Favorite Music of 2019

Insert my usual caveat that I didn't listen to nearly enough metal or rap. I also probably listened to a disproportionate amount of jazz, hence marking my full transition into "Dad."

As with last year, there wasn't really an album that stood out to me as my definitive "favorite" in 2019, and in fact, the top 5 are probably interchangeable as far as preference goes. For the albums I reviewed, I linked to the original reviews. It's most of them.

Anyway, as you can tell, I don't really have much of a preamble to this one. Hope you like the picks. Enter list.

Favorite Albums:

1. Jenny Hval: The Practice of Love
Hypnotic, beautiful, conceptual, yet immediate. I've been a Jenny Hval fan for a while, so it was probably just a matter of time before she topped one of these lists.

[Read original review]

2. Holly Herndon: PROTO
"There’s a pervasive narrative of technology as dehumanizing," Holly Herndon says in the liner notes to PROTO. "We stand in contrast to that." Clearly; PROTO is an album created in collaboration with Spawn—an A.I. created by Herndon and her colleagues. It's far from the cold experiment that genesis implies, though, and as Herndon's notes indicate, it's an oddly tender and even spiritual work. Herdon's notes go on to compare this album to the Appalachian church music she experienced growing up, which is both an appropriate and a radical comparison to make: if the capacity for worship and wonder is part of what makes us human, what does that say about Spawn?

3. Ariana Grande: thank u, next
One of the best pop songs of the decade births one of the best pop albums of the decade. No surprise.

[Read original review]

4. Christian Scott aTunde Adjuah: Ancestral Recall
Scott has been one of the best, most forward-thinking jazz musicians out there for a while now, so when I say that Ancestral Recall is just more of the same, know that that's the highest praise.

[Read original review]

5. William Basinski: On Time Out of Time
Black hole space ambient drone—possibly the most exciting string of nouns I've ever written.

[Read original review]

6. Xiu Xiu: Girl with Basket of Fruit
Unless you're looking in danker corners than I am, Girl with Basket of Fruit is probably the weirdest album you'll hear all year. Keep on keeping on, Xiu Xiu.

[Read original review]

7. Thom Yorke: ANIMA
I've been a fan of pretty much all of Thom Yorke's solo output, so I didn't really connect to the "return to form" conversation a bunch of people were having around this album. But that doesn't mean it isn't still great, and it has that awesome Paul Thomas Anderson Netflix collaboration connected, too.

[Read original review]

8. Vampire Weekend: Father of the Bride
Bloated and inconsistent, sure, but try telling that to me when that "Harmony Hall" piano hits.

[Read original review]

9. Lana Del Rey: Norman Fucking Rockwell!
If we're all still around in 2049 or whatever, people will probably think of this album (either that or "Old Town Road") when they think about 2019 music, or at least 2019 music culture. The disaffected despair, the meta games, the cutting, allusive lyrics, the brutal intimacy cloaked in a distancing persona—this just feels like what music in 2019 is all about. It's pretty sad. It's also pretty great.

[Read original review]

10. Elder Ones: From Untruth
Probably the more formally challenging album on this list—an off-kilter, dissonant 47 minutes of avant-garde world music/jazz. But if you can get on its wavelength, it's powerful, and Amirtha Kidambi's intensity is infectious.

[Read original review]






Great 2019 Songs Not On These Albums:

Bobby Krlic: "Fire Temple"—From the Midsommar score. If you've seen Midsommar, then you know what happens here, and oh man. If you haven't seen the movie, well, that's fine. It's still one of the most stunning pieces of music you'll hear all year.

Bruce Springsteen: "Hello Sunshine"—Bruce was pretty open about his struggles with depression on his autobiography a couple years back, and "Hello Sunshine" feels like an extension of that honesty. "You know I always liked that empty road," he sings, "No place to be and miles to go." Springsteen often sings in characters, but this is maybe about as personal as The Boss has ever gotten.

Carly Rae Jepsen: "Now That I Found You"—An absolutely buoyant pop gem from CRJ. So you know, business as usual.

Cykada: "Third Eye Thunder"—Despite being ostensibly jazz, this is one of the proggiest tracks I heard all year. Cykada's self-titled album was #11 on my list, and it's another great record from the London jazz scene.

Don Campbell: "All Too Well"—Covering a song as personal and beloved as Taylor Swift's best song is a tall order, but Don Campbell manages it by turning it into a sort of emo anthem. Taylor Swift has always been a couple steps from being an emo artist herself, so it works great.

Flying Lotus: "Fire Is Coming" (feat. David Lynch)—About as freaky as you'd want a David Lynch collaboration to be.

HAIM: "Summer Girl"—If my pattern tracks, I'll be lukewarm on the next HAIM album when it comes out, even after being over-the-moon about its lead single. But whatever; I've worn this magical, warm, slinky little track out in the months since its release, and its Paul-Thomas-Anderson-directed music video is probably my favorite of the year.

Lil Nas X: "Old Town Road" (feat. Billy Ray Cyrus)—Undeniable. The two biggest pop songs of the year were off-format oddities by internet weirdos, and this is pretty much the only thing about the wider world of 2019 that made me feel hope.

Margo Price: "Cocaine Cowboy" (live on Jimmy Kimmel Live!)—"Cocaine Cowboys" came off Margo Price's 2017 record All American Made, where it's a brisk little blues stomp. But when Price performed it live on Kimmel's show, it became a Rolling-Stones-esque jam, the "Can't You Hear Me Knocking" of country music, if you will, and the result is some of the best music of Price's career.

Matmos: "Silicone Gel Implant"—Experimental duo Matmos is known for high-concept playfulness, and their 2019 album Plastic Anniversary is no different, an entire record crafted from sound samples made with plastic. This is my favorite track off that record, the most danceable, fun few minutes on the album.

Octo Octa: "I Need You"—I first listened to this warm, spacious electronic track late at night in the hospital after my son was born, which, as far as I'm concerned, is the best place to hear it. Hasn't left me since.

Powder: "New Tribe"—I also heard this in the hospital after my son's birth. It's the polar opposite of "I Need You": animated by an ominous, machine-like drive. It's just as infectious, though.

Sharon Van Etten: "Comeback Kid"—Van Etten pivots from a folksy sad sack to an anthemic sad sack. I can dig it.

Taylor Swift: "Cruel Summer"—The best purely pop moment on Swift's new album. In fact, the best moment in general.

Wilco: "Love Is Everywhere (Beware)"—Typical Wilco lyrics of oblique paranoia in relief against bright folk music. This elder-statesman stage of Wilco's career is a lot more complex than people are willing to give it credit for, and this track is a great example of that. It also has that effervescent guitar refrain.

Mini Reviews for September 2-8, 2019

More reviews this week than last week: enjoy!

Movies

The Last Black Man in San Francisco (2019)
This movie is ramblier and kinder than I would have liked it to have been, and it is yet another movie about gentrification that dramatizes it as solely the actions of individuals rather than those (often white) individuals' dance with the trickle-down effects of poor (or malicious) urban planning and infrastructural investment by municipal governments. I dunno how to dramatize that well, but my urbanist-wonk heart want to see a movie that does it. That said, The Last Black Man in San Francisco is gorgeously filmed and acted, and regardless of my nitpicks on the sociopolitical specifics, it gets at the emotional heart of the modern American gentrification crisis: that the technically correct history that (in general) people of color have only temporarily occupied inner cities built for white people belies the reality that people of color have, in both a material and symbolic sense, built the neighborhoods given to them by mid-century white flight, and that the 21st century's enforcement of the technical history is a piercing betrayal of that felt reality. I say this as basically a white gentrifier myself, a now-established identity I don't really know what to do with other than to as best I can rage along with this movie and my own neighbors. Grade: B

Can You Ever Forgive Me? (2018)
Large pieces of this movie are good enough to make the case for this movie being one of last year's best, and I'm sorry I slept on it until now. The based-on-a-true-story premise (Lee Israel's infamous embellishing/forgery of famous literary letters) is outrageous and fun enough already, and the screenplay by Nicole Holofcener and Jeff Whitty simmers with vibrant-yet-melancholic acid in exactly the best ways you'd imagine a collaboration between those two writers to. The bristly friendship between Melissa McCarthy's Israel and her partner-in-crime, played by Richard E. Grant, is both a wicked sparring match between two terrible people and also shockingly disarming in its underlying tenderness, and I could have watched them for a great deal longer than this movie actually lasts. It's not a perfect film by any means; the plot itself lurches almost audibly from act to act, and the ending in particular feels undercooked. But I'd happily trade all the clunky story structure in the world for scenes as good as the ones between McCarthy and Grant here. Grade: A-

Kronk's New Groove (2005)
It's hard to say that I'm disappointed with this movie, given the wretched track record of direct-to-home-media Disney sequels, but there is something particularly disheartening about taking one of the most delightful animated characters of all time and giving him daddy issues and a very poorly structured screenplay to work through. Seriously, what is up with this movie's structure? It's basically three discrete parts linked with the most tenuous of connective tissue, which probably means that Disney planned to chop it up to run within half-hour TV slots on Disney Channel. Two lessons were learned today, one for me and one for the suits: for the suits, don't plan movies based on how they will air piecemeal on TV; for me, DON'T WATCH DIRECT-TO-HOME-MEDIA DISNEY SEQUELS, ya fool! Grade: D

Touki Bouki (1973)
Take away the numerous cutaways to animals being slaughtered, and I really dig this aesthetic—and I guess as long as I'm eating meat, I probably deserve to see like a dozen cows' throats cut. Yeah, but at any rate, the colors, the shot composition, the extremely interesting sound collages and loops this movie puts on its soundtrack—those things are all great, and the plot, which devotes itself to constructing a myth of freedom and assimilation that it then vigorously deconstructions, is engaging, even in its loopy and discursive execution, and that's all pretty interesting. It might even be flat-out great without the presence of a pretty ugly gay stereotype right in the middle of the movie. Grade: B

House of Wax (1953)
A perfectly enjoyable bit of old-school horror. There's nothing really exceptional here (except for Vincent Price, of course, and his character's ludicrously convoluted system of beakers and glass tubes apparently needed for pouring a boiling vat of wax onto a human subject), but pretty much everything is good enough: the period details, the patient pacing, the completely lurid and silly plotting, etc. Plus, this 88-minute-long feature has a 10-minute intermission midway through, which is the kind of user-friendly experience I can really get behind in cheap '50s horror. Grade: B




Books

Beasts Made of Night by Tochi Onyebuchi (2017)
So much of fantasy is defined by European and specifically Christian tropes that it's always a breath of fresh air when a work of fantasy comes along that doesn't rely on these ideas. Beasts Made of Night is a YA fantasy based heavily on the practices of Islam and the Nigerian heritage of its author; Tochi Onyebuchi has created a fascinating, vibrant world in this novel, shaping distinctly non-Western ideas into exciting forms—all the more exciting for my relative unfamiliarity with the influences he's drawing on. The book centers on Taj, a teen who belongs to a class of people called "sin-eaters," who must, as the name implies, literally devour the sins of others (which take on dangerous physical representations) and thereby carry the psychological burdens of their actions. It's a strong idea rooted in a world full of interesting mythological gestures that hint at a much richer historical and philosophical background than the book ever really gets into (presumably, the sequels will get into these topics more thoroughly). But for a first book, it's fine that we only get flavors of the whole meal, because what resides within this book's environment is delicious. I wish I could say the same for the plot and characters, which stumble through the book's pages with little structure or dynamism; the world these people live in is so alive that it's a disappointment that the actual humans in the story feel kind of flat. Come for the worldbuilding, stay for the worldbuilding, I suppose. Grade: B

Music

Elder Ones - From Untruth (2019)
The composer and bandleader of Elder Ones, Amirtha Kidambi, calls music "a way to tap into the abstract and mystifying aspects of the universe," and that's certainly present in spades on From Untruth, a challenging, aggressive, and often transcendent collection of music that feels like the intersection between the spiritual and free jazz traditions and the Indian folk music that Kidambi calls her own personal "blues." But what makes this music special is that this abstract mysticism is rarely left untethered from material reality; it's an album that understands that the abstract and otherworldly only has meaning in a lived context, which for Kidambi clearly means a political one: there is a song here called "Eat the Rich," for goodness sakes, and it's kind of awesome. Kidambi's shrieking vocals and swirling harmonium blend with her band's percussion and brass to form rich soundscapes that are as dissonant as they are beguiling and anti-capitalist, anti-imperial political statements as urgent as they are blunt. It's not always an easy listen, and this isn't always to the record's benefit—"Decolonize the Mind" in particular feels stretched thin by discordant digressions. But when it's on, it is often thrilling. Grade: B+