Not sure if anyone will read this now that I've quit Facebook and can't post there. But if you are reading it, hello! I don't have any preamble this year; hope you enjoy the list!
Favorite Albums:
1. Geordie Greep: The New Sound
An hour-long jazz-rock odyssey with showtune flourishes that is also a concept album featuring a bunch of satirical character portraits of awful men and their awful ideas about sex and women. This is either going to be very much your thing or it's going to be very much not your thing, and I guess this list tells you where I fall. No other record this year exhilarated me and repulsed me as much as this one. An oddly sad album, too, given the subject matter.
2. Charli xcx: BRAT
Glitchy, fuzzed-out club music reminiscent of Charli's work with PC Music back in the day, but for as experimental as that sounds on paper, it's also just an unrelenting parade of banger after banger. A great example of how pop lyrics can employ syntactical simplicity to find depths of emotion with more efficiency and power than more typically literary songsmiths.
3. Kim Gordon: The Collective
"Alt-rock legend talk-sings over trap beats for 40 minutes" was not a musical recipe I would have ever come up with, but the results speak for themselves. Probably the most successful rap-adjacent album a 71-year-old white woman is ever going to make, and the way that Gordon and producer Justin Raisen find credible continuity between Sonic-Youth-style experimentation and contemporary hip-hop is fun and interesting.
The final two tracks ("Challengers: Match Point" and "Compress / Repress") are obviously the best songs on here and the entire reason for listening to the score. The score knows it, too, because it spends a bunch of the preceding 30 minutes teasing little incomplete snippets of the finale until the pieces finally arrive in an orgiastic release. Kinda like the movie itself and its soon-to-be-legendary final scene (where "Match Point" plays, of course). Rarely has a score so fully encompassed the affect of its film in microcosm.
Every bit as good as Afrique Victime, maybe even better. Definitely more urgent. And as with all Mdou Moctar, the cherry on top of everything else is that it's pure guitar shredding the whole time.
Indie rock Meatloaf with a penchant for surreal, even at times psychotic flavors to its breakup songs. Plus, a surprisingly great cover of "Call Your Girlfriend" in the middle of it all.
A slight move back toward the familiar after the loose and jammy Father of the Bride, which for me means a more consistent record with fewer highs. But a Vampire Weekend album is still a Vampire Weekend album, and the tunes here are still infectious. The tempo jump in "Ice Cream Piano" alone is worth checking out the whole album.
I am very out of touch with the world of metal, but every once in a while, a metal release floats its way to my ears and I get hooked. That's what happened with this weird, sludgy, psychedelic metal album.
We've gotten a little further into the ambient jazz wave that Sinephro helped codify with Space 1.8 back in 2021, and she's still one of the greats of this little corner of jazz. Immaculate textures. Not to mention the production and mixing by Nala herself, which are aces. One of the best headphone albums of the year.
In the liner notes to this album, Smith sarcastically suggests that this album is "Bachman Turner Overdrive meets Last Exit-era Sonny Sharrock," and while his point is that he doesn't compose music to be a melange of influences, I gotta say that I don't think I could come up with a better way to describe this deeply odd, deeply arresting album. Oops. He also writes that it's okay to find this music funny, which is good, because I do think there's something very playful and even comedic about it, and I also don't think laughing at something has to be derogatory. The joy of invention is infectious and manifests itself as cathartic laughter, after all.
Great 2024 Songs Not On These Albums:
Adeem the Artist: "Night Sweats"—Adeem remarking that a murdered Palestinian child's "face is like my son's" is something that's never left me after I heard it the first time. I don't think I could ever say anything about this genocide that even approaches the power of that line. Oh my god, what have we done?
Bon Iver: "THINGS BEHIND THINGS BEHIND THINGS"—Scratches a classic Bon Iver itch, only with Vernon singing at a non-falsetto register. The most I've liked a new Bon Iver track in quite some time.
Sabrina Carpenter: "Taste"—I didn't think I liked Sabrina Carpenter at first, but then "Espresso" broke down my defenses just in time for "Taste" to get me. Hooks on hooks.
Doechii & JT: "Alter Ego"—I don't know anything about Doechii, but I randomly heard this in a mix, and I quickly became addicted to a song that rhymes "vagina" and "designer" and sounds like M.I.A. covering Azealia Banks, or maybe the other way around.
Donato Dozzy: "Santa Cunegonda"—A hypnotizing techo groove. Probably not the most innovative thing out there, but I am but flesh.
Emergency Group: "Spirit Logic"—A great cosmic epic from a great fusion group. The effortless expansiveness that this group manages to evoke again and again remains intoxicating to me.
FATHER JOHN MISTY: "Josh Tillman and the Accidental Dose"—I don't know if I heard a better distillation of the waking-nightmare feeling of being alive in 2024 than this track.
Floating Points: "Fast Forward"—Sam Shepherd continues to make some of the most exciting dance music out there. This rules. I would go to clubs more if this is the kind of thing they played.
Greg Foat: "Sea of Tranquility"—The delicious intersection of smooth jazz and spiritual jazz, with some ambient synths thrown in for extra flavor.
Fucked Up: "HOLD UP HALF THE SKY"—Fucked Up's limited-time-only album Who's Got the Time & A Half? is pretty solid overall, but this is the track on there that I found myself replaying most. An oddly addicting chat/groove.
Helena Hauff: "Punks in the Gym"—I hadn't checked in on Helena Hauff in a while, and when I do, lo and behold, her 12" from this year absolutely rules. This one's the clear standout, a throbbing, sinister banger that the liner notes accurately describe as "a volcanic dance where 303 earthquakes shake the ground before eruptions."
JPEGMAFIA: "either on or off the drugs"—The story surrounding JPEGMAFIA's album I LAY DOWN MY LIFE FOR YOU was twofold: 1) he's incorporating rock elements, and 2) he's being uncharacteristically vulnerable. My favorite track off the record didn't do much of #1, but it had plenty of #2: a song that staggers between contemptuous swagger and self-loathing, culminating in a prayer that his children don't end up weak like him. May be the first song I've heard that samples an AI-generated song, too, which is something I don't know how I feel about.
Kendrick Lamar: "squabble up"—It was between this and "Meet the Grahams" for the Kendrick representation on this post (still need to spend more time with GNX as an album). Ultimately, I decided that it's a lot more fun to listen to the way he pronounces the "face / taste" rhyme than to six and a half minutes of a man being murdered in cold blood.
Mary Lattimore & Walt McClements: "We Waited for the Bears to Leave"—Lattimore's harp and McClements's accordion oscillate with each other into a 12-minute contemporary-classical crescendo. Very cool.
Kelly Lee Owens: "Dreamstate"—She's mostly just chanting the title of the song over an electropop pulse. I love that.
Chappell Roan: "Good Luck, Babe!"—Of the many, many Chappell Roan earworms that captivated everyone this year, this was the one that got its wormy hooks into me. That bridge is virtually Swiftian.
Shabaka feat. Floating Points & Laraaji: "I'll Do Whatever You Want"—Exactly the sum of its parts, and given the parts, that of course means it's great.
The Smile: "Zero Sum"—Had The Smile calmed down and released either a single album with only the best tracks from this year or two more sonically distinct albums, I probably would have found space for the band on the album list. Instead, in a crisis of indecision between their two very good 2024 albums, I decided to punt and simply include the best track from either album. Forever in my mind associated with some of the worst dancing by some of the worst people.
Patricia Taxxon: "Frat Claws"—I don't know a lot about furries or the music they make, but this is a terrific piece of indietronica. Good for the furries.
Xiu Xiu: "Piña, Coconut & Cherry"—People talked about the new Xiu Xiu record being their most accessible in years, and maybe it was, but the final track, which ended up being my favorite, feels like it could have come from the group's previous record, the abyss-black Ignore Grief. Dissonant strings, dissonant synths, and fuzzed out screaming turning what on paper seems like a love song into something that sounds apocalyptic. I guess that is now my preferred mode for the band.
