2019 Favorites, In Brief:
I’m writing this because I decided I wanted to actually write a “2019 favorite albums list” out for myself since I hadn’t really thought much about new records this year. Here’s that list.
#10: Big Thief — Two Hands
Much has been discussed of Big Thief’s dominating 2019 run, with the band being branded by everyone who discusses music for even five minutes in a public space being forced to take their stance on the band’s two releases. I personally fall into the camp that sees these releases as an impressive display from them, but my contrarian streak rides high considering that A. these are the first releases I’ve actually liked from the band (excluding Lenker’s 2018 solo release abysskiss) and B. I think Two Hands is the superior of the two albums. Here, the band throws out the ethereal, mystic ideas of their previous release for something more textural and immediate. The record revels in spaces between violence and comfort, with songs like “The Toy” and “Not” drawing up the chaos of the world and channeling it into songs that feel as if they’ll tear apart the moment they’re finished. It’s in this primal feeling that Big Thief manage to reach for some of the rawest and most direct emotional impact they’ve ever hit upon.
#9: clipping. — There Existed An Addiction to Blood
clipping. records are the kind of works that only truly devoted nerds could dream up, comprised of over-complicated songwriting exercises designed to draw out the most intent results from their creators. An Addiction to Blood continues the rap group’s habits well, taking a spark from the venerated genre of horrorcore this time around. Along the way, there’s tributes to John Carpenter scores, harsh-noise breakdowns, and a good dozen or so dead bodies splattered within the fourteen main tracks of the record. The intensity amps up over the course of the tracklist, leaving the listener bathed in the well constructed tension generated by the lyrics and the instrumentals accompanying them, which range from minimalist haunts to amped up rhythms designed to draw out all the fervency Daveed Diggs’ ratcheting delivery deserves. Blood is a record that feels as unnerving as it is memorable, like the musical equivalent of a gory display spread out in front of you. It’s disturbing spectacle, carefully mapped out for maximum effect, rap album as horror film.
#8: Charli XCX — Charli
The first three words Charli says on this record are, “I go hard”. She isn’t kidding.
#7: the Mountain Goats — In League with Dragons
Mountain Goats albums since their signing to Merge Records have largely been simple and pleasant enough affairs, barring the 2017 “NO COMPED VOCALS, NO PITCH CORRECTION, NO GUITARS” curveball of Goths. Dragons rises to the top of the pool by drawing out all those simple and pleasant qualities into their greatest form, with lead singer and normal control freak John Darnielle letting the reins loose to allow superproducer Owen Pallett’s flourishes into the band’s now much looser sound. The narratives here focus on aging heroes, be they actual wizards, baseball stars, or John’s eternal muse, Ozzy Osbourne, all characters who find the powers that once served them waning. The arrangements here open up brilliantly, finding new spaces in the Goats’ compositions that make their songs sound richer and illuminated with detail. Similarly, Darnielle finds joy in everything, from stories of “firearms and flashdrives” to just heralding the lowly possum. Where Goths drew away from tradition, this feels like the ideal of what a normal Mountain Goats album can be.
#6: Quelle Chris — Guns
Satire of the news perhaps seems like a drawn out form by now, a relic for a time when the stakes of current events didn’t feel near apocalyptic. In that understanding, Quelle Chris has always been astute in his comedic skills, but Guns is the point when he perfects his form. After last year’s collaborative effort with his fiance Jean Grae, Everything’s Fine, Quelle has returned to his solo work to make a rap record unlike much else released this year. Guns looks at the arms race being taken up in all corners of American life and culture, the equivalent of sending off a few rounds into the sky and investigating the impact points when they come down. Songs like “It’s the Law” breach the obvious unfairness of the separate, but unequal standards of justice dealt against black citizens in America, and whether it’s really the guns themselves that kill people or the system that’s allowed them to run rampant in the first place. It manages it all with a toothy grin, being the only album that can throw out such an obvious gag for a hook such as “Everyone can get it like Obamacare” and still make you laugh at it. Quelle Chris has already proven he can stand alongside even the strongest rappers, but here he shows his ability to bridge his grander concepts neatly, shooting out a full clip of his best songs.
#5: and the Kids — When This Life Is Over
I usually only talk about a record seriously if I feel I can distinguish the emotional lines of my enjoyment from what makes me actually enjoy it. I’ve cried to this album nearly every time I’ve listened to it, so I think I have to recuse myself from analytical discussion here.
#4: Vampire Weekend — Father of the Bride
Indie music’s prodigal sons have returned from perhaps one of the longest breaks possible short of a total dissolution or a break between Fiona Apple album cycles, and with them they’ve brought strange fruits. FOTB is a looser, more playful album than anything Vampire Weekend have put out before, and yet it feels burdened with the weight of the world. It’s a record about trying to find community in the face of much more catastrophic circumstances, filled with loose grooves and a musical vocabulary that spans from reggae covers of disco classics to simply Phish-style silliness. Ezra Koenig has taken full control of the band, and his ingenuity shines through in a new way. It’s perhaps the most sincere work the band has ever made, embracing whatever ideas it wants to along the way. This isn’t even the best Vampire Weekend album, but it’s the one I’d most want to hear plenty times more after this year.
#3: black midi — Schlagenheim
black midi are a machine. A machine which changes every four measures, a machine built from the ideas of every dead-eyed middle-aged guy who’s really into post-punk and comments on full album rips of Daydream Nation or Tago Mago wishing they “could find more stuff like this nowadays”. They are (and this is just from one scan of one comments’ section): Talking Heads, Slint, Polvo, Hella, King Crimson, the Jesus Lizard. They played with Damo Suzuki once, for fuck’s sake. They are a motorik engine, built to hit the pleasure centers in the brain with the most obvious but gratifying grooves imaginable, trained equally in the ideas of building something ridiculous and making it sound good in the process. They are, of course, all the rage this year, as is appropriate for any band who can make this sort of music right out of the gate and have the big music press machine back them up. Schlagenheim thrives on the sheer charisma of hearing the band lock into these ridiculous grooves and lock into it, best described by my friends as “the goblin mindset”, whatever the hell that’s supposed to mean. The machine will continue to thrive.
#2: Angel Olsen — All Mirrors
I saw Angel Olsen perform my former favorite song of hers, “Acrobat” two years ago at a festival. It opened up near dead silent, just letting her voice command everything over the field, with the festival crowd just standing in awe. Five minutes in, with everything up to that point having been barely above a whisper, the band kicked in. They drew up an immediate uproar, playing with ever ounce of intensity they could have mustered the whole set, and as soon as they had started, they drew back again. With just the first song on this record, Angel finally captures that same effect in the studio, and it elicits the kind of loud and hyperbolic reactions it deserves. “Lark” is the greatest song Angel has ever recorded, and it’s somehow only the first song on this album. The rest of All Mirrors draws on much quieter storms, reserved pieces that meditate on sounds of more reserved styles of synth pop and traditional orchestral music, and it’s in their understatement that they’re just as shocking as that first salvo. Whenever the acoustic version of this album is planned to be released, it’ll surely be a highlight for that time as well, because the pieces at their core here are brilliant emotional flares cast into the night sky.
#1: glass beach — the first glass beach album
For the second year in a row, my favorite album of the year is a debut album from an essentially unknown artist. As with last year, I sat with this one for a while thinking it was just relatively decent, and then eventually it hit me in an emotional level and I became completely captivated, annoying everyone who follows me on Twitter in the process. the first glass beach album is a miracle of punk rock ingenuity, built over the course of three years and eventually assembled into the form it is now. Glass Beach are compelled to treat genre and style as hard lines to be completely shattered, the musical equivalent of Calvinball as the listener gets slingshotted from bedroom pop to surf rock or lounge music in an instant. The sheer audacity of this kind of playfulness to their sound is admirable in just how much sheer fun it is to listen to, to the point you almost forget how downright depressing some of these songs are. You’re a lot less likely to notice “yoshi’s island” is talking about the sheer pain of gender dysphoria when it’s doing so with a very catchy instrumental paced at a bossa nova, mutating into a breakneck guitar rager in its final moments to match the joy of just being seen for the person you are. In their handling of trans identity and how it interacts with one’s personal relationships, J McClendon’s lyrics flourish, showing an intimate connection with the ideas at hand in each of these songs’ individual character sketches, and a very rough, but surprising evolution of many tropes that emo typically provides in its lyrical standards. Like their contemporaries in groups like Origami Angel and their tourmates Dogleg, Glass Beach aren’t afraid to just have fun with the form, even in the face of a more harrowing world around them. They make it all seem wondrous.
