Music/ 2023
My annual round up of music.
I almost didn’t make a post here, since I listened to very little new music this year, but I always tell my students that they can use their failures (of imagination, of nerve, of research) as fodder for writing, so I’m trying to do the same. In the absence of anything satisfying or staying that came out recently, I listened to these older records instead, some of them fairly obsessively.
Toad the Wet Sprocket
Dulcinea (1994)
Apart from their radio singles in the 90’s I never got into Toad. My brother did a bit, and I always kind of thought of them as one of his bands (we overlapped significantly, but each had a couple that were just ours). I don’t remember why I turned this on early in 2023, but I did and was caught immediately. I’ve played in every couple of weeks since January. It’s rare that I missed a significant album from the 90’s, having had my finger directly on the musical pulse of that time, but I’m glad to be making up for this one now.
The Violet Burning
S/T (1996)
Here’s another one I sort-of listened to in the 90’s, but I think I never had a copy of the CD, and this was during the time when such things were prohibitive. They were certainly part of my scene, but I never quite caught on. This band is edgy like crazy, and dark, but also huge; not anthemic, but storm-like. Had I paid more attention then, this would’ve been one of my favorite records ever. Now, I hear it tinged with a bit of regret.
Bon Voyage
The Right Amount (2002)
I’m a sucker for Bon Voyage, as I am generally for Martin brothers’ projects (hello, Pony Express!) and things involving Andy Prickett, but I didn’t get to this one, having figured their debut was a sort-of one-off side project. A few years ago, I played that self-titled all year, and played it for my wife who couldn’t believe it was from 20 years ago. This one is sweeter somehow, less grungy, but it still swings. Why do I always picture Quinten Tarantino vibes when this is on? It’s period music, but what period? Noir?
John Van Deusen
Every Power Wide Awake (2017)
This was just me going into the back-catalog of one of my favorite artists of last year, and it’s the most recent thing I cared about musically this year. I can listen to these Origami records all the time, with their huge range of musical styles and challenging lyrics. It helps that he’s become my daughter’s favorite singer too, our soundtrack to drives to school.
Miss Angie
100 Million Eyeballs (1997)
How did I come upon this record in the Year of Our Lord 2023? I vaguely recall seeing the cover before; someone in college must have had it, back when it was a normal thing to walk into someone’s dorm room and start perusing their CD collection. I played it on a whim, likely looking for something else the kids would like to hear on the way to school, something bubble-gum and bouncy and not gross. Nailed it! Miss Angie sounds a bit like Hole, a bit like Garbage, but most like Verruca Salt. It’s a very strange combination though, and an intentional one, I think: the lyrics are rather theologically-inflected (none of this Plumb/Sarah Marsden casual association with “heaven,” no “is this about a boy or about Jesus?” nonsense). Some songs are just straight verses from John the Revelator, but—here’s were it gets awkward—they’re delivered in this syrupy, playful sexuality that’s…umm…awesome. I mean, her voice and mode of delivery are the sexiest thing since Mazzy Star. Super Hot church-lady music with great mixing and punchy guitars. That’s what I’m listening to.
…and that’s pretty much it. Not too many records and none of them from the current year. I have a list like this for every year since 1986 and this is the first time that’s the case. I don’t know if it’s because the move away from albums and toward singles is now more or less complete, or if I have just now reached that age whereat people start feeling music isn’t being made for them—why for instance there was that whole generation who listened to 50’s music in the 70’s, or to 70’s music in the 90’s. Maybe 2024 will be a great one for music and I’ll get right back on the train, but even if I am waylaid at the station for now, it has been good to spend the interim with these records for company.
Music/ 2022
The Year of our Lord 2022 in music.
Ronnie Martin
From the Womb of the Morning
I always wanted to like Joy Electric, Martin’s other band, more than I actually did, but this side project just hit me upside the head. I love its tunefulness, its bonkers production, the obscure biblicism of its lyrics. I even kind of love how much my daughter complains that I play it too much. Bonus: Martin also wrote the Advent devotional my family is using this year. What this guy does with syntactic stress is as fun and innovative as what he does with the KJV.
Mr. And Mrs. Garrett Soucy
From the River to the Ends of the Earth
This soulful LP has a jazz delivery over early Bon Iver instrumentation, which is a recipe for success in my book. I guess it’s more mumble-core, or what we used to call lo-fi, than anything else. Very much my scene. I think I love best how it sounds completely believable as a 90’s record, or a 70’s. If you told me it was from the 1930’s, I wouldn’t doubt it, apart from the production quality.
Dogleg
Melee
Probably my most played record this year, they’re a bit like Japandroids and maybe, just a bit like Driver Eight. Gawd, I miss music sounding like this. I loved coming of age in the 1990’s.
Touché Amore
Lament
The only possible competitor for “most played,” this is a good bit harder rock than I have recently rolled, but the energy! The delivery! Reminds me of old At the Drive-In. Honestly, this is the record I think about most, wishing I were listening to it when I’m doing something else. I started spinning this last year, so that feeling has lasted for some 14 months now.
Wolves at the Gate
Eulogies
Music I put on while lifting weights in the garage, and perfect for that. Inventive and theologically-rich.
Wilco
Ode to Joy
Sneaky Wilco, making a sad record about joy. Like all Wilco records, it’s a little air-headed, often sweet, and beautifully mixed.
Mark Kozalek and Jimmy la Valle
Perils from the Sea
Kozalek records often feature in my best of lists, but I’ve been off the wagon for a few years. This one is really here on the strength of a couple of songs; when will I ever forget hearing “You Missed my Heart”?
TobyMac
Life After Death
This isn’t so much a record as a collection of singles, but how this guy keeps dropping hits is anyone’s guess. So many perfect pop songs here. It’s just been nominated for Dove and Grammy awards, so I’m not alone in thinking so. It also features “21 years,” written about the death of his son, which is vicariously my kids’ first experience of death. We cry as a family over it.
John Van Deusen
Marathon Daze
I interviewed John with Joel Hartse for Image this year and started listening to his albums in earnest. I listened across all four, but most to this new one, which my daughter knows well enough to put on when she wants to cheer me up.
Caedmon’s Call
S/T
This is a 25th anniversary re-recording of the band’s influential first record, which had not been available for streaming since the label that released it collapsed. I prefer the original version in most cases, but it is exciting to hear the songs fresh and it was a marker of the year to anticipate this release after the Kickstarter campaign and as the band released the tracks one at a time.
Peabod
Growing Up pt. 2
Kids have a tolerance for consuming the same thing that I can hardly fathom except that I remember doing it too. How many times did I see Monty Python? Sebastian eats only pb+j sandwiches and that’s all he cares to try, for instance. This record, which, let me say, I really admire, is one of those things for them. They literally ask to play it every single day, and sometimes just put it on a loop. They never tire of it. So when I think about 2022, this will always be the soundtrack.
Music/ 2021
My annual round-up of the music that shaped the year.
Strokes
The New Abnormal
This record came out at the tail end of 2020 and so I featured it on my year-in-review post, though I’d only been listening to it for a month or so by year’s end. It stayed with me (and with us: the whole family loves it) throughout this year too. My son Sebastian (4) has choreographed a dance to the song “Bad Decisions.” I think every Strokes record lands on a best-of list of mine somewhere (apart from that RCA one, yuck) because I think this band is tops. They won a Grammy for this one, right, for Album of the Year category? So apparently loads of people agree with me on this one.
Luxury
Health and Sport
Luxury is perhaps my single favorite band, ever, from any time period, the way The Beatles or U2 are for some people, so seeing this will surprise no one. It’s one of their missing albums, not present on streaming platforms and thus not present at all for most listeners. That meant for me having the great fun of committing to—paying for—a record I hadn’t heard a single note of, which really is fun, a kind of gambling. I mean, I did have the recommendation of Andy Prickett from the Parallel Love documentary to go on, which isn’t nothing. Also, earlier this year I was on a panel of “experts” making cases for which is the best Luxury album and Lee Bozeman asserted at the end that this was his favorite from their catalog. Happily, they’ve just issued a vinyl pressing. It’s a moody and dramatic record, triumphant somehow and experimental and perfect.
TobyMac
The Elements
This is Not a Test
I believe I am old enough now not to have to apologize for my liking Christian music. I always have, since those early Benny Hester, Leslie Phillips, Amy Grant, and Petra LP’s I spun as a precocious 6 year-old, ignoring the Mickey Mouse sing-a-long 77’s they’d bought me the plastic turntable for. It continued through high school and college and life thereafter: whatever else I was listening to, I always simultaneously treasured CCM. DC Talk’s records were deeply formative for me, but I fell off the train after Jesus Freak and left TobyMac’s solo work alone until I randomly played his demos CD last year for my kids when we were on a road trip. They were hooked. So was I. We’ve spent this year going through his catalog and these two new records were our most played music of 2021 by a huge margin. They ask for him all the time. I took everyone to see his concert (their first) at the fair (also their first). It’s a great gift to be able to share this with them, our whole family moving to music that moved me first when I was a teenager. I’m grateful both for his creative longevity and his witness.
Skillet
Victorious
I’ve always maintained that these lists are not necessarily what I think to be “the best” records of a given year—often they weren’t even released during the year in question—but the ones that defined the year for me. I loved and still love that first Skillet record but haven’t followed anything in-between. This one I only played because I turned my garage into a weight room during COVID and needed some testosterone-fueled workout music. I tried all kinds of playlists and punk bands, but nothing got my blood pumping so much as this one, so I played it at least once a week when I got out there. They’ve still got it though. “Terrify the Dark”? That song has me gasping for breath.
War on Drugs
I Don’t Live Here Anymore
War on Drugs last appeared on my 2014 list when I sunk deep in Lost in a Dream. I tried the next one, but couldn’t get into it, though many others revere it as a masterpiece. But this one had me from the first track, from the first few seconds of the first track. There’s just so much going on musically in this record. Each year, I send my dad a CD that I think he, audiophile, will appreciate. This year, it’ll be this one, an instant classic that achieves that status in part by not ignoring the classics.
Coda: I don’t usually have a runner-up category or anything like that, but this year, the two records I thought about most were Waxahatchee’s Saint Cloud and Natalie Berman’s Mercy. I don’t know what to do with either of them, exactly, which is why I’m reluctant to place them on the list. I can develop relationships with some artists slowly and I wouldn’t be surprised to see either of these become essential for me, but it could just as easily go the other way and I never listen to either of them again. I don’t know. I’m thinking about it.
Music/ 2019
Not to trumpet my preferences as to who released the “best records of 2018” but to remember what my life was like year by year, and to do that by tracing its soundtrack.
Better Oblivion Community Center
S/T
I got my first Conor Oberst record in 1995, when I heard Collection of Songs over the house system at Zia Records in Phoenix, AZ. I don’t often approach the till asking who they’re playing—and this was all before the days when one could ask Siri, or Shazam for such info—but the song was busy destroying song structures as I had understood them to that point, and somehow had found a sub-basement beneath the term “lo-fi.” I loved it after a long tutelage and then the next, perfect, Letting off the Happiness (Saddle Creek, 1998), and so on through the next 4-5 records, but then our relationship began to cool.
Oberst’s teaming up with Phoebe Bridgers for this LP was a stroke of genius. Each artist’s weakness is compensated for, each strength amplified. I first heard of it through a twitter friend who announced it as his Album of the Year upon the initial listen way back in March. I was skeptical, but then I heard the first song, and the second, and so on through the rest of this gorgeous, melodic partnership.
Pedro the Lion
Phoenix
So I was pretty well primed to like this album. I’ve been following Dave Bazan’s music since the Whole e.p. came out in 1997 that I bought at True Tunes in Wheaton, IL, and I’ve seen him in concert more than any other artist. The early Pedro records are firmly fixed in the constellation of classics for me, and I dig the solo records nearly as much, though his bite of the feeding hand I find often irksome. But also, I was born and raised in Phoenix just like him, whereupon we both attended conservative Christian colleges, and then settled in the Pacific Northwest (and for awhile attended the same church). This record then, in which Bazan confronts the city of his youth and, in a way, his own back catalog of records that I’ve memorized, is as in my wheel-house as an artistic creation can be.
I love the way he writes the city’s biography. Little things like the mention of Circle K (our local convenience store that is, weirdly, a big part of life in PHX), the touring of model homes (Phoenix is in a perpetual subdivision building boom), and the name-checking streets that I drove down daily in those first magic years when I began driving and mostly used that freedom to attend concerts by bands like this.
Luxury
Trophies
This was the year of Luxury for me. This band has been around—and not just around in the world, but around my own niche musical scene—for some 20 years and I never quite got it. Probably, in the late 90’s and heavily influenced by the Seattle scene/grunge, I rejected the preening, sexy, 80’s punk/The Cure vibe this band radiated. I always knew they were cool, that they were one of us (Christian adjacent rebel scenesters), and I think I may even have had a Luxury sticker on my guitar case, picked up at a Blenderhead or Sometime Sunday show, but I had none of the records.
Well, I do now. Someone put me on to Trophies and I was taken immediately, and by “immediately,” I mean from the first words of the album which read “Like Allen Ginsberg reading ‘Howl’…” The odd thing is, I listened to a CD set of Ginsberg reading his complete poems on a solo drive across the US just after graduating college. It was one of the great artistic heights of my life. But the record doesn't stop there; a lyric in a later song reads “change your life,” a reference to the last line of Rilke’s “Archaic Torso of Apollo,” which I have translated and taught. Rilke’s work about angels forms the backdrop of my own new book of poems, which I was signing a contract for the very week I heard this record. What are the odds? On and on it goes. The record has feelings about Salvador Dali which I share, and about faith, and a dozen other things besides. But also: it kills. Musically, this record is so bracing and tight that it peers only with Radiohead, in my mind.
Okay, but that isn’t all. A documentary called Parallel Love covering the band’s changing fortunes was also released this year. I watched it at Northwest Film Forum (making it the only movie I saw in a theater this year, and only the second time I’ve ever gone solo to a theater) introduced by the band’s guitarist, Matt Hinton. The film is great and it tells the band’s story, but also the story of the scene out of which they came (which they largely rejected) but which is very dear to me. That film turned me from an appreciator to a fan. I started listening to Amazing and Thank You (Tooth and Nail, 1995) and thought Holy cow! Then I recalled the Andy Prickett quote from the film about their second two records being unbelievably special so I ordered the S/T (Bulletproof, 1999) which is now… I think… probably, in my top ten records ever. I just can’t believe the intelligence and artistry and faithfulness of these songs. I’m missing one record from their catalog and I’m only holding out because I don’t want to overdo it—Luxury records were easily my first, second, third, and maybe fourth most played this year—but I feel like…was it Alexander who wept when there were no more worlds left to conquer? Like that.
The Appleseed Cast
The Fleeting Light of Impermanence
It occurs to me that every album on my list of this year’s favorites features artists who have been making music for 20+ years, and about whom I’ve known for decades. This is surely the first time that’s been true across my year-end lists. Usually, unless a Damien Jurado record comes out, my year in music is dominated by new artists. Year of 1990’s nostalgia? Well, in any case, Appleseed Cast is another one of those. I loved their first album The End of the Ring Wars (Deep Elm, 1998) and the Low-Level Owl records after it and then proceeded on my course of life, occasionally glancing backwards in admiration but otherwise moving on. So when I heard they were making a new record, I was no more than mildly curious, but thankfully, I was curious enough to play the first track. “Whut?” I thought to myself. “What a work is here?” The things this band does with time signatures and technology, the way they’ve matured over the decades, never running out of ideas: the light, I mean to say, may be less fleeting than we have been given to assume.
Starflyer 59
Young in my Head
One last record that I didn’t see coming, and whose ascendance fits the narrative shape outlined above, Starflyer 59’s new effort also resurrected my affections for the band’s whole catalog. Here too, I’d been a huge fan of Silver (Tooth and Nail, 1994) and Gold but then left them alone when they moved away from shoegaze and fuzz toward a more typical vocally-forward sound. They’re a productive band, so there are something like 10 albums in-between those early ones and this and I missed them all, every once in awhile trying a couple tracks, not understanding them, and clicking somewhere else. What made this one different? Well, a shift in sound is one. Starflyer is always evolving and their recent turn toward groove, hook, synth, reminded me of Future Islands, The Fascination Movement, and even Dave Bazan, in the best ways. It gave me an in anyway, and once there, I saw how reflective and thoughtful the lyrics were, how muscular and clean the music. I listened to this record more than any other while driving my daughter to school in the mornings; maybe that’s part of it.
It made me excited about Tooth and Nail again: I watched this documentary about the label’s founding with a lump in my throat for joy at the world that was. And when I had time this year to listen to podcasts (usually when traveling to a conference or a poetry reading) I listened to Labelled. Then, randomly, I met Brandon Ebel (founder of the label) hanging out by SPU. Nothing can be like it was, of course, but I’m so glad some shape of the scene is around still, and gladder still for bands like this, so dedicated to their craft that they keep bothering to make music, despite everything.
Hey: year-end lists are my favorite way of discovering new music (algorithms be damned!), so, if you have one, drop a line sharing it?
Music/ 2018
Not to trumpet my preferences as to who released the “best records of 2018” but to remember what my life was like year by year, and to do that by tracing its soundtrack.
Nathaniel Rateliff and the Night Sweats
Tearing at the Seams
This was a party record that turned out to be more than a party record. I got their previous LP as a gift from a friend, who bought it for me blind. I’d never heard any of their songs nor expressed interest in so doing; he just thought I’d like it. When was the last time that happened to me? A Frank Sinatra box set I received in 2001?
Anyway, I loved it and then found this next record even more compelling. For me, they evoke Sly and the Family Stone and Van Morrison, with a little bit of James Brown and Chris Stapleton. That’s just about the oddest combination of groups I can conjure, but it all works here. It sounds like there are 20 people in this band, which is why the songs always sound like they’re burning down a house in which they’ve just thrown a kegger. I can’t see why that should appeal to me. One doesn’t support roguish behavior in most cases, but there’s also something wise in this record, something sweet I can’t quite (obviously) name.
Damien Jurado
The Horizon Just Laughed
I want to say ‘no surprise here,’ or some such thing since records by Damien Jurado have topped my best of lists in more years than any other artist. I’ve been a fan since his first record came out in 1995. But actually it is surprising, to me anyway, that an artist has managed to impress, surprise, and move me year after year for my entire adult life. This year was no different, except in that the album was accompanied by a host of critical accolades, topping year-end lists all over. The record is a great place to start with the catalog, moreover. Much of it reads like a love-letter to Washington, my home, which Jurado just left, itself a fairly sure shortcut into the good graces of this partisan.
The songs are literary, highly allusive and again, timeless. Much of this could well have come out alongside Velvet Underground and no one would bat an eye. That it came out in 2018 instead shows just how long a game Jurado is engaged in.
Little Joy
S/T
Here was another instance of my finding music in ways I’d long since despaired of. I was in a record shop thumbing the stacks with my daughter, when a song came on the house system. Man, this is great, I thought. And then the next song, which sounded like it was from a different band: a girl singer this time. And then then next, by yet another band, this time sung in French. I had to ask the guy what awesome playlist this was. He said “Little Joy.”
“What, like, all the songs you’ve played in the last fifteen minutes were from the same band?”
I bought the only copy they had.
The record came out a few years ago and I missed it the first time around. No matter, since it might just as easily have been made in 1960’s Paris and 1970’s Rio or 1990’s New York. It’s just cool, swinging, melodic, and cyan-tinged. I wish it weren’t a side-project of so many super-groups and that they’d make more records, but I’m thankful for this one, and for record shops.
Oasis
Definitely Maybe
Sometimes my year of listening is characterized by a throwback record that I obsess over long enough for it to figure in my most-played albums of the year. A few years ago, I listened to Driver Eight, which came out in 1997, practically non-stop. But then, I’d liked Driver Eight at the time of its release, so nostalgia figured. The case of Definitely Maybe is a little different. I loved Oasis’ 2nd and 3rd records but this one never did anything for me, until this year. On a plane, probably to this conference, I saw the documentary Supersonic (dir. Whitecross 2016). It was catnip for me. Part of the appeal probably has to do with comments the narrator makes toward the end of the film where it is suggested not only that a band as big as Oasis will likely never exist again, but that it couldn’t. The music industry is so fragmented, the number of bands so explosive, the way we consume music so diverse and so individual, that a movement so large scale is probably impossible. I was in England in the 1990’s and recall sitting in pubs when an Oasis song came on the jukebox. I’d never seen so many people go so crazy over anything, let alone so many of them hold so dear the same thing. The band is brash and rude, but the movement around them is compelling to me mostly due to the unity it inspired, and apparently, inspires still. After watching the film, I listened to this record, the one most featured therein. Multiply that listen by around 50 and you have a fair bit of my 2018.
There are a couple of other records that I’m excited about just now, but I have no way of knowing whether they’ll be definitive in the way these above have, and that is the point of these lists for me: not to trumpet my preferences as to who released the “best records of 2018” but to remember what my life was like year by year, and to do that by tracking its soundtrack.
Did any of these records move you likewise? What did I miss?
You can read other entrants in this series of recollections here, or leave an email address at the link below to hear about other new developments and posts.
Happy 2019!
Music/ 2016
I've kept a list of the most important records for my life every year since 1992.
Chvrches
Every Open Eye
This record humbled me. I loved their first, The Bones of What you Believe, and we'd seen a moving concert in our year away, but I couldn't get my head around this one. I'm a crier--plays, mostly, but also classical music-- but nothing wrecks me like "The Mother we Share;" I just bubble right over. On this new one, nothing. I tried maybe three times through and found it all shallow. Then, a tweet. Aaron Sprinkle (@aaronsprinkle), whose various contributions, in Poor Old Lu, as a solo artist under his own moniker, as producer) are featured on my best records lists more often than anyone else's, said:
Perfect? This guy knows more about music than anyone I can think of and he can't handle how great this record is? Who am I then to demure? I tried again. Nothing. But Aaron Sprinkle said! Again. Nothing. That one song is kind of fun though. Again. Again. Pretty soon, I loved the album, song for song and note for note. It just grew. Pretty soon, I didn't want to listen to anything else. It was a case, too rare in this time of fleeting pleasure, fleeting attention, and belief in one's own every whim as the surest route to fulfillment, of shutting up and listening to someone who knows what they're talking about. Of learning then, and of difficult beauty whose pleasures are all the more lasting for the contest.
Leon Bridges
Coming Home
A book by its cover. I knew I'd dig this record before I heard any of it. This is exactly the kind of retro cool I'm a sucker for: the font, his clothes, his posture, the old LP label, all catnip for me. When I put it on and heard those rolling drums and the vintage mic (or mic effect, no matter), I was a goner. The heartening backstory, Bridges' devotion to his mother, and his old-time religion all add to the attraction for me. A lot of people compare him to 70's Sam Cooke, so I spent a good few months listening; I can see the resemblance I guess, but none of Cooke's actual songs stick out the way most of these do. I tend to think of Bridges more along the lines of Aloe Blacc, who, if he weren't busy trying to be an average rapper, would be an incredible soul singer. Good stuff.
Alvaays
Alvaays
Glorious girl pop. I love the self-aware contradictions in their breakout track that begins "you expressed openly your contempt for matrimony," and whose chorus swells into a plea, "Marry me, Archie!" Another win for the retro-cool camp, this time 1950's beach-core. When I thought about the year in music, this was always the first to come up as one of the clear contenders.
Julien Baker
Sprained Ankle
Heart. On. Sleeve. This music is painfully earnest and painful in all the best ways. It's devastating. I used to think early Bright Eyes, or maybe Grouper was the saddest music I knew. No more. It's Baker by a yard. But what a sweet ache. Thanks to Joel Heng Hartse for the tip on this one.
David Bazan
Blanco
Basically, if Bazan is making a record, I'm going to buy it and listen to it and think long and hard about it. At this point, we've been together so long that to do otherwise would amount to a kind of adultery. Since Pedro the Lion's Whole ep in 1997, I have adored this music. It's shaped a huge part of my aesthetic. Now that he's gone from believer to thoughtful questioner to glib reactionary atheist it's harder to get behind some (most?) of the things he says, but the music is still concerned, still true in ways I hardly ascribe to any other recording artist. Blanco came out within a week or so of the new Radiohead and was everything I wished that latter album would have been.
Bon Iver
22, A Million
This album makes me feel old because it's so clearly from the future. I just shake my head muttering "what will they think of next?" How did he manage to make that beautiful? And then that too? All the bits and beeps that make Age of Adz so precocious and annoying are here used in service of..well, not songs quite...what even are these sounds? Does this count as music? This is art-core of a type no one would have expected from the bearded cabin boy from Wisconsin. That makes three Bon Iver records now that have topped my year end lists, each massively, unrecognizably different from the rest.
Various Artists
Hamilton (Original Broadway Cast Recording)
And then there's this. Hamilton is a cultural phenomenon at present, and a play before it's a soundtrack, but this recording is how I encountered it, not having seen a single scene from the set, not knowing what anyone involved looked like, and having no sense of its popularity. I just listened to this soundtrack because I liked the star on front and the idea of an historical musical. Using a streaming service, I read along with the lyrics to the whole album the first time through, so this was sort-of concurrently a literary experience. It was late when I put it on, so I listened to the first half and went to bed feeling like Keats' "watcher of the skies;" something new and strange and beautiful had entered the galaxy. Next day, I couldn't wait to find the alone time to finish the record and I basically haven't shut up about it since. I'm not sure this counts as music, quite, but 2016 will always be for me the time when this was happening.
I've kept a list of the most important records for my life every year since 1992. I haven't posted them all, since I'm daunted by the task of explaining why each of over 100 albums is so meaningful for me, but you can see a few recent years here.
Happy 2017!
Music/ 2015
Favorite records of 2015
Sufjan Stevens
Carrie and Lowell
I’ve admired Sufjan Stevens’ music for a long time, but after BQE and Age of Adz I was ready to write him off as precocious, too obsessed with his own genius actually to make good music, instead making only good ideas. But this album brought it all back. Every bit of talent and musical inventiveness he has combines with honesty that’s more than precious, more than a posture here. Carrie and Lowell is not only my favorite record from this year; it’s one of my favorite records ever.
Waxahatchee
Ivy Trip
This is a new band for me. Waxahatchee have been making music for awhile in a homespun, stripped down style reminicent of early Bright Eyes records. They’re kind of anti-aesthetic, with little hushed or clean, and the album cover fairly shouts “we’re not going to be beautiful for you or anyone else!” but actually, they are. Truth is, I can harldy say why I like this record so much, but I’ve heard it every week this year, and when it’s not on, I think about when I can listen to it again.
Tame Impala
Currents
Here’s another case in which the professional critics were right. It was a slow-grower for me, not as easily impressed by dance music as some. I kept playing this record mostly to see what some people saw in it. After awhile, it clicked. Song after song cleverly rewrote 80’s tracks, or else acted as though they had no inheritance whatsoever and where simply making music for the kind of world they thought this was or might be. It’s a hip record, but also kind of dorky; it’s futuristic and retro at the same time. As an educator, and a therefore a pitchman for difficult beauty, I appreciate having to work at art sometimes, and appreciate being taught.
Airborne Toxic Event
Dope Machines
Though the Airborne Toxic Event’s first record was one of my favorites of 2008, I didn’t expect to see much more from them. That record was so raucous, such a party, I thought surely they’d get the buzz out of thier collective system. Dope Machines doesn’t even sound like it’s from the same band, jangly guitars replaced with electronic loops, big Springsteenesque riffs flipped instead to faders and blips. But the attitude is still here, and the joy, and the sense of abandon that seems only possible among foreigners or drunks. This record makes me want to do everything better, but also to do it more somehow.
Grouper
Ruins
This record actually came out in 2014, and I listened to it some then, but I didn’t love it till this year. This whole rainy autumn back in the Pacific Northwest, it was one of the only soundtracks that made sense to me. Female-fronted like Waxahatchee, delicate like Sufjan Stevens, brave like Airborne Toxic Event, and true to its own (new) aesthetic like Tame Impala, Ruins wraps up everything I loved about music this year.
Music/ 2014
My favorite records.
Temples
Sun Structures
Sun Structures is one of those rare records I liked from the first note. After that, I liked each song better than the one before it and a hundred or so listens has done nothing to blunt that first thrill. It's big hooky Brit-rock, but dirty, and full of fun musical references to bands from way before any of these lads were born.
War on Drugs
Lost in a Dream
Here's a case where the people's voice was dead on. The album topped every respectable year-end list, and for good reason. It's a bit of a grower. At first, one doesn't see what the big deal is with what sounds like a Springsteen cover band, but the deeper one goes into the dream, the more the album's patience and musicality reveal themselves.
Damien Jurado
Brothers and Sisters of Eternal Son
Pretty much every year that Damien Jurado releases an album, it makes my Best-Of list. No two of them are really alike, some heavy rock, some country-folk, some space-age pop. I love every single one out of all proportion. If I had to pick one artist to listen to, to the exclusion of all others (horrid world, that) I wouldn't hesitate to select Jurado. This album is psychedelia--not my usual cup of tea--and it took a month or so to understand what was going on here. Now, I think about this record even when I'm not listening to it, wondering how its doing and how long we'll have together.
Spoon
They Want my Soul
I've loved Spoon since 2002's Kill the Moonlight, but between that record and this, though I've adored some of the singles, none of the albums caught me quite right. This one brings it all back home: the swagger, but also the joy. This album is a band in top form. It's like watching Achilles in battle; not only like they won't miss a step, but like they can't somehow.
Future Islands
Singles
This album defines my time in London more than any other. I rode the tube for at least two hours every day, so I listened to tons of music, including most of the albums on this list, thanks to the new deep-bench streaming services. I started listening to Singles before I knew anything at all about the band, finding it compelling--oddly confident, throw-back lounge music but somehow unmistakably of-the-moment. Then I saw the band's beautiful performance on Dave Letterman and was hooked.
Year in Music 2013
This was a pretty great year for music, as all serious critics seem to agree. Last year, I couldn't find anything to listen to apart from the heartbreaking Perfume Genius record and "Bloom" by Beach House, which I practically played out.
By contrast, this year I had a full list of favorites by halfway through. Some make appearances on many critics' year-end lists; others aren't mentioned anywhere, from what I can see. When I look back at 2013, from any vantage of later years, I'll remember it as the time I was listening to and loving these records:
At least as much as any of these records, I loved a little release by an Icelandic band called Hynmalaya. They have no distribution deal in America, and haven't even bothered to set-up an Amazon page with a few of their CD's, but they're giving away the whole record (MP3) free on their website. It's quiet and beautiful music, with full string and horn sections that seem to know their place, as so few such sections do. And lyrically, it reminds me of the best book I read this year, which you should also seek out.
Runners-up
Junip Self-Titled
The Love Language Ruby Red
Veronica Falls Waiting for Something to Happen
Foxygen We Are the 21st Century Ambassadors of Peace & Magic