The original title for this was going to be 2020: tl;dr music doesn’t really help, but I’m not sure it feels as apt as I thought weeks back. Make no mistake, the list that follows may still be too long (though you should see the earlier drafts), but having revisited the following albums again and again I’m not sure the assertion fits like I’d thought, regardless of how flippant it was intended. Hell if I don’t feel a bit better than I did.
Music is never going to save us, but it sure can soften the sharpest edges. That’s what these albums did for me this year, one that was almost exclusively sharp edges, and maybe they can do the same for you. They’re not presented by rank—that would be and always is ridiculous—but rather some vague chronology of my encounters with them. We’ve got 13 artists (yeah I’m trying to be cute I guess) and a total of 15 releases.
I should note three albums that are not on this list, but very likely would’ve been if I hadn’t written a lot of words about them already: Joey Agresta’s Let Me to Rock, Kath Bloom’s Bye Bye These Are the Days, and Bill Wells’s The Viaduct Tuba Trio Plays the Music of Bill Wells. I do believe everything I said about them then still stands.
15 FAVORITES
Ulla – Tumbling Towards a Wall (Experiences Ltd.) / inside means inside me (Boomkat Editions)
Last winter I was listening to Ulla’s balmy side of Plafond 4 multiple times a day, near-dependent on its centering effects, so the arrival of Tumbling Towards a Wall was a welcome gift at the height of what then seemed like a rough winter (so naive). While I expected something similarly soothing, what I got was far murkier, even foreboding, and all the more entrancing for it. The album’s full of slight tracks that still manage to fill a room, a testament to Ulla’s preternatural sensitivity to atmosphere and structure. The dewy-eyed dub single “Leaves and Wish” exhibits this perfectly. The gradual shifts in its drum patterns offered some of the most cathartic listening I came across this year, waiting with bated breath for that gentle kick drum heartbeat to return. Each track stands as an exemplar of atomized song craft, all tapping into liminal emotional states, and listening back to it some 11 months later is like revisiting the calm before a storm.
If Tumbling braced for any number of troubles ahead, inside means inside me was absolutely subsumed by the one that won the race. Recorded in the Spring under lockdown for Boomkat’s stellar Documenting Sound series, it’s some uniquely difficult listening for how well it captures the confusion and dread of its moment. On Side A, Ulla lays an aqueous ambient bed and plays out snippets of phone conversations from those early days of the pandemic that are crushing in their universality. “Hey you ok?” followed by a choked “No”; a manic laugh, then, “I’m going mental”; a tearful “It’s not any of our faults but all of my friends have been real fucked up lately.” Side B unfurls like the long stretches of time spent alone, where moments pass without sticking. Brief field recordings of chirping birds, jingling keys, and sloshing water are isolated like decontextualized images that don’t quite connect. The side’s sole, central phone sample offers a grim prognostication: “It’s gonna be a real different planet.” And here we are and it kind of is.
Soakie – Soakie (La Vida Es Un Mus Discos)
Earlier this year I often found myself working the register at a cafe that saw way too much business, facing an endless line of customers who were willing to wait 30 minutes just to order a latte as long as they could be indignant about it while they waved their phones at the register. All I had in my head was Soakie’s “Or You Or You”. The NYC/Melbourne hardcore quartet know how to pound out quality antisocial punk missives at breakneck speed, and at its release their self-titled debut was all I needed to get me through the work week. Summer Perlow vacillates between withering lilts and ferocious snarls, infusing her righteous takedowns of male privilege and capitalist rot with corrosive venom. “Boys on Stage” should’ve pummeled way more ears this year if not for the fact that everyone had to cede the stage a month after its release. With many of these tracks taking aim at toxic social dynamics, they don’t hit the same now that so much that is social has been shelved, but others have only grown more potent. “Ditch the Rich” and its rallying cry that “All the poor should start a war / All the rich get in a ditch” sounds better than ever.
Big Blood – Do You Wanna Have a Skeleton Dream? (Feeding Tube Records)
Big Blood have been at it for well over a decade and have dozens of quality releases to show for it, but their stretch of albums released over the last 5ish years have seen them branching out from their freak folk roots to funnel all manner of old school rock and pop subgenres through their ghostly filters. Their latest takes a stab at the stale bubblegum of ‘60s girl groups, and they sound like witches out for the blood of those predatory producers of old. Tracks like “Sweet Talker” and “Pox” are patented Big Blood, eerie and rollicking in the best way. Elsewhere they cut straight to the heart thanks to the band’s newest full member (and offspring of the old) Quinnisa Kinsella Mulkerin. Her stunning turns on “Real World” and standout “Insecure Kids” hit hard with their clear-eyed summations of society’s dismal state and uncertain future. It’s jarring to hear lyrics about Fortnite and Snapchat laced into such anachronistic music, but coming from a child entrenched in that culture it devastates. Closing on a ghostly version of “Ave Maria” feels as faithful as it does blasphemous given the Lynchian romp that’s preceded it, but hey, at this point we’ll take help wherever we can get it.
FUJI||||||||||TA – iki (Hallow Ground) / KŌMORI (Boomkat Editions)
Since 2009 Japanese sound artist Yosuke Fujita aka FUJI||||||||||TA has been experimenting with a unique pipe organ of his own design, featuring 11 pipes and powered by a “fuigo”, a traditional blacksmith’s pump. In April he widely unveiled it with the first of a few 2020 releases, iki, and the results are surprisingly expansive for what would appear to be such a limited instrument. Fujita coaxes a fragile beauty out of the organ’s sighs, but maintains a powerful sense of physicality via to the creaks and clacks of the pump. Influenced by traditional Japanese gagaku—a centuries old classical court music which emphasizes timbre—the album’s evocative, hypnotic ebbs and flows offer a pleasant sense of dislocation, while its steadily insistent rhythms imbue it with an elemental force. Its not entirely calming but not at all harsh, and that liminality has fit the time like a glove.
The more recent KŌMORI, Fujita’s contribution to the aforementioned Documenting Sound series resonates with the time aesthetically and conceptually, finding him collaborating with a colony of bats in a cave at the bottom of Mt. Fuji. He notes his interest in inaudible sounds drew him to bats for their use echolocation, but points to their role in the evolution of coronaviruses as relevant to this pandemic-centric recording as well. The tape’s three tracks respectively feature Fujita and the bats in collaboration, Fujita solo, and just the sounds of those winged viral scapegoats. The pairing is inspired, perhaps the most haunting thing I’ve heard all year.
Yves Tumor – Heaven to a Tortured Mind (Warp)
Sean Bowie aka Yves Tumor has been one of the best pop-adjacent artists around since adopting their current moniker, but Heaven announced the arrival of a full-blown rock star with fitting bombast. I mean, it opens with a damn fanfare, and fittingly so as Bowie deservedly celebrates their entrance into the pantheon of oversexed musical icons. Tracks like “Romanticist” and “Kerosene!”, the phenomenal duet with Diana Gordon, ooze sweat and sleaze in a way that was frankly kind of torturous for the socially distanced among us. And just because this is their most pop album yet doesn’t mean they’ve tamped any of their idiosyncrasies, the mark of a true icon. It’s plenty harsh (the gnarled guitar loop on “Medicine Burn”), knotty (those frantically layered drums on “Dream Palette”), maybe even a little nerdy (“Asteroid Blues” samples Metal Gear Solid, and is that title a Cowboy Bebop reference? I could certainly see it soundtracking an interstellar dogfight), but none of that negates the broad appeal of these soulful anthems. This album revealed to me that I haven’t seen a legitimate rock star in a long long time. I didn’t know it was something I wanted but here we are.
Sun Araw – Rock Sutra (Sun Ark Records)
“The goal has always been the creation of a psychedelic music, by which is meant a psychotropic music: not an aesthetic sensibility but a method of discontinuous experience,” states Cameron Stallones aka Sun Araw on his Bandcamp. So it seems he isn’t striving to make druggy music—the stereotype of psychedelic music, for better or worse—he’s trying to synthesize musical drugs. As much as I love his entire catalog, I’m not sure he’s so transcended those reverb-soaked trappings to the degree he has on Rock Sutra, an album so unabashedly goofy and disorienting it could be a controlled substance. Recorded live-to-MIDI with his band, the squiggly sound he’s been perfecting over the last few years reached an apex, made clear from the start by “Roomboe.” Its herky jerky groove fails at locking into something you can easily nod along to more than it succeeds, and it’s way more fun for it. “78 Sutra” was my feel-good jam of 2020, its charming plinks and wobbles skating over a breezy bass line for 11 blissful minutes. But I’ve probably said more than is necessary. Stallones himself notes: “It doesn’t stay put, and it keeps zooming in to reveal more and more. This is so you can zoom in and experience ‘feeling-without-articulating’ for yourself, which is better than reading about it here.” I can’t argue that point, so just listen.
Carman Moore – Personal Problems (Reading Group)
Though it may be late on the heels of the 2018 restoration of Bill Gunn’s visionary 1980 “meta soap opera”, the reissue of this superb soundtrack came at an opportune time for its coziness if nothing else. Moore’s sparing, warm piano motifs and sweet, bluesy grooves accompanied countless days spent indoors. That said, I wouldn’t label this introverted music. Much like the film, which harnessed new videocassette technology to capture Black life in NYC in the early ‘80s in a vérité fashion, this music buzzes with a quiet vibrancy. In a couple cases (“Harlem Moment”, “Love Conquers”) there’s actual lively conversation in the background, an effect I always enjoy for the romantic image it conjures of an artist spinning magic for an inattentive audience—not unlike Gunn with the film itself. PBS foolishly passed on airing it back in the day, which feels particularly egregious given the instantly endearing “Tema 1” and its affable public television air. But the soundtrack itself is just Side A. On the flip we’re treated to a set of improvisations on the original score’s themes recorded by Moore in 2019, and it’s wonderful to hear how he stretches out these pieces some 40 years later, suffused with a newfound interiority that paired well with the melancholic domesticity that would soon become the norm.
Liz Durette – For Now (self-released)
This informal collection from Baltimore keymaster Liz Durette is half tracks she deemed too bleak for her official 2020 release, the also excellent Delight, and half “the new social distancing music”. Which are which I couldn’t say, but they’re all splendid, searching microtonal odysseys in miniature. I say miniature because something about the tones she’s settled on with her polyphonic MIDI keyboard feel toy-like even as they stretch across rarely explored registers, and that’s a very good thing. What could have otherwise overreached into grandiloquence is instead rendered charmingly approachable, albeit in a very alien way. There’s a graceful clumsiness in the way many of these tracks unravel, and a welcome sense of humor. “5” in particular, with its off-key sighing and occasional straining towards recognizable tunes is peppered with moments that never fail to illicit a dopey grin. I hear the cosmic as well, particularly in “1” which I found jaw-dropping in its singular beauty from the first listen. The way the notes strain towards familiar tones is so palliative, and that’s perhaps the best term to describe this collection. A lovely respite from the known universe.
Wendy Eisenberg – Dehiscence (self-released)
They may have released a superb full band album this year, but it’s this intimate collection of demos that I’ve returned to most. A breakup album to trump all breakup albums, it captures the experience of heartbreak in brilliantly prismatic fashion—the hope and despair, the heightened self-awareness and solipsism, the reflexive cataloging of the past, the reckoning with the now even colder world around you. One of my favorite cuts, “as the bird flies in vermont, for carrie”, looks back on a friendship lost years before the breakup at hand: “Hey, isn’t it crazy? / It’s been three years since the last we’ve talked / Or looked at each other at all.” It so perfectly captures that impulse to seek a comforting voice, only to remember they’re not there for you anymore. The whole collection is vulnerable in its lyrics and stripped down aesthetic, but being one of the best guitarists working today and a prodigious songwriter to boot, Eisenberg exudes an enviable confidence and incisiveness even when mired in self-reproach. Their arrangements are gorgeously lyrical—here one can really appreciate the influence of João Gilberto and Egberto Gismonti on Eisenberg’s work—running circles around any perceived “bedroom pop” peers. They claimed the collection would only be up for a limited time, but eight months later it’s the bestseller on their Bandcamp, and with good reason. Still, I wouldn’t sleep on it.
Flanafi – Flanafi (Boiled Records)
The debut of Philly’s Flanafi aka Simon Martinez is a slippery one, worming around funk, jazz, blue-eyed soul, IDM flourishes, and weirdo rap ad-libs in undeniably coherent fashion. His mumbly grooves immediately made me think of D’Angelo, but only if he’d spent all his time away from recording locked in a basement jamming to freaks like R.A.P. Ferreira and Ryan Power. Though he’s been experimenting with this kind of sound for years as half of Pulgas, left to his own devices Martinez doesn’t get bogged down in any foggy jamming, allowing his unique songwriting and guitar wizardry to really shine. “Necessary Beams” is buoyed by a sweet muted melody, but it’s also littered with clunky riffs that infuse some real personality, and their expert deployment point to his six-string fluency. Lyrically things are a bit fuzzy, but the way Martinez deploys his whisper thin voice, shapeshifting through whines, coos, and croaks, matches the music perfectly. “Whistler” is a prime example of his powers as a one-man chorus. On closer “Waiting Like the Rest of Them” Martinez playfully demands “Tell me how great I am” but I reckon he shouldn’t need us to reinforce what’s so evident.
(Liv).e – Couldn’t Wait to Tell You (In Real Life)
We’ve all been spending more time alone than we probably ever hoped to—or maybe we did and are learning what fools we were—but with no clear end in sight it behooves us to try and make some peace with ourselves. Opening with a self-interrogation (“So tell me, everybody got a love story, right?” “It’s never been a secret that I love myself”), Couldn’t Wait to Tell You unfolds as a scattered audio diary, one in which love is explored from a multitude of angles. A versatile singer who knows how best to warp her vocals, (Liv).e aka Olivia Williams renders competing impulses as tangible voices vying for our attention, and through it all the specter of the smartphone looms. “Switch off, baby / We’ve gotta turn off, baby / Cos if I want your online attention then it really ain’t pure” she insists on highlight “Unplug Me”, a track peppered with the faint, desperate, all too familiar appeal “Unplug me!” If the shifts in each track’s lyrical concerns feel a bit like chasing down one train of thought only to have another barrel right into you, the collaged, Quiet Storm-indebted beats provided largely by mejiwahn expertly bind everything together. (Liv).e doesn’t seek to square all these facets of herself as much as revel in their messiness, and the album’s all the better—and realer—for it.
Brother Theotis Taylor – Brother Theotis Taylor (Mississippi Records)
This year, with nowhere to look but our screens, which offered up as much tragedy as we could handle and then some, we were constantly confronted with the precarity of our way of life. You might say “impermanence” was the watchword of the year, but I guess that’s redundant when it’s the very nature of life itself. 92-year-old gospel musician and preacher Brother Theotis Taylor knows this and lives by it. “We don’t know when the Lord gon’ come but he said he gon’ cut it short and righteous… so it pays us to be on time,” he offers in the liner notes of Mississippi Records’ self-titled collection of mid-‘70s recordings. As such, he’s spent his lifetime honing his craft and letting the spirit move through him, and his talent has not gone unrecognized. He toured Southern Georgia with Sam Cooke and the Soul Stirrers and even performed at Carnegie Hall in 1990, and it’s no wonder why listening to these choice cuts, many recorded at home by the reel-to-reel perched on his piano. Highlights like “If I Could Just Hold Out ’Til Tomorrow” and the unforgettable “Somebody’s Gone” took on a profound heaviness this year as death tolls climbed, but Taylor’s spirited playing and soaring voice is a balm. We may not last forever, but as long as there are ears to hear it this music ought to.
Lori Goldston – On a Moonlit Hill in Slovenia (Eidertown Records)
I’ve listened to this brief tape more than anything else this winter, though it feels far more appropriate for a summer night. Maybe it’s just the crickets, but there’s a sympathetic warmth to Goldston’s playing as well, a patience, that feels born of one of those temperate nights spent sprawled in the grass in the company of close friends. Recorded at a house show in the titular setting, in this short set of extended improv one of the best contemporary cellists shows respectful deference to the soundscape that surrounds her, lending all the more power to her richly layered crescendos when they arrive. She builds steam with such intuition and care, weaving in gorgeous swells between lovely seeking passages, and I always find myself rapt by her gruff bowing, yearning plucks, and softly teased harmonics. I’ll spare you a play by play as I’m ill-equipped to describe such transcendent music, but suffice to say this has earned a permanent spot in my late night rotation regardless of the temperature.
BONUS 10
And because I can’t help myself, here are ten other albums that I didn’t find the time to write about but would be remiss not to point you to:
Aksak Maboul – Figures (Crammed Discs)
Dewa Alit & Gamelan Salukat – Genetic (Black Truffle)
badsista – LUCY 3D (self-released)
David Behrman, Paul DeMarinis, Fern Friedman, Terri Hanlon, Anne Klingensmith – She’s More Wild… (Black Truffle)
Laura Cannell – The Earth With Her Crowns (Brawl Records)
DJ Python – Mas Amable (Incienso)
Jeff Parker – Suite for Max Brown (International Anthem)
Matt Robidoux – Brief Candles (\\NULL|ZØNE//)
Luke Schneider – Altar of Harmony (Third Man Records)
Rojin Sharafi – Zangaar (Zabte Sote)