Albums of 2020

[epilogue]

The new Margo Price is as great as advertised.

[epilogue]

Current ranking of the 2020 albums I've heard so far (updated):

Fetch The Bolt Cutters - Fiona Apple
Gigaton - Pearl Jam
RTJ4 - Run The Jewels
That's How Rumors Get Started - Margo Price
Set My Heart on Fire Immediately - Perfume Genius

Suite For Max Brown - Jeff Parker
Dias Raros - Melenas
Homegrown - Neil Young
Saint Cloud - Waxahatchee
Reunions - Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit

Wake UP! - Hazel English
Women in Music Pt. III - HAIM
grae - Moses Sumney
Punisher - Phoebe Bridgers
After Hours - The Weekend

The Loves of Your Life - Hamilton Leithauser
Rose In The Dark - Cleo Sol
Are You Gone - Sarah Harmer
For Their Love - Other Lives
Song For Our Daughter - Laura Marling

Expectations - Katie Pruitt
SAWAYAMA - Rina Sawayama
Sideways to New Italy - Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever
La vita nuova - Christine and the Queens
Folk N' Roll, Vol 1: Tales of Isolation - J.S. Ondara

Saturn Return - The Secret Sisters
Notes On a Conditional Form - The 1975
Muzz - Muzz
Petals For Armor - Hayley Williams
Thank You Ancestor Finger - Harper's Jar

American Death Squad (EP) - Jeff Ament
Eclipse - Addy
Bonny Light Horseman - Bonny Light Horseman
The New Abnormal - The Strokes
Straight Songs of Sorrow - Mark Lanegan

Future Nostalgia - Dua Lipa
Likewise - Frances Quinlan
Beginners - Christian Lee Hutson
color theory - Soccer Mommy
Heavy Light - U.S. Girls

From Liberty Street - Mapache
Invisible People - Chicano Batman
Music To Be Murdered By - Eminem
Marigold - Stu Larsen
3.15.20 - Childish Gambino

[washing machine]

Anyone check out the new Hum record? All the Gen Xer's on my TL were creaming over it. I haven't had a chance to listen yet.

Yup. If you like the other Hum records, you'll like this Hum record.

Yeah, this album is all I've been listening to this week. Mostly on runs. Sounds great on headphones. Anyone else get a Lee Ranaldo feel from the vocals?

[Kevin Davis]

Current ranking of the 2020 albums I've heard so far (updated):

Fetch The Bolt Cutters - Fiona Apple
Gigaton - Pearl Jam
RTJ4 - Run The Jewels
That's How Rumors Get Started - Margo Price
Set My Heart on Fire Immediately - Perfume Genius

Suite For Max Brown - Jeff Parker
Dias Raros - Melenas
Homegrown - Neil Young
Saint Cloud - Waxahatchee
Reunions - Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit

Wake UP! - Hazel English
Women in Music Pt. III - HAIM
grae - Moses Sumney
Punisher - Phoebe Bridgers
After Hours - The Weekend

The Loves of Your Life - Hamilton Leithauser
Rose In The Dark - Cleo Sol
Are You Gone - Sarah Harmer
For Their Love - Other Lives
Song For Our Daughter - Laura Marling

Expectations - Katie Pruitt
SAWAYAMA - Rina Sawayama
Sideways to New Italy - Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever
La vita nuova - Christine and the Queens
Folk N' Roll, Vol 1: Tales of Isolation - J.S. Ondara

Saturn Return - The Secret Sisters
Notes On a Conditional Form - The 1975
Muzz - Muzz
Petals For Armor - Hayley Williams
Thank You Ancestor Finger - Harper's Jar

American Death Squad (EP) - Jeff Ament
Eclipse - Addy
Bonny Light Horseman - Bonny Light Horseman
The New Abnormal - The Strokes
Straight Songs of Sorrow - Mark Lanegan

Future Nostalgia - Dua Lipa
Likewise - Frances Quinlan
Beginners - Christian Lee Hutson
color theory - Soccer Mommy
Heavy Light - U.S. Girls

From Liberty Street - Mapache
Invisible People - Chicano Batman
Music To Be Murdered By - Eminem
Marigold - Stu Larsen
3.15.20 - Childish Gambino

Your commitment to new music is impressive. I've think I've really listened to maybe 8-10 new albums this year, though I'm always sampling around. So far albums I really like are:

Wolfgang Muthspiel, Scott Collier, and Brian Blade - Angular Blues
Ambrose Akinmusire - On the Tender Spot of Every Calloused Moment
Joshua Redman, Brad Mehldau, Christian McBride and Brian Blade - Round Again
Avishai Cohen - Big Vicious

I need to check out the Jeff Parker album in full -- what I've heard from it so far has been really good.

[Brett]

Mini-reviews of 2020, Part 2:

T. Gowdy - Therapy with Colour
One of a few new-to-me artists from this year, T. Gowdy makes electronic music that would usually be typified as ambient minimal techno. It's a style that I'm generally pretty fond of, and through exploring Gowdy's back catalog, he can be pretty good at it. Unfortunately, I haven't really been able to crack this nut of an album, though. I enjoy two of the five tracks, but the rest seem low effort and pedestrian to me at the moment. I haven't put it on a while, so here's to hoping I'll get a different perspective after the break.

Joyfultalk - A Separation of Being
Joyfultalk is, at it's core, composer/musician Jay Crocker, and it's sound is best described as a punk-like DIY approach to creating new age music. Crocker builds his own refurbished instruments to create his music: synths, keyboards, drum machines, etc. On this album he's also created his own scoring system for creating swirling, interlocked, modular compositions. It's conceptually fascinating and the results are pretty nice, too, albeit a shade too repetitive across the album's runtime.The two shorter segments are where the album shines, while it's longer third section drags the whole thing down a bit.

Markus Floats - Third Album
This is one of my favorite releases of the year so far. Markus Floats, the pseudonym of Markus Lake, specializes in a hybrid electronic music that juxtaposes meditative drones against rhythmically energetic and melodically engaging synthesized suites. The resulting six pieces are spiritually refreshing abstract jaunts into a slightly alien soundworld. It's quite easily his strongest and most focused work so far, and I think he could have a great future.

Roger Tellier-Craig - Études
Every once in a while I get a bee in my bonnet for some low-key noise music; nothing harsh but sounds that don't do much musically other than interact with their space. This album occupies that position this year. Something in the neighborhood of the Wandelweiser Group, Tellier-Craig's minimal synth compositions are exercises in dynamics that plot stretches of near silence with crashing waves of texture and tone. Most likely to be described as "annoying," I find something strangely compelling about it.

Karkhana - Bitter Balls
Middle Eastern free-folk psychedelic-jazz kraut band Karkhana features seven instrumentalists from three different continents including Sam Shalabi, Maurice Louca, and Sharif Sehnaoui. It's about as out there as the genre name stew suggests with long passages of instrumental explorations married to rollicking groove-based jams. My only gripe with the album is how that combination of structures are arranged: the three longer pieces all follow the template of exploratory section that eventually evolves or transitions into the jamming part, while the final, shorter song is only the jam.

The Dwarfs of East Agouza - The Green Dogs of Dahshur
A sister band to Karkhana that also features Sam Shalabi and Maurice Louca with Sun City Girls' Alan Bishop rounding out the trio. Generally leaning harder on the spacey, psychedelic krautrock side than the prior band, the third full-length from this band is their most dreamlike and weird. They dig pretty deeply into a cosmic realm of drift and alien structure especially on the albums middle two lengthier cuts, and it's all quite captivating stuff. So far this trio deal exclusively in quality and they're one of my favorite active groups at the moment.

Rob Clutton Trio - Counsel of Primaries
Bassist Rob Clutton composes pieces that draw from a spectrum of music spanning counterpoint heavy modern classical, European folk, lounge pop, and various styles of jazz. This album finds him creating pieces based on his vast catalog of solo bass explorations and rearranged for a trio of bass, saxophone, and drums. Like his bass and sax duet album from last year, this record appears to have a heavy academic bent to it, but it's also rather inviting to less well-attuned ears like my own. I sometimes get lost trying to follow the various threads the band chases, but it's a joy to listen to regardless, with some stellar engineering and production.

[dad]

Really looking forward to the new Protomartyr tomorrow.

[chewm]

Really looking forward to the new Protomartyr tomorrow.

hell yeah!

[epilogue]

Current ranking of the 2020 albums I've heard so far (updated):

Fetch The Bolt Cutters - Fiona Apple
Gigaton - Pearl Jam
RTJ4 - Run The Jewels
That's How Rumors Get Started - Margo Price
Set My Heart on Fire Immediately - Perfume Genius

Suite For Max Brown - Jeff Parker
Dias Raros - Melenas
Homegrown - Neil Young
Saint Cloud - Waxahatchee
Reunions - Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit

Wake UP! - Hazel English
Women in Music Pt. III - HAIM
grae - Moses Sumney
Punisher - Phoebe Bridgers
After Hours - The Weekend

The Loves of Your Life - Hamilton Leithauser
Rose In The Dark - Cleo Sol
Are You Gone - Sarah Harmer
For Their Love - Other Lives
Song For Our Daughter - Laura Marling

Expectations - Katie Pruitt
SAWAYAMA - Rina Sawayama
Sideways to New Italy - Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever
La vita nuova - Christine and the Queens
Folk N' Roll, Vol 1: Tales of Isolation - J.S. Ondara

Saturn Return - The Secret Sisters
Notes On a Conditional Form - The 1975
Muzz - Muzz
Petals For Armor - Hayley Williams
Thank You Ancestor Finger - Harper's Jar

American Death Squad (EP) - Jeff Ament
Eclipse - Addy
Bonny Light Horseman - Bonny Light Horseman
The New Abnormal - The Strokes
Straight Songs of Sorrow - Mark Lanegan

Future Nostalgia - Dua Lipa
Likewise - Frances Quinlan
Beginners - Christian Lee Hutson
color theory - Soccer Mommy
Heavy Light - U.S. Girls

From Liberty Street - Mapache
Invisible People - Chicano Batman
Music To Be Murdered By - Eminem
Marigold - Stu Larsen
3.15.20 - Childish Gambino

Your commitment to new music is impressive. I've think I've really listened to maybe 8-10 new albums this year, though I'm always sampling around. So far albums I really like are:

Wolfgang Muthspiel, Scott Collier, and Brian Blade - Angular Blues
Ambrose Akinmusire - On the Tender Spot of Every Calloused Moment
Joshua Redman, Brad Mehldau, Christian McBride and Brian Blade - Round Again
Avishai Cohen - Big Vicious

I need to check out the Jeff Parker album in full -- what I've heard from it so far has been really good.

I'm going to give a couple of these a try. The Ambrose Akinmusire one looks especially interesting.

[epilogue]

Started On the Tender Spot of Every Calloused Moment. But I could tell my wife wasn't feeling it. She gets bristly with certain kinds of more aggressive or experimental jazz. Maybe the record isn't that but I could feel her getting stressed out across the room during the opening track, bracing for the worst.

So I switched to Angular Blues. I'm really digging this right now. Definitely plan on going back to Ambrose Akinmusire, though, once I have headphones and can listen on my own. Really excited by what little I heard.

[bodysnatcher]

Started On the Tender Spot of Every Calloused Moment. But I could tell my wife wasn't feeling it. She gets bristly with certain kinds of more aggressive or experimental jazz. Maybe the record isn't that but I could feel her getting stressed out across the room during the opening track, bracing for the worst.

This is so relatable it hurts

[epilogue]

Started On the Tender Spot of Every Calloused Moment. But I could tell my wife wasn't feeling it. She gets bristly with certain kinds of more aggressive or experimental jazz. Maybe the record isn't that but I could feel her getting stressed out across the room during the opening track, bracing for the worst.

This is so relatable it hurts

There's a local bookstore that I blame entirely for this. Every time we're in there, they're playing the most bizarre and aggressively bad jazz I've ever heard. It's like that bit on Parks & Rec when the stereotypical "NPR stand-in" character plays two different styles of jazz records at the same time, on top of one another. It's completely destroyed her trust and/or interest in most Jazz music that isn't Django Reinhardt.

What broke your wife?

[dad]

Really looking forward to the new Protomartyr tomorrow.

hell yeah!

[Kevin Davis]

Started On the Tender Spot of Every Calloused Moment. But I could tell my wife wasn't feeling it. She gets bristly with certain kinds of more aggressive or experimental jazz. Maybe the record isn't that but I could feel her getting stressed out across the room during the opening track, bracing for the worst.

So I switched to Angular Blues. I'm really digging this right now. Definitely plan on going back to Ambrose Akinmusire, though, once I have headphones and can listen on my own. Really excited by what little I heard.

Glad you're liking them! My wife gets antsy with the busier-sounding jazz too -- I am very conscious not to play certain things around her because it makes her feel nervous and claustrophobic (one time I made the mistake of playing Coltrane Live in Seattle in the car and it was like she was having a PTSD flashback). Akinmusire definitely has an expressionistic style of playing, not quite "free" but certainly a bit atonal and nonlinear in places, sometimes favoring sharp strokes, jabs, punctuations, etc. over melody, though he weaves in and out of all of it -- I will say that the first track on his new album is probably as wonky as it gets, and if she has an ear for the less abrasive stuff, she might enjoy other parts of the album. Angular Blues is an album for all tolerance levels -- fans of jazz should appreciate the guitar playing and excellent trio interplay, and those with no interest in jazz should easily be able to relegate it to the background.

[Mickey]

Broads, am I right??

Thanks for the recs KD. Looking forward to digging in to some of these.

[VinylGuy]

women.


JUST KIDDIN

[Birds in Hell]

Have been playing Cavern of Anti-Matter’s soundtrack to Peter Strickland’s In Fabric a lot lately:

[Kevin Davis]

Broads, am I right??

Thanks for the recs KD. Looking forward to digging in to some of these.

Hope you like them! There is a track on the Wolfgang Muthspiel album called "Solo Kanon in 6/8" (I think) that gives me William Tyler vibes -- not stylistically, necessarily, just in the sense that I find myself basking in the glory of what one person can do with a single guitar.

[Kevin Davis]

Dylan and Marling look good for AOTY so far.

The Dylan album is interesting as far as AOTY goes. It requires a lot of context. It's more a personal statement of an 80 year old than a real, strong musical statement. There's a weight to it that the same album by a 25 year old would lack. That's on me but part of the process.

I forgot about the new Dylan -- in general I find it hard to incorporate music by artists that I've been deeply into for 20-ish years into "best music of the year"-type conversations, as I feel like I process them on such a different wavelength. I have been enjoying the Dylan album a lot too, but I don't think it's quite the triumph that many others around here and elsewhere do. Somewhat surprisingly, it's the blues-based tracks I find myself compelled to return to most -- after Love and Theft and Modern Times I had grown pretty tired of that approach, but these ("False Prophet" and "Goodbye Jimmy Reed" especially) really hit the spot for me. I think his ravaged voice is much more suited to this type of material, where he can really work the phrasing, than it is to something like "Mother of Muses" where the focus is squarely on the melody. Anyway, good record, but I always get my hopes up that the "best album since the 70's!" hype isn't hype, and it always is. It's ultimately about on par with Modern Times and Tempest for me, give or take a few decimal points.

[psychobain]

Phoebe Bridgers, Laura Marling, Haim, Hayley Williams, Margo Price, Fiona Apple...

Girls are kicking some ass

[Higgs]

Mini-reviews of 2020, Part 2:

Roger Tellier-Craig - Études
Every once in a while I get a bee in my bonnet for some low-key noise music; nothing harsh but sounds that don't do much musically other than interact with their space. This album occupies that position this year. Something in the neighborhood of the Wandelweiser Group, Tellier-Craig's minimal synth compositions are exercises in dynamics that plot stretches of near silence with crashing waves of texture and tone. Most likely to be described as "annoying," I find something strangely compelling about it.

LOL. Might give this one a skip. Some other interesting stuff there though, and I like Addy as well.