Favorite Music of 2017

As always, I feel like I need to emphasize that it's impossible to listen to everything, and it's even more impossible to give everything the time needed to truly appreciate it all. I'm also really bad at listening to metal and hip hop. So please let me know what I missed! Chances are I didn't even hear it.

Anyway, here's my list. As I did last year, I put links to the original reviews of the albums, if I'd reviewed them. And as always, feel free to share your own favorite music of the year. I love all this nerdy, list-trading stuff at the year's end.

Favorite Albums:

1. Björk: Utopia
Some years, the #1 spot is a no-brainer; others, it's hard to pick out one record above the rest. This year is the latter; any of these first four albums could have been my #1. But I'm giving it to Björk anyway because she freakin' deserves it. A companion of sorts to 2015's Vulnicura, Utopia takes everything that was compelling about that album and flips it—sweeping strings in place of broody electronica, ecstatically optimistic emotional landscapes instead of heart-rending pain. That's not to say this album is all sunshine, but it's so very full of life in a way that's world-shaking and contagious. Björk has called it her "Tinder" album... is this what Tinder is like?

2. Neil Cicierega: Mouth Moods
I'm still amazed at just how funny this album is, how seamlessly produced it is, how endlessly inventive with seemingly played-out pieces of pop music flotsam it is. It's a masterpiece, a call for all other works of mash-up artistry to stop because there's nowhere left to go from here.

[Read original review]

3. Harriet Tubman: Araminta
I've left way too much jazz rotting on the vine of my "I should listen to this more closely" list, but of the works I had time to spend with, Araminta is the far-and-away winner. It's tense and uncompromising in the spirit of the best jazz fusion, but it's also smooth enough to not get lost in the technical weeds.

[Read original review]

4. Fleet Foxes: Crack-Up
We had a lot of late 2000s indie rockers come back with albums this year, and most of them were pretty good. But only a few of them (I'd say this and the LCD Soundsystem album) actually feel like genuine evolutions of the band's output, and of those, only Fleet Foxes had the stones to make a freaky, elliptical, proggy puzzle of an album, and if you've been reading this blog for any length of time, you know how I feel about proggy puzzle albums.

[Read original review here]

5. SZA: CTRL
"Love Galore" is the most well-deserved Top 40 hit of the year, and the rest of the album is at least as good. I liked the Solange record from last year a lot, but I think I'm feeling about this album what everyone else said they felt about that album.

[Read original review here]

6. Kendrick Lamar: DAMN.
Kendrick's fourth album is his darkest by a considerable stretch. For Kendrick, the world of 2017 is arbitrary and its God capricious, and most troubling of all is Lamar's sneaking suspicion that he might deserve it all. It's a profound and uneasy exploration of depression, and it's one that, even if I've never quite been able to embrace, I've never been able to shake either.

[Read original review here]

7. Spoon: Hot Thoughts
I mean, it's a Spoon album. Y'all know what this is.

[Read original review here]

8. Foxygen: Hang
Foxygen go glam and give us the great Queen album we never knew we needed in 2017.

[Read original review here]

9. King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard: Polygondwanaland
King Gizzard released a lot of music in 2017. But only one of their many albums has "Crumbling Castle," the 10-minute psych rock opus that kicks off this album.

[Read original review here]

10. White Stag: Emergence
Local Knox-prog pride. The most ambitious and successful band in Knoxville's prog rock scene makes their most ambitious and successful album yet.

[Read original review here]







Great 2017 Songs Not On These Albums:

Arcade Fire: "Everything Now"—People made fun of the ABBA synths on this song, but Arcade Fire has always been a little cornball. Besides, the track's mix of cornball and earnest despair is one of the few places on the uneven Everything Now album that hits the exact tone the band is going for.

J Balvin & Willy William: "Mi Gente (feat. Beyoncé)"—I mean, "Despacito" is okay, but I've never been a huge Daddy Yankee fan, and I hope we can all agree that as long as we need English-language pop stars to ensure the crossover of Spanish-language songs, Beyoncé is a much better ambassador than the Biebs. Besides, this song owns; "Despacito" does not.

David Bowie: "When I Met You"—Unless there's some hidden trove somewhere, this is the last music we'll ever hear from David Bowie. He's not talking to us here, but it's hard not to feel like lines like "You have just everything/But nothing at all" are meant to usher us into a Bowie-less world. To paraphrase my wife's favorite movie, I am so uninterested in a world without Bowie. But it's the world we have now, and at least we have this song—everything and nothing at all.

Brockhampton: "Gummy"—It sounds like an M.I.A. song covered by West Coast rappers, and I dig it.

Cardi B: "Bodak Yellow"—I love a good rags-to-riches-self-love debut, and here we are with the catchiest one in years.

Carly Rae Jepsen: "Cut to the Feeling"—Have we all agreed that CRJ is the pop queen of the 2010s? Because when the best pop song of the year comes from a tossed-off tie-in to a crappy animated movie, kept off the best pop album of the 2010s because it wasn't good enough, I think we need to start edging Taylor Swift off the stage to make room for Carly.

Coldplay: "All I Can Think About Is You"—It sounds like old Coldplay, and I love old Coldplay, so sue me.

Brian Eno & Kevin Shields: "Only Once Away My Son"—A collaboration between Eno and the My Bloody Valentine guy is obviously great on paper, but it's still remarkable to hear just how great it is in the flesh. A magnificent drone that soothes and shakes in equal measure.

Father John Misty: "Things It Would Have Been Helpful to Know Before the Revolution"—Considering we haven't had a major, society-upheaving revolution in the Western world (yet), it may be a tad premature for ol' J. Tillman to be having anxiety about the post-revolution world. Still, there's something affecting about the way his character recognizes our current system's inherent problems while still feeling a sort of melancholy about what might be lost if we overthrew it all.

HAIM: "I Want You Back"—This was knocking about with "Cut to the Feeling" as my Song of the Summer. The platonic ideal of that HAIM appropriation of '90s pop kitsch with millennial sensibilities.

Jay-Z: "The Story of O.J."—Possibly Jay-Z's best song, and definitely Jay-Z's best music video. Also: "You wanna know what's more important than throwing away money at a strip club? ... ... ... Credit."

LCD Soundsystem: "Other Voices"—I praised LCD up in the Crack-Up blurb for actually evolving their sound, and good on Murphy for that. But I guess my favorite American Dream track is the one that sounds most like their old stuff. Am I losing my edge? I'm probably losing my edge, right?

Lorde: "Green Light"—I like contemplative, moody Lorde as much as the rest of y'all, but come on, this song rocks. Lorde cuts loose and gives us the yearning pop song we'll never deserve.

The National: "The System Only Dreams in Total Darkness"—I might be too far out of my indie rock 4 lyfe phase to deeply care about a The National album again, but this song has some very cool guitar work and even a guitar solo. It's really great and not at all weepy. I like weepy, but this is what I'm talking about.

Margo Price: "All American Made"—Price's sophomore record doesn't have anything as great as show-stoppingly great as "Hands of Time," but it does have "All American Made," a melancholy piece of social commentary that feels like it stepped of Bruce Springsteen's Nebraska. She says she wrote it during the Obama presidency, and a few of the lines bear that out (surely we don't need to wonder if Trump "sleeps at night"), but this piece is oh-so 2017.

St. Vincent: "Los Ageless"—Out of an album full of St. Vincent trying to be more melodically immediate, this song is the most melodically immediate, and with an absolutely killer chorus, too.

Sufjan Stevens: "Wallowa Lake Monster"—There's a persistent theme in my music-listening habits this year where I kept listening to isolated Sufjan Stevens songs and thinking, "Boy, that's really good; I should listen to one of his albums." I still haven't listened to one of his albums all the way through, but this song, a previously unreleased track from his Carrie & Lowell sessions, is really good.

Taylor Swift: "New Year's Day"—The old Taylor may be dead, but this is a convincing imitation of her. There are more forward-thinking songs on reputation, and if I'd spent more time with the album, I might have chosen one of them. Still, "Please don't ever become a stranger whose laugh I could recognize anywhere" is one of those perfectly realized lines that Swift shrugs off so effortlessly that it's easy to miss that she's one of the most talented pop writers of her generation.

The War on Drugs: "Strangest Thing"—Some of The War on Drugs's "lookatme, I'm '80s heartland rock!" thing wears thin at times, but on the other hand, there's "Strangest Thing," pretty much the best-case scenario for this aesthetic, a monster midtempo composition that starts big with its synths and guitars and just keeps getting bigger for its nearly 7 minutes.

Kamasi Washington: "Truth"—It's a 13-minute jazz composition that's both standalone and the culmination of a bunch of musical themes from Washington's Harmony of Difference EP. Beautiful and bright and lively, it's the sort of song that lives up to jazz's ideal as the most socially constructive American genre.

Mini-Reviews for October 9 - 15, 2017

Fall Break is, sadly, now over. So long, beautiful week with loads of time for watching horror movies and reading. It was wonderful.

Movies

The Wailing (곡성) (2016)
Horror movies with subtext are good, and horror movies with metaphysical and/or religious subtext are the best. The Wailing is the latter, and it's a whip-smart one at that, operating not just as an impressively dense, twisty horror narrative but also a frightening religious fable about the seditious nature of evil and, if I'm not mistaken (I might be—I don't know nearly enough about Asian history/politics), a pretty piercing political allegory about xenophobia. It's a movie that, in depicting a single South Korean village, envelops the totality of the world stage without ever violating the reality of its small-time setting, suggesting the far-reaching consequences of the way that mythological and social powers engage with one another. What I'm saying is that The Wailing is pretty much brilliant. Grade: A

Inland Empire (2006)
One of the things that's helped David Lynch maintain such a devoted following is that as odd and experimental as his work tends to get, there's usually a concrete narrative to be sussed out upon repeat viewings—in other words, viewed in a certain way, they're puzzles. At least, until Inland Empire. I have no earthly idea what's going on on a narrative level in this movie, and I doubt that repeat viewings will help clarify this; for all the talk of that "dreamlike" Lynchian atmosphere, Inland Empire may be the only film of his that's completely untethered from from a grounding reality, its events progressing with the rhythm of a nightmare: the same actor plays an entirely different character in two consecutive scenes; a door in Poland opens in Hollywood; human figures contort into horrifying distortions; clips of incongruous music float in and out of the mix. Which is not to say that it's a haphazard film in the least. All its scenes circle around iterations of similar themes of violence, filmmaking, identity, and ambition, and it's almost as if Lynch is building a collage out of the tenuous logic of whatever narrative each moment gives us. The movie has the feel of something monstrous bursting through the barrier between subconscious and conscious, and as such, there's an elemental power to the film's cumulative effect, even if on a moment-by-moment basis it's kind of ugly and baffling. Plus, Laura Dern deserves all the awards for her performance here. Come for her, if for nothing else. Grade: A-

Them (Ils) (2006)
This movie's greatest strength is just how coy it plays with its antagonist(s)—basically, a horror movie of the home invasion variety in which the shots are specifically constructed to obscure what exactly it is that's afflicting our protagonists (for a long time, it's not even clear whether or not it's human). The effect is almost abstract, and it's mesmerizing in its obliqueness. Unfortunately, the movie throws all that down the toilet in its final minutes with an epilogue that not only reveals far too much but then punctuates it with several screens of explanatory text. I know, "based on a true story," blah blah. But come on—this was building to something great, and instead, it's just pretty good. Grade: B

Body Snatchers (1993)
When I was in elementary school, we lived on an Air Force base. My mom wanted to grow a vegetable garden, so she, my siblings, and I planted one with the help of my grandfather. It all went well enough until one day, we got a knock on the door. It was an officer telling us that we couldn't have a garden because the soil was filled with toxic chemicals that would get into the vegetables. So we had to destroy the plants. I say all this to explain why Body Snatchers, the third film adaptation of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, now relocated to a military base, resonated with me, perhaps even more than the revered 1978 version. My experiences on the Air Force Base were largely positive, but there's no denying the vague disquietude of living in a location where everyone dresses alike, where toxic waste resides in the soil beneath your feet, where armed guards and cement barriers greet you each time you leave and return, and where, in a heartbeat, you could be caught and quarantined within the small confines of the base (as actually happened on 9/11/01). It's not hard to imagine my warm childhood memories twisted into horror like that on display in this film. I'm a little iffy on some of the stuff that happens toward the film's end, but in general, it's a fantastic iteration on the Invasion evolutionary chain. Grade: B+

The Slumber Party Massacre (1982)
Nearly every review I've found of this movie talks about the way it makes a virtue out of the typical slasher movie fake-out cliches, and that's absolutely true; the jump scare has never been so perfected as when this movie lampoons its essential silliness and twists it into a metaphor for the violation of women's bodies through non-violent means (before the actual violent violation, of course). This is not a horror comedy, exactly, but it's very funny. The fake-out gags, sure, but there is a lot of the reverse, too, where we know something very bad is happening while the characters remain almost comically ignorant of it—in particular, one scene involving a refrigerator that seems to have heavily influenced the early main-character-clueless-of-horror-in-front-of-his-face goings of Shaun of the Dead. Even with all this genre subversion, the movie still hews a little closer to slasher tropes than I'd like—we're still dealing with scantily clad women being cut up, and while this is written/directed by women, which is a relief, I still wonder if this plays too much into the hand of the genre pitfalls. Regardless, mild trepidation aside, I enjoyed this quite a bit. Grade: B+

The Ghost Ship (1943)
The big joke about this is that there are no ghosts, nor anything even close to resembling one. So the RKO-mandated title is a gigantic bit of misadvertisement; what we're left with instead is a sort of thin psychological thriller about a ship's officer whose worried that his captain is insane. It's got some pretty good atmosphere and a few nicely tense scenes ("There are some captains who would hold this against you"), which make it entertaining enough that it's not a waste of time. But there's nothing all that remarkable about it, and the beginning portion of the movie is super weak. Grade: B-




Music

The Sugarcubes - Life's Too Good (1988)
I think, if we're being honest here, the only reason most of us still talk about The Sugarcubes is that the group was a jumping off point for Björk, who has totally Beyoncé'd the other fine members of this group with an all-eclipsing solo career. Life's Too Good, The Sugarcubes' debut, is a good record of post-punk energy, but I'm here for Björk, and, with apologies to the rest of The Sugarcubes (who I am sure are talented in their own rights), Björk totally steals the show here with her soaring vocals. The rest is fine. Grade: B

Favorite Music of 2015

Due to my new teaching job (so apparently teaching is time-consuming, guys; who'da thunk?), I haven't posted on this blog in a while, and my post frequency probably won't be much better next spring either. But dang it, it's the end of the year, and far be it from me to shy away from posting my annual thoughts on the music and movies that affected me most over the past twelve months. I'm still working through a lot of films from 2015 (that post will be coming much closer to January), but I think I've listened to all the music I'm going to have time to process until the new year. As always, here are my favorite albums plus a handful of fantastic songs not represented by these records. Feel free to leave your own favorite records/songs in the comments! I always love new music suggestions and/or conversations about new music.

Favorite Albums:

1. Kendrick Lamar: To Pimp a Butterfly
good kid, m.A.A.d. city could have happened anytime in the past 20 years, but it's without question that TPaB is a 2015 record in the most vital way possible. At a time when pop culture seems determined to ignore the most turbulent era since the '60s, Kendrick delivers a blistering state of the union address that also, miraculously, becomes the most intimate musical statement of 2015. Here's the thing, though: it's not just the politics or the confessional lyrics or the gorgeous jazz-fusion instrumentation or Tupac or the fact that "Alright" became a black protest anthem; it's that Kendrick did it all and still managed to craft the tightest, most musically innovative album in recent memory.

2. Father John Misty: I Love You, Honeybear
An album about "true love" as told by the sage alter-ego of indie darling J. Tillman should be insufferable. Admittedly, the Father John Misty persona often feels like an exercise in "I don't even know anymore." Not that it matters; the whip-sharp lyrics are reason enough to adore this album. But even considering the layers of irony strengthens the album's central theme: value defies reason. "Maybe love is just an economy based on resource scarcity, but what I fail to see is what that's gotta do with you and me," Misty sings, and it's the most compelling way to say "follow your heart" I've heard in a while. So too the music: maybe it's all ironic facade, but does it matter if it moves you?

3. Joanna Newsom: Divers
It would be the height of pretension to claim that I understand this album. I do not. It's a concept album, something about the circular nature of time and death and something something. Maybe I haven't spent enough time with it, or maybe I'm just not the right person to understand Newsom's allusive writing; I've never been very good at James Joyce either. But Joyce isn't set to music. Comprehensible or not, Divers sounds gorgeous. Not the least of the instruments is Newsom's voice, which animates the lyrics with sonic (if not semantic) truth. Any album that manages not to only use the word "Ozymandian" but find its rhyme is going to rank pretty high in my book.

4. Viet Cong: Viet Cong
Make that The Band Formerly Known as Viet Cong, since these folks (understandably) decided to change their name after considering the social implications of VC. Before the name change, though, you'd be forgiven for mistaking the band for a parody: a post-punk group with an inflammatory political name who end an album of dark, brooding music with an 11-minute song called "Death"—it's a veritable pileup of '80s indie clichés. The album is a testament to the power of songcraft over innovation. Just take that finale, "Death," probably my favorite song of the year: there's not an original idea in it, but when you hear how savage, how massive it is, you'll forget every precedent.

5. Wilco: Star Wars
Some critics are calling it Wilco's return to form. That's silly—not because Star Wars isn't Wilco in top form (it definitely is) but because that ignores 2011's even-better The Whole Love. Let's not pit one against the other, though, since they're clearly artistically distinct statements: in contrast to The Whole Love's lush studio detail, Star Wars exudes a playful, tossed-off quality that recalls Wilco's live shows. In fact, their performances of back-half Being There tracks from I saw them live in Memphis a few years ago were a good approximation of what coalesces here: the immediacy of their '90s work filtered through the grizzled maturity of post-millennial Wilco. Great stuff.

6. Kamasi Washington: The Epic
I'm no expert on jazz, but I know enough to recognize that this record isn't innovative—it's merely very, very good. "Merely," as if being very, very good is something to sneeze at. This is jazz maximalism at its finest, and I do mean maximalism: a nearly three-hour record here, filled with furious, spit-flicking sax from Kamasi. The ghost of Coltrane looms large on this album, and that's awesome; I love Coltrane. Therefore I love Kamasi Washington. But it's not just his prodigious, skill that makes this album tick; it's how there's room for a 13-minute riff on The Magnificent Seven; it's how the sax fury is punctuated by unabashedly old-fashioned jazz vocals: all the comforts of home.

7. Vijay Iyer Trio: Break Stuff
More jazz stuff. It's good. Real good. This is my first experience with Vijay Iyer, the prolific (and I do mean prolific—just check out this guy's discography) New York pianist who's been working as band leader since the '90s. I can't comment on how this record compares to that enormous body of work, but I can say this: Break Stuff manages that neat trick of being soft piano music without lapsing into background muzak. With the brooding, minimalist intensity of original tracks like "Hood," this album commands attention, then rewards with surprising reinventions of classics by Monk, Strayhorn, and Kamasi's best bud himself, Coltrane. Nothing broken here.

8. Björk: Vulnicura
It's entirely possible (even likely) that that's a vagina on Björk's outfit. That's just vintage Björk cover art shenanigans. In fact, "vintage Björk" is how most critics have been discussing Vulnicura, comparing it to her mid-career highlight, Homogenic. That comparison is certainly apt, although it also ignores just how fresh this record sounds. This is the melodic clarity of Homogenic filtered through a lens of avant-garde and modern classical, as if Björk's heartbreak—following her separation from longtime partner Matthew Barney—has fractured the songwriting into prismatic shards she doesn't know how to reassemble: the most beautiful sadness you'll hear all year.

9. Carly Rae Jepsen: Emotion
My love for Carly Rae Jepsen is no secret. Make fun all you want; her music is still a minor pop miracle. At its core, Emotion is Jespen doing that same "Call Me Maybe" thing: crafting catchy songs that communicate deceptively simple sentiments from seldom-explored corners of the Top-40 emotional spectrum. As much as the word "adolescent" is thrown at her music, the year's most mature pop lyric comes from her magnificent closer, "When I Needed You," where Carly sings, "Sometimes I wish that I could change, but not for me, for you, so we could be together forever, but I know that I won't change for you 'cause where were you for me when I needed someone?" Wonderful.

10. Rachel Grimes: The Clearing
Of all the albums on this list, The Clearing is the one whose cover art does the best job at evoking the record's music: you look at that ethereal, spare cover, and you've got a great idea of the sounds you're in for. Rachel Grimes delivers an utterly hypnotic cross pollination of post rock and modern classical. "Delicate" is the wrong word for it: these pieces are ghostly, indistinct, occasionally threatening shapes that congeal from that cover-art mist until some sound or a breath melts them back into the air. The music doesn't go anywhere; it's nonlinear and amorphous in a way that I imagine that could be frustrating to some. But whatever. I think it's gorgeous.


Great 2015 Songs Not on These Albums:

Adele: "I Miss You"—My relationships with Adele songs come in waves: I like them, I grow sick of them, I rediscover them a while later and find new things to like, and so on. I'm at varying stages of this cycle for each song on 25, Adele's excellent and already overplayed record from a few weeks ago. I'm still in the like (even love) phase for "I Miss You," though. It's Adele's wager at making a Florence+The Machine song, and it's at least as good as anything from Florence's album earlier this year.

Donnie Trumpet & The Social Experiment: "Sunday Candy"—Donnie Trumpet & The Social Experiment's full-length, Surf, is warm but inconsistent. The album's standout, "Sunday Candy," is neo-soul perfection. It's effervescent video is even better. Chance the Rapper may be becoming rap's resident cornball, but who cares when he's helping to craft this sort of nirvana?

Dread: "Can You Hear Me Dying in the Backyard?"—Somewhere out in the wilds of Bandcamp, a little band named Dread created a concept EP about The Sopranos. Like, the TV show. And it's very good! Especially this song, which recounts one of the more existentially harrowing moments in the series's final season (Sopranos aficionados can probably guess what it is based on the title). This project sounds like a joke on paper, but in practice, it's an engaging blast of lo-fi post-punk.

David Bowie: "★"—aka "Blackstar," the 10-minute jazz-rock-acid freakout from Bowie's upcoming 25th studio album of the same name. This is the awesomeness of David Bowie: the dude's about to turn 69, and he's still making music that's stranger and more astral than most musicians a third of his age. Also, he apparently listens to Kendrick Lamar.

Missy Elliot: "WTF (Where They From)"—This song almost made this post on the strength of its video alone, surely the best non-Kendrick-Lamar-affiliated music video of the year. But don't let statements like that distract from the fact that, video aside, this is a really fantastic song. And you don't realize just how fantastic until you get to "Sticking out your tongggggggggue." Who else but Missy Elliot would make one of the catchiest hooks of the year out of a bunch of consonants?

Roman GianArthur: "NO SURPR:SES"—Unsurprisingly, the best song from OK Computer becomes the best song on an EP of R&B Radiohead covers. Bonus points for the Janelle Monáe verse.

Savages: "The Answer"—As if there weren't already enough reasons to be excited about a new Savages album, the first single to drop from next January's Adore Life plays up the metal influences that helped make their debut feel so colossal. It rocks, y'all.

Shamir: "Call It Off"—Lots of sweat, tears, and anguish led to the decision to leave Shamir's infectious debut, Ratchet, out of my top 10 albums this year, so take this song as a consolation prize. Well, a consolation prize to a consolation prize: the album's best song, "On the Regular" was actually released last year, so this is the next best song to qualify for this year's post. Ranking politics aside, "Call It Off" is still a fantastic showcase for what Shamir does best: the slinky funk-fusion instrumentation, the nimble melodies, and of course the heaping helping of personality.

Joan Shelley: "Over and Even"—Evoking the spacier moments from Vashti Bunyan or Joni Mitchell, Joan Shelley delivers a gorgeous four minutes of spare, cosmic folk music.

Sleater-Kinney: "Price Tag"—Never change, Sleater-Kinney. Not that change seems likely. These gals are as fierce as ever, as evidenced by this blistering opening track from their stellar comeback album. That they're going after our culture's fetish for low retail costs (yes, that's an exciting topic!) is just gravy.

Steven Wilson: "Ancestral"—Steven Wilson's Hand. Cannot. Erase. is a spotty album of neo-prog revival, but when it's good, it's good. And it's really, really good in "Ancestral."

Kanye West: "All Day"—Still waiting on that new album, Ye. Hopefully it's as good as this track.

White Stag: "Rhythms of Clockwork"—Local Knoxville pride. The city has a budding prog scene that's inventive and interesting, and this, a 12-minute standalone opus, is the most exciting track to come out of that area. It's a huge step forward for White Stag, and I'm really looking forward to what they do next.


And that's all, folks! Don't forget to leave your own favorite music of the year!

Until next time.