s not that Lloyd’s rich sax sounds just like he did in the 70’s, 80’s or the gazillion ECM products since, rather his tradition is that every solo is a thoughtful (no, “mindful”, because this is, at its base, a spiritual music) exploration of the moment and its possibilities now.  In that sense it’s beatnik music- saluting all our becoming buddhanesses Daddy-0.  I prefer Moran to chug along under Lloyd rather than strike out on his own – there is a cocktail lounge danger in his facile chording (especially with the familiar starting lines of covers). Something powerful and sweet about a man well in his 70’s phrasing “any day now.” Again, great art always savages the mystery of mortality, and make no mistake, this great art.  Two fingers of Glenfiddich, no chaser.

 

5.       Junip-Junip

The slight psychedelic instrumentation and arrangements, the somber and unremittingly humorless vocals, and the syncopation that chugs along no matter how morose Gonzalez sounds – all these support the curious outcome of music that is both facile-easy listening, catchy, poppy and genuinely intense.  Sounding like no other band (as familiar as the tunes are, and the hooks and choruses immediately seem familiar, I am lost to their progenitors) the Swedes calmly worm their into your regard from the first nylon-string

 

6.       Heirlooms of August – Down at the 5-Star

The Red House Painters/Sun Kil Moon bassist offers elegant string quartets and rich pedal steel and tear-stained countrified vocals singing sweetly of black tar heroin and guns and Darjeeling tea (the Koselek gift and disease).  Sophisticated Americana for those living the hip life in Williamsburg… VA.  (Although in truth this is more likely a house-concert, garden party in Atherton, than any place with real rednecks).  A GPS.

 

7.       Bill Frissell – Big Sur

Song cycles/tone poems/evocations of place are problematic and often highly subjective.  But Frissel’s strength and limitation for me has always been the cheery lack of subjectivity.  The point of view waffles in the plein air and floats with any current.  But this music (some original, some covers, some surf-guitar rock out) does seem Ventana prone.  Far from wind chimes and sitars, there is a timeless lassitude of the sun, trees, shadows and microclimates of the central coast.  Ambling arrangements that take their jazzy time.  A dash of intensity that breaks and recedes like tide.  The languid fiddle, roomy drumming  and other instrumentation connect Big Sur more to the west of Ireland than the native American west.  A bundle of white sage.

 

8.       Lars Danielson – Libretto

Gentle figures of vaguely middle eastern flavors from the Turkish pianist who plays over the solid jazz bass lyricism of Danielson.  And the emptying Scandinavian cool jazz of Arve Hendrikson’s trumpet – clearing out space. A train schedule.

 

9.       Jay Farrar – Honky Tonk

Curated Bakersfield-sound tribute album, with a classicism framing the swing and sway of the salt of the earth.  The poetry of what’s not remembered.  The steel guitar and fiddle waltzing up the Kern River.  Time to drink up and go home, there’s church tomorrow and your ex-wife made you promise to hide the dope before the kids come to visit you and Suze.  Wisdom and respect, and since it’s Farrar, not a touch of irony nor humor.  Can’t make country music better than this.  A union card.

 

10.   How to Destroy Angels – Oblivion

This is many things in not the usual order.  Electronic rumbles and drones, dance beats and hip-hoppy momentum.  Sweet euro-girl melodies – week on Mikonos stuff.  But the whole is much more engrossing than those parts.  Yeah, yeah, Reznor and post-industrial blah blah blah.  But the unfinished quality of most of the composition, and the dirty-clean sound, thrown at the wall to see what sticks, means he’s matured and the sonic disjointed modern experience can surprise, even for the more mature.  A subscription to AARP.

 

11.   My  Bloody Valentine

Great hopes for the “great murkiness” to return in all is power, but this evaporated before that last song… and even in this nebbish product-placement, they made this and it still pulls at the raveling strings of my heart.  A therapist’s business card.

 

12.   Oenehontrix Point Never –R Plus Seven

So of his sonic trickster schtick seems a little old, and not in the “old” way he might want.  40% sounds like a Vangelis record that is skipping (not surprising that he’s gone to soundtracks).  I liked Replica, but this reminds me I really didn’t like Vangelis.  Yeah, there’s a lot of perky visuals here (remember all those odd eastern European cartoons that would win “best animated” Oscars?).  A broom.

 

13.   Giovanni Guidi Trio – City of Broken Dreams

Starkly beautiful jazz piano breaking rhythms while breaking melodies while breaking hearts.  Deceptively listenable, because in his intentionally quiet and simple phrasing he’s pushing some limits, and unintentional elegance (think early Keith Jarrett), he (they – Morgan the bassist is now the ECM go-to session bassist, and is the perfect foil for music than is/and isn’t “in the tradition) make luminous the very idea of jazz.  A flashlight.

 

14.   Califone – Stitches

Another solid outing by the great band that is ignored by most.  Americana/Freak folk that falls apart in fragments rather than is meta-made or deconstructed. Stitches indeed.  And this is as fragmented as any they’ve made, even as all the production tricks (acoustic technology, and technology hollowed out in lo fi and homemade recording) sort of settle in their expected place now rather than rile up or instigate.   Earnest and yearning rasp by Riuli that quite actually completes anything, but seems to imply it would preach if it could.  A scrapbook from your dead uncle’s keepsakes.

 

15.   Julia Holter – Loud City Song

The post-millennial Laurie Anderson fabricates nerdy ditties, with plenty of non-digital soundscapes strewn about the cool studio.

 

16.   Goldfrapp

A continental drift of winsome and melancholy songs, filled to all corners of its “ambient” space with “voice” trending more to Claudine Longet  or going further back, Sylvie Vartan, than the Cocteau Twins.  No, not winsome, wistful.  Tender music, with “putting you on hold” rhythms.  Your love is very important to us.  Break your heart at the sound of the tone.

 

17.   Arcade Fire – Reflector

I know I supposed to hate this, pivoting to dance music a la Talking Heads and not having any other place to go, and building tension from more traditional pop strategies rather than “artist collective” drivenness.   But you know Butler’s voice (and lovely vocal stylings) are a good meaure against David Byrne.  And what the hell some of the songs have a bass line that is more Brother’s Johnson than club. 

 

18.   Surfer Blood

Music like this (airy, pop melodies, and few retro-indie guitar washes, simple drumming, oh oh oh choruses) isn’t very geisty for zeit.  A fuzz tone here, and missed beat there…  refreshingly lo-fi without an ironic attempt to be lo-fi.  Happy soundtrack for a film that wouldn’t have a chance in hell of getting funding these days.

 

19.   Darkside- Psychic

Music from an abandoned ghost ship, floating among fatal icebergs north of the arctic sea.  Chamber music if those chambers are huge and cool.  Washes of chilly electronic noise, humanized by static and acoustic instrumentation.  The child of Pink Floyd and Eno, somewhere under the numbness of the top layers is a melodic intention to rock.

 

20.   Forest Swords

Friendly and lazy music – dub, reggae, and club nuggets sprinkled through a new agey mélange of acoustically referenced treated sounds.  Easy listening in a thoughtful way, too chillwave to survive on a massage table, too rhythmic and fragmented to meditate with, but a nice pathway to simi-asian occult commercialist head hanging.  Euro glitch and ex-pat soul chorus.  Hmm, a gong?

 

21.   Julia Hulsmann Quartet  In Full View

So the blue note, right?  Jazz in the classic mode where a theme is introduced, and while there is improvisation and rhythmic interplay of drums, bass (remember this is “classic”) and a Hubbardesque horn and Hulsmann’s careful but insistent piano chording and tinkling, pushing things forward, the blue note defines.   And then Miles introduced the blue empty space.  All these Europeans aren’t really angry enough to move to post-bop, or electronic shredding, and instead mine the blue space with total confidence there is something still there.  All the relentless ECM/Eicher releases map out that space – where heart and brain help each other disappear.  This is classic without quotes.  This is the sound of a gloriously stated nothingness – but the rain is on le boulevard.  An umbrella.

 

22.   Zomes

Question Mark and the Mysterians covering Fairport Convention with a dash of Cocteau Twins.  Rich and intentional droning with a minimalist Germanic detachment (and the woman vocalist sometimes sounds like Nico), and the choices of timbre are so farfisa-on-Jupiter that there is joke lurking in the cloudy pensive pop figures.  Romantic and silly and slow.  A cooking spoon.

 

23.   Boards of Canada

Maybe their best.  Opens with a movie credits fanfare, and the whole piece seems like samples of movie soundtrack atmospherics with washes of sound and train track pace.  Although a dance and hip hoppy rhythm implied here and there, the synths and compositional shape seem  very retro.  Half the tracks sound like something off the great lost Tangerine Dream LP.  A touch more laughter and this could be really cheese,  but the spacious and gracious pulling back to buttress the (unseen) cinema achieves a beauty that is timeless in part because it sound old.  A cup of ayahuasco.

 

24.   Ketil Bjornstadt  La Notte

While it’s a Eurojazz suite inspired by Michelangelo Anotonioni, its roots are in the stark and wide shots of his cinematic language, not any Mediterranean and political thinking of the director.  Languid and long melodic lines (even in the loping propulsion of Arnildsen’s powerful bassand Andy Sheppard’s anxious hunger-mongering sax) patiently building with arctic circle melancholy.  Jazz from  the continent and its above that doesn’t work the blue note cool, rather the western composition tradition.   A cup of hot chocolate, slightly bitter.

 

25.   For Now I am Winter Olafur Arnalds

In the neo-classical ambient school of Johann Johannsson and Max Richter, but there is something, not darker, but more regretful and mysterious in Arnalds’ very somber compositions.  Although not as piercingly odd as his beautiful 2010 And They Have Escaped the Weight of Darkness, there is a maturity, even a gravity that makes this seem more serious than the “soundtrack” affect that most of this genre has.  The guest vocals give it a song-cycle shape, with the theme, after a couple listens, seared into the consciousness.  And while there is a wintry quality, this is to Bon Iver what Mahler is to a Muzak. This should be first on my list; I listened to it twice as much as anything else this year.  I listened not because I heard something new each time, but rather I heard precisely the same thing each time.  A solid rooting into a not-unpleasant detached and polite melancholy.  Like clockwork.  A smooth pebble from the shore near Reykjavik.  

 

26.   The Haxan Cloak - Excavation

Not all drones are equal.  You’ve got your fog-drone, your industro-drone, your South Asian-drone, your New Age drone, your death metal drone, and your acid-trip-on-Stinson-Beach drone, to name just a few.  Haxan Cloak have all of these in small doses, but for the most part sound like a mothership from the Empire (Asimov, not Lucas) coming into frame.  All heavily seasoned by ghost fragments of the tortured or the emptied souls wandering for eternity in deep space. Yet somehow the sum of these parts is astonishingly serene music, making “ominous” a color of salvation.  I resist the notion that this is headphones at skunk hour music – a comfortable buzzing drone with mechanistic and ritualistic setting, is good for driving, yoga, house cleaning or prayer.  Less exhumation, and if not more exaltation, enough  exhalation for the day.  A flashlight.

 

27.   Surfer Blood – Pythons

Simple and quaint alt-rock (college stations would play this in 1992) that makes a range of influences work.  Periodic neo-punk screaming, sweet pop vocals, chunks of power chords, and lo-fi jangle.  A touch of reverb, and muddy-by-intention mixes.  All kinda reminding of the throwaway grandeur of the Pixies.  A lighter.

 

28.   San Fermin – San Fermin

The clever ivy-league burnished compositional art-pop notwithstanding (the connections to Sufjan Stevens are manifold), there is an urgency in these grooves.  A baritone sax with Morphine-like grit, a string ensemble forcing the issue, the male vocals like Nick Cave and the female vocals like Sylvie Vartan and the ye-ye chorus.  A wide horizon of soundscapes – serious music for the impatient and doubtful.  A copy of the New Yorker.

 

29.   James Plotkin  and Paal Nilssenn-Love –Death Rattle

Although called “free jazz”,  through my other-wised trained ears this sounds like acoustic, real time production of what a lot of processed, drone, (insert genre here) electronic music is.  Angry by turns, then cerebral, then atavistic, then simply making a glorious noise to some God that no longer is there.  The scandanavian drummer Elvin Jonesing in a real room, while Plotkin’s guitar rumbles and screeches with Jimmy Page timbre circumnavigating a leftover darkness.  A pipe.

 

30.   Kuniko – Cantus

A windchime a block away suddenly develops a melody and rhythm that roughly sounds like it’s Steve Reich – or Arvo Paart – minimalist and tubular, bittersweet and thoughtful.  Japanese virtuoso makes the marimba sound like Aeolian harp catching the late 20^th century’s westwind. Though more outside summer concert than Shelley’s revolution.  A bookmark.

 

31.   The Dowland Project /John Potter – Night Sessions

Pensive, challenging and hypnotic hybrid.  Medieval fragments and full compositions washed in a jazz idiom of rubato and an occasional blue note.  I would imagine that the musicians of the 13th century weren’t that studious and would have been intrigued by a tenor sax syncopating the chants.  Potter’s careful tenor holds the many parts together – it never feels cluttered or forced, rather like open stone spaces, in whatever century.  Turns out the shared space of medieval and jazz sounds middle eastern.  A twig of burning juniper.

 

32.   Friedman & Liebezeit – Secret Rhythms 5

The drummer from Can (still alive) chases the dragon through a hippie drum circle jamming in an austere laboratory in Cologne.  Lots of metal and clang, cowbell and old school synth, and an occasional jazz guitar.  Funny, if Can were still together, I guess this is what they would sound like.  Each cut is short yet has the feel of an hour-long jam, improvisational and cold-sweaty.  A tab of purple ohm.

 

33.   Dean Blunt – The Redeemer

Odd music – heavily orchestrated (lush strings), alternative pop, found soundscapes, with an urgent narcotized R&B folkrock vocal singing lyrics of angst, poison, and hope. Artrock song psychos.  Pretentious in all five senses, and although pretention scores well with me, this is far less than the sum of  its parts.  A rosary with a cooking spoon.

 

34.   Autechre –Exai

The great blip, buzz, clip and clack continues – electronics from another star system (and let the volume cause the base tones to wedge nails out of boards and hair follicles to rejuvenate).  Two CDs of interstellar church music – with perhaps a bit more of a solemn cadence than their previous 10 releases.  I think this is better than most of the previous, but it also matters not at all.  Rumbling off in the global climate change sunset.  A pea shooter.

 

35.   Heirlooms of August – Down at the 5-star

If there is a genre trad-country, new-age, drug music… this is it.  Lovely pedal steel guitar figures backing ephemeral, tentative vocals (duets), seemingly wistful for a simple past, but whose melancholy opens up in the yawning great Darkness at the base of common-peoples lives.  Maybe that as always the thread in country music… maybe it’s just some weird hybrid of modern displacement.  Whatever, dude, the beauty of this music chills and astonishes and gets blown away quickly.  A yearbook with forgotten inscriptions on the photos of kids, some now dead.

 

36.   French Films – White Orchid

37.   Life Coach – Alpha Waves

38.   John – Wizards

39.   Atoms for Peace - AMOK

40.   Volcano Choir – Repave

41.   Konstellaatio – Konstellaatio

42.   Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds – Push the Sky Away

43.   Washed Out – Paracosm

44.   Dirty Beaches – Drifters

45.   Yo La Tengo – Fade

46.   The Field – Cupid’s Head

47.   Deathaven – Sunbather

48.   Aidan Baker – BBS

49.   Bibio – Silver/Wilkenson

50.   Phoenix – Bankrupt